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I think you're missing the point of the conversation. I'm not excusing or justifying what he did at all. The point of this is, other than our sense of justice and desire to punish someone for doing something bad, what is prison supposed to achieve? I'd like prison to achieve the kind of justice that yes, does provide some sense of justice to victims, but aims to reform criminals and reduce crime. Now, independent of this case, America is clearly failing, because our recidivism rate is (depending on the study you look at) between 40% and 70% over a matter of months and years, which is pretty terrible [1]. Many other first-world countries are achieving far better rates. And for per-capita imprisonment, America is literally the worst in the world according to Wikipedia [2]. Last I checked, a couple of years ago, it was second. But back to this specific article. Yes, this person was convicted of a serious crime and went to jail. But while there they were isolated in a way I consider a violation of the 8th amendment without due process. Not only do I consider this a failing of "justice" in its own right, but it's left this person less able to go and rejoin society in a productive way. Poverty is one of the strongest predictors of criminality: how is this helpful to anyone? Just because you want to punish it and doing so seems fair, doesn't mean the way the US justice system will implement that punishment is doing something good in the end. You can reform that system without just excusing serious crimes. [1] https://atlascorps.org/recidivism-united-states-overview/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera... edit: I feel like this is the same kind of misunderstanding everyone's having with the #BlackLivesMatter vs #BackTheBlue stuff right now. People complain about the way some police are doing their jobs, and point out ways some other police departments or police in other countries do it much better, and the alternative we consider is no police. What the actual fuck? Can't we just have police tone down the tactics and approach the problem a different way? Since when is saying that police are killing people too easily and too often saying that they just shouldn't have even arrested the person? |
To keep a person from doing something harmful again when we don't know any other way to make them not do it and we aren't willing to risk more harm.
Sure, if we could magically change the person so they would see what they did before as bad and never do it again, we wouldn't have to keep them in prison. But we don't have any way of doing that. What techniques we do have for "rehabilitating" people are simply not very reliable, so there's a limit to how much we are willing to depend on them as an alternative to incarceration.