[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.