The Failure of the Prison System

Here's a nice article on what a rational prison system might look like. Some excerpts:

Those who fill our prisons are clearly undeterred by society’s punishments. The fact that rates of recidivism in the UK and US hover between 60 and 65 per cent only underscores the point that incarceration routinely fails to deter repeat offending. It might seem that more severe punishments would be more effective deterrents, but often the opposite is true. In a number of cases, the death penalty appears to have produced an anti-deterrent effect, increasing rather than reducing crime rates. And it’s telling that Europe’s lowest reoffending rate is in Norway’s humane prison island of Bastoy. Contrary to popular intuitions, what matters most in deterring criminal behaviour is not so much the severity of punishment but the likelihood of getting caught.

  Aeon

I don't know why that has been so hard for us to "get". Could it be that we're really not so much interested in deterrence as we are in revenge?

Broadly speaking, on finding someone guilty of a crime, we have three ways of responding: punishment to deter; rehabilitation to heal; or incarceration to protect. These responses are not mutually exclusive and often overlap. For each, there are two questions to answer: will it be effective and can it be ethically justified? The answers depend on whom we’re talking about – each brain is unique. A ‘one size fits all’ approach is inefficient and unethical.

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The idea that the punishment should ‘fit the crime’ has little place in a rational criminal justice system. A pragmatic response would depend less on the crime and more on the specific criminal.

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In the US, 10 times more people with serious mental illnesses are in prison than in state hospitals. In the UK, roughly 90 per cent of offenders suffer from psychiatric disorders.

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To think rationally about socially harmful behaviour, we need to stop seeing it as the outcome of the mystical ‘free will’ of the individual and view it instead as the product of natural causes, as a doctor views the symptoms of a disease.

Like someone afflicted with a contagious virus, the threat a criminal poses is not ultimately of his making. Exposed to the same genetic and social conditions, each of us would exhibit similar symptoms. Focusing on punishment alone does little to prevent further outbreaks. Instead, it distracts from addressing the material and cultural conditions [...] that breed those symptoms.

Continue reading.

If you have Netflix, you could also watch the currently streaming documentary "13th".

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.