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Oscar_Cunningham comments on Open Thread, September 23-29, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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There's a post on Overcoming Bias about this here.
The key quote, "Incarceration destroys families and jobs, exactly what people need to have in order to stay away from crime." If we had wanted to create a permanent underclass, replacing corporal punishment with prison would have been an obvious step in the process.
Obviously that's not why people find imprisonment so preferable to torture, though; TheOtherDave's "sacred anti-value" explanation is correct there. It would be interesting to know exactly how a once-common punishment became seen as unambiguously evil, though, in the face of "tough on crime" posturing, lengthening prison sentences, etc.
Maybe it's a part of human hypocrisy: we want to punish people, but in a way that doesn't make our mirror neurons feel their pain. We want people to be punished, without thinking about ourselves as the kind of people who want to harm others. We want to make it as impersonal as possible.
So we invent punishments that don't feel like we are doing something horrible, and yet are bad enough that we would want to avoid them. Being locked behind bars for 20 years is horrible, but there is no speficic moment that would make an external observer scream.
It is, incidentally, not obvious to everyone that the desire to create a stable underclass didn't drive our play a significant role in our changing attitudes towards prisons... in fact, it's not even obvious to me, though I agree that they didn't play a significant role in our changing attitudes towards torturing criminals.
Because corporal punishment is an ancient display of power; the master holding the whip and the servant being punished for misbehavior. It's obviously effective, and undoubtedly more humane than incarceration, but it's also anathema to the morality of the "free society" where everyone is supposed to be equal and thus no-one can hold the whip.
(Heck, even disciplining a child is considered grounds to put the kid in foster care; if you want corporal punishment v incarceration, that's a hell of a dichotomy. And for every genuinely abused kid CPS saves, how many healthy families get broken up again?)
The idea is childish and unrealistic, but nonetheless popular because it plays on the fear and resentment people feel towards those above them. And in a democracy, popular sentiment is difficult to defeat.