Thank you for the detailed and considerate reply, despite the fact that I missed your most extensive post on the topic, I should add!
I only noticed it after the fact, which is when I added the following:
edit: I missed your lengthy post from the last page, so these are some additions:
Originally Posted by Amir0x
It matters not if an individual kills one person or a million; the crimes are only that of scale.
Saying that scale doesn't matter is essentially ignoring the fact that we operate in a world with finite resources and that there is no room for our ability to exercise judgment as to what is more urgent at any given moment, just as I said above.
Furthermore, I'd love to know if you have any information on studies done in prison systems which attempt to correlate chances of rehabilitation with severity of crime. Do such studies really show no correlation? Are mass murderers equally likely to reform as single time murderers or lesser criminals? And what is the cost to society to reform a mass murderer VS the cost to rebuild a small business that was financially ruined, or help provide minimum wage families with better quality of life, or any other common issue that's not related to crime?
Had I seen your original post earlier, I would have worded mine differently, and emphasised only the points I feel weren't already addressed. I should add that I share your belief that the worst criminals are beyond rehabilitation with the tools available to us today; I only worded my post the way I did in order to support my argument that administering expensive treatment that has little to no empirical evidence of being effective is illogical, and that this is the very logic that dictates health insurance or medical policies when they do not hand out support for experimental treatments of terminal illness. Why certain individuals in the prison system should receive the privilege of such treatment when non criminals who have fallen ill do not is beyond me.
I do not mean to discredit the effort you put into this post, but virtually every point you made here was answered by a post I made
here.
It illustrates why it's cheaper to focus on rehabilitation, why it's more beneficial for society, why it's more beneficial for the prison staff who must watch inmates and for fellow prisoners who must be stuck in prison alongside fellow violent/dangerous criminals. And we absolutely do know the paths we must take - a substantial focus on education alone has proven by fact to reduce recidivism rates, inmate-on-inmate violence, prison staff violence, the list goes on and on. These are not pie-in-the-sky ideals, and they are not unproven fluff. I encourage you to go through the post I linked or simply do some of your own research. We are not in a place where a great many mysteries exist as to how to get these things done. We are only in a place where our own inaction or desire for revenge prevents us from thinking logically about how to do it, because we don't want to be the ones caught giving convicted pedophiles access to computers for learning or games.
Frankly, most of your points have ignored the commentary made by others in the topic, along with the evidence they have provided. For example, your commentary implies that you believe we think that many of the worst mass murderers or pedophiles can be truly reformed/rehabilitated in the sense that one day they could be properly released back into society. Again, this is not the case.
Odds are these people are mentally deficient to the point where they will always have to be imprisoned, but that is not a determination you or I get to make, nor should we put arbitrary requirements on how severe a crime must be before we stop trying to see if someone can be rehabilitated.
Once again, this last sentence is exactly the part I take issue with. We
do make such determinations and we
should be making them to a certain degree, even if that means risking occasionally making incorrect judgements, because that is the only way to understand, in the long run, how to respond correctly to offenders of varying degrees. Let me explain myself before you jump at me saying I'm supporting giving the death penalty to potentially innocent people because that is not what I mean. I mean that there already exist maximum security prisons and minimum security prisons, based on existing laws created to determine the severity of the crime, and within those prisons individual inmates are already given different privileges based on their behavior at any given moment - surely this is necessary for the rehabilitation process!
But, and here's the important part, none of that matters. Rehabilitation is not just for inmates with a possibility of getting out. And it's also not just for inmates that have a real chance of changing their criminal proclivities. It is for the entire prison industrial complex, to change the environment for the betterment of society.
This would be true if all prisoners were thrown together into the same prison, but that's not the case anywhere in the world, because I say above we DO make distinctions based on severity of the crime. I can extend my previous comparison of medical treatments to rehabilitation programs. Isn't it more logical, given a limited budget, to spend more on rehabilitation programs for minimum security prisoners than it does spending it equally on minimum and maximum security prisoners? If the money being used to keep a mass murderer locked away for life is enough to fund rehabilitation programs for ten lesser criminals, isn't it obvious where that money should go?
Again, I will walk you through the steps
1. A prison system that is driven by rehabilitation (plenty of education, access to some entertainment, access to counselors and visitors, job re-entry programs etc) is one that has net benefits for society, and this has been borne out by every study that has been done on the subject.
2. In a rehabilitative prison system, instances of suicide go astronomically down. Instances of treatment for severe mental disabilities go down, saving tax payers money. Instances of violent crimes on other inmates go down, also saving tax payers money. Instances of violent crime against prison staff go down, also saving tax payers money.
3. In a rehabilitative prison system, criminals who do have a shot at getting parole do not also risk as severe level of mental degradation, and have literally 60-80% better chance at leaving prison and reintegrating into society in a safe and responsible way. I do not even need to explain how many ways this is better for the community. The lower the recidivism rates, the less criminals we have to pay to actually house in prison, the less crimes being perpetrated on members of society, the more they can hold jobs - the better society benefits as a whole. Again, this is not pie-in-the-sky idealism. It is borne out by every viable study that has been done on the subject.
All of this is purely in relation to prisoners with good chances of rehabilitation to begin with, and we all agree that since the necessary tools to facilitate such rehabilitation exist and have proven to be effective at a reasonable cost, they should be used. But you yourself believe that the worst criminals don't belong in this group to begin with, so I don't understand the point of this lengthy explanation.
4. In a rehabilitative prison system, inmates who commit crimes for which they are eligible for parole are at less risk of being negatively influenced by other criminals who have essentially gone insane by years of incarceration. Additionally, a prison system which gives most prisoners a hope for release if they are genuinely rehabilitated is one where there are far less escape attempts (saving money), far less violent crimes internally (saving money) and far more behaved consumers overall. The net result is if you give inmates a bit of hope, many just naturally behave. Again, the statistics back this up.
Once again, most of this has already been covered. You make a distinction between two types of prisoner who are not equal, and then go on to assume they should be put together in the same ward. Is this insane prisoner not a danger to other inmates? Why are they being punished by being exposed to him to begin with? Has he gone insane as a result of maltreatment by the prison system? If so, he should be treated separately from others, in a way that allows him to recover. If he was this way to begin with and has no chance of rehabilitation, why is he imprisoned with criminals who have a chance at returning to society? Isn't his presence in the facility hurting their chances, prolonging their stay (costing tax payers money) or making them more likely to return to crime if they are granted parole?
5. Harsher punishment has never once been demonstrated to deter serious crimes. In fact, the vast majority of the studies and statistical data point we have to look at (again, check my massive post and many of the links in it) suggests the precise opposite: states with no death penalty have lower instances of murder for example. Countries with no death penalty also have far lower instances of serious crime per capita. It's also cheaper to avoid the death penalty for tax payers. And unless you're going to set to changing the protections we have in the constitution*, it's always going to be that way.
I agreed with you from the start that capital punishment is not a deterrent, and that using it as such is misguided. Regarding differences between countries, allow me to suggest that perhaps the difference between some countries and others isn't as one dimensional as allowing or not allowing capital punishment. Maybe there's a correlation between not having the death penalty (or having it but using it very rarely) and also having better methods/practices for treating criminals? Methods which effectively give them a better chance of rehabilitation? That seems to make much more sense, based on everything you have said yourself about the rehabilitation process.
* It's important to note that changing the constitution to make it easier to put people to death (for the sake of making it cheaper versus lifelong incarceration) is also one of the more abhorrent ideas I've ever seen posed. As the innocence project continually suggests, we NEED the ability to continually appeal death sentences. Countless innocent people have been put to death, and the easier we make that process, the easier it is for an innocent to be put to death. If even one innocent is put to death in the name of our petty blood lust, we are an inherently unethical country.
This is all well and good, but if administering the death penalty is so expensive it means these people are allowed to corrupt the minds of others, resulting in even more pain, misery and death, should we congratulate ourselves on our superior morality?
If as a result of keeping some criminals in the same facility as lesser ones it's possible to ruin many a life of prisoners who may have been able to recover otherwise, or increas prison suicides or offenses made by prisoners that are reinstated in society, shouldn't the correct course of action be to have someone in the position to exercise careful judgement and weigh the cost to others against the cost to the criminal? That seems to me to suggest there is room for capital punishment.
It's true that the judicial system makes mistakes, but that shouldn't completely discount what we have learned over hundreds of years. Every criminal case brought to court has different degrees of certainty attached to it, and there's no point in treating them all equally. For example - multiple eye witnesses and/or recorded evidence of a crime taking place make it much less likely the defendant is innocent than circumstantial evidence. This kind of criteria is what the judicial system is based on to begin with, and is no doubt used when arguing for or against a death sentence in democratic countries that allow it..
Mistakes made by the judicial system should be treated with careful consideration and judgement on a case by case basis by top experts in the relevant field, only this guarantees the correct lessons are learned from such mistakes. Grouping certain mistakes together in an attempt to provide a "one size fits all" solution, or pointing them out in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of the judicial process, goes against core ideals on which the system was built in the first place. These ideals include investigation, and logical reasoning, carefully checking and balancing each consideration and how it affects all of society, and treating each individual case with as much intellectual rigour as possible before interpreting the law.
