Yes.
Prisons should be first to rehabilitate the offender if it's possible, if there is no punishment of being away from society people will be more willing to commit crimes.
The main problem with prisons is that they seem like a waste of tax payer funds.
Why should I sentence someone for pre-meditated murder for 20 years? Wouldn't it be better to just off him? Same with rapists. If the crime was done to intentionally harm another person that person is a danger to society.
The economics are also not in favor of keeping criminals like that.
For all other crimes the prison should help rehabilitate that person and if possible pay for his incarceration to offload the burden on the tax payer.
I don't think this kind of reductive thinking, if taken into more political and behavioral extreme areas works. Lets try this mental exercise, what is the physical damage to me if I get raped? In extreme cases one could get infected with a potentially deadly STD, or if a woman, onr may become pregnant, but in many cases at the physical level, it's not all that different from regular sex between people. The main diffe…
>what is the physical damage to you if you get raped? I don't think the parent was suggesting only physical damage be considered. They discussed several examples of emotional damage. EDIT: And I'm not really sure why you're calling their post reductive either, it seemed fairly nuanced, and ended with "It's a very deep question. Not something that HN will answer in a thread."
The OP kind of was when they brushed away the burglary they experienced as, not much monetary loss and the lost feeling of security was back went away after a few weeks. To feel secure in one's home is f*&(ing important. I'm not equating it to rape, but it's that intangible feeling of lost of trust you cannot quickly brush away.
Can't ignore in all that, the issue of public order. Going soft on bullies (which is what many smash-and-grab criminals may be) means it grows without limit. So establishing public order is not an optional thing.
You keep saying that prison deters public order offences. It clearly doesn't. I'm curious why you think it does?
Where is your evidence that prison doesn't deter petty crimes, burglary, rape, etc.?
Before Napoleon there was such a thing as "restorative justice": "Restorative justice is an approach to justice that focuses on the needs of the victims and the offenders, as well as the involved community. This contrasts to more punitive approaches where the main aim is to punish the offender, or satisfy abstract legal principles. Victims take an active role in the process. Meanwhile, offenders are encouraged to tak…
How about sociopaths? They can become serial offenders, learning all the while how to apologize more effectively each time they are apprehended. If a crime has little downside, then crime will grow.
Go re-read his post. Apologizing might be acceptable for some crimes and with some victims, but not all. Others may demand compensation or more punitive measures. There's nothing there about crime having little downside; if the community requires you to repay a victim for everything you stole from him, and wants you to do a bunch of hard labor (community service) in addition, that sounds like a pretty big downside to me. The main idea isn't going soft on crime, it's letting the victims decide on the punishment. It makes a lot of sense: if someone steals my TV, gets caught, and the punishment is for him to buy me a new TV and fix my door that he broke and another 100 hours of lawn care on top of that, that's a lot cheaper and better for society than sticking him a prison for several years. The system we have now is entirely punitive, doesn't give victims much say in the process, and doesn't restore the victims at all (they have to sue the criminal separately in civil court).
Spoken like a truly out of touch academic. Here's an incident that took place last week in a town near me: A man with a beer and a condom approached a random couple on the sidewalk and declared his intention to have sex with the woman. When she declined, two of his brothers and a fourth man appeared from behind a bush, beat the man into submission and dragged the woman back to their apartment. They barricaded the doo…
Show me where in the article he suggests that violent felons not go to prison?
He merely points out that punishments less severe than prison (i.e. fines) are ineffective against the poor, while prison is poor at rehabilitation.
[edit]
Furthermore his suggestion of deferred sentences would work great to imprison someone with multiple minor charges, as you mention these perpetrators having.
There's a very interesting thought experiment devised by the human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smitg and outlined at the end of the excellent book "So You've Been Publicly Shamed" by Jon Ronson. Quoting from the book; “Let me ask you three questions,” he said. “And then you’ll see it my way. Question One: What’s the worst thing that you have ever done to someone? It’s okay. You don’t have to confess it out loud. Que…
One of the most damaging things Clive Stafford Smith has done is to give public support for Moazzem Begg, who was almost certainly a high-ranking member of al Qaeda ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moazzam_Begg ). (Sure, Begg should have gotten a fair trial -- he would have gone to court had the charges not been dropped, probably because the intelligence services didn't want to reveal all the intel they had gathered o…
In every human society in history, there have been people who choose to rob, rape and kill. There's no pleasant way to deal with such people, but it is the role of the state to deal with them, or you have anarchy. It isn't the role of the state to prevent "emotional damage", "bad wives" or "bankers".
The point of the question (which is an interesting question regardless of who asked it) is that we should challenge what the role of the state is. We definitely shouldn't blindly or unquestioningly accept that the state is there to do one thing or the other, to deal with robbers and not bankers, because "that's the way it's always been" or something. That is how states attain power over citizens and we end up with things like the scandalous overreaching surveillance revealed by Snowden et al.
> Should we really be putting someone in prison for burglary when there are people who rip millions of people off with legal price gouging or break up a family by cheating? I agree that cheating usually hurts more than burglary. However, it's not just a question of how harmful it is, but also how many people feel the urge to do it. We can mostly deal with burglary by criminalizing it, but criminalizing cheating would…
And again cheating is much greyer area than killing. The marriage, the wedding, being faithful are very artificial social constructs. I for once, would never, ever want somebody to be punished because she cheated on me. I may not like it, but I don't think the state has anything to do with it.
I was going to say that it is criminalised in South Korean, but I see they struck down that law last year.
"The law called for sentences of up to two years in prison. Adultery cases were only heard when a spouse filed a complaint, and could be withdrawn at any time by that spouse."
You should at least be comparing expected outcomes (if not worst possible outcomes) rather than actual outcomes. Especially because your thought experiment is subject to extreme (literal) survivorship bias; no murder victim will answer your hypothetical. Other crimes such as carjacking, which has a 50% death rate for the victim, should be punished very severely even if the victim survived. In addition, in cases where…
I think the point of the parent is not that we should punish more, it's that we should punish less: since we don't punish grave misbehaviors that have dire consequences but are technically not illegal, why punish shoplifting?
But not punishing shoplifting is a non-starter. So if inflicting emotional pain is worse than mere property loss, and we want to keep things equal/relative, that means we start punishing for inflicting emotional pain. This whole line of reasoning leads to either anarchy or more punishment for arguably moral issues.
There's a very interesting thought experiment devised by the human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smitg and outlined at the end of the excellent book "So You've Been Publicly Shamed" by Jon Ronson. Quoting from the book; “Let me ask you three questions,” he said. “And then you’ll see it my way. Question One: What’s the worst thing that you have ever done to someone? It’s okay. You don’t have to confess it out loud. Que…
This is a good question, but the direction he's going with it seems like it might be advocating throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It's true, we're not punishing the right people, and the people we punish are frequently being punished too much for comparatively minor crimes. The solution isn't to eliminate punishment, it's to fix the system so that the bigger criminals don't get away with their crimes because of their wealth and political connections. And for things that aren't against the law but are devastating, maybe we need to look at changing the law. However, even here, civil suits usually serve to deter such behavior: many things aren't technically "illegal", but they are actionable "torts", which you can sue people for. The McDonald's coffee case is a good example here, and shows why civil suits, though frequently derided, actually serve as a check on really bad behavior that doesn't have specific laws passed against it yet: McD's kept their coffee heated to dangerously-high temperatures, despite other people being injured by it in drive-thrus, and when it happened to this woman, she sued (wanting them to pay her medical bills, as she sustained serious burns) and won a very large punitive judgment as the jury felt that McD's was negligent. There's no law saying how hot coffee should be served (and that's likely to be micromanaging and not a good way to run society), but it is entirely possible to be sued for "negligence" when you do something that gets someone hurt, so there is a big incentive to not do that, and to make sure you don't seriously injure someone through your carelessness.