That sentence leaped out as me as the crucial error that plunged the article into confusion. The words "prisoners could go in on Friday, and emerge, rehabilitated, on Sunday." are a massive failure of natural language where two very different ideas get referred to by a single ambiguous phrase.
Start by recalling Daniel Dennett's warnings against thought experiments. We set them up by saying: imagine X. We make a vague and half-hearted effort to imagine X. Then we draw the conclusion that we believed in all along. We seldom put the effort into our thought experiments that would let the logic of the scenario drive us to an unexpected conclusion.
Let us try to take Dennett's warning seriously. Fred goes into prison on Friday saying "Ofcourse I glassed the fucking bitch! That cunt deserved it." He comes out on Sunday saying "Call me Frederick. Call me Frederick the Fabulous. I hereby renounce my past life. It was so hopelessly vulgar. I will never be able to live down the shame of it, but I will strive mightily, for as long as God keeps me on earth, to be a shining example of penitence and good taste."
The psycho-surgery and neural implants had done their job and Fred really is rehabilitated over the weekend. Where is the old Fred, who seldom got through a rugby match without being sent off, who lost girlfriends through spending all his money on beer, and whose dangerous, manly allure won him new ones, quickly, if not for long? Is this new Federick even straight? Why is he playing chess on Friday nights. People are shocked, disturbed, creeped-out. The state psychiatrist is adamant that it is the same person and has old school records to prove it. Rough old Fred had been the strongest chess player in his school, aged 9. The friends who don't recognise him now, didn't know him then.
The folk understanding is that the elite are erasing prisoners completely, effectively stealing their bodies to provide homes for completely new people who subscribe to elite values. The elite understanding is that criminality comes from developmental wrong turns that are being rolled back and that rehabilitation involves rolling back the wrong turns and fasted forwarding the criminal to become the person be should have become all along.
Whoops! I've think I've over done taking the thought experiment seriously. In Crowe's brave new world people are indeed upset if prisoners go in on Friday, and emerge, rehabilitated, on Sunday, but for the opposite reason. In PhilGoetz's version they are upset because there is no punishment. In Crowe's version rehabilitation is a kind of death penalty, but with extra nastiness, and way too harsh.
OK, that is half my story. There is a plain, flat, literal meaning to "prisoners could go in on Friday, and emerge, rehabilitated, on Sunday." as vividly imagined above. The idea that people would be unhappy with the lack of punishment strikes me as implausible speculation.
The other half of my story concerns the cynical, ironic meaning of "prisoners could go in on Friday, and emerge, rehabilitated, on Sunday.". Politicians want to save money so they cut jail terms. They head off criticisms that crime will rise by denying that it is a cost saving measure. They are ring fencing the money they save on shorter jail terms and spending it on new, scientific rehabilitation. Twice the reform, in half the time. It is mostly lies. The new therapies don't work. They are only rolled out in two showcase prisons, with hand picked prisoners who have already reformed. The savings are mostly spent bailing out the banking system. Meanwhile, other politicians are rather pleased that crime is rising. That means they can persuade the public that more money must be spent on police and criminal justice and law enforcement. And that means that those politicians have a free hand to pass laws against vice and eliminate civil liberties and generally become the stern paternalistic father to all their children, err, adult citizens.
Meanwhile, the ordinary bloke, trying to get by in a rough part of town, where his flat gets burgled and his car gets stolen, knows exactly what is going on because he has seen it all before. Fred goes into prison on Friday, emerges rehabilitated on Sunday, burgles a flat on Monday and steals a car on Tuesday.
Of course people would be upset if prisoners could go in on Friday, and emerge, rehabilitated, on Sunday, because the cynical and ironic meaning is the only meaning they have for those words.
I've often encouraged people to give someone a more charitable interpretation. But I haven't had to ask someone not to deliberately search out the least-charitable interpretation... until now.
The idea that people would be unhappy with the lack of punishment strikes me as implausible speculation.
If you'd said, "most people", I wouldn't agree, but I could imagine you were thinking it through carefully. But it's "implausible" that people want revenge on criminals? No. I find that implausible.
...That sentence leaped out as me as the
Why do those words go together?
Society - and for once, I'm using this term universally - teaches that, if you committed a crime, you should be punished.
But in some societies, we have an insanity defense. If you had a brain condition so that you had no - here it's a little vague - consciousness, or moral sense, or free will, or, well, something - then it would be cruel to punish you for your crime. Instead of going to prison, you should be placed somewhere where you can't hurt anybody, where professional physicians and counselors can study your case and try to reform you so that you can rejoin society.
Wait - so that isn't what prison is for?
No. Prison is to punish people. Is it any wonder that prison doesn't reform people, when we don't want it to reform them? Most people would be upset if prisoners could go in on Friday, and emerge, rehabilitated, on Sunday. When people say, "It would be cruel to punish people who aren't responsible for their actions", they are implicitly saying, "Prison is necessarily cruel; and that's good, because we should be cruel to criminals who are responsible for their actions."
But the more we learn about psychology and neuroscience, the further responsibility recedes into the distance.
Outcome-based justice argues that we should give up playing the blame game, because neuroscience keeps finding more and more proofs that things are "not our fault". Instead, we should write laws that deter crime.
You might think this is what we already try to do. But it isn't! Witness this confused article from the Brookings Institute, Cognitive Neuroscience and the Future of Punishment by O. Carter Snead. Snead objects to outcome-based justice. He summarized all of the arguments for it, yet managed to completely miss their point, concluding where he started from, saying that outcome-based justice is obviously bad because it could lead to being cruel to people who didn't deserve it. (Instead of only being cruel to the people who do deserve it, which is obviously what we want to do.)
Snead understands that outcome-based justice deters crime:
You might expect that Snead goes on to explain why these laws are bad things. But he doesn't! He assumes we can all see that these are obviously bad things.
The Wrath of Kahneman describes a study which asked whether people punish others in order to deter crime, and concluded, No. People are doing something else.
One theory is that people are trying to be fair. Everyone should get the same chances; everyone should get the same punishment for the same crime. John Rawls argues this explicitly in Justice as Fairness: Justice should not be utilitarian, but should instead be fair.
I believe Rawls' view is also the popular view of what "justice" means. And, I will argue in a later post, it is part of a pattern showing a deep divide between two different ways of using the word "ethics".
ADDED: Constant made the point that, while one part of outcome-based justice is preventing future harm from the criminal on the dock, another part is deterring harm by other criminals. This latter part does not benefit from punishing criminals who cannot be deterred. Thus, to optimally punish both criminals who can and cannot be deterred, the law requires a concept of moral culpability, and should punish criminals who can't be deterred more lightly. This is a better origin story for the linking together of morality and free will than the just-so story I'd come up with, so I plan on stealing it for my next post. (SilasBarta may have been trying to make the same point, but I found his comments impenetrable.)
(This post is laying groundwork for two other posts that will go in different directions, neither of which concerns justice.)