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Comment by matbatt38 | Hacker News Reader

Sorry but that's a terrible argument. It is likely that there is no or at least very few free will. But that doesn't mean that nothing can be done. Care and education are not only preventive, they could also be used as an answer to criminality - even in a world without free will.

Prison is known to fail at changing people who commit crimes anyway, free will or not, autistic or not: half of people who go there get arrested again in the 5 years. I'll actually follow you in taking the argument to the extreme: prison are pointless in almost every case and we should replace it with something different.

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> I'll actually follow you in taking the argument to the extreme: prison are pointless in almost every case and we should replace it with something different.

If rehabilitation is their only goal. If their primary reason of existence is to keep criminals from committing further crimes against citizens, they work well. You'd just need to extend the time to make them work even better. Can't reoffend if you're behind bars (well, you can, but only against your fellow prisoners, and that might earn you solitary confinement, aka prison in prison).

And how does that work out for you, the country with the biggest per-capita incarcertation rate in the world?

I am not a country, so I'm not the country with the biggest per-capita incarceration rate in the world, and so idk how to answer your question.

I do think in general that it's very hard to compare countries on these metrics unless the countries are very similar in culture and demographics. I.e. comparing Norway to the US feels like comparing a dog to a cow. You can extract some fundamental information ("tend to have four legs", "food goes in at one end and comes out the other") but there's little value in explaining the cow's digestive system to dog breeders who asked about nutrition.

>unless the countries are very similar in culture and demographics

Point being, citizens of such a country might not be in the best position for arguing in favor of prison as means to reduce crime by locking away the baddies (as opposed to rehabilitation), as said country has both the greatest incarceration rate and far worst crime statistics.

Especially considering - speaking of culture and demographics - that they're not some narco-banana republic, or some developing world backwater, but a rich western country.

Or perhaps the Old-Testament ideas regarding punishment and incanceration are part of the problematic difference in culture that leads to more crime - as opposed to a response to it...

I guess I'm probably in a great position to argue for or against prisons as a means of protecting the population from criminals, since I'm not from the US, which you seem to assume.

> Or perhaps the Old-Testament ideas regarding punishment and incanceration are part of the problematic difference in culture that leads to more crime - as opposed to a response to it...

Hey, maybe cancer causes cigarettes instead of the other way around, you never really know.

>I guess I'm probably in a great position to argue for or against prisons as a means of protecting the population from criminals, since I'm not from the US, which you seem to assume.

Well, let's not necessarily assume you're "in a great position". But, yeah, you sure are in a much greater position to argue about that, than someone from a country that enforcings this "means of protection" but still has horrific crime stats...

>Hey, maybe cancer causes cigarettes instead of the other way around, you never really know.

I wouldn't exactly call "culture" a single-direction causual factor like cigarette smoking.

But what do I know, perhaps a strawman can be correct once in a while!

>Care and education are not only preventive, they could also be used as an answer to criminality - even in a world without free will.

In a world without free will "care and education" don't matter. People are gonna do what they are gonna do, and education or care aren't gonna change it. No free will means determinism, not just in choice of action, but in everything else too.

> In a world without free will "care and education" don't matter.

The fact that care and education cause change in the behavior has nothing to do with any "freedom" as in "free will"

>The fact that care and education cause change in the behavior

If you don't have free will there's no change in behavior. You have the same predetermined behavior you'd have all along - the care is incidental, would have happened or not happened anyway.

No free will == deterministic universe. Everything that is to happen can't change, and is already "schedulled" in a causuality cascade from billions of years ago.

If you don't have free will, you can't also decide to have "care and education" or not. Whether you will have them or not have them is already a done deal.

> You have the same predetermined behavior you'd have all along - the care is incidental, would have happened or not happened anyway.

This is correct, but this does not mean that, say, education is useless. It is just predetermined whether we give education or not.

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