This is a generic, indeed a cliché tangent that points straight to a dumbed-down, predictable flamewar. Please don't do that on HN, regardless of how you feel about criminals.
Not having access to adequate forms of mental stimulation and activities for normal socialization, however, can reach the standard of torture, before long. Ramp it up enough, and eventually you're inflicting irreversible brain damage.
Whether it's either cruel or unusual is a subjective question.
What I asked was whether it's ok for a prisoner's quality of life to be determined by the whims of the prison. I'm of the opinion that whatever the right quality of life is, it should be consistent across the board. If I commit a federal crime, the punishment shouldn't vary based on which prison I get sent to.
In other words, if you think it's perfectly reasonable for, say, a murderer to be placed in extended isolation (as an example), then that should be applied evenly to all murderers.
Surely we agree on that much? Or do you believe being a criminal means you should be subject to arbitrary punishments at the whims of your captors?
It's pretty cruel to allow a person's mind to decay due to lack of stimulus. Prisoners need something to do. Books and board games are cheap and keep people occupied.
"Not having access to entertainment is not cruel or unusual"
Do you mean by some legal definition, psychological, or personal opinion?
Personally, I don't see how spending most of your day in a cell without a book or game, for years, wouldn't result in severe psychological damage. Damage that might have consequences for others once you're eventually released.
You could excuse literally any punishment with that line of reasoning. It's nonsensical, designed to appeal to emotion instead of presenting a coherent, logical approach to sentencing.
At some point we need to think pragmatically about what kind of society we want to create, rather than spending all of our time worrying about whether or not people are getting what they deserve.
> At some point we need to think pragmatically about what kind of society we want to create, rather than spending all of our time worrying about whether or not people are getting what they deserve.
To me, these two things are the same.
I want to live in a society where people are held responsible for their actions. If they commit a crime, they should be punished in proportion to their crime. This is a kind of humanism because it respects individuals' freedom of choice (i.e. you choose to commit a crime...or not).
To be concerned "whether or not people are getting what they deserve" is the definition of justice. And it goes both ways: if the punishment is too severe, too random, or inflicted on the innocent, that is also a problem.
Justice can't be separated from rehabilitation. If your punishment system predictably increases recidivism rates for crimes that have real-world consequences, then you basically are punishing innocent people for other people's actions.
Unless you plan to keep every prisoner in prison indefinitely, then the state that they are in when they leave prison matters. It doesn't just matter for them, it also matters for everybody else who lives alongside them in the future -- people who don't deserve to live in a worse, more dangerous society just because we determined that somebody else completely unrelated to them didn't suffer enough yet.
Prisoners who leave prison without being properly rehabilitated are a liability and a risk for everyone else outside of prison -- and even if you don't care about the prisoners, you should at least care about the other citizens who live around them.
> Justice can't be separated from rehabilitation. If your punishment system predictably increases recidivism rates for crimes that have real-world consequences, then you basically are punishing innocent people for other people's actions.
If we grant humans responsibility then this is not true. If we jail someone for knocking over a liquor store and then he gets out 5 years later and kills an old lady, the responsibility for those crimes is his. Not "society's," not "the criminal justice system's," only his.
My argument is that humans can make choices and therefore we are responsible for our actions. You argument is that humans cannot make choices, we are rag dolls tossed around by fate (or whichever system you feel like attacking).
> Unless you plan to keep every prisoner in prison indefinitely, then the state that they are when they leave prison matters. It doesn't just matter for them, it also matters for everybody else who lives alongside them in the future -- people who don't deserve to live in a worse, more dangerous society just because we determined that somebody else completely unrelated to them didn't suffer enough yet.
> Prisoners who leave prison without being properly rehabilitated are a liability and a risk for everyone else outside of prison -- and even if you don't care about the prisoners, you should at least care about the other citizens who live around them.
Talking about "prisoners who haven't been properly rehabilitated" makes my skin crawl. Criminals are human beings and you don't have a right to mold them according to your whims just because they broke the law. You only have a right to punish them in proportion to their crime, nothing more or less.
You believe that through empirical and rational reasoning you can "rehabilitate" criminals in order to reduce crime. I don't think this is true. I think your perspective is driven by emotion, a distaste for punishment, and a sense that the downtrodden are always right. But even if it is true, I'm against it on humanistic grounds.
A society where criminals are punished proportionally to their crimes is an end in itself.
> You argument is that humans cannot make choices, we are rag dolls tossed around by fate (or whichever system you feel like attacking).
We can with a high degree of confidence say that a focus on rehabilitation, training, and safer prison environments reduces future crime rates, the same way that we can say that putting air bags in cars reduces automobile deaths. You can take from that what you will about free will, but there just is an obvious relationship here, I don't think anyone can dispute that.
I don't think I'm attacking the concept of free will if I say that adding guard rails on a twisty road will reduce automobile deaths. I don't think I'm attacking the concept of free will if I say that areas with high job opportunities and housing rates tend to have less crime, and that investing in public infrastructure can lower crime rates. Similarly, I don't think I'm attacking the concept of free will if I say that prisoners being able to get a job after they leave prison is heavily correlated with recidivism rates.
> Criminals are human beings and you don't have a right to mold them according to your whims
Okay sure, but giving prisoners access to educational and recreational materials and programs isn't "molding them" against their will. They want this stuff too.
It's not for a prisoner's benefit that jails are charging money to make phone calls to their family -- that's not a policy that's born out of our commitment to avoid changing their minds against their will. We're not talking about "reeducating" people, we're looking at very obvious statistical data that says people who don't spend their entire prison sentence wasting their minds, who have training to get a job after they leave prison, who aren't regularly placed into dangerous situations that reinforce fight/flight responses while they're in prison, are less likely to hurt other people.
And you can look at that and say that it's distasteful, or that they don't deserve a job, or that you don't like the idea that environment and resources have an obvious statistical effect on crime rates; but if you do, then I think that you should also have to grapple with telling ordinary people who have committed no crimes that you're deliberately putting prisoners into situations where the math says that those prisoners are more likely to commit future crimes.
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To add onto this, we already do have policies in prisons that are designed to mold prisoner minds, many of them really problematic -- we knock off jail time for prisoners that take on dangerous jobs (often for little to no pay), and the excuse we use is that it's good for them. We've put prisoners into extremely dangerous situations fighting wildfires in California even though many of those prisoners on release are not eligible to be firefighters because of their felony records. Less on the problematic side, we also regularly commute drug sentences if prisoners will enter rehab programs and do community service, a judicial policy that pretty much everyone thinks is a good idea.
So it's not like I'm proposing some kind of dangerous unprecedented idea here, we are already more than happy to talk about rehabilitation as an excuse for policy when it suits us. I'm not proposing a brand new unheard-of idea, I'm just arguing that giving access to books, educational materials, and entertainment will also very clearly make society safer -- and that whether or not you think it's anyone's responsibility to keep prisoners from re-offending, it is still kind of messed up to tell ordinary citizens, "we're going to have policies that make you less safe because we're worried somebody somewhere isn't suffering enough." As a citizen, even isolated from my beliefs about how justice actually works and how it's different from punishment, I still think it's pretty understandable and pretty logical to be upset about that.
> We can with a high degree of confidence say that a focus on rehabilitation, training, and prison environment reduces future crime rates, the same way that we can say that putting air bags in cars reduces automobile deaths. You can take from that what you will about free will, but there just is an obvious relationship here, I don't think anyone can dispute that.
Comparing social engineering to an air bag is silly. We can ram cars into walls in labs over and over. We can't fit society in a lab and so we can't model it very well. But even if we could reduce crime using these strategies, the strategies themselves fit my definition of a crime because they violate my definition of justice.
> I don't think I'm attacking the concept of free will if I say that adding guard rails on a twisty road will reduce deaths. I don't think I'm attacking the concept of free will if I say that areas with high job opportunities and housing rates tend to have less crime, and that investing in public infrastructure can lower crime rates. Similarly, I don't think I'm attacking the concept of free will if I say that prisoners being able to get a job after they leave prison is heavily correlated with recidivism rates.
You previously blamed the justice system for recidivism instead of the criminal (because it should have reformed him). That's quite different than "guard rails". What did I say that made you think I'm against "investing in public infrastructure" or "allowing ex-cons to get jobs"?
> Okay sure, but giving prisoners access to educational and recreational materials and programs isn't "molding them" against their will. They want this stuff too.
> It's not for a prisoner's benefit that jails are charging money to make phone calls to their family -- that's not a policy that's born out of our commitment not to accidentally mess with their minds against their will. We're not talking about "reeducating" people, we're looking at very obvious statistical data that says people who don't spend their entire prison sentence wasting their minds, who have training to get a job after they leave prison, who aren't regularly placed into dangerous situations that reinforce fight/flight responses while they're in prison, are less likely to hurt other people.
I said that the punishment should be proportional to the crime. I didn't say that prisoners should sit in their cells going insane. I didn't say the author here should not be able to have a chess board. It's reasonable to question whether a punishment is proportional to the crime, whether it is cruel and unusual, etc.
Overly cruel punishments (China executing drug users for example) are exactly as wrong as punishing criminals "for their own good". If you could prevent all theft by, say, cutting off the hands of thieves, would you be okay with that? (I wouldn't, because the punishment does not fit the crime).
> And you can look at that and say that it's distasteful, or that they don't deserve a job, or that you don't like the idea that environment and resources have an obvious statistical effect on crime rates; but if you do, then I think that you should also have to grapple with telling ordinary people who have committed no crimes that you're deliberately putting prisoners into situations where they're more likely to hurt them.
I never said ex-cons don't deserve a job. I don't think that ex-cons should have to announce themselves in job applications. That is exactly the kind of dehumanizing strategy that I'm arguing against. When you've done your time, you've paid your dues, the world is set right, and you should be able to go on your way.
Believe me, I know what you're proposing is not "brand new". It's very old. And you're correct to say that it already exerts a lot of influence.
My argument is that, as it gains more and more influence, the value of human beings will gradually be lost, because we will be treating people as means to some end (a better society, a safer society), rather than ends in themselves. Humans will be viewed as "products of their environment" rather that free-willing, free-acting agents. Anyway, this drama is not new, it's as old as time and I'm sure it will keep playing out for as long as there are people.
I understand you didn't write this, but this is the context my original comment was made in -- the context of a series of posters who were very explicitly denying the humanity and agency of the prisoners in question. Again, they weren't you, but still, understand that the context I'm talking about and the entry point I had into the discussion was people arguing that denying prisoners mental stimulation and leaving their brains to rot was a fair and just punishment.
My argument was that even if you didn't care about the inherent humanity of a prisoner, you should at least care about reducing recidivism rates, which mental stimulation and job training absolutely does.
And I understand now that you aren't arguing against that. You came into this conversation with a different perspective and you're annoyed that I'm treating it like the same perspective. I apologize for that. It's hard for me to context switch so quickly, but I should have made more of an effort.
But similarly, the perspective I have is not at all that we should treat human beings purely as a means to an end, and I don't think I said anything to that effect; my argument has consistently been that even if someone doesn't care about human beings as an end to themselves or as beings with basic human rights, at least they can care about the society surrounding them. Because that's the context that this thread started in: people literally arguing that making sure a victim was satisfied was the only goal that mattered.
I haven't advocated for any of the extreme positions you're talking about: I'm not saying that people don't have responsibility for their actions, I'm saying that in responding to those actions we as a society are capable of hurting more people than just the guilty, and we have some degree of moral duty to prevent innocent people from being unnecessarily hurt when it's possible and prudent to do so. In other words, if I know someone innocent is going to be hurt, and I can prevent it without taking away the rights or dehumanizing another person, and I refuse to do so, that isn't justice.
So for example, if a person drives drunk and crashes, I'm not saying that person isn't to blame or that they shouldn't be punished. But I do still want to put up some guard rails and possibly save their life and maybe even a few other drivers as well. If they hit into another driver or pedestrian while drunk and kill them -- that is itself an unjust outcome.
So if someone came to me and said, "why are you paying for taxis for drunk drivers, why are you putting up guard rails, why can't they accept responsibility", I wouldn't argue that drunk drivers aren't responsible for their actions. But I would argue that as a society we also have a responsibility to protect innocent people on the roads who didn't choose to drive drunk (again, to the extent that we can do so without unfairly targeting or taking away someone's rights). I'm not arguing the extreme, I'm not arguing that if someone gets pulled over driving drunk that they shouldn't be charged. I'm not arguing that we should just let everybody out of jail, or cut off their hands if they steal, or bribe criminals to stop committing crimes. I'm arguing what I think is a fairly standard, uncontroversial opinion in the context of a thread that said that we needed to keep murders from playing board games because of justice.
From your above comment, I kind of suspect that you don't actually disagree with me on that except in the extreme where it interferes with personal responsibility. In fact, it sounds like the two of us actually agree on a nontrivial number of actual policies (getting rid of felony boxes in job applications, giving prisoners mental stimulation, allowing them to talk to their families, even building out housing/public infrastructure in low-income areas). Aside from a concern that I'm going to lose control, completely abandon the idea of personal responsibility, justice, or human rights and go all Minority Report on the world (something that, again, I want to be clear I am not advocating for), what do we actually disagree on?
Can I extend an olive branch where we just agree that the original context of this thread (prisoners aren't being treated harshly enough by the current system) was a really bad take for both moral and pragmatic reasons?
Even were the victim alive, we are not a society that encourages the victim to dictate the punishment, nor allow the victim to carry out the punishment, so what would the victim's thoughts matter?
As much as it's presented otherwise, punishment western democracies is first and foremost a method of deterrence for the good of all, not for the satisfaction of those harmed.
It's not about him. It's about us, as a society. When we imprison someone, we take ownership and responsibility for their well-being.
To be clear, we can decide, as the responsibility holders over their well-being, that we believe they should be treated like garbage. Right or wrong, we have that ability and there is no higher authority than society itself to determine if that's right or wrong.
Although I have a strong opinion about what is or isn't an appropriate punishment, we absolutely should not be basing our decisions on the feelings of the victim. Putting aside that the victim is dead and can't express how they feel about it, this is no way to run a law-based society.
If I commit a crime, and someone else commits an identical crime, surely we can agree that the punishment -- whatever it may be -- should be the same (or at least equivalent). It shouldn't vary based on who the victim is or how the victim may feel about it.
If you are not sentencing someone to life in jail or the death penalty, then you can't treat a prisoner bad enough to cause lasting damage because they will rejoin society at some point.
This is irrespective of the victim's thoughts; if I get violently robbed and society + a judge has decided that's worth 10 years in jail, then that's what it is.
If you think prisoners deserve absolutely nothing to the point of causing psychological or physical harm then you are saying the crime they committed is worth life in prison or the death penalty.
It's possible, but I don't think it's pragmatic. I don't think the higher tier needs of violent offenders is something as a society we need to spend resources on.
Unless your alternative is the death penalty or life without parole, we had better start thinking about it. One day, they will be released and after 10-30 years of desocialization we will have to suffer the consequences of that treatment. Either by supporting them indefinitely through social welfare programs or by the consequence of them committing additional crimes due to an inability to obtain or maintain a job and reasonable social standing.
People here imagine this hard-working professional with good intentions to better himself in prison that just was caught with marijuana or cocaine a few years ago. They don't realize that these are people that would rape their mothers, instead they advocate for them to have pleasant conditions.
>People here imagine this hard-working professional with good intentions to better himself in prison
I'm under no illusion that a lot of people in prison have committed heinous crimes, that doesn't mean they shouldn't be treated like a human being. Their punishment is their loss of freedom. They still have a need for recreation like everyone else, and chess if anything can be a helpful tool in hopefully improving their mental state.
I think the American prison system does very little to improve the chances that these people can become better citizens and psychologically depriving them of stimulation I can only imagine stands in the way of achieving that.
Like it or not, this is not reality. Reality is that they aren't treated like human beings, are deprived recreation, are unsafe, are mistreated by staff, etc.
Saying that loss of freedom is their punishment is viewing it in the most idealistic way, disconnected from the reality of it. Being in the prison system is far worse than lack of freedom.
> Being in the prison system is far worse than lack of freedom. That's why prison reform is so important.
Or maybe that is kinda the point of prison? I’m all for nonviolent offenders to go into rehabilitation etc etc... but for the violent... prison is supposed to be shit, or am I missing something?
Public safety - Keep someone deemed a threat to society away from the public until they have served their time, or are otherwise deemed safe.
Deterrence to others - Show to other citizens that committing a particular crime has punishment, so they will not do the same.
Punishment of the offender - Actions have consequences.
Reform - As much as possible, set prisoners up for success if they are eventually to be let out. There is a lot more to this, but I'll leave it there.
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Note how "revenge" and "sadism" are not in that list. How does it benefit society, or the prisoners, to remove certain social, educational or entertainment activities? Do you think someone planning to murder or rape someone will be deterred by knowing they won't have chess? Do you think it helps or hurts a prisoner's mental health by taking away such simple things?
I don't have many answers, but more people need to see prison for what it should do for society and the incarcerated, rather than wishing for prisoners to get sexually assaulted (for example).
People here advocate for them to have pleasant conditions because it ultimately produces a society that has less people who would rape their own mothers.
It's people like you who are so blinded by your hunger for revenge to actually consider solutions that would decrease our recidivism rates.
>Revenge for the wronged is a part of the justice isn’t it?
No it is not. Revenge is not justice. Human society has come a long way from Hammurabi; we got rid of "eye for an eye" centuries ago. "An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind" is what is wrong here.
Fundamentally though it is not still about some level of revenge? Just because we got more sophisticated to take into account things like intent doesn’t really change the math. You’ve made a nice quote but drawn a distinction without drawing a difference
If I steal $2k the punishment is usually still give $2k back and then all fees then even some punitive damages...
>If I steal $2k the punishment is usually still give $2k back and then all fees then even some punitive damages...
If I kill your brother, is it proper justice for you to kill my brother?
Many crimes are irreversible; and revenge only serves to make the victimized feel better but ultimately does not restore balance. Justifying revenge quickly leads you down to inhumane punishments - after all who's to say the victim was given their fill of revenge? This is why there has always been a philosophical line between justice and revenge.
The whole point of a criminal justice system is to reduce crime. That definitionally means focusing on making sure prison doors ain't revolving. Whether that crime reduction meets some individual's arbitrary standards of retribution is entirely secondary to that fundamental primary objective; revenge for the sake of revenge is not justice, but rather the precise opposite.
> The whole point of a criminal justice system is to reduce crime.
I think the justice system is just what the people think it should be... not some unarguable objective goal.
Having said that... people value revenge. If we automatically released all killers because we had a drug or 10 day program that would 100% prevent reoffence, I don’t think people would call that justice. Right or wrong, I think in most people’s eyes justice demands some level of revenge if not to a specific person, then to society at large.
Restoration of the wronged is more valuable than revenge for the wronged. A rehabilitated prisoner can pay restitution, an executed or habitually imprisoned criminal can’t pay restitution.
It is beneath me to beat a dog out of spite when it bites me because it is sick or was badly trained. Such an act of cruelty would say more about me than anything else. I feel the same way about such low-life humans, pretty much.
I think a lot of people here disagree with you, but you aren't wrong. This is a fact a lot of people forget when they jump to the defense of criminals.
It's also possible to believe that revenge against a criminal isn't positive for anyone on its own. There should be consequences to crime, especially egregious ones like murder, but that doesn't mean that the victims are better off and it doesn't mean we should sadistically torture people who almost always have wiring issues that made them prone to committing terrible acts. It's essentially saying that we believe that criminals are hopeless for reform, which can be true, but often times it's not true.
And you know this how? Further, you know that this classification applies to the author how?
God forbid we put some effort into rehabilitation to prevent recidivism instead of just retribution for the sake of retribution. The guy's serving a 33 year long sentence. That's 33 years isolated from society, and 33 years of lag behind said society, resulting in a lifelong disadvantage even without considering employers being wholly unwilling to hire people with criminal backgrounds. That's punishment enough; if you believe otherwise, then the American prison system is clearly failing to do its job.
It's hard to say here in the US, since rehabilitation over retribution is poorly studied, particularly for violent offenders.
As I linked in response to your other comment asking a similar question, though, other countries have demonstrated quite a bit of success with the approach, Norway as one example having a low recidivism rate even among violent offenders. The Norwegian socioeconomic safety nets certainly help, too; crime in general is a function of both mental health and economic standing, so public policies aimed at addressing both of those things will naturally lead to both fewer incarcerations and fewer reincarcerations.
IQ is kind of a worthless measurement, given the numerous problems with its reliability and its rather arbitrary standards. Turns out measuring intellect is more complicated than some one-size-fits-all single numeric score (the meaning of which constantly fluctuates by design anyway).
> it's one of the most studied quantifiable concepts in pyschology.
A McDonald's hamburger is one of the most studied forms of food in gastronomy. That doesn't necessarily make it worthwhile to eat :)
See also: Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man, which describes at length why things like IQ and craniometry are fundamentally flawed due to their fallacious and unscientific insistence on reification and ranking - neither of which have been adequately proven to be applicable to something as complicated as human intelligence.
See also the very existence of the Flynn effect, and the fact that IQ is defined such that 100 is always the average IQ - making the comparison of IQs across time periods meaningless, since 100 IQ in 1900's America means something different from 100 IQ in 2000's America which means something different from 100 IQ in 2000's Norway which means something different from 100 IQ in 2000's Nigeria.
