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Comment by orange_joe | Hacker News Reader

I don’t fully buy into rehabilitative Justice. I’ve not read an account of how to handle one off crimes. Things like manslaughter or negligence. Crimes with extremely low rates of recidivism. Should people who commit these crimes be let off without consequence? If the point is character building, do you simply keep people imprisoned until their character improves. I’m not saying you have these answers but I haven’t seen them elsewhere.

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Does some people deserve a shitty life, in general that is not something we should strive for.

There are two things I feel about this, first is prisons as they are in many countries are really bad for the employees, lots of suicide etc. As a prisoner being put away for years with minimal contact with the outside world is a really heavy punishment even if you live a life without constant fear.

A society that mistreat people is not something to strive for, and making prisons as bad as they can get will affect society as a whole. Paying prisonguards a little extra to take the risk of suicide seems really rotten to me.

Edit: this extends to warcriminals.

If those people are extremely unlikely to commit a crime again, why should there be continuing consequences for them? What purpose does it serve beyond satisfying someone's feeling of revenge?

And if they are still dangerous, then, yes, you keep them locked up. But even then what's the point of making them suffer beyond the restrictions that are necessary to ensure the safety of the rest of society?

Rehabilitation can also fall under 'actions have consequences '.

This means removing your freedom to move and not necessarily turtoring you.

If only there were countries that handled incarceration differently from the US that we could learn from.

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