The ghost in the box

[shkrobius]

If liberty is inalienable natural right, as we hold it, how can the convicts be deprived of liberty as just punishment? The Bible does not consider imprisonment (as opposed to jailing before a trial) as the lawful mode of punishment. There is no "tradition" justifying this barabarian practice except for the perverted sadism of Germanic pagans,

Comments

[kobak]

Thank you bringing this topic up again! Prisons are absurd, it is clear. The question is what to do instead. When UK was sending convicts to America and Australia, it obviously didn't ask indians and aborigens for permission. I wonder how you imagine something like that in the modern world. You can say that USA is big enough and there's enough place for "internal" exile, as your story about desert town of rapists hints; but even if so, this solution would clearly be impossible for a small country.

It's also interesting to note that incarceration is accused here in being both (a) unnaturally cruel and (b) unearned award. It's either one, or another.

P.S. By the way, Jeremy Bentham is hardly Victorian: he died in 1830, I looked it up.

[shkrobius]

Bentham died in 1832 and he is at the UCL http://www.ucl.ac.uk/Bentham-Project/who/autoicon
That's where you are now, right? I saw it there twenty years ago... Bentham was not, technically, a Victorian, but he was even less a Georgian.

There areare lot of countries that would be happy to make some money. Yhink of it as another way to integrate the world.

It is ironic, but it is the two sides of the same coin. If you take liberty away from people, now it is your duty to take care of these people. Just look at the prison growth in the US since 1980 and think how dear it is.

[i_eron]

Let us be more specific. We may send the convicted felons to Africa. For the lesser offenses - to Kenya or Uganda. For the major ones - to Zimbabwe or Kongo. These countries would be happy to make some money. I guess a country cannot be happy, we mean some particular people there that can. Very particular

[shkrobius]

Gently smiling jaws are the abundant display in the US prisons. You depict all these horrors, but people in Africa consider these to be the normal life of a free man, and such life is neither cushioned nor is suppossed to be cushioned. I assure you that the life of American colonists was particularly happy. There was cholera and Lyme disease! Scalping Indians! French! Hunger! But there was somethng else - freedom

[poltorazhyda]

Bravo, Professor! You've reinvented colonialism, and for all the right reasons. Surely, Subsaharan Africa would benefit from importing a managerial class with higher IQs and morality (relatively speaking-despite the depraved condition of our underclass, machete genocide and cannibalism are pretty rare here.) Why make these men (some of whom have great networking, managerial and interpersonal skills) moulder their lives away in prison? And what's the worst that could happen? Could Africa suck any worse

[shkrobius]

I reinvented penalcoloniasm, if you wish. I am not suggesting to put American criminals in charge of the multicolored masses in faraway places. All I am suggesting is paying countries fees for penal colonies on their land. If someone makes profit from such an arrangement, very well. If some convicts want to stay and naturalize, it is their own business.

You automatically assume that no one would be interested. I think you are mistaken. What we spend locally on a single prisoner in a day can feed an African family for a month. Our own ghost towns in the Rust Belt go to the great lengths to get prisons, so there are jobs. Other countries cannot compete - exactly why? They can offer barriers much better than barbed wire and steel bars, for a small fraction we spend to erect such barriers domestically, while depriving people of their liberties.

[poltorazhyda]

> am not suggesting to put American criminals in charge of the multicolored masses in faraway places

[kobak]

Please forgive me for interrupting, but what exactly are the reasons that Africa is not self-sustating or self-developing anymore? Could you briefly elaborate?

PS. Thank you for mentioning "The Forsaken", I found it on Amazon and it does look interesting.

[poltorazhyda]

In brief: the US gained hegemony over the West as a result of WW2. Driven by the Unitarian/Fabian Socialist ideology of its ruling elite, it proceeded to decolonialize the African dominions of its allies. Academically in the 50's and 60's, the rationale was that on one hand, once these colonies ceased being exploited for their mineral and agricultural resources by their evil khaki-shorts-wearing mustachioed overlords, they would develop into high-tech modern nations. Yes, back in the day all right-thinking people in the circles of power purported to believe this shit. On the other hand, the reasoning went, due to inexorable historical forces, the yearning of the African masses to be free from the colonial yoke would make them inevitably throw off said yoke anyway; therefore, it was incumbent for us to set up a counterpart to the Communists who were otherwise sure to take power on the tide of national liberation. These counterparts, instead of spouting the Communist line and having been trained in Moscow would spout a nationalist line

[kobak]

Thank you. May I ask: and what in your opinion should have been done instead? No decolonization at all (i.e. European empires should have tried to stay in power, preserving the African map of 1945)? Or decolonization, but different? Were there any alternatives?

[poltorazhyda]

The European empires and genuinely sovereign postcolonial states did try to stay in power. See: Indochina, Suez, Algeria, Portugal's African wars, the Dutch counterinsurgency in Indonesia, the Brits in Malaysia and Oman, Rhodesia, Namibia...nobody could resist the US hegemon in its heyday, especially not when we had our former client, the USSR to play bad cop to our good cop. WW1 and WW2 put an end to the era of sovereign European states and led into a global Monroe Doctrine.

[kobak]

I see. So USA actively supported decolonization, and European empires stood no chance. But purely hypothetically -- what would you find a better scenario? Empires surviving, and all of Africa being colonial until the present day, as it was in 1945? Let's say I'm just interested in your personal Poltorazhyda Doctrine (as opposed to Monroe one).

[poltorazhyda]

Yes, I think it would have been much better had Africa remained colonial to this day.

[poltorazhyda]

And not just me. Time Magazine has published this weird anomaly recently: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1713275,00.html

[i_eron]

Perhaps it had worked in the past. But the present is really different from the past. There were just 100 million people in the whole of Africa in 1800 or even 1850. Now there is a billion, growing fast. Colonialism is just not possible today. Look how the West has bravely plunged into Libya which has a small population, all neatly spread along the coastline like on a plate. A similar casus belli in Syria somehow goes unanswered. Why? Simple. There are 21 million people in Syria, in a 2D geography, not 6.5 million in a 1D one. Too difficult. There is no way the West could carve itself a place in Africa for the convicts

[poltorazhyda]

>Look how the West has bravely plunged into Libya which has a small population, all neatly spread along the coastline like on a plate