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Something to consider: just because there is a widely present neurological basis for criminality doesn't mean we shouldn't segregate those suffering from it fro

by scarmig 11y ago

Something to consider: just because there is a widely present neurological basis for criminality doesn't mean we shouldn't segregate those suffering from it from society. They're still a risk and real danger to everyone around them. It would be nice, though, if we could move away from the idea that we need to be the implementers of some grand cosmic justice, where every sin of the accused must be punished by inflicting pain and suffering on them (up to and including brutal gang rapes, which are popularly joked about and sometimes even celebrated, at least in America). That might require re-evaluating or even disposing of traditional notions of moral guilt and punishment, though.

tormeh 11y ago
This. Segregation, not punishment. I believe as neuroscience advances way fewer things will be ascribed to amoral choices. Explaining crime with free will is often like explaining natural disasters with God's will - mere supersition.
- ams6110 11y ago
  So we need a new Australia where we send all our criminals? How is "segregation, not punishment" materially different from what we do now with prisons.
  - pessimizer 11y ago
    Sounds better. More therapeutic.
    - tormeh 11y ago
      Many prisons are built to be awful places on purpose. That needs to stop.
  - scarmig 11y ago
    One asks us to adopt a frame of criminal justice as a social harm reduction policy; the other encourages us to think of criminal justice as a way of doling out pain to monsters totally unlike us. It's still not at all an easy problem to solve--a whole lot of what makes prisons so shitty is the other prisoners, but enforcing a total isolation on the criminal from anyone he may hurt or be hurt by is probably more harmful than a shiv, which is the deep tension that any solution will have to work around. But the bigger thing standing in the way of a solution is the belief of most people, which is rarely even thinly veiled, that most criminals deserve whatever they get. Which is understandable: many times (most of the time?) the criminal has actually done something heinous, and I suspect we're programmed to depersonalize and even hate people who commit asocial crimes. But it does lead to barbaric results that a civilized society should reject. ETA: Just to be explicit that there are ways to make the experience of prisons better: don't charge a prisoner $20 for a 15 minute phone call. Allow them internet access. And, more controversially, implement the panopticon--right now there's little to no accountability for the things that happen within prison walls.
  - tormeh 11y ago
    In theory? Not much. In practice? No beatings, more rights and permissions etc.
- zo1 11y ago
  Remember, we have to think about rehabilitation, otherwise segregation is just another form of punishment. So, it seems that segregation implies: There is something wrong with the individual, therefore we have to keep them from being within harm's reach of the general populace. This is a binary, on-off mechanism. That is why society, I guess, opted for unpleasant segregation, as a means of doling out a variable "fix" to the problem (mild for petty crimes, heavy for serious ones). Otherwise, you'd have to segregate each individual that ever does any sort of wrong, or breaks any violent law, etc.
pessimizer 11y ago
> Something to consider: just because there is a widely present neurological basis for criminality doesn't mean we shouldn't segregate those suffering from it from society. I think buying that criminal behavior is caused by disease or brain structure (disease when the perpetrator is a middle-class white male, brain structure otherwise) is a problem. If criminality has a physical cause, than law is a natural phenomenon, and the law-makers are law-makers due to natural order rather than culture and dominance. It would be scary if we started testing people for reified diseases of disorder, and banishing them based on the results.
wanderfowl 11y ago
Be careful, though, with the natural swing the other way, towards the medicalization of deviance. Although there are no shortage of people who do terrible things due to impaired capacity, there are plenty of healthy people who cognizantly do make choices negative to others. They're fully rational and logical, but from the external view, terrible. These choices may be grounded in emotional or intellectual "idiosyncrasies", but you can't quite call them medical, and the "oh that poor dear" narrative isn't helpful. You can treat illness, but you can't treat worldview and behavior. The other problem with this train of thought is that then, other "amoral" choices become medical. For instance, when many believed homosexuality was a terrible horrible amoral sin, there was a push to consider it a "disorder" (with the complicity of the psychological community), which merited psychological or other medical interventions. This lead to the idea of "conversion therapy", because an "illness" can usually be "cured". Similar views have been proposed for other socially unacceptable behaviors, and later discredited when the wider moral viewpoint shifted. When this decade's "morality" crisis is treated as medical, you open the door to medical (mis)treatment of anything society doesn't care for, and that's, in many ways, worse than the current approaches. You can release somebody from jail when we realize a law is stupid, but 10 years of Psychiatry's Favorite Hot New Substance in a small padded room runs the risk of depriving people of far more than just time. I agree that the motive of the legal system should be less about revenge, but a "people who do bad things are all mentally ill" narrative doesn't fix that. If done poorly, it mostly means that people doing things we don't like will spend their lives drugged out of their heads in padded rooms, rather than sober in concrete ones. So, we need to keep a strong line between "people making bad choices" (which requires behavioral interventions) and "people unable to make choices in reality" (which requires medical or psychiatric ones). These are two different situations, and as our current system proves, neither intervention suffices for both.
- scarmig 11y ago
  I agree that medicalization of everything is the wrong course to go down. My perspective is more this: Criminals have often done terrible things, whether because of "they make bad choices" or "they are unable to make sane choices." In the worst case scenario, these things are incurable, either by medical procedures or by punishment, and their criminality is likely to recur. How do we deal with these broken people? "Humane" prison (comfortable-enough segregation from the general population, coupled with real, universal observation to protect them from each other) seems to me to be the best route, with the death penalty as a distant second. That has the added benefit of serving people better who are the same but treatable, either via behavioral, psychiatric, or medical interventions. At the very least, it doesn't make things worse for them, which prisons as-they-exist-today currently do.

by scarmig 11y ago

tormeh 11y ago

This. Segregation, not punishment. I believe as neuroscience advances way fewer things will be ascribed to amoral choices. Explaining crime with free will is often like explaining natural disasters with God's will - mere supersition.

ams6110 11y ago
So we need a new Australia where we send all our criminals? How is "segregation, not punishment" materially different from what we do now with prisons.
- pessimizer 11y ago
  Sounds better. More therapeutic.
  - tormeh 11y ago
    Many prisons are built to be awful places on purpose. That needs to stop.
- scarmig 11y ago
  One asks us to adopt a frame of criminal justice as a social harm reduction policy; the other encourages us to think of criminal justice as a way of doling out pain to monsters totally unlike us. It's still not at all an easy problem to solve--a whole lot of what makes prisons so shitty is the other prisoners, but enforcing a total isolation on the criminal from anyone he may hurt or be hurt by is probably more harmful than a shiv, which is the deep tension that any solution will have to work around. But the bigger thing standing in the way of a solution is the belief of most people, which is rarely even thinly veiled, that most criminals deserve whatever they get. Which is understandable: many times (most of the time?) the criminal has actually done something heinous, and I suspect we're programmed to depersonalize and even hate people who commit asocial crimes. But it does lead to barbaric results that a civilized society should reject. ETA: Just to be explicit that there are ways to make the experience of prisons better: don't charge a prisoner $20 for a 15 minute phone call. Allow them internet access. And, more controversially, implement the panopticon--right now there's little to no accountability for the things that happen within prison walls.
- tormeh 11y ago
  In theory? Not much. In practice? No beatings, more rights and permissions etc.
zo1 11y ago
Remember, we have to think about rehabilitation, otherwise segregation is just another form of punishment. So, it seems that segregation implies: There is something wrong with the individual, therefore we have to keep them from being within harm's reach of the general populace. This is a binary, on-off mechanism. That is why society, I guess, opted for unpleasant segregation, as a means of doling out a variable "fix" to the problem (mild for petty crimes, heavy for serious ones). Otherwise, you'd have to segregate each individual that ever does any sort of wrong, or breaks any violent law, etc.

pessimizer 11y ago

> Something to consider: just because there is a widely present neurological basis for criminality doesn't mean we shouldn't segregate those suffering from it from society. I think buying that criminal behavior is caused by disease or brain structure (disease when the perpetrator is a middle-class white male, brain structure otherwise) is a problem. If criminality has a physical cause, than law is a natural phenomenon, and the law-makers are law-makers due to natural order rather than culture and dominance. It would be scary if we started testing people for reified diseases of disorder, and banishing them based on the results.

wanderfowl 11y ago

Be careful, though, with the natural swing the other way, towards the medicalization of deviance. Although there are no shortage of people who do terrible things due to impaired capacity, there are plenty of healthy people who cognizantly do make choices negative to others. They're fully rational and logical, but from the external view, terrible. These choices may be grounded in emotional or intellectual "idiosyncrasies", but you can't quite call them medical, and the "oh that poor dear" narrative isn't helpful. You can treat illness, but you can't treat worldview and behavior. The other problem with this train of thought is that then, other "amoral" choices become medical. For instance, when many believed homosexuality was a terrible horrible amoral sin, there was a push to consider it a "disorder" (with the complicity of the psychological community), which merited psychological or other medical interventions. This lead to the idea of "conversion therapy", because an "illness" can usually be "cured". Similar views have been proposed for other socially unacceptable behaviors, and later discredited when the wider moral viewpoint shifted. When this decade's "morality" crisis is treated as medical, you open the door to medical (mis)treatment of anything society doesn't care for, and that's, in many ways, worse than the current approaches. You can release somebody from jail when we realize a law is stupid, but 10 years of Psychiatry's Favorite Hot New Substance in a small padded room runs the risk of depriving people of far more than just time. I agree that the motive of the legal system should be less about revenge, but a "people who do bad things are all mentally ill" narrative doesn't fix that. If done poorly, it mostly means that people doing things we don't like will spend their lives drugged out of their heads in padded rooms, rather than sober in concrete ones. So, we need to keep a strong line between "people making bad choices" (which requires behavioral interventions) and "people unable to make choices in reality" (which requires medical or psychiatric ones). These are two different situations, and as our current system proves, neither intervention suffices for both.

scarmig 11y ago
I agree that medicalization of everything is the wrong course to go down. My perspective is more this: Criminals have often done terrible things, whether because of "they make bad choices" or "they are unable to make sane choices." In the worst case scenario, these things are incurable, either by medical procedures or by punishment, and their criminality is likely to recur. How do we deal with these broken people? "Humane" prison (comfortable-enough segregation from the general population, coupled with real, universal observation to protect them from each other) seems to me to be the best route, with the death penalty as a distant second. That has the added benefit of serving people better who are the same but treatable, either via behavioral, psychiatric, or medical interventions. At the very least, it doesn't make things worse for them, which prisons as-they-exist-today currently do.