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Comment by atemerev | Hacker News Reader

“Rehabilitation” means that a person is suffering from some condition, and they are not personally at fault for their crimes. While there is some partial truth in this point of view, taking it at 100% face value is unfair, to say the least. People can be actually guilty of something.

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Hard disagree. Rehabilitation means you take something that wasn’t working and you fix it so it can be useful again. Most convicts will eventually be released. In an ideal world, each of them will have learned how to participate in decent society so that they can be a good neighbor, employee, boss, friend, or whatever.

I’m not saying that from a bleeding heart “prison should be a resort campout!” strawman perspective, but as someone who wishes people came out of prison kinder and more sociable than they went in.

This is all conditional on the prison system of a country being a retributive or rehabilitation oriented element. The USA strongly leans towards retribution.

'Rehabilitation" means a few different things, depending on context. In the context of penology it means "giving a prisoner a way to integrate back into society and reduce their chances of recidivism". This is not only useful for the prisoner, but useful for society, since most prisoners are eventually released.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehabilitation_(penology)

Even if it did mean that, so what? Shouldn't the goal of public policy be to benefit society? What's more likely to benefit society: Sticking people in big expensive torture boxes or trying to cause people to not do things that convince a bunch of other people that they deserve to be stuck in big expensive torture boxes?

Okay, if someone cannot be "rehabilitated" where is the value to society or to that person in punishing them to make them suffer more on top of separating them from the public?

This is a very hard subject and mountains of paper have been produced debating it without any clear resolution in sight. I don't think a HN discussion is going to resolve it one way or the other.

One of many possible values to society is that punishment reduces the motivation of vigilantes. For example if person A killed person B’s child, then person B (or a mob encourage by B) might be less motivated to seek vigilante punishment if there is some chance that a legal system could punish person A instead.

The value is delivering justice and deterring would be criminals

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