[creep]

> learning gives us a different understanding of ourselves and the world around us, and it provides us tools to become more empathetic

This is the key. I really don't believe punishment works. I'm on mobile at the moment so it would be tedious to find sources, but I will do so later when I have time.

But a great example for this is with parenting. A child doesn't learn why changing their behavior is beneficial to them outside the context of punishment if punishment is used. They simply learn to hide the behavior, because it is the punishment itself that provides the negative feedback. Showing the child why a specific behavior is detrimental to them gives them negative feedback about the behavior itself. One of the best ways to show this to children is by appealing to their empathy. "Would you like it if X did that to you?" That's a simplistic example.

But in education, the examples are numerous. And for reasons that may be obvious prisoners won't necessarily be in education for say, a math degree, but they would be taking courses in history and philosophy, and the like. Humanities courses give the perspective that crime-affected communities often lack. And they give hope and possibility by exploring all the realms of human thought

Incarceration is inhumane. It does not work. How can someone possibly have hope for changing their behavior when they are treated like an animal in a cage? it does nothing for reinforcement since their freedom after a served sentence is likely to entail returning to a broken community.

[andrewla]

Oliver Wendell Holmes discusses the purpose of incarceration in The Common Law [1], and I've found it to be insightful when thinking about what the purpose of prison is.

> It has been thought that the purpose of punishment is to reform the criminal; that it is to deter the criminal and others from committing similar crimes; and that it is retribution. Few would now maintain that the first of these purposes was the only one. If it were, every prisoner should be released as soon as it appears clear that he will never repeat his offence, and if he is incurable he should not be punished at all. Of course it would be hard to reconcile the punishment of death with this doctrine.

> The main struggle lies between the other two. On the one side is the notion that there is a mystic bond between wrong and punishment; on the other, that the infliction of pain is only a means to an end. Hegel, one of the great expounders of the former view, puts it, in his quasi mathematical form, that, wrong being the negation of right, punishment is the negation of that negation, or retribution. Thus the punishment must be equal, in the sense of proportionate to the crime, because its only function is to destroy it. Others, without this logical apparatus, are content to rely upon a felt necessity that suffering should follow wrong-doing.

It goes on from here in great depth. Recidivism as a metric of the effectiveness of prison is not misguided, per se, but is not sufficient. The deterrent effect of imprisonment is hard to measure; the punishment aspect is impossible to measure.

I agree, on a purely subjective basis, that we have tilted way too far in the direction of retribution and deterrence, to the point where we have maxed effectiveness as a deterrent, and have more than satisfied the "blood lust" of the victims of the crime (that is, reducing vigilantism and private retribution to a non-factor).

[1] http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2449/2449-h/2449-h.htm#link2H...

[devinhelton]

I am all for teaching empathy. I am all for teaching people to behave well because it is the right thing to do (not because of fear of punishment).

But -- some percent of the population are predatory, or have the potential to become predatory. They have come to believe that the strong (them) have the right to take from the weak. They steal, rob, rape, murder because it benefits themselves to do so. And if you take away any prospect of bad consequences, more people will become predators.

I also think our current prison system is a pretty awful. But if you take it away, what would you do with criminals instead? What do you do with the 20 year old man who robs someone at gunpoint, or drags a woman into an alley and rapes her? I think there are alternatives out there, but IMO they must involve punishment (to deter others) and containment/supervision (to prevent the criminal from preying upon others again). My own preference for punishing something like armed robbery would be something like a sentence of 10 years of doing farm labor followed by a three year gradual reintegration into society.

[skookumchuck]

I have slowly come to the conclusion that punishing people for crimes is barbaric. What we should do is incarcerate them for the purpose of preventing them from harming others further. (Simple withdrawal of freedom and isolation from society is enough punishment and deterrence. Heaping punishment on top of that is pointless and barbarous.)

[zanny]

What the justice systems of most nations is missing is the idea of banishment and exile. In city states you were rarely imprisoned - that was very expensive to do, and society had to then keep you alive while you were non-productive. You were often enslaved, to work off your debt to the society. You were often beaten, but not maimed, because you were less useful crippled. If your (perceived) crime was severe enough, you were often killed.

But then there was exile, where you may not warrant your own death or loss of freedom, but the society just doesn't want you around any more. This would apply to the robber barons of modern times, the scam artists and those that prey on the weak. But we simply don't have the ability to banish such people - there is no where to send them, you cannot just put them outside your borders and say never come back. Even without any intent for retribution prison is a necessary construct to isolate those too dangerous to participate in society from it, but some criminals aren't actually physically dangerous. They are only dangerous with power, authority, or an audience. You would traditionally just want to exile those kinds of criminals after taking their possessions to recompense their victims, but we have no real way to do that anymore. Even if you had somewhere to put many of these criminals, the world is too interconnected to stop them from committing more crimes against your citizens abroad. Its often hard to completely strip someone of their accrued power.

So either they walk free with paltry fines or maybe rarely destitution, or they end up in prison like Madoff when they are so grossly criminal you have to do something. The breadth of response to crime today is to take possessions, take freedom, or in barbaric countries like the US take life. The option to take citizenship or residency is no longer an option, which is a shame, because there are a lot of crimes that would be well suited for it.

[devinhelton]

What about someone who commits auto theft? Seems like isolation is actually overkill and more inhumane than other forms of punishment. 24/7 GPS monitoring should suffice to make sure he doesn't steal again. But you still need punishment, else the calculus for the would be criminal is heads I get a car, tails, I get caught, but nothing bad happens to me.

[d0lph]

Isolation is a punishment though isn't it?

[skookumchuck]

Isolation from society, yes. But that's to protect society, its purpose is not punishment.

Basically, I like the Norwegian approach.

[LoSboccacc]

I keep hearing that it is because 'humans are social animals' and all that but is it really for people with antisocial behaviour?

[bomb199]

It does really really bad things to you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glS0ApOAaCw

[d0lph]

If it were non-optional, I think so.

[yters]

Then just lie, cheat, steal and kill until one reaches their goal. In a way, it seems clear cut punishment is more humane than medicating or isolating a criminal out of existence. Punishment tells the criminal "this is wrong" in clear terms. Anything else communicates "you are an animal without moral agency and we treat you as such." Consequently, unpunished criminals will act as animals instead of rational beings.

[ghostbrainalpha]

>>But -- some percent of the population are predatory, or have the potential to become predatory. They have come to believe that the strong (them) have the right to take from the weak. They steal, rob, rape, murder because it benefits themselves to do so. And if you take away any prospect of bad consequences, more people will become predators.

And if you leave the consequences.... they become CEO's.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/09/13/1-in-5-ceos-are-...

[omegaworks]

>And if you take away any prospect of bad consequences, more people will become predators.

This premise is false. People have gotten along without the present distorted system of mass incarceration, not having a system of punishment doesn't itself produce predators. Social norms are quite powerful by themselves. The present system needs to be wholesale re-evaluated for its fairness and effectiveness at producing people that don't reoffend.

At the moment it exists, structurally, to create a labor force that can be forced to work for free, effectively continuing the practice of slavery in this country. This systematized role disproportionately affects communities of color, unsurprisingly, in line with the historical victims of the practice.

>What do you do with the 20 year old man who robs someone at gunpoint, or drags a woman into an alley and rapes her?

Well, at the moment we let them out after 90 days if they're on the swim team at Stanford.

https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/02/us/brock-turner-release-jail/...

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

We have always had systems of punishment and retribution. In the past if you killed or raped someone, the clan and family members would try to hunt you down and kill you. Basically, the state took over the function of punishing wrongdoers. What happens when the state stops punishing people is not that punishment stops, but that you end up with vigilantism. For example in Detroit https://www.cnn.com/2013/08/14/us/michigan-suspect-beaten/in...

[omegaworks]

> We have always had systems of punishment and retribution.

We have, but the system that the article is critiquing is, in fact, the one we presently live under.

You can, in fact, punish people without prisons. You said it yourself, we've done it with other means in the past. The article addresses incarceration specifically.

The whole article intends to convince us that incarceration should not be punitive, but restorative.

You directly missed my point. The carceral threat is only one stick, and judging by recidivism data, not one that is working particularly well. Perhaps we should examine another set of sticks, or even maybe, perhaps consider another set of carrots. Dismantling the prison industrial complex will not itself create predators, which is the claim I responded to.

[LoSboccacc]

> People have gotten along without the present distorted system of mass incarceration

while the incarceration system has limits when it comes to rehabilitation, this part of the post is extremely mistaken.

just because it was slavery and banishment aren't equivalent to incarceration doesn't mean there was no system of punishment - for as far as myth can track our oral history crime and punishment was always present in some form or another as a value and a condition for the existence of social groups larger than tribes

crime and punishment was codified as social values in laws, tradition and religion precisely because not having them caused more strife than having them, a point that is driven over and over again with the stigma the same myth gives to personal vendetta as opposed to systematic punishment.

[devinhelton]

It's cheap to point out the problems of a system with making a case for something that might work better. Answer my question: What should be done about the 20 year old man who robs someone at gunpoint or drags a woman into an alley and rapes her?

[badpun]

> How can someone possibly have hope for changing their behavior when they are treated like an animal in a cage?

If I were treated like an animal in a cage, I sure as hell would not like to go back to prison again.

[Cyberdog]

No ex-convict wants to return to prison. However, they've just been put in a position where all of their peers are also criminals, and getting a well-compensated job after release is incredibly difficult, especially if they do not already have specialized skills and education. So it's very easy to fall back into bad habits, especially if that's how they were paying the bills.

Destigmatizing a criminal record when it comes to hiring (or anything else for that matter) would help a lot, but the government doesn't seem too interested in helping out with that (though I hope the current low unemployment rates help in this regard). Prison education programs would also help. If the government is going to lock people in little boxes with other criminals, stigmatize them for the rest of their lives, and seriously contend the point of it is to reduce recidivism, they need to be doing this sort of education at the very least.

[gerbilly]

> No ex-convict wants to return to prison.

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.

[Cyberdog]

I think Charles Manson might be a bit of a statistical outlier.

[nerfhammer]

The whole point of prison is that of confining people to somewhere that they would not willingly remain confined to.

[creep]

Right, but I'm assuming you live in a decent community with decent support. You live in a decent house with a decent job. This is also the reason you are likely not to commit a significant crime-- there is no need. There is no power to be gained, no money that you couldn't obtain legally, no significant anger or behavioral patterns.

But the opposite is true for most re offending criminals. Their freedom from the cage thrusts them into another cage. There is no point in not committing crime, especially if you are part of a gang. The gang affords you power and a kind of familial bond to other people.

[blurbleblurble]

This is so true. I've heard friends who've been in the workhouse talk about it, how it was a free place to stay and you didn't have to worry about where your meals were coming from. It's not that they "wanted" to be there, but they preferred it over indefinite jail.

[mal808]

If you're treated like an animal in a cage, odds are you won't have the skills to survive in society when you're eventually released, and end up falling back into old habits. Watch this and see what you think: https://www.netflix.com/title/80217333

Some of it goes against your instincts, but the results speak for themselves.

[andrei_says_]

Punitive justice sounds great in theory but in practice it has not prevented crime from occurring and reoccurring.

There is a lot of research on punishment showing that it only works to increase the motivation to not get caught. It in no way influences the reasons behind criminal/illegal behavior. Otherwise no one would ever get a second parking or speeding ticket or a dui.

Having prisons be run as colleges is better for society than having prisons run as plantations.

In 2018, high quality online education is close to free. Coursera, edux, udemy are just some of the examples.

[bbctol]

People don't want to go to prison the first time, either.

[shishy]

Intuitively I agree that most convicts do not want to return to prison again (though I am certain you can find examples if you tried).

But I believe the argument is that the way prison/punishment is structured right now makes reintegration into society difficult, and as a result is ineffective.

[bomb199]

When the choice is to commit crimes or live in hellish poverty, the choice becomes easier. Going to prison just means you get free food and board for a while. Sure, it's awful. But your only shot getting a better life is crime....

[hnal943]

> But your only shot getting a better life is crime....

that is true for 0% of Americans in prison

[Sonnol53]

Yea, creating this environment for these people is just a start, but it goes into a positive direction. I agree that punishing these people doesn't do any good in the long term.

[wuxb]

Education could be too late for some people. Big countries have spent some money and many years on negotiating with a single person--the leader of North Korea. I'm afraid that's the largest investment in this world to teach some one for something good. The resource (time, money, love) for people who are making mistakes are so limited compared with what is actually needed to make effective changes to them. The reality is so cruel. I believe the effort on school education is still be most effective one. Better be home-schooling if one is really capable. Kids are the hope.

[ericmcer]

Isn't part of the punishment the therapeutic aspect for victims? Our justice and prison system is broken in many ways, but it has always sat kind of wrong with me that someone could steal from, hurt, or kill me or someone I love and then go to a rehab camp to learn why what they did was wrong.

I definitely try to be progressive about it, and for victimless crimes 100% rehabilitation and learning, but If a loved one or me was a victim, it would be difficult to watch them taking humanities courses.

[cortic]

The system is flawed, it will always be flawed. some innocent people will be imprisoned, some guilty people will never be caught. Since its impossible to change this i think the system should be designed with this in mind;

what we would like to do with the 'guilty'? what would sit right? this is not the question we should be asking about a flawed system as we can never be sure who is guilty.

Instead take a look at someone innocent, your daughter, wife, your son; And ask what you would be willing to put them through if it was their turn to be the innocent people imprisoned? i'm sure the list would be short, the necessities, remove; freedom? ok. But access to education? entertainment? social interaction? protection? What would sit right with you knowing that your loved ones risked this existence every day?

This is the reason i hate the death penalty, forced labour, solitary, and all inhuman, cruel and dehumanizing things that our prisons employ.. These things don't protect us, they exist only due to vindictiveness; And they ignore the inevitability of mistakes.

[zanny]

The more we learn about human psychology the harder it is to take a criminal and say "this is a bad person who is wholly responsible for their behavior and deserves what they get".

For a vast, huge majority of victims of crime by far and way the most valuable thing to them is not retribution or vindication, it is their own attempt to regain safety. The knowledge their assailant is no longer able to hurt others is so much more substantial on average to victims than the knowledge their assailant is suffering or dead.

Retribution is a tart feeling. Its empty. It gives you a moment of animal hormone rush before you realize it isn't gaining anyone anything. Its just part of being angry.

Yes, of course if you were involved in a crime, or someone you loved, you would want retribution. We all would feel that way. Our brains are wired too strongly to react in that manner. Its a survival instinct, one of those deeply rooted behaviors you cannot undo like the gag or drowning reflexes. That is why it is so valuable that those of us not under its influence recognize it doesn't serve a practical purpose in civilized society. You retaliate to save your life from an immediate threat, and you use that instinctual bloodlust to insure the threat is neutralized. You don't channel it to use state institutions to harm people long term to appease your animal brain in the same way you don't guzzle cheese wiz all the time because your brain keeps telling you to eat so long as food is available. We have that instinct, both to eat endlessly and be sedentary and to seek retribution. Neither are rational, and both require discipline to restrain, not glorify.