I do not know how much one should be punished for various crimes. I’d imagine that our current policy is too inhumane. But however much one thinks people should be punished for various crimes, it’s hard to fathom why corporal punishment is ruled out but prison is tolerated. Given that prison is the less humane option, either both should be allowed or neither should.
One reason to support prison as punishment for crimes over corporal punishment is that prisons confine and isolate dangerous individuals for lengthy periods, protecting the general public via physical separation.
I'd argue that physically preventing certain violent people from being able to harm others is indeed one of the most important purposes served by criminal law, and it's not served very well by corporal punishment. Some individuals are simply too impulsive or myopic to be deterred by corporal punishment. Almost the moment you let them free, after their beating, they'd just begin committing crimes again. By contrast, putting them in a high security prison allows society to monitor these people and prevent them from harming others directly.
The death penalty perhaps served this purpose in the past by making violent criminals permanently incapable of harming others ever again, but our society has (probably correctly) largely decided that it is morally wrong to toss away someone's life merely because they are pathologically dangerous. Therefore, prison serves as a useful compromise when protecting the public from violent criminals who are unable to stop committing repeated offenses.
Thankfully, most people generally age out of crime, so life sentences are rarely necessary, even for those who are generally quite violent.
The US government has a relevant report on this if people are interested: https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/effects-aging-recidivism-among-federal-offenders
For example:
Age and criminal history exerted a strong influence on recidivism. For offenders in Criminal History Category I, the rearrest rate ranged from 53.0 percent for offenders younger than age 30 at the time of release to 11.3 percent for offenders age 60 or older. For offenders in Criminal History Category VI, the rearrest rate ranged from 89.7 percent for offenders younger than age 30 at the time of release to 37.7 percent for offenders age 60 or older.
You are using "The criminal justice system" to mean " The US criminal justice system " throughout. Typical-countrying is particularly problematic in this case, because the US is such an outlier.
The way to humanize a prison system is not to replace unofficial tortures with official ones. Other countries have abandoned capital and corporal punishment , and have lower incarceration rates.
If the death penalty is not so bad, why does almost everyone on death row seek to appeal it?
The US has a high incarceration rate largely because we have so much crime, not because our criminal justice system is particularly punitive.
This article is a pretty interesting comparison of the US and supposedly-more-rehabilative systems like Norway's: https://inquisitivebird.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-the-nordic-rehabilitative
Turns out the secret of Norway's success is to put a bunch of people driving too fast in prison and also deport 1/4th of their prison population every year.
1That article seems to focus on recidivism rate, not incarceration rate or crime rate. But still your point is interesting and I decided to check. I compared the Wikipedia tables for incarceration rate and intentional homicide rate (the most objective proxy for crime rate that I can think of). It turns out if I sort countries by the ratio between the two, both Norway and the US are in the middle of the pack. Moreover, it seems there's no relation between these variables: the scatter plot looks like just a bunch of random points.
EDIT: thinking more about this, it's much more complex. Incarceration rate probably depends both on crime rate and on society's tolerance for crime (hidden variable), and crime rate probably depends both on incarceration rate and on society's custom for crime (hidden variable). So there are feedback mechanisms in both directions, with hidden variables that vary by country. Maybe someone can make a clear conclusion from this, but not me.
I was thinking the recidivism rate shows that the US's criminal justice system isn't really an outlier in terms of the effectiveness (people seem to re-offend at similar rates to other countries).
Although the lack of a difference does seem to indicate that unless we're going to go full-Singapore, what remains of capital punishment in the US doesn't seem to be helping.
Incarceration plays three roles (to varying degrees of success): punishment (and therefore deterrent), rehabilitation and exclusion from society.
One group of people would prefer focusing on rehabilitation rather than punishment, and are likely those who oppose solely serving vegan food to prisoners. Another group of people sees prisoners as no longer human and deserving of moral concern, and think that the cruelty of prison is the point.
The US prison system leans more towards the latter than the former (see: mandatory prison labor), though other places in the world lean differently. How far and in what direction prison systems should lean is a topic for philosophical debate.
Though also note that degree of punishment doesn't really correlate with deterrence from crime (review Apel and Nagin (2011), tl;dr: more about certainty of getting caught, it's complicated)
I think political-related proposals should pass two tests. First: is the policy good in itself. Second: If the people on the "other side" passed a mirrored proposal how bad would that be? This is my shortcut to trying to guess how repugnant they might find my idea.
On the second issue, maybe right-wingers would insist that women in prison should not be allowed to have abortions (it would be a deterrent, and they think abortions should be minimised anyway). Which maybe gives some insight into how they perceive your proposal, and therefore might help you frame it in a way that provokes less opposition. (I think your writing style maybe results in you provoking more opposition than your idea in itself warrants).
The problem with feeding prisoners vegan food to make their lives worse is similar to the problem with forcing them all to convert to Islam to make their lives worse--there's a group of people in the real world who would really like to convert others to Islam, and forcing prisoners to convert is a huge benefit to this group. The problem isn't just that the prisoners' lives are made worse; it's that it does so in a way which people are motivated to do for other reasons unrelated to prisoners or crime, creating both a moral hazard, and a dubious handout to outsiders who should not just be receiving handouts.
This was went completely the opposite direction to the one I expected. I thought you were heading towards "if all prisoners must be vegan then veganism will become associated with criminals in the cultural zeitgeist and become unfashionable."
Since the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world, replacing an imprison-too-many-people system with a flog-too-many-people system doesn't seem like the most important thing to me. It seems more important to figure out how to punish fewer people in the first place.
I'll bite the bullet for this one and suport vegan nutraloafs for all prisoners. Prison labor is a valuable source of restitution and rehabilitation, and tying it to non-terrible food in canteens seems like a good ideas.
—Tom Lehrer.
In the modern West, we tend to think of ourselves as very civilized, certainly compared to our ancient and barbaric ancestors. We don’t own slaves, women can drive, while they couldn’t in Ancient Rome, and so on. Though we systematically torture about 90 billion beings every year, before killing them, this is generally not seen as hindering our moral progress, for one generally doesn’t think that their moral failings are as severe as those of the past. And plus, those beings aren’t smart, so who cares?
One case where we like to think we’re very civilized and sophisticated is in our criminal justice system. We don’t behead people anymore—excepting Yemeni children, of course, and that’s as a side effect of our noble aims of funneling money into the hands of arms contractors—but instead, in the words of Tom Lehrer, we’d “rather kill them off by peaceful means.” Similarly, unlike those ancient savages, we don’t beat or hang people when they commit crimes—instead we lock them in prison.
Now, obviously I think in many ways we are more civilized than previous generations. But many of the criminal justice policies that we regard as indicative of being noble and civilized seem to be nothing of the sort. Nearly everyone would oppose bringing back corporal punishment, bringing back beatings for crimes. But how is what we do very different?
Somewhere between 1.9% and 40% of people are raped in prison. It would be unsurprising if it was nearer 40%, given how underreported it is. About a quarter of people, at least, are physically assaulted. So we sentence people to be locked in a box where many people get beaten as…a humane alternative to beating. Being locked up for 10 years isn’t a nice addition that takes the edge off a beating—a beating is just as bad whether implemented by the state as a punishment for a crime or implemented by a violent prisoner as a punishment for a crime.
The punishments we provide, while less viscerally upsetting than public floggings, are no more humane. I’d certainly much rather be beaten than be sentenced to prison for 10 years. Furthermore, because public beatings are more sudden, and those who commit crimes generally don’t think about long-term effects, they might even be a more effective deterrent.
Our criminal justice system functions very well to allow us to feel good about it. Those who commit crimes have their lives ruined, but it’s out of sight and out of mind. It’s not a public spectacle that makes us nauseous, so when the rapes and beatings happen behind closed doors, when people’s lives are ruined by decades of incarceration, we don’t feel responsible.
A while ago, I proposed serving only vegan food in prisons. I argued that this is a pretty good deterrent—having people eat bad food is pretty humane compared to other methods of deterrence. It also has the advantage—and this is the main draw of the proposal—of reducing the number of animals that get tortured and murdered every year for the sake of gustatory pleasure. People were horrified by this proposal—how dare I propose making the lives of prisoners worse?
But what do people think prisons are for? The purpose of a prison is to make the life of prisoners worse, so that they’re both unable to commit crimes while in prison and so that the punishment effectively deters crime. Ideally, they’d also rehabilitate, people, but vegan prisons don’t hamper that. My proposal is a million times more humane than the status quo!
Corporal punishment clearly causes people lots of misery. But so does any punishment for crimes. What is supposed to make prison any more humane? What makes it more civilized—less barbaric? Beyond the fact that we don’t have to witness the barbarism and cruelty, why is it any less barbaric and cruel?
In fact, were it not by the state, we wouldn’t think prison was one bit more humane than corporal punishment. If a person locked people in their basement with violent criminals for many decades, we’d think they were worse than one who just beat someone. So why is corporal punishment supposed to be any different?
I do not know how much one should be punished for various crimes. I’d imagine that our current policy is too inhumane. But however much one thinks people should be punished for various crimes, it’s hard to fathom why corporal punishment is ruled out but prison is tolerated. Given that prison is the less humane option, either both should be allowed or neither should. Allowing lengthy, life-ruining prison sentences, but condemning corporal punishment as barbaric is wildly indefensible. It’s a byproduct of foolish sentimentalism, of the greater emotional salience of corporal punishment. Contrary to modern notions, we are not any more civilized than those who supported corporal punishment.
Here’s another uncomfortable question—why are we so opposed to the guillotine. Oh sure, there might be all sorts of practical difficulties for it—beheadings get blood all over the place, hell of a job for the janitors. But why is it seen as so uncivilized? Our government kills people for their crimes, and yet bizarrely we act like other societies are backwards because they do their killing in a different way. This is so even though guillotines are less painful than our current cocktail of drugs that sometimes causes excruciating agony.
Lara Bazelon, in the recent Free Press Debate, described that if she could change one law, she’d get rid of the death penalty. My reaction was: what? The death penalty is only a bit worse than life without parole—I’d certainly take a 50% chance of life and 50% chance of death over certainty of life without parole. The number of people given the death penalty is in the low double digits. Contrast that with the 6-digit death count of our barbaric policy to arm the Saudis as they bombed and starved Yemeni kids, which killed many orders of magnitude more people—and the people killed were largely innocent children rather than malevolent child rapists. Really? This is supposed to be the biggest issue?
Our criminal justice system is completely screwed up. It’s dominated by a perverse kind of status quo bias, where we lock people in boxes for decades and then act like doing anything different is barbarism akin to the Roman gladiators. We’ll have better progress when we come to realize two facts: first, our current policy is unspeakably brutal, and second, punishment for crimes is inevitably at least a bit brutal.