Should criminals be punished or rehabilitated?
They need to know they've done wrong, and the victims need to know their pain has been recognized. Therefore, punishment is vital
I'd rather not be mugged again, thanks, and I'll trade in my savage glee at seeing them suffer if that's what it takes.
This is silly. Obviously there's a happy medium. The current system isn't so bad.
A thief should have his/her hand cut off.
They need to know they've done wrong, and the victims need to know their pain has been recognized. Therefore, punishment is vital
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I'd rather not be mugged again, thanks, and I'll trade in my savage glee at seeing them suffer if that's what it takes.
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This is silly. Obviously there's a happy medium. The current system isn't so bad.
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A thief should have his/her hand cut off.
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Given five minutes before work this morning, I can only find UK reoffending rates statistics for 10-17 year-olds. Apparently, in 2004, 41.3% of young offenders reoffended within a year.
Now I've had my car broken into a couple of times, but in my book that barely qualifies as being a victim of crime compared to some crime against your person, like being mugged or (God forbid) actual bodily harm. So my point of view is probably off to one end of the scale (the Bleeding Heart Liberal end, obviously - duh). But speaking personally, even if I was the victim of some sort of serious crime, I'd like to think that I'd prefer a rehabilitation policy to one of punishment. I'd like to think that, if you could absolutely guarantee that I would never be a victim of crime again, I'd be happy to see the criminal go unpunished.
That's a slightly misleading statement, because it links punishment and rehabilitation - and I think most of the evidence shows that there is no link. Some might argue that that is because the punishments we hand down aren't extreme enough - but we only have to look at Dickensian England and the origin of the phrase "might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb", to see that it doesn't stamp out crime. It might reduce the level, but it pushes the remainder to increased levels of desperation and violence. That's not good.To my mind, that condones a level of barbarism into society which is precisely the wrong direction for society to progress in.
Oh, and for the record, I do not believe that the state has the right to take the life of any of its citizens, for any reason. But that's not the debate I wanted to have. I want to concentrate here on the prison system, and what it achieves or fails to achieve. And what that says about us, and what we demand of it.
Okay, well, that's my rather facile opinion on the matter, thrown together in ten minutes this morning. What do you think?
(and Moom, having lit the blue touchpaper, retires...)
56 comments:
"They need to know they've done wrong" Oh, come on! Are you suggesting that the little scrote who broke into my yard to steal my ladders didn't realise it was wrong? The benefit of prison is that the offender commits no more offences while he's inside. That's what prison is for: to protect the public. Punishment should also be a deterrent to others; if you do this, you will suffer. He gets caught, he goes to jail, and while he's in jail he steals no more ladders. If he steals again as soon he's released, he goes back in for longer. Ad infinitum.
"To my mind, that condones a level of barbarism into society which is precisely the wrong direction for society to progress in." I think you're making a fundamental mistake here; you're assuming that criminals are part of society. They're not. By their actions, they've deliberately put themselves outside of society. Society's responsibility is to its members; it must protect them from the criminal, by whatever means it determines to be necessary.
Matt, prisons are like democracy. They suck, but no one's come up with a better system.
Here's a radical prediction for you -- nearly universal surveillance will drastically reduce if not eliminate most incidental crime within 2 decades.
Examples? Cars capturing video around them and shpping data to you. Not driving without you in them. E911 with video in your neclace. X10 systems that notify you in real time if someone breaks into your house are already on the market.
I view evil, whether with a small or big "E" mostly as a lack of empathy. The criminal is able to function by avoiding empathy. At Enron, he convinces himself it's a victimless crime. In East LA, he knows the member of the other gang is less human than he is. And of course sometimes, he is simply high, or hungry. In all but the last two cases, rehabilitation depends on whether or not empathy can be taught. I am skeptical.
Several years ago we had our doormat stolen. I reported this to the police, who gave me a crime report number. We were very definitely victims of a crime, by any definition. I hope the criminals have by now burned to death painfully in a freak tragic house fire, along with all their families. Bastards.
I often have this sort of discussion with my wife, who works in the criminal justice system. My stance (my wife, of course, disagrees - but then, we're married) is that prisons are both expensive and useless. Their function seems to be to contain undesirables and keep them away from us good people. That's all. There's no element of teaching them a lesson, or attempting to change behaviour in any way - it is merely an effective strategy of removing them from us.
If there were a cheaper and yet humane way of achieving this, I'm sure it'd be explored with vigour (but the various 'mental health' venues aren't the direction either, they're more of an equally expensive variant of prison with different wallpaper).
I propose that the solution is embodied in a simple (yet very difficult to achieve) test criteria: make the offender definitely not want to perform such an act. Punishment really isn't a positive deterrent - it's a negative deterrent, and in most cases, I'm not so sure that prison counts as a deterrent. Either way, I don't think that punishment is a good motivation - better to re-engineer someone's value system so that they just don't want to offend. We're embarassingly lacking in the psychological technology that would allow these activities - we're still in the medieval days with our reliance on Pavlovian conditioned-responses to punishment.
How this is to be achieved is not something I have an answer for. I know it's not happening, and I know nobody really has any effective means of implementing such an effect, but in my mind, this is the solution - find something that satisfies the aforementioned process, and we're on our way to a civilised treatment of crime. As I say, I've really no idea how it can be done, which direction to take, what constitutes an effective procedure, etc. All I know is that I believe money spent in this direction is likely to be a valuable investment.
My wife, of course, want's 'em all locked up - that'll teach 'em.
There are three aspects to punishment to consider, not two:PunishmentRehabilitationDeterrenceCutting people's hands off clearly falls under deterrence.
I completely disagree with tc's prediction over petty crime - no amount of technology will stop it.
were you offered counselling?
I've always liked the idea of castrating a rapist.
Clearly, the moon colony is the answer
Well, I think if I had to go everywhere with my arse hanging out, I'd certainly think twice about reoffending.
There's an interesting section in Steven D. Levitt's "Freakonomics" on crime and punishment which seems to bear out the observation above about detection reducing crime, by examining homicide rates in different countires over several centuries.
In the past, the punishment for murder was usually the most extreme possible, yet homicide rates were very much higher, presumably because the perpetrators stood a much better of getting away with it than they do with modern detection methods.
"The nationwide boycott of business by migrants in 2006 cost the US consumer about $3 each out of pocket."
"Retailers reported that same day shoplifting declined by 90%. Expanded figures show that the yearly loss to consumers in increased prices -- $10 billion -- is about the same as the added value from migrant labor."
Okay, I realize that is silly. Fact remains, all crime has an economic basis: Cost, Price, Risk/reward, and opportunity cost are all factors that consciously, to degree, are evaluated by a potential criminal. The problem with many paradigms of justice is that rehabilitation and punishment are only available options if a criminal is captured and convicted. Polite society has only deterrence with which to deal, and beyond expanding effort to reach the affected (vigilantism; assassination; exile; protective custody) we have only the media and cultural ties in common with our afflict ors. We need to follow the lead on crime-stoppers but in a model similar to that used in terrorist organizations, conspire with criminals to out their co-conspirators. When everyone realizes that, for a price, antisocial characters will eat their young, even this method to solicit cooperation will fail. In the meantime, though, there will be a great contraction in the criminal element.
Um... Punishment is an aspect of punishment? But I think I know what you mean ;)
"Matt, prisons are like democracy. They suck, but no one's come up with a better system" Arthur, for some reason that I can't explain, whenever somebody starts a posting with my name I get the instant feeling I'm being talked down to ;) But I disagree with you. I think the prison system is a victim of political expediency and kneejerk reactions, rather than on the research done into crime and rehabilitation. Surely the point is to prevent crime in our society. Either we lock the criminals away forever, or we have to change their behaviour so they don't offend again. The current system of putting them away for a while with other criminals in a very unpleasant, confrontational environment is simply storing up trouble with compound interest. I've never been to prison - I've never even visited one - but judging from their media profile, they've become universities of crime, often with their own economics based on prestige and drugs. They don't prevent people going out and committing more crime, so what's the point? To assuage our righteous anger? I don't think that speaks very well of us.
""They need to know they've done wrong" Oh, come on!" Ian, sorry about that - that's not my opinion, and not the option I voted for. If my representation of an argument I don't approve of was facile and badly put, then I apologize. I really tried to portray it in a positive light, to avoid bias. Obviously I missed, badly. But I violently disagree with your contention that criminals are not part of society. I don't understand how you can put anyone outside of society. What the blazes is society, anyway? To my ears, your contention that they aren't part of society can only come about by the government absolving itself of any duty of care towards them, and that is tantamount to denying their humanity. And at that point, you might as well gut them and sell the meat in supermarkets.
Hardly - what about rape, assault and murder?
Laws are merely a statement of a society's norms, which is why the definition of what is a crime varies from place to place. Moreover, economists have done analyses over and over which show that most violent criminals studied (i.e., the ones caught) have only a poor grasp of the risk/reward ratios of the crimes they committed, reflected in the ludicrously small sums they are usually trying to steal.
On the side of non-violent crime, Ivan Boeksy carried on insider trading even after he had so much money that the insider trading provided a very small part of his returns (in fact, if he had stopped once he had amassed his fortune, he would never have been caught). The same is true of many other white collar criminals. And look at all the celebrities caught shoplifting petty items.
Which suggests that crime is mostly about the violence and/or the thrill of law breaking, and not so much about the fiscal reward.
"They need to know they've done wrong" Hey, I voted for that one! Yeah Ian's right they do know. Even a child knows he's done wrong, but the parent repeats himself for the 100th time and hopes one day it will stick.
I'm not putting anyone outside society; I'm saying that by deliberately flouting commonly accepted modes of behaviour - which, to my mind, is what defines 'society' - a criminal puts himself outside of society.
F***, even dogs know when they've done wrong! Birds even. It's programmed into us very deeply.
to whom are you responding, Peter?
I find that sometimes I need to use the name to make it easier to read the thread. I find it helpful, but I guess I'll strive to avoid it in your case in the future.
My point was that there are all kinds of issues associated with prisons, most of which are probably familiar to all of us, and honestly, didn't need to be spelled out, but nevertheless, a mechanism for separating those that are willing to harm others from those that would be harmed is necessary, and my goal was to state it in many fewer words.
Your goal seems to be a very progressive society. I hate to be positioned into everyone one of these arguments as though you are the eloi and I am the morlock -- but we seem to constantly wind up there. I submit, though, that a real society, and not an allegory, requires balance -- and for now, requires prisons.
Fair enough. Personally I use the quoting thing for that, but I understand. I'll try not to let it bug me in future.
You're right, of course, that those who would harm others need to be separated for at least as long as it takes to be pretty sure that they won't do it again (assuming certainties in this field don't exist). My concern is that prisons as currently constituted are more about punishment than about rehabilitiation. As for deterrence, I suspect that that's the primary mechanism the prison system has at the moment for preventing crime, and it's gone as far as it can. I don't think people want to go back to prison, and yet they reoffend. What depresses me is that politicians often disregard the advice of expert in the field because they fear that the general population will accuse them of being soft.
Or maybe I'm just a big softie. But an eloi? Gosh I hope not
hahaha. Excellent.
In all seriousness, you know my vision is all about techno solutions. There's probably a name for that :)
But I do believe, as stated earlier, that much of in your face crime will get harder & harder to pull off. One does have to watch out for unintended consequences, of course -- carjackings were partially a result of cars that are harder to steal.
I think there's just a chance, as we hurl by Kurzweil's singularity, that much of what we now understand about the economy, including scarcity based dynamics, will be increasingly challenged.
You, I think (but swearing for emphasis, not at you!). A sense of right and wrong, as well as shame, as well as law enforcement (for want of a better term), is built into all of us, and has been since before we were mammals, since birds got it too.
is your name Peter? well, well, well!
getting confusing isn't it!
So, if there were an age of plenty - no need for poverty, no need for even being a little bit hard up for cash, perhaps no need for cash even, and no need for being richer than you require to satisfy your ongoing desires, then there would still be crime?
I think there'd be less poverty or scarcity motivated crime (ie, people having to steal things to pay for drugs - just say no and here, have some drugs), there'd be less opportunistic smashing of car windows for things, there'd be less shoplifting, perhaps.
There would, of course, still be the non economically driven crimes - anger related, jealousy related and the otherwise products of various disagreements.
But I think that there'd still be a 'thrill of the sport' aspect that keeps a lot of existing crimes alive - although perhaps nowhere near the prominence of their current glory days.
Of course there would, just as people trash pay-phones and torch litter bins and smash my car window just for the hell of it, even though there's no tangible benefit. There will always be sociopaths, and we will always need to be protected from them.
I guess we could always throw you on the barbie and find out...
And that's a key difference between us. I've made my money from technology since I got out of college, but I firmly believe that you have to solve something physically before you can throw technology at it. If the underlying processes are flawed, no amount of technology will help you.
Common sense would dictate that you're right and I'm wrong. But I won't let that stop me. :)
I don't disagree in princilple. It's just that I believe it's hard to properly size the changes that are coming.
The US is currently the country most likely to gaol (jail) its citizens, anywhere in the world. I think there is about 1 in 146 US citizens in prison.
...in large part due to misguided sentencing rules on drug offenders. A very large of non-violent drug users have been sent to prison for possession of minor amounts of minor drugs, completely skewing the whole demographic, and flooding state jails past their breaking points. I don't know about other states, but NYS is in the throes of repealing the draconian sentencing responsible.
Yep, that's the story as I understand it, too.
I wonder whether intensive counselling and programming would result in a lowering of recidivism rates? If we can program people to become loyal to a cult then there is probably a good change of instilling a loyalty to polite societal standards.
Ludwig Van would approve, I'm sure.
Power. Power. and more Power.
What does a person need with power? If you answer, "Power is a commodity. It can be used to secure one's position." you will see a direct connection between criminals and economy optomization.
People abhor this type of reductionism because it implies premeditation, the taint of which is almost impossible to overlook.
Power. Power. and more Power.
What does a person need with power? If you answer, "Power is a commodity. It can be used to secure one's position." you will see a direct connection between criminals and economy optomization.
People abhor this type of reductionism because it implies premeditation, the taint of which is almost impossible to overlook.
Power. Power. and more Power.
What does a person need with power? If you answer, "Power is a commodity. It can be used to secure one's position." you will see a direct connection between criminals and economy optomization.
People abhor this type of reductionism because it implies premeditation, the taint of which is almost impossible to overlook.
Because in China, they're executed instead, possibly at 100 times the rate in US (estimates range from 1,770 to 8,000 plus vs 60), 4 times as many as the rest of the world combined. 68 offenses carry the death penalty, and more than half are non-violent, including tax evasion.
Well, one could also suggest that enforcement of the law would lower recidivism rates. One law in particular, the right to trial by jury of one's peers. Move to quell the embarrassing number of cases that are wiggled through the courts under procedural rules (plead no contest; waive the trial; abrogate the charge to substitute a less serious charge) and thereby avoid a jury hearing. One asks, "Are we to surrender our right to identify and to punish offenders to a disinterested and noninvested officer of the court?" The whole Western social safety net is based on checks and balances, as is the criminal court styled with parties to the pleading (prosecution/defense), the people, and the judge. Modern courts are depersonalized, streamlined, and monolithic; neatly, the end result of the practice of law under such a regimen is an anemic and apathetic seat of power to dispense justice in fairness to all.
On top of which, the purpose of court proceedings appears to be to win, not to determine truth and dispense justice. There must be some paradigm more valid than the adversarial system.
That doesn't make any sense at all, Ian. Executing 1800 people, against a population of 1.3 Billion, may make them the most likely to execute, but it has very little to do with the extraordinarily high rate of imprisonment in the US.
To wit:
According to the International Centre for Prison Studies at King's College London, the U.S. currently has the largest documented prison population in the world, both in absolute and proportional terms.
The US has roughly 2.03 million people behind bars, or 701 per 100,000 population.
Russia has the second-highest rate (606 per 100,000, for a total of 865,000).
China has the second-largest number of prisoners (1.51 million, for a rate of 117 per 100,000)
Rounding out the top ten, with rates from 554 to 437, are Belarus, Bermuda (UK), Kazakhstan, the Virgin Islands (U.S.), the Cayman Islands (UK), Turkmenistan, Belize, and Suriname, which you'll have to agree puts America in interesting company.
South Africa, a longtime star performer on the list, has dropped to 15th place (402) since the dismantling of apartheid.
The UK & Wales, 139 per 100,000
Spain, 125 per 100,000
Canada, 116 per 100,000
Australia, 112 per 100,000
Italy, 100
Germany, 91
France, 85
Japan, 53
India, interestingly, has just 29 per 100,000 in prison
Of the US prison population of 2 million, about 450,000 are there for drug offences, up from 40,000 12 years ago.
The problem is more complex than just execution rates, Ian.
Anyone seen 'A Clockwork Orange'?
The courts of law are there to dispense law, not justice. If there was true justice, then there might not be as many crimes, or maybe people would at least have more faith in the system.
For the record, I'm more into poetic justice than just plain law. Poetic justice keeps the faith with me, but that's just my personal thought on punishment.
Well, the procedures in 'A Clockwork Orange' are nevertheless reasonably primitive, stemming from similar efforts in intelligence between the wars, and very highly visually provocative - it wouldn't have been much of a book or a film if it was all a bit ho-hum and unremarkable and 'it just works'. Of course it shocks - that's the storytelling leverage. However, the procedures are based loosely on related techniques openly used in the Second World War and the Cold War to change the way a subject thinks about life - a shift in their baseline values. Unfortunately, those early techniques tend to be more sensational and clumsy than they are slick and effective.
However, move on significantly from these embarassing beginnings that are, to the sciences of persuasion, franky comparable in sophistication to those tools of medicine of centuries ago that shock and astound us in museums, forcing us to consider how much further we like to think we've progressed in that field. In terms of psychological technologies, we're nowhere - it's less than embryonic. It's a field that's wide open for opportunity, but remains largely ignored by most.
Repealing the damn drug laws would solve the "problem" entirely.
See my earlier post, [froglet], re: Ludwig Van.
Making anything that is currently illegal, legal, will solve the crime problem too.
My Better Half studied Human Rights Law at university and part of her course involved a visit to Glasgow's reasonably notorious Barlinnie Prison, some of the inmates being at the time involved in a long-running human rights case that claimed that in having to take a dump in a bucket and then dispose of it in the morning was a violation of their human rights. She claimed that slopping out was an outrage, a foul, black mark on our reputation as a civilised nation. Now, usually I am your standard pinko liberal – from each u.s.w. – but in this instance, I completely fail to see how it can be that doing a poo in a bucket and sharing a room with that bucket is such a violation. There are two reasons for this
First is that, in the hot and sticky summer of 1990, I attended the International Scout Jamboree in Knutsford. (Bear with me here). I was stationed, along with the rest of 3rd Helensburgh, in the Winchester sub-camp, which was in many ways very much like Dora-Mittelwerk, except there was a subcamp song ("Winchester Winchester! Rah! Rah! Rah! Winchester Winchester! Best by far!") and marginally fewer rockets. But the toilets. Oy, the toilets. Cavernous wooden huts, divided into doorless cubicles, each containing a tin bucket for shitting in. Obviously, if one went to the toilet at any time other than three minutes after the jobby-sucking machine came and emptied the buckets, you were likely to find yourself dropping the kids off into a very busy and somewhat murky pool. The record temperatures, of course, served only to transform the buckets into portable (but not potable) shit ovens. But the point of this: never did me any harm. It's only poo. And it's not as if the inmates at Bar-L were being made to eat it or owt.
Secondly, jail isn’t supposed to be fun.
On the point at hand, though, I would say that, yes, jail serves a purpose and that purpose is to separate those who don't get caught committing crimes from those that do. I do not believe that the rehabilitative or punishmentatory elements work much (if at all). There are, then, three ways to cut the number of people in prison
1. Stop sending people to prison. This is not a vote winner, so it will never be implemented.
2. Take effective steps to eliminate the anomie etc that lies at the root of much (but not all) crime. This can't happen because nobody can agree with anybody else about how or indeed whether it would work. So that leaves us with
3. Breed better criminals. Train them up, if needs be. Make them better at committing the crimes, at getting away with the crimes. It's a radical step, yeah, but nothing else seems to have worked.
very nice.
Actually, I'm not sure what the problem actually is. Is it that too many people are in prison? Are we what, losing their productivity? Spending too much money to keep them there?
Not in my opinion, which is why I disagree with Hector regarding the statistic that he quotes (though not its veracity). Given that there are a lot of criminals, the more of them that are in prison at any one time, the more I like it. A large prison population is only a bad thing in that it means that there are a lot of criminals; you don't reduce the latter by reducing the former - rather by doing the opposite.
Well, there is a big downside with putting people in prison willy-nilly - petty criminals will be put in with hardened criminals, and learn their wicked ways.
Though violent crime has been trending down for the most part.
And we should also note that, in NYC, that was after the police started prosecuting "soft" crime, like jumping turnstiles, squeegeeing car windows, and grafitti. This is a complex issue, and knee-jerk repsonses are often wrong.
Some blame the current prison overpopulation on the work camp model developed around WPA standards. Some yayhoo looked around and said, "Think what we could do with a couple hundred able-bodied men around here" (u'course, when you chew baccy a mite, that thought comes out sounding like, "What we have here is a failure to communicate.")
I have to go with what Peter has already stated, about a quarter of inmates in the US aren't really criminals. They've broken laws that deprive them of opportunities, rather than break laws that prescribe punishment for acts of victimization.
So, the solution here is to keep locking people away until all of the "bad" people are being supported financially by all of the "good" people?
Let me assure you, this is a recipe for disaster. The financial burden on roughly 51% (The average in most OECD nations) of the populace, to support the other 49% who don't work, is already large enough. It costs an equivalent of about USD52K to keep a prisoner for a year. That sort of money ought to buy a lot more intensive psychotherapeutic manipulation of imprisoned offenders, that we might fuck sufficiently with their heads to prevent re-offending, I'm thinking.
I'll work on replacing the pledge of allegiance with an empathy training chant.
Ommmm.....
No. Apprehending criminals is separate from punishing them, is separate from rehabilitating them.
Catching minor offenders often means you've caught major offenders too (as was definitely the case during the subway fare crackdown - several wanted criminals were arrested after they tried to jump trnstiles), and so is a very useful thing.
Simply throwing people in jail and forgetting about them, whatever their offense, is a dumb ass approach that leads to a net degradation of society as minor offenders mix with hardened criminals. Many jail administrations would prefer to spend their limited money on medicating their inmates for passivity, rather than therapy aimed at behavior modification, or job training for reentry into the workforce.
Right now, the only real attempts at rehabilitation seem to be carried out by the Nation of Islam and other religious groups, which have their own agendas.
sp: agendae
I think there is considerable scope for a system that allows proper rehabilitation, rather than honing the anti-social skills of prisoners. For too long we've treated them as refuse, rather than raw materials.
Or, the easy way to stop crime completely: abolish all law. Of course, just because it means that there isn't a law against somebody stealing your car, there's nothing to stop the victim to hunt the person down and sell 'em into slavery, gain their own punnishment... Heh. ;-)
ah anarchy, yes I've heard it's popular in the UK. : P
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