> Rape and torture The comment you're commenting about doesn't use either of these words. He (or she) merely says that "prisons should be scary" and "the curr

> Rape and torture The comment you're commenting about doesn't use either of these words. He (or she) merely says that "prisons should be scary" and "the current system does a good job of achieving that." In fact, I would tend to agree with him: Prisons should be scary. If people have no reason to be scared of prisons, what keeps a huge number of people from just giving up on ever doing anything economically productive and instead just shoplift or burglarize whenever they want/need something and don't have enough money for it, because they know that once they're caught they can just take it easy and sit in jail playing video games all day? If that happens, who will grow and prepare all the food to feed these prisoners, and do the work to maintain the jail facilities (and the supply chain which produces the needed materials)? A society that doesn't have a punishment that people are afraid of seems to me like it would be on a short road directly to a complete collapse of civilization. The second point is right on the money as well: The current system does do a good job of being scary. I certainly don't want to go to jail, and I've made a habit of noting gray areas in the law where behavior I intuitively think of as "reasonable" is actually illegal, and how you should conduct yourself around law enforcement officials to minimize your chances of going to prison (in the US, you should never help them in any way, never lie to them or physically resist them in any way, refuse consent to all searches, and decline to speak with them unless you have the advice of a lawyer who represents you and will be present during the questioning.) Neither he nor I say that rape and torture is the only possible way to make prisons scary. For me, being locked up for years without video games is scary enough by itself.