[tadbit]

> Prisons are for society’s benefit, not for prisoners

It would greatly benefit society to have prisoners be rehabilitated. It's currently just a vicious cycle that produces hardened, repeat offenders that prison companies can make money off, money that comes from tax payers.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

> It would greatly benefit society to have prisoners be rehabilitated.

It would. If only we knew how to do that.

There are places in this country where attitudes develop for many years, decades even, before that person is ever incarcerated. By the time that happens, these attitudes are quite immutable, and they see any gentleness as vulnerability. They're adept at lying, exploitation, and have no qualms about hurting others. What sort of rehabilitation do you even think is possible? Where do you expect this million person army of rehabilitators to come from exactly, to be hired in these prisons? When they start getting raped and killed, will you just double down? Under what principles, exactly, do you expect the rehabilitations to operate? Do you ever remember seeing some study or research that concluded "If steps A, B, and C are performed on convicts who meet the empirical criteria of X, Y, and Z" then they will become upstanding members of society"?

[vidarh]

We know, however, that treating people like animals in harsh prison conditions and lengthy sentences does not reduce reoffending rates.

We can tell, from comparing with systems. So the current US prison system imposes vast amounts of violence and abuse on prisoners without achieving anything beneficial.

I've said before and I say it again: If I were to - by some stroke of magic, seeing as I'm neither a US resident or citizen - be put on a US jury, I don't think I could find a moral justification for convicting someone even if I knew with 100% certainty they were guilty. The US prison system stands out as such a barbaric and immoral system that I'd consider inflicting it on anyone hardly any more moral than most violent crime.

[rustcleaner]

>If I were to - by some stroke of magic, seeing as I'm neither a US resident or citizen - be put on a US jury, I don't think I could find a moral justification for convicting someone even if I knew with 100% certainty they were guilty.

That's called Jury Nullification, and if you ever hope to successfully reserve your right to invoke it you best not tip your hat in any way that you have been made aware of it.

Don't search it on your normie-browser search engines, do it on Whonix or TBB. Remain data vigilant!

[vidarh]

Given there is zero chance that I will ever serve on a US jury given I don't live in the US, it's not a concern for me. But good tip for anyone in the US who might want to do it.

[tadbit]

> If only we knew how to do that.

We'll never figure out how to do it until we actually start trying to rehabilitate people.

> There are places in this country where attitudes develop for many years, decades even, before that person is ever incarcerated.

This is text book bigotry.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

> We'll never figure out how to do it until we actually start trying to rehabilitate people.

We'll never figure out how to do it because it's unethical to experiment on humans. But even more damning than that, we don't have a good theory of mind that explains criminality. It's all half-assed woowoo nonsense meant to bolster this or that political ideology.

[tadbit]

> We'll never figure out how to do it because it's unethical to experiment on humans.

Ah, yes, we never do that. All of our advancements in medical and psychological sciences just pop into existence out of no where!

> It's all half-assed woowoo nonsense meant to bolster this or that political ideology

Right. And your comments here aren't pushing an agenda at all. Definitely not a bigoted, inhumane agenda.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

My only agenda is that it's irritating to listen to non-scientific and pseudo-scientific nonsense bandied about by people who plainly should know better.

What do you propose? That if we can't rehabilitate, we don't bother to deter criminals, or to sequester them from society so they can do less harm, or even that we refuse to punish them thereby encouraging private vengeance? Is that why you irrationally hold onto the clearly mythical rehabilitation, because if we can't have that then we must also abandon the others but subconsciously you know what that shitshow would look like?

The world needs more thinking, not less, and it needs less feeling/empathy, not more.

[timschmidt]

> What do you propose? That if we can't rehabilitate, we don't bother to deter criminals

There's no conclusive proof that even the death penalty deters crime: https://crim.sas.upenn.edu/fact-check/does-death-penalty-det...

> or to sequester them from society so they can do less harm

Sequestration with counseling and education would be useful. Unfortunately, we concentrate the convicted instead, which results in prisons functioning as colleges for criminality: https://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2014/10/20/prison-c...

[hn_go_brrrrr]

> We'll never figure out how to do it because it's unethical to experiment on humans.

I don't think jails have to go through an IRB before they make changes.

[mlyle]

The answer is somewhere in-between:

A researcher would have a hard time getting an IRB to let them build a study at a jail where the jail treats a random half of the inmates in a different way. And judicial oversight might not allow that, either. Further, it's hard to control adequately.

We're going to be stuck with time series and case control studies of changes made haphazardly. It doesn't mean we can't get better, but it's a tougher hill to climb.

[kelnos]

> If only we knew how to do that.

We do. Quite a few other developed countries than ours are able to successfully rehabilitate prisoners, and have a very low rate of recidivism. We're never going to rehabilitate 100% of all convicted criminals, but we can certainly do orders of magnitude better than we do here in the US today.

But the US doesn't want to work like that. Most people here seem to think that prison is a place to be punished, not to be "fixed". And the entire prison-industrial complex that sits atop it all has a vested interest in keeping it that way.

In the US we are very good at cutting off our own noses to spite our faces. The kind of prison that actually rehabilitates people looks "unfair" to most Americans. It looks like coddling, a vacation, when compared to our current prison system. Americans want criminals to be punished, first and foremost. They should live in poor conditions and have the most difficult time. Because that's what they "deserve". And it doesn't matter if that produces the worst outcomes for American society as a whole, including for the people who believe this stuff. As long as the convicts get their harsh punishment, the tough-on-crime crowd is happy to endure any poor societal side-effects.

It reminds me of how we deal with homeless people, or even housed people who are on the edge financially. God forbid we give anyone anything without them having earned it. That would be colossally unfair to all those hard-working folks! Even if welfare and homeless assistance ends up making everyone's lives better than the alternative.

It's completely disgusting, but I don't know how to change people's attitudes on this, not at a country-wide scale.

[mlyle]

> Quite a few other developed countries than ours are able to successfully rehabilitate prisoners, and have a very low rate of recidivism.

I think we can learn quite a bit from those places, and do better. I don't think the cruelty of the system helps at all.

But I don't think that the problems that the US faces with criminality and criminal behavior are exactly the same as what other developed nations face. Just looking at different outcomes isn't super compelling evidence.