What if prisons were actually about rehabilitation?
Imagine for a moment that everyone in jail deserved to be there. They are simply too dangerous to be out on the streets and interacting with others in society.
Now imagine that some of those trillions the governments of this world have was actually put into rehabilitating these individuals instead of punishing them, or turning them into workers?
Can you imagine if every inmate at every prison had their own personal psychologist/counselor who they could speak to whenever they wanted? Where they could get to the bottom of whatever problems they have and address those problems so that when they leave the prison, they are no longer a danger to society?
How much would such a person be worth to this world? How much power to get through to struggling youths would someone who has lived that life, faced their demons and conquered them have? I imagine an awful lot.
But instead we have prison systems that non-violent criminals go into and come out as violent ones. We do not have rehabilitation, but education on how to be an unsavory member of society.
We largely ignore the prison system. For all the anti-government media I have absorbed, the prisoners of this world seem forgotten by most. But I think it is time we started remembering them.
If we ignore the fact that many in there are innocent or non-violent criminals, and try to convince ourselves that all in there are genuinely dangerous, we still have to admit to ourselves that they likely would not have been if they had grown up in a different world.
We have corrupting forms of media assaulting us at every possible angle, and mass impoverishment that leads people to do things they otherwise would not in order to feed themselves and their families. Should we really be giving up on them so easily? Should we really just be forgetting about them and the fact that they've been locked in cages by the very system that conditioned them to be the type of person that belongs in a cage?
If a kid grows up listening to songs on the radio about shooting people and selling crack, and if he later in life ends up shooting someone who tried to rob the crack he was selling; should we be mad at him? Or should we be mad at the radio stations that conditioned him to believe selling crack was the way to go?
If another child grows up repeatedly seeing news broadcasts about bullied children shooting up their schools, and watching movies like John Wick where a supposed hero is depicted shooting bullies in the head one after the other without even showing a glimpse of emotion on their face, and if that child later buys a gun and goes into school and shoots a few kids who had been bullying them; should we disappointed in the child or in the news company and the movie industry that together led him to do what he did?
My guess would be that even the majority of rapists, serial killers and paedophiles are likely adopting their interests from TV and pornography. Should we continue to be mad at them or should we finally point the finger at the corrupting influence rather than the resulting symptom?
For the past however many decades, it appears we have opted to be mad at the one who committed the crime rather than the environment that brought them to do it. Perhaps that is why it has been so easy for us to forget about them, to such a point that I do not even know a phrase for a type of activism that seeks to stop locking humans in cages, when I know a phrase for so many other types of activism. Perhaps no one cares to have them truly rehabilitated. Perhaps we have simply told ourselves that rehabilitation is not possible and so incarceration will just have to do.
But the thing is, if it is truly our TV's and our Radio's, our poverty and our poor mental and physical health, that leads so many of us to do really shitty things to one another; then we have the evidence right there that rehabilitation is possible. I'm no psychologist, but it seems to me that in most cases a professional might even be able to use the knowledge of the crime, and the history of the person, to uncover the conditioning that led to the behaviour, and therefor reveal the lesson that needs to be unlearned.
I've only started thinking about this issue - in any significant capacity - for the first time day. And yet I already have an approach to rehabilitation that seems rather sound to me. So how could they not have came up with an approach of their own and perfected it by now?
Aren't we supposed to get better at things the longer we do them, so why are prisons getting worse? I think the obvious truth is that they are not trying to rehabilitate people anymore - if they ever were. They've given up, and prisoners have become a source of income rather than a responsibility to help someone overcome their problems.
I think we ought to look at criminal behaviour, in the violent or harmful sense, as a mental illness- or an emotional one. If we can label a dangerously low amount of Vitamin C in the body as scurvy- and then label that a physical disease, then why should we not look at the condition of having dangerously low levels of compassion, and label thatas an emotional or mental impairment?
By calling a lack of compassion a disease, we can put an urgency on it to be addressed, rather than simply accepted as normal human behaviour and then punished. If it were considered a disease, we might have funding and scientific research into human behaviour that was able to reveal to us the true sources of corruption within society so we could stomp them out and replace them with mechanisms that condition us with love for one another instead.
A compassion deficiency is most certainly an illness to me, I realise. And perhaps it is one that even the best of us are suffering from if we have decided to give up on those of us who have been forced into cages for living the lives they were led to live by a system that we are all responsible for perpetuating.
I think we ought to consider what one rehabilitated life might be worth to society, and then consider what a hundred thousand might be worth? Then perhaps we might do more to ensure that prisons be about more than punishment.
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.
It is an important but a difficult topic to tackle. On one hand, I agree that there really need to be made more efforts for rehabilitation and re socialization.
On the other hand, I also think that doing so would be more of a case of treating the symptoms, not the cause of the actual problem.
Leaving mental diseases and problems that come with that aside, efforts need to be so that everyone can live a life that is just comfortable and manageable enough that acting in violation to the law is just not attractive.
On the other hand. in order for people to respect the big laws, we need to enforce the small ones. That may sound harsh but rules aren't there to limit your freedom but to highlight your possibilities.
I thank you for your comment but I recognize that a discussion on this particular topic may not be very fruitful for either of us. This is because I believe that rules are there to limit our freedom, and so with a disagreement on the principle, I feel it#s somewhat pointless arguing the product.
Check out the Maxims of Law pertaining to punishment, you might find a few you don't agree with but you'll have no problem approving of this one:
https://ecclesia.org/truth/maxims.html#Crime
If you want the book on them. https://books.google.com/books?id=qMkEAAAAYAAJ
This sounds agreeable, but only as long as it isn't limited to detention and guarding. I would like prisons to still be places where you can actually create a foundation on which you can build a life on after you are being freed.
The mind is that place. Prison isn't supposed to be about Isolation either.
I disagree, the stronger the opposition the more fruitful the discussion. I can't learn anything from someone who just agrees with me on everything I say and vice versa.
And on your next point, we have rules and laws that punish people that go around killing people. This may limit some, but it makes me feel much more free because I do not have to fear that I get murdered at any given opportunity just because.
There's no "big law" or "small law", there's only law. Law is the product of Reason and most of the law comes directly from Mosaic law or it comes from the Golden Rule.
Didn't know that these are called "The golden rule". Always something new to learn!
this is SUCH an important issue, and one that I have written about.. It is a Very sad state of affairs that prisoners are treated like animals (or indeed that animals are treated like animals!).. and that prisons are run as a business that only profit from people reoffending and returning..
The prison system should indeed be ALL about rehabilitating people so that they can integrate back into society. I see the current system as a symptom of what i can only call ruthless capitalism. How can we treat people like animals and expect them to behave like humans.
I have upvoted this post from the @ecotrain minnow support project and hope this encourages you to keep writing great posts!
Our views seem to align on this.
Just a quick note as you know that I'm not reading in any depth. ^_^;