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Comment by voisin | Hacker News Reader

Let’s cut the bullshit. Prisons have nothing to do with rehabilitation and everything to do with punishment and dissuading others. If there was any desire for rehabilitation, prisons would look a lot more like in-patient therapy. Phone calls would never have cost as much as they have, and books and other self-improvement tools would be freely available.

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Someone else mentioned this and I don't think it's talked about enough: They're basically there to just warehouse shady people so they can't commit more crimes.

Shady people who couldn't afford a good lawyer.

Yup, I'm just talking on paper, too. Technically you could reduce crime, while still giving the rich a free pass.

It's just shitty.

Having spent a decade inside, that was the conclusion I came to. It basically keeps poor people off the streets.

Prisons don't deter crime. They might give the impression of deterrence to honest individuals. However, I think everyone in prison believed they had a scheme, process, or system in order to evade detection; believed what they were doing was on the boundary of the law, but inside it; or they committed a crime of passion.

Sounds like a good argument for longer sentences. If they can't be deterred (and many of them can't) and they can't be resocialized (and many of them can't), why let them out and ruin more lives?

The chance of being caught is more deterring than the punishment severity

They can't commit more crime (outside of prison) while they are inside prison. We also know that just getting older has a wonderful effect on recidivism.

I think a third category exists which is the largest percentage of people in the system: people in bad situations for whom it isn’t that they thought they’d get away with it nor was it a crime of passion. I.e. it wasn’t that they were bad people conniving nor were they good people temporarily inflamed into being bad people. These are the hopeless people in terrible circumstances (poor, inner city, falling into a gang as the only place they belonged, with no role models - as an example) who did bad things.

In generality they might believe the law will catch up to them. However, they would have chosen to steal bread from this store this time because it would minimize getting caught. But I agree with your point.

There are people in prisons who are wholly innocent as well.

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