8 ms·

Prisons serve many purposes and rehabilitation should be lowest priority of them, after incapacitation, deterrence, and retribution. Prisons are for society’s b

Prisons serve many purposes and rehabilitation should be lowest priority of them, after incapacitation, deterrence, and retribution. Prisons are for society’s benefit, not for prisoners. If inmates can be rehabilitated, great, but all those other things are more important.

1992spacemovie 2y ago
Hey get outta here with your common sense hot take.
pdpi 2y ago
When people come out of prison, they need a bed to sleep on and food in their stomachs, and they will find those things one way or another. Absent the means to achieve those goals legally, the only alternative is returning to a life of crime. So, really, the choice is either rehabilitation or recidivism. Recidivism comes with a bunch of costs to society, so rehabilitation is ultimately for society's benefit. (I would argue that retribution has no place in the justice system, but that's a discussion for another day)
korhojoa 2y ago
That, as a person from a nordic country, sounds like a very American take. At least over here, the point is to make the people be in a state where criminal behavior isn't desirable. Coming out of a sentence with debt (unrelated to the reason you were there) seems counterproductive.
- ensignavenger 2y ago
  Pretty sure most Americans would disgree with this point of view as well.
  - rustcleaner 2y ago
    Voting patters. Americans, like any human, loooove righteous violence, both witnessing and enacting it. The System in America is Americans' collective expression of this impulse.
ddoolin 2y ago
That take doesn’t work very well.
tadbit 2y ago
> Prisons are for society’s benefit, not for prisoners It would greatly benefit society to have prisoners be rehabilitated. It's currently just a vicious cycle that produces hardened, repeat offenders that prison companies can make money off, money that comes from tax payers.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
  > It would greatly benefit society to have prisoners be rehabilitated. It would. If only we knew how to do that. There are places in this country where attitudes develop for many years, decades even, before that person is ever incarcerated. By the time that happens, these attitudes are quite immutable, and they see any gentleness as vulnerability. They're adept at lying, exploitation, and have no qualms about hurting others. What sort of rehabilitation do you even think is possible? Where do you expect this million person army of rehabilitators to come from exactly, to be hired in these prisons? When they start getting raped and killed, will you just double down? Under what principles, exactly, do you expect the rehabilitations to operate? Do you ever remember seeing some study or research that concluded "If steps A, B, and C are performed on convicts who meet the empirical criteria of X, Y, and Z" then they will become upstanding members of society"?
  - tadbit 2y ago
    > If only we knew how to do that. We'll never figure out how to do it until we actually start trying to rehabilitate people. > There are places in this country where attitudes develop for many years, decades even, before that person is ever incarcerated. This is text book bigotry.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
      > We'll never figure out how to do it until we actually start trying to rehabilitate people. We'll never figure out how to do it because it's unethical to experiment on humans. But even more damning than that, we don't have a good theory of mind that explains criminality. It's all half-assed woowoo nonsense meant to bolster this or that political ideology.
monomyth 2y ago
Retribution provides almost no societal benefit. Most of society doesn’t know or care about any individual crime. Rehabilitation of a single member however will benefit all of society, as you can’t predict all possible social interactions of a single person.
- BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
  Social order, the people wronged want to know that the culprit suffered for it, otherwise said people will start to feel the judicial system is disconnected from justice itself. I mean, why do you think Lex Talionis is that historically universal?
  - vidarh 2y ago
    For my part, I consider inflicting suffering to be fundamentally immoral, because the "moral" justification for retribution relies on the notion of free will, and there is no rational case for free will.
  - rustcleaner 2y ago
    That is religion. The belief in an eye for an eye to appease Ahura Mazda™, lest our blessings of good fortune run dry next glowing season!
    - BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
      Come on, religion spawns from the culture it's created in, not the opposite.
  - ClumsyPilot 2y ago
    > Social order The caste system and human sacrifice also provide social order. Medieval system of peasants and lords and kings provided social order. Spanish inquisition and torture provide social order.
notaustinpowers 2y ago
Okay, and how's that been workin' out? What's the old adage about insanity again?
s1artibartfast 2y ago
>Prisons serve many purposes and rehabilitation should be lowest priority of them, after incapacitation, deterrence, and retribution. I dont think any sane person would argue against the first two as priorities. I think the balance retribution vs Rehabilitation is far more debatable, as both DO have conflicting impacts on society's benefit, and not just prisoners.
- lupusreal 2y ago
  Incapacitation is the easiest to make the case for societal benefit. If a robber is locked up, he can't rob you. That's incapacitation. Nearly everybody agrees that incapacitation is necessary, even people obsessed with rehabilitation are generally willing to concede that until a dangerous criminal is successfully rehabilitated, he probably needs to be locked up.
  - s1artibartfast 2y ago
    Agreed, I think we are saying the same thing. I left out a word
  - vidarh 2y ago
    Hardly any prisoners are sentenced to rehabilitation, and most justice systems have few means of doing so, so it appears hardly any justice system is based on the notion of locking people up until they are rehabilitated. (there are some rare exceptions - in Norway the maximum sentence is 21 years except in some particularly serious cases you can be convicted to incarceration for the purpose of protecting society - this punishment is in theory shorter in that you can get out after 10 years, I think, but you won't get out until a parole committee deems that you are no longer a risk). Furthermore, if justice systems were based on reoffending risks, then sentencing would look very different. Most murderers who commit murders that aren't gang-related, for example, are very low-risk prisoners. Yet no justice system I am aware of takes that into account.
    - lupusreal 2y ago
      Incapacitation is only one of the reasons we imprison people, albeit the most important reason and the most easily defensible. Murderers who are unlikely to reoffend are still put into prison because our prisons are also for punishing people who do things we think are worthy of punishment. There's no contradiction here, prisons simultaneously serve several purposes.
vidarh 2y ago
There's no societal benefit in retribution, and the evidence is entirely against the use of inhumane prison conditions as an effective means of deterrence. Personally I'd find it more moral to subject people supporting these kinds of conditions to them than to subject anyone else to them, because I find the notion of supporting this level of harm to others to be no more moral if you vote for it than if you commit a violent crime.
- lupusreal 2y ago
  > There's no societal benefit in retribution It quells vigilantism.
  - p_j_w 2y ago
    Vigilantism is no better than the crimes that vigilantes seek to prevent.
  - vidarh 2y ago
    There are no massive waves of vigilantism in places with shorter sentences and less brutal prison systems to suggest that it does.
    - lupusreal 2y ago
      Some cultures are more prone to vigilantism than others. Absence of vigilantism in one country is only very weak evidence that it wouldn't occur in another if their government stopped punishing criminals. Particularly, America has a culture that puts relatively high value in individualism, and I think that would make vigilantism, individuals meting out their own brand of justice, common if not for the perspective that the government will dole out harsh punishments without the victims needing to do it themselves. We aren't Norway, and the delta between the present status quo in both countries is itself evidence of this cultural difference.
      - vidarh 2y ago
        I find this notion that America values individualism bizarre, given how authoritarian American society is - the extent of state control and violence that is tolerated seems entirely foreign to me, and yet the same US government is supposedly scared of shutting down attempts at vigilantist violence? It doesn't pass the smell test for me. I also find this American exceptionalism unconvincing. No, you are not uniquely barbaric brutes unable to reason about the morality of your actions. Nor is this about the US vs. Norway. There are plenty of places with more lenient prison systems without any such huge waves of vigilantism. There's no evidence to suggest more lenient sentencing would cause vigilantism of a level that can't be stopped just like other violent crime.
lupusreal 2y ago
Incapacitation should be the highest priority, not second to last.
throwaway23616 2y ago
[flagged]
- gambiting 2y ago
  >>murderers, rapists and thieves to walk free after receiving a slap on the wrist. You think spending potentially decades of your life in prison is a slap on the wrist?
AlwaysRock 2y ago
> Prisons are for society’s benefit, not for prisoners. I wonder if creating a system that helps people build a better life after they have served their time might actually result in better outcomes for everyone...
gambiting 2y ago
Retribution shouldn't even be on this list, tbh.
atoav 2y ago
Prisons should act in societies benefit not the fulfillment of your personal revenge-fantasies. Because that is what you propose. The goal of prison is to take people put of the environments they are in, as a punishment, to stop them from doing things they shouldn't, but also to not have them do it again. I'd argue, not having them do it again is The most important goal of prisons. And it turns out, that rehabilitation is very good at that given scientific consesus. It is just not good at fulfilling personal revenge-fantasies like yours.
- bruce511 2y ago
  A countries prison system is a reflection of the attitudes and priorities of people in that country. For people who are violent at heart, prisons are violent. For people who love money, prisons are about money, for those who care about individuals and seek the improving of others, you get rehabilitation and so on. Show me your prisons and I'll tell you about your society.
meroes 2y ago
Prisons are a jobs program for rural states and a way to increase their census counts -> congressional seats, and for state gerrymandering.
p_j_w 2y ago
>Prisons are for society’s benefit Which is precisely why they should be geared primarily towards rehabilitation. We'd all be better off if we can reform people and have them be productive members of society. This is far better than losing productive hands to satisfy our bloodlust and base desire for vengeance.
rustcleaner 2y ago
Remember people: Jury Nullification. Do not admit to knowing about it. Do not explain why you are not voting guilty, just that you have doubts. If 1 in 10 jurors on average were conscientious about the terrible treatment of the convicted, it would grind the apparatus to a halt in weeks! Why do you think they keep felons from voting and serving on juries? I think it's to keep the state's poor customer service reviews under wraps.
miki123211 2y ago
Rehabilitation is also for the benefit of society, a rehabilitated prisoner is less likely to commit more crime after they get out. I would say that deterrence (preventing non-prisoners from committing crimes) and rehabilitation (preventing prisoners from committing crimes when they get out) should be the primary objectives of the system.
mlyle 2y ago
Incapacitation lasts just for a short time. If you don't rehabilitate prisoners, you're just going to have the same problem again a few years from now. And we don't have the capacity to lock up everyone forever.

1992spacemovie 2y ago

Hey get outta here with your common sense hot take.

pdpi 2y ago

When people come out of prison, they need a bed to sleep on and food in their stomachs, and they will find those things one way or another. Absent the means to achieve those goals legally, the only alternative is returning to a life of crime. So, really, the choice is either rehabilitation or recidivism. Recidivism comes with a bunch of costs to society, so rehabilitation is ultimately for society's benefit. (I would argue that retribution has no place in the justice system, but that's a discussion for another day)

korhojoa 2y ago

That, as a person from a nordic country, sounds like a very American take. At least over here, the point is to make the people be in a state where criminal behavior isn't desirable. Coming out of a sentence with debt (unrelated to the reason you were there) seems counterproductive.

ensignavenger 2y ago
Pretty sure most Americans would disgree with this point of view as well.
- rustcleaner 2y ago
  Voting patters. Americans, like any human, loooove righteous violence, both witnessing and enacting it. The System in America is Americans' collective expression of this impulse.

ddoolin 2y ago

That take doesn’t work very well.

tadbit 2y ago

> Prisons are for society’s benefit, not for prisoners It would greatly benefit society to have prisoners be rehabilitated. It's currently just a vicious cycle that produces hardened, repeat offenders that prison companies can make money off, money that comes from tax payers.

NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
> It would greatly benefit society to have prisoners be rehabilitated. It would. If only we knew how to do that. There are places in this country where attitudes develop for many years, decades even, before that person is ever incarcerated. By the time that happens, these attitudes are quite immutable, and they see any gentleness as vulnerability. They're adept at lying, exploitation, and have no qualms about hurting others. What sort of rehabilitation do you even think is possible? Where do you expect this million person army of rehabilitators to come from exactly, to be hired in these prisons? When they start getting raped and killed, will you just double down? Under what principles, exactly, do you expect the rehabilitations to operate? Do you ever remember seeing some study or research that concluded "If steps A, B, and C are performed on convicts who meet the empirical criteria of X, Y, and Z" then they will become upstanding members of society"?
- tadbit 2y ago
  > If only we knew how to do that. We'll never figure out how to do it until we actually start trying to rehabilitate people. > There are places in this country where attitudes develop for many years, decades even, before that person is ever incarcerated. This is text book bigotry.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
    > We'll never figure out how to do it until we actually start trying to rehabilitate people. We'll never figure out how to do it because it's unethical to experiment on humans. But even more damning than that, we don't have a good theory of mind that explains criminality. It's all half-assed woowoo nonsense meant to bolster this or that political ideology.

monomyth 2y ago

Retribution provides almost no societal benefit. Most of society doesn’t know or care about any individual crime. Rehabilitation of a single member however will benefit all of society, as you can’t predict all possible social interactions of a single person.

BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
Social order, the people wronged want to know that the culprit suffered for it, otherwise said people will start to feel the judicial system is disconnected from justice itself. I mean, why do you think Lex Talionis is that historically universal?
- vidarh 2y ago
  For my part, I consider inflicting suffering to be fundamentally immoral, because the "moral" justification for retribution relies on the notion of free will, and there is no rational case for free will.
- rustcleaner 2y ago
  That is religion. The belief in an eye for an eye to appease Ahura Mazda™, lest our blessings of good fortune run dry next glowing season!
  - BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
    Come on, religion spawns from the culture it's created in, not the opposite.
- ClumsyPilot 2y ago
  > Social order The caste system and human sacrifice also provide social order. Medieval system of peasants and lords and kings provided social order. Spanish inquisition and torture provide social order.

notaustinpowers 2y ago

Okay, and how's that been workin' out? What's the old adage about insanity again?

s1artibartfast 2y ago

>Prisons serve many purposes and rehabilitation should be lowest priority of them, after incapacitation, deterrence, and retribution. I dont think any sane person would argue against the first two as priorities. I think the balance retribution vs Rehabilitation is far more debatable, as both DO have conflicting impacts on society's benefit, and not just prisoners.

lupusreal 2y ago
Incapacitation is the easiest to make the case for societal benefit. If a robber is locked up, he can't rob you. That's incapacitation. Nearly everybody agrees that incapacitation is necessary, even people obsessed with rehabilitation are generally willing to concede that until a dangerous criminal is successfully rehabilitated, he probably needs to be locked up.
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  Agreed, I think we are saying the same thing. I left out a word
- vidarh 2y ago
  Hardly any prisoners are sentenced to rehabilitation, and most justice systems have few means of doing so, so it appears hardly any justice system is based on the notion of locking people up until they are rehabilitated. (there are some rare exceptions - in Norway the maximum sentence is 21 years except in some particularly serious cases you can be convicted to incarceration for the purpose of protecting society - this punishment is in theory shorter in that you can get out after 10 years, I think, but you won't get out until a parole committee deems that you are no longer a risk). Furthermore, if justice systems were based on reoffending risks, then sentencing would look very different. Most murderers who commit murders that aren't gang-related, for example, are very low-risk prisoners. Yet no justice system I am aware of takes that into account.
  - lupusreal 2y ago
    Incapacitation is only one of the reasons we imprison people, albeit the most important reason and the most easily defensible. Murderers who are unlikely to reoffend are still put into prison because our prisons are also for punishing people who do things we think are worthy of punishment. There's no contradiction here, prisons simultaneously serve several purposes.

vidarh 2y ago

There's no societal benefit in retribution, and the evidence is entirely against the use of inhumane prison conditions as an effective means of deterrence. Personally I'd find it more moral to subject people supporting these kinds of conditions to them than to subject anyone else to them, because I find the notion of supporting this level of harm to others to be no more moral if you vote for it than if you commit a violent crime.

lupusreal 2y ago
> There's no societal benefit in retribution It quells vigilantism.
- p_j_w 2y ago
  Vigilantism is no better than the crimes that vigilantes seek to prevent.
- vidarh 2y ago
  There are no massive waves of vigilantism in places with shorter sentences and less brutal prison systems to suggest that it does.
  - lupusreal 2y ago
    Some cultures are more prone to vigilantism than others. Absence of vigilantism in one country is only very weak evidence that it wouldn't occur in another if their government stopped punishing criminals. Particularly, America has a culture that puts relatively high value in individualism, and I think that would make vigilantism, individuals meting out their own brand of justice, common if not for the perspective that the government will dole out harsh punishments without the victims needing to do it themselves. We aren't Norway, and the delta between the present status quo in both countries is itself evidence of this cultural difference.
    - vidarh 2y ago
      I find this notion that America values individualism bizarre, given how authoritarian American society is - the extent of state control and violence that is tolerated seems entirely foreign to me, and yet the same US government is supposedly scared of shutting down attempts at vigilantist violence? It doesn't pass the smell test for me. I also find this American exceptionalism unconvincing. No, you are not uniquely barbaric brutes unable to reason about the morality of your actions. Nor is this about the US vs. Norway. There are plenty of places with more lenient prison systems without any such huge waves of vigilantism. There's no evidence to suggest more lenient sentencing would cause vigilantism of a level that can't be stopped just like other violent crime.

lupusreal 2y ago

Incapacitation should be the highest priority, not second to last.

throwaway23616 2y ago

[flagged]

gambiting 2y ago
>>murderers, rapists and thieves to walk free after receiving a slap on the wrist. You think spending potentially decades of your life in prison is a slap on the wrist?

AlwaysRock 2y ago

> Prisons are for society’s benefit, not for prisoners. I wonder if creating a system that helps people build a better life after they have served their time might actually result in better outcomes for everyone...

gambiting 2y ago

Retribution shouldn't even be on this list, tbh.

atoav 2y ago

Prisons should act in societies benefit not the fulfillment of your personal revenge-fantasies. Because that is what you propose. The goal of prison is to take people put of the environments they are in, as a punishment, to stop them from doing things they shouldn't, but also to not have them do it again. I'd argue, not having them do it again is The most important goal of prisons. And it turns out, that rehabilitation is very good at that given scientific consesus. It is just not good at fulfilling personal revenge-fantasies like yours.

bruce511 2y ago
A countries prison system is a reflection of the attitudes and priorities of people in that country. For people who are violent at heart, prisons are violent. For people who love money, prisons are about money, for those who care about individuals and seek the improving of others, you get rehabilitation and so on. Show me your prisons and I'll tell you about your society.

meroes 2y ago

Prisons are a jobs program for rural states and a way to increase their census counts -> congressional seats, and for state gerrymandering.

p_j_w 2y ago

>Prisons are for society’s benefit Which is precisely why they should be geared primarily towards rehabilitation. We'd all be better off if we can reform people and have them be productive members of society. This is far better than losing productive hands to satisfy our bloodlust and base desire for vengeance.

rustcleaner 2y ago

Remember people: Jury Nullification. Do not admit to knowing about it. Do not explain why you are not voting guilty, just that you have doubts. If 1 in 10 jurors on average were conscientious about the terrible treatment of the convicted, it would grind the apparatus to a halt in weeks! Why do you think they keep felons from voting and serving on juries? I think it's to keep the state's poor customer service reviews under wraps.

miki123211 2y ago

Rehabilitation is also for the benefit of society, a rehabilitated prisoner is less likely to commit more crime after they get out. I would say that deterrence (preventing non-prisoners from committing crimes) and rehabilitation (preventing prisoners from committing crimes when they get out) should be the primary objectives of the system.

mlyle 2y ago

Incapacitation lasts just for a short time. If you don't rehabilitate prisoners, you're just going to have the same problem again a few years from now. And we don't have the capacity to lock up everyone forever.