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.
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.
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
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7870768-never-believe-that-anti-semites-are-completely-unaware-of-the-absurdity
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:
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.