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RE: What if prisons were actually about rehabilitation?
My guess would be that even the majority of rapists, serial killers and pedophiles are likely adopting their interests from TV and pornography.
Perhaps. But i'm not gunning people or abusing children, and I've grown up on the same planet as these people.
I don't think we can blame environment in the main, or else we'd all be fked up. Some people are just bad, bad eggs. Saying that, a lot of cell-timers aren't that bad, and I do think rehabilitation is possible in some cases.
However, time/money. Do you want to put more money into things for the good, or potentially piss it up the wall trying to help the bad?
Well I think that while we all live in the same world, we all experience completely different lives. I find that nothing provides me with more growth in terms of understanding myself and others, than trying to empathize with the actions of others that piss me off.
When I do so, it reveals to me how one single moment can have such a dramatic impact on someones life. One bad lesson learned, or one good one missed, and you are on a completely different life path.
Another way I think about it, though this will probably be perceived as arrogant, and it very likely ought to be too, is that if we imagine for a moment we all did grow up with the exact same experiences, and yet only a percentage of us turned out to be bad apples, would that not make them weaker than us?
Whether it be weaker in the sense that their minds are more easily programmed by corrupting influences, or in the sense that they have less will power to say no the things they are tempted to do but know they should not, it would certainly suggest to me that they are weaker, or that they have at least been unable to find their strength yet.
If this is the case, then should we not be trying to help these people as opposed to trying to sentence them to death or life in a cage?
I suppose this is the part I'm unwilling to believe in, for it seems akin to giving up on humanity if we can believe that any of us do not have the potential to be good.
It's a good question. I would say I would rather waste money trying to help someone who needs help, than spend it on something someone who doesn't need help doesn't need. And there's plenty of that type of spending going on, and therefore plenty of potential funds to help these prisoners.
I agree that no one looks through the same eyes as another, and think back to my childhood friends and how different we are, and we're. At the same time we kicked a ball on the same piece of grass, laughed in class, and for the most part had the same homelife.
But I see differences in the home life, and perhaps that is the key variable in this case.
I think this is very true, I can see that from personal experience.
As far as the last point, if you are almost sure it will be wasted, then perhaps offering to the good who do need would be the better bet?
As well as the single offenders being locked away, there are 3/4/5 timers who I don't feel deserve the enormous funding it does/would take to try rehabilitate for the n'th time. We have good, starving people on this earth, and I would rather take the safer bet here.
Interesting topic.
I wonder, do Amish have a Crime problem in the least, do they have an abusive parent problem in the least? even only verbally abusive? You say that we all grow up on the same planet, but why not make it "we all grow up in the same universe" or multiverse, it's all rather missing the point because the point would be missed at the moment you mitigate the numerous, or innumerable environmental influences, to "we all grew up on the same planet" as there is hardly a difference between one place on the planet and the billions of others that people inhabit.