I'm all for challenging the current US justice system, but I'm not sure why "posed no threat" is your only standard for who should be in prison. He did actually violate the property rights of other people. Prison, in mine and many others' opinions, is not just about rehabilitation.
Then slap an anklet on him and make him say sorry once a week until you're satisfied.
"You violated our property rights, so we're going to feed, clothe, and house you for the next twenty years and resent you for it" is something a crazy person would say.
I think because I live in an extremely violent place it changed the way I think about prisons. I'm not saying that you or me are right or wrong, really.
Most criminals are already living in hell. You send them to a prison with this idea that you are punishing them with the clear intention of feeling good in some way (maybe closure?).
What people lack of understanding is that prisons are not real punishment for those who are actually there. Some of them might even like it. So, prisons are not efficient in punishment nor rehabilitation. What are those things?
> What people lack of understanding is that prisons are not real punishment for those who are actually there. Some of them might even like it. So, prisons are not efficient in punishment nor rehabilitation.
Maybe they're not effective punishment or rehabilitation, but I would certainly say they're an effective deterrent. They might not be a punishment for anyone in there, but they could still be (and at least in my case, certainly are) seen as a punishment for some people who aren't in there. I would bet that a prison sentence is a much better deterrent than, say, volunteer hours or a fine. Whether deterring bank robberies is a valuable enough goal is a matter of opinion I suppose.
Obviously this is all conjecture, if someone can pull up a study showing that prison sentences don't have any deterrent effect over other forms of punishment then I'd accept that I'm wrong... But I'd be somewhat shocked if that were the case.
> if someone can pull up a study showing that prison sentences don't have any deterrent effect over other forms of punishment then I'd accept I'm wrong...
This is not some joe-schmoe study either, from the executive summary:
"Fifty studies dating from 1958 involving 336,052 offenders produced 325 correlations between recidivism and (a) length of time in prison and recidivism or (b) serving a prison sentence vs. receiving a community-based sanction."
In particular:
"The essential conclusions reached from this study were:
1. Prisons should not be used with the expectation of reducing criminal behaviour.
2. On the basis of the present results, excessive use of incarceration has enormous cost implications.
3. In order to determine who is being adversely affected by prison, it is incumbent upon prison officials to implement repeated, comprehensive assessments of offenders’ attitudes, values, and behaviours while incarcerated.
4. The primary justification of prison should be to incapacitate offenders (particularly, those of a chronic, higher risk nature) for reasonable periods and to exact retribution."
Summary points 1 and 4 are key: Prisons are not effective deterrence, but they are great tools for indirect retribution suffered by the victim(s).
Also in response to your last comment "I'd be somewhat shocked [..]": There are plenty of things that goes against simple human intuition--that's what science is for. Believe the facts, and disregard intuition.
That study only looks at the deterrent effect on existing criminals, not the general populace. I think there is confusion about the word "deterrent". I always thought about 'deterrent' in this context as: "Prisons are a deterrent.. just the thought of serving time in jail will deter anyone from committing a crime." Whereas the study you linked reports: "We have found that criminals who serve longer sentence are no more deterred from committing another crime than those who served short sentences."
Fair enough. There are plenty of studies out there regarding this topic, though a definitive conclusion is probably beyond any one single study. See papers Justin McCrary have published (he's done quite a bit of work in this area).
One such paper takes an interesting approach, combing the criminal records to see if the fact that deterrence is stiffened after 18 has an deterrent effect on crime rate by comparing juvenile offenders that are months pre-18 and 'adult' offenders that have just recently turned 18. The finding is 'surprisingly' a negative. Only very minor drop off rate is seen.
By the by, there's no definitive research that shows that prison sentences act as a deterrent against crime. And there's a lot of research on crime & punishment out there.
> punishing them with the clear intention of feeling good in some way
This plays some role, but I'd say the biggest reason people give in favor of having prisons is rational: Deterrence. If crimes aren't punished, what stops people from stealing when they want something they can't afford? What stops the strong from beating up the weak for fun, for profit, or as a way to resolve disputes in their favor? What stops the weak from shooting the strong because they finally get tired of being beaten up? What reason is there to adhere to contracts and agreements necessary for effective commerce if it would be more beneficial to one party to break them?
If you agree that punishment is necessary, but prison is somehow deficient as a punishment, what's the alternative? The punishment has to be sufficiently undesirable to cause most people to avoid crime in order to avoid the punishment. In addition, if it's going to be implemented in the US, it can't be cruel and unusual punishment since that is strictly Constitutionally prohibited, and if it's going to be implemented in a relatively free and democratic society, it has to show respect for generally accepted human rights principles. This excludes solutions like lashing, waterboarding, more extreme torture, massive expansions of the death penalty (I believe England as late as the 1500's would hang homeless children for stealing clothes to keep warm in the winter), or collective punishment (punishing someone else instead of or in addition to a criminal, e.g. many authoritarian regimes are willing to punish opponents by jailing, torturing, and/or killing their innocent friends, relatives, and children).
I do think that US criminal justice could be better. Currently many crimes are punished too harshly, sometimes sentences are inconsistent, current implementation of plea bargaining sometimes leads to terrible injustices, public defenders are woefully underfunded, the education system doesn't do a good job of covering these issues, and life is far too difficult for people after a felony conviction (discrimination against workers with felony records is legal and widespread; this sort of discrimination shouldn't be illegal, but culturally we need to be more willing to let people have second chances).
The Aaron Swartz analogy doesn't work. The point that the parent was trying to make was that for your average violent and even non-violent criminal (typically low-income upbringing, living in run-down conditions, living on the "streets" but not in a homeless sense), prisons are not real punishment. In fact, conditions in prison can for some be an improvement. Aaron grew up in an upper-middle class environment. Prison would have been a total change for him.
The problem with deterrence is that criminals by their very nature do not think about the consequences of their actions. This is a generalization, but criminals tend to have poor impulse control and don't think about the future. This is why many studies have shown that the death penalty does not work as a deterrent - a murderer is not being rational in their decision to murder someone. They either do it in the heat of the moment (can't control their temper), or they do because of overwhelming emotion/hate/spite/sociopathy (premeditated murder).
Here's the flaw in your argument against the necessity of deterrence:
If a policy effectively prevents a targeted category of people from becoming criminals, then most criminals won't be from that targeted category.
Say p ~ 10% of people either don't think about the consequences of their actions or don't care whether they go to jail. Say q ~ 90% do care about the consequences of their actions and do care whether they go to jail.
Under a system where deterrence is a strong element, most criminals will be from p. But remove the deterrent, and you'll start seeing more criminals from q.
Let me clarify. I did not say that deterrence is utterly without use. When I said that there is a problem with deterrence, I meant that the current state of deterrence in our justice system is broken. There is a mistaken belief that more punishment necessarily entails greater deterrence, which is many times not the case. There is really a threshold when it comes to deterrence. There is very little to no deterrent effect of the death penalty vs. life without parole, as others have posted here. In fact, I personally find it hard to believe that a life sentence versus, say, 50 years in prison, has any additional deterrent effect for something like murder. The rational 90% would still be adequately deterred.
What is it about then? I see only one reason for a person to be locked up:
1- He poses a threat to society and should be removed, as not to endanger others.
Prison it is not about education, it is not about rehabilitation. It is required to keep dangerous individuals from causing further harm (the other option would be the capital punishment).
Prisons are also used as punishment, but that's a side-effect. There are other ways of having a non-violent (or no longer violent) person repay his debt to society.
Putting people in prison for anything other than physical violence is ridiculous.
In this case, there was likely violence involved, but we do not have details, so I'll refrain from trying to apply the reasoning to this case.
>> "Prisons are also used as punishment, but that's a side-effect. There are other ways of having a non-violent (or no longer violent) person repay his debt to society."
Is this accurate? Depriving someone of normal civilian rights seems pretty punitive to me. And regarding other ways for people to repay their debts to societies: I'm interested in hearing what else we could be doing with these people.
>For most of history, imprisoning has not been a punishment in itself, but rather a way to confine criminals until corporal or capital punishment was administered.
> I'm interested in hearing what else we could be doing with these people.
"These people" casts a very wide net.
My personal point of view: any time that someone is convicted because of material/monetary damages, this individual should not be locked up. He should be paying for that in some other way. Some other way could be with labor - or simple fines.
Violent crimes, on the other hand, are a different matter. Take the China or the US approach, I don't particularly care, as I want those people removed from the society the fastest way possible.
This case in particular is pretty severe, as it involved firearms and threatening people. I do not have much sympathy for the guy because of that. However, since he was released, his criminal record should be sealed. After all, if he was released, then he is assumed to have "paid off" his debt and also presumed non-violent.
Either let people really pay for their crimes or keep them locked up indefinitely. Releasing unemployable people is not a good thing to do. If anything, this person is now much more likely to commit crimes, as legal work opportunities are greatly reduced. Not to mention living with other criminals for most of his adult life...
