I feel most people's opinion regarding criminal justice is something like, "A public lashing is cruel and unusual punishment for a shoplifter, lock him up in a violent homosexual zoo instead."
This is retarded. So you want to replace prisons, with even more expensive prison colonies?
Likewise the idea to punish people with wage garnishment and fines. There are plenty of criminals who have never worked an honest job, nor are planning to. What would you garnish? Their criminal proceeds? Knowing that the government will take your money, is an excellent motivation to NOT get a job.
It’s certainly not. While there is a lot of recidivism, it’s hardly the case that nobody gets rehabilitated.
US recidivism rates are around 70% within five years. I’d assume that the recidivism in Europe is somewhat lower just based on the fact that they have much fewer prison spots than America.
A brief search on the topic shows that German recidivism rates (for example) are roughly half of the American ones.
That would definitely violate individual rights, and I'm not sure it would discourage crime. Depends on the crime. Some people have absolutely no relationship with any of their family. You could make some kind of "guilt by association" argument to suggest that the friends of criminals are more likely to be criminal. I would hate if I suddenly became responsible for the crimes of someone else. Being an accomplice to a crime is itself a crime already.
To be more specific, this would apply in the following scenario:
- the criminal has no wage or on-paper assets to garnish as per V900's example.
- there is evidence that the aformentioned relatives knew/abedded the criminal in some way (housing, comms, etc), making them culpable to picking up the slack.
I'm not advocating for some blanket bioreactionary model of "well, you share DNA therefore help pay his court fees", that's weird. This is trying to establish a chain of causality with external parties, IF, the criminal has absolutely nothing that can be seized by the judicial/governing forces.
Even if we ignore how much it would cost to prosecute and investigate, the effects would ultimately likely be that they drop out of official employment and either work on the black market of turn to crime themselves.
I’m very sceptical about garnishment and restitution as it is. It doesn’t benefit neither the victim nor the former criminal. If we want people to quit doing crime, we should end policies that encourage it. Such as garnishing their legally owned wages.
Why would non-violent criminals be prioritized over violent ones for a sterilization program?
To answer your question - I would worry that mass sterilization would lead to worse crime in the long run due to the resulting existential dread of people knowing that their ability to procreate is destroyed. Psychopaths/sociopaths might not be bothered, but they're in the minority.
I'm not saying I want criminals to be procreating, but I'm skeptical that removing a base/primal urge would reduce crime, I could it see becoming more savage and barbaric.
I don't think it's true that mass sterilization would lead to worse crime. Eunuchs? Not to mention, the lowered testosterone/estrogen?
I'm not too skeptical. We've been though the most violent ages in history recently, and we have only gotten ridden of reproduction control in the last several decades.
Imo reproduction ain't base/primal, at least not before puberty or after menopause.
The world is already becoming more savage and barbaric, and getting rid of sterilization has made it worse.
Fantastic. Strongly agree. I would have all of the violent criminals executed and the rest could go and live in a city of refuge. For single time offences or petty theft, corporal punishment or fines could be a suitable alternative.
For the most part, I do agree prisons do need to be abolished (absolutely with prison sentences more than five years). But at the same time, corporal punishment and compulsory sterilizations need to return. And places that have abolished the death penalty (coastal Cascadia and the U.K. come to mind) should absolutely bring it back.
It's a good idea to keep bringing up the wide variety of premodern societies (Israelites, Vikings, etc.) that had no prisons, and also had no reputation for being soft. But you've got to remember that these societies were also much more comfortable with dispensing capital and corporal punishments or even selling people into slavery for their crimes.
V900 makes a good point about how ordinary people sleep better at night when they expect rapists and murderers to actually suffer for what they did, and not just be isolated in a place where they're unlikely to reoffend. So if you actually want to get majority support for doing away with prisons then you're going to have to lean hard into the capital/corporal punishment angle.... Cane shoplifters. Make the rapists live in terror of SOMETHING - the gallows, or castration, or hard labor in a penal colony in the Mohave desert where the lynch gangs dispense prison justice at will. (Your expectation that the penal reservations will have no gangs and that murders will be swiftly punished there is unrealistic when you consider that even in America's inner cities, about half of murders go unsolved nowadays.)
On the upside, I totally agree with you that America's public schools have grown to resemble prisons, and that using ADHD medication on so many boys (and girls too but at a smaller rate) is a moral outrage. I've even written about it at my own blog here and here:
I'm all for more variable and more creative sentences, including public shaming/stocks etc.
But I think you're underestimating how many prisoners are there for violent crimes. You compared the percentage of all crimes period, and most of those people are never caught. The majority of people in state prisons are there for violent crimes. It's only federal prisons where violent crimes are a minority, because the feds prosecute more white collar crimes like securities fraud. But state prisons house ten times the prisoners that federal prisons do, meaning about 50% of all current prisoners are violent. I think with those stats, you'd have more people choosing jail to the reservation. You said you choose a tent over bars, but is that still true when most of the other campers are violent?
1. Violent criminals are more likely to get caught than non-violent criminals. So actually, I am overestimating, not underestimating, when I use the number of those prosecuted.
2. Let's say you're correct, and if someone shoplifts, they are also violent. Kill them or send them to Haiti. Don't put them in a prison. Prisons are expensive and immoral. This is a financial and moral point.
3. State prisoners are 63% violent. I'm not asking for them to be released in the street. I offer a slate of ideas to choose from to reduce cost and increase freedom.
4. The idea that a prison colony would be more violent than a prison is not well founded. 17% of deaths in prison are due to murder. In the civilian population, only 0.75% deaths are due to murder. Are you truly concerned for prisoner welfare, and trying to protect them from murdering each other? Then you should be open to running the prison colony experiment and seeing what the murder rate is. At the very least, people show be given the option. I argue for experimenting, because tax payers deserve a cheaper option. I support innovation and oppose risk-aversion because the system is expensive, violent, and inhumane.
But of course 20x as many deaths in prison are from murder as opposed to deaths in the non-prison population: that's where the murderers are! 63% of the people there are violent enough to have gotten caught - and also likely multiple times and something fairly serious. People have this idea that people get thrown in jail for just anything, but spend a day in a state court watching criminals get sentenced and you will be shocked at how many chances they get, how many repeat offenders, and how long and bad some of their rap sheets are. The only areas where I'd say the US is particularly harsh w/sentencing is drug/DUI type crimes.
I'm not against experimenting with various of the things you've suggested. I don't think an island works bc it's very easy to leave an island. A preserve with a Jurassic-park style electrified fence around it is probably better. But see, when you mentioned biometric tracking like retinal scans, my immediate thought was that you're just going to have a bunch of guys tearing out the eyeballs of the other guys that they murder, so that they can keep scanning them and making it seem like they're still doing their check ins. I think the 17% of deaths in prison being murder goes UP on a preserve where no one is locked safely behind bars, and is just in a tent they can get dragged out of. And assuming there are no women in the preserve, male rape probably goes UP in a place without security cameras everywhere.
It would be an interesting experiment. I still think most of the non-violent offenders would choose the prison, as well as any older guys. Which should mean that the actual prisons become nicer places to be. The prospect of potentially being sent to a free-range prison colony might also serve as more of a detriment/disincentive to commiting crime in the first place, because I think it would be very scary for anyone who wasn't already hooked into, via family or friends, whatever parallel warlord society developed on the reservation (which seems inevitable).
Prison reform is also a call for judicial reform, like how Illinois recently wanted to eliminate cash bail and leave pre-trial sentencing completely in the hands of the judge’s discretion, even for violent crimes. It didn’t work.
I’m intrigued by your ideas, and would be in favor of serious reform around non-violent crime that alleviates the massive economic burden. Conversely, maximizing punishment for violent crimes with public hangings and immediate death penalties for repeat offenders and clear psychopaths. Part of the reason older systems worked is because they were unapologetic about purging the worst in their midst. They typically went too far, but you can be selective in what to copy and what to avoid when looking at old models.
I find it to be a spectacle for the benefit of the sadistic masses, and I oppose it. If I am wrong and it is proven to lower recidivism, sure, let people run the studies and prove their case. But I don't think anything reduces recidivism besides physical removal and segregation.
It also ignores the punitive role in prisons. Yes, prisons are ideally also rehabilitative, but a majority of voters would likely want prisons to have a punitive role as well.
People sleep better at night knowing that rapists and murderers aren’t having a great time inside their little prison colony.
Meh, prisons aren’t ideal. And a lot depends on how they’re run. Look at the difference between European and American prisons for example. In some European prisons, the inmates get furlough every weekend.
I honestly don’t think they’re much more expensive than American ones. You can have many fewer guards if you treat it more like a boarding school, like in Europe, vs America.
Conversely European prison sentences are much shorter. Life often means 20 years. You may get 8-12 for a murder, 3-4 for rape.
It's not possible to create a wonderful society made entirely of criminals but if one of the prison colonies ever figured it out it would be a discovery on par with the discovery of fire.
How anti-rehabilitationist are you? Do you mean that once they commit a crime, they will be isolated in the reserve indefinitely?
You say that immates would be allowed to have "heterosexual" sex. From an anti-rehabilitationist perspective that would he dangerous because criminals would breed criminals. The idea of putting them in jail is also that they do not reproduce.
I just have to say that the idea of putting criminals onto a reservation was the premise of the movie “Escape From New York”, and the sequel “Escape from L.A.” I recommend the former, but not the latter.
I would lean towards a system like Norway’s before trying something as radical (not that it’s a bad idea, but it would be a massive change with concomitant risk) as this proposal.
The proposals given here are diverse, and none of it is black or white: "It is a false dilemma to claim that only one single alternative to prison should be allowed. Even if I am wrong, and prison is morally or practically optimal in 99% of cases, if there are still 1% of cases where it is a bad fit, we should be open to considering alternatives. If we only reduce our prison population by 1%, that is an improvement for the tax payer and for the moral strength of the nation."
Why don't you make self sustaining prison where everyone works to sustain themselves, think of a sort of penal battalion but full of non combat MOS, pogs only, with them being taught how to do their jobs, that way you can actually remove the need to fund prison since they are self sustaining (with farming and all)
Also, when you have a rowdy bunch of violent criminals the first thing you would not want to have is to make them having this free-for-all battleground that allows them do whatever they want to do, expecting them to follow the rules is naive, especially given the fact that they were sent in for violating the law in the first place
Also, thought on applying operant conditioning to criminals? it works in animals and for interrogation, why not criminals
I never said they would be allowed to do "whatever they want to do." Every post objecting to my article is conflating multiple solutions. You have to listen to me when I say "not a one sized fits all solution."
So Christianity can be blamed for prisons as well as many wars. I'm not surprised.
Wasn't Australia originally a penal colony? Maybe that partially explains why Australia is currently so interesting today.
Another alternative to penal colonies might be very nice prisons like they have in Norway. These prisons, described by Robert Sapolsky in his book *Determined*, are virtually indistinguishable from college dorms. So much so, that people who believe in retributive justice are outraged when they find out how nice Norwegian prisons are. Sapolsky believes that retribution is wrong because we all lack the kind of free will that retributionists believe justifies punishment for crimes. He agrees that we need to protect society by isolating dangerous criminals, but the ordinary prisons designed to be punitive are not justified.
Australia was a prison colony but they weren't swanning around relaxing in the sun. They were worked to the bone, life was seriously hard and they worked and worked and worked. Then they were loaned out to settlers and they worked some more. The early settlers, ranchers, squatters etc. used the convicts as slave labour in all but name. They were often in such remote places that walls were not required, the land itself was the prison.
Abolishing prisons makes economic sense. If society doesn't become more efficient, it will collapse, and primitive societies do not imprison people. Prison abolition is inevitable.
I feel most people's opinion regarding criminal justice is something like, "A public lashing is cruel and unusual punishment for a shoplifter, lock him up in a violent homosexual zoo instead."
It seems so!
People need to pay more attention to the Old Testament. No prisons or police under the Law of Moses.
Cain was punished with exile, and allowed to build his own city called Enoch.
Bring back Public Corporal Punishment, but especially for adults!
The Old Testament’s treatment of criminals and foreigners was very forward-thinking, still is.
Joseph was thrown into prison with the Egyptians, which shows how corrupt the land of Egypt was!
His sentence made sense, Potiphar gaslit Joseph and then used her political clout to get rid of him.
The Israelites didn't have prisons, but the Egyptians did. Institutionally corrupt.
This is retarded. So you want to replace prisons, with even more expensive prison colonies?
Likewise the idea to punish people with wage garnishment and fines. There are plenty of criminals who have never worked an honest job, nor are planning to. What would you garnish? Their criminal proceeds? Knowing that the government will take your money, is an excellent motivation to NOT get a job.
Deporting people to Haiti isn't expensive.
Now THAT we agree on!
You agree with the article then.
I agree with that part lol. The prisons we have today are compromises. Trying to strike a balance between punishment, seclusion and rehabilitation.
Rehabilitation is fake.
It’s certainly not. While there is a lot of recidivism, it’s hardly the case that nobody gets rehabilitated.
US recidivism rates are around 70% within five years. I’d assume that the recidivism in Europe is somewhat lower just based on the fact that they have much fewer prison spots than America.
A brief search on the topic shows that German recidivism rates (for example) are roughly half of the American ones.
What about sterilizing the ones who haven't murdered, raped, molested, but who have still committed crimes?
Eugenics happened in North America up until the 80s my friend.
Go after known relatives’ and accomplices’ wages.
That would definitely violate individual rights, and I'm not sure it would discourage crime. Depends on the crime. Some people have absolutely no relationship with any of their family. You could make some kind of "guilt by association" argument to suggest that the friends of criminals are more likely to be criminal. I would hate if I suddenly became responsible for the crimes of someone else. Being an accomplice to a crime is itself a crime already.
Yeah, that’s some 1984 shit.
To be more specific, this would apply in the following scenario:
- the criminal has no wage or on-paper assets to garnish as per V900's example.
- there is evidence that the aformentioned relatives knew/abedded the criminal in some way (housing, comms, etc), making them culpable to picking up the slack.
I'm not advocating for some blanket bioreactionary model of "well, you share DNA therefore help pay his court fees", that's weird. This is trying to establish a chain of causality with external parties, IF, the criminal has absolutely nothing that can be seized by the judicial/governing forces.
"making them culpable" means charging them with a crime, making them a criminal in their own right, separately.
Even if we ignore how much it would cost to prosecute and investigate, the effects would ultimately likely be that they drop out of official employment and either work on the black market of turn to crime themselves.
I’m very sceptical about garnishment and restitution as it is. It doesn’t benefit neither the victim nor the former criminal. If we want people to quit doing crime, we should end policies that encourage it. Such as garnishing their legally owned wages.
What policies encourage crime?
What about sterilization of certain non-violent and (possibly) even violent criminals?
Why would non-violent criminals be prioritized over violent ones for a sterilization program?
To answer your question - I would worry that mass sterilization would lead to worse crime in the long run due to the resulting existential dread of people knowing that their ability to procreate is destroyed. Psychopaths/sociopaths might not be bothered, but they're in the minority.
I'm not saying I want criminals to be procreating, but I'm skeptical that removing a base/primal urge would reduce crime, I could it see becoming more savage and barbaric.
Did I imply that?
I don't think it's true that mass sterilization would lead to worse crime. Eunuchs? Not to mention, the lowered testosterone/estrogen?
I'm not too skeptical. We've been though the most violent ages in history recently, and we have only gotten ridden of reproduction control in the last several decades.
Imo reproduction ain't base/primal, at least not before puberty or after menopause.
The world is already becoming more savage and barbaric, and getting rid of sterilization has made it worse.
interesting, sources to share so i can learn more?
Do I have to share sources?
Fantastic. Strongly agree. I would have all of the violent criminals executed and the rest could go and live in a city of refuge. For single time offences or petty theft, corporal punishment or fines could be a suitable alternative.
What about stalkers or prankers? Aren't they by definition violent?
That said, I would advocate for stalkers and prankers to at least get lashed in public. Make them receive humiliation.
Sure, makes sense. I think abolishing prisons is in itself a good directional aim regardless of specifics around implementation.
For the most part, I do agree prisons do need to be abolished (absolutely with prison sentences more than five years). But at the same time, corporal punishment and compulsory sterilizations need to return. And places that have abolished the death penalty (coastal Cascadia and the U.K. come to mind) should absolutely bring it back.
Some quick thoughts here:
It's a good idea to keep bringing up the wide variety of premodern societies (Israelites, Vikings, etc.) that had no prisons, and also had no reputation for being soft. But you've got to remember that these societies were also much more comfortable with dispensing capital and corporal punishments or even selling people into slavery for their crimes.
V900 makes a good point about how ordinary people sleep better at night when they expect rapists and murderers to actually suffer for what they did, and not just be isolated in a place where they're unlikely to reoffend. So if you actually want to get majority support for doing away with prisons then you're going to have to lean hard into the capital/corporal punishment angle.... Cane shoplifters. Make the rapists live in terror of SOMETHING - the gallows, or castration, or hard labor in a penal colony in the Mohave desert where the lynch gangs dispense prison justice at will. (Your expectation that the penal reservations will have no gangs and that murders will be swiftly punished there is unrealistic when you consider that even in America's inner cities, about half of murders go unsolved nowadays.)
On the upside, I totally agree with you that America's public schools have grown to resemble prisons, and that using ADHD medication on so many boys (and girls too but at a smaller rate) is a moral outrage. I've even written about it at my own blog here and here:
https://twilightpatriot.substack.com/p/more-bat-research-or-when-not-to
https://twilightpatriot.substack.com/p/the-can-we-and-the-should-we-of-science
And here is an article where I praise the right-leaning US Supreme Court for upholding California's animal cruelty laws:
https://twilightpatriot.substack.com/p/conservative-justices-show-their
I don't expect any of my articles to generate popular support for anything. This is an elitist blog.
I'm all for more variable and more creative sentences, including public shaming/stocks etc.
But I think you're underestimating how many prisoners are there for violent crimes. You compared the percentage of all crimes period, and most of those people are never caught. The majority of people in state prisons are there for violent crimes. It's only federal prisons where violent crimes are a minority, because the feds prosecute more white collar crimes like securities fraud. But state prisons house ten times the prisoners that federal prisons do, meaning about 50% of all current prisoners are violent. I think with those stats, you'd have more people choosing jail to the reservation. You said you choose a tent over bars, but is that still true when most of the other campers are violent?
@Kryptogal:
1. Violent criminals are more likely to get caught than non-violent criminals. So actually, I am overestimating, not underestimating, when I use the number of those prosecuted.
2. Let's say you're correct, and if someone shoplifts, they are also violent. Kill them or send them to Haiti. Don't put them in a prison. Prisons are expensive and immoral. This is a financial and moral point.
3. State prisoners are 63% violent. I'm not asking for them to be released in the street. I offer a slate of ideas to choose from to reduce cost and increase freedom.
4. The idea that a prison colony would be more violent than a prison is not well founded. 17% of deaths in prison are due to murder. In the civilian population, only 0.75% deaths are due to murder. Are you truly concerned for prisoner welfare, and trying to protect them from murdering each other? Then you should be open to running the prison colony experiment and seeing what the murder rate is. At the very least, people show be given the option. I argue for experimenting, because tax payers deserve a cheaper option. I support innovation and oppose risk-aversion because the system is expensive, violent, and inhumane.
But of course 20x as many deaths in prison are from murder as opposed to deaths in the non-prison population: that's where the murderers are! 63% of the people there are violent enough to have gotten caught - and also likely multiple times and something fairly serious. People have this idea that people get thrown in jail for just anything, but spend a day in a state court watching criminals get sentenced and you will be shocked at how many chances they get, how many repeat offenders, and how long and bad some of their rap sheets are. The only areas where I'd say the US is particularly harsh w/sentencing is drug/DUI type crimes.
I'm not against experimenting with various of the things you've suggested. I don't think an island works bc it's very easy to leave an island. A preserve with a Jurassic-park style electrified fence around it is probably better. But see, when you mentioned biometric tracking like retinal scans, my immediate thought was that you're just going to have a bunch of guys tearing out the eyeballs of the other guys that they murder, so that they can keep scanning them and making it seem like they're still doing their check ins. I think the 17% of deaths in prison being murder goes UP on a preserve where no one is locked safely behind bars, and is just in a tent they can get dragged out of. And assuming there are no women in the preserve, male rape probably goes UP in a place without security cameras everywhere.
It would be an interesting experiment. I still think most of the non-violent offenders would choose the prison, as well as any older guys. Which should mean that the actual prisons become nicer places to be. The prospect of potentially being sent to a free-range prison colony might also serve as more of a detriment/disincentive to commiting crime in the first place, because I think it would be very scary for anyone who wasn't already hooked into, via family or friends, whatever parallel warlord society developed on the reservation (which seems inevitable).
Nonenof this works with open borders
Did you read the part where I advocate for borders within the United States?
Prison reform is also a call for judicial reform, like how Illinois recently wanted to eliminate cash bail and leave pre-trial sentencing completely in the hands of the judge’s discretion, even for violent crimes. It didn’t work.
I’m intrigued by your ideas, and would be in favor of serious reform around non-violent crime that alleviates the massive economic burden. Conversely, maximizing punishment for violent crimes with public hangings and immediate death penalties for repeat offenders and clear psychopaths. Part of the reason older systems worked is because they were unapologetic about purging the worst in their midst. They typically went too far, but you can be selective in what to copy and what to avoid when looking at old models.
Personally I prefer to deport people over executing them.
Serious question - do you see merit in public punishment? If so, is it something that would be advantageous to bring back into our culture?
I find it to be a spectacle for the benefit of the sadistic masses, and I oppose it. If I am wrong and it is proven to lower recidivism, sure, let people run the studies and prove their case. But I don't think anything reduces recidivism besides physical removal and segregation.
I never looked into this myself, but are there studies on recidivism that you're aware of?
It also ignores the punitive role in prisons. Yes, prisons are ideally also rehabilitative, but a majority of voters would likely want prisons to have a punitive role as well.
People sleep better at night knowing that rapists and murderers aren’t having a great time inside their little prison colony.
You can punish people by killing them. Putting people in prisons is evil.
Meh, prisons aren’t ideal. And a lot depends on how they’re run. Look at the difference between European and American prisons for example. In some European prisons, the inmates get furlough every weekend.
European prisons are needlessly expensive.
I honestly don’t think they’re much more expensive than American ones. You can have many fewer guards if you treat it more like a boarding school, like in Europe, vs America.
Conversely European prison sentences are much shorter. Life often means 20 years. You may get 8-12 for a murder, 3-4 for rape.
Norway spends $93,000 each year for each prisoner in its system.
In comparison Massachusetts and New York spend roughly 70.000$ a year and California, according to some estimates 130.000$
(I acknowledge that there’s a big difference in how costs are counted etc. depending on who you ask.)
It’s not a terribly big difference imho, and Norwegian inmates are incarcerated for much shorter stretches.
I guess the important factor is recidivism.
I wouldn’t mind paying slightly more for a prisoner, if there’s a bigger chance he/she won’t be back.
Weren't lengthy or life sentences unheard of until the early 1900s or at least until after the War Between the States?
It's not possible to create a wonderful society made entirely of criminals but if one of the prison colonies ever figured it out it would be a discovery on par with the discovery of fire.
It would be better than prison.
How anti-rehabilitationist are you? Do you mean that once they commit a crime, they will be isolated in the reserve indefinitely?
You say that immates would be allowed to have "heterosexual" sex. From an anti-rehabilitationist perspective that would he dangerous because criminals would breed criminals. The idea of putting them in jail is also that they do not reproduce.
I just have to say that the idea of putting criminals onto a reservation was the premise of the movie “Escape From New York”, and the sequel “Escape from L.A.” I recommend the former, but not the latter.
I would lean towards a system like Norway’s before trying something as radical (not that it’s a bad idea, but it would be a massive change with concomitant risk) as this proposal.
https://www.firststepalliance.org/post/norway-prison-system-lessons
The proposals given here are diverse, and none of it is black or white: "It is a false dilemma to claim that only one single alternative to prison should be allowed. Even if I am wrong, and prison is morally or practically optimal in 99% of cases, if there are still 1% of cases where it is a bad fit, we should be open to considering alternatives. If we only reduce our prison population by 1%, that is an improvement for the tax payer and for the moral strength of the nation."
Many Latin American countries don't have life imprisonment, and they still have tons of crime, El Salvador being an exception.
That said, President Bukele should go ahead and execute all of those gangbangers, or at least as many as he can possibly can.
You're a seriously unserious person
Thank you for boosting the visibility of this post
You're welcome, the more that see it the better!
Do you have an argument?
Arguments are for the weak.
Why don't you make self sustaining prison where everyone works to sustain themselves, think of a sort of penal battalion but full of non combat MOS, pogs only, with them being taught how to do their jobs, that way you can actually remove the need to fund prison since they are self sustaining (with farming and all)
Also, when you have a rowdy bunch of violent criminals the first thing you would not want to have is to make them having this free-for-all battleground that allows them do whatever they want to do, expecting them to follow the rules is naive, especially given the fact that they were sent in for violating the law in the first place
Also, thought on applying operant conditioning to criminals? it works in animals and for interrogation, why not criminals
I never said they would be allowed to do "whatever they want to do." Every post objecting to my article is conflating multiple solutions. You have to listen to me when I say "not a one sized fits all solution."
So Christianity can be blamed for prisons as well as many wars. I'm not surprised.
Wasn't Australia originally a penal colony? Maybe that partially explains why Australia is currently so interesting today.
Another alternative to penal colonies might be very nice prisons like they have in Norway. These prisons, described by Robert Sapolsky in his book *Determined*, are virtually indistinguishable from college dorms. So much so, that people who believe in retributive justice are outraged when they find out how nice Norwegian prisons are. Sapolsky believes that retribution is wrong because we all lack the kind of free will that retributionists believe justifies punishment for crimes. He agrees that we need to protect society by isolating dangerous criminals, but the ordinary prisons designed to be punitive are not justified.
I don't support the Norwegian system, because it is expensive. I think "criminal justice" should be profitable, not a burden on taxpayers.
Australia was a prison colony but they weren't swanning around relaxing in the sun. They were worked to the bone, life was seriously hard and they worked and worked and worked. Then they were loaned out to settlers and they worked some more. The early settlers, ranchers, squatters etc. used the convicts as slave labour in all but name. They were often in such remote places that walls were not required, the land itself was the prison.
Abolishing prisons makes economic sense. If society doesn't become more efficient, it will collapse, and primitive societies do not imprison people. Prison abolition is inevitable.