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what it means is less important than the real questions it raises. - if in the united states we refer to our prisons as 'correctional' facilities, what quantit

what it means is less important than the real questions it raises. - if in the united states we refer to our prisons as 'correctional' facilities, what quantitative correction could require nearly a century of internment? - if by any study it costs nearly 40,000 dollars to house a prisoner for one (1) year, was the night watchmans life truly worth 3.2 million dollars of Connecticut taxpayers money? - what meaningful value was extracted from his slave labor? was it enough to offset even a fraction of the internment cost? - Can the state identify how or if a nearly 100 year old man has been rehabilitated in their correctional facility? has the process improved?

glimshe 3y ago
Some countries limit the time you can spend in prison for this very reason, no matter what you did. For instance, Brazil sets it to 40 years total even if you killed 100 people.
- slashdev 3y ago
  I’m a fan of the death penalty for really egregious cases, given a hypothetical perfect Justice system. Some people are not worth trying to rehabilitate. However, the Justice system is flawed and a decent percentage of people who get the death penalty are innocent. So what do you do? I’d rather they be locked up for the rest of their natural lives, barring a change in evidence or technology that leads to a change in sentence. But I don’t want some remorseless psychopath back in society because they’ve reached the limit on how long we can hold them.
  - Femolo 3y ago
    I'm against it as I do believe that we are not just the result of our own free will free of anything but a result of our environment, luck etc. I'm lucky that I had parents which gave me behavior patterns which do not make me kill or rape others. And even if someone believes they are right, they are actually right just no in the moral and ethical sphere of a majority. I don't like rape and in my world it's wrong. But that doesn't change their world view. And I don't kill him due to this because why would I be allowed to end the life of someone else? The best I can do is to remove this person from the society. It's easy to kill and hard not to. And in the worst case scenario I would kill someone who hurts or killed a close person (perhaps) but I would need to accept the consequences of it.
  - causi 3y ago
    I wonder if something productive could be done by expanding the options beyond "guilty" and "not guilty" because someone can be found guilty by a jury for almost any reason. Perhaps if there was a further status of "guilty by egregious evidence" that required a higher standard of evidence such as direct recording of the commission of the crime by the perpetrator and the death penalty was only applicable in those cases. I'm not ok with a one percent chance of executing the wrong person for any crime no matter how horrific, and our justice system trends at least 4% wrongful conviction. I'm fully ok with a 0.001% chance of executing the wrong person for even second-degree murder.
    - dsego 3y ago
      Isn't "beyond reasonable doubt" already a high standard? I've watched cases on youtube where it was really obvious from all the circumstances that the defendant did it. But it wasn't beyond reasonable doubt, so the jury had no choice but to declare them innocent.
- dsego 3y ago
  Croatia is the same, our serial killer that started killing when he was 16 is being released soon, killed someone on a free weekend while serving time, got married in prison. Not sure what to say of such a system, I'm not really in favor. And 40 years is like the max, for raping and killing it's more like 15-20, eg a deranged man who chopped of a tourist's head is released in a few years after serving 15, another man that raped and killed a minor is soon to be out as well after 22 years in prison.
  - hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
    That sucks. That guy will 100% guaranteed kill someone again. Portugal is the same except instead of 40 it's 25 if I remember correctly. Egregious.
habitue 3y ago
Prison has multiple purposes: retribution, incapacitance, deterrence, and rehabilitation. - retribution: gives victims and families of the victim retribution. This one doesn't seem important in the modern day, but if you ignore it you get vigilante revenge, blood feuds, honor culture etc. Having the state take on "revenge" kills these cycles. - incapacitance: straight up preventing dangerous people from being out and being dangerous. - deterrence: long prison sentences deter other people from committing crimes because they don't want to get a long prison sentence. Also deters the prisoners themselves from committing another crime (if their sentence is short enough) - rehabilitation: here's finally the "corrections" part, and honestly our system in the US isn't great at rehabilitating anyone. In principle this is a prudent idea, but we'd have to spend a lot more tax dollars on prisoners to actually rehabilitate anything. That's politically pretty unappealing
- ansible 3y ago
  > rehabilitation ... That's politically pretty unappealing Here in the USA, yes. Some EU countries take this quite a bit more seriously, to good effect.
- RheingoldRiver 3y ago
  > but we'd have to spend a lot more tax dollars on prisoners to actually rehabilitate anything. That's politically pretty unappealing I don't have a source for this but I thought the opposite was true? That the general consensus was we'd end up spending less because the recidivism rate would go down?
  - lolinder 3y ago
    I think they mean more per prisoner per year, which is immediately measurable. It'd be done in the hope that total costs would go down over decades, but in our current political climate it's hard to sell improvements that take decades to manifest.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  > we'd have to spend a lot more tax dollars on prisoners to actually rehabilitate anything Not necessarily. Recidivism costs a lot, too. Norway spends over $100k/inmate, to the US's $25k/inmate (https://bpr.berkeley.edu/2022/10/25/what-can-we-learn-from-the-norwegian-prison-system/ https://bpr.berkeley.edu/2022/10/25/what-can-we-learn-from-t...), but only 20% reoffend versus 2/3 of American inmates. (Resulting in 70/100k incarcerated versus the US's 700/100k; that $100k/year starts to look like $10k/year now.) Here in NY, there was a big political fuss over free community college for prisoners a few years back (pre-pandemic); Cuomo wound up killing it. I suspect helping inmates get associates degrees to use when they got out would've wound up saving money, but that's not how it played in the PR realm.
goodpoint 3y ago
> if in the united states we refer to our prisons as 'correctional' facilities, what quantitative correction could require nearly a century of internment? It's only punishment, there is no correction at all. > if by any study it costs nearly 40,000 dollars to house a prisoner for one (1) year, was the night watchmans life truly worth 3.2 million dollars of Connecticut taxpayers money? Can we please not value people's life in money? Because if we can then slavery would be justified. > what meaningful value was extracted from his slave labor? was it enough to offset even a fraction of the internment cost? Ditto.
- dsego 3y ago
  > Can we please not value people's life in money? Because if we can then slavery would be justified. That isn't a logical statement, one does not follow from the other.
- ansible 3y ago
  > Can we please not value people's life in money? It feels quite icky to do this, but it is necessary when making policy decisions. Every day, governments and corporations decide to spend (or not spend) X amount of dollars to save Y number of lives. Does it make sense to spend some money on infant mortality prevention, vs research on cancer types that only really old people get? What about seatbelt laws? Or pollution prevention? Ideally, we would rationally spend our limited money on providing the best life for the most people. Not that this actually happens for a variety of reasons. If we are to get the best value for our money, then we need to assign a value to human life in terms similar to disability-adjusted life years (DALY): https://www.who.int/data/gho/indicator-metadata-registry/imr-details/157 https://www.who.int/data/gho/indicator-metadata-registry/imr...
  - goodpoint 3y ago
    No, measuring loss of income due to premature death is very different from saying "was the night watchmans life truly worth 3.2 million dollars". On top of that, making healthcare decisions based on future income goes straight against ethical guidelines. By your logic people unable to work due to disability, age or serving a life sentence would be denied any healthcare.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

glimshe 3y ago

Some countries limit the time you can spend in prison for this very reason, no matter what you did. For instance, Brazil sets it to 40 years total even if you killed 100 people.

slashdev 3y ago
I’m a fan of the death penalty for really egregious cases, given a hypothetical perfect Justice system. Some people are not worth trying to rehabilitate. However, the Justice system is flawed and a decent percentage of people who get the death penalty are innocent. So what do you do? I’d rather they be locked up for the rest of their natural lives, barring a change in evidence or technology that leads to a change in sentence. But I don’t want some remorseless psychopath back in society because they’ve reached the limit on how long we can hold them.
- Femolo 3y ago
  I'm against it as I do believe that we are not just the result of our own free will free of anything but a result of our environment, luck etc. I'm lucky that I had parents which gave me behavior patterns which do not make me kill or rape others. And even if someone believes they are right, they are actually right just no in the moral and ethical sphere of a majority. I don't like rape and in my world it's wrong. But that doesn't change their world view. And I don't kill him due to this because why would I be allowed to end the life of someone else? The best I can do is to remove this person from the society. It's easy to kill and hard not to. And in the worst case scenario I would kill someone who hurts or killed a close person (perhaps) but I would need to accept the consequences of it.
- causi 3y ago
  I wonder if something productive could be done by expanding the options beyond "guilty" and "not guilty" because someone can be found guilty by a jury for almost any reason. Perhaps if there was a further status of "guilty by egregious evidence" that required a higher standard of evidence such as direct recording of the commission of the crime by the perpetrator and the death penalty was only applicable in those cases. I'm not ok with a one percent chance of executing the wrong person for any crime no matter how horrific, and our justice system trends at least 4% wrongful conviction. I'm fully ok with a 0.001% chance of executing the wrong person for even second-degree murder.
  - dsego 3y ago
    Isn't "beyond reasonable doubt" already a high standard? I've watched cases on youtube where it was really obvious from all the circumstances that the defendant did it. But it wasn't beyond reasonable doubt, so the jury had no choice but to declare them innocent.
dsego 3y ago
Croatia is the same, our serial killer that started killing when he was 16 is being released soon, killed someone on a free weekend while serving time, got married in prison. Not sure what to say of such a system, I'm not really in favor. And 40 years is like the max, for raping and killing it's more like 15-20, eg a deranged man who chopped of a tourist's head is released in a few years after serving 15, another man that raped and killed a minor is soon to be out as well after 22 years in prison.
- hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
  That sucks. That guy will 100% guaranteed kill someone again. Portugal is the same except instead of 40 it's 25 if I remember correctly. Egregious.

habitue 3y ago

Prison has multiple purposes: retribution, incapacitance, deterrence, and rehabilitation. - retribution: gives victims and families of the victim retribution. This one doesn't seem important in the modern day, but if you ignore it you get vigilante revenge, blood feuds, honor culture etc. Having the state take on "revenge" kills these cycles. - incapacitance: straight up preventing dangerous people from being out and being dangerous. - deterrence: long prison sentences deter other people from committing crimes because they don't want to get a long prison sentence. Also deters the prisoners themselves from committing another crime (if their sentence is short enough) - rehabilitation: here's finally the "corrections" part, and honestly our system in the US isn't great at rehabilitating anyone. In principle this is a prudent idea, but we'd have to spend a lot more tax dollars on prisoners to actually rehabilitate anything. That's politically pretty unappealing

ansible 3y ago
> rehabilitation ... That's politically pretty unappealing Here in the USA, yes. Some EU countries take this quite a bit more seriously, to good effect.
RheingoldRiver 3y ago
> but we'd have to spend a lot more tax dollars on prisoners to actually rehabilitate anything. That's politically pretty unappealing I don't have a source for this but I thought the opposite was true? That the general consensus was we'd end up spending less because the recidivism rate would go down?
- lolinder 3y ago
  I think they mean more per prisoner per year, which is immediately measurable. It'd be done in the hope that total costs would go down over decades, but in our current political climate it's hard to sell improvements that take decades to manifest.
ceejayoz 3y ago
> we'd have to spend a lot more tax dollars on prisoners to actually rehabilitate anything Not necessarily. Recidivism costs a lot, too. Norway spends over $100k/inmate, to the US's $25k/inmate (https://bpr.berkeley.edu/2022/10/25/what-can-we-learn-from-the-norwegian-prison-system/ https://bpr.berkeley.edu/2022/10/25/what-can-we-learn-from-t...), but only 20% reoffend versus 2/3 of American inmates. (Resulting in 70/100k incarcerated versus the US's 700/100k; that $100k/year starts to look like $10k/year now.) Here in NY, there was a big political fuss over free community college for prisoners a few years back (pre-pandemic); Cuomo wound up killing it. I suspect helping inmates get associates degrees to use when they got out would've wound up saving money, but that's not how it played in the PR realm.

goodpoint 3y ago

> if in the united states we refer to our prisons as 'correctional' facilities, what quantitative correction could require nearly a century of internment? It's only punishment, there is no correction at all. > if by any study it costs nearly 40,000 dollars to house a prisoner for one (1) year, was the night watchmans life truly worth 3.2 million dollars of Connecticut taxpayers money? Can we please not value people's life in money? Because if we can then slavery would be justified. > what meaningful value was extracted from his slave labor? was it enough to offset even a fraction of the internment cost? Ditto.

dsego 3y ago
> Can we please not value people's life in money? Because if we can then slavery would be justified. That isn't a logical statement, one does not follow from the other.
ansible 3y ago
> Can we please not value people's life in money? It feels quite icky to do this, but it is necessary when making policy decisions. Every day, governments and corporations decide to spend (or not spend) X amount of dollars to save Y number of lives. Does it make sense to spend some money on infant mortality prevention, vs research on cancer types that only really old people get? What about seatbelt laws? Or pollution prevention? Ideally, we would rationally spend our limited money on providing the best life for the most people. Not that this actually happens for a variety of reasons. If we are to get the best value for our money, then we need to assign a value to human life in terms similar to disability-adjusted life years (DALY): https://www.who.int/data/gho/indicator-metadata-registry/imr-details/157 https://www.who.int/data/gho/indicator-metadata-registry/imr...
- goodpoint 3y ago
  No, measuring loss of income due to premature death is very different from saying "was the night watchmans life truly worth 3.2 million dollars". On top of that, making healthcare decisions based on future income goes straight against ethical guidelines. By your logic people unable to work due to disability, age or serving a life sentence would be denied any healthcare.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]