It is so obvious, how could I not realize it earlier? That is what’s in natural beef flavor.
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[quote=“zikzak, post:19, topic:66673, full:true”]
To start with, your premise is flawed: That there should be one solution for anyone who doesn’t obey the rules.[/quote]
Well I never said there should be one solution. Some of your examples below are actually done, where people do rehab and probation and community service in lieu of serving time. I also agree we need waaay better mental health care, as some of the problems we have are directly a result of that. But there are still a lot of people running around hurting others and taking things they shouldn’t.
Yeah - well - historically before we had huge prison systems, we did use other methods. Like public shaming, which might have been effective, but I can’t imagine that being used today. Too many feels hurt. But people also did a lot of banishing. You can’t live here any more, go be someone elses problem. So they just moved things around. And they did a lot of just killing people. Early America and Europe had a whole lot of things they would just rather hang you for than deal with you.
Now I am sure you are an optimist and would hope we wouldn’t repeat the tactics of the past. And while I DO think we should try to actually reform people in prison, doing so his easier said than done. While yes, maybe someone stole because they had no other option. But there are a lot of people out there who are just manipulative sociopaths who take what they want, do what they want, and they don’t care if people get hurt. Some people like hurting others.
I do like though you concept of finding ways to deal with them as a community - though it should be BEFORE they get in trouble.
Interestingly, the term sociopath was coined to express that the kind of behavior you describe is actually social in nature, rather than a fundamental individual quality. Obviously you’re correct that people do those things, but the explanation is far more complex and interconnected than “it’s just how they are”.
It’s very, very appealing to conclude that someone who has acted badly is irreparably defective. That story offers a satisfying narrative, moral clarity, and a simple practical solution: eliminate them from society. So when you notice yourself thinking along those lines, question your motivation.
You’re right that there are some unique cases where it’s going to be prohibitively difficult to figure out how to address someone’s behavior. But those cases are a very small fraction of “criminals”. As this article shows, most victims of the justice system are random poor/non-white people. If we weren’t devoting so much resources to imprisoning everyone, we could give huge attention to each of the tough cases. Much like with school, as the class size shrinks, individualized attention increases and outcomes improve. Cases that previously seemed impossible can be worked out when you have both the means and the requirement to resolve them. And prisons only work on a large scale - when you have only a handful of people who would genuinely be candidates for imprisonment, it’s probably going to make sense to do something different with them anyway.
The death penalty is an uncivilized practice, and it’s good that we’ve (partly) moved away from it. I think that’s a true mark of social progress. But jail is the modern equivalent of hanging. It follows the same brutish philosophy: we don’t want to deal with you, so we’ll just use force to remove you from society. If we want to progress further, we need to get rid of this philosophy altogether, which means getting rid of prison as a solution to social problems.
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That was the idea when the first penitentiary was opened, the Eastern State Penitentiary1, in 1829. It didn’t work. People have been trying to make the idea work ever since.
ESP had a lot of issues with it’s rehabilitation though. It thought that zero human contact was the way forward, which is incredibly messed up. No seeing guards, no hearing other prisoners, alone in solitary and no speaking, for years.
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