Get back to us if you ever have a loved one get murdered, raped, or assaulted.
Justice is not solely about rehabilitation. It is very much about righteous punishment for doing evil. We can acknowledge that context and environment foster crime while also not tolerating crime.
Personally, I don't give one care about the "why" of certain classes of crime. I have zero tolerance or empathy for the doers of violence. If you murder someone, your life is forfeit to me. If you rape someone, I hope you get locked away for a minimum of 20 years. If you seriously assault someone, you should have to do jail time.
What you call "righteous punishment" is just revenge. You want revenge. It is a natural response to being wronged. But that is not justice. And it is no way to build a society. To be overly cliche, two wrongs do not make a right.
The moral use of the penal system is to remove the danger from society, make restitution, and rehabilitate where possible. Those are not always possible. Torturing people held captive is its own crime, and one we are guilty of to a horrifying extent as a nation. To say nothing of the innocent people we subject to these horrors.
This is not the argument you think it is - of course the people creating an unjust system will define their own system as just. We know that there are better ways, and appealing to tautology is just sort of burying one's head in the sand.
I am merely pointing out that your personal opinion of "what justice is" does not accord with the principles upon which the U.S. justice system is built (along with many others around the world).
Any definition of justice is going to be arbitrary and subjective. I disagree with your definition. I see elsewhere in this thread that you take an absolutist stance with regard to your opinion on how justice should be done, one in which you're unwilling to acknowledge that it is possible to have differing opinions on what justice should be. That's fine. You're just out of sync with the majority opinion. And you will be ineffective in persuading a sufficient number of other people (see also Marjorie Taylor Green, AOC, etc). You also seem to be able to predict the future ("you're on the wrong side of history"). Again, that's fine (I'll take some stock tips if you can make those predictions too). I just disagree.
I won't be replying further as your replies suggest to me an inflexibility and intolerance regarding this subject.
> You also seem to be able to predict the future ("you're on the wrong side of history"). Again, that's fine (I'll take some stock tips if you can make those predictions too). I just disagree.
It's not hard, since we see other countries already in the "future" where it's working. You're free to disagree and turn a blind eye. I'm hoping that the people reading will see that this kind of attitude about being resolute that the horrors we inflict on our prisoners both innocent and guilty are good, is itself its own kind of horror. That this attitude will perpetuate the suffering of our fellow Americans.
I disagree. That’s exactly what justice is, providing it is carried about by the state after a fair legal process and not by private feuds. This is also a great way to build a safe and free society, and the fact we’ve gotten away from this is one of the reasons we’re less safe and free - to be “kinder” we’ve installed a surveillance state and horrible bureaucratic systems that provide neither justice nor peace nor freedom, but instead make a mockery of all of them.
You are free to disagree and be in the moral wrong, and on the wrong side of history. There are good examples of much better humanitarian penal systems with far better outcomes in Scandinavian countries that demonstrate this reality well. Returning to the past as you seem to want is just reactionary and does not serve progress.
> You are free to disagree and be in the moral wrong,
The reason I posted is because you seemed to be unaware other people have different moral value systems. This is the fundamental reason behind a lot of disagreements. Here's the root of it: you think I a morally wrong and I think I am morally right. There is no rational argument to demonstrate that either of us are correct.
That's also why you're fundamentally unpersuasive. You're not convincing anyone by making bald assertions of your unsupported moral beliefs.
> the wrong side of history.
History will go on for a long time, and there is no arc of some sort of moral progress, just shifting social norms changing with historical accidents. This type of argument is particularly unpersuasive and tends to raise people's hackles immediately, because it's a declaration that you are (again, without evidence) so incredibly righteous that history itself will steamroll people who disagree with you.
> There are good examples of much better humanitarian penal systems with far better outcomes in Scandinavian countries that demonstrate this reality well.
The better outcomes may have nothing to do with the nature of the penal system itself, but wider cultural differences. In fact, this seems much more likely, given the extant differences in US subcultures and demographics. Slicing up the US crime data by economic quintiles and various demographics gives the lie to a lot of arguments. Even excluding the wider cultural comparison, talking about this without evaluating the commonalities between the crimes in questions and aggravating factors between the two countries makes this a really apples-to-oranges comparison.
> The reason I posted is because you seemed to be unaware other people have different moral value systems. This is the fundamental reason behind a lot of disagreements. Here's the root of it: you think I a morally wrong and I think I am morally right. There is no rational argument to demonstrate that either of us are correct.
I have no such illusions; I'm simply saying that this archaic one is objectively wrong from a humanitarian and historical standpoint. We both think we are right; the difference is you are wrong. There is no agreeing to disagree here, and it is quite cut and dried.
Further, I am not saying these things to convince you of anything, and I of course don't think I will. I cannot convince someone to care about their fellow human being. I am saying these things for the sake of those reading.
Okay, so you can go ahead and lay out how I am objectively wrong from a humanitarian and historical standpoint? It’s fine to assert that but so far you haven’t actually explained it.
I agree there is no agreeing to disagree about value differences. The key is to identify what outcomes we both want and, from that starting point, evaluate what historical and sociological evidence suggests can get us to those outcomes. Moral framing does not help.
"Cite your sources as to why torturing prisoners is wrong" is simply shorthand for "I actually like the idea of this torture and you can't tell me otherwise". Like I said, I can't make an argument as to why you should care about your fellow human if you don't already. It's not a good faith question.
We know that punitive measures do not act as a deterrence and in the case of more progressive countries that have wildly better outcomes we know what actually has good outcomes. If you're really interested all the literature is just a google away. Check out US incarceration and recidivism rates (which are the worst in the world) and those of more progressive countries. The data is all there for you, if you are curious. We've seen what doesn't work, and we've seen what does. It's not my job to educate you.
Like I said, I'm not here to convince you of anything. I cannot change your value system, I can only make a public example of why it does no good to drag us into the past, and all the atrocities that entails.
EDIT: sort of an afterthought, but for those reading I always find it hilarious that whenever a reactionary sees something work in another country the first instinct is to say "actually the US might exist in a bizarro reality where everything is opposite, and you can't prove that it's not so ha". As if the most scientific approach to seeing someone's repeated successful results is to absolutely refuse to try to replicate it yourself!
It has been my observation that the “humanitarian” experiments in the US have been a large net negative for everyone involved. It is not theoretical.
It’s not a bizzaro reality: peoples and cultures vary across geography in different ways.
Contrary to being a reactionary, my fear is that the denial of these differences and the failure of well-intentioned policies is going to eventually lead to a draconian authoritarian backlash that could be prevented by having more sensible policies now. And as I said in my original post, many of the worst aspects of American culture and the legal system are already downstream consequences of failed “humanitarian” policies that are making a mockery of justice, civil rights, and peace/safety.
All in all, I am afraid that you will not make much progress by assuming everyone who disagrees with you is a morally objectionable reactionary and refusing to seriously engage with them. You are making a religious argument and not a policy argument. I also don’t think it does you service to conflate punishment with torture and make straw men.
I have seen false conviction estimates ranging from 1 to 5 percent. All systems which involve any kind of classification will have a non-zero false positive rate. Does that mean we should do away with them? Of course not. We should simply seek to improve systems with better and better processes, while accepting that we might approach but never achieve zero false positives.
What alternative would you propose? Doing away with criminal justice? Do you think murderers and rapists should be allowed to roam free? How about drug traffickers who knowingly distribute life destroying substances in their communities?
Think of someone you really love. Maybe its your child, your parents, your partner, or a friend. Now imagine the pain and fear they would feel as they are murdered. What would they think and feel as they are choked to death? Or bludgeoned? The sheer terror. The pain. The senselessness of their life ending. Imagine that you find their corpse. Imagine the pain and horror you would experience. The hole in your heart. Really try to visualize this scenario. To feel it emotionally and with your senses.
Now imagine the perpetrator going unpunished. Walking free. Or getting put on some cushy rehabilitation program to better their life. Does that seem right? Does it seem just? Does it seem fair?
In my opinion, this discussion is way too academic, abstract, and one-sided. How about we focus on victims and their survivors?
In my opinion, this discussion is way too academic, abstract, and one-sided. How about we focus on victims and their survivors?
It seems that victims and their survivors already have a wellspring of support, but not as much effort on reducing the number of perpetrators and victims in our society.
We are focused on 'righting' the wrong rather than actually fixing it. Of course, you could incarcerate or execute these individuals, but that would not be a fix in the same way that starving people to death is a way of 'solving' the famine.
Individuals, no matter how much 'free will' or 'agency' they have, are all subjected to cause and effect.
This conversation isn't in the context of the concept of prisons, or even crime and punishment in general. It's specifically about solitary confinement which, along with corporal punishment, is torture that does permanent damage to someone. If you're going to countenance torture (or capital punishment), the very least you can do is is consider the likelihood of them being innocent.
Yes, the scene you describe is appalling. And, from reports, not uncommon in the States. Would I be in the right state of mind to make effective policy or humane decisions after that trauma? No. Would a reasonable person want revenge? Probably. Would a systematic revenge-based system lead to more or less miserable outcomes?
The US has the highest rate of incarcerations in the world. Is that working?
Putting so much effort into punshiment and so little into prevention smacks of revenge rather than wanting to actually improve things.
So it is OK to inflict righteous punishment on the 5% of innocent prisoners?
If we built a society that treated everyone with respect, we likely wouldn't have so much crime to begin with. If our social institutions were setup to remove children from abusive situations ASAP, if we lived in a world where baby formula didn't have to be locked up at grocery stores (seriously, that is very fucked up, anyone who needs baby formula should be able to go to a government provided store and get some no questions asked, no hoops to jump through), and if we lived in a world where parents didn't have to work multiple jobs with every changing shifts just to pay rent, maybe we wouldn't have to worry about crime so much.
Instead we live in a world where minority children are treated worse in schools, where society assumes teenagers who aren't white are "up to some trouble", and in a world where those in power regularly show distain for life in general.
We've had presidents go on TV defending torture, why the hell should some poor kid who has nothing in life start to feel empathy for anyone?
> I have seen false conviction estimates ranging from 1 to 5 percent.
I agree with the rest of your comment, but I think this statistics only means that 1-5% of convicts were falsely convicted and could prove it. So the actual number is probably much larger. I would guess something like 20%.
Sounds like you're more interested in feeling good than actually fixing the problem that caused people to be assaulted.
We can acknowledge that context and environment foster crime while also not tolerating crime.
Are you interested in having less victims and less perpetrators in the future, or is punishment you're interested in for its own sake rather than as a potential tool?
Get back to us if you ever have a loved one get murdered, raped, or assaulted.
Justice is not solely about rehabilitation. It is very much about righteous punishment for doing evil. We can acknowledge that context and environment foster crime while also not tolerating crime.
Personally, I don't give one care about the "why" of certain classes of crime. I have zero tolerance or empathy for the doers of violence. If you murder someone, your life is forfeit to me. If you rape someone, I hope you get locked away for a minimum of 20 years. If you seriously assault someone, you should have to do jail time.