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Lumifer comments on Open Thread, September 23-29, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I've been working on a series of videos about prison reform. During my reading, I came across an interesting passage from wikipedia:
What struck me was how preferable these punishments (except the hanging, but that was very rare) seem compared to the current system of massive scale long-term imprisonment. I would much rather pay damages and be whipped than serve months or years in jail. Oddly, most people seem to agree with Wikipedia that whipping is more "severe" than imprisonment of several months or years (and of course, many prisoners will be beaten or raped in prison). Yet I think if you gave people being convicted for theft a choice, most of them would choose the physical punishment instead of jail time.
Don't look at it from the perp point of view, look at it from an average-middle-class-dude or a suburban-soccer-mom point of view.
If there's a guy who, say, committed a robbery in your neighborhood, physical punishment may or may not deter him from future robberies. You don't know and in the meantime he's still around. But if that guy gets sent to prison, the state guarantees that he will not be around for a fairly long time.
That is the major advantage of prisons over fines and/or physical punishments.
On the other hand, making people spend long periods of time in a low-trust environment surrounded by criminals seems to be a rather effective way of elevating recidivism when they do get out, so the advantage as implemented in our system is on rather tenuous footing.
And of course, the prison system comes with the major disadvantage that imprisoning people is a highly expensive punishment to implement.
I am not arguing that prisons are the proper way to deal with crime. All I'm saying is that arguments in favor of imprisonment as the preferred method of punishing criminals exist.
This is totally obvious, I'm not sure why you felt you needed to point that out.
The point of my comment is that it is interesting that prison isn't viewed as cruel, even though it's obviously more harsh than alternatives. Obviously there are other reasons people prefer prison as a punishment for others.
That's only an advantage if the expected cost to society of keeping him in prison is less than the expected cost (broadly construed) to society of him keeping on robbing.
The relevant part: "look at it from an average-middle-class-dude or a suburban-soccer-mom point of view".
They do have political power and they don't do expected-cost-to-society calculations.
I guess I just hadn't interpreted "point of view" close enough to literally.
well, short of death.
Death is an existential punishment :-/