> I think it's debatable, after generations of experience, that prisons make people more criminal. At the very least, rehabilitation doesn't work very well
I agree until this point you made.
We know the "modern prison system" is a very loose term dictated by "where" much more than just an abstract idea. In places like the Netherlands they have so few prisoners they had to close down prisons.
There are certainly a group of people who cannot be easily re-introduced to society: People who commit premeditated murder, rapists, pedophiles, serial killers, mass-murderers, terrorists. But this accounts for a fairly small percent of the prison population.
Most prisoners can fall into a few categories: Stupid, No other means of decent survival, Drugs.
I'll tackle these in order of ease:
- Drugs - This has been shown to be the easiest to solve. Giving prisoners the option of avoiding their entire sentence in exchange for rehab and support group attendance has been INCREDIBLY effective.
- No other means of decent survival - A.k.a. poverty. This feeds the drug problem too. People need: Food, Shelter, Entertainment. Boredom is the cause of too many kids, drug use, and theft of goods. Giving these people a decent base education and job placement programs can be orders of magnitude more efficient.
- Stupid - This can cause the other problems too, but I include in here a lack of self control. Many times this can be solved with education, job placement, emotional control education, etc. There are ways to rehabilitate these people into society.
Instead of everything I said, we treat marijuana arrests in the USA worse than many cases of murder, rape, fraud. We need sane laws here.
Furthermore the real criminals that cause a ton of subsequent crime is financial fraudsters. We call it "white collar criminals" who get at best a slap on the wrists -- Steal 20 mil? Go to jail for a few years. Have a bag of weed? Go to jail for 10 years. These white collar criminals are the ones that need punishment the most. They cause so much subsequent crime, and they always believe they both deserve what they do and can get away with it. These are the ones we need to lock away for the longest of times.
And finally the privatization of prisons. So much on that. But basically, if you run a prison as a business, it is 100% not in your interest to prevent future crime, but rather to ensure the prisoners (your cash cows) never leave.
I think I may have worded that poorly. I'd didn't mean to imply rehabilitation is impossible. I meant that, in broad strokes, taking the last 200 years of experience on earth, successes have been few an far between. On average, prison time may have even increased future criminality.
Even the best examples aren't great. From random study I just googled:
The 2-year re-arrest rates ranged from 26% (Singapore) to 60% (USA), two-year reconviction rates ranged from 20% (Norway) to 63% (Denmark), and two-year reimprisonment rates ranged from 14% (USA – Oregon) to 43% (Canada – Quebec, New Zealand)
Interesting things to read about (i'd need to do some research to find this research paper again, i think it was on hacker news 6 months ago or so):
most people committing murder fall in the following categories:
- they premeditated and thought they were NOT going to be caught, so prison isn't a deterrent. They thought they were smarter than forensics.
- they were in a situation and had to kill someone due to circumstances of the other crime. Such as robbing a store, the clerk pulls a gun, now you gotta shoot them before you die. This was a massive lack of foresight and thus again punishment isn't a deterrent because they don't think things though.
- they were angry and it got out of hand. No foresight, they acted on pure emotion. This may be anger issues or other reasons. There is no deterrent here, only rehabilitation.
- political / hate-based killings. These people feel they are doing society a favor, they feel RIGHT to do this killing. Deterrent doesn't help if the political climate is empowering them and making their message amplified.
Now just imagine how much crime is in similar categories as above. The same logic applies.
So basically we need to focus entirely on prison time being a rehabilitation to: make the person understand and accept what they have done. make the person feel genuine remorse. make sure the person has alternatives in life to doing what caused the problem to begin with. Most places in the world focus more on "remove the undesireables" and "punishment is future deterrent". So really we're doing literally the opposite.
I agree until this point you made.
We know the "modern prison system" is a very loose term dictated by "where" much more than just an abstract idea. In places like the Netherlands they have so few prisoners they had to close down prisons.
There are certainly a group of people who cannot be easily re-introduced to society: People who commit premeditated murder, rapists, pedophiles, serial killers, mass-murderers, terrorists. But this accounts for a fairly small percent of the prison population.
Most prisoners can fall into a few categories: Stupid, No other means of decent survival, Drugs.
I'll tackle these in order of ease:
- Drugs - This has been shown to be the easiest to solve. Giving prisoners the option of avoiding their entire sentence in exchange for rehab and support group attendance has been INCREDIBLY effective.
- No other means of decent survival - A.k.a. poverty. This feeds the drug problem too. People need: Food, Shelter, Entertainment. Boredom is the cause of too many kids, drug use, and theft of goods. Giving these people a decent base education and job placement programs can be orders of magnitude more efficient.
- Stupid - This can cause the other problems too, but I include in here a lack of self control. Many times this can be solved with education, job placement, emotional control education, etc. There are ways to rehabilitate these people into society.
Instead of everything I said, we treat marijuana arrests in the USA worse than many cases of murder, rape, fraud. We need sane laws here.
Furthermore the real criminals that cause a ton of subsequent crime is financial fraudsters. We call it "white collar criminals" who get at best a slap on the wrists -- Steal 20 mil? Go to jail for a few years. Have a bag of weed? Go to jail for 10 years. These white collar criminals are the ones that need punishment the most. They cause so much subsequent crime, and they always believe they both deserve what they do and can get away with it. These are the ones we need to lock away for the longest of times.
And finally the privatization of prisons. So much on that. But basically, if you run a prison as a business, it is 100% not in your interest to prevent future crime, but rather to ensure the prisoners (your cash cows) never leave.