Comment by applfanboysbgon
14 hours ago
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.
I feel like you're asking two different questions: what do we do about average criminals, and what do we do when our normal strategies don't work?
Most shoplifters stop after they get caught the first time, even if they don't face any further consequences. Most people who keep shoplifting after that stop if they are caught and face consequences like community service. In general, the system of escalating punishments before prison actually works to keep problems from developing to that level.
If someone is doing serious violent crimes then it seems obvious that they need to be imprisoned until we can figure out how to make them stop. But what if someone is doing minor property crimes where the total value of those crimes does not exceed the cost to imprison them? In that case we are essentially offering an incredibly inefficient subsidy to property owners.
The real answer is to directly address the factors that lead to crime and disorder, such as cost of living exceeding prevailing wages, unemployment, drug addiction, and mental illness.
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