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0 pointsomegaworks8y ago0 comments

>And if you take away any prospect of bad consequences, more people will become predators.

This premise is false. People have gotten along without the present distorted system of mass incarceration, not having a system of punishment doesn't itself produce predators. Social norms are quite powerful by themselves. The present system needs to be wholesale re-evaluated for its fairness and effectiveness at producing people that don't reoffend.

At the moment it exists, structurally, to create a labor force that can be forced to work for free, effectively continuing the practice of slavery in this country. This systematized role disproportionately affects communities of color, unsurprisingly, in line with the historical victims of the practice.

>What do you do with the 20 year old man who robs someone at gunpoint, or drags a woman into an alley and rapes her?

Well, at the moment we let them out after 90 days if they're on the swim team at Stanford.

https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/02/us/brock-turner-release-jail/...

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RcouF1uZ4gsC8y ago

We have always had systems of punishment and retribution. In the past if you killed or raped someone, the clan and family members would try to hunt you down and kill you. Basically, the state took over the function of punishing wrongdoers. What happens when the state stops punishing people is not that punishment stops, but that you end up with vigilantism. For example in Detroit https://www.cnn.com/2013/08/14/us/michigan-suspect-beaten/in...

omegaworksOP8y ago

> We have always had systems of punishment and retribution.

We have, but the system that the article is critiquing is, in fact, the one we presently live under.

You can, in fact, punish people without prisons. You said it yourself, we've done it with other means in the past. The article addresses incarceration specifically.

The whole article intends to convince us that incarceration should not be punitive, but restorative.

You directly missed my point. The carceral threat is only one stick, and judging by recidivism data, not one that is working particularly well. Perhaps we should examine another set of sticks, or even maybe, perhaps consider another set of carrots. Dismantling the prison industrial complex will not itself create predators, which is the claim I responded to.

LoSboccacc8y ago

> People have gotten along without the present distorted system of mass incarceration

while the incarceration system has limits when it comes to rehabilitation, this part of the post is extremely mistaken.

just because it was slavery and banishment aren't equivalent to incarceration doesn't mean there was no system of punishment - for as far as myth can track our oral history crime and punishment was always present in some form or another as a value and a condition for the existence of social groups larger than tribes

crime and punishment was codified as social values in laws, tradition and religion precisely because not having them caused more strife than having them, a point that is driven over and over again with the stigma the same myth gives to personal vendetta as opposed to systematic punishment.

devinhelton8y ago

It's cheap to point out the problems of a system with making a case for something that might work better. Answer my question: What should be done about the 20 year old man who robs someone at gunpoint or drags a woman into an alley and rapes her?

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