#21

Eventually, it’s not like we’d remove prisons first then fix society later, but ultimately they’re putting the cart before the horse. I appreciate there are a tiny amount of very damaged folk that need to be removed from the populace for everybody’s safety too but I don’t think locking them away forever serves any purpose either.

#22

what would you have in place of prisons?

#23

to think there aren’t people that need to be locked up forever is utopian and silly. like in theory if you can rehabilitate them, great, but there are clearly and unfortunately people way beyond that, often due to psychological problems i imagine. extreme example: if someone openly admits they’re going to kill as soon as they leave the prison, you don’t just set them free because, well, they’ve been there long enough.

#24

No, thinking prisons are a necessary evil is the silly utopian project - and demonstrably does not work and has made things like social inequality, structural racism, alienation, poverty, reoffending all the rest of it worse in the long run.
And if you’d actually bothered reading what I said I never denied there weren’t a small amount of people like that, but I don’t think institutionalisation is the answer for that either. It’s a much more complicated problem than that.

#25

Whatever the confinement is framed as, anyone who is clearly a danger to other people can’t be allowed unsupervised interaction with society. Call it prison or Happy Fun Rehabilitation and Love Time but you have to do something about it.

#26

really long community service for all crimes except murder / sex offences.

#27

Sure. So what do you do with the murderers/sex offenders?

#28

LOCK EM UP.

#29

Well no, that’s what we have now. That’s the thing that’s making things worse.
Every case is individual but in a society where we had greater equality and communitarian living, and more importantly a change in social attitudes we’d be able to catch warning signs much earlier since people would be less isolated. This isn’t pie in the sky thinking, it’s the reason North European countries have so many less prisoners and are ending up closing a lot of their prisons.
That’s not to say there wouldn’t be instances of extremely violent crime still happening, but at that point it’d probably be more a job for a hospital - removing the idea of punishment and punitive measures and it’d be much better for the wider society too.

#30

So you still have prisons then.

#31

Yeah, for the worst 1% of crimes. you could probably fit them all in one jail somewhere terrible like Manchester.

3 Likes
#32

:smiley:

#33

I was thinking actual Butlins

2 Likes
#34

I know it probably comes from a good place but I genuinely think you borders on the dangerously extremist on this one. I reckon that society has failed the majority of people who end up in prison and that a better society with better education, healthcare and welfare support will eradicate most problems. That’s towards what the Scandinavian model is getting at.

Your suggestion that even after that support was provided someone could rape someone else and then society would just say “well, that’s a case for the hospital then” to the victim and let the criminal walk free is even worse than what we have now and pretty distasteful tbh.

#35

You keep bandying around words like extremist and utopian and frankly I feel the same about you and our current system.
I think your last paragraph is so idiotic and putting so many words in my mouth and again getting away from what I was ever saying I’m an idiot for even responding to it, but obviously I think rape culture is a structural problem that is best tackled socially and in the media, and with communally organised preventative measures and a huge change in culture - rather than letting rapists go free.

1 Like
#36

ATP 2018 - the nightmare of the criminal justice system (curated at her majesty’s pleasure)

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#37

I’ve always wondered whether prisoners taking certain drugs, specifically cannabis, may be beneficial to the people who run prisons and whether it might be…tolerated. Am i stating the obvious, or being daft? The chances of me causing a riot after a bucket bong would be fucking nil.

#38

yeah, til they run out of weed and get the rage

#39

Stoned rage?

Hmmm.

#40

See, here we come from exactly the same position.

Here I don’t think we do. Sorry if I misread it, but to me that suggested that a violent crime - such as rape, which I used as an extreme example to emphasise how uncomfortable I found it - would be unpunished and be “more a job for a hospital” in such a system. How I read that was so far to the left as to be what I’d class as an “extremist” view, even if it came from a good natured belief in humanity and society.

Anyway, the basic idea that crime is a societal issue and can by and large be prevented without resorting to incanceration is a common ground and I wasn’t trying to offend you and agree the language was a bit unnecessarily confrontational. Probs best leave it at that.