[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?