Clearly not. Prison does not work, for most definitions of 'work'.
If you want to stop people re-offending there are cheaper and easier ways.
Prison is used because of weird financial incentives and because it's politically advantageous to say that you're locking criminals up.
> We threatened them with a fucking lifetime in jail, and that still did nothing to stop them committing crimes?
Most people pay no attention to the law when making choices about the way they live their lives. I do not steal. The reason I do not steal is because that's how I was raised, not because it's illegal and carries a potential jail sentence. Punishments might make someone pay attention to the methods used - murderers still kill, but they make an attempt to destroy evidence.
Have you heard about the guy who committed 2 crimes, and was then wrongly arrested and convicted for a 3rd, and sent away for life? All appeals failed. He escaped from jail, gathered evidence, and cleared his name. That 3rd conviction was quashed.
Unfortunately, escaping from prison is a crime, and so he was arrested and convicted of that, and returned to jail for the rest of his life.
It is odd that you go from "don't imprison non-violent offenders" straight to "don't punish non violent offenders".
There's a bunch of stuff that we can do that is cheaper than prison, and better at stopping people from committing more crime. Restorative justice programmes are pretty good.
> The suggestion that the threat of imprisonment does not act as a deterrent to criminal activity is absurd.
Why are you not a thief? Is it because you're afraid of prison, or is it because you know that stealing is wrong?
The rate of recidivism is pretty high, the US imprisons so many people yet still has crime.
> Do you really not see "I'm here because I screwed up. I probably should try to not screw up in the future." going through the mind of prisoners as they sit in their cells?
But it doesn't. Really, it doesn't. People pass the blame onto others. Prisoners may well think "I screwed up by getting caught. I probably should try harder not to get caught in future".
>Are you suggesting they should go unpunished?
I believe he is suggesting there are other methods which are more effective, less costly, and meet current societal goals. Remember that prison is partly about punishment, but to society, we just want productive people who do stuff that falls into the category of pro-social behaviors.
>The suggestion that the threat of imprisonment does not act as a deterrent to criminal activity is absurd.
I think that this point cannot really be proven anyway, so I will let it lie.
>Do you really not see "I'm here because I screwed up. I probably should try to not screw up in the future." going through the mind of prisoners as they sit in their cells?
Maybe? Who cares? The actual thing I am interested in is recidivism, and according to pew:
About 43 percent of prisoners who were let out in 2004 were sent back to prison by 2007, either for a new crime or violating the conditions of their release, the study found. That number was down from 45 percent during a similar period beginning in 1999.
So we are sitting at 43% re-offend AFTER going to prison... looks like our system works!
> What people lack of understanding is that prisons are not real punishment for those who are actually there. Some of them might even like it. So, prisons are not efficient in punishment nor rehabilitation.
Maybe they're not effective punishment or rehabilitation, but I would certainly say they're an effective deterrent. They might not be a punishment for anyone in there, but they could still be (and at least in my case, certainly are) seen as a punishment for some people who aren't in there. I would bet that a prison sentence is a much better deterrent than, say, volunteer hours or a fine. Whether deterring bank robberies is a valuable enough goal is a matter of opinion I suppose.
Obviously this is all conjecture, if someone can pull up a study showing that prison sentences don't have any deterrent effect over other forms of punishment then I'd accept that I'm wrong... But I'd be somewhat shocked if that were the case.
> Is it really worth the cost of imprisoning people for non-violent crimes?
Are you suggesting they should go unpunished?
> It doesn't appear to deter people from committing crimes.
The suggestion that the threat of imprisonment does not act as a deterrent to criminal activity is absurd.
> It certainly doesn't help criminals rehabilitate and become productive members of society.
Do you really not see "I'm here because I screwed up. I probably should try to not screw up in the future." going through the mind of prisoners as they sit in their cells?
> and tend to favor phasing out prison terms for non-violent offenders,
So, white collar criminals shouldn't serve prison sentences? How should we punish non-violent white-collar criminals? Take away their holiday homes?
> It's the intellectually lazy, "Common-sense", Joe-Sixpack politics of 3-strikes laws that got us into this mess. "Lock criminals up and throw away the key, I say!"
Most countries have laws that separate habitual criminals from society. Most people view prison as having four purposes:
1. Rehabilitation (i.e. change the behaviour of a convicted individual through positive (reward) and negative (punishment) reinforcement).
2. Punishment
3. Protect the public by separating harmful individuals.
4. Serve as a deterrent to potential criminals.
The “three strikes” and similar laws in other countries are clearly to protect the public by separating habitual criminals from society. This is completely reasonable.
The deterrent effect has two components – the severity of the punishment and the effectivety of the prosecution. If a criminal believes he can escape prosecution, the deterrent effect will not work.
Unfortunately the left did the most damage to the judicial system. Firstly, prison sentences aren’t a deterrent any more. In the old days you received a prison sentence with “hard labour” - this was removed because the left opposed it – in most countries prisoners sits around all day doing nothing (this also increases the cost of incarceration).
The same goes to work – it was usual practice to set prisoners to work in their community on government property/parks. This not only reduced the cost of their incarceration but served as a powerful deterrent to people who see them and shows them the disappointment that society views their actions.
In my country the left started “improving” the criminal and justice system (with almost all the suggestions leftist suggestions). Unfortunately violent crime tripled in 15 years and all other crimes increased.
It is unfortunate that the same justice system that “Joe sixpack” likes works so effective in countries such as Singapore or Japan.
> We tried the 3-strike model, that that doesn't seem to have worked out great.
How would it have worked? Prison isn't about reform in this country, it's about punishment. And there's basically no support once you're out, which just leads to criminals going back to what they were doing before going in because they don't have any other options.
For starters, how about a government infrastructure program that offers former convicts a reliable source of income? Society benefits from both their labor and in theory the fact they aren't committing crimes to feed themselves.
> Punishment that neither makes the victim whole or rehabilitates the offender is just useless vengeance.
You're ignoring deterrence. And yes, deterrence works. I don't park in red zones all that often.
You're also ignoring the benefits of "warehousing". If person A commits an assault a week, general society avoids an assault every week that person A is in jail.
You can argue that the cost exceeds the benefit, but you don't get to ignore the benefit.
> At one point in our history the criminal justice discussions were about how best to rehabilitate the offender rather than punishment.
Yes, that's what they talked about, but what did they accomplish?
Some do. Perhaps the most famous example is Charles Manson who said he'd been in prison for so much of his life that it was his home.
Sorry I forget the source, but one longtime prisoner said that after release, it's like he was still in jail, because after being imprisoned, the real prison is in your mind.
Incarceration becomes a mindset.
With three strikes laws locking people up for life for relatively minor third offences, this should give us pause.
Putting these examples aside, there is a lot of evidence that punishment simply does not work.
For example many states have the death penalty for capital crimes, sometimes by the medievally brutal electric chair[1], and still people continue to commit murder.
[1] Like burning at the stake with all the modern conveniences.
>What is the alternative? If someone kills someone in cold blood do you just let them roam free? You could argue that certain crimes don't warrant certain levels of punishment but incarceration /generally/ seems necessary.
There are more crimes and pre/potential crimes than just violence and murder. We even treat some innocent people as guilty by locking them up. At least we wouldn't have innocent people in cages if there were no cages. Perhaps restitution or weregeld could be a substitute for theft or assault. But I strongly doubt that putting people behind bars does much to improve their lives or the ones they've affected in the overall vast majority of cases.
> Basically, locking people up prevents them from committing crimes for that duration. [...] that's going to reduce crime by removing whatever crimes they'd commit.
You're making a lot of assumptions here. 1) There is no crime in prison. 2) The imprisoned would have kept on committing crime for their total sentence if they were not in jail. 3) Prisoners 'return' to the world committing the same type/volume of crimes that they were committing when they went in.
For #1: There is crime in prison, a whole lot of it, and (even if you don't have sympathy for criminals) it's bad for society; people may come out worse off than they went in, driving crime up further. Jail is an intense experience, and it seems like the skills that you develop while 'surviving' in jail may not be so constructive for society when you're released.
For #2: As a kid my friends and I made a lot of stupid mistakes and some pretty bad decisions. Purely arbitrary factors (race, affluence, geography, etc) meant that none of us were ever locked up for them. We had the opportunity to correct our behavior, grow out of it. Had we have been punished harshly, it's likely that that our bad behavior would have continued. This is due to #1 (exposure to crime/criminals in prison, and contact with the justice system), but also loss of opportunities, and probably a different exposure or experience with drugs.
For #3: The above two points lead to the possibility that people who come out of jail are more likely to engage in more or worse criminal activity when they're released than when they went in.
So while there need to be consequences for crime, it's not at all evident that increased incarceration, certainly the way we are doing it, would lead to reduced criminal activity.
> Convince people that we need to reform prisons and jail fewer people.
Well, why should it convince people of that? Perhaps people are in fact being rational. When a necessary social role becomes expensive, it makes sense to make it cheaper, not to stop doing it.
Are you going to get rid of courts because it costs so much to bring someone to trial? We have a large prison population because we have a large criminal class in this country. 5 homicides per 100K, 370 violet assaults per 100K. Those are committed every year. With these statistics, having ~400 prisoners per 100K is what you would expect, if not on the low side, since we haven't even started talking about non-violent crime. If you disagree, which of these do you think should not get jail time?
> Does deterrance actually work? Show me someone in the US who doesn't know about jails.
I don't know how to address this disconnection in logic. Do you assume that knowledge of a deterrent should create zero crimes ?
You are right though, maybe deterrence doesn't work and summary execution will be the only long term solution to prevent any possible reoffending. I for one welcome Judge Dredd-like overlords.
> maybe? will they get out early? when will they go?
I don’t know, but that is a question for behavior. I do believe in rehabilitation being the underlying goal of prison, so I’d be thrilled if they came out of it changed people.
> a guy selling cigarettes on the streets of NYC without a permit would have been choked to death in seconds. (actual thing that happened)
And that is awful. Never said I was defending that.
> seems like this justice imbalance in the USA is something we can get bipartisan support for changing. lets do it yall.
> I think the present emphasis on prisons as solely a form of rehabilitation is misguided.
I don't think that's currently an emphasis outside of a handful of countries with extremely liberal views on the matter, Norway being probably the most extreme case. In the U.S., for example, punishment and a desire by politicians to appear "tough on crime" seem the main factors. I certainly don't think sentence lengths are calculated based on statistical evidence about which sentence lengths would actually be most effective in reducing crime.
I'd make the opposite claim, myself: I think the present emphasis on prisons as solely a form of punishment is misguided. In particular, I have no interest in my money being used to subsidize somebody else's desire for revenge. I'm okay with paying a minimal amount of taxes to lock people up when absolutely necessary, but I'd like that to be scientifically determined so people are locked up in the most cost-effective way, when actually needed to deter crime and reduce recidivism. But paying into a "socialized revenge" public subsidy? No thanks.
>someone who has taken someone's innocence (and perhaps their ability to have a happy life) has certain privileges taken away.
They should have already been served the 'punishment' or retribution within prison, and hopefully have been reformed. Why do you still want to punish them? Do you not think the punishment is adequate?
One of the aims of the prison system is rehabilitation into society. You're actively trying to stop that out of revenge?
Clearly not. Prison does not work, for most definitions of 'work'.
If you want to stop people re-offending there are cheaper and easier ways.
Prison is used because of weird financial incentives and because it's politically advantageous to say that you're locking criminals up.
> We threatened them with a fucking lifetime in jail, and that still did nothing to stop them committing crimes?
Most people pay no attention to the law when making choices about the way they live their lives. I do not steal. The reason I do not steal is because that's how I was raised, not because it's illegal and carries a potential jail sentence. Punishments might make someone pay attention to the methods used - murderers still kill, but they make an attempt to destroy evidence.
Have you heard about the guy who committed 2 crimes, and was then wrongly arrested and convicted for a 3rd, and sent away for life? All appeals failed. He escaped from jail, gathered evidence, and cleared his name. That 3rd conviction was quashed.
Unfortunately, escaping from prison is a crime, and so he was arrested and convicted of that, and returned to jail for the rest of his life.
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