Topic: Instead of Prisons? - page 2. (Read 1775 times)

One criminal can spoil a lot of non criminals in your scenario.

Also - who in their right mind would volunteer to stay beside that certain criminal in the first place?

   I've been working on an idea for a while, this seems like a chance to put it up for comment.

It's basically hybridizing the refuge camp and the prison. The idea is that if you group criminals together, they are going to become more criminal. If I hang out with southerners, eventually I am going to develop a drawl- peer group influences behavior. So criminals need contact with people who they can learn good habits from. The US accepts refugees all the time from places where there are wars or oppression going on, and the idea is to get these people working in small facilities on patches of land, say, a house with 8 bedrooms each with 2 to 4 bunk beds, a big communal kitchen and living area, a workshop and a farm. Maybe a few goats and cows, chickens, vegetables, corn and potatoes and some fruit trees, beehive and duck pond. Maybe a workshop for furniture, window frames, clothing. Take 10 low risk inmates selected for the program because of good behavior in prison, and 10 recent immigrants from Africa and Asia, and 4 -6 staff. The immigrants can get green cards based on good work results, and the inmates can get their sentence reduced.

    This way there is a majority of non-criminals in the work group, so the momentum of peer pressure in the groip will be towards non-criminal behavior. Since the immigrants and the criminals can both work for less than minimum wage to secure their early release or green card, the projects can be self sustaining. Currently eajch prisoner costs over 20k a year- a project like this could cost half that, since they would produce their own food, and the food and crafts could even be sold at a profit. In the mean time people would build relationships, learn work ethic, and learn non-criminal thinking. Bad behavior or violence would mean getting sent back to prison or having the visa revoked. Prisoners could be tracked with a tracking chip, so if they run off they would be easily found again. There would also be cultural exchange and people could learn about other parts of the world and maybe broaden their horizons.

    This would just be a way to reduce the number of people in prison and kind of decentralize the system.

You are correct, it is a form of revenge. A form of revenge that produces constructive results for society helping to reconstruct the damage the loss that individual caused, as well as reducing the incentive to turn prisons into a commercial endeavor which drives arrest quotas. This as opposed to a system which is not only NOT constructive but creates even a further burden on society.

In your little scenario you assume a lot of things, like you would personally be overseeing the criminal that committed a crime against you. That is pretty moronic even by your standards. No one in their right mind would put the life of a human in your hands. As you pointed out sadistic individuals like yourself would commit further crimes abusing that individual, most likely leading to that person murdering you in your home because they cant take it any more. You make lots of assumptions about me and why I have the opinions I do. I will be the one to decide why I have an opinion thank you.

Funny how you skipped over the whole funding of 2.5 million people in prison part. I wonder why?

What you're arguing for is, can be, and would be used as a kind of revenge. Honestly, if I was someone looking for revenge, I'd *love* a system where someone I used the legal system to screw over would be forced to give me money and/or be my servant for a long time period. That'd be MUCH more humiliating than simply being sent to prison or punished in some other way. I'd LOVE to be able to emotionally abuse and bully them with no fear of recourse, with people like you supporting the abuse of the people you claim to protect 'cos you think it makes you look morally superior. Modern day indentured servitude for the win.

I actually dislike the American prison system too for the reasons you stated among many others, but ok.

They have those. It is called a maximum security SHU (Segregated Housing Unit).

Forced labor sounds constructive enough for me

I would like to have same prisons, but with people isolated inside those prisons, in single cells. No physical contact (in some cases verbal) with other inmates whatsoever. They can be of constructive use from inside there too.

How about learning from China, one bullet each

Excuse me, but if anyone is wining here it is you. Even if you don't give a crap about the well being of criminals whatsoever, the fact still remains that society paid a great debt to bring that individual to adulthood, and will continue to pay huge debts to incarcerate them. Reparations are a substitute for revenge because the victim can profit from the labor of the perpetrator.

The existing criminal justice system is nothing but a machine designed to take good old American biblical eye for an eye blood lust and transform it into a corporate profit system that neither deters crime nor brings reparations to the victims. If you want to spend half of your paycheck paying to incarcerate alcoholics for being alcoholics, drug addicts for being drug addicts, and poor people for being poor that's fine - just don't expect the rest of society to help you. If you really think our country (taxpayers) can afford to keep incarcerating more than 2.5 million people and growing, you are truly ignorant. Go take your liberal bashing bullshit rhetoric to a liberal.

Why does talk about punishment always have to devolve into self-righteous whining about revenge? That's literally what the state is FOR -- it's a centralized substitute *for* individual revenge. Deal with it.

Restitution to the victim.

It was found in icelandic law that if restitution could be transferrable it helped weaker victims who could not fight for their rights to sell their rights to restitution to someone who could.

Restitution was usually in the form of payments to the victim.

+1M
I would strongly vote for 3 variant (exile).

Why are punishments almost always centered around revenge rather than restitution for the victims? maybe Jake needs mandatory employment working for the victim until he works off a suitable sum in proportion to the damages caused? In the case of murder, in many states they take the life of the murderer. Why not take that life and put it to constructive use rather than just ending life in revenge?

I think even if it's thought about differently in the future, even with different motivations for the population as a whole and even if used far less than at the moment, there will still need to be mechanisms for seperating groups of people.

I'm not talking about nationalism, I'm talking about what would today be called incarceration, but I don't consider it is a great solution so lets explore some others.

I'm going to use an example person who is not very typical but gives an example of a difficult case.

Jake is 30 and an academic studying the mind, his is politically fairly anarchist, mostly sociable and his thoughts largely revolve around his academic interests, he generally considers financial matters only enough to maintain the low maintenance lifestyle he is very happy with.

Jake however has mood swings and tends to start fights and injur strangers when he feels down.

There is an effective treatment for this, subtly taking into account the many small factors for his condition and carefully realigning only what needs to change, even taking the patients preferences into consideration. Jake however considers this aspect of his personality to be a part of himself and won't agree to the change.

Jake has been caught three times, the first time he received an official warning, the 2nd was a period of time in jail, this is the 3rd and he is given a choice of punishments:

1. Prison, some of which may be served as community service.
2. Accepting the treatment and a shorter time in Prison.
3. Exile to a suitable region, in his case it is much more anarchistic and contains a lot of people with severe mood swings, it's more dangerous that where he currently lives but no war zone and may be a better fit for him. Returning to many others regions would then require Jake to accept punishment 1 or 2.
4. Your own solutions that should be able to apply to a variety of crimes.

Discuss.