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Comment by vbtemp | Hacker News Reader

> about why so many Americans are in prison in the first place, IMO.

You are right and the prison situation in the USA is not ok. But that said, just as this situation could be called f--ked up, also keep in mind that many parts of US society are also REALLY F--KED UP. There's a lot of injustice and racism throughout the criminal "justice" system, but there's also a sick amount of senseless, senseless violence.

Source: Friends and family who are prosecutors and public defenders. A relative of mine was once in the position of having to defend a group of teenagers who lynched and murdered a stranger on the street with golf clubs.

Maybe without agreeing, you can at least understand the motivation for [definitely short sighted] tough-on-crime programs.

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Yes, I can understand it while at the same time not agreeing with it.

It seems to me that one of the biggest questions on this issue that Americans need to face is: are you punishing or are you rehabilitating? I don't pretend to have a universally applicable and useful answer to that question, but societies should at least be very clear about which option is being chosen and what the consequences of that choice are.

> It seems to me that one of the biggest questions on this issue that Americans need to face is: are you punishing or are you rehabilitating?

It seems to me that there is a third option: isolating. Some people we cannot cure, but should not be "punished". Even so, they need to be kept away from the general population for the sake of the population.

I personally think that using imprisonment as a sort of "punishment" is barbaric and has no place in a civilized society. It should only be used to rehabilitate or, barring that possibility, isolate. You have someone who just won't stop killing people and your psychologists are at a loss as to how to turn him into a safe productive member of society? By all means, keep him locked up and off the streets, but trying to frame this detainment as a "punishment" is how we start down a very dark road.

Quite so. The purpose of my simplified question was to contrast the concept of punishment with really any other option. Because I don't think America has faced the fact that many of its citizens still require punishment of criminals as opposed to rehabilitation, isolation or whatever may actually be a more appropriate and humane response, were religious or pseudo-religious doctrine taken out of the equation.

I believe the privitisation of the penal system in the US has set the stage for all kinds of misdirected incentives. I wonder if some who benefit from the system as it stands are in fact quite happy to perpetuate the need for revenge/punishment.

I do none the less understand the impulse for revenge on an individual level. Anyone who says they don't must have had a charmed life indeed. I just think it's time we start consciously removing such instincts from our penal systems.

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