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I hate the US penal system. I grew up a semi conservative individual. Good guys and bad guys. Three strikes and your out sounded great. Tough on crime. All of t

I hate the US penal system. I grew up a semi conservative individual. Good guys and bad guys. Three strikes and your out sounded great. Tough on crime. All of that. A couple years ago, I was asked by my faith congregation to serve as a volunteer at our local maximum security state prison, offering Sunday services to the inmates. I did so for 3 years. It changed me. We’re there some truly troubled/warped people there? Yes. Do I kid myself that their “stories” weren’t surely one sided? No. I was struck by how arbitrary the whole thing is. And how utterly ineffective it is. What troubled me the most is that we have outsourced this whole raft of problems, without sending it overseas. We want “problems” to just go away. And stay away. And so we outsource the existence of human lives to an alternate universe that exists right beneath our toes. And we maintain fascinating opinions about these people and their lives, with almost zero insight into what the existence we consigned them to was. When people heard I went to the prison every Sunday to visit with inmates, they would immediately wax their opinion about what it must be like. And I found over time that their imagination did not match my reality. Their can be no empathy in that scenario. I dream (pointlessly) about a world where a much higher percentage of lay civilians spent volunteer time in prisons. Awareness leads to empathy. And only then when we weren’t outsourcing the issue, we might actually be moved to find something more effective.

bm3719 4y ago
Most of us have been the victim of some kind of crime at some point in our lives. The many times it's happened to me, I also considered the notion of empathy: namely that the criminal lacked it for me, the victim. Not saying the current system is in any way an optimal solution or even close to it, but one thing it does provide is a lot of time for those who have acted without empathy to reflect on their misdeeds.
- mozman 4y ago
  It also puts a lot of money in the pockets of those who run private prisons. The incentives are perverse. It’s also not about rehabilitation, it’s about penance but that rarely materializes. Once you go to prison you learn how to be a better criminal. You can’t get a job because of your record. Far too easy to turn back to crime and land right back inside. It’s cruel. It has nothing to do with reflection. Inhumane at best.
  - insane_dreamer 4y ago
    Private prisons should be abolished. I cannot understand how we as a society accept the notion of a system that financially incentivizes incarcerating people. It's abhorrent. Does any other developed country do this?
    - abfan1127 4y ago
      private prisons maintain costs far better than public prisons. The issue you implicitly refer to is prison contracts state "minimum payments when populations drop below [some] threshold". Its not the private prisons arresting people, trying people, and funneling them into their pocket books. The real issue is the concept of imprisonment ought be about putting people who truly can not be trusted to be "at large". Prison shouldn't be a punishment. There are other alternatives.
      - mozman 4y ago
        Private prisons shift the burden onto the inmates and often have subpar services such as food and cell hygiene. There’s a lot of hyperbole and incentives for the narrative to sound better than it is. Unfortunately I have experience from a family member. See it for yourself if this is an issue you care about.
      - kingkawn 4y ago
        Private prisons only have lower costs if you exclude the eventual, and inevitable, intervention by the Justice dept to fix their inhumane conditions.
      - muwtyhg 4y ago
        > Its not the private prisons arresting people, trying people, and funneling them into their pocket books. Have you heard of the "Kids For Cash" scandal? Private prisons actively try to get more people incarcerated by bribing judges. The judges are complicit too, but the private prisons are absolutely trying to "funnel them into their pocket books"
        4y ago
- texaslonghorn5 4y ago
  If it's a repeat problem, then the prison time isn't working, perhaps the best solution would be some other rehabilitative way to learn empathy...
- kingkawn 4y ago
  Or for those without empathy to find out that the society too, beneath it all, has no empathy
- PheonixPharts 4y ago
  There's a bit of irony in the tone of this comment since it shows no capacity for empathy for those who commit crimes, most significantly in the sense that you clearly believe that prison is for others who are not you. I've been the victim of a range of crimes over my life including assault and robbery. I particularly remember the one case where I was robbed from a studio apartment while I was sleeping. I was, obviously, quite rattled. I remember looking for other stories of this happening to people and was surprised how many people viewed being robbed as an assault on their dignity and expressed incredible desire for revenge. I just couldn't muster these same feelings. While my day was ruined by the evening I could already feel my life coming back together: the lock had been changed, I cancelled all my credit cards, has a replacement license on it's way to me, and all in all was just out about $20 that had been in my wallet. I had a realization then that while my life was already coming back together the life of the person who robbed me was perpetually in the state of chaos that I had felt that morning. I high risk, low reward robbery like that is typically for drug money, and undoubtedly whatever fix that robber had gotten for my $20 was long faded and they were back putting themselves at risk. The key insight that hit me was that that momentary break in my sense of security that morning, that's what the person who robbed me constantly lives in. That person goes to bed with the same sense of insecurity I woke up in. But my security is only disrupted on these rare occasions where our lives our inverted, but my default is comfort and theirs is perpetually in that state baring that brief moment where they have enough money for that next fix. I earnestly felt no need for any vengeance as any desire for vengeance was already dealt out by reality. What more punishment could I wish on someone than for them to wake up every morning feeling the same as I did for just that one.
  - thrown_22 4y ago
    >There's a bit of irony in the tone of this comment since it shows no capacity for empathy for those who commit crimes, most significantly in the sense that you clearly believe that prison is for others who are not you. If you believe that there are too many people already the death penalty for j-walking isn't a punishment it's a policy to keep the rest of us alive past 2100.
  - atdrummond 4y ago
    This is silly. I was robbed in the Tenderloin in December and had to spend days in the ICU. The cops won’t do anything. I have permanent brain damage and have lost all progress I made working on my C-PTSD from childhood sexual abuse. The guys who attacked me don’t live a life of chaos. It’s a job for them and the market is the most lucrative it has ever been.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- sangnoir 4y ago
  > Most of us have been the victim of some kind of crime at some point in our lives. The many times it's happened to me, I also considered the notion of empathy: namely that the criminal lacked it for me, the victim. Most of us have broken multiple laws without being aware of it (or casually aware of it) - the idea of separating citizenry between "criminals" and "non-criminal victims" is too binary, as root comment mentioned.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- standardUser 4y ago
  The current system is an anti-solution, causing more problems than it solves and failing to succeed at even it's most basic purposes. Unless someone is an imminent violent threat they should not be detained in any form for long periods of time, and those who are detained should be treated in a way intended to improve their situation and remove the need for incarceration.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
warning26 4y ago
I don't really understand what the purpose of prisons is, and I don't think anyone else really does either. Is it punishment? If so, then there are much more effective and cheaper ways we could punish people. Is it rehabilitation? If so, how does being locked into a room with a bunch of other criminals rehabilitate someone? Is it removing criminals from society altogether? In that case, there's a far more efficient way to do that. Because prisons don't have a clear role, they end up being a weird and ineffective mix that achieves virtually nothing.
- Volatile-Rig 4y ago
  We know the purpose of prisons; very cheap labor without oversight.
  - worik 4y ago
    An exemption to the prohibition of slavery.
  - alex_sf 4y ago
    UNICOR makes 61 million a year. Not exactly big business.
- avalys 4y ago
  > achieves virtually nothing. The purpose of prisons is to remove people from society altogether, yes. They do accomplish this. Your complaint on that point is that they don't do this efficiently (compared to what, killing the prisoners instead?)
  - arcticbull 4y ago
    The penal system generally solves along three axes, whose distribution varies based on the society in which they exist. 1) Segregation. Taking dangerous individuals and putting them in a separate area away from society. 2) Rehabilitation. Changing the behavior of these individuals to avoid recidivism. 3) Retribution. Just making these people miserable because it people outside prison feel good knowing the people in prison are having a bad time. The US penal system is designed principally around (1) and (3) and pays lip service to (2).
hedora 4y ago
In most other countries, the prison system's job is to reform the prisoners. In the US, it is designed to be punitive, and there is a direct financial incentive to increase the percentage of prisoners that are sent back to prison after serving their time. The system is working as designed: the US has a much higher percentage of its population in prison than most other countries, and extremely high recividism rates.
- dahfizz 4y ago
  You're really overplaying the financial angle. Only 8% of prisons are private. And even then, it's the government that has to pay the prisons. Imprisonment always costs tax money.
  - hedora 4y ago
    The prison labor alone is worth $11 billion dollars a year (from 800,000 workers): https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/15/us-prison-workers-low-wages-exploited https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/15/us-prison-wo... Also, many state run prisons outsource things to contractors that price gouge.
flatline 4y ago
I don’t believe in life imprisonment but for truly exceptional cases. It is needlessly cruel and a huge burden to our system. The prison industrial complex is dystopian. But what do you mean by “ineffective”? The purpose of prison in the US is twofold: punitive as a deterrent, and to keep criminals away from the rest of society. I have doubts about the effectiveness of the former, but the latter is super effective, we lock up more people than any other first world country! It’s really hard to argue against that from a political standpoint.
- darig 4y ago
daniel-cussen 4y ago
rgrieselhuber 4y ago
This is one of the things i hate most about our political system, is how it coerces people to pigeonhole themselves into an entire set of beliefs because it is made to seem that you have to embrace those beliefs once you accept the identity of “conservative” or “liberal.” We should be expanding our experiences wherever possible (in beneficial ways) to expand our consciousness and to learn to see life through the perspective of others. I’m glad you were able to do that here.
closeparen 4y ago
It's a beautiful experience, and thank you for sharing it. >We want “problems” to just go away. And stay away. We do. But the thing is, sharing public spaces with a fuller range of human misery and depravity each time you leave your home, is an option. I just don't see it accomplishing the sort of positive transformation that people credit it with. Instead it makes everybody miserable, afraid, and insular - avoiding public spaces, locking themselves in cars, moving to the exurbs. There are clearly people who don't morally deserve some kind of brutal punishment, and yet are the reason we can't have nice things. God damnit, I want nice things. But it's probably true that justice demands we accept a certain amount of spoilage.
jrochkind1 4y ago
What do you think can be done to change the attitude of people who used to think like you? Nothing but a similar experience to the one you had, direct contact with it? I guess that's what you suggest at the end of your comment. That's great that your congregation did such a thing and reached out to you and you took the opportunity. Your comments about outsourcing human lives to an alternative universe invisible seems to me very observant. Have your attempts to talk about what you saw ever done anything to change the imagination of those who you are talking to?
Snowbird3999 4y ago
[deleted]
- adwn 4y ago
  > We can solve these problems in a month if enough people just thought with empathy about this topic for 10 minutes. How?
next_xibalba 4y ago
> ineffective Get back to us if you ever have a loved one get murdered, raped, or assaulted. Justice is not solely about rehabilitation. It is very much about righteous punishment for doing evil. We can acknowledge that context and environment foster crime while also not tolerating crime. Personally, I don't give one care about the "why" of certain classes of crime. I have zero tolerance or empathy for the doers of violence. If you murder someone, your life is forfeit to me. If you rape someone, I hope you get locked away for a minimum of 20 years. If you seriously assault someone, you should have to do jail time.
- afandian 4y ago
  Do you have the same amount of confidence that the legal system can tell innocent people apart from guilty people?
  - gxt 4y ago
    So because we're not perfect we should do nothing?
  - next_xibalba 4y ago
    Yes. I have seen false conviction estimates ranging from 1 to 5 percent. All systems which involve any kind of classification will have a non-zero false positive rate. Does that mean we should do away with them? Of course not. We should simply seek to improve systems with better and better processes, while accepting that we might approach but never achieve zero false positives. What alternative would you propose? Doing away with criminal justice? Do you think murderers and rapists should be allowed to roam free? How about drug traffickers who knowingly distribute life destroying substances in their communities? Think of someone you really love. Maybe its your child, your parents, your partner, or a friend. Now imagine the pain and fear they would feel as they are murdered. What would they think and feel as they are choked to death? Or bludgeoned? The sheer terror. The pain. The senselessness of their life ending. Imagine that you find their corpse. Imagine the pain and horror you would experience. The hole in your heart. Really try to visualize this scenario. To feel it emotionally and with your senses. Now imagine the perpetrator going unpunished. Walking free. Or getting put on some cushy rehabilitation program to better their life. Does that seem right? Does it seem just? Does it seem fair? In my opinion, this discussion is way too academic, abstract, and one-sided. How about we focus on victims and their survivors?
giardini 4y ago
Since prison is "arbitrary" and "ineffective" then you're likely wasting your time by visiting prisoners. You should turn to a more productive activity perhaps. But to do that without regret you'll have to first ask yourself why you are willing to spend your time on prisoners.
bombcar 4y ago
Take the next step and hire on as a prison guard. Your opinion won't change much but you'll get a feeling for "why things are the way they are" and a substantial part of it can be attributed to outside (well-intentioned) meddling. My friend was a guard at a maximum facility and he said the best prisoners were the lifers; they had nothing to prove and were in it for the long haul; the worst were the ones doing a short sentence or had been transferred from lesser-security prisons. Part of the problem is we have prison stratification - instead of each suburb or neighborhood having a jail for the appropriate inmates from the area, we ship them all to massive processing facilities for "efficiency" which has all sorts of side-effects. It's entirely possible to have empathy for prisoners without desiring them to be released from prison.
throwaway894345 4y ago
I think it's possible to be "tough on crime" with respect to removing violent offenders from society while also reforming how prisons work on the inside as well as attenuating the problem from the frontend via social services and so on. I've always been a pretty moderate liberal, but seeing how "soft on crime" policies (reducing the amount of policing and catch/release prosecution) have dramatically harmed communities in Chicago (especially the minority communities that were "plagued by racist police") over the last ~decade has made me into a "hard on crime" person insofar as I think violent offenders should be removed from society first and foremost. We can work on tackling crime from the frontend and we can try and make prisons more humane, but I don't think these concerns can override the need to keep law-abiding people safe.
magic_hamster 4y ago
I am not entirely sure what to make of your comment. You are clearly a very compassionate person. And yes a lot of people in prison are not the "tough guy" stereotype. However, there are more than a few that will exploit your sympathy. Asking you to bring them stuff or to give them money. Sadly it's almost always the same thing. It's very easy to make friends with a person in need. What happens when they get out is a different story.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
shakezula 4y ago
To your same point about empathy for prisoners- I have a similar point about how I think everyone should be arrested and booked overnight at least once in their life. People speak far too harshly and absolutely about “criminals” and how they behave in situations they have zero understanding of and support laws that uphold those institutions. Getting arrested changed me and my opinions on criminal Justice at a fundamental level. Having no control over your future in that environment, being stripped and searched, it makes you feel vulnerable in a way that nothing else does and I think the average person would come out of it with a drastically different base opinion of crime and punishment. Note: I’m not advocating for violence or violent crime; I was arrested for an overdue traffic ticket and just that experience alone was absolute shit.

bm3719 4y ago

Most of us have been the victim of some kind of crime at some point in our lives. The many times it's happened to me, I also considered the notion of empathy: namely that the criminal lacked it for me, the victim. Not saying the current system is in any way an optimal solution or even close to it, but one thing it does provide is a lot of time for those who have acted without empathy to reflect on their misdeeds.

mozman 4y ago
It also puts a lot of money in the pockets of those who run private prisons. The incentives are perverse. It’s also not about rehabilitation, it’s about penance but that rarely materializes. Once you go to prison you learn how to be a better criminal. You can’t get a job because of your record. Far too easy to turn back to crime and land right back inside. It’s cruel. It has nothing to do with reflection. Inhumane at best.
- insane_dreamer 4y ago
  Private prisons should be abolished. I cannot understand how we as a society accept the notion of a system that financially incentivizes incarcerating people. It's abhorrent. Does any other developed country do this?
  - abfan1127 4y ago
    private prisons maintain costs far better than public prisons. The issue you implicitly refer to is prison contracts state "minimum payments when populations drop below [some] threshold". Its not the private prisons arresting people, trying people, and funneling them into their pocket books. The real issue is the concept of imprisonment ought be about putting people who truly can not be trusted to be "at large". Prison shouldn't be a punishment. There are other alternatives.
    - mozman 4y ago
      Private prisons shift the burden onto the inmates and often have subpar services such as food and cell hygiene. There’s a lot of hyperbole and incentives for the narrative to sound better than it is. Unfortunately I have experience from a family member. See it for yourself if this is an issue you care about.
    - kingkawn 4y ago
      Private prisons only have lower costs if you exclude the eventual, and inevitable, intervention by the Justice dept to fix their inhumane conditions.
    - muwtyhg 4y ago
      > Its not the private prisons arresting people, trying people, and funneling them into their pocket books. Have you heard of the "Kids For Cash" scandal? Private prisons actively try to get more people incarcerated by bribing judges. The judges are complicit too, but the private prisons are absolutely trying to "funnel them into their pocket books"
      - 4y ago
texaslonghorn5 4y ago
If it's a repeat problem, then the prison time isn't working, perhaps the best solution would be some other rehabilitative way to learn empathy...
kingkawn 4y ago
Or for those without empathy to find out that the society too, beneath it all, has no empathy
PheonixPharts 4y ago
There's a bit of irony in the tone of this comment since it shows no capacity for empathy for those who commit crimes, most significantly in the sense that you clearly believe that prison is for others who are not you. I've been the victim of a range of crimes over my life including assault and robbery. I particularly remember the one case where I was robbed from a studio apartment while I was sleeping. I was, obviously, quite rattled. I remember looking for other stories of this happening to people and was surprised how many people viewed being robbed as an assault on their dignity and expressed incredible desire for revenge. I just couldn't muster these same feelings. While my day was ruined by the evening I could already feel my life coming back together: the lock had been changed, I cancelled all my credit cards, has a replacement license on it's way to me, and all in all was just out about $20 that had been in my wallet. I had a realization then that while my life was already coming back together the life of the person who robbed me was perpetually in the state of chaos that I had felt that morning. I high risk, low reward robbery like that is typically for drug money, and undoubtedly whatever fix that robber had gotten for my $20 was long faded and they were back putting themselves at risk. The key insight that hit me was that that momentary break in my sense of security that morning, that's what the person who robbed me constantly lives in. That person goes to bed with the same sense of insecurity I woke up in. But my security is only disrupted on these rare occasions where our lives our inverted, but my default is comfort and theirs is perpetually in that state baring that brief moment where they have enough money for that next fix. I earnestly felt no need for any vengeance as any desire for vengeance was already dealt out by reality. What more punishment could I wish on someone than for them to wake up every morning feeling the same as I did for just that one.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  >There's a bit of irony in the tone of this comment since it shows no capacity for empathy for those who commit crimes, most significantly in the sense that you clearly believe that prison is for others who are not you. If you believe that there are too many people already the death penalty for j-walking isn't a punishment it's a policy to keep the rest of us alive past 2100.
- atdrummond 4y ago
  This is silly. I was robbed in the Tenderloin in December and had to spend days in the ICU. The cops won’t do anything. I have permanent brain damage and have lost all progress I made working on my C-PTSD from childhood sexual abuse. The guys who attacked me don’t live a life of chaos. It’s a job for them and the market is the most lucrative it has ever been.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
sangnoir 4y ago
> Most of us have been the victim of some kind of crime at some point in our lives. The many times it's happened to me, I also considered the notion of empathy: namely that the criminal lacked it for me, the victim. Most of us have broken multiple laws without being aware of it (or casually aware of it) - the idea of separating citizenry between "criminals" and "non-criminal victims" is too binary, as root comment mentioned.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
standardUser 4y ago
The current system is an anti-solution, causing more problems than it solves and failing to succeed at even it's most basic purposes. Unless someone is an imminent violent threat they should not be detained in any form for long periods of time, and those who are detained should be treated in a way intended to improve their situation and remove the need for incarceration.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

warning26 4y ago

I don't really understand what the purpose of prisons is, and I don't think anyone else really does either. Is it punishment? If so, then there are much more effective and cheaper ways we could punish people. Is it rehabilitation? If so, how does being locked into a room with a bunch of other criminals rehabilitate someone? Is it removing criminals from society altogether? In that case, there's a far more efficient way to do that. Because prisons don't have a clear role, they end up being a weird and ineffective mix that achieves virtually nothing.

Volatile-Rig 4y ago
We know the purpose of prisons; very cheap labor without oversight.
- worik 4y ago
  An exemption to the prohibition of slavery.
- alex_sf 4y ago
  UNICOR makes 61 million a year. Not exactly big business.
avalys 4y ago
> achieves virtually nothing. The purpose of prisons is to remove people from society altogether, yes. They do accomplish this. Your complaint on that point is that they don't do this efficiently (compared to what, killing the prisoners instead?)
- arcticbull 4y ago
  The penal system generally solves along three axes, whose distribution varies based on the society in which they exist. 1) Segregation. Taking dangerous individuals and putting them in a separate area away from society. 2) Rehabilitation. Changing the behavior of these individuals to avoid recidivism. 3) Retribution. Just making these people miserable because it people outside prison feel good knowing the people in prison are having a bad time. The US penal system is designed principally around (1) and (3) and pays lip service to (2).

hedora 4y ago

In most other countries, the prison system's job is to reform the prisoners. In the US, it is designed to be punitive, and there is a direct financial incentive to increase the percentage of prisoners that are sent back to prison after serving their time. The system is working as designed: the US has a much higher percentage of its population in prison than most other countries, and extremely high recividism rates.

dahfizz 4y ago
You're really overplaying the financial angle. Only 8% of prisons are private. And even then, it's the government that has to pay the prisons. Imprisonment always costs tax money.
- hedora 4y ago
  The prison labor alone is worth $11 billion dollars a year (from 800,000 workers): https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/15/us-prison-workers-low-wages-exploited https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/15/us-prison-wo... Also, many state run prisons outsource things to contractors that price gouge.

flatline 4y ago

I don’t believe in life imprisonment but for truly exceptional cases. It is needlessly cruel and a huge burden to our system. The prison industrial complex is dystopian. But what do you mean by “ineffective”? The purpose of prison in the US is twofold: punitive as a deterrent, and to keep criminals away from the rest of society. I have doubts about the effectiveness of the former, but the latter is super effective, we lock up more people than any other first world country! It’s really hard to argue against that from a political standpoint.

darig 4y ago

daniel-cussen 4y ago

rgrieselhuber 4y ago

This is one of the things i hate most about our political system, is how it coerces people to pigeonhole themselves into an entire set of beliefs because it is made to seem that you have to embrace those beliefs once you accept the identity of “conservative” or “liberal.” We should be expanding our experiences wherever possible (in beneficial ways) to expand our consciousness and to learn to see life through the perspective of others. I’m glad you were able to do that here.

closeparen 4y ago

It's a beautiful experience, and thank you for sharing it. >We want “problems” to just go away. And stay away. We do. But the thing is, sharing public spaces with a fuller range of human misery and depravity each time you leave your home, is an option. I just don't see it accomplishing the sort of positive transformation that people credit it with. Instead it makes everybody miserable, afraid, and insular - avoiding public spaces, locking themselves in cars, moving to the exurbs. There are clearly people who don't morally deserve some kind of brutal punishment, and yet are the reason we can't have nice things. God damnit, I want nice things. But it's probably true that justice demands we accept a certain amount of spoilage.

jrochkind1 4y ago

What do you think can be done to change the attitude of people who used to think like you? Nothing but a similar experience to the one you had, direct contact with it? I guess that's what you suggest at the end of your comment. That's great that your congregation did such a thing and reached out to you and you took the opportunity. Your comments about outsourcing human lives to an alternative universe invisible seems to me very observant. Have your attempts to talk about what you saw ever done anything to change the imagination of those who you are talking to?

Snowbird3999 4y ago

[deleted]

adwn 4y ago
> We can solve these problems in a month if enough people just thought with empathy about this topic for 10 minutes. How?

next_xibalba 4y ago

> ineffective Get back to us if you ever have a loved one get murdered, raped, or assaulted. Justice is not solely about rehabilitation. It is very much about righteous punishment for doing evil. We can acknowledge that context and environment foster crime while also not tolerating crime. Personally, I don't give one care about the "why" of certain classes of crime. I have zero tolerance or empathy for the doers of violence. If you murder someone, your life is forfeit to me. If you rape someone, I hope you get locked away for a minimum of 20 years. If you seriously assault someone, you should have to do jail time.

afandian 4y ago
Do you have the same amount of confidence that the legal system can tell innocent people apart from guilty people?
- gxt 4y ago
  So because we're not perfect we should do nothing?
- next_xibalba 4y ago
  Yes. I have seen false conviction estimates ranging from 1 to 5 percent. All systems which involve any kind of classification will have a non-zero false positive rate. Does that mean we should do away with them? Of course not. We should simply seek to improve systems with better and better processes, while accepting that we might approach but never achieve zero false positives. What alternative would you propose? Doing away with criminal justice? Do you think murderers and rapists should be allowed to roam free? How about drug traffickers who knowingly distribute life destroying substances in their communities? Think of someone you really love. Maybe its your child, your parents, your partner, or a friend. Now imagine the pain and fear they would feel as they are murdered. What would they think and feel as they are choked to death? Or bludgeoned? The sheer terror. The pain. The senselessness of their life ending. Imagine that you find their corpse. Imagine the pain and horror you would experience. The hole in your heart. Really try to visualize this scenario. To feel it emotionally and with your senses. Now imagine the perpetrator going unpunished. Walking free. Or getting put on some cushy rehabilitation program to better their life. Does that seem right? Does it seem just? Does it seem fair? In my opinion, this discussion is way too academic, abstract, and one-sided. How about we focus on victims and their survivors?

giardini 4y ago

Since prison is "arbitrary" and "ineffective" then you're likely wasting your time by visiting prisoners. You should turn to a more productive activity perhaps. But to do that without regret you'll have to first ask yourself why you are willing to spend your time on prisoners.

bombcar 4y ago

Take the next step and hire on as a prison guard. Your opinion won't change much but you'll get a feeling for "why things are the way they are" and a substantial part of it can be attributed to outside (well-intentioned) meddling. My friend was a guard at a maximum facility and he said the best prisoners were the lifers; they had nothing to prove and were in it for the long haul; the worst were the ones doing a short sentence or had been transferred from lesser-security prisons. Part of the problem is we have prison stratification - instead of each suburb or neighborhood having a jail for the appropriate inmates from the area, we ship them all to massive processing facilities for "efficiency" which has all sorts of side-effects. It's entirely possible to have empathy for prisoners without desiring them to be released from prison.

throwaway894345 4y ago

I think it's possible to be "tough on crime" with respect to removing violent offenders from society while also reforming how prisons work on the inside as well as attenuating the problem from the frontend via social services and so on. I've always been a pretty moderate liberal, but seeing how "soft on crime" policies (reducing the amount of policing and catch/release prosecution) have dramatically harmed communities in Chicago (especially the minority communities that were "plagued by racist police") over the last ~decade has made me into a "hard on crime" person insofar as I think violent offenders should be removed from society first and foremost. We can work on tackling crime from the frontend and we can try and make prisons more humane, but I don't think these concerns can override the need to keep law-abiding people safe.

magic_hamster 4y ago

I am not entirely sure what to make of your comment. You are clearly a very compassionate person. And yes a lot of people in prison are not the "tough guy" stereotype. However, there are more than a few that will exploit your sympathy. Asking you to bring them stuff or to give them money. Sadly it's almost always the same thing. It's very easy to make friends with a person in need. What happens when they get out is a different story.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

shakezula 4y ago

To your same point about empathy for prisoners- I have a similar point about how I think everyone should be arrested and booked overnight at least once in their life. People speak far too harshly and absolutely about “criminals” and how they behave in situations they have zero understanding of and support laws that uphold those institutions. Getting arrested changed me and my opinions on criminal Justice at a fundamental level. Having no control over your future in that environment, being stripped and searched, it makes you feel vulnerable in a way that nothing else does and I think the average person would come out of it with a drastically different base opinion of crime and punishment. Note: I’m not advocating for violence or violent crime; I was arrested for an overdue traffic ticket and just that experience alone was absolute shit.