(as an aside: bland food won't work well on someone who lost their sense of smell from long covid, and prison populations were heavily affected)
(as an aside: bland food won't work well on someone who lost their sense of smell from long covid, and prison populations were heavily affected)
The consistent texture of the Nutraloaf may “help” here. My spouse lost her sense of smell (for other reasons than Covid) years ago and now relies heavily on textures for food enjoyment.
In a detention center, you get a spoon to eat with, rehabilitation, a knife and fork. Other living conditions are inline with that.
You seem to think all humans are the same, well adjusted, able to readily and happily change to live with others, and so on.
The truth is, many people in jail are indeed stabbing others in jail for "no reason", as in "no reason most would consider valid".
There are indeed issues with the US prison system, or so I've read, but I assure you that inmates in prisons are known, world wide, to get stabby without cause. Here's a primary example...You know you can punch someone in the head instead of stabbing, yes?
This continues down to "talking instead of physical violence", but by saying stabbing is the result of poor conditions, you're saying stabbing is the sensible result of any lack of joy.
There's a whole body of complicated philosophy about what criminal law should do, whether it's about avenging victims or rehabilitating offenders or deterrance or profit motive, but I don't think we even need to get into that because a fundamental assumption even having that conversation requires is that the things the state locks people up for are legitimate and this is at this point the exception for me rather than the rule
Would evidence change your belief?
> Violent offenses account for over 3 in 5 people (62%) in state prisons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...
Here is a good page that has lots of info on the populations: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2024.html
And a pie chart showing the difference in population between all the various types: https://static.prisonpolicy.org/images/pie2024-2X.webp
It's basically around half the total.
But it should be added that violent offenders are not the only category which harmed someone. Stealing from people harms them. Others might want to carve out shoplifting from this, but not me: for one thing, many stores are owned by identifiable human beings, and stealing from that store is stealing directly from them. For big chains or whatever, diffuse harm is still harm. On a personal level I care less about the latter, but this is not a distinction which should be enshrined into law. Theft is wrong.
By any sane breakdown, the large majority of people imprisoned or jailed are there directly due to harming other people. I lean towards policy which will minimize the amount of offenses which don't directly harm other people, personally. What crimes you feel fall into that category differs from person to person, though.
But the fact remains that pointing guns at people, stabbing them, stealing their car, breaking into their house, raping them: these harm the victims, directly, and those sorts of offenses are, in fact, the majority for which prisoners are imprisoned or jailed.
- copyright violation
- jaywalking
- possessing marijuana
- peeing outside within 100 yards of a minor
- a 17 and 18 year old in a committed relationship having consensual sex
- "obscenity"
- [medically necessary] abortion [of a pregnancy due to rape from a family member]
- being gay in the military
Let me remind you (& everyone) that this is not normal outside of our very fucked up country. We lock up so many more people that the next 3 biggest countries combined still don't lock up as much as we do. We have an incarceration problem.So, ignore those, and focus on the violent crimes again. Why do we have so many more violent criminals than anyone else? Do we still think this is just totally normal, and we can't do anything about it, so fuck it, lock them up and throw away the key? If we were talking about any other metric of a healthy population (child death rate, inability to get food or housing, infectious disease rate, etc) we would be actually working to change these numbers rather than just building more places to stick the people we don't want to think about. Maybe the fact that there are so many violent crimes is a good enough reason for us to start rethinking our policies, what makes our fucked up citizens act this way, and how we can begin to turn the tide.
Or we can give into apathy and say, fuck it.
"Criminal" is not about harm by the convict but about successful prosecution.