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.
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 prisons 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.
Edit to clarify that this is about 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.
The question was about prisons in general, their personal experience being the basis of them questioning the ethicality of the concept of prisons.
For that matter the Norwegian example is a perfect antithesis to the punitive American system.
Therefore they were absolutely on topic. You may freshen up on comprehensive reading.
Norway is an exception to the rule. Not a generalized example. Calling out an edge case, doesn’t change all of the generalized cases.
Yes thats what an antithesis is.
My reply was about what prisons are. I was not replying to OP
Congratulations, you’re not on topic then.
W/e
They probably got the lowest crime rates in the world. American criminals hit different
So its about race and not system?
So you have incentivised crime against society for survival.
That actually happens btw. There are homeless that will commit crimes, so they get arrested, so that they have a couple of free nights of not freezing to death in the cold.
I haven’t incentivized crime, but yes our current institutions do so.
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.
Not every person that commits a crime is insane. Society wants to be protected from the worst of these people, ergo prisons.
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.
Prisons I would argue are purposefully not nice as a feature to make sure people don’t want to go back there no matter how rough they were living on the outside
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.
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.
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.
Punishment, rehabilitation and removing someone from public life due to the danger they represent are the three most common reasons to imprison where I live.
The end products would be: society getting its “pound of flesh”, a better educated and matured person upon release and the protecting of the public from dangerous individuals.
(In practice though, most of our prisons are just universities of crime)
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
They were embraced by the left to rehab criminals and by the right to keep criminals off the streets
Here’s a good introduction into the theory behind criminal punishment, which prisons are a form of: https://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=41
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.
Since I’m not a psychologist or even (alas) particularly empathetic, I will leave aside the fact that this post appears to be a veiled cry for help, and answer the actual question.
Prison exists to protect society from dangerous individuals, but also because it’s the simplest form of non-corporal punishment. Flogging and flaying and chopping and mutilating and so on are all well and good but at some point in humanity’s march to civilization such things will start making the rulers queasy and it becomes more palatable to just lock the problem up for a while.
Personally I have a radically liberal take on this. I think that the purpose of punishment (other than protection, as mentioned) should be not retribution but rather restoration. In my ideal world, prison sentences would mostly be swapped for various forms of community service.
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.
We gotta put the poors somewhere…/s
