does prison work

Q

Quagmire

convince me or convict me
Registered Senior Member
no longer an issue anymore, the powers that be seem only too happy to release any murderer, rapist or paedophile.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4944164.stm

it has since been confirmed that it is 5 murderes released onto britains streets.

and the powers that be dont know how many have reoffended.

this is now a very important political football, lets see who catches up with the 1000 or so wrongly released prisoners and find out whether they have committed further crimes - if they have, and i suspect they are more likely to than not, resignations shouldnt be accepted, the fools involved ought to be imprisoned for gross negligence have their wonderful political state pensions stripped, and never be allowed to work in positions of authority ever again.
 
he still hasnt gone.

how can 'the government' expect the public to be responsible when one of its top decision makers wont do the right thing and accept responsibility for his own ineptitude.
 
Prison should be the last resort to any society. The punishment should result in a manner in which the punished will learn from his mistake. But, sometimes, a society has a citizen who does not want to obey these rules. He will then disobey them and do so openly.
He will do so with out any thought of loss of life or similar thoughts.
I ask, "How are we supposed to teach this person the "right" way and "reform" him?"

I will gladly agree that many innocent people are incarcerated daily. I will also say that these people have all the time in the world to fight thier sentence.
As for "passing the buck", that does happen. The lackey does go to jail for his superior. that is wrong. Many times, money=power and that afrodesiac is potent.
 
Sorry, continued. as a society, we must balance these violators and put them where thier actions dictate the proper re-action. If a citizen constantly violates another's citizen's rights and does so without remorse or "bad" feelings, then lock him away. Society must learn to regulate it's crimes with the proper punishment.

A good example is "zero tolerance". That is just a term for pinhead midlevel buearucrats to act like robots and only use the book for a chair leveler.

examples:

1. 11 year old girl has plastic knife in lunch (packed by mother) and honestly gives it to teacher. teacher then suspends her for "possession of a weapon". All the teacher had to do was call the mother, "Mss. jones, please do not put any more knives in your daughter's lunch. it is a violation of our weapons policy (that you signed). thank you.
Lesson learned: if you have a prohibited item, keep it and throw it away at the earliest chance. if you are honest, you are a criminal under zero tolerance standards.

2. Highschool senior (cpt. football team, 4.0, no trouble, scholarship [full] to college) lends truck to friend to move parents. a butter knife falls out of one the boxes. By a stroke of luck, the butter knife lands in the middle of the front seat. A surprise search reveals this "weapon" (if any one has seen a butter knife, you would have to be Gumby to be hurt by it). this senior gets arrested, his scholarship dissappears (under a morals clause), he now has an arrest record. he now must face a judge and explain this "weapons violation"
Lesson learned: NEVER LOAN YOUR FRIEND YOUR TRUCK TO MOVE ANY ONE. A "WEAPON" MAY FALL WHERE A SURPRISE INSPECTION MAY TURN IT UP!!!
Proper response: Principle checks with Senior's friend. Friend confirms that truck used to move parents. Butter knife fell out of a box and no "weapon's violation"

When I was going through school, they taught me that if I found a bag of pot on the ground I was to put my foot on it and not move. When an adult came asking why I was not in class I could say, "Sir, I have a bag of pot under my foot. I found this bag when I walked and suspected drugs. I will now remove my foot and you can take it.

Today's response to above scenario:

Student puts foot over suspected drugs.
Student waits for adult
Adult asks why student standing and not in class (violation of school zero tolerance truency policy)
Adult reports student to principals office
Adult explains to principle situation.
Principle then calls cops and informs student that he is to remain here and not leave
Studend does as told.
Cops arrive and arrest student for "possession of drugs"
Cops take student (in cuffs) in front of students into a police car
Student now has a record of drug possession.
student now has lost any potential scholarship (morals clause)
Principal (Robotic, mid level buearucrat) goes back to office and continues day

Proper response:
Adult takes drugs
Adult escorts student to principal's office
Principal then gets student record - record indicates a perfect student and not a singe instance of any potential drug involvement. in fact student graduate of DARE.
Principle takes drugs and stores them.
Principal thanks student for honesty
Student, adult, principal all leave knowing that drugs are in school and something must be done.

Prison is much like a zero tolerance policy. Some students need prison because they do not want to obey laws. Some students want to obey laws and are confused when society does imprison them for obeying the laws. Some citizens we must incarcerate, because they refuse to obey society's laws. some we can modify the punishment and let the punishment be the crime. Some just feel bad that they now have a record that is an extreme punishment in it's own form.
 
No, prison doesn't work. It does not work because it is all about punishment instead of rehabilitation. I believe that our criminal justice systems should be about 10% punishment and 90% rehabilitation. Unfortunately it is the complete opposite. We choose to combat the misery and pain in this world by inflicting more misery and pain. We don’t like to think about new creative ways to prevent or reduce the misery and pain in the world. We hear stories about rapists, murders, and child molesters and the first response from most people is that they should be executed or imprisoned for the rest of their lives. We don’t want to think about the problems in our society that created the criminals. We don’t want to think about what has to be done to rehabilitate the criminals.

I will admit that some criminals cannot be rehabilitated, but they can still be useful in our society. I believe that all prisoners that are serving a life sentence should be given a reason to live. If they behave properly they should be given some privileges like, a comfortable bed, internet service, cable television, conjugal visits with a spouse or prostitute. (If they weren’t convicted of rape) In return they should have to give something back to our society. They could work within the prison. (General labor, factory jobs, Ect.) We could create a relatively peaceful society within our prisons, where the inmates would have to work for all of their privileges. But that would be too difficult our politicians, wardens, Ect. It would require too much thinking and rational thought. It is much easier to treat our criminals like shit and release some of them without any rehabilitation so they can commit more crimes.
 
q0101 said:
No, prison doesn't work. It does not work because it is all about punishment instead of rehabilitation. I believe that our criminal justice systems should be about 10% punishment and 90% rehabilitation. Unfortunately it is the complete opposite. We choose to combat the misery and pain in this world by inflicting more misery and pain. We don’t like to think about new creative ways to prevent or reduce the misery and pain in the world. We hear stories about rapists, murders, and child molesters and the first response from most people is that they should be executed or imprisoned for the rest of their lives. We don’t want to think about the problems in our society that created the criminals. We don’t want to think about what has to be done to rehabilitate the criminals.

I will admit that some criminals cannot be rehabilitated, but they can still be useful in our society. I believe that all prisoners that are serving a life sentence should be given a reason to live. If they behave properly they should be given some privileges like, a comfortable bed, internet service, cable television, conjugal visits with a spouse or prostitute. (If they weren’t convicted of rape) In return they should have to give something back to our society. They could work within the prison. (General labor, factory jobs, Ect.) We could create a relatively peaceful society within our prisons, where the inmates would have to work for all of their privileges. But that would be too difficult our politicians, wardens, Ect. It would require too much thinking and rational thought. It is much easier to treat our criminals like shit and release some of them without any rehabilitation so they can commit more crimes.
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I agree, this is the vicious circle that affects all judicial systems around the world. What good does it do to lock up a menace to society only to throw them back into society almost certain that they will commit another crime? The other issue is the cost to the tax payer for locking people up. Dangerous criminals should of course be imprisoned for the public good, but what of people guilty of crimes such as fraud, or computer hacking, etc,? Wouldn't it better serve the public interest to rehabilitate these criminals so that they can pay for their crimes without making us pay to keep them locked up?
The system needs big change, I think everyone can agree on that.
 
of course prisons work. it gives a means for the convicted to exercise, learn "tricks of the trade" from other inmates, and eliminates any future they may have had. i mean, that's what we want right? better, stronger criminals.

Shawshank Redemption said:
The funny thing is - on the outside, I was an honest man, straight as an arrow. I had to come to prison to be a crook.
Click to expand...

In return they should have to give something back to our society. They could work within the prison.
Click to expand...
hey, they make your license plates, man! besides that, i think the guards take them out to work on roads, or pick up trash, or fight fires.
 
For most murderers, their act is a crime of passion. They get enraged at someone for something he did, or something they think he did, and they kill him. They're statistically unlikely to do it again for a couple of reasons.

One is that it's rare for anybody to get than angry once in his life. For it to happen twice is against the odds.

For another, we're talking about a person who is more or less normal and just got carried away by the grief or other pain of an unusual circumstance. When it's over and the emotion subsides, he has to deal with the overwhelming realization that he actually killed somebody. He becomes one of the few people on earth who knows what it feels like to have killed. Who has to spend the rest of his days with that guilt. Most people, no matter how riled up they got before the murder, will probably be a little cowed by the experience and not want to go through it again.

I have a hypothesis that the average murderer is less likely to murder a second time than you or I are to do it the first time, because he knows what it's like. Letting passion killers out may not be harmful to society at all. In fact, letting them mingle with the population and tell everyone how horrified they are might help keep the rest of us in line. How many of us has ever spoken personally with a murderer? Might those dark fantasies we have of killing the guy who ripped of our investment money, or ran off with our wife, or cheated us out of a promotion, or kept playing loud music until 3am, be a little less likely to come true if we heard a first-hand account of what life was like after the other guy stopped breathing?

That said, of course most of the high-profile murders are committed by people who aren't even close to normal. They're amoral one-percenters, or career criminals doing it for "business," or mentally unbalanced, or so damaged by an event in their life that they've lost their sense of direction. Serial killers, terrorists, hit men, etc.

These are the people who commit multiple murders. If you don't lock them up for life, they very probably will come right back out and kill someone else.

I just don't get the impression that it's very difficult to tell these two vastly different types of murderers apart.

Let the passion killers go after a few years. Lock up the truly bad guys for life, or execute them if you insist.
 
Unfortunately, the capitalist system seems to create more of the dangerous kind of murderers. Those dangerous kinds have been mentally destroyed by extreme amounts of stress such as poverty. Take a look at the US. The US has the most overcrowded jails in the world. In Brazil, the number of people in prison is directly proportionate to the number of poor people in the area. Coincidence?
 
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