> 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.
