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> Locking people into cages is an odd sort of profession. And yet it's necessary, unless we've decided that we should go back to the Good Old Days of just kill

> Locking people into cages is an odd sort of profession. And yet it's necessary, unless we've decided that we should go back to the Good Old Days of just killing them. > Sounds like a real thug^Wkeeper. Hard people get hard treatment. As a drill instructor of mine used to say, "Play pussy, get fucked."

angersock 11y ago
Is it actually necessary, though? At steady state, I mean--we currently have a lot of people who are now damaged thanks to the behavior of people like your girlfriend, and short of a purge we probably can't use more reasonable methods. As for your DI, well, there's a bit of a difference between behavior that works in a military context and civilian reformation. One would hope, at least.
- omegaham 11y ago
  > Is it actually necessary, though? At steady state, I mean--we currently have a lot of people who are now damaged thanks to the behavior of people like your girlfriend, and short of a purge we probably can't use more reasonable methods. Good question. We've always had a problem with the age-old question of "What do you do with criminals?" In antiquity, the answer was simple - nothing, unless it impacts the rich. The poor can squabble amongst themselves, and as long as they don't kill anyone important or terrorize too many merchants or rob a rich person's house, they're left alone. This changed during Victorian times - the thinkers of the time saw the awful living conditions of the poor and decided that it wasn't Christian to leave the poor to suffer like this. So, they instituted penitentiaries - places where the wayward could be corrected and nudged back in the right direction. Here's the problem - it doesn't work. Prison has two genuine uses - it isolates shitty people so that they can't mess with the rest of society, and it deters other people from following their example. With initiatives like the War on Drugs, we've completely borked the shit out of this because we're now sentencing enormous numbers of relatively normal people to long prison terms. This has the following effects: 1. Prison staff are now focused on survival rather than staying on top of their jobs. This leads to inmates running the show. It also leads to said relatively normal inmates having to fight for survival as well, exacerbating the problem. 2. Large numbers of people are damaged by these conditions, emerging from prison completely fucked psychologically. 3. People notice that said people are unstable and likely to return to crime, and they act accordingly by turning them into outcasts (who go right back to committing crime). If we want this to change, we need to turn prisons from enormous Walmarts (One-size fits all incarceration for the whole family!) to focused facilities for the worst of the worst. The animals go in their cages, and everyone else gets off with mandatory counseling and community service. This will drastically lessen the load on prison staff, who can now actually do their jobs instead of fighting to stay alive however they can.
  - angersock 11y ago
    Well put. I think that that expansion of use under the War on Drugs is certainly a good part, if not indeed the main part, of the problem.
Frondo 11y ago
What you're describing (your girlfriend devising her own extra-judicial punishments for criminals' sexual harrassment) isn't a criminal justice system, it's thuggery. Your drill instructor sounds like a retrograde sexist thug, too, and it seems like you go along with that. Which, ok, but not the attitude I'd want to carry around with me.

angersock 11y ago

Is it actually necessary, though? At steady state, I mean--we currently have a lot of people who are now damaged thanks to the behavior of people like your girlfriend, and short of a purge we probably can't use more reasonable methods. As for your DI, well, there's a bit of a difference between behavior that works in a military context and civilian reformation. One would hope, at least.

omegaham 11y ago
> Is it actually necessary, though? At steady state, I mean--we currently have a lot of people who are now damaged thanks to the behavior of people like your girlfriend, and short of a purge we probably can't use more reasonable methods. Good question. We've always had a problem with the age-old question of "What do you do with criminals?" In antiquity, the answer was simple - nothing, unless it impacts the rich. The poor can squabble amongst themselves, and as long as they don't kill anyone important or terrorize too many merchants or rob a rich person's house, they're left alone. This changed during Victorian times - the thinkers of the time saw the awful living conditions of the poor and decided that it wasn't Christian to leave the poor to suffer like this. So, they instituted penitentiaries - places where the wayward could be corrected and nudged back in the right direction. Here's the problem - it doesn't work. Prison has two genuine uses - it isolates shitty people so that they can't mess with the rest of society, and it deters other people from following their example. With initiatives like the War on Drugs, we've completely borked the shit out of this because we're now sentencing enormous numbers of relatively normal people to long prison terms. This has the following effects: 1. Prison staff are now focused on survival rather than staying on top of their jobs. This leads to inmates running the show. It also leads to said relatively normal inmates having to fight for survival as well, exacerbating the problem. 2. Large numbers of people are damaged by these conditions, emerging from prison completely fucked psychologically. 3. People notice that said people are unstable and likely to return to crime, and they act accordingly by turning them into outcasts (who go right back to committing crime). If we want this to change, we need to turn prisons from enormous Walmarts (One-size fits all incarceration for the whole family!) to focused facilities for the worst of the worst. The animals go in their cages, and everyone else gets off with mandatory counseling and community service. This will drastically lessen the load on prison staff, who can now actually do their jobs instead of fighting to stay alive however they can.
- angersock 11y ago
  Well put. I think that that expansion of use under the War on Drugs is certainly a good part, if not indeed the main part, of the problem.

Frondo 11y ago

What you're describing (your girlfriend devising her own extra-judicial punishments for criminals' sexual harrassment) isn't a criminal justice system, it's thuggery. Your drill instructor sounds like a retrograde sexist thug, too, and it seems like you go along with that. Which, ok, but not the attitude I'd want to carry around with me.