> Regardless of the debate on how tough (or not) love should be, the absent fathers issue seems like something concrete and impactful that we should be trying to address.
Where would we even start? The only circumstances where we could hope to do anything at all are those where it's either not a problem, or is still only a minor one... if daddy's doing 20 for murder or dealing at the kilo level, are we supposed to let him out so he can sing lullabies?
There exists an entire class of problems that people only seem to comprehend the causes of once those same problems have escalated far beyond the capacity for comprehension to allow us to fix them. Perhaps the universe hates us. Or maybe we just deserve it.
It is strange that you immediately went the criminal route. I was thinking more about fathers who work too much, which is most in my world. They spend far less time with their children than their wives, maybe 5x to 10x. My father had a grueling commute as a child that was 90 minutes each way. What a waste. I hardly saw him during the week, then he was exhausted on the weekends. I cringe every time I hear senior (_ALWAYS_ male) executives say: "I do it all for my kids." Yeah right; work less and spend more time with your kids -- that is what they really want, not another fancy ski trip.
The start of this was the industrial revolution. Instead of the family and the home being the main workplace and source of income (farming, family trade, etc.) men went off to work, women went off to work, children went off to work. The family was atomized. Basically, corporations are the downfall of civilization.
Today, most people work long hours away from their family (both men and women) not to buy another ski trip but just to keep a roof over their heads and feed their kids. How can all of us find our way back to family business?
A simple answer (the one other developed countries tend towards) would be to emphasize / invest more in rehabilitation than in retribution/deterrence in the criminal justice system.
Another set of approaches would be to fund pro-natal/pro-family initiatives such as child income tax credits, to make it easier for fathers to participate in family life; at the margin economic instability drives families apart among other things. (More paternity leave (and better maternity leave while we’re at it) would help a lot here too).
I think you can look to other countries for examples here, Scandinavian countries for example have much better pro-family programs we could copy if we were really serious about this.
> I've had the argument online many times, but people are simply too stupid and/or wishful-thinking to understand how wrong they are.
This is a terrible way to conduct a discussion. Please read the site rules, in particular “be nice”. If you can’t comment without being triggered, don’t.
>Your idea of rehabilitation is "hey, we're going to try to be nice to lowlifes, and they'll suddenly become upstanding citizens"
This is a strawman. You have no idea what their idea of rehabilitation is, in fact they only shared that our balance is out of whack.
And it is. What we are doing now, with mass incarceration and barely-humane conditions DOES NOT WORK. In fact, it would be hard to intentionally design the system in a way that does a better job of increasing recidivism and overall human misery.
Forget all this talk of "being nice to lowlifes", how about we stop shooting ourselves in the foot first?
>Do you really believe that would work? Like, how much can you afford?
Our government spends billions and trillions of dollars on things which have less utility. Resources are not what is lacking, prioritization and political will is.
> You have no idea what their idea of rehabilitation is, in fact they only shared that our balance is out of whack.
Either their definition is the same as the popularly known definition, or it is a worthless definition.
The popular definition is "whatever defects of personality caused the person to commit criminal acts have been mitigated entirely or reduced to the point that the risk of recidivism is negligible" or something like that.
Is there another definition any sane person should care about?
> What we are doing now, with mass incarceration and barely-humane conditions DOES NOT WORK.
It's doing exactly what it's supposed to do. It's just that the thing it's supposed to do isn't rehabilitation, and never was. And you'd have to be a seriously naive person to have ever swindled yourself into believing anything else.
1. Punishment of the wicked.
2. Sequestration of the dangerous.
3. Deterrence of the tempted.
> In fact, it would be hard to intentionally design the system in a way that does a better job of increasing recidivism
We could just let them out early, so they'll do it again. It would increase recidivism nicely, since given a (more or less) fixed population of criminals in any given time period, they'd be outside prison for longer periods of time where they have the opportunity to do it again. If in a span of 10 years an armed robber spends 8 years in prison, he only has 2 years in which to commit crime.
Let's just let him out after a weekend, so he has 9.9.
We could even call it rehabilitation, because you know, if we don't make him so miserable surely he will magically transform into some excellent citizen.
> Our government spends billions and trillions of dollars on things which have less utility.
This weakens your case, it doesn't make it stronger. "We're already spending trillions on other things" means there's less available to spend on this. Not more.
Where would we even start? The only circumstances where we could hope to do anything at all are those where it's either not a problem, or is still only a minor one... if daddy's doing 20 for murder or dealing at the kilo level, are we supposed to let him out so he can sing lullabies?
There exists an entire class of problems that people only seem to comprehend the causes of once those same problems have escalated far beyond the capacity for comprehension to allow us to fix them. Perhaps the universe hates us. Or maybe we just deserve it.