CCCToad on 23/10/2012 at 04:17
Quote Posted by Kolya
Stay tuned until next week when SubJeff breaks other taboos most of us have given much thought so far:
- Should the lower classes be allowed to breed more than they can feed?
- Can public punishment help deter smalltime criminals?
- Is forced labour a viable way to help the economy? (Hint: Sometimes it is.)
And would torture be an appropriate punishment for these crimes?
So here's another question. For those of you defending the use of torture, what do you have to say about this particular part of history?
Inline Image:
http://talesfromtheer.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/spanish_inquisition.jpgLarryG on 23/10/2012 at 04:51
The '70s in BBC Monty Python land? I think it was a very creative and imaginative time the like of which we have not seen for 40 years.
Peanuckle on 23/10/2012 at 15:44
Quote Posted by DDL
Ah yes. Nothing quite says "rehabilitation" like calling someone a monster and then locking them in a tiny isolated cell.
Unless you're happy to lock people away forever (in which case, hell: why not shoot them?) then you're always going to have to release these people, so doing your very fucking best to make their imprisonment as deliberately shitty as possible is unlikely to pay dividends in the long run.
Plus with wrongful convictions (while admittedly difficult to estimate) apparently running at roughly 0.5-1% of all cases (up to 3% in capital cases), you're happily endorsing the infliction of deliberate suffering not only on criminals, but also a whole load of wholly innocent people.
..and this thread was mostly about whether it was ok to torture people
for information, not "torture them for years just because they're a murderer..probably."
So I guess we know where you stand now, eh?
EDIT: godfucking damnit, firefox: fucking refresh :(
1. Rehabilitation is a practical myth. People go to prison and LEARN to commit crime. Unless you're willing to create a paradise island like Norway, that shells out the big bucks to give prisoners their own homes, community, and generally create a nice place to live, and they STILL have a 20% recidivism rate. People who commit crime fall into two categories: Those who made a mistake, and those who made a lifestyle choice. The first kind will stop. The second never will.
2. Making their prison nicer to help them rehabilitate isn't working. Make it miserable as possible to put the fear of prison in them, and maybe that'll work instead.
3. Wrongful convictions will always happen, but thankfully they're an extreme minority. We have to put faith in the justice system and work to make it better or else our society can't work. I do not endorse the punishment of innocent people, every effort should be undertaken to prove them innocent or guilty beyond reasonable doubt.
4. The conversation grew into a different thing. I was addressing someone else, not the original topic.
In conclusion: Stop strawmanning me, goddamn. Here: (
http://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/strawman)
DDL on 23/10/2012 at 16:05
Dude, I directly quoted you. You said "treat them like the monsters they are and lock them in a tiny individual cell where they're lucky to have a mattress on their bedsprings", and I equated that with deliberately inflicting suffering.
...Which it is.
Also, citations for "rehabilitation is a practical myth" and "rehabilitation isn't working"? Because if all you've got is "rehabilitation doesn't work..except in norway, where it totally does" then you're not on the steadiest ground.
CCCToad on 24/10/2012 at 02:40
Quote Posted by DDL
Dude, I directly
quoted you. You said "treat them like the monsters they are and lock them in a tiny individual cell where they're lucky to have a mattress on their bedsprings", and I equated that with deliberately inflicting suffering.
...Which it is.
Also, citations for "rehabilitation is a practical myth" and "rehabilitation isn't working"? Because if all you've got is "rehabilitation doesn't work..except in norway, where it totally does" then you're not on the steadiest ground.
He's also making the exact same argument that authorities in the middle ages used to explain the need for torture and the more savage forms of execution: that extremely harsh penalties deter further crime and are therefore necessary.
Peanuckle on 24/10/2012 at 08:37
Quote Posted by DDL
Dude, I directly
quoted you. You said "treat them like the monsters they are and lock them in a tiny individual cell where they're lucky to have a mattress on their bedsprings", and I equated that with deliberately inflicting suffering.
...Which it is.
Also, citations for "rehabilitation is a practical myth" and "rehabilitation isn't working"? Because if all you've got is "rehabilitation doesn't work..except in norway, where it totally does" then you're not on the steadiest ground.
The intent is not to inflict suffering, but to keep them locked up at minimum expense to society. There's no reason to pamper hardened criminals.
The Norway article shows how they use fantastically extreme efforts and focus on a single prison as some kind of experiment, and still suffer recidivism. If even those methods fail, then what would ever succeed?
"He's also making the exact same argument that authorities in the middle ages used to explain the need for torture and the more savage forms of execution: that extremely harsh penalties deter further crime and are therefore necessary. "
If only we had reliable crime statistics so that we could compare methodology. But what I'm trying to say is that for some people NO punishment will deter further crime. But not all crimes deserve capital punishment, so we don't just execute everyone.
You can see prison as a place for forced rehabilitation, which hardly works. Or you can see it as a place of sequestering that keeps dangerous people out of society.
demagogue on 24/10/2012 at 09:20
For the record, in the literature there are four purposes to incarceration: to isolate criminals to prevent them from committing more crimes; to punish criminals for committing crimes; to deter others from committing crimes; to rehabilitate criminals.
Received opinion is that the second reason (criminal responsibility) is the hub and the other reasons are spokes off of that. The criminal has to, above all, deserve their punishment; and society has to be expressing its role to hold them accountable before society first, before anything... So ideally they get no more or less punishment than what plays that role, and the other purposes are thumbs on the scale to perform other purposes within the allowances of that one.
An argument against inhumane punishment (medieval style torture as punishment; the rack, public drawing & quartering, etc) or the death penalty is that society doesn't have the standing to legitimately hold criminals accountable for their behavior through those means. If you start treating humans like animals, it's a way of saying they are not responsible for their actions but just slavering uncontrollably like a dog you have to kick or put down. This is crossing a line away from responsibility for our actions altogether, which is the heart of liberal government.
Edit: If a person were really not able to control themselves, that's what we have the doctrine of excuse by mental illness for. These are the people that don't have trials and don't deserve punishment because they don't deserve the status of being responsible or autonomous humans. We still don't have standing to torture or execute them though. They get locked up in a padded cell and medicated to fog the world away from them to let them "live" in some other world of their own making.
DDL on 24/10/2012 at 09:36
Peanuckle: If minimum expense is key, then you need to consider all the variables. Reoffending, for instance, incurs expenses at the policing level, the offence itself (variable depending on the offence), prosecution and the legal process, and the prison costs for the entire duration of the second incarceration. Reoffending is
expensive for society. And that's just financially. Socially it's also hugely destructive.
Now you keep bringing up Norway as some kind of text book example that "cushy prisons cannot stop reoffending", but you're missing the point: 20% recidivism is
really, really low. And that's for the whole of Norway, not just "a single prison".
For comparison, the Uk runs at about 50%, the US runs at around 60-70%.
(
http://www3.unil.ch/wpmu/space/publications/recidivism-studies/) Linky (
http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=17) stats.
If you were diagnosed with a disease and told "there is a 70% chance this disease will kill you. However, if you take this drug, you lower than risk to 20%", would you refuse the drug because it "doesn't work"?
Treating prisoners more humanely has a clear and demonstrable effect on lowering recidivism. It doesn't eliminate it, but as you say, "for some people NO punishment will deter further crime".
So then you're left with toting up the costs: do nicer prisons cost more than you save by lowering reoffending rates?
Of course, there's the other (social attitude) considerations, such as "do we want to live in a society that treats criminals as people, or as minimum expense cage-fodder?" and the (apparently depressingly strong) human need for punishment/vengeance, but even then: if you're clamouring for
punishment! to the point at which you're actively disregarding methods proven to lower crime, then I think you've got your priorities mixed up.
Lowering crime should be more important than 'punishing the wicked'. (in my opinion, obviously)
SubJeff on 24/10/2012 at 10:47
Quote Posted by demagogue
If you start treating humans like animals, it's a way of saying they are not responsible for their actions but just slavering uncontrollably like a dog you have to kick or put down.
I said I was done but whoaaaaaa hold up there!!
This is a total non sequitur. A duplici non sequitur.
Torturing or killing people is not treating them like animals, and torturing or killing people is not saying they are not responsible for their actions.
It depends on the reason for doing these things, but let's assume we're doing it as punishment (since we've already discussed torturing for information ad nauseum). I rather think that torture or death as punishment is the exact opposite of treating humans as animals; it is treating them as sentient humans who have done something society deems bad enough to warrant these punishments. It is an acceptance of the motivations and reasons they have done this, of the pleasure, hard-ons and gratification they got by inflicting crimes upon others in a way that only humans can, and the utter condemnation of it as evil and so deserving of these severe punishments.
DDL on 24/10/2012 at 11:25
But then you have the problem of legitimacy:
"killing is totally and utterly wrong, and thus punishable by death."
"...oh shit yeah, sorry: killing is ok if we do it, btw."
It's like saying "hurting people is wrong, unless you're hurting someone who's hurt someone else", or perhaps "Bad things aren't bad if they're used on bad people".
But then you have the issue of vigilante violence, or say..intergang warfare, where everyone is a 'bad person' but it's still (I guess) a crime? So it becomes "Bad things aren't bad if they're used by the state on bad people", and now you're ascribing powers to the state that are waay above those enjoyed by its actual populace, and powers that are pretty horrible, no less.
And to be fair, this is a problem with all "punishment" mentalities. Most punishment boils down to the de facto infliction of procedures (incarceration, isolation, sometimes even death) that would be wholly illegal if they were inflicted by unsanctioned individuals, for the deliberate purpose of causing discomfort to the individual concerned. Punishing someone for causing suffering....by causing suffering.
If you drop the punishment angle, then the remaining three aspects dema suggested (to isolate criminals to prevent them from committing more crimes; to deter others from committing crimes; to rehabilitate criminals) more or less legitimize incarceration: it's not punishment, it's isolation to protect the population and provide an opportunity for rehabilitation, while also hopefully acting as a deterrent (the evidence also seems to suggest that nicer prisons also do better on the second point).
