Powerful and engaging column on such an important matter. For post people prison is not for life, and hence we need to think carefully about how to improve these systems to reduce recidivism and to prevent prisoners from becoming worse. Really challenging to think about people who get convicted for a long time given the crimes they committed. short sentences seem problematic, but so do other options. We have heard / read some things about Norway and other systems that appear to achieve much lower rates of reoffending. We wrote a first pass on some of this issues: https://curingcrime.substack.com/p/recidivism-trying-to-rehabilitate-prisoners-91fd4a7b5f5e
Thank you for your kind words & thoughtful comments! Indeed, since prison is not for life, it certainly seems the best use of it to make useful citizens out of our criminals. That said, it hardly seems as if our systems are designed to do that. In fact, every option is more or less problematic, which rather raises the question of what exactly we think we are doing with our criminals…
Thank you for your comments! It’s good if you to take the time & make the effort to respond to my newsletter. There are of course at least three justifications of punishment, only one of which concerns rehabilitation, which is what I wrote about here. There are arguments for other justifications. Perhaps we shall approach them in an upcoming newsletter. Meanwhile, my feeling (& it’s probably no more than that) is that rehabilitation is the best use of the prison system. If you can fix a bad guy by putting him in prison, when he comes out we have that much less threat. Evidently that is not what we in the western world seem to think, though - at least in practical terms. It’s just not what we do. I have my reservations about retribution, although I acknowledge that there are philosophical arguments in favour of it. This is a big old subject, & one I raised almost by accident!
You make some good points! I definitely don’t think that rehabilitation should be the only aim of punishment. Indeed, if it were, you would be quite right that it wouldn’t make sense to punish murderers in particular. They tend to be if a different character from most other criminals. Indeed, it’s often said that the tenor of their lives is generally to be law-abiding. In their case, I suppose deterrence is the main argument for punishment. Even that has its difficulties. You can very well make the argument that deterrence just doesn’t work, especially when it comes to heated end-of-relationship arguments as the one you mention. Indeed, in some measure, all justifications of punishment fall short. It’s been something of a quandary for me ever since I started studying it, I don’t mind admitting.
Powerful and engaging column on such an important matter. For post people prison is not for life, and hence we need to think carefully about how to improve these systems to reduce recidivism and to prevent prisoners from becoming worse. Really challenging to think about people who get convicted for a long time given the crimes they committed. short sentences seem problematic, but so do other options. We have heard / read some things about Norway and other systems that appear to achieve much lower rates of reoffending. We wrote a first pass on some of this issues: https://curingcrime.substack.com/p/recidivism-trying-to-rehabilitate-prisoners-91fd4a7b5f5e
Thank you for your kind words & thoughtful comments! Indeed, since prison is not for life, it certainly seems the best use of it to make useful citizens out of our criminals. That said, it hardly seems as if our systems are designed to do that. In fact, every option is more or less problematic, which rather raises the question of what exactly we think we are doing with our criminals…
Thank you for your comments! It’s good if you to take the time & make the effort to respond to my newsletter. There are of course at least three justifications of punishment, only one of which concerns rehabilitation, which is what I wrote about here. There are arguments for other justifications. Perhaps we shall approach them in an upcoming newsletter. Meanwhile, my feeling (& it’s probably no more than that) is that rehabilitation is the best use of the prison system. If you can fix a bad guy by putting him in prison, when he comes out we have that much less threat. Evidently that is not what we in the western world seem to think, though - at least in practical terms. It’s just not what we do. I have my reservations about retribution, although I acknowledge that there are philosophical arguments in favour of it. This is a big old subject, & one I raised almost by accident!
You make some good points! I definitely don’t think that rehabilitation should be the only aim of punishment. Indeed, if it were, you would be quite right that it wouldn’t make sense to punish murderers in particular. They tend to be if a different character from most other criminals. Indeed, it’s often said that the tenor of their lives is generally to be law-abiding. In their case, I suppose deterrence is the main argument for punishment. Even that has its difficulties. You can very well make the argument that deterrence just doesn’t work, especially when it comes to heated end-of-relationship arguments as the one you mention. Indeed, in some measure, all justifications of punishment fall short. It’s been something of a quandary for me ever since I started studying it, I don’t mind admitting.