this post was submitted on 30 May 2024
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Society is literally better off if Fuckface 45 is no longer available to be around society. Most people who are in jail can be reformed, and likely shouldn't even be there.
But there's a very small subset of the populace who must rot. Fuckface 45 is in that group.
Yes, I agree. I was attempting to get across the hypocrisy of speaking of ethical absolutes which are then followed by the cognitive dissonance of exceptions that nullify the principles of the ethics.
Punishment as a crime deterrent is acceptable, but punishment for the sake of sadism or vengeance is not. Prisons should be applied to keep the vast majority of society safe and to reform who we can so that they can return to society and function beside us all, rather than prisons existing as torture chambers for those who have committed transgressions.
I can't add anything else, I agree.
Punishment as a crime deterrent is acceptable
Ok, I'll be the one to disagree with that statement.
Let me first say that the word "crime" is rather problematic. If I'm going to argue that society shouldn't "punish" people for certain things, it doesn't make sense for me not to take exception to contjnuing to use the term that means basically "the set of actions for which society should punish one." So maybe something more like "antisocial behavior" is better?
Anyway, I think it kindof takes a broken person to hurt people. (To a large extent, at least. There are thresholds of "hurting people" below which I'm sure you'd agree no action should be taken.) And punishment, at least after a certain age, cannot but further damage a person. What a person needs in order to rehabilitate is to become whole/well. Not to be (further) oppressed.
I can get behind, say, protecting people (not just the "innocent", and potentially including the perpetrator) by involuntary imprisonment. (Were I in such a mental state in the future, the (hopefully) sane person writing this post would want to be kept from doing anything truly terrible. That's not to say I trust the institutions we have today to do the right thing in such a case, but in principle I'd be for the practice if executed well.) Rehabilitation (even sometimes involuntary rehabilitation) as you rightly call out can be laudible (again depending on the execution). But I can't advocate for state-imposed or society-imposed "punishment." Even aside from theoretical arguments about the roll of the state, punishing someone who was already desperate enough to commit antisocial acts is just going to make them more desperate for longer and prevent real rehabilitation. Probably dooming them to a life of repeat offending.
Whatever institutions are necessary for dealing with antisocial behavior in a populace really need to be more akin to medical institutions than places of "punishment."
We can be humane and still accomplish that. He goes to prison, but because of the insanely high chance of him being harmed, or forcing secret service to also effectively be in prison, we give him house arrest. Secret service are now his jailers. He gets TV but no access to communications outside supervised visits and phone calls.
Almost entirely limit his ability to mass communicate and influence the world.
He gets TV
Like fuck he should get that. Give him newspapers to read to keep up with the news.
What he ingests ultimately won't matter. It's what he disseminates that truly matters. And he shouldn't be able to get messages out to the masses. His voice to the people needs to be cut out.
And to tack on, the secret service detail should be rotated regularly so he can't maintain buddies.
But imagine the fun when he can't have his dose of happy chemicals while watching faux news.
I'll allow it lol
What really ought to be done is to take away the opportunity for bad people to be able to abuse any sort of power.
The thing about policies like prison abolition is that they don't work by themselves. They must be accompanied by changes in society as a whole. This includes designing systems where people don't need to be locked up. This primarily involves removing the financial cause of crime (poverty and desperation) through welfare and socialism and all that cool stuff, and dealing with the psychological cause of crime (rage, greed, etc.) with significantly better mental healthcare. Even utter selfish psychopaths will usually cooperate in a fair system because they recognize that cooperation and mutual aid is beneficial for all, including themselves.
Still, some people are just unrepentant monsters. Personally I favor sending such people to live with each other on an isolated island where they're free to do whatever so long as they stay there. Sort of like a self-managed Australia.
Be very cautious of how this is done, these are the grey areas fascists like to hide in.
https://reductress.com/post/free-speech-is-a-fundamental-right-says-bedbug/
https://qz.com/1053957/charlottesville-neo-nazis-and-the-case-against-free-speech-for-fascists
As someone who doesn’t believe that humans have free will, I don’t believe people should be cast as being culpable for their actions and thus morally deserving punishment or praise.
However, there exist people who do harm to their neighbors and to society, and the above doesn’t mean that they need to be given free rein to do whatever they’re driven to do. To me, the call to eliminate prisons is like the call to defund police - it’s not saying that nothing should be there, but rather what we currently have not only doesn’t solve the problem but actually makes it worse.
From my point of view, incarceration needs to serve at least one of two purposes:
- Changing the person’s propensity to engage in those behaviors using an evidence-based medical approach rather than one of “criminal justice”
- Isolation to prevent caused harm while necessary. The isolation should be no more onerous than is strictly necessary. It might mean hotel-like accommodations and academic classes, but the people would not be permitted to leave the facility. I believe this is the practice in some Northern European countries, which have a lower rate of recidivism than the US.
We can dream.
Americans have a huge hard on for punishing people, regardless of utility.
I'm against police brutality and inhumane prisons except for people who insist those things should be the norm and wield their influence to make it so.
Due to the wide range of possible human development, I'm sure there are some people who are actually incapable of being rehabilitated. I don't think that's typical, and I think rehabilitation should be the preferred option.
Yeah the solution isn't no prisons, the solution is better prisons that focus on making folks ready for society again. When that's not at all possible then lifetime in good living conditions is fine, maybe these facilities are more medically oriented than straight up prisons. Nordic countries are once again showing the way there.
Then they shouldn't call it "prison abolition". Leftists are horrible at naming stuff. "Reform prisons? No, let's headline that we want to abolish them. Reform police? No, let's say we should stop funding them and also make an acronym saying every individual cop is a bastard, which would basically turn anyone who has had a good experience with someone in the police against our movement"
the person you're responding to isn't a prison abolitionist if they dont say there should be no prisons.
IIRC, anarchists typically want to actually abolish police departments and replace them with a novel method of security called community defense.
it's not novel. it's what communities have done since the beginning of time.
This is a fair point, but in our atomized society systems that require large amounts of interconnectivity to function are novel. Novelty isn't really a function of history so much as familiarity.
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To me, "prison abolition" sounds fine, since the new type of detention facilities would have very little in common with traditional prisons, the point of which is, mainly, punishment.
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Yeah the solution isn’t no prisons
yes, it is. imagine this with any other abolished human atrocity of our past.
locking people in cages is wrong.
i haven't read the reductress article, but here's my take as a prison abolitionist: abolish prisons. there are a thousand other people who got railroaded worse and are getting stiffer sentences in worse prisons than trump will ever know. the slogan "none of us is free until all of us are free" has a new inverse "don't let trump free until all of us are free". this is absolutely abolitionist while avoiding being a special pleader for trump, and will likely have the same practical result if the maxim is followed: prisons are unlikely to be abolished, so he would be eually unlikely to escape it.
I agree. But for people that can't be rehabilitated, the "prison" should still provide them with a decent life. Not luxurious, but comfortable enough that thy can still be happy in an isolated environment.
Happy probably isn't the right word but then again neither is really I think any word that exists in the English language, I don't think we have a word that encapsulates the mere lacking of pain and suffering without any positive feeling in its place.
Nah, I'll stick with happy. As long as they can't harm others, even absolute dickwads should he allowed to be happy. Within reasonable limits in terms of cost to society in order to make it happen, of course.
Bring back the oubliette just for him.
Can we lower him in it upside-down? That would be more painful, but would also kill him a lot faster... Hmmm, the long term affects would probably be worse.
These all or nothing arguments are for stupid people to embrace. I don't want to get rid of prisons. I want to get rid of for profit prisons. I want to get rid of long prison sentences for drug use that doesn't involve violence. I want longer terms for any theft. Perhaps life terms for organized theft like those trash humans who raid a store. I want anyone convicted of multiple felonies to rot there for the rest of their life. I want anyone of rapes or murders to do the same. What I want is a prison system that tries educate and redeem short time inmates and give the bare minimum to trash like trump.
What I want is a prison system that tries educate and redeem short time inmates
So much this, the goal should be rehabilitation into society. I acknowledge that some crimes are too egregious, and it’s reasonable that if someone behaves in an egregiously sociopathic or psychopathic way, then they should rot in prison away from the rest of society.
I find that a lot of the extreme ideologies are often there to take away person power from achievable and practical goals.
I want prison sentences for white-collar, corporate crime.
I think it should break down like this,
Civil Law, for civil disputes related to property, nuisance behavior, and other such day to day business.
Criminal law, where sentences start actually including punitive time of some variety or other has to cause harm, has to be intentional or so damaging that not having intended to do harm doesn't cover just how much harm was did. Non violent offenders should be fasttracked to work based rehabilitation programs in supervised housing. Violent offenders need time with a mental health professional before they can be cleared to enter rehab.
Felony Law, the especially heinous and destructive shit that requires an entire prosecution team to handle the sheer weight of what you did either because of scale or because what you did is so heinous that it causes mental health problems for people handling the evidence (this is a real thing, the toolbox killers disgusted one investigator so much he ended up killing himself because he was unable to live with even knowing the extent of what they did). This is the level where isolation from society should be less about making a holding space in which a person is given the tools and expectations to do better for themselves, and more about keeping this clear grave danger to society writ large quarantined from potential victims. If they seem to redeem themselves, great, they can keep being redeemed in their padded cell.
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Reactionary conservatives are always so shiny when freshly minted.
I think it's normal to have an emotional reaction to certain crimes, which is why there is a jury selection process, and such a thing as recusal for conflicts of interest. Someone can logically be against the death penalty but call for it if a loved one was murdered for instance.
I don't think one emotional outbursts makes a whole political spectrum shift, but I could be wrong
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I don't need him to rot in prison. I'd be quite satisfied with total recompense for all he's stolen, given away that wasn't his, and simply not payed that he owed. He would be reduced to zero, and nobody will deal with him ever again. Life as the rest of us would be punishment enough for him, especially when they let all the other criminals out and somebody he pissed off since he got into politics comes after him.
Failing the ideal of prison abolition, I suppose rotting forever is good enough.
MORE free room & board for the twice-impeached, convicted felon president?
Why not paid federal minimum wage to work 40 hour weeks for community/charity causes?
13th amendment starts out so strong…
thennn the ooooof
Damn, whoever wrote that has terrible handwriting.
Low energy pre-typewriter Abe
It was probably a secretary or a calligrapher who was deliberately getting artsy with it by choosing a style in which all the letters look the same. Which is a terrible font choice. And writing poorly on purpose is still writing poorly. This secretary chose aesthetics over producing a record that would be readable hundreds of years in the future.
Really?!
They couldn’t re-ink consistently though?
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Prison is very often not free. A lot of inmates leave prison with massive bills. Prisoners also aren't typically paid anything close to minimum wage.
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I hope you are abolishing them not in favour of death penalty
I think it's more in line with abolishing the current for-profit prison system in favour of a system that actually decreases recidivism.
ETA: I know that technically the death penalty would also decrease recidivism but I don't think the government should have the power to have people killed. I was thinking along the lines of the Scandinavian systems.
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