I read Surface Detail a while back and it had an interesting take on the punishment of criminals. The mind can be a dark place…
Ultimately I’d rather go for something that reduces people need to commit crimes rather than punishing them after the action but do we really want to do that?
Yeah, because all those studies are solving the problem.
Are you saying we need a study to see if the studies have solved the problem?
i guess the real issue is what forces people to crime in the first place, im guessing its not simply because the punishment isnt severe enough, but im guessing that would factor into the thinking…
saw an interesting show, suggesting on of the reasons for the illegal tabaco explosion and subsequent wars in Australia now is becuase the punishments arent severe enough, legislation is catching up to it, but for a long period, from a criminality POV, the risk vs reward factor with selling illegal Tabaco as opposed to harder drugs was advantageous for the criminal
ultimately though, i think alot of petty crims dont turn to crime becuase its a great career decision, to risk sounding all Brendan Rodgers, its becuase alot of hope has been taken away from people…
the third factor is the overglamourisation of thug culture…until popular culture decides being a thug isnt something to glamourise, it will always be attractive to certain people
there…ive solved the crime issue, im done for today, tomorrow ill come back and solve the hospital system, and by monday next week i should have a bit of time to work on world peace…
How much money is wasted on public enquiries, reviews etc. They take years to tell us what we already know. It’s a nonsense.
Well, for things like crime and punishment, they are usually better served by simply seeing what does and doesn’t work in other countries.
There is a mountain of evidence that shows that this is simply not how it works.
The bigger problem is that their recommendations are rarely adopted by the organisations found wanting. Stephen Lawrence died 33 years ago and the Met is still being described as institutionally racist even today.
What isn’t solving the problems is the failure to implement the recommendations from these studies. Some people just want to believe they know better than people who have devoted decades to study such things.
Get a few Bibby Stockholm vessels into service.
Thatll give them shitty internet & TV signals, as well as sea sickness to deal with
The problem with that approach is that a very large percentage of the people in prisons are people with chronically poor decision-making ability. Sure, there are some crimes that hold up to a rational analysis of benefit versus cost/risk, but even those are often committed by people who aren’t thinking that through, just taking advantage of an opportunity.
Basically, most criminals are fundamentally just fuck-ups.
More importantly, brutalising and dehumanising prisoners creates hardened, sometimes sadistic, animalistic people in large numbers due to lowering and actually eroding due to punishment and isolation, their empathy, and increases recidivism rates greatly (and due to more serious crimes).
It is stupid way to treat prisoners and serves only for petty revenge and retribution, as you willfully create fruther socioeconomic problems (costly) due to “your” irrational need for revenge and cruelty. British prisons have a very poor repuation in Norway and it is kind of odd to read that even British prisons (which are known as fairly terrible places to be, where you actually create further criminals in many cases due to ill treatment of prisoners) are too “mild” and not savage and sadistic enough.
It doesn’t work. Dehumanising people, even people who have done terrible things, doesn’t work. You only further damage them and creates risks for society as well as the fellow inmates of said prisoners mistreated.
That having been said, terror (instilling extreme fear) works.
It’s possible to lower crime rates through authoritarian and totalitarian control and punishments (such as decimation, mass executions, public torture). Of course it is. But to do so you must create a fucked up hell scape where you will be lucky to find a “nice” person to talk to, since everyone around you will be desensitised.
The only other way that works, is rehabilitation. So evil hellscape or rehabilitation, and imo the more you try for the middle the more you will fail.
Obviously this requires more prison space so until there is this isn’t an option.
Even if it was an option, our pathetic justice system, aided and abetted by some batshit out of touch judges, means harsher sentences aren’t going to happen.
Hundreds of murders every year, yet only a total of 70 odd are serving whole life orders.
Life obviously doesn’t mean life, with more emphasis on rehabilitation than keeping the cunts away from the public by too many people
It isn’t called the University of Crime for nothing
That’s a wild reading of the responses.
What I, and a few others, have argued is that there is absolutely no evidence that harsh prison conditions have any impact on offending rates.
As @Arminius said, prison is full of people with chronically poor decision making abilities. I’d go further and suggest that the rates of people with ADHD and Autism spectrum disorders in the prison population is absolutely sky high.
We used to have a death penalty FFS. That wasn’t a deterrent. I don’t know why you think taking the internet away would be.
That is the utterly depressing reality of working around criminal justice. I was briefly part of a working group in the mid-90s tasked with an overhaul of the Canadian system. It wasn’t a waste of time, some problems were legitimately addressed, but at core the basic tension you identify above was just not solvable. You could move in one direction or another to adjust the balance of the negative results towards the one you (or the politicians driving it at any one time) want less of, but you just get more of the other one. In the end, we just threw our hands up, gave up on the idea of ‘the good’, and just looked at how to minimize the system cost to the taxpayer. At the most basic level, I just don’t really believe in rehabilitation.
I did somewhat enjoy saying that to someone lobbying for the Elizabeth Fry Society…
Wider estimates suggest that up to half of the adult prison population may be neurodivergent, covering conditions like autism, ADHD, dyslexia, and learning disabilities, though many cases remain undiagnosed. Reports from the HM Inspectorate of Prisons
Harsher treatment or conditions while in prison doesn’t work.
Rehabilitation doesn’t work.
Only solution is more prison space becoming available.
Not creating this space by letting criminals out early, but by building more prisons.
The number one priority in the eyes of everyone should be to keep these criminals away from the public.
There’s also a lot of people in prison who are just bad people who got a kick out doing what they did to end up in prison,
an adrenaline buzz if you like