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tadbit | 1 year ago
It would greatly benefit society to have prisoners be rehabilitated. It's currently just a vicious cycle that produces hardened, repeat offenders that prison companies can make money off, money that comes from tax payers.
NoMoreNicksLeft|1 year ago
It would. If only we knew how to do that.
There are places in this country where attitudes develop for many years, decades even, before that person is ever incarcerated. By the time that happens, these attitudes are quite immutable, and they see any gentleness as vulnerability. They're adept at lying, exploitation, and have no qualms about hurting others. What sort of rehabilitation do you even think is possible? Where do you expect this million person army of rehabilitators to come from exactly, to be hired in these prisons? When they start getting raped and killed, will you just double down? Under what principles, exactly, do you expect the rehabilitations to operate? Do you ever remember seeing some study or research that concluded "If steps A, B, and C are performed on convicts who meet the empirical criteria of X, Y, and Z" then they will become upstanding members of society"?
vidarh|1 year ago
We can tell, from comparing with systems. So the current US prison system imposes vast amounts of violence and abuse on prisoners without achieving anything beneficial.
I've said before and I say it again: If I were to - by some stroke of magic, seeing as I'm neither a US resident or citizen - be put on a US jury, I don't think I could find a moral justification for convicting someone even if I knew with 100% certainty they were guilty. The US prison system stands out as such a barbaric and immoral system that I'd consider inflicting it on anyone hardly any more moral than most violent crime.
tadbit|1 year ago
We'll never figure out how to do it until we actually start trying to rehabilitate people.
> There are places in this country where attitudes develop for many years, decades even, before that person is ever incarcerated.
This is text book bigotry.
kelnos|1 year ago
We do. Quite a few other developed countries than ours are able to successfully rehabilitate prisoners, and have a very low rate of recidivism. We're never going to rehabilitate 100% of all convicted criminals, but we can certainly do orders of magnitude better than we do here in the US today.
But the US doesn't want to work like that. Most people here seem to think that prison is a place to be punished, not to be "fixed". And the entire prison-industrial complex that sits atop it all has a vested interest in keeping it that way.
In the US we are very good at cutting off our own noses to spite our faces. The kind of prison that actually rehabilitates people looks "unfair" to most Americans. It looks like coddling, a vacation, when compared to our current prison system. Americans want criminals to be punished, first and foremost. They should live in poor conditions and have the most difficult time. Because that's what they "deserve". And it doesn't matter if that produces the worst outcomes for American society as a whole, including for the people who believe this stuff. As long as the convicts get their harsh punishment, the tough-on-crime crowd is happy to endure any poor societal side-effects.
It reminds me of how we deal with homeless people, or even housed people who are on the edge financially. God forbid we give anyone anything without them having earned it. That would be colossally unfair to all those hard-working folks! Even if welfare and homeless assistance ends up making everyone's lives better than the alternative.
It's completely disgusting, but I don't know how to change people's attitudes on this, not at a country-wide scale.