Speaking of crime and punishment, here’s a thread on prison and recidivism.
In short, we’re told – by a civil rights lawyer who claims that “cops and prisons are killing us all” – that neither custodial sanctions nor more lenient attempts at correction have much impact on rates of reoffending. This is then presented, by the same lawyer, as a reason not to imprison the predatory and murderous, who are apparently deserving of our sympathy. Unlike, one assumes, their numerous victims, and future victims.
And so, we arrive at the strange logic that if a person has been arrested many times for behaving like an animal, many times, and has consequently, belatedly, ended up in prison, thereby allowing the law-abiding some relief from his predation, then this is a bad thing. For which, we, not he, should feel bad.
As noted in the discussion, there’s a reliance, not least among progressives, on the notions of deterrence and rehabilitation as being how one determines whether prison is fitting or effective, or even an obsolete institution, something to abolish. But an antisocial moron with poor impulse control is likely to remain so until he dies, or is killed while engaging in criminal activity.
The concepts of punishment and incapacitation – of stopping a monster’s sociopathic activity and sparing others violation and misery, if only for the duration of his imprisonment – don’t seem to figure highly in progressive circles. Where, as we’ve seen, all kinds of contortions are very much in fashion.
Among the replies and linked tangents are some common, if unconvincing, suppositions. For instance, that habitual violent criminals – say, the kinds of creatures who gleefully sucker-punch elderly women because they happen to be of East Asian descent – will somehow be morally redeemed by “affordable housing” and “access to healthcare.”
Oh, and more “theatre” for schoolchildren.
Update, via the comments, where Darleen adds,
Incarceration may not REFORM or stop any particular criminal from committing crime on the outside, but at least law-abiding citizens will get a break from dealing with him for the duration of his sentence.
In reply to which, pst314 quotes Theodore Dalrymple:
Prisoner: “Prison doesn’t do me any good.”
Dalrymple: “Ah, but it does me good.”
Prisoner: “What do you mean?”
Dalrymple: “When you are in prison you are not burgling my home.”
At which point, readers may register that the limited effect of imprisonment – and lenient alternatives – on rates of reoffending could be construed in ways that, shall we say, diverge from progressive orthodoxy. One might, for instance, infer that those incarcerated for serious criminal savagery – and who, on release, continue being criminal savages – are irredeemable, and therefore undeserving of pretentious sympathy. One might even infer that the wellbeing of such creatures is no longer a concern.
Update 2:
In hindsight, this post has become the first part of a trilogy of sorts. See also parts two and three.
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