Chimpy Chompy on 26/10/2012 at 10:50
It's okay DDL some of us understand you! Not sure if I agree yet. But I am realising, it's tricky to make a reason-based case for punishment as a justification for incarceration.
SubJeff on 26/10/2012 at 11:27
It is.
Its not the same thing as I'm saying dude.
DDL on 26/10/2012 at 13:28
Quote Posted by Subjective Effect
People should be locked up if they commit a crime so that they get it that they've done something wrong.
That could happily fall under 'rehabilitation'. Restorative justice, where they actually meet their victims and get a sense of what they've done, can also achieve this, arguably far
better than just sticking them in a cell to "think about what they've done".
What I'm trying to get at is the importance of separating the need to make someone
suffer for their crime, from the actual process of making rational, evidence-based assessments of the optimal way to protect people, rehabilitate offenders, and generally discourage and reduce crime as a whole.
Humour me, and consider this (slightly silly) thought experiment: a man has committed a gruesome murder. We know with
certainty that if he is allowed to get away with it scott free, he will never do it again. If, however, he is punished in any way, he will
definitely do it again upon release. (for the sake of the experiment, we're disallowing the death penalty/life without parole, and we're assuming this has no bearing on crimes committed by others)
Now even I (with my apparently
objectionably liberal attitude) get a gut feeling that he
shouldn't be allowed to walk away from this, even in this silly example where mathematically this is
absolutely and unarguably the best thing to do. Punishing him is damning someone in the future to a horrible death, but knowing that our offender got
punished for the murder....would make
me feel better. Vengeance, even by proxy, is hugely satisfying (this is scientifically proven, incidentally).
And this is a problem.
If we can't get over this visceral hunger for vengeance, for knowing that people who have wronged us (or wronged us by proxy) get their righteously-deserved comeuppance, then we're going to be totally blind to a whole ton of perfectly valid (but perhaps less inherently
satisfying) approaches. Or to put it more elegantly (ahem): (
http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-reasons-humanity-desperately-wants-monsters-to-be-real/) we need "monsters" to exist.
And coming back to prisons: if we can take the mindset that imprisonment is
first and foremost about protecting the general population, providing opportunities to rehabilitate the incarcerated, and acting as a deterrent (demagogue's three secondary spokes), and
lastly and leastly about 'punishment' (dema's primary spoke), then we take imprisonment away from the "make em suffer" approaches like Peanuckle's fervent need to stick thinking, feeling human beings into a rags & gruel gulag, and more toward evidence-based "what methods actually reduce crime?" approaches. Because again, reducing crime is more important, ultimately, than that delicious hit of satisfaction one gets from seeing a wrongdoer get punished, even if it is oh-so-satisfying.
Does that make it any clearer?
scumble on 26/10/2012 at 13:40
I should throw in an idea on this as this seems to be getting tied up on prison - there are other forms of justice that work based on restitution. All this talk of rehabilitation is a bit fluffy, saying sorry to the victims etc.
What I read on the traditional law in Somalia was quite interesting, in that all "punishments" amount to some form of payment. Even a life is given a price in that the offender has to repay a debt effectively. If a family loses the support of a key member because they were killed, the killer has to pay something specific. If there is a reasonable way of enforcing that the debt be paid, the imposition of said debt could be much more onerous than time in prison. That said violent offenders could well remain locked up, but the term is defined by how long it takes them to pay off the debt. It is similar to paying fines I suppose, but the money goes to the victim or victim's family etc.
This has always seemed to make more sense to me than some vague sense of having got justice because someone got locked in a building. It might give some satisfaction to the bereaved, carrying on with a murder example, but "justice" doesn't pay the bills.
Peanuckle on 26/10/2012 at 18:16
DDL:
I'm on board with you 100% for not arresting people for stupid crimes. That incarceration vs. crime graph of yours is just repulsive. However, I don't agree with you on just releasing the non-violent offenders. Those are the people who commit all manner of fraud, scams, tax evasion, and so on.
One could argue that someone who defrauded a charitable organization for millions of dollars should just be made to pay it back, but then they're right back where they started, and wiser for getting caught. They need to be taken out of society so that people and infrastructure can understand how they were manipulated and build defenses against it during the crook's downtime. If the Enron leadership were made to pay back every cent they had illegally gotten and then set free, they'd probably get right back to screwing the little guy.
There's certainly a number of people who were arrested for ridiculous things (you're under arrest for resisting arrest!) who could be let go, but a good number of people in prison belong in there.
--
The problem with your example of the murderer who'd never do it again is that we simply can't tell if they'd do it or not. Everyone swears to God that they won't. And then they do and laugh about how they fooled the cops. We simply can't take the risk.
--
Scumble: The major problem of locking people up till they pay their debt is that they don't make much money in prison, so they'd be there forever, maybe even beyond what their crime would require. Instead, I would suggest that the debt be paid as much as the individual can afford (sell all his assets, etc.) and THEN toss them in the cell. That way you're not dragging out punishment.
Of course, if you make a man pay into destitution, then he's extremely likely to turn back to crime once he gets out...
DDL on 26/10/2012 at 19:10
By released, I don't think either I or that report were suggesting just "let em out, job done": we're talking "take them from prison, where they're just sitting around costing tax dollars, and put them back out on probation & community service, where they can do useful work and not cost tax dollars." Like many of us have been pointing out, there are lots of ways to 'punish/rehabilitate/educate/deter' people that don't involve just sticking them in a box for X years.
I don't think scumble was suggesting "Prison AND fines", either. You leave the guy free to work and earn money, but take chunks from that until he's repaid his debts. Locking him up at the same time as fining him is just silly.
You commit fraud, you're ordered to repay the defrauded, plus do X hours of community service. No need for prison.
This sort of thing happens regularly in the UK, it's just that the US appears to be massively prison-happy.
Locking up a fraudster doesn't make the public feel safer, because the public doesn't feel threatened by fraudsters in anything like the same way they do by say...stabhappy mcstabberson the stabfiend, so that's "protection of the public" avoided. They can have time to think about what they've done and get rehabilitative education while they're doing their road sweeping community service, so that's "rehabilitation" covered. And hell, nothing unnerves a powerful CEO like the prospect of spending ten weeks changing nappies on elderly carehome residents (with no pay) so there's deterrent. :)
Also, using phrases like "a crook's downtime" pretty much suggests you're automatically assuming they're all career criminals, which is not necessarily the case (fraud and other 'white collar' crimes have historically lower recidivism rates than violent crime), and will thus tend to prebias your opinions.
And finally, my example with the murderer was specifically worded to show that even if you construct that obviously fictitious scenario, one STILL feels that some sort of punishment should be meted out. We feel that people should be punished even when it makes absolutely zero logical sense, so it's not surprising we feel punishment is necessary when there are actually plausible arguments to favour it. It's just that it clouds the issue hugely, and is mostly (at heart) more about public revenge-satisfaction than it is about reducing crime.
Vasquez on 27/10/2012 at 05:37
Quote Posted by DDL
We feel that people should be punished even when it makes absolutely
zero logical sense
Well, that's what you get for dealing with humans.
Also - why is it not logical that actions have consequences? If you do something good, the consequence makes you feel good, when you do something bad, the consequence makes you feel bad. It's basic psychology and ultimately it's what still makes us tick, like any other animals.
