[aaomidi]

> Because prisons aren't going to away.

They should. I don't think this is something I'm willing to change my mind on.

Prisons are literally one of the worst things we've made. They serve no purpose other than to dehumanize, rape, assault, and other fucked shit to "undesirables." It allows us to put problems to be solved to a later date, instead of addressing them head on and making sure it doesn't happen.

Prison should be an optional rehabilitation option for people, with it potentially being forced on a very very small minority of the population. No more than 0.01% of the population should be in forced rehabilitation, and no more than 1% in optional rehabilitation.

[mLuby]

> They serve no purpose other than to

Come on, you know that's not true.

Prisons exist primarily to control threats from society. And secondarily to punish people for getting caught breaking rules, partially for vengeance and partially for deterrence.

Societies have tried other methods of controlling threats beyond imprisonment, including (but definitely not limited to) ankle bracelets, public shaming, shunning, exile, offender registries, altering brains via chemicals, brainwashing, torture, or surgery, altering bodies via sterilization or mutilation, death, even collective punishment.

So prisons aren't great, but they're better than many of the alternatives.

On a personal note: that crime of any kind is even possible in a 100% controlled environment speaks to the malicious incompetence of those administering the prisons, and to our shameful collective thirst for vengeance. As with people, judge a society by how they treat the least powerful.

[int_19h]

It's very much the other way around. Prisons exist primarily to punish, and secondarily for isolation. But they were originally - as a concept - intended to be about rehabilitation. The end result is something that doesn't rehabilitate, is a very expensive way to punish someone in a way that makes it hard to control the severity of the punishment, and does a lot more than what's needed for simple isolation.

On top of all that, it gets severely overused, not the least because of this broad assumption that it's "better than many of the alternatives", even when that's not actually true - in many cases, prison sentences that replaced one-off corporal punishments for minor crimes can be a lot more disruptive for the life of the person undergoing them.