Aswad
Posts: 9374
Joined: 4/4/2007 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Iamsemisweet Maybe, LadyC Not just maybe. Check out the prison systems in Scandinavia. They're fairly similar to each other. And radically different from the ones in the USA. You will note that we have exceptionally low relapse rates, on top of low crime rates, with very few cases of "poor behavior" both in the prisons and during apprehension of criminals. Rehabilitation rates are also pretty damn good. Privileges to make conditional on good behavior is a significant incentive, especially with long sentences. And most people do not, when actually faced with reality, see a lifetime sentence the same way as capital punishment. Especially when you are able to provide conditions which serve the purpose of safeguarding society without making things as shitty as possible for the inmates. Assuming you want people to be safe, that is. Most criminals who might face severe penalties are in a situation where they have limited options, supported by pretty solid evidence. A suitable analogy is war. You have an opponent with no retreat from the battlefield, other than what you are willing to provide. So, either you throw your 'soldiers' at an enemy with the back to the wall and nothing to lose, or you negotiate a way out. Life imprisonment with a tolerable standard of living is a good trade for the safety of your 'soldiers' (i.e. the police). You have a bad situation going in, everyone standing to lose, and the stakes are asymmetrical. The reasonable society-scale choice is to spend some money on reducing loss of life, by making defeat an option for the opponent. Social morality differs from individual morality on the point of 'right' vs 'wrong', in that it is the mesoscale result that matters, not the microscale result of each event. Multiply the 'rightness' and 'wrongness' of each 'right' and 'wrong', then sum them up and put them on the scale. If a policy causes several slight 'wrongs' to be balanced against a few major 'rights', then it is the socially moral way to go. It isn't particularly controversial that the policy of not negotiating with kidnappers, terrorists, etc., is a sound one in terms of social morality. And, similarly, it shouldn't be controversial that spending tax money on keeping criminals tolerably happy is a sound policy, because it is demonstrably effective at preventing greater wrongs. We can probably agree that spending tax money on their happiness is- in and of itself- a wrong, since it involves taking money from people who don't want to give up that money. But it's a lesser wrong, even when summed over all the instances. Sometimes, you have to spend money or lives, in order to save money or lives. It seems absurd to spend lives on saving either (or both), when you can spend money on saving both. Assuming one aims to actually do that. If the whole point is to be exacting vengeance by inflicting punishment, then one should delegate that task to a seperate "domestic torture and execution force", instead of billing and couching it as a matter of public risk management or crime prevention (collectively: "safety"). As for the problem for guards in jail, it is directly related to how the USA manages its jails. We don't have the same problem, even in the max security prisons. Health, al-Aswad.
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"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind. From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way. We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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