This is not a question of about parroted nonsense and cultural norms. I mean what end product do they produce that justifies their existence in the first place.
I’m physically disabled and have been living in a prison like situation for nearly 11 years. How does my situation balance into the ethics of prisons? I’m on a path to homelessness and a premature death due to institutionalized neglect and abuse from US institutions. Criminals are housed and fed in exchange for similar isolation, abuse, danger, insurmountable debt, and a largely unemployable and destitute future. These seem to conflict in ethics.
It’s a little jarring seeing a post like this alongside a post celebrating the possibility of jailing people for doing a nazi salute. Anyway to answer your question, some people cannot function in society. They are dangerous, and the only way to prevent them from harming others is to isolate them from society.
I found https://daily.jstor.org/the-invention-of-incarceration/ by using https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=punishment+before+prison&ia=web
My assumption before even reading that was: I expect it’s because people wanted a punishment that wasn’t a monetary fine, corporal punishment, enslavement, death, or “death but we’ll pretend to not see you running away, and we might pardon you in 10 years, but if we see you before then we’ll kill you” (exile). I knew those were the only punishments in ancient Rome (and people weren’t held for long before facing a trial), and it seems that not much had changed until the idea of long term incarceration was conceived: https://romanempiretimes.com/crime-and-punishment-in-ancient-rome-justice-and-inequality/ https://factsanddetails.com/world/cat56/sub408/entry-6360.html
Why do people allow them to exist?
We know they’re being used inhumanely. We know they’re expensive. We know they don’t prevent crime.
In the United States, they are largely used for slave labor.
They were embraced by the left to rehab criminals and by the right to keep criminals off the streets
We gotta put the poors somewhere…/s
As others have already said: Prevention is a point: There are people who should not be out in the open,honestly. I worked with people who rightfully will not be freed unless they are basically close to hospice care. They are dangerous and some even say this of themselves. I worked with a nice gentleman who shared his recipes with me. For cooking human meet - which he had real life experience in as he killed his family and ate parts of them. (He is very likely dead by now) Another guy raped at least 30 woman/girls,some as young as 5, and tried to rape female staff around him while in a psychiatric hospital (and in a regular hospital that just saved his life after another patient attacked him).
Should these people be kept separated from the society? Yes. Should they be miserable and suffer for the rest of their life? No. They are still human and the absolutely abysmal conditions in the prison systems of some countries, especially the US are a disgrace.
I am fairly happy that at least in my country the constitutional courts have set clear boundaries how prisoners and institutionalised patients have to be treated, especially after they served their jail time and are only kept locked up for preventional reasons. And that the level of danger to the society they posses needs to be reassessed periodically.
The other side is punishment. I am far less certain about this side of the issue - prison terms have a deterrent effect to most people,but not all of them. And it seems that we haven’t yet found a good way to address this. For most people the thought of being locked up and therefore being under total external control does at least give them enough “discomfort” to not actually do anything stupid and if they do they often are at least “suffering” from that enough to not do it again.
Suffering is initially set into “” here, as it is not meant to equal actual suffering like what some politicians and some populations want. The inmate suffers enough by being deprived of his/her freedom, being under external control. We know that for sure. They do not need to be punished more by make their life hell. The same goes for “extremely long sentences for minor stuff”. Firstly this does actively endanger the population. We have pretty good data around sexual assault for that. We can surely agree that rape is a horrible crime and a rapist should be punished. But making rape as bad as murder is a bad idea. Because now the perpetrator has no incentive to not kill his victim - instead the perpetrator now has one to do so. If he/she goes to prison for the same amount of time, why not reduce the risk of victim identifying them? Same goes for the act itself - when every sexual assault is rape for some perpetrators their sick logic comes to the conclusion that they can go “all in” anyway. (I literally have been told that by an inmate)
The same goes for “life sentences without the option for parole”. This leads to only one thing: You have an inmate with nothing to loose. Once they learned to survive the first stint in solitary and without the things “good behaviour” can get you, they will have nothing that the prison staff can take away from them - and they can take away a lot from everyone else. Therefore punishment must always give people hope - hope that they will get out at some point. Even though there are some that are unlikely to live to that point.
Lastly we know that bad conditions in prisons and a lack of reintegration as well as the stigma that some countries (e.g. the US) put on their inmates actively push people into reoffending because they develop mental health problems, can’t find a stable life outside the prison,etc.
Anyway: the main problem OP has is a different one - it’s the lack of help people with chronic diseases are getting. This is what makes their destiny far worse than that of prisoners - because they are always in it for life.
We’ve decided morally, that killing is wrong. So if killing is wrong, but we have to keep killers out of society, then we’ve got to put them in a place away from society. Somewhere along the way, we decided that killing isn’t the only thing that requires you be separated from society.
You haven’t committed a crime, therefore are free to succeed or fail at life all on your own. Society hasn’t judged you, therefore society hasn’t seen the need to take care of you either.
With a few exceptions of life sentences, this is not how it works. We have prisons to separate the bad apples for a while, and we use that time to rehabilitate the apples. Its not a perfect solution bit it works better than without prison
Pretending that people get rehabilitated in prison, LOLOL
That’s some LARP level imagination you got there.
Norway has one of the lowest recidivism rates in the world, around 20% within five years of release.
This clearly says US Institutions.
I’m on a path to homelessness and a premature death due to institutionalized neglect and abuse from US institutions.
This person wouldn’t be posting here if they were from Norway.
So you have incentivised crime against society for survival.
160 years ago in 1865, slavery was outlawed except as punishment for a crime. This posed a severe shortage of cheap labor, which was solved by creating a plethora of fiddly little crimes targeting the poor and marginalized. The next 75 years, the role slavery filled was instead covered by convict leasing and prison peonage, ending only when FDR issued a circular ordering prisons to stop the practice because we were about to enter WW2 and it made us look like the bad guys. To replace the cheap labor of convict leasing, prisons instead became factories. Prisoners are technically paid now: they dont have access to the money, and it only goes towards paying bail as well as other expenses, but they are technically being paid for their work. Therefore, it’s not slavery! 🤔
This is the pragmatic reason why prisons exist: because slavery is illegal. We made up the moral reasoning because deep down we know it’s wrong. Back in the pre-civil-war era, we also had justifications for why slavery was good: the slaves were incapable of making moral decisions, we were civilizing a barbarous people, etc etc. It was bullshit then, and it’s still bullshit now.
This feels like nonsense to me, looking at the numbers. The U.S. spends something like $80 billion a year on prisons, and prison labor supposedly generates around $9 billion a year. What is that, a negative 81% ROI?
Prison labor like we read about is not humane and would be unconstitutional in a better country, but I can’t see it as the REASON for prisons. Ultimately, people feel good about punishing “bad” people. I don’t think it goes any deeper than that.
Not every person that commits a crime is insane. Society wants to be protected from the worst of these people, ergo prisons.
Simplest way to put it is that prisons exist because some people simply cannot be allowed to live in “normal” society. Unfortunately, people have decided that this fate is no longer reserved for the worst of the worst/those that pose imminent danger, but now include “moral” offenses.
This is one of those topics where there is no “good” solution - only “less evil” options. And until humans as a species no longer have the various hold-over traits from our time before “civilization”, we’ll have to accept that we have to collectively make shitty choices.
Criminals are housed and fed in exchange for staying away from regular society.
The disabled are housed and fed in exchange for not having to watch them die of starvation in the streets.
Having these institutions be nice places to live is secondary to their primary goals. Most of the time they’re out of sight, out of mind.
I recommend listening to this podcast about prisons, has great insight into prison and why they ended up the way they are, and how some people intend to change the system to be more… helpful than just as a way to collectively “punish” the “bad guys”.
There are different ideas about the purpose of imprisonment but the ones I’m aware of are exclusion, deterrence, punishment and rehabilitation. The second two are predicated on prison being worse than freedom, which obviously doesn’t hold for people in a lot of situations. In fact I’ve heard of people comitting minor crimes so they can be let into prison.
Unless prisons can get really good at rehabilitation then the only way they can be effective is if life outside of prison is healthy and prosperous.
Prisons serve to remove a person from society (in the civilised world).
Removing a person from society has two subtly different justifications:
- Prevention: their offence against society is such that society must be protected from them.
- Punishment: their offence against society is such that society wants them deprived of society.
Consider the difference between violent crimes (1) and nonviolent crimes (2).
Note that some societies expand (2) to include more punishment than just separation from society.
