Poll: Should prison serve as punishment, or should it be used for rehabilitation instead?
- Thread starter BreakfastMan
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- Apr 1, 2009
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- Whatever, just wash your hands.
"he robbed me, I demand death for him" "well if vaugly looks like he might be guilty, at least his skin is the right color, fry him"RamirezDoEverything said:
yeah the justice system is foolproof enough for that
Trust me, no you are not.Kaleion said:
OT: Rehab. Possible combination of both but primarily rehabilitation. Repeat offenders that are just manipulating the system get punishment.
Then again, I'm a crazy pseudo-Libertarian Communist so what do I know?
I think it shouldd be mostly rehab because everyone who proves that they cannot be rehabilitated should just be killed or better yet used as slaves to build the first moon/mars colonies.
What the fu-RamirezDoEverything said:
Are you saying you support torture just for the sake of it?
And your first statement is utter shit - people commit crimes for all sorts of reasons. You can't just blanket everyone.
OT: It should serve as both.
People should be in there for punishment, but they may as well attempt something useful with them to integrate them back into society.
The Eighth Amendment exists for a reason you know.cannot_aim said:
And I'm pretty sure using them as slave labor on other planets falls under that somewhere.
Though, I don't know where. But it falls somewhere there.
Rehabilitation doesn't work when you isolate persons from the society you're trying to integrate them back into.
Punishing people in prisons just makes them mistrust and resent society especially when they're innocent.
Better to rehabilitate the criminals that didn't commit violent crimes within society and just kill those of them whom did and will habitually continue to do so.
You might argue that it is uncivilized to kill criminals but it's better to kill a criminal than let them revisite their crimes upon society at large time and time again.
Punishing people in prisons just makes them mistrust and resent society especially when they're innocent.
Better to rehabilitate the criminals that didn't commit violent crimes within society and just kill those of them whom did and will habitually continue to do so.
You might argue that it is uncivilized to kill criminals but it's better to kill a criminal than let them revisite their crimes upon society at large time and time again.
Ok death might have been excessive but hard labor that would forge the way for humanity into the universe, I think the government could find a way to bend the rules for that.LegendaryGamer0 said:The Eighth Amendment exists for a reason you know.cannot_aim said:
And I'm pretty sure using them as slave labor on other planets falls under that somewhere.
Though, I don't know where. But it falls somewhere there.
Both.
Prison should serve as a punishment so it is a deterrent to other people who might be considering committing crimes. It should not be a nice place to be and should in fact be considered very much the last place you would ever want to go.
However, if you are going to release people out of prison and back into the real world it also needs to be not only a place of rehabilitation but should also keep people with long sentences up to date with the world as much as possible. Imagine someone who went into prison in the 1980s being released now, so much has changed they wouldn't know how to react if they had been kept entirely isolated from outside changes.
The problem is balancing these two out, because often rehabilitation means showing people that there are other ways of resolving conflicts besides violence, stealing and murder, but to someone who only understands violence at first violence will have to be used until they can be broken out of that cycle.
It's probably almost impossible, but I do think prisons can be both rehabilitative and punitive. Or at least fall somewhere between the two.
First off, torture against anyone is inhumane and a sign of cruelty or at least lack of empathy with other humans. If your response to that would be to say that you don't think criminals are other humans then you have severe problems you probably need to get help for.
Also, do you honestly believe there is any such thing as a 'natural born killer/thief'? Science can't even prove if people will naturally be jerks, nice guys or average joes and you're positing that there exists such a thing as a natural killer unchangeable in the entirety, and that that person is thus worthy of death and torture?
Even if you were to take the most common types of personality disorder which lead to people killing, sociopathy, psychopathy, paranoid schizophrenia and a whole host of others, and then prove that these mental imbalances were irrefutably naturally occuring, nothing we could do about them, then still the amount of people with the conditions who don't commit murder would far outweigh the amount of people who do.
And what about people who steal out of desperation because they don't have any money? Are they worthy of torture too? What about people who commit piracy, which is a crime, should they all be tortured? Are they natural born thieves who would go on stealing regardless of if you tried to talk them out of it, or spent any time finding out why they had problems?
Your post borders on ignorance of human psychology, humanity to your fellow man, and common sense.
Prison should serve as a punishment so it is a deterrent to other people who might be considering committing crimes. It should not be a nice place to be and should in fact be considered very much the last place you would ever want to go.
However, if you are going to release people out of prison and back into the real world it also needs to be not only a place of rehabilitation but should also keep people with long sentences up to date with the world as much as possible. Imagine someone who went into prison in the 1980s being released now, so much has changed they wouldn't know how to react if they had been kept entirely isolated from outside changes.
The problem is balancing these two out, because often rehabilitation means showing people that there are other ways of resolving conflicts besides violence, stealing and murder, but to someone who only understands violence at first violence will have to be used until they can be broken out of that cycle.
It's probably almost impossible, but I do think prisons can be both rehabilitative and punitive. Or at least fall somewhere between the two.
whatRamirezDoEverything said:
First off, torture against anyone is inhumane and a sign of cruelty or at least lack of empathy with other humans. If your response to that would be to say that you don't think criminals are other humans then you have severe problems you probably need to get help for.
Also, do you honestly believe there is any such thing as a 'natural born killer/thief'? Science can't even prove if people will naturally be jerks, nice guys or average joes and you're positing that there exists such a thing as a natural killer unchangeable in the entirety, and that that person is thus worthy of death and torture?
Even if you were to take the most common types of personality disorder which lead to people killing, sociopathy, psychopathy, paranoid schizophrenia and a whole host of others, and then prove that these mental imbalances were irrefutably naturally occuring, nothing we could do about them, then still the amount of people with the conditions who don't commit murder would far outweigh the amount of people who do.
And what about people who steal out of desperation because they don't have any money? Are they worthy of torture too? What about people who commit piracy, which is a crime, should they all be tortured? Are they natural born thieves who would go on stealing regardless of if you tried to talk them out of it, or spent any time finding out why they had problems?
Your post borders on ignorance of human psychology, humanity to your fellow man, and common sense.
Punishment is equally meaningless though; It does nothing to prevent crime, and can make criminals act even worse later on if they are actually going to be released.RamirezDoEverything said:
It doesn't undo what they did either.
Basically, it's just an excuse for being almost as bad as the criminals.
But whatever. I've long since given up expecting fairness or rational behaviour from people.
(most Punishment is neither in any real sense - It's only practical value is if it functions as an effective deterrent, but the people who would be put off by deterrents can usually be dealt with more effectively by other methods anyway.)
Punishment in a way can be rehab. It is just like teaching your kid or dog not to do something. You beat them, or if its the dog make it sleep outside and tell it no. Same with criminals, your beat em, tell em not to do it again, and then you repeat. Chances are that if they dont want to go back to jail and get beat, they wont commit the crime.
Either that or they begin to associat the crime with the pain.
Either that or they begin to associat the crime with the pain.
The process of legal costs of sending a man to death is higher then keeping him for life in a prison.Niagro said:
I believe that we should use prisoners as slaves.
I don't see the point of punishment. It achieves nothing. If the person was scared of the punishment, they'd not have committed the crime to begin with. At best, you just make the person punished angrier at the way they're being treated. How does that help? So what, it makes you feel better, but if the prison system is used as a societal salve, that we all convince ourselves that criminals are being made miserable and somehow that makes things better, then we really need to examine ourselves and our society more closely, that we might work on not needing such barbarous forms of reassurance in future.
It's basically scientifically proven that like 99% (i.e. a large number) of prison sentences are better taken as a medical situation rather than a punishment. Some criminals have had hard lives that they need changing, others have psychological problems. The few that really deserve punishment over rehabilitation are (possibly ironically) those white collar criminals and such, but they still need their situation to be taken with care to ensure that they don't actually commit the crime again, rather than just keep them away from society for x amount of time and assume that the problem's going to be fixed.
Atm it's just an isolation+Crime School institution.
I say the entire concept is flawed and outdated by this point and we should consider new methods of dealing with crime.
I say the entire concept is flawed and outdated by this point and we should consider new methods of dealing with crime.
