10 ms·

> I don't really understand what the purpose of prisons is, and I don't think anyone else really does either. Some people can't function in society. What do yo

by dxhdr 4y ago

> I don't really understand what the purpose of prisons is, and I don't think anyone else really does either. Some people can't function in society. What do you do with them?

pessimizer 4y ago
Lock them up with other maladjusted people for years, then let them loose on society with a hardened attitude, extensive criminal connections, and no ability to find employment?
- Ekaros 4y ago
  The last part really leads to to question, what do people expect to happen? Them willingly starve or freeze to death?
- thefounder 4y ago
  The main issue is that we have time based sentences only for most crimes. Criminals should never be left back in society unless they prove themselves fit/worthy to come back. Of course I don't mind a minumum time based sentences as punishment on top of that requirement either. However betrayed trust cannot be repaid in full just serving time locked-up.
  - bryanrasmussen 4y ago
    >The main issue is that we have time based sentences only for most crimes. Criminals should never be left back in society unless they prove themselves fit/worthy to come back. So if this was the strategy of the U.S until about 2010 I suppose it would have been morally justifiable as an act of self-preservation to kill anyone that saw you smoking pot - assuming of course that there is such a thing as personal rights and people had the right to smoke pot, but the government prevented them from doing so. on edit: perhaps I'm in a bad mood but I do find it astounding how often when one of these articles comes out about how inhumane the American prison system is, whole branches of the discussion devolve into conflicting ideas on how one can make it more inhumane.
    - thefounder 4y ago
      Why would you kill someone who sees you smoking pot? That may lead to a minimum life sentece as punishment regardless of your rehabilitation. If you were certain that you can never quit smoking pot/rehabilitate in prison then perhaps your action "could be" justifiable. You should be aware that drug use is not affecting only you. You also fund an international criminal enterprise. If you want to use drugs then take the hard, legal way(i.e political activism). As far as I'm concerned all drugs should be legal and served in hospitals unpon request at reasonable prices or free for those who cannot afford them. But I'm not making the laws so I'm not looking providing drugs to addicts at affordable prices either regardless of how ethical would be.
      - bryanrasmussen 4y ago
        >If you were certain that you can never quit smoking pot/rehabilitate in prison then perhaps your action "could be" justifiable. If you have a right to smoke pot then you should not have to rehabilitate yourself, just as you should not have to love Big Brother or any other number of things. >If you want to use drugs then take the hard, legal way(i.e political activism). here I'm wondering if you are using 'you' to refer to people in general or to me? Either way it's sort of silly, hardly anybody is going to say I will do drugs after my political activism to make doing drugs legal succeeds! If it's to me I don't smoke pot, but I do believe people have the right to do it. So if you are going to be thrown in prison on an indefinite sentence for something you have the right to do then I would advocate extreme violence for anyone that was in danger of being arrested for smoking pot. In the end your indefinite time until rehabilitation proposal is more extreme than the current American system. >As far as I'm concerned.... reading your last paragraph I get the feeling your view of 'drugs' is they are all somehow the same as heroin?
        thefounder 4y ago
        >> If you have a right to smoke pot Well, if you have that right into law then I don't understand why you think you risk going to jail. As far as I am concerned I believe people should be allowed to take any drug they want and even commit assisted suicide for any reason they want (as long as they are sane). After all we own our body and the gov should only protect us from abuse from others(i.e misleading advertising like they did with the tabacco). That being said I believe in indefinite time until rehabilitation. If the law is wrong we should work to fix it instead to bend it at the expense of so many especially for crimes that lead to violent/tragic outcomes. I also think people should own the effects of their choices. Buying from criminal or terrorist organisations does lead to tragic situations for many people regardless of the product you buy. Being ignorant shouldn't absolve you of guilt.
  - cmehdy 4y ago
    Mandatory minimums don't work. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/5-charts-show-mandatory-minimum-sentences-dont-work https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/5-charts-show-mandator... https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/end-mandatory-minimums https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/end-...
    - thefounder 4y ago
      Mandatory minimums should be used as punishments only. Obviously the release should depend by rehabilitation(mandatory).
      - YZF 4y ago
        Who/how determines rehabilitation? If the prison benefits financially from a prisoner staying in prison how is that going to work in practice? I goggled this: https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offenses.jsp https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen... I think it's kind of interesting. The people one might concerned about are probably: "Homicide, Aggravated Assault, and Kidnapping Offenses" -> 3.2% of prisoners. "Robbery" -> 2.8% ... I think the first question is what % of all prisoners should probably not be there in the first place and how do you deal with the root causes of them getting there. Then we can worry about when we let them out.
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      Mandatory minimums do work. They don't work when they're draconian measures passed in law-and-order frenzies by reactionaries, but they work for decreasing sentencing disparities between sympathetic criminals and unsympathetic ones. The fact that the mandatory minimums for crack were so much higher than for powder cocaine was a good thing. They're an admission that the system is openly racist, and a target to aim at. Without them, we'd just have judges sentencing white snorters to probation and putting black smokers under the jail on their own discretion, and we'd need statistics that we wouldn't be given access to in order to make a case. It's better when racism is out in the open rather than buried in a judge's latitude.
  - concordDance 4y ago
    > Criminals should never be left back in society unless they prove themselves fit/worthy to come back. How could this be done in practice?
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  Well, we tried pulling back policing and slap-on-the-wrist prosecution policies and violent crime is surging. How long until friendship, positive energy, and rainbows kick in and bring crime levels down? There are more constructive solutions to the prison problem--notably solving frontend problems + prison reform, but locking up violent offenders is part of "solving frontend problems" so we can't exactly stop doing that and hope to make up the difference by investing in after school programs. Any serious solution to crime has to be "lock up offenders and X" rather than "letting offenders run rampant and X".
  - PuppyTailWags 4y ago
    > we tried pulling back policing and slap-on-the-wrist prosecution policies and violent crime is surging Firstly, where is pulling back policing happening? I don't know of a single city that has actually reduced their police size to any real sense? Additionally, how do we know this isn't just correlation and not causation? Inflation is higher, more people are addicted to things, housing insecurity is rising.
    - alex_sf 4y ago
      > Firstly, where is pulling back policing happening? Most metropolitan areas. Seattle [1][2] and Minneapolis [3] have both established public policies of not responding to, citing, or arresting for a wide range of offenses. > I don't know of a single city that has actually reduced their police size to any real sense? Minneapolis has reduced the number of police officers, through various means, by 30%. [4] > Additionally, how do we know this isn't just correlation and not causation? Because we have multiple studies proving a causal relationship. [5][6] [1] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/times-watchdog/seattle-police-halted-investigating-adult-sexual-assaults-this-year-internal-memo-shows/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/times-watchdog/sea... [2] https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/seattle-police-bellevue-other-law-enforcement-immediately-stop-arresting-people-drug-possession/BXK4XTO3DFCYZFGQ3YOYTYJFUI/ https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/seattle-police-bellevue-oth... [3] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-policing-minneapolis/ https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-poli... [4] https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/minnesota-supreme-court-orders-minneapolis-to-hire-more-cops-as-city-down-more-than-200-officers-from-2-years-ago/ https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/minnesota-supreme-cou... [5] https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/rssa.12142 https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/rssa.12142 [6] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/426877 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/426877
TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
Currently the options seem to be prison or Congress. There are a lot of naive takes in this thread. Prison is objectively and disproportionately racist and classist. It's not so much about deterring crime as about terrorising and brutalising certain demographics. For the winners to feel better about themselves, the losers have to lose hard. It's essentially just sadism. This has nothing at all to do with preventing criminality, as the penal systems in other countries - notably Scandinavia - have proved.
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  > Currently the options seem to be prison or Congress. This made me chuckle out loud, well done! > There are a lot of naive takes in this thread. Prison is objectively and disproportionately racist and classist. It's not so much about deterring crime as about terrorising and brutalising certain demographics. Yes, there are biases against various races and classes, but they absolutely don't override the bias against criminals. Our system is flawed, but it's far from "about terrorizing and brutalizing certain demographics". This kind extreme hyperbolic rhetoric isn't helpful, and insofar as it motivated the de-policing and catch/release prosecution policies which led to the violent crime surge, it has done far more harm to minority communities than the criminal justice system could hope to do.
  - PuppyTailWags 4y ago
    > the de-policing and catch/release prosecution policies which led to the violent crime surge I don't actually know if this is true, intuitively. The highest-crime areas are not the areas with the least police. The lowest-crime areas are not the areas with the most police. Crime seems to respond as a phenomenon to other dysfunction of society, not because there is opportunity to commit them. So, I don't know, can you educate me more about the relationship between police presence and its causation statistically towards crime? [To be clear, I'm not asking in bad faith or whataboutism. I'm genuinely trying to become more educated in this as a layperson who doesn't study crime to any degree.]
    - throwaway894345 4y ago

by dxhdr 4y ago

> I don't really understand what the purpose of prisons is, and I don't think anyone else really does either. Some people can't function in society. What do you do with them?

pessimizer 4y ago

Lock them up with other maladjusted people for years, then let them loose on society with a hardened attitude, extensive criminal connections, and no ability to find employment?

Ekaros 4y ago
The last part really leads to to question, what do people expect to happen? Them willingly starve or freeze to death?
thefounder 4y ago
The main issue is that we have time based sentences only for most crimes. Criminals should never be left back in society unless they prove themselves fit/worthy to come back. Of course I don't mind a minumum time based sentences as punishment on top of that requirement either. However betrayed trust cannot be repaid in full just serving time locked-up.
- bryanrasmussen 4y ago
  >The main issue is that we have time based sentences only for most crimes. Criminals should never be left back in society unless they prove themselves fit/worthy to come back. So if this was the strategy of the U.S until about 2010 I suppose it would have been morally justifiable as an act of self-preservation to kill anyone that saw you smoking pot - assuming of course that there is such a thing as personal rights and people had the right to smoke pot, but the government prevented them from doing so. on edit: perhaps I'm in a bad mood but I do find it astounding how often when one of these articles comes out about how inhumane the American prison system is, whole branches of the discussion devolve into conflicting ideas on how one can make it more inhumane.
  - thefounder 4y ago
    Why would you kill someone who sees you smoking pot? That may lead to a minimum life sentece as punishment regardless of your rehabilitation. If you were certain that you can never quit smoking pot/rehabilitate in prison then perhaps your action "could be" justifiable. You should be aware that drug use is not affecting only you. You also fund an international criminal enterprise. If you want to use drugs then take the hard, legal way(i.e political activism). As far as I'm concerned all drugs should be legal and served in hospitals unpon request at reasonable prices or free for those who cannot afford them. But I'm not making the laws so I'm not looking providing drugs to addicts at affordable prices either regardless of how ethical would be.
    - bryanrasmussen 4y ago
      >If you were certain that you can never quit smoking pot/rehabilitate in prison then perhaps your action "could be" justifiable. If you have a right to smoke pot then you should not have to rehabilitate yourself, just as you should not have to love Big Brother or any other number of things. >If you want to use drugs then take the hard, legal way(i.e political activism). here I'm wondering if you are using 'you' to refer to people in general or to me? Either way it's sort of silly, hardly anybody is going to say I will do drugs after my political activism to make doing drugs legal succeeds! If it's to me I don't smoke pot, but I do believe people have the right to do it. So if you are going to be thrown in prison on an indefinite sentence for something you have the right to do then I would advocate extreme violence for anyone that was in danger of being arrested for smoking pot. In the end your indefinite time until rehabilitation proposal is more extreme than the current American system. >As far as I'm concerned.... reading your last paragraph I get the feeling your view of 'drugs' is they are all somehow the same as heroin?
      - thefounder 4y ago
        >> If you have a right to smoke pot Well, if you have that right into law then I don't understand why you think you risk going to jail. As far as I am concerned I believe people should be allowed to take any drug they want and even commit assisted suicide for any reason they want (as long as they are sane). After all we own our body and the gov should only protect us from abuse from others(i.e misleading advertising like they did with the tabacco). That being said I believe in indefinite time until rehabilitation. If the law is wrong we should work to fix it instead to bend it at the expense of so many especially for crimes that lead to violent/tragic outcomes. I also think people should own the effects of their choices. Buying from criminal or terrorist organisations does lead to tragic situations for many people regardless of the product you buy. Being ignorant shouldn't absolve you of guilt.
- cmehdy 4y ago
  Mandatory minimums don't work. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/5-charts-show-mandatory-minimum-sentences-dont-work https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/5-charts-show-mandator... https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/end-mandatory-minimums https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/end-...
  - thefounder 4y ago
    Mandatory minimums should be used as punishments only. Obviously the release should depend by rehabilitation(mandatory).
    - YZF 4y ago
      Who/how determines rehabilitation? If the prison benefits financially from a prisoner staying in prison how is that going to work in practice? I goggled this: https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offenses.jsp https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen... I think it's kind of interesting. The people one might concerned about are probably: "Homicide, Aggravated Assault, and Kidnapping Offenses" -> 3.2% of prisoners. "Robbery" -> 2.8% ... I think the first question is what % of all prisoners should probably not be there in the first place and how do you deal with the root causes of them getting there. Then we can worry about when we let them out.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    Mandatory minimums do work. They don't work when they're draconian measures passed in law-and-order frenzies by reactionaries, but they work for decreasing sentencing disparities between sympathetic criminals and unsympathetic ones. The fact that the mandatory minimums for crack were so much higher than for powder cocaine was a good thing. They're an admission that the system is openly racist, and a target to aim at. Without them, we'd just have judges sentencing white snorters to probation and putting black smokers under the jail on their own discretion, and we'd need statistics that we wouldn't be given access to in order to make a case. It's better when racism is out in the open rather than buried in a judge's latitude.
- concordDance 4y ago
  > Criminals should never be left back in society unless they prove themselves fit/worthy to come back. How could this be done in practice?
throwaway894345 4y ago
Well, we tried pulling back policing and slap-on-the-wrist prosecution policies and violent crime is surging. How long until friendship, positive energy, and rainbows kick in and bring crime levels down? There are more constructive solutions to the prison problem--notably solving frontend problems + prison reform, but locking up violent offenders is part of "solving frontend problems" so we can't exactly stop doing that and hope to make up the difference by investing in after school programs. Any serious solution to crime has to be "lock up offenders and X" rather than "letting offenders run rampant and X".
- PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  > we tried pulling back policing and slap-on-the-wrist prosecution policies and violent crime is surging Firstly, where is pulling back policing happening? I don't know of a single city that has actually reduced their police size to any real sense? Additionally, how do we know this isn't just correlation and not causation? Inflation is higher, more people are addicted to things, housing insecurity is rising.
  - alex_sf 4y ago
    > Firstly, where is pulling back policing happening? Most metropolitan areas. Seattle [1][2] and Minneapolis [3] have both established public policies of not responding to, citing, or arresting for a wide range of offenses. > I don't know of a single city that has actually reduced their police size to any real sense? Minneapolis has reduced the number of police officers, through various means, by 30%. [4] > Additionally, how do we know this isn't just correlation and not causation? Because we have multiple studies proving a causal relationship. [5][6] [1] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/times-watchdog/seattle-police-halted-investigating-adult-sexual-assaults-this-year-internal-memo-shows/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/times-watchdog/sea... [2] https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/seattle-police-bellevue-other-law-enforcement-immediately-stop-arresting-people-drug-possession/BXK4XTO3DFCYZFGQ3YOYTYJFUI/ https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/seattle-police-bellevue-oth... [3] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-policing-minneapolis/ https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-poli... [4] https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/minnesota-supreme-court-orders-minneapolis-to-hire-more-cops-as-city-down-more-than-200-officers-from-2-years-ago/ https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/minnesota-supreme-cou... [5] https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/rssa.12142 https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/rssa.12142 [6] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/426877 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/426877

TheOtherHobbes 4y ago

Currently the options seem to be prison or Congress. There are a lot of naive takes in this thread. Prison is objectively and disproportionately racist and classist. It's not so much about deterring crime as about terrorising and brutalising certain demographics. For the winners to feel better about themselves, the losers have to lose hard. It's essentially just sadism. This has nothing at all to do with preventing criminality, as the penal systems in other countries - notably Scandinavia - have proved.

throwaway894345 4y ago
> Currently the options seem to be prison or Congress. This made me chuckle out loud, well done! > There are a lot of naive takes in this thread. Prison is objectively and disproportionately racist and classist. It's not so much about deterring crime as about terrorising and brutalising certain demographics. Yes, there are biases against various races and classes, but they absolutely don't override the bias against criminals. Our system is flawed, but it's far from "about terrorizing and brutalizing certain demographics". This kind extreme hyperbolic rhetoric isn't helpful, and insofar as it motivated the de-policing and catch/release prosecution policies which led to the violent crime surge, it has done far more harm to minority communities than the criminal justice system could hope to do.
- PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  > the de-policing and catch/release prosecution policies which led to the violent crime surge I don't actually know if this is true, intuitively. The highest-crime areas are not the areas with the least police. The lowest-crime areas are not the areas with the most police. Crime seems to respond as a phenomenon to other dysfunction of society, not because there is opportunity to commit them. So, I don't know, can you educate me more about the relationship between police presence and its causation statistically towards crime? [To be clear, I'm not asking in bad faith or whataboutism. I'm genuinely trying to become more educated in this as a layperson who doesn't study crime to any degree.]
  - throwaway894345 4y ago