Prisoners have rights too, you know...

I'm really quite sick, and don't feel like citing this information, but I will say my main sources of information come from spending time being locked up, and others I know that have as well. Being I'm completely doped up on Nyquil as well, I'll tag this since I ramble.

Spoiler

The entire penal system is fucked because it's not for rehabilitating people, it is a business. Yes, we have very hard working, kindhearted people like Ms. Pink Cup, that try very hard to make a difference. Sadly though, due to the privatization of the correctional system, the main goal of these institutions is making money. Yeah, average Joe Schmuck that gets caught banging a hooker while his wife is at the grocery, or some out of town stewardess picked up a DUI after one too many, will be in and out and that's their experience with the system. Then there's the scum bag down the hall that beats up his girl friend, who will be in and out every time he gets drunk, till he eventually kills her and he becomes state property for good.

Three hots and a cot? Try eating a combination of flour and water three meals a day. Great tip I got from a guy that had spent the majority of his life locked up (anyone from the old board my remember my 'masturbating cell mate' story), don't ever eat any of another guys leftovers, you'll catch diseases. Which is a reason to NEVER turn the heat on, prevent the spread of airborne infectious diseases. And I'd LOVE to know the profit on the commissary. Guys live on Cheetos and the crap like you'd have bought at the summer camp canteen. It's like going to a pro sports game, a burger and coke cost an arm and a leg.

The state PAYS for each head that is kept over night in these private correctional facilities. They sit on your paperwork a few extra days, they just made a bit of money. The state of Georgia pays several hundred from what I was told per prisoner to give them a cot and some slop.

Once big money becomes involved in anything it goes to hell. They don't care inmates are fucking each other, it's just the dregs of society. The only way there'd be a policy change on this HIV issue is if one of those guys got out, raped one of these 'investors' daughters and gave her HIV.

 

Long..

Spoiler

My earliest impressions of jailing was that the place should be hellish enough, and the sentence long enough, to deter people from doing the crime. Obviously that's a very simplistic view of things and doesn't take into account the myriad of other factors that contribute. But, in essence, I don't think it's an incorrect proposition.

I'm not a criminal and I've never been arrested. I haven't even practised criminal law, but I've worked in law firms that do and I know a handful of guys who have been inside for medium term stretches.

I think some primary fault lies in the legal system where certain criminal acts are mitigated against arguments about bad upbringings and remorse. I say certain because applying universal rules to anything is often a dangerous thing. In many respects it should be a contextual thing looking at the nature of the crime itself. For example, if a defendant commits a crime and blames it on a bad childhood of parental abuse as a contributing factor to their actions then it should either be disregarded or investigated to see whether it was of sufficient impact to put them at a mental deficiency. If it is, into the mental health system with them. If not, then they have the mental capacity to realise it was wrong and to do something to make sure it doesn't affect their future actions.

In terms of remorse, there should be only the barest minimum of times that this should have any effect. If you're sorry about something, you shouldn't have done it (or the contributing factors) in the first place. In many instances, I would hazard to guess that the defendant is sorry they got caught, not for their actions.

Without these forms of mitigation, we should see tougher sentences which would deter a portion of offenders.

Prisons themselves shouldn't be daycare facilities. And they shouldn't be charities. I'm not advocating that we lock them all in an arena and let them have at it. They're still human beings and should be afforded the basic human rights. But that's not to say they can't be participatory in their upkeep.

It costs money to keep inmates, obviously, which is ultimately paid for by the community that the inmate has wronged against. In some respects, it's adding insult to injury. I see no reason why inmates should not be required to perform work duties to pay for everything above base level requirements. If they don't want to work, that could be their choice, but they don't get access to anything but a basic cell, basic meals and basic healthcare.... no television, internet, reading, education and so on. That's more than the ordinary person in free society gets for gratis. By basic cell and meals, I mean exactly that. Bare minimum with no comforts.

All work by inmates should be done at a rate of pay, depending on what functions they're performing. A proportion of that (say, nominally, half) goes towards paying for their 'lodgings'; food, shelter, television, etc. The rest can be used to purchase things like education.

It might be argued that this would only give rise to a black market of goods and 'services', but this exists anyway and anything short of completely cutting inmates off from each other and the outside work is not going to stop it.

 

Maybe this is the problem. In Canada, criminals are just not afraid of our pussified justice system anymore. Fuck, they just overturned the "Double Credit For Time Served In Pre-Trial Custody" provision that saw criminals get 2 for 1 time awaiting trial! The Youth Justice Act? Give me a fucking break. 17 year olds are commiting sex, hate, and other crimes, using loopholes designed in the 70's, to let Little Johnny get off light for stealing a chocolate bar because "he can be rehabilitated".

Would you beat your wife if you knew the rest of us got to have a go at you with baseball bats behind City Hall after work when you were convicted?

"An Eye For An Eye, Makes The Whole World Blind" is a neat little philosophical phrase until you compare murder and rape to fraud or break and enter.

I'm no statistician, but if crime isn't fair, or consistent, then why should punishments be? I'm sorry but if you rape women or beat your wife and kids, you should be treated like a Vietnam POW.

Logically speaking, the Judicial system is supposed to be a deterrent against crime. If it's not deterring crime it's obviously not working.

 

The problem with this is that the deterrent effect is largely ineffective. In order for it to work, humans have to use a large degree of logical thinking when committing crimes. Human beings aren't the logical creatures we like to think we are. Take this for example:

Yeah, people probably would. Why? Because people still do terrible crimes even though they know they have a good chance of spending their life in prison where they'll likely be subject to all sorts of violence. And also because most people don't stop to think about the specific effects of their crime before they commit them. That leads people make the wrong assumption that "the punishment must not be tough enough because most people aren't deterred". Once that assumption is made then that opens the door for a justification for longer prison sentences. When that fails to deter crime, that opens the door for even longer prison sentences, or creative alternatives like raping rapists or assaulting assaulters, or just simply killing anyone who does something wrong to someone else.

I forget where or when it was, probably Europe in the middle ages, but the laws got so awesome that people were routinely sentenced to death for stealing a loaf of bread. It happened all the time in a public square. Guess what, people still stole bread. I think that your assumption that the criminal justice system is supposed to primarily deter crime is completely misguided, wrong, and the source of most of the problems with the system today.

 

There's some irony in the fact that the military is bound by international law to treat POWs better than you would treat criminals.

Institutional sadism has no place in a first world country, especially not its justice system. There's a reason why the methods you're such a big fan of are used in places like Saudi Arabia.

 

I don't think it's completely wrong, it's just not a black and white situation. By design, society's rules are there in part to deter people from doing the wrong thing. It does this in a number of ways, including fines and incarceration.

In broad, sweeping terms you could say there's three types of people. There are people in society who do or don't do things out of the goodness of their own heart. And there are those people who do or don't do things because they don't want to get in trouble. And then there's the people who are going to go and do it anyway.

The people who are going to do it anyway are the ones you can't deter. Whatever the reason, no limit of punishment is going to deter them from their actions. The people who are going to be good are never going to be a problem.

It's the middle group that is being aimed at. It's the threat of consequence that stops them from doing anything they like, and it's something that is indoctrinated into us from a young age. At least, in part, the notion of stopping this group of people from breaking laws is behind the setting of penalties.

One of the primary parts of this is the risk/reward ratio. Is the reward worth the risk of getting caught? If the reward is greater or about equal, the person may be prepared to do it. For (a ridiculous) example, what if the penalty for stealing $100 was a slap on the wrist? Some people would say that for $100 it would be worth it. To take it to the other extreme, what if the penalty was death? A lot less people would be prepared to risk it. By setting the penalty somewhere between the two, society can deter the crime being committed in a certain percentage of cases.

There's a lot more to the issue, including balancing societal values and human rights. It's complex and will never satisfy all parties, but completely discounting deterrence as a primary aim of the justice system is too dismissive.

 

It's time.

 

Now ask yourself why. Criminals are hardly logical in their actions - and the ones that are rarely commit crimes that effect others. The deterrent effect of the penal system isn't harsh enough, because we value things like cruel and unusual punishment or "Rights". Criminals shouldn't have any rights. Humans are as logical as you're going to see in nature, and I think that emotion plays too big a role in that thought proccess.

So let's start executing violent offenders on PayPerView and see what happens.. We could use it to pay for the cable subscriptions..

Fuck them. My parents taught me right from wrong. Obeying the law is one of those things.

How is that an assumption and not a fact? If people aren't deterred by a punishment then the punishment is obviously not severe enough. Do you know what the definition of a deterrent is?

Now you're just stretching it dude. Cutting your head off for stealing a loaf of bread to feed your starving family is a far, far, cry from a priest raping a young boy for a bag of fucking Lays and a Coke. Put the bread stealer on a government program for the less fortunate and shoot the fucking kiddie-diddler on HBO - that's all i'm sayin.

Our governments might, but have you seen the shit the Japanese or Vietnamese did to your guys in the last 50 years?

 

I think the key word there is primary. It should not be the primary aim. That has been the primary aim of the CJ system for the last 20 or 30 years and all it's gotten us is a bloated prison system that's very good at putting people away for long periods of time and little else. And somehow the public opinion is that we need tougher sentences in order to deter crime because, gosh, there's so many criminals in prison. See what I'm getting at here? It's fucking stupid logic that can only lead to harsher and harsher and harsher punishments.

I'm not saying that deterrence doesn't have it's place. I would argue that unofficial societal forces do just as much if not more to deter crime than the threat of punishment. Losing a job is a good deterrent. Having your parents ashamed of their criminal son is a good deterrent. Having your friends and neighbors know you're a criminal is a good deterrent. Those things work for most people. But like you said, there are certain people who are only deterred by the threat of punishment from the state. Fine, that's not a problem as long as the punishment is only slightly greater than the rewards of the crime. In theory, that's all you need to deter crime. But what we do when we make deterrence the primary function of punishment is increase the level of punishment when crime still exists at levels we deem unacceptable. Because the severity of punishment is the only variable we can control. And politicians and the media tend to inflate the actual levels of crime to the point that the public is perpetually in fear of criminals. Hence the ever increasing lengths of sentences and overcrowded prisons. Once that snowball gets rolling it is extremely tough to stop it. That's how we end up with this dichotomy of actual treatment of prisoners and the public perception.

 

My point made a rather loud zooming noise as it flew over your head.

How can we say that as a government and society we are superior to our enemies? By what objective measure can we, in times of war, tell the other side that we are objectively superior to them and internally justify our actions agains them? One such measure would be the state of our prisons, and how we treat our prisoners of war. Amnesty International doesn't collect reports of torture in prisons for shits and giggles. People who made arguments for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 were keen on reminding everyone of widespread torture in prisons; the conditions in Abu Ghraib prison might not be great right now by they were vastly worse before. I am, by the way, Canadian, so your use of "your guys" in that sentence is incorrect only in reference to Vietnam; some Canadians were involved in the Pacific and were horrifically abused at the hands of the Japanese. It is a hallmark of a civilized country that it follows and upholds international law. Do you propose that the Canadian military begin treating POWs it captures in the same way that you would treat domestic criminals? I think the only consistent answer is yes, but then, there you have it: you think of the most horrific examples of torture you can think of, and advocate that we employ them. Those examples you thought of are from enemies that we and our allies have fought and suffered under. So, their method of treating prisoners and POWs is the reason we consider them the enemy and fight against them, and you want us to become those things we fight against.

 

It's an assumption because MOST people ARE actually deterred by the punishment, among other things. You could even get the same level of deterrence with lesser punishments. The problem is that deterrence doesn't work on some people. Many people for that matter. So the public sees these people who cannot be deterred still committing crimes and increase punishments in an attempt to deter them.

Look at this and think for a second. Do you not know what the definition of a deterrent is? If you are unable to deter many many people in a society from stealing a loaf of bread with the threat of capital punishment, do you really think HBO broadcasts of an execution is going to stop violent crimes? Put down the torch dude.

People have all sorts of motives to commit crimes (the starving family stealing bread despite the threat of execution), and you will never be able to have a heinous enough punishment to deter all crimes because of this fact. It's good to see someone creative enough to try though.

 

I'm paraphrasing from my Psych and the Law textbook because I'm lazy, but I'll dig up citations if you want:
In the state prison system in the US:
-nearly 75% of the incoming population are convicted of nonviolent crimes
-49% of the offenders currently housed in the system are violent offenders
(discrepancy is because of the length of time that violent vs. nonviolent offenders spend incarcerated)

 

Perhaps they could issue all prisoners with lockable anti-rape chastity type belts preventing the receival and giving of ass sex.

 

George Carlin's idea of State Prison Farms.

http://videosift.com/video/George-Carlin-on-State-Prison-Farms

 

I don't think you can necessarily divorce punishment and deterrence from one another. The latter is a natural byproduct of the former. And to my mind, the primary aim of putting people in jail is that it's an acceptable form of punishment. It's also about removing those people from society for a length of time to safeguard it's citizens, but if that was the primary then people would either be removed from the country altogether or not released until they were reformed, regardless of period.

One of the major failings of the prison system is that you're putting a bunch of bad people together in one place and giving them a lot of time and frustration. To get biblical, idle hands do the devil's work. Inmates can become institutionalised where they're unable to function in society so they re-offend upon release; some seeing jail as a "comfort". Minor offenders can become hardened offenders through any number of means, which is especially prevalent in the juvenile system.

You can't put offenders into isolation for the period of their incarceration, it's considered inhumane. You can't enforce them only socialising with non-offenders, that's not going to happen. You can't house all the murderers in one area, all the fraudsters in another; it's too costly. So unless you dramatically change the system, there's always going to be the capacity for things to go wrong.

Every country seeks its own way of dealing with things, and societal, cultural and religious values all play a part. We can only judge others by our own standards, which is still flawed because it's a moral judgment. There's no objective scale of who's better than who overall, because values and weightings weigh differently all over. You may get consensus from the majority, but it's still not decisive.

As an isolated example, look at USA against Saudi Arabia. Vastly different cultures. In Saudi Arabia a lot of crimes are severely punished, often by beheading. Many of the freedoms enjoyed in US are not available to people is SA, regardless of whether they're a citizen or not. Looking at one particular criminal act, according to a UN survey between 1998 and 2000, the per capita instance of murder in the US was 0.0428 per 1000. The figure in Saudi Arabia was 0.00397 per 1000; or at least ten times less. So, forgetting everything else, you're more than ten times the risk of getting murdered in the US as you are in Saudi Arabia. In part, at least, you'd have to attribute that to their penal system. Does that make SA a better country than the US? For not getting murdered, yes. For anything else and overall, no.

 

Basic statistics lesson:

What you've looked at is the relative risk reduction of murder between one country and another. You've seen that it's an order of magnitude different. The problem here is that the numbers are so small that even a miniscule absolute difference is going to compute out to a massive relative difference. So, the p for the U.S. .0000428 (.0428 / 1000 = .0000428); in Saudi Arabia it's .00000397. .0000428 - .00000397 = .000038, or you are .0038% more likely to be murdered in Saudi Arabia than in the United States. In other words, there is one extra murder in the United States per 25,753 people.

I also did the math and found that there are 114 murders annually in Saudi Arabia (probably more because this is 10 year old murder data but I used the current population). Do you know how many executions there are annually? There were 102 in 2008. 153 in 2007. You are just as likely to be executed in Saudi Arabia as you are to be murdered. And fuck, even when they behead people, they dose them up on painkillers in case the guy fucks up as he's chopping your head off.

Aside from my nerdery, if you really think I can't objectively say that living in the United States is better than in Saudi Arabia because of "different cultures", well, there are more than a few Saudi women who wouldn't mind trading places with you.

 

Statistics are wonderful, and can be easily misused, which is why I gave a very basic and isolated example. I don't want to derail this thread by arguing over semantics when I was trying to make a simple point about something else, but there is a point so bear with me. For the nerds, I'll show my working in a spoiler tag.

I wasn't commenting about executions, or harsh and unjust punishment, or lack of freedom (which I noted). I was talking about deterrence. Say what you like, but the figures do show that the average person is ten times more likely to be murdered in the US than in Saudi Arabia. If one of the reasons for that is because if I kill someone I'll probably get beheaded, then you have effective deterrence to a degree. Rightful? No, depending on your morals. Personally, if someone murdered one of my loved ones I'd be asking to swing the sword myself.

That gets away from the basic point that started this, but to bring it back into focus I do consider that the harshness of penalty should include a factor for deterrence. If the punishment only fit the crime, it's a zero sum game. If you increase it (within moral constraints) to include a premium so that the punishment outweighs the crime, then all other things being equal you're going to get less incidence of the crime. People will disagree with this, the same as anything else. I accept that, and you've got the right to your opinion as I do mine. But it's simple behaviour, the steeper the penalty; the more the average person will consider not doing it.

As an aside, you're not being truly objective; because you're basing your decision on a subjective set of values and morals. You can say one is better than the other, and for what it's worth I agree with you. But, by definition, objectivity is without personal feelings or prejudices.

Working for the nerdery:

Spoiler

I discussed the per capita rates of murder in my previous post. The populations of the USA and Saudi Arabia as at mid 2008 (the most up to date data I could find for SA) were 304,059,724 and 24,645,686 respectively. At the per capita rates, we get derived actual figures of:

USA: 304,059,724 x 0.0428/1000 = 13,014 murders
SA: 24,645,686 x 0.00397/1000 = 98 murders

Obviously, there's a massive difference in population. To take it back to comparable numbers, we get (by dividing population by incidence):

USA: 304,059,724/13,014 = 1 murder for every 23,364 people
SA: 24,645,686/98 = 1 murder for every 251,486 people

Or, to take it to same figures, in the USA there were 10.76 murders for every 251,486 people. Or, in other words, as I said: 10 times more likely to get murdered in the USA than in Saudi Arabia.

The actual murder statistics may have been even higher for the USA. The FBI website lists the recognised number of murders and non-negligent manslaughters at 16,272 for 2008 (taking it to 13.46 murders for every 251,486 people). Even adding in the number of executions given by Ghettoastronaut of 102 (to take the number to 200), you're still 5 times more likely to get murdered in the USA than murdered or beheaded in Saudi Arabia.

Sources: Populations by Google data. USA murder statistics by FBI website. Per capita rates as per previous post.

 

Do you think a lot of criminals got the chance at a stable childhood where boundaries were set and right and wrong were taught? I'm going to go out on a limb here and say no. Maybe I'm dumb, but I find it very difficult to believe that those that violently react because someone smudged their Pumas have the capacity to deal with their anger constructively.

 

To take this to its nadir should only people who’ve had a decent upbringing be “fully” punished for violent crime?

I personally don’t give a two shits why a dog bites, the fact that it does bite is all I need to know.