Is it possible to punish and rehabilitate at the same time? I ask partly because I have small kids. When they do bad things, I try to focus on educating them and not punishing. Then again, most of the bad things they do (making a mess, being too loud, etc.) are relatively benign. If they were to do something really horrible and victimize some other kid, I would probably punish them, but at the same time I would hope I could teach them never to do such a thing again.
I think that's the moral dilemma with prison systems. It's easy in abstract to say that we should just focus on rehabilitation and take this utilitarian argument about what's best for society. But I know that if, for example, someone were to harm my children, I would have trouble being convinced that that person needs free college and housing (partly paid for by me). Even if that statistically led to a better outcome for society, it would not seem like justice; rather it would seem that person is being rewarded for harming my family. This I think is a general problem with utilitarianism - that when we just focus on group outcomes, we sometimes lose sight of things like individual rights and justice, messy moral concepts that don't always create optimal group results.
Maybe there is some way to do both things or differentiate between types of criminals. I don't really have a solution. Just posing the conundrum.
Every situation involves them losing their freedom. Even in this cage free prison they are stuck there under someone else's control. This is a punishment, and I don't see why justice needs more than this. A victim may wish for harsher punishment, but that won't actually help their problems.
Totally agree. Vengeance sounds great until you get it - and you realize you still have the same problems, and maybe a few new ones.
Perhaps like rehabilitating offenders, we also need to rehabilitate victims as well. Being a victim can be as troubling than being an offender because it's not really in your control. This can really be hard on people, especially mental health, PTSD, anxiety, fear of people, etc.
I'm not even sure such a system exists - it seems like the victim would be on their own for finding care and help with that?
In the Netherlands there is a program for exactly that, "slachtofferhulp" ("victim help"). I'm not entirely sure what it entails, but I've been offered it even after merely witnessing the shop on the corner of my street being robbed from a distance (the thief ran past me just as I stepped outside my house, so I made a statement to the police).
Well okay he did threaten me, raising the knife while saying "don't even think about it" [standing in his way/stopping him]. But he didn't come at me, and I was certain I could have outrun him if he did (by running towards the shop, which he was focused on getting away from, after all), I remained at distance. Of course, this being the Netherlands, there was about zero risk the guy would pull a gun (especially after brandishing a rather cheap looking chef's knife).
Exactly. Taking away someone's liberty is a substantial punishment, and the imposition of longer sentences for more serious crimes should slake the natural desire for vengeance to some degree.
But the victim is not the only stakeholder in the justice system. There are also the accused (prisoner's rights), and society at large (lower recidivism). The interests of all need to be balanced.
Justice needs more than this because victims will wish for harsher punishment. The public will not feel satisfied and trust in the justice system will lessen, etc. You can tell people but you can't honestly expect the whole of society to just become "enlightened" about this. Desire for vengeance is a thing, it lives in us, and even though I can personally (usually) rationally decide to let it go, I feel it's still there and when I'm angry, quite prominently so.
It's not a good thing, but you can't just ignore it. Justice needs to deal with this, otherwise it won't be accepted.
Fortunately this desire isn't very smart and can be tricked easily. If you paint something as terrible punishment and people see it as such, that is enough. Unlike, say, public safety, it doesn't actually need to be real to fully benefit society.
Watching dog whisperer, I learn that there is a difference between punishment and discipline. Do not punish.
When you take action like yelling or grounding out of frustration, anger, fear, or ___, it is a punishment.
When you take action from a calmer standpoint, it is called discipline.
Sometimes I wonder if that is actually a problem with our justice system. We deal justice in cold blood, calmly, burocratically, often months after the act. (And OTOH also without possibility of negotiation or mercy.)
I wonder if it wouldn't be better to deal punishments out immediately, and in anger rather than calmly. I'm not suggesting this, just playing devil's advocate, but maybe bring back corporal punishment.
From a behaviorist or evolutionary psychology standpoint, it would seem that we are more predisposed to learn from a swift, "personal" punishment, than from a delayed, unpersonal punishment.
I remember reading about a case study in a region where the central goverment collapsed, and there was effectively no police and no prisons. People went to a justice system very loosely based on local traditions. The punishment for most wrongdoings would be that people showed up and rough-handled you and beat you up, taking some compensation from you as they saw fit. There was always someone watching the punishment to ensure that it didn't go to far. It sounds quite brutal, but the thing I remember was that the rate of repeat offenders was among the lowest every measured (although I wonder how good you could measure that in a "failed state"). For the life of me I can't find this story anymore though.
Again, I'm not suggesting anything like that, so please don't downvote if you disagree with corporal punishment. I think it's interesting to contemplate the choices we have made in our justice system and their effectiveness, though.
I understand the comment is in the context of the article. My comment was in the context of creating and maintaining leadership.
Calmness breeds calmness and calm decisions that last a long time. Where as fear creates an artificial set of rules that disappear when the fear factor is gone.
In the case of crimes against community, punishment does not help as much as greater involvement in community and stronger connection to those who lose.
We also have prison therapists. There are other programs I know I'm forgetting. Overall building a rehabilitation system is hard. If I had to choose between the task of building that and the task of building genera; AI, I think building general AI might be easier.
Kill two birds with one stone: build general AI, feed it data about prison conditions, programs, and recidivism rates, and let the AI figure out how best to rehabilitate criminals. :)
Not that I don't get what you're saying, not that I never want revenge, but still, since I also tell this myself: can you imagine someone hurting a child who has not been damaged in some way? I'm not claiming to be perfectly healthy, but healthy enough that I cannot fathom it, just like I cannot fathom rape. And how many people are responsible for how many thousands of dead children torn to shreds by wars of aggression and get invited to how many gala dinners each year, on your dime? Even just that should make us pause. Do we punish the weak because they deserve it, or because we can't get at those who deserve it even more?
The parents who today don't have the time or energy to raise their kids well, maybe because they have to work 17 jobs to survive or whatever, and the marketing which doesn't care for anyone other than inspiring fears and wants they would be happier without and taking their money, create the sociopaths, and education systems that pigeonhole people cutting off what doesn't fit, and so on, those create the sociopaths of tomorrow much more than those poor fucks themselves do. The guy spitting at the window in the subway while twitching to music and some hellish mixture of drugs didn't have the same life as me, just making bad choices. Maybe in some cases that's true, but generally I consider the fact I'm not a murderer something I should be grateful for, not something to be proud of. Justice is a big word, and like "why?" it can have many iterations.
I'm not saying this to put you on the spot, but this is how it ends up for me, that's the train of thought that sometimes even replaced my thirst for revenge with things I like better, and which I think are better for me. I think the best revenge is to attain the ability to get revenge and then not get it, to no longer need it.
If turning the other cheek is weakness, why does this make my jaw drop and give me goosebumps?
Imagine if the relatives of 9/11 victims calling out against meeting violence with violence, against murdering more innocents, would have been listened to. The Middle East would still be a mess, but orders of magnitude less so. It just used the people who griefed to sow more grief. Justice, hmm.
There is the reaction you want to have, and there is the reaction that would make your loved one who was harmed proud. Food for thought, anyway :)
Yes, people have a desire for justice, for fairness. This desire is natural, as well as it is right. Therefore it deserves to be addressed properly. It is also however, as you say, not what is best for society. Therefore its harm needs to be minimized, while still properly addressing the desire.
Which is why we have mostly symbolic punishments. And they work very well. Already, most of our punishments are symbolic substitutes for much, much worse punishments we could do (and used to do) to people. We don't chop off body parts any more, banish people or torture people to death (well the US does, but I hope we agree this is not a required part of a good justice system).
You deserve to have your desire for justice and fairness met, while society deserves to have its needs for public safety, deterrence and rehabilitation met. You can't really get the benefits of safety or rehabilitation symbolically.
Is it possible to punish and rehabilitate at the same time? I ask partly because I have small kids
Maybe, but the criminal mind is not the same as the (normal) child mind. Perhaps there are "types" of criminals, but the psychopathy criminals' actions is startlingly uniform. A corner crack dealer and Bernie Madoff are more separated by their means at their disposal, less their intent.
> The whole point of the criminal legal system is not about individual justice. It's a crime against the state.
I'm sorry, that's ridiculous. You can call murder a crime against the state all you want, but I'll be damned if there isn't a very long history of inviting the family of the victim to witness state-sanctioned executions. Criminal punishment definitely incorporates individual justice.
When you hear "state" for laws old enough to be common-law, think more of "community." A murderer makes random strangers in town mad on the victim's behalf, so they go kill the murderer. They aren't killing them to get justice for the victim; they're killing them because the victim was someone they knew as a member of the community and they feel pain at their loss. This pain, in aggregate, is the pain the "state" feels in response to an act, and lashes out in response to. It's the reason that terrorism is a bigger deal than plain treason: both affect the government itself in some sense, but terrorism inflicts pain on the people in aggregate, and so the people-in-aggregate, in their roles as "legislature" and "jury", seek to punish it more strongly.
If that were true, murdering someone with little to no connections (e.g. a homeless person) wouldn't be a crime.
As a citizen my motivation for punishing murder is to keep society stable and my family safe. It doesn't matter who was murdered, it matters that the perpetrator is tried.
I think that's the moral dilemma with prison systems. It's easy in abstract to say that we should just focus on rehabilitation and take this utilitarian argument about what's best for society. But I know that if, for example, someone were to harm my children, I would have trouble being convinced that that person needs free college and housing (partly paid for by me). Even if that statistically led to a better outcome for society, it would not seem like justice; rather it would seem that person is being rewarded for harming my family. This I think is a general problem with utilitarianism - that when we just focus on group outcomes, we sometimes lose sight of things like individual rights and justice, messy moral concepts that don't always create optimal group results.
Maybe there is some way to do both things or differentiate between types of criminals. I don't really have a solution. Just posing the conundrum.