[somebodythere]

The societal failings like prisons existing in the first place? The police and courts who supply a steady stream of fodder to the prison-industrial complex? The legislators who create innumerable and overbroad laws to give the above carte blanche to abuse vulnerable groups?

By all means, let us get rid of all of these things.

[hnracer]

> The societal failings like prisons existing in the first place?

Prisons existing is not a societal failure. You can't have a society with 330 million people and not have at least 1 murderer who is relentlessly violent, who needs to be physically confined to protect everyone around them. As soon as you have 1 individual like that (which is almost guaranteed by the law of large numbers irrespective of how good that society is), you've already agreed that some kind of prison (whether or not you label it as such) is necessary.

Every large country has some kind of supermax prison, including Scandinavian countries, because it's a simple reality that individuals like the above exist in small numbers.

[aaomidi]

We're not talking about 1 individual though. The US has the highest prisoner per capita in countries that report this stat.

How many of these people are the Dexter type murderer?

[hnracer]

All I was disputing was the original statement that prisons existing = societal failing.

[99_00]

I'm suggesting helping people before they interact with the police and courts.

[bigbubba]

What help would or could you give to an unrepentant rapist before they are captured by the police?

[99_00]

I'm suggesting a government, medical system, and community focused on helping people before they get to that point in their lives.

I'm focusing on the part I think we can all agree on and therefore is solvable.

[bigbubba]

When that inevitably fails, where do you put the unrepentant rapist, if not in a prison? This is a simple question, if you find yourself unable to answer it, it's because your proposal is moronic.

[99_00]

I'm not answering the question because it is irrelevant to my proposal. I'm not sure why you're having a hard time getting that.

[Nasrudith]

You might want to look at the historical status quo before prison - I highly doubt you would approve of public floggings, mutilations, and quickly carried out (from trial at least) executions. Prison requires cheap enough food or a high ransom to be viable as an institution to allow keeping them working and some means of ensuring they cannot escape or fight successfully - potentially guards as well.

It can be a historical running dark joke - "Sadly <x> still qualified as an improvement." such as slavery technically being a bit better than early human warfare ending in genocide either directly or indirectly (forced out of all territory capable of sustaining themselves).

That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to do better (ones with far better recidivism rates should be a model for one) but given the history it isn't a failing in itself - that would suggest a shift away from widespread killing and mutilating people was a mistake.

[bigbubba]

Where would you put a rapist, if not in a prison?

[lhorie]

If you look at California, for example, you can literally verify that many registered sex offenders live just a few blocks away from any given person. The thing with prison mentality is that people forget that most crimes don't carry life sentences and that ex-cons eventually go back to the streets.

So the question becomes how do you reconcile the secretly dark desire to wipe undesirables off the face of the earth forever vs a legal system that says that people do have the right to live normal lives after they've paid their debts to society. There isn't really a viable middle ground here. The current status quo is to just spend ungodly amounts of tax dollars deferring the dilemma to X years in the future. But when the time is up, either you wait for a relapse and go through the whole thing again, or you just accept that society wants undesirables banished and just kill them all all the time to free resources, or you come up with some reasonable reintegration strategy where people are ok living near ex-cons. Most people would probably balk at the idea of unconditional life/death sentences, under some tautological idea of justice. You can see small scale cases where reformed murderers claim to have found god and built families, and whatever. The challenge is that there's a lot of very strong stigma as soon as you leave tight social circles and that's where the relapses often come from.

[bigbubba]

That's a whole lot of words to not answer my question. Where would you put unrepentant rapists, if not in a prison?

[lhorie]

It does answer your question: you kill them (e.g. law systems that stone them to death) or reintegrate them into society or just keep doing the prison/release/relapse dance indefinitely, burning through tax dollars all the while.

You may put a rapist in a prison but then they serve their sentence and might go on to become your neighbor, regardless of whether they repent or are willing to rape again. Where do you put them then? Who gets to decide who's unrepentant? You see how the question gets uncomfortable?

I get that you're trying to just imply that some criminals should just rot in prison, but that's exactly the blindsidedness that I was talking about when it comes to discussions about prison systems.

[bigbubba]

I can see you're not taking this conversation seriously, since your proposal would entail a massive increase in executions, which I know you do not seriously desire. You know, as well as I do, that justice systems make mistakes. I do not have to explain to you that an innocent man can be released from prison, but cannot be unexecuted. You know this, yet I bring it up anyway because you insist on pretending to be a moron.

[lhorie]

It isn't _my_ proposal. Stoning is a real punishment that was implemented in certain societies. You asked for alternatives to prison sentences and I presented them. It's a bit tall to then suggest that I invented things like islamic law and further, that I'm a moron for bringing it up.

If you scroll elsewhere, you can see I also mentioned that one could spend weeks fruitlessly debating what constitutes a criminal beyond redemption and that that does add extra layers of touchiness when it comes things like capital punishment.

You may not like capital punishment (and I'm neither condemning nor advocating for it), but it is a real punishment framework that addresses tax burden and the problem of discomfort of having to live near a sex offender. Does it have flaws? Absolutely. As you said yourself, justice systems make mistakes. When I said "tautological idea of justice", what I'm deriding is the double standard some people fall into when making an argument that boils down to "killing innocent people is wrong because it cannot be undone" and use that as a differentiator in opinion between capital punishment and long prison sentences, since one can also make the same argument about innocent inmates (the "silver lining" type of argument is usually callously oblivious to the horrors of prison life, as well as stigma, trauma, loss of opportunity and health, etc and the fact that this damage cannot be undone, no matter how much one thinks saying "oops, sorry" is good enough). One can flip the silver lining argument as such: "at least he was put out of his misery quickly". (Again, not advocating for it, just reiterating that side of the debate)

A lot of anti-prison folks will argue that the better option is reintegration, which involves skill development, counseling, etc. This gels well with the vast majority of inmates who are in prison for small crimes. The flaw, of course, is that you can't really proactively stop the odd psychopath. Trade-offs, trade-offs.

[goatinaboat]

By all means, let us get rid of all of these things.

Unfortunately the American people voted otherwise. See what Harris was up to in CA. Expect it to be rolled out nationwide. Biden created the laws that made it possible. They are a right pair.