Vasquez on 24/10/2012 at 11:42

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Edit. Gnash, read thoroughly the post before replying..

Let's face it: providing nice comfy environment for criminals to enjoy their life just feels wrong. At least it does to me, especially when you think about the people who live in poverty and do not commit crimes.

Preventing crime would be the best way, but that would also lead to another set of "You can't do that!" -thoughts, because tendency to criminal lifestyle is to some extent inherited - afaik both genetically and socially.
What can you do about that, without trampling over human rights all over again?

demagogue on 24/10/2012 at 12:14

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It's hardly my argument. What I said is an old line in the classic instrumentalism vs deontological debate, vintage Bentham v Kant. You have to look at the argument I was responding to. It depends on the grounds for your actions... If the grounds for your maltreatment is purely instrumental--the only yardstick are the ends: stopping future crime--that's by definition taking personal responsibility out of the equation and only looking to consequences. The move I made is one classic way people like to dramatize the issues at stake between them (Bentham was famously accused of treating ethics like training dogs to get the outcome you want).

Another classic flip of that line (that you're taking up) is to turn Kant to pro-death penalty, that execution respects human responsibility & autonomy in the most serious way possible (not sure about torture since by its definition it's consequential. If it weren't, it wouldn't meet the definition of torture anymore and just be pure punishment, and the line that brutal treatment, ripping people apart with horses as punishment, is taking their crime "seriously" doesn't fly I don't think, cf Foucault & the history of punishment.) But that flip you're taking (with the death penalty anyway) does have a respectable tradition too (especially the use Nozick made for it in Anarchy, State, Utopia, holy cow that was the opening foray ushering in the entire 80s libertarian front, Reagan & Thatcher, & making it briefly academically respectable; and Clarence Thomas the US justice is famous for that line to defend the death penalty), but I think it implodes on itself when you try to make autonomy & not treating people as a "means" but as an "end" consistent with a death penalty ... But the argument would take us on a long trek. (And again, torture by definition is using persons as a means not an end so I think it's a non-starter.) The whole point of my jab is that the classical way to dramatize treating people as a means is treating them as animals (since horses are for riding, pigs for eating, & sub-humans for extracting information; not for caring about their opinions or autonomy or personal responsibility for its own sake).

Note I wasn't arguing against *your* position per se, so it's not meant as a criticism (so not a strawman). If we'd go on with an actual debate, it'd be a heuristic to set up the two poles of Bentham v Kant line... So you could get to the actual debate going on at its root, and the complexity of real world cases that skirt the line between the two ... is the basis of government authority/justification over what it can do to its citizenry grounded in consequences (instrumentalism or utility) or autonomy (deontology)? Or maybe some other grounds (cf. contractualism). That's the actual debate at its root here, if we'd ever get to it. But in practice most people indiscriminately jump back and forth between instrumentalism & deontology in defending their position, and end up not saying anything particularly philosophically coherent except expressing their intuitions. I mean I like off the cuff arguments like that too, where I can just throw out some dramatic language to make a point, but if it gets challenged & I want to be careful, I have to drop a post like this to ground where it's coming from...

Edit:


He would have been right if he'd just added the phrase "without justification", then it's trivially true. Locking up a person against their will without justification (also most legal systems add due process), is the tort of false imprisonment, and pretty much any court in a civil law or common law tradition will give them a claim for some compensation.

I should add here I think the purpose of any debate is not to "solve" the issue, and definitely not to score points by catching someone saying something they don't really mean, but to make the entire line (usually these are very old debates with well established traditions and lines) as solid as it can be, and to fix all arguments to be their strongest form. So that's why I'm more likely, instead of just posting "I'll just leave this here" (condescending eyebrow raise), I'll always want to fix it to what he *should* have said to make a good point. Just my personality though. I never like to argue against people; I try to argue with them.

Peanuckle on 25/10/2012 at 00:23

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It costs an average of 31 thousand dollars a year to keep a person locked up in the United States. That's a year's salary for some people. And in one year, the total cost of American prisons was 75 BILLION dollars.

I'll give you the point that cushy conditions are better for reducing recidivism than punishing conditions, but we don't have the resources to pursue that kind of effort nation-wide, same reason we don't give every cancer patient top of the line treatment.

My chief concern is how much money it costs us to imprison people. We can reduce it by reducing the quality of accommodations, and by reducing the number of people imprisoned. USA has the highest percentage and number of imprisoned people in the entire freaking world. Some of the blame for that can be laid at victimless crimes like being drunk in public or "assaults" that are minor fights. Don't need to arrest everyone who slaps someone else, and we don't need to give druglords internet access.

A significant reduction in recidivism would be nice, but I doubt it'd be 75 billion dollars nice.

Numbers here: (http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/incarceration-2010-06.pdf)

DDL on 25/10/2012 at 10:20

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And it was flawed, given that there are multiple legitimate justifications for 'locking people up against their will' that do not fall under the remit of "punishment", such as to protect others from them, possibly even to protect them from themselves (see also, mental institutions), to get them treatment they otherwise refuse to take/cannot be guaranteed to take (see also, mental institutions).

A key difference between a prison and a mental institution, here, is that "punishment" is almost never emphasised when referring to mental institutions: these are places where mentally ill people go to get help (if possible) and be kept under monitored conditions (if not). Also, of course, people are less likely to say
"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"
when referring to a mental institution.
You're not locking mad people away because they're disgusting monsters who deserve the cheapest crappest most unpleasant accommodation possible, but for prisoners this is all good apparently. And the difference is this primal need for punishment, something that strikes me as both hugely uncivilised and in all honesty ultimately pointless. The fact that people genuinely seem to generate catharsis from knowing that punishment has been inflicted...saddens me.

Now, Peanuckle: what you are suggesting is a very...'evolutionary' approach: Saying prisoners are expensive, so we should make them cheaper boils down to "we have a problem, so what approaches minimise the effects of this problem?".
This is not a criticism (it's a successful strategy, after all), but it's also not necessarily optimally efficient. An advantage we have over evolution is that we're not blindly reacting: we can follow causal chains. "We have a problem, so..why do we have a problem? And can we stop this happening, or at reduce it, before we even need to think about ways of minimising the effects of this problem?"

In other words, if prisoners are so expensive, it might be better to find ways of reducing prisoner numbers, or better still reducing crime, rather than making prisons cheaper (and consequently nastier).
As the .pdf you linked says: "stop fucking imprisoning people for everything"


So yes, I agree with this (as do you): reduce prisoner numbers. Why not take all those non-violent offenders out of jail and into community service programmes or whatever, and spend a fraction of the money saved on say...education for young offenders, or improving conditions for the remaining inmates, or hell, almost anything else other than just "locking people up for almost everything".

As for reducing quality of conditions, you haven't provided any evidence that this would produce a marked saving: we don't know how much of that 31k overhead is going on "prison quality" and how much is on things like guard salaries, judicial hearings and admin, or whatever. Also it assumes prisoners generate no value, when of course they can and do actually work. Mostly low level menial jobs, but still ("oh my god: prisoners are taking our jobs!"). Without MOAR NUMBERS we can't make this assessment, but luckily there's google for that!
(http://www.usprisonculture.com/blog/2010/08/16/how-does-california-spend-49000-per-prisoner-a-breakdown-of-costs/) COSTS!
Ok, it's california and 2008, and it's apparently 49k (god, even prisoners have a higher standard of living in CA), but with those caveats:




So basically if we got rid of the library, gym, religion-time and made them wear rags, eat gruel, and provided only minimal medical attention, we'd save...maybe 10k, at the most? And most of that would be from dropping medical care: if you provided medical care (like civilised nations are supposed to), then you'd be lucky to break 3k in savings.

So really, unless you're planning on replacing prisons with Dark Knight Rises-style gulag pits* (which would incur a pretty hefty infrastructure cost anyway: giant pits don't dig themselves), you're not saving anything like as much by making prisons shitty as you are by not sticking everyone in prison, and if we factor in the US's recidivism rate of 60-70% vs Norways 20%, then it seems pretty clear that "not imprisoning everyone" and "making conditions better for those you DO incarcerate, so they're less likely to reoffend on release" are going to have the most significant effects on lowering prison budgets.

And lowering crime! We do want to lower crime, right?


*COULD THE NEXT BANE BE LIVING IN YOUR BACK YARD? WRITE TO YOUR CONGRESSMAN

SubJeff on 25/10/2012 at 14:06

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So you don't think that criminals should be punished? Is that what you are saying here?

I think that the catharsis we get from knowing that punishment has occurred is a built into us on some fundamental level. You can fight it, you can try to "rise" above it, but even for most calm, non-reactionary people the idea of some form of punishment is the norm.