Bullies: Go To Jail?

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One must have respect for the opinions of the public to be humiliated by it. A good many do not. Lynching was a popular sport in the US south for black people who demanded to be treated as humans. I see little appeal in that process.

Maybe not lynching.

Honor killing perhaps?

Since you're intent on public revenge and releasing the savage residing in self righteous people, each participant can be armed with a club and they can slowly beat him to death while he's tied to a post. It could become a popular sport like bear baiting.Eventually, when the mood and process proves more popular than reality TV it will become very difficult to tell the difference between criminals and the general public and they can indulge in public free-for-alls to torture and humiliate and murder each other to their heart's content.

The thing is, no matter how we decide to approach the problem, people are always going to come to harm. It's really a matter of choosing the lesser of many evils.

That's how it is at the moment, anyway. I'm quite optimistic about the situation, though. Violence has been declining for centuries - if you're living in a developed, then you're in one of the most peaceful times & places in human history. I see no reason why this trend shouldn't continue. There's an interesting video about this subject here:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ramBFRt1Uzk[/youtube]

Hopefully, the whole thing will gradually become less of a problem and maybe, someday, it might disappear entirely. But what to do in the meantime? It's important to remember that prisons cause a significant amount of suffering. Perhaps if the money that's currently being spent on prisons went to, say, helping people in areas of high crime rates find work, we might be able to do more good.

No, I think you're downplaying the harm prison causes. It's not just a concept. They literally exist, and they cause a massive deprivation of liberty and waste of life. People going into prisons can expect not an environment free of crime, but a very violent one, where, far from being taught appropriate modes of behaviour, they are shown that the weak are to be exploited and assaulted, and the strong must act aggressively simply to prevent themselves from coming to harm. Then there's the emotional harm caused to the families and friends of prisoners.

We do not need prison to communicate what sort of behaviours people are against. The vast majority of prisoners know that what they did is considered wrong by society. Anybody who isn't aware that things such as rape, murder or theft are considered wrong would probably end up in a mental hospital, rather than a prison.

I think I just have much less sympathy for them.


I don't know where I argued that this was a good thing or that they didn't need reform.


Your thinking like an aspie though, we seem to have a logic that's somewhat divorced from reality and here's how I'd explain it. There are two sides of our functioning - 1) the logical/rational/analytical and 2) the animal/basic organism that operates by patterns of logic that usually but not always overlap the first. The problem is we're all 1) and almost nothing of 2), and because of that we tend to fall for a lot of ideas that completely lack any conventional wisdom - simply because we haven't experienced, internally, what it is to be most NT's or further down the road what it is to be the sort of malignant narcissist that our prisons are typically filled with.

So far, I'm just saying, I haven't seen a disagreement from you as much as just your own emotional point of reference on the same facts. Maybe I missed something?

I don't have any sympathy for them.



There may be some way of reforming them such that they produce more good than harm, but I'm not sure about that. My main concern would be to stop sending people to prisons at all. For one thing, I think that a lot of people who are currently incarcerated simply should not be in prison, no matter what the prison is like. I accept there are people who need to be seperated from society, but I prefer not to call those institutions prisons - although they may be prisons by definition, I prefer to distinguish my concept from the current one which involves needlessly depriving people of lots of freedoms.



First of all, I disagree that something which is simply 'emotional disagreement' doesn't count as real disagreement. You might have two people who are pro-choice, but one of them is personally disgusted by abortion, while the other likes abortion because they see it as an expression of women's rights. I'd say that they have a genuine disagreement, even though neither may have a rational justification for their views, and even though they reach the same conclusion when they do think about the issue rationally.

In any case, I don't think my disagreement is mere difference of 'emotional point of reference', whatever that means. You claimed that prisons are needed to communicate acceptable modes of behaviour to society, and my position is that this is simply incorrect.

I would never deny that I have many views which go against conventional wisdom. However, I would deny that simply being conventional wisdom is a good reason to believe something. I would also never deny that prisons are filled with 'malignant narcissists' and other kinds of unpleasant people. I'm not sure what this has to do with what I'm saying, though.

I don't think prisons communicate acceptable modes of behaviour. We learn what is considered socially appropriate behaviour through various influences but particularly school, family, friends, and just common sense. And these are very effective at communicating what is considered socially appropriate. You also have to remember that there are many socially inappropriate that will not result in a prison sentence, or any kind of official punishment at all.

This is also worth mentioning again: "far from being taught appropriate modes of behaviour, they are shown that the weak are to be exploited and assaulted, and the strong must act aggressively simply to prevent themselves from coming to harm". Yes, presumably, we may be able to change this through reform. The point is, however, that the current prisons clearly do not provide good examples of how we should act - and yet, most people are not criminals. So I doubt it is prison that teaches us how everybody wants us to behave.

Regarding the effectiveness of prison versus alternatives, there have been times throughout history, particularly in primitive or nomadic cultures, when prison simply wasn't an option. I like the eye-for-an-eye concept of punishment fits the crime. Certain crimes such as murder, rape, and treason, for example, are no doubt worthy of the death penalty. All others, in keeping with eye-for-an-eye policy can be dealt with either in those literal terms (which doesn't REALLY solve anything), financial restitution (take away my ability to work and provide for my family, then YOU work and provide for my family), or some other more direct form of servitude until such appropriate time as the transgression can be worked off or forgiven. There is, of course, no other possible way to repay life except with life, as with the case with murder and rape (rape, though not necessarily depriving one of life, in my opinion is hardly too far down the justice ladder to be judged as anything less than the equivalent of murder). Disloyalty to one's country, of course, exposes one's own people to danger in which there likewise cannot be any restitution other than the traitor's death.

Common sense, though: Good luck in this day and age implementing a justice system without incarceration.

I think bullying CERTAINLY is deserving of some kind of appropriate punishment, which may or may not be jail time. I've certainly been a victim of that at various times in my life, most recently someone trying to take away my children through anonymous calls to CPS last year. We were very lucky that CPS couldn't possibly make any kind of case against us, but the caller knew very well the nightmare that CPS calls can make for innocent families. Back middle school and high school, I got in just enough fights and did enough damage to make my point (it's amazing what you can do when you actually HOPE you'll get killed in the process). But I also got threatened more often later on because I decided I cared more about staying in school rather than trying to prove something--the teachers/administrators would have just sided with the more popular brown-nosers anyway.

What I DON'T want to see happen is people using anti-bullying measures to play whatever card they have just to get at/get rid of people they don't like. If I'm in elementary or high school and I express certain religious views and someone else of a different religion/persuasion expresses a different or opposing view, I shouldn't have the right to go to a teacher/administrator/school board and accuse the other person of being a bully because they disagree with me or I just plain don't like them.

That's even more objectionable to me. As I said in my first post here: I'm not in favour of punishment in general. The most I would support is, in a very small number of cases, forcing people to be put in institutions seperate from the rest of society. I suppose you could call these jails, but I wouldn't support depriving them of any other luxuries or liberties, so such institutions would be far less harsh than the current ones we have.

That easy slide from treason into the death penalty makes me very queasy. Objections to the outrageous stupidity of the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan could so easily be termed treason. Death is a very neat way to silence opposition to stupidity.

Objection to war is not treason, though. I'm referring to, say, a soldier who turns spy for the other side, giving away troop positions, tactics, and so on. If you can't trust someone to act in national defense because they're working for the other side, there's no better alternative than death.

By complete contrast, you have those who were "just following orders." Abraham Lincoln, for example, pardoned MANY Confederate soldiers mainly for that reason and to end the bloodshed on both sides, i.e. what good would executing all of them really have accomplished? In our military of the present day, I understand that there does exist protocol for soldiers to usurp command in the event that command fails to act in the best interest of the company or State--kinda like in The Caine Mutiny, but I'm not that familiar with military procedures except that a soldier does not have to obey unlawful orders.

At any rate, treason is not really something a civilian really CAN be guilty of. I'm not getting into McCarthyism, which seems to suggest otherwise. I know Sand is going to accuse me of IGNORING the issues, but I'm really just trying to avoid yet another diatribe I don't really have time for!

You're ignoring the issues.

What about reinstating the chain gang? That would cost the state less, since we're now getting work out of the criminals (if I'm not going to get yelled at for using such a judgemental word). And since they're working all day, they don't have as much idle time to take advantage of each other, so it should improve the conditions of the prison. I agree that the prison system needs reform, but I don't think we should do away with it for good. This is just my suggestion for improving it.

I don't know if there really IS an answer, honestly. I'm dreadfully ignorant on labor as punishment for crimes, though I don't see any real reason to object to it. In the kinds of justice systems I was talking about, working off indebtedness incurred in the commission of a crime was perfectly acceptable, although I get the idea that this was more a voluntary kind of thing. Say, for example, you damaged someone's eye in a fight, a judge could (like in today's insurance system) assign a monetary value for the eye, which could be worked off if you didn't have the money. But I suppose if you were unwilling or unable to do that, you could opt for having your own eye put out.

Chain gangs, though, like you said, are very useful and productive, I think, and it at least gives an incarcerated criminal some sense of purpose and freedom. "Chain gang" implies forced labor, though, and the idea of working off a crime depends on voluntary servitude. I see small-time criminals all the time doing work for the county or the city. They pick up my garbage every Friday!

I myself even once made a deal with a judge to work off a traffic ticket in a creative way: I offered to do community service by playing piano at a nursing home!

Arrrggghhh! Flay the bullies with a cat-o-nine-tails and leave their carcasses to be eaten by the birds.

ruveyn