You could excuse literally any punishment with that line of reasoning. It's nonsensical, designed to appeal to emotion instead of presenting a coherent, logical approach to sentencing.
At some point we need to think pragmatically about what kind of society we want to create, rather than spending all of our time worrying about whether or not people are getting what they deserve.
> At some point we need to think pragmatically about what kind of society we want to create, rather than spending all of our time worrying about whether or not people are getting what they deserve.
To me, these two things are the same.
I want to live in a society where people are held responsible for their actions. If they commit a crime, they should be punished in proportion to their crime. This is a kind of humanism because it respects individuals' freedom of choice (i.e. you choose to commit a crime...or not).
To be concerned "whether or not people are getting what they deserve" is the definition of justice. And it goes both ways: if the punishment is too severe, too random, or inflicted on the innocent, that is also a problem.
Justice can't be separated from rehabilitation. If your punishment system predictably increases recidivism rates for crimes that have real-world consequences, then you basically are punishing innocent people for other people's actions.
Unless you plan to keep every prisoner in prison indefinitely, then the state that they are in when they leave prison matters. It doesn't just matter for them, it also matters for everybody else who lives alongside them in the future -- people who don't deserve to live in a worse, more dangerous society just because we determined that somebody else completely unrelated to them didn't suffer enough yet.
Prisoners who leave prison without being properly rehabilitated are a liability and a risk for everyone else outside of prison -- and even if you don't care about the prisoners, you should at least care about the other citizens who live around them.
> Justice can't be separated from rehabilitation. If your punishment system predictably increases recidivism rates for crimes that have real-world consequences, then you basically are punishing innocent people for other people's actions.
If we grant humans responsibility then this is not true. If we jail someone for knocking over a liquor store and then he gets out 5 years later and kills an old lady, the responsibility for those crimes is his. Not "society's," not "the criminal justice system's," only his.
My argument is that humans can make choices and therefore we are responsible for our actions. You argument is that humans cannot make choices, we are rag dolls tossed around by fate (or whichever system you feel like attacking).
> Unless you plan to keep every prisoner in prison indefinitely, then the state that they are when they leave prison matters. It doesn't just matter for them, it also matters for everybody else who lives alongside them in the future -- people who don't deserve to live in a worse, more dangerous society just because we determined that somebody else completely unrelated to them didn't suffer enough yet.
> Prisoners who leave prison without being properly rehabilitated are a liability and a risk for everyone else outside of prison -- and even if you don't care about the prisoners, you should at least care about the other citizens who live around them.
Talking about "prisoners who haven't been properly rehabilitated" makes my skin crawl. Criminals are human beings and you don't have a right to mold them according to your whims just because they broke the law. You only have a right to punish them in proportion to their crime, nothing more or less.
You believe that through empirical and rational reasoning you can "rehabilitate" criminals in order to reduce crime. I don't think this is true. I think your perspective is driven by emotion, a distaste for punishment, and a sense that the downtrodden are always right. But even if it is true, I'm against it on humanistic grounds.
A society where criminals are punished proportionally to their crimes is an end in itself.
> You argument is that humans cannot make choices, we are rag dolls tossed around by fate (or whichever system you feel like attacking).
We can with a high degree of confidence say that a focus on rehabilitation, training, and safer prison environments reduces future crime rates, the same way that we can say that putting air bags in cars reduces automobile deaths. You can take from that what you will about free will, but there just is an obvious relationship here, I don't think anyone can dispute that.
I don't think I'm attacking the concept of free will if I say that adding guard rails on a twisty road will reduce automobile deaths. I don't think I'm attacking the concept of free will if I say that areas with high job opportunities and housing rates tend to have less crime, and that investing in public infrastructure can lower crime rates. Similarly, I don't think I'm attacking the concept of free will if I say that prisoners being able to get a job after they leave prison is heavily correlated with recidivism rates.
> Criminals are human beings and you don't have a right to mold them according to your whims
Okay sure, but giving prisoners access to educational and recreational materials and programs isn't "molding them" against their will. They want this stuff too.
It's not for a prisoner's benefit that jails are charging money to make phone calls to their family -- that's not a policy that's born out of our commitment to avoid changing their minds against their will. We're not talking about "reeducating" people, we're looking at very obvious statistical data that says people who don't spend their entire prison sentence wasting their minds, who have training to get a job after they leave prison, who aren't regularly placed into dangerous situations that reinforce fight/flight responses while they're in prison, are less likely to hurt other people.
And you can look at that and say that it's distasteful, or that they don't deserve a job, or that you don't like the idea that environment and resources have an obvious statistical effect on crime rates; but if you do, then I think that you should also have to grapple with telling ordinary people who have committed no crimes that you're deliberately putting prisoners into situations where the math says that those prisoners are more likely to commit future crimes.
----
To add onto this, we already do have policies in prisons that are designed to mold prisoner minds, many of them really problematic -- we knock off jail time for prisoners that take on dangerous jobs (often for little to no pay), and the excuse we use is that it's good for them. We've put prisoners into extremely dangerous situations fighting wildfires in California even though many of those prisoners on release are not eligible to be firefighters because of their felony records. Less on the problematic side, we also regularly commute drug sentences if prisoners will enter rehab programs and do community service, a judicial policy that pretty much everyone thinks is a good idea.
So it's not like I'm proposing some kind of dangerous unprecedented idea here, we are already more than happy to talk about rehabilitation as an excuse for policy when it suits us. I'm not proposing a brand new unheard-of idea, I'm just arguing that giving access to books, educational materials, and entertainment will also very clearly make society safer -- and that whether or not you think it's anyone's responsibility to keep prisoners from re-offending, it is still kind of messed up to tell ordinary citizens, "we're going to have policies that make you less safe because we're worried somebody somewhere isn't suffering enough." As a citizen, even isolated from my beliefs about how justice actually works and how it's different from punishment, I still think it's pretty understandable and pretty logical to be upset about that.
> We can with a high degree of confidence say that a focus on rehabilitation, training, and prison environment reduces future crime rates, the same way that we can say that putting air bags in cars reduces automobile deaths. You can take from that what you will about free will, but there just is an obvious relationship here, I don't think anyone can dispute that.
Comparing social engineering to an air bag is silly. We can ram cars into walls in labs over and over. We can't fit society in a lab and so we can't model it very well. But even if we could reduce crime using these strategies, the strategies themselves fit my definition of a crime because they violate my definition of justice.
> I don't think I'm attacking the concept of free will if I say that adding guard rails on a twisty road will reduce deaths. I don't think I'm attacking the concept of free will if I say that areas with high job opportunities and housing rates tend to have less crime, and that investing in public infrastructure can lower crime rates. Similarly, I don't think I'm attacking the concept of free will if I say that prisoners being able to get a job after they leave prison is heavily correlated with recidivism rates.
You previously blamed the justice system for recidivism instead of the criminal (because it should have reformed him). That's quite different than "guard rails". What did I say that made you think I'm against "investing in public infrastructure" or "allowing ex-cons to get jobs"?
> Okay sure, but giving prisoners access to educational and recreational materials and programs isn't "molding them" against their will. They want this stuff too.
> It's not for a prisoner's benefit that jails are charging money to make phone calls to their family -- that's not a policy that's born out of our commitment not to accidentally mess with their minds against their will. We're not talking about "reeducating" people, we're looking at very obvious statistical data that says people who don't spend their entire prison sentence wasting their minds, who have training to get a job after they leave prison, who aren't regularly placed into dangerous situations that reinforce fight/flight responses while they're in prison, are less likely to hurt other people.
I said that the punishment should be proportional to the crime. I didn't say that prisoners should sit in their cells going insane. I didn't say the author here should not be able to have a chess board. It's reasonable to question whether a punishment is proportional to the crime, whether it is cruel and unusual, etc.
Overly cruel punishments (China executing drug users for example) are exactly as wrong as punishing criminals "for their own good". If you could prevent all theft by, say, cutting off the hands of thieves, would you be okay with that? (I wouldn't, because the punishment does not fit the crime).
> And you can look at that and say that it's distasteful, or that they don't deserve a job, or that you don't like the idea that environment and resources have an obvious statistical effect on crime rates; but if you do, then I think that you should also have to grapple with telling ordinary people who have committed no crimes that you're deliberately putting prisoners into situations where they're more likely to hurt them.
I never said ex-cons don't deserve a job. I don't think that ex-cons should have to announce themselves in job applications. That is exactly the kind of dehumanizing strategy that I'm arguing against. When you've done your time, you've paid your dues, the world is set right, and you should be able to go on your way.
Believe me, I know what you're proposing is not "brand new". It's very old. And you're correct to say that it already exerts a lot of influence.
My argument is that, as it gains more and more influence, the value of human beings will gradually be lost, because we will be treating people as means to some end (a better society, a safer society), rather than ends in themselves. Humans will be viewed as "products of their environment" rather that free-willing, free-acting agents. Anyway, this drama is not new, it's as old as time and I'm sure it will keep playing out for as long as there are people.
Even were the victim alive, we are not a society that encourages the victim to dictate the punishment, nor allow the victim to carry out the punishment, so what would the victim's thoughts matter?
As much as it's presented otherwise, punishment western democracies is first and foremost a method of deterrence for the good of all, not for the satisfaction of those harmed.
It's not about him. It's about us, as a society. When we imprison someone, we take ownership and responsibility for their well-being.
To be clear, we can decide, as the responsibility holders over their well-being, that we believe they should be treated like garbage. Right or wrong, we have that ability and there is no higher authority than society itself to determine if that's right or wrong.
Although I have a strong opinion about what is or isn't an appropriate punishment, we absolutely should not be basing our decisions on the feelings of the victim. Putting aside that the victim is dead and can't express how they feel about it, this is no way to run a law-based society.
If I commit a crime, and someone else commits an identical crime, surely we can agree that the punishment -- whatever it may be -- should be the same (or at least equivalent). It shouldn't vary based on who the victim is or how the victim may feel about it.
If you are not sentencing someone to life in jail or the death penalty, then you can't treat a prisoner bad enough to cause lasting damage because they will rejoin society at some point.
This is irrespective of the victim's thoughts; if I get violently robbed and society + a judge has decided that's worth 10 years in jail, then that's what it is.
If you think prisoners deserve absolutely nothing to the point of causing psychological or physical harm then you are saying the crime they committed is worth life in prison or the death penalty.
At some point we need to think pragmatically about what kind of society we want to create, rather than spending all of our time worrying about whether or not people are getting what they deserve.