okapi-forest-unicorn t1_it65wgi wrote on October 21, 2022 at 5:33 AM

Prison: punishment or rehabilitation, Should someone pay their entire lives for a crime.

A news segment got me thinking about this and I’m curious what other perspectives are.

The article was about a teenage boy who murdered a teenage girl via strangulation. Because he was a minor at the time in my country you can’t release their name. He’s finished his sentence and is due to be released soon and the victim’s family want laws changed to be able to publicity name and shame him. They want to do this for “the safety of the public”.

I’ve seen Law and Order SVU episodes on a similar issue. In regards to rapists who finish their sentences. As weird as it sounds they normally focus on for lack of a better phrase run of mill offenders. Like I know these are horrible crimes but they aren’t Jeffery Dahmer or Dennis Rader level horrible.

And I’m conflicted on the issue.

On one hand I understand the idea. These people committed rape/murder which is awful and I wouldn’t want to live near them either. And the families/victims want them to suffer, I get that sentiment.

But if we give people sentences that they can finished/served even without parole. Shouldn’t we focus on rehabilitation first and punishment second? To make sure society is safe with them out? This guy, the one that’s a teenager, killed someone and he’s done his time shouldn’t we leave him alone and allow him to reintegrate into society? Or should we sentence all offenders like him to remain in prison their entire lives? I also feel like if we continue to name, shame and make this ex prisoners lives miserable their just going to commit another offence bring more pain into the world. And we would have been better off having them rot in prison.

What are your thoughts?

TMax01 t1_it9a6ek wrote on October 21, 2022 at 9:37 PM

It is a well-established (though by no means universally accepted) premise of human behavior that negative reinforcement (punishment) is almost entirely ineffective past the age of reason (about four to seven years old) and of limited value even before then. Nevertheless, most people far older than that continue to desire retribution for an injustice. There are valid and good reasons for this desire, but that it can be a deterrent (a prospective negative reinforcement, in other words) is not really one of them.

As for rehabilitation, it, too, has a meaningful basis in the arena of criminal sentencing, but coercion nullifies the possibility of rehabilitation: a human cannot be forced to rehabilitate, they can only be convinced to obey. Also, the practice of providing heightened opportunities for rehabilitation to criminals contradicts the demands of justice, by essentially rewarding convicts for previous bad behavior and (if this can even be considered separate) effectively substituting advantage for retribution, in a social sense.

For imprisonment to be just and moral, it should be seen as simply sequestration, removing an individual from society. Whether it is a punishment or is an adequate opportunity for voluntary rehabilitation is for the convict to determine. Making their living conditions as sparse as humanely possible based on the nature of their crime is appropriate, but willfully (including through malicious neglect) making their circumstances intolerable or horrifying in a misguided effort to maximize either punishment or deterrence is not merely inhumane, it is counter-productive.

It really doesn't matter how severe or horrendous the crime was. The optimim process from a social perspective is whatever has the greatest statistical likelihood of resulting in a convict both recognizing and accepting the immorality of their actions and voluntarily choosing to rehabilitate themselves. And what we are currently doing in the United States is not that. A large part of the reason we have such a significant problem with crime in the US is because of the prison system in the US, although the teleologies are so complex that most people aren't interested in understanding how that is possible. And the people who most definitely (and erroneously) believe in punishment have any easy time convincing anyone who has any desire for retribution against lawbreakers to vote for the Wrong Wing Party, and spewing atrocious lies about anyone who does manage to understand that 'the beatings will continue until moral improves' is too much of a joke to even be funny.

"My parents whipped the hell out of me, and I'm a better person for it," is something that only comes out of the mouth of a severely emotionally damaged individual.