6 ms·

Is Prison Necessary?

27 points by charlescearl 7y ago

thatoneuser 7y ago
Wow this is stupid. I guaran-fucking-tee these "prison abolishers" wouldn't sit in a room unchecked with a violent criminal. Some dude with tattoos all over his face, 6'5 and 320 pounds of muscle. Yet here they are sitting on their soap box talking about how prison isn't necessary and how we just need more resources. If anyone seriously believes this - you are free to go into the slums in any major city and fix them yourself. But that won't happen because these cowards sit comfortably behind a beaurocratic chair expecting someone else to do the dirty work. I'd love for prisons to not exist. But they do for a reason.
- adrianN 7y ago
  I think the real question is whether there are more effective ways than prisons to deal with criminals. Perhaps you can prevent people from becoming hardened violent criminals in the first place. It doesn't seem like prisons are very good at that job.
  - thatoneuser 7y ago
    Perhaps you can, perhaps you can't. I'm all for helping people not become criminals but until we can do that we have to protect innocent people.
- vectorEQ 7y ago
  Some dude with tattoos all over his face, 6'5 and 320 pounds of muscle. <-- your view of a criminal paints a picture of the inside of your mind, and it's not pretty.
  - thatoneuser 7y ago
    Yeah I was nearly assaulted by someone of that description a bit ago and it was a very unpleasant experience. Do you know how prisoners often look and carry themselves? It's weird you're making the point you're making.
Fjolsvith 7y ago
A sad but true story: I spent about 6 years in federal prison, and at my last prison location, I made a really good friend, Jeff. He could play guitar as good as Slash (he ran the prison music room), he was funny, and could run a D&D game like the best DM's out there. I knew him about 19 months before I release d to the halfway house. He was supposed to release about a year after me. He had gone into the Army when he was 18. Because he could play the guitar, he got into a band unit, and they would march in parades and such. He molested his first victim for which he was caught while in the Army, and they gave him a hard 20 (20 years with no parole or probation). They also never ordered him into sex offender treatment. He spent most of his prison time in the military brig, but was eventually transferred into the Federal Prison system for being a troublemaker (brewing alcohol, getting drunk and fighting). That's how I met him. I always wanted to be his friend after we got out of prison. I never expected him to re-offend, after knowing him pretty closely for a year and a half. When I asked my Supervision Officer if I could write to him while he was still in prison, I was ordered to not have any contact with any former prison acquaintances while on probation. I though, "Okay, I'll just wait until I finish my probation. No problem." A few years after my release, I thought I would at least check up on him without contacting him. When I found out what he had done after he got out of prison, it was like I had been punched in the gut. I was in a state of numb disbelief for days. Here are a couple of articles about Jeff: https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/police-missing--year-old-girl-from-poplar-bluff-mo/article_7862c855-eb03-5833-b3fa-f5748dde0173.html https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/police-... https://www.kfvs12.com/story/19996812/jeffrey-dean-shelton-faes-additional-kidnapping-charges/ https://www.kfvs12.com/story/19996812/jeffrey-dean-shelton-f... https://www.courthousenews.com/child-molester-gets-120-years/ https://www.courthousenews.com/child-molester-gets-120-years... Prison is the best place for him.
- Faaak 7y ago
  If he would've been correctly re-integrated, this would've maybe never happened. This proves it: all this prison time alone, without good programs in place, was just "vengeance" and it didn't work.
  - nick_kline 7y ago
averros 7y ago
In Soviet Union common criminals were given lighter sentences because they were considered "socially close" to proletariat. Political prisoners were treated much harsher. I see American communists infesting universities and outlets like NYT aren't any different in this respect. They are all for handling common criminals with velvet gloves, but don't think twice about hitting "deplorables" (whose only crime is to think differently) in the head with bike locks and cement-filled coke cans. Because Hitler or something.
kstenerud 7y ago
The article largely mirrors how European countries deal with crime: low sentences and extensive re-integration programs. The goal in Europe is integration and eliminating recidivism, whereas the goal in America is vengeance and isolation. You won't see any progress until that overarching goal changes.
- nullwasamistake 7y ago
  IMO the biggest problem with American penal system is how crazy the punishments are for non-violent crimes. Get caught smoking crack a few times? You might be in prison for many years. Another issue is how the government + private industry is allowed to punish you for life even though you've supposedly "done your time". Employers can and regularly do discriminate even for things that would have no affect on job performance. Oh also housing and loans. You're basically pushed to the fringes of society unless you manage to make it big with your own business. Oh and if you commit a drug crime you're cut off from school financial aid for life. And if you have any felony the army probably won't even take you. Have fun trying to turn your life around when your own government slams the door. I'm okay with long prison sentences for really nasty stuff like murder. Not such a big deal if an ex-con steals some shit again, pretty bad if he goes back to killing people.
- Grustaf 7y ago
  Sweden is at the forefront of this movement. Have you seen Swedish crime statistics lately?
  - _pmf_ 7y ago
    Our US friend like to maintain their utopian views of Europe; don't distract them with facts.
  - nchie 7y ago
    How are crime statistics relevant? If anything, you should look at recidivism. Crime statistics have more to do with other things in society than the 'philosophy' of prisons.
  - 7y ago
jillesvangurp 7y ago
Dutch prisons are currently leasing space to Belgium because of low occupancy rates. This low occupancy is the result of various policies to cut costs. Prisons are not cheap so cutting sentences a bit and using alternative punishments for lighter offenses helps keep cost down. People still get caught doing stuff they are not supposed to. Locking them up is one of the punishments and it's used if needed. But it is used in moderation. Occasionally this is unpopular when high profile criminals end up back on the streets a bit sooner than people would like. Particularly when it involves e.g. sex offenders. But mostly this works out fine. This has not resulted in a massive crime wave and most people in prison are neither sex offenders nor psychopathic murderers. The US is a great example of how prisons don't help prevent crime. It has the largest prison population per capita in the world and crime and murder rates to sustain that (i.e. notably much higher than other countries and also much more violent). Locking up people in the US apparently does not seem to lower crime rates. If anything, prisons actually help perpetuate this problem. The people who come out of them are likely to end up coming back. That's why it is important to keep young offenders out of prisons. Locking them up all but guarantees they come back for more. Locking them up for really minor offenses is simply counter productive and just locks them into a life of crime. Part of the problem in the US is of course that prisons are big business. Big as in trading on Wall Street. E.g. CoreCivic is worth about 2.5B $: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CXW/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CXW/ I used to regard movies from the eighties like Robocop as pure satire but you have to admit that this company, it's name, and it's sameless corporatism and hollow marketing makes it look like OCP quite a bit. Straight from their website: "CoreCivic's effective, high-quality reentry programs are at the center of our mission to reduce recidivism and help better the public good.". Yeah, right. Comes with a photo of a friendly smiling prisoner (black, naturally).
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- wahern 7y ago
  > Part of the problem in the US is of course that prisons are big business. This is directly debunked in the article: "By now it has become almost conventional wisdom to think that private prisons are the 'real' problem with mass incarceration. But anyone seriously engaged with the subject knows that this is not the case. Even a cursory glance at numbers proves it: Ninety-two percent of people locked inside American prisons are held in publicly run, publicly funded facilities, and 99 percent of those in jail are in public jails."
Grustaf 7y ago
Maybe it’s just me but I couldn’t find an actual argument. Unless it’s that the murderer’s life is just as valuable so it’s bad to steal part of it from him by putting him in prison. I don’t think anyone outside academia values the lives of murderers very much, is there another argument in there somewhere?
- zichy 7y ago
  >I don’t think anyone outside academia values the lives of murderers very much What.
  - Grustaf 7y ago
    I should have said left-wing academia I guess but it’s sort of tautological.
- wahern 7y ago
  Because Gilmore isn't trying to make an argument about specific approaches. She's trying to change the narrative--the way to reduce violence in society is to address the root causes of violence, not react to it after the fact as if both violence and violent people are inevitable. Does she actually believe that prison would never be necessary for anyone if we could enact the ideal set of societal changes? It's not clear to me that she actually believes that.[1] I'm particularly doubtful that she thinks we can just turn loose existing violent offenders. If you read between the lines what she seems to believe is that the abolition movement as she understands it is more a process than a goal, and it's largely prospective. Note that she's quite critical of the motives of other reformists. [1] In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if she thought both the question and the answer irrelevant. We see an elephant in the room and she's saying, "there is no elephant". That is, if you presuppose an elephant you're going to end up creating one.
  - charlescearl 7y ago
    That was the sense I was getting. I’ve been grappling with the implications. The whole concept of prison and policing in the US — I’ve just experienced as state sponsored violence against the communities that I’ve lived in. Releasing a violent predator just seems wrong, but US isn’t even trying to rehabilitate, there has to be an alternative.
galfarragem 7y ago
Prisons might not help prevent crime but surely help prevent retaliations. Victims that support keeping their offenders out of jail might exist but I'm not aware of such cases.
- zacherates 7y ago
  Here's a statement from someone robbed at gunpoint doing exactly that (arguing to keep the perpetrator out of prison): https://twitter.com/stainerson/status/1125956097997774850 https://twitter.com/stainerson/status/1125956097997774850
chr1 7y ago
The article doesn't propose any practical ways of reducing the number prisoners. Simply letting everyone out and hoping for the best doesn't seem to be a good plan. One thing that could work for non-violent crimes, would be a bracelet that records all conversations and all movements of wearer, making recidivism very hard. Of course attempts to destroy the bracelet should be punished by real prison terms.

27 points by charlescearl 7y ago

Wow this is stupid. I guaran-fucking-tee these "prison abolishers" wouldn't sit in a room unchecked with a violent criminal. Some dude with tattoos all over his face, 6'5 and 320 pounds of muscle. Yet here they are sitting on their soap box talking about how prison isn't necessary and how we just need more resources. If anyone seriously believes this - you are free to go into the slums in any major city and fix them yourself. But that won't happen because these cowards sit comfortably behind a beaurocratic chair expecting someone else to do the dirty work. I'd love for prisons to not exist. But they do for a reason.

adrianN 7y ago
I think the real question is whether there are more effective ways than prisons to deal with criminals. Perhaps you can prevent people from becoming hardened violent criminals in the first place. It doesn't seem like prisons are very good at that job.
- thatoneuser 7y ago
  Perhaps you can, perhaps you can't. I'm all for helping people not become criminals but until we can do that we have to protect innocent people.
vectorEQ 7y ago
Some dude with tattoos all over his face, 6'5 and 320 pounds of muscle. <-- your view of a criminal paints a picture of the inside of your mind, and it's not pretty.
- thatoneuser 7y ago
  Yeah I was nearly assaulted by someone of that description a bit ago and it was a very unpleasant experience. Do you know how prisoners often look and carry themselves? It's weird you're making the point you're making.

Fjolsvith 7y ago

A sad but true story: I spent about 6 years in federal prison, and at my last prison location, I made a really good friend, Jeff. He could play guitar as good as Slash (he ran the prison music room), he was funny, and could run a D&D game like the best DM's out there. I knew him about 19 months before I release d to the halfway house. He was supposed to release about a year after me. He had gone into the Army when he was 18. Because he could play the guitar, he got into a band unit, and they would march in parades and such. He molested his first victim for which he was caught while in the Army, and they gave him a hard 20 (20 years with no parole or probation). They also never ordered him into sex offender treatment. He spent most of his prison time in the military brig, but was eventually transferred into the Federal Prison system for being a troublemaker (brewing alcohol, getting drunk and fighting). That's how I met him. I always wanted to be his friend after we got out of prison. I never expected him to re-offend, after knowing him pretty closely for a year and a half. When I asked my Supervision Officer if I could write to him while he was still in prison, I was ordered to not have any contact with any former prison acquaintances while on probation. I though, "Okay, I'll just wait until I finish my probation. No problem." A few years after my release, I thought I would at least check up on him without contacting him. When I found out what he had done after he got out of prison, it was like I had been punched in the gut. I was in a state of numb disbelief for days. Here are a couple of articles about Jeff: https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/police-missing--year-old-girl-from-poplar-bluff-mo/article_7862c855-eb03-5833-b3fa-f5748dde0173.html https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/police-... https://www.kfvs12.com/story/19996812/jeffrey-dean-shelton-faes-additional-kidnapping-charges/ https://www.kfvs12.com/story/19996812/jeffrey-dean-shelton-f... https://www.courthousenews.com/child-molester-gets-120-years/ https://www.courthousenews.com/child-molester-gets-120-years... Prison is the best place for him.

Faaak 7y ago
If he would've been correctly re-integrated, this would've maybe never happened. This proves it: all this prison time alone, without good programs in place, was just "vengeance" and it didn't work.
- nick_kline 7y ago

averros 7y ago

In Soviet Union common criminals were given lighter sentences because they were considered "socially close" to proletariat. Political prisoners were treated much harsher. I see American communists infesting universities and outlets like NYT aren't any different in this respect. They are all for handling common criminals with velvet gloves, but don't think twice about hitting "deplorables" (whose only crime is to think differently) in the head with bike locks and cement-filled coke cans. Because Hitler or something.

kstenerud 7y ago

The article largely mirrors how European countries deal with crime: low sentences and extensive re-integration programs. The goal in Europe is integration and eliminating recidivism, whereas the goal in America is vengeance and isolation. You won't see any progress until that overarching goal changes.

nullwasamistake 7y ago
IMO the biggest problem with American penal system is how crazy the punishments are for non-violent crimes. Get caught smoking crack a few times? You might be in prison for many years. Another issue is how the government + private industry is allowed to punish you for life even though you've supposedly "done your time". Employers can and regularly do discriminate even for things that would have no affect on job performance. Oh also housing and loans. You're basically pushed to the fringes of society unless you manage to make it big with your own business. Oh and if you commit a drug crime you're cut off from school financial aid for life. And if you have any felony the army probably won't even take you. Have fun trying to turn your life around when your own government slams the door. I'm okay with long prison sentences for really nasty stuff like murder. Not such a big deal if an ex-con steals some shit again, pretty bad if he goes back to killing people.
Grustaf 7y ago
Sweden is at the forefront of this movement. Have you seen Swedish crime statistics lately?
- _pmf_ 7y ago
  Our US friend like to maintain their utopian views of Europe; don't distract them with facts.
- nchie 7y ago
  How are crime statistics relevant? If anything, you should look at recidivism. Crime statistics have more to do with other things in society than the 'philosophy' of prisons.
- 7y ago

jillesvangurp 7y ago

Dutch prisons are currently leasing space to Belgium because of low occupancy rates. This low occupancy is the result of various policies to cut costs. Prisons are not cheap so cutting sentences a bit and using alternative punishments for lighter offenses helps keep cost down. People still get caught doing stuff they are not supposed to. Locking them up is one of the punishments and it's used if needed. But it is used in moderation. Occasionally this is unpopular when high profile criminals end up back on the streets a bit sooner than people would like. Particularly when it involves e.g. sex offenders. But mostly this works out fine. This has not resulted in a massive crime wave and most people in prison are neither sex offenders nor psychopathic murderers. The US is a great example of how prisons don't help prevent crime. It has the largest prison population per capita in the world and crime and murder rates to sustain that (i.e. notably much higher than other countries and also much more violent). Locking up people in the US apparently does not seem to lower crime rates. If anything, prisons actually help perpetuate this problem. The people who come out of them are likely to end up coming back. That's why it is important to keep young offenders out of prisons. Locking them up all but guarantees they come back for more. Locking them up for really minor offenses is simply counter productive and just locks them into a life of crime. Part of the problem in the US is of course that prisons are big business. Big as in trading on Wall Street. E.g. CoreCivic is worth about 2.5B $: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CXW/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CXW/ I used to regard movies from the eighties like Robocop as pure satire but you have to admit that this company, it's name, and it's sameless corporatism and hollow marketing makes it look like OCP quite a bit. Straight from their website: "CoreCivic's effective, high-quality reentry programs are at the center of our mission to reduce recidivism and help better the public good.". Yeah, right. Comes with a photo of a friendly smiling prisoner (black, naturally).

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
wahern 7y ago
> Part of the problem in the US is of course that prisons are big business. This is directly debunked in the article: "By now it has become almost conventional wisdom to think that private prisons are the 'real' problem with mass incarceration. But anyone seriously engaged with the subject knows that this is not the case. Even a cursory glance at numbers proves it: Ninety-two percent of people locked inside American prisons are held in publicly run, publicly funded facilities, and 99 percent of those in jail are in public jails."

Grustaf 7y ago

Maybe it’s just me but I couldn’t find an actual argument. Unless it’s that the murderer’s life is just as valuable so it’s bad to steal part of it from him by putting him in prison. I don’t think anyone outside academia values the lives of murderers very much, is there another argument in there somewhere?

zichy 7y ago
>I don’t think anyone outside academia values the lives of murderers very much What.
- Grustaf 7y ago
  I should have said left-wing academia I guess but it’s sort of tautological.
wahern 7y ago
Because Gilmore isn't trying to make an argument about specific approaches. She's trying to change the narrative--the way to reduce violence in society is to address the root causes of violence, not react to it after the fact as if both violence and violent people are inevitable. Does she actually believe that prison would never be necessary for anyone if we could enact the ideal set of societal changes? It's not clear to me that she actually believes that.[1] I'm particularly doubtful that she thinks we can just turn loose existing violent offenders. If you read between the lines what she seems to believe is that the abolition movement as she understands it is more a process than a goal, and it's largely prospective. Note that she's quite critical of the motives of other reformists. [1] In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if she thought both the question and the answer irrelevant. We see an elephant in the room and she's saying, "there is no elephant". That is, if you presuppose an elephant you're going to end up creating one.
- charlescearl 7y ago
  That was the sense I was getting. I’ve been grappling with the implications. The whole concept of prison and policing in the US — I’ve just experienced as state sponsored violence against the communities that I’ve lived in. Releasing a violent predator just seems wrong, but US isn’t even trying to rehabilitate, there has to be an alternative.

galfarragem 7y ago

Prisons might not help prevent crime but surely help prevent retaliations. Victims that support keeping their offenders out of jail might exist but I'm not aware of such cases.

zacherates 7y ago
Here's a statement from someone robbed at gunpoint doing exactly that (arguing to keep the perpetrator out of prison): https://twitter.com/stainerson/status/1125956097997774850 https://twitter.com/stainerson/status/1125956097997774850

chr1 7y ago

The article doesn't propose any practical ways of reducing the number prisoners. Simply letting everyone out and hoping for the best doesn't seem to be a good plan. One thing that could work for non-violent crimes, would be a bracelet that records all conversations and all movements of wearer, making recidivism very hard. Of course attempts to destroy the bracelet should be punished by real prison terms.