I've always held to the "Sin City"[1] philosophy: society's needs change over time, while people fundamentally don't. The existence of prison is just a failure of society to accommodate the wide variety of human natures.
Obviously this brings up questions of the "dangerous to society" variety, but a minuscule percentage of prisoners are dangerous psycho killers.
[1] Most people think Marv is crazy, but I don't believe that.
I'm no shrink and I'm not saying I've got Marv all figured out or anything, but "crazy" just doesn't explain him. Not to me. Sometimes I think he's retarded, a big, brutal kid who never learned the ground rules about how people are supposed to act around each other.
But that doesn't have the right ring to it either. No, it's more like there's nothing wrong with Marv, nothing at all--except that he had the rotten luck of being born at the wrong time in history. He'd have been okay if he'd been born a couple of thousand years ago. He'd be right at home on some ancient battlefield, swinging an ax into somebody's face. Or in a roman arena, taking a sword to other gladiators like him.
They'd have tossed him girls like Nancy, back then.
I can say I would not want to live in a society that "accommodates" the needs of rapists, murderers, child molesters as well as the various petty criminals.
Sin City was a dark film, I never found it a model for cultural structure.
What about one that accommodates people who possess marijuana? What about a society that accommodates people who have opioid addictions and need medical help? I think you have a rather skewed idea of the majority of our prison population. I'll give you a hint, though: most of them aren't rapists, murderers, and child molesters.
> most of them aren't rapists, murderers, and child molesters.
I assume there are also a lot of people in prison that aren't rapists or murderers but still cause a lot of troubles if left to their own device. What should be done with these ones? I agree prison is cruel and inhuman and I'm all for better detention conditions, but I don't think it's realistic to suggest we should leave these people walk freely (or to suggest that they don't exist). What are the alternatives?
>"What about one that accommodates people who possess marijuana? What about a society that accommodates people who have opioid addictions and need medical help?"
Marijuana at least in the US, is an example of where society is actually changing to accommodate people:
Also the Opioid epidemic is finally getting the attention it deserves at the federal level in the US. I think we will see an end to the cruel policies that are in place:
We got Al Capone for tax evasion. Sometimes the laws you see as unjust are there for a reason. In California, for instance, a DUI has a part A and B so if they drop one part you always get convicted of the other.
Are you suggesting that most offenders of what are typically seen as 'minor' or 'victimless' crimes are actually guilty of more serious crimes, but for whatever reason cannot be caught or prosecuted?
He's saying that minor crimes are the element of indeterminacy that gives the legal system wiggle room to dole out arbitrary punishment when actual circumstances almost, but not fully warrant normal punishment.
A classic example is Al Capone caught for tax evasion. A more recent one is OJ Simpson jailed for some break-and-entering bullshit because everyone wants to punish him for those famous murders.
>" A more recent one is OJ Simpson jailed for some break-and-entering bullshit because everyone wants to punish him for those famous murders."
I'm sorry "breaking and entering bullshit"?
The crime was armed robbery and kidnapping. And it was OJ Simpson who said that nobody could leave the room which brought up the kidnapping charge. All of this actually happened. Nobody disputes these claims. Nothing to do with breaking and entering but much more serious crimes.[1]
If a family member of yours was robbed in their hotel room at gun point would it still be "bullshit"?
I saw a tv show that presented those facts, yes. It also features the Goldman family celebrating that he got any kind of jail time at all. And it was a long sentence too!
So are you saying he shouldn't have been jailed for armed robbery and kidnapping? That seems unreasonable. Or are you saying that the Goldmans shouldn't have been happy he was in prison? Maybe so, but that's got nothing to do with the criminal justice system.
Actually, my broader point is that there's substancial indeterminacy to the legal system and that society uses this wiggle room to dole out mob justice.
That may be true, but I don't see how it's relevant to OJ. He wasn't lynched or set up; he committed a crime and went to prison for it. I don't see how that's mob justice even if some people were happy about it.
This is me being an armchair "bird lawyer" without actual expertise, but it seems to me that his threatening people with a gun for them to stay in a room for a few minutes while he searched the place for the goods they thought stolen from him...
... well, it's not good. But is it kidnapping? My common sense tells me by then the system was biased against him. Mob justice, therefore, even if not from a wild, tar-and-feather variety.
>> I'll give you a hint, though: most of them aren't rapists, murderers, and child molesters.
> HINT = 15% of the prison population in California are sex offenders.
Rapists and child molesters would both fall under the sex offender category, meaning 85% of prisoners are not convicted of those crimes (according to your post, which lacks citation).
Are you indicating that more than one in three California prisoners are convicted of murder? It sounds like you’re making a case for more than 35% of prisoners as murderes (15 + 35 = 50%). I’m not comfortable with that assumption without links to data.
This definitely doesn't support their point, but the State of California's report[0] turns out to be generally fascinating. More to the point of this thread, sex offenders and murderers make up ~26% of their prison population.
I was myself confused by the comment I was replying to. I don't like when people say "hint, most people x".
I wanted to get better information about what the actual statistics were, because I didn't know what percent of the prison population were sex offenders, which was 15%.
I'm not sure what my position on this issue is. But it appears that a decent percentage of people in prison in California are serious criminals, and although some are definitely marijuana offenders that should probably be released, I don't think its fair to call that the majority of the people in the prison system.
I can say I would not want to live in a society that "accommodates" the needs of rapists, murderers, child molesters as well as the various petty criminals.
The communists did this in the Gulag system, by putting the rapists and murders -- who had obviously been victimized by the previous system -- in charge.
Pretty sure that wasn't intentional. It's just what happens in dangerous times -- dangerous people prosper.
It was deliberate and ideologically driven. The people who were imprisoned by the previous repressive system must have been innocent victims of that system.
> a failure of society to accommodate the wide variety of human natures
The raison d'être of the society (and the state) is not to "accommodate" anything, especially not some particular aspects of human nature, but rather to suppress them, limit the "natural" freedoms -- in order to create a semblance of order and harmony among humans, which, in particular, makes it easier to control (and protect) them.
Oof. That is one view. There are others, that tend to note that society exists without state institutions - in fact, society is a necessary precondition to a state.
Some of these other views don't credit 'society' as something with a will or a reason, simply as an emergent property. That's not to say 'society' doesn't cause things to happen, but it does imply disagreement with the parent comment.
I absolutely agree that states are primarily instruments of suppression and coercion. I just think that equating state and society is not only incorrect, but also heads down a potentially dangerous path. Societies emerge from being social animals in proximity, states emerge from negotiations, coercion, or some combination thereof.
Are you sure that states don't emerge automatically too?
We are hierarchical creatures, even in a small group of friends hierarchy appears on its own. If you have a hierarchy the rest is just organizational details.
I disagree. If society always let people get away with their crimes, criminals would gain an evolutionary upper hand and soon crime and distrust would become the norm. Criminals would be popping out children and altruistic people would be picking up the bill.
Also I think that our current system lets white collar criminals off too easily; they should be punished more severely.
This type of evolution is especially dangerous in a modern context because technology and globalization have taken the humanity out of our daily interactions and have therefore reduced the importance of altruism.
But if don't have prison sentences, how do you prevent the next Madoff? Human nature is what it is, you just can't assume that all citizens are fundamentally good. There needs to be somehow a system of penalty/incentive to behaving well. It's not just about locking dangerous people away.
Perhaps if we tried prosecuting most of the people who commit large-scale financial abuse, instead of throwing the book at one guy and letting the rest off with a wink and a nod.
If prison sentences are merely a deterrent to other criminals, then sure, we need some evidence to back up the idea that deterrence works. (I would think it's pretty self-evident that there are a ton of minor/medium crimes that would increase in prevalence if there were no consequences, though.)
But it's not. Prison is also a punishment for the person who committed the crime, and, if our prison system wasn't so messed up, could be a place for reform.
The most fundamental human rights are to be able to live without suffering what the guys that are in these prisons do to the society. Living without fear of violence, rape, murder, being burglarized, conned, etc. These are human rights.
Merely keeping someone in a cell is a rather gentle treatment compared to how other cultures or other times treat/treated criminals.
Now we can discuss sentence lengths, prison sentencing for certain non violent crimes, etc. But I am sure I am not alone to have no sympathy for the idea that putting criminals in jail is violating their human rights.
Living without fear of being conned is a human right??
I can buy that living without fear of murder or rape or even theft is a human right (we have a right to life, liberty, and property). I can even buy that locking con men away is desirable from the point of view of improving society as a whole. But raising that to the level of a human right seems much.
Yes, as I said in my comment, property is commonly recognized as a human right.
Nothing in that Wikipedia article says anything about being conned or deceived out of your property, and my question is whether a right to not be conned can be derived from that right. Do I have a fundamental human right to hold onto my property even if I am making a decision to give it up that other people think is unsound? Does that right prevent me from giving up my property? (There are, in general, rights that prevent you from doing things - for instance, I'd say that the right to liberty prevents you from consenting indefinitely to authoritarian government. Is this one of them?) Or do I have a fundamental human right to do with my property as I wish, and a right to not have my decisions second-guessed by the government?
For example, several jurisdictions believe that I cannot give up all copyright claims to some software I write, and that whatever I do, I maintain a "moral right" or "author's right" to the software, and even if I want to promise someone that they can literally do whatever with the software, the laws prevent me from doing that. I think this is a violation of my liberty, but clearly the people writing the laws think that I am being conned.
Obviously this brings up questions of the "dangerous to society" variety, but a minuscule percentage of prisoners are dangerous psycho killers.
[1] Most people think Marv is crazy, but I don't believe that. I'm no shrink and I'm not saying I've got Marv all figured out or anything, but "crazy" just doesn't explain him. Not to me. Sometimes I think he's retarded, a big, brutal kid who never learned the ground rules about how people are supposed to act around each other.
But that doesn't have the right ring to it either. No, it's more like there's nothing wrong with Marv, nothing at all--except that he had the rotten luck of being born at the wrong time in history. He'd have been okay if he'd been born a couple of thousand years ago. He'd be right at home on some ancient battlefield, swinging an ax into somebody's face. Or in a roman arena, taking a sword to other gladiators like him. They'd have tossed him girls like Nancy, back then.