• [EFFORT] The American System of "Corrections"
    4 replies, posted
[b]What are prisons even for?[/b] When a person enters into a society, there is a contract formed. The individual promises to not commit murder, surprise sex, theft, and thousands of other things, and in exchange, the society promises that the individual will not have murder, surprise sex, theft, or those same thousands of other things from happening to them. When an individual commits a forbidden act in lieu of this contract, it means that society has also broken its promise to the victims, if any. In order to maintain an orderly system, there has to be a way to keep that initial promise as best as the society can. The solution we've somehow fallen into has been to simply take people that break the law and remove them from the general pool of society and call it good. On a small scale, the logic is partially consistent: if you have a group of 5 people, and one of them breaks a rule, then removing that person from the group will probably lead to less rule breaking. Things this extremely limited model doesn't address however, include: [list]what happens to the person who gets removed from the group[/list] [list]what happens when the person is returned to the group after a period of time[/list] [list]whether or not a person that commits a crime once is predisposed to continue committing crimes with or without intervention[/list] [list]many other factors[/list] [b]What makes prisons the best choice?[/b] When most children are growing up, they are brought up with the concept of being punished for doing bad things. This generally works well for parenting, as kids end up avoiding the bad things that would get punished and go on to lead normal lives. An unfortunate side effect of this is that the idea of retribution for misbehavior becomes an absolute positive. The reason prisons have evolved as they have in America is largely due to the idea that the way to correct behavior is punishment. There is an enormous, albeit underappreciated, gap between punishment coming from a parent and punishment coming from the state. It should go without saying, but unfortunately this idea seems to be lost on those that have directed the justice and punishment systems into their current states. It is still based on the notion that negative reinforcement from the state will make people behave better, even though every statistic points in the opposite direction. [b]What's so special about American prisons compared to the rest of the world?[/b] America imprisons more people, both raw and per capita, than any other country in the world. We have 2.3 million people in prison at a rate of 760 per 100,000, compared to china's 1.5 million prisoners and russia's 626 per 100k. We have 4% of the world's population, and 1/4 of the world's prison population. As if this wasn't bad enough, these numbers are actually rising. In 2007 From 2000 to 2007, the country's population rose by 6.4%, and the prison population rose by 15%. We got to have such an inflated prison population by taking the misguided retribution philosophy i outlined before, and then taking it to its comical limits. 1/5 of the people in prison are there with a drug offense as their most severe charge, and just under half are there for non-violent offenses. A lot of these people going into prison are only criminals by the technical definition. The problem is that once they're in prison for years, it becomes nigh impossible to re-adjust to life on the outside again. Things that are okay and even necessary in day to day prison life simply do not work for outside life, and so many of them end up right back in prison. Over 2/3 end up getting re-arrested within 3 years of release, and half get charged with a new crime. The system does not work. On the very tip of the "comical limits" sundae is this statistic. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International did a study into people sentenced to life in prison without parole for crimes committed as juveniles. These are early teenagers that end up living their life, from age 13-17 to death, in prison, for something stupid that they did. They surveyed every country to see how many people were in each country that fit this criteria, and found interesting results. Tanzania has one such case, South Africa has four, and Israel has between four and seven. The US has two thousand, two hundred and twenty five such cases. Every other country in the world has zero. In fact, there are only a handful of countries that even have the legal allowance of such a sentence, but they rarely if ever use it. [b]So how do you fix such a broken system?[/b] You really don't. The solution is pretty clear and obvious: more emphasis on prison education and rehabilitation, shorter prison sentences all around to prevent people from becoming too detached from the outside world, at least decriminalization for marijuana, if not legalization for that and other drugs; it's not hard to come up with a dozen different things to improve the situation. The reason it is untenable is because it is nigh impossible to convince the population at large that punishing or killing a murderer or rapist isn't the best course of action, and that maybe society would be safer in the long run if they were instead rehabilitated into people that don't break the law. There are many, many things wrong with the prison system in america and i've hardly even scratched the surface, so i'm hoping this thread will have a lot of horrors and depressing statistics. PYF prison problem.
What's so broken about the system that you explained? Hell, I think punishments should be harder then what they have now.
this thread doesn't mean anything without sources for your info
Aids ?
OP's avatar says it all.
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