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We've decided morally, that killing is wrong. So if killing is wrong, but we have to keep killers out of society, then we've got to put them in a place away from society. Somewhere along the way, we decided that killing isn't the only thing that requires you be separated from society.
You haven't committed a crime, therefore are free to succeed or fail at life all on your own. Society hasn't judged you, therefore society hasn't seen the need to take care of you either.
With a few exceptions of life sentences, this is not how prisons works. We have prisons to separate the bad apples for a while, and we use that time to rehabilitate the apples. Its not a perfect solution bit it works better than without prison.
Edit to clarify that this is about prison
Pretending that people get rehabilitated in prison, LOLOL
That's some LARP level imagination you got there.
Norway has one of the lowest recidivism rates in the world, around 20% within five years of release.
This clearly says US Institutions.
I'm on a path to homelessness and a premature death due to institutionalized neglect and abuse from US institutions.
This person wouldn't be posting here if they were from Norway.
The question was about prisons in general, their personal experience being the basis of them questioning the ethicality of the concept of prisons.
For that matter the Norwegian example is a perfect antithesis to the punitive American system.
Therefore they were absolutely on topic. You may freshen up on comprehensive reading.
Norway is an exception to the rule. Not a generalized example. Calling out an edge case, doesn't change all of the generalized cases.
Yes thats what an antithesis is.
Therefore, off topic.
No it (and multiple other re-intergration based incareration systems are more effective and socially health than the punitive system the USA uses.
Anserweing OP's question if incareration can be made more ethical than is currently the case in the USA.
It's quite on topic really.
if incareration can be made more ethical than is currently the case in the USA
You go ahead and get right on that. Let me know how that goes.
Wow, so your answer is to... not even attempt anything? Just declare "nope, that's impossible (despite evidence to the contrary) so why bother trying"?
Let me know how that goes...
It's clear that, in this case, the education system could use some updating, too.
Are you attempting anything? Because bitching about it on the internet isn't far from doing nothing. What have you done in your life to change the US prison system? I'd love to hear it.
Because bitching about it on the internet isn't far from doing nothing
So youre saying "bitching online" does have an effect, since it's not nothing, by your own admission?
You know how 0.9999999999999999999999999~ = 1?
It's like that. A rounding error at best. So yes, in reality, nothing.
If all you're doing is bitching about it on the internet, then you are doing nothing and then acting virtuous about doing nothing.
YAY you have warm fuzzy thoughts and feelings! Congratulations you're a "good person"!
So you're saying it isn't nothing, right? That's what you said, yes?
in reality, nothing
Did you miss that part?
then you are doing nothing
Or that part?
So... you're going back on your own words?
Brave of you to admit such things aloud. I'd be ashamed to do that much less admit to doing that.
Or is it that you're trying to say that speaking up about things you care about doesn't make a difference to anything?
You should read your own link. Nowhere in there does it list "bitching about something in a dark corner of the internet on a private forum"
All of the examples listed -- kinda require you getting out of your chair and you know doing something.
But you haven't, and won't. And instead of admitting that, you're going to argue what the definition of "doing something" means. You're not stupid. You know you haven't ever done anything, you know that nothing in your life has contributed at all to the subject matter at hand.
But also I know you haven't done anything either, and that calls into question your virtues, and that ruffles your feathers.
It's not enough to just have "good thoughts". I at least realize that the herculean effort required to achieve such change is beyond the average persons capabilities or even desires. That doesn't make me a bad person, just someone who understands the reality of the situation at hand.
Oh, so you are going back on your own words?
tut, tut
My reply was about what prisons are. I was not replying to OP
Congratulations, you're not on topic then.
W/e
They probably got the lowest crime rates in the world. American criminals hit different
So its about race and not system?
So you have incentivised crime against society for survival.
That actually happens btw. There are homeless that will commit crimes, so they get arrested, so that they have a couple of free nights of not freezing to death in the cold.
I haven't incentivized crime, but yes our current institutions do so.
It's a little jarring seeing a post like this alongside a post celebrating the possibility of jailing people for doing a nazi salute. Anyway to answer your question, some people cannot function in society. They are dangerous, and the only way to prevent them from harming others is to isolate them from society.
As others have already said: Prevention is a point: There are people who should not be out in the open,honestly. I worked with people who rightfully will not be freed unless they are basically close to hospice care. They are dangerous and some even say this of themselves. I worked with a nice gentleman who shared his recipes with me. For cooking human meet - which he had real life experience in as he killed his family and ate parts of them. (He is very likely dead by now) Another guy raped at least 30 woman/girls,some as young as 5, and tried to rape female staff around him while in a psychiatric hospital (and in a regular hospital that just saved his life after another patient attacked him).
Should these people be kept separated from the society? Yes. Should they be miserable and suffer for the rest of their life? No. They are still human and the absolutely abysmal conditions in the prison systems of some countries, especially the US are a disgrace.
I am fairly happy that at least in my country the constitutional courts have set clear boundaries how prisoners and institutionalised patients have to be treated, especially after they served their jail time and are only kept locked up for preventional reasons. And that the level of danger to the society they posses needs to be reassessed periodically.
The other side is punishment. I am far less certain about this side of the issue - prison terms have a deterrent effect to most people,but not all of them. And it seems that we haven't yet found a good way to address this. For most people the thought of being locked up and therefore being under total external control does at least give them enough "discomfort" to not actually do anything stupid and if they do they often are at least "suffering" from that enough to not do it again.
Suffering is initially set into "" here, as it is not meant to equal actual suffering like what some politicians and some populations want. The inmate suffers enough by being deprived of his/her freedom, being under external control. We know that for sure. They do not need to be punished more by make their life hell. The same goes for "extremely long sentences for minor stuff". Firstly this does actively endanger the population. We have pretty good data around sexual assault for that. We can surely agree that rape is a horrible crime and a rapist should be punished. But making rape as bad as murder is a bad idea. Because now the perpetrator has no incentive to not kill his victim - instead the perpetrator now has one to do so. If he/she goes to prison for the same amount of time, why not reduce the risk of victim identifying them? Same goes for the act itself - when every sexual assault is rape for some perpetrators their sick logic comes to the conclusion that they can go "all in" anyway. (I literally have been told that by an inmate)
The same goes for "life sentences without the option for parole". This leads to only one thing: You have an inmate with nothing to loose. Once they learned to survive the first stint in solitary and without the things "good behaviour" can get you, they will have nothing that the prison staff can take away from them - and they can take away a lot from everyone else. Therefore punishment must always give people hope - hope that they will get out at some point. Even though there are some that are unlikely to live to that point.
Lastly we know that bad conditions in prisons and a lack of reintegration as well as the stigma that some countries (e.g. the US) put on their inmates actively push people into reoffending because they develop mental health problems, can't find a stable life outside the prison,etc.
Anyway: the main problem OP has is a different one - it's the lack of help people with chronic diseases are getting. This is what makes their destiny far worse than that of prisoners - because they are always in it for life.
Not every person that commits a crime is insane. Society wants to be protected from the worst of these people, ergo prisons.
Criminals are housed and fed in exchange for staying away from regular society.
The disabled are housed and fed in exchange for not having to watch them die of starvation in the streets.
Having these institutions be nice places to live is secondary to their primary goals. Most of the time they’re out of sight, out of mind.
Prisons I would argue are purposefully not nice as a feature to make sure people don't want to go back there no matter how rough they were living on the outside
Prisons serve to remove a person from society (in the civilised world).
Removing a person from society has two subtly different justifications:
Consider the difference between violent crimes (1) and nonviolent crimes (2).
Note that some societies expand (2) to include more punishment than just separation from society.
There are different ideas about the purpose of imprisonment but the ones I'm aware of are exclusion, deterrence, punishment and rehabilitation. The second two are predicated on prison being worse than freedom, which obviously doesn't hold for people in a lot of situations. In fact I've heard of people comitting minor crimes so they can be let into prison.
Unless prisons can get really good at rehabilitation then the only way they can be effective is if life outside of prison is healthy and prosperous.
Simplest way to put it is that prisons exist because some people simply cannot be allowed to live in "normal" society. Unfortunately, people have decided that this fate is no longer reserved for the worst of the worst/those that pose imminent danger, but now include "moral" offenses.
This is one of those topics where there is no "good" solution - only "less evil" options. And until humans as a species no longer have the various hold-over traits from our time before "civilization", we'll have to accept that we have to collectively make shitty choices.
Punishment, rehabilitation and removing someone from public life due to the danger they represent are the three most common reasons to imprison where I live.
The end products would be: society getting its “pound of flesh”, a better educated and matured person upon release and the protecting of the public from dangerous individuals.
(In practice though, most of our prisons are just universities of crime)
160 years ago in 1865, slavery was outlawed except as punishment for a crime. This posed a severe shortage of cheap labor, which was solved by creating a plethora of fiddly little crimes targeting the poor and marginalized. The next 75 years, the role slavery filled was instead covered by convict leasing and prison peonage, ending only when FDR issued a circular ordering prisons to stop the practice because we were about to enter WW2 and it made us look like the bad guys. To replace the cheap labor of convict leasing, prisons instead became factories. Prisoners are technically paid now: they dont have access to the money, and it only goes towards paying bail as well as other expenses, but they are technically being paid for their work. Therefore, it's not slavery! 🤔
This is the pragmatic reason why prisons exist: because slavery is illegal. We made up the moral reasoning because deep down we know it's wrong. Back in the pre-civil-war era, we also had justifications for why slavery was good: the slaves were incapable of making moral decisions, we were civilizing a barbarous people, etc etc. It was bullshit then, and it's still bullshit now.
This feels like nonsense to me, looking at the numbers. The U.S. spends something like $80 billion a year on prisons, and prison labor supposedly generates around $9 billion a year. What is that, a negative 81% ROI?
Prison labor like we read about is not humane and would be unconstitutional in a better country, but I can't see it as the REASON for prisons. Ultimately, people feel good about punishing "bad" people. I don't think it goes any deeper than that.
Since I'm not a psychologist or even (alas) particularly empathetic, I will leave aside the fact that this post appears to be a veiled cry for help, and answer the actual question.
Prison exists to protect society from dangerous individuals, but also because it's the simplest form of non-corporal punishment. Flogging and flaying and chopping and mutilating and so on are all well and good but at some point in humanity's march to civilization such things will start making the rulers queasy and it becomes more palatable to just lock the problem up for a while.
Personally I have a radically liberal take on this. I think that the purpose of punishment (other than protection, as mentioned) should be not retribution but rather restoration. In my ideal world, prison sentences would mostly be swapped for various forms of community service.
They were embraced by the left to rehab criminals and by the right to keep criminals off the streets
In the United States, they are largely used for slave labor.
I found https://daily.jstor.org/the-invention-of-incarceration/ by using https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=punishment+before+prison&ia=web
My assumption before even reading that was: I expect it's because people wanted a punishment that wasn't a monetary fine, corporal punishment, enslavement, death, or "death but we'll pretend to not see you running away, and we might pardon you in 10 years, but if we see you before then we'll kill you" (exile). I knew those were the only punishments in ancient Rome (and people weren't held for long before facing a trial), and it seems that not much had changed until the idea of long term incarceration was conceived: https://romanempiretimes.com/crime-and-punishment-in-ancient-rome-justice-and-inequality/ https://factsanddetails.com/world/cat56/sub408/entry-6360.html
Here's a good introduction into the theory behind criminal punishment, which prisons are a form of: https://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=41
Why do people allow them to exist?
We know they're being used inhumanely. We know they're expensive. We know they don't prevent crime.
We gotta put the poors somewhere....../s
I recommend listening to this podcast about prisons, has great insight into prison and why they ended up the way they are, and how some people intend to change the system to be more... helpful than just as a way to collectively "punish" the "bad guys".