[goto_self]

This is absurd. Something can work in some cases for some people and yet not in all cases. It's not a matter of always working or never working.

There's a line of thought I keep seeing in this thread: a purpose of imprisonment is deterrence by punishment. people still commit crimes. therefore deterrence by punishment doesn't work. therefore prisons should be replaced with free-range daycare for adults.

You don't have to like the idea of restricting someone's freedom. But would you rather that a violent offender be in prison and unable to cause further harm? I would.

[jschwartzi]

It's not an either-or kind of thing, where we can either put people in a hell-on-earth where they're traumatized or we can let them go free. It's possible to acknowledge that a person has done something terrible while also treating them with some basic human dignity. Lots of professions agree that you get from people what you expect, and when you expect people to act with dignity many of them do.

Prison doesn't have to be a place where punishment is meted out upon some imperfect soul for an eternity. It can just as easily be a place where the inmates are expected to make an effort to understand why they are there and how they can move on from that chapter of their life. And we can still lock up the unrepentant for a very long time.

Many of the Christians that I've talked to use the phrase "hate the sin, love the sinner." Maybe it's time we took that to heart and allow our prison population the dignity of being treated like human beings?