Comment by cwmoore
13 hours ago
Given the shared source of the legal doctrines, I'd like to see the terms "superstition" and "irrational relic" properly applied to human incarceration as well, although the historical context recedes with every new generation.
Sorry, let me clarify your position? You're saying that prisons are irrational and superstitious and that Anders Breivik should be free? Care to explain your enlightened view to the class, if I'm not misunderstanding you?
Obviously nobody thinks once-in-a-generation exceptional monsters should be living among us, building straw men like that isn't helpful. I recommend reading the Scott Alexander blog post "Prison And Crime: Much More Than You Wanted To Know" here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prison-and-crime-much-more-...
To oversimplify, the only value that prison provably offers to society is the crimes prevented by keeping someone who would have done crimes locked up. Pretty much all of the other supposed benefits like deterrence (not doing a crime due to fear of punishment) or rehabilitation (becoming a better person in prison) don't actually exist in real life at meaningful rates. Because it costs so much to keep someone in prison, it's actually really hard to find cases where the harm to society for the crimes they would have done justifies the investment of resources to imprison them. That doesn't mean no such cases exist and we shouldn't have prisons, but they are clearly overused when they are almost the default method of crime consequence in Western society, especially for minor property crimes like retail shoplifting.
For most crimes at both the mild and severe ends of the spectrum, the reality is that imprisonment is the only effective way to reduce these crimes. Deterrence and rehabilitation are fiction: criminals are and will continue to be criminals.
What is your proposed method to prevent minor property crimes? A fine? Probation? An educational class on not stealing? When those inevitably fail, you need to remove the person from society to prevent them from continuing to commit the crime and impacting others.
There's certainly a discussion to be had about imprisoning people for victimless crimes, like drug possession by itself (my POV is overdose to your heart's content), but for crimes that result in victims, removal from society to reduce/prevent additional victims is a reasonable course of action.
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