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

[cema]

The Bible, however, prescribes capital and corporal punishment. Corporal is now abolished almost universally in the Western world; capital is on the way out too.

What would you propose as punishment?

[chaource]

Good point. I would be for the return of corporal punishment. Why was it abolished anyway?

[shkrobius]

Human dignity. Dressing men in organe jumpsuits and locking them in a small room with concrete walls, steel bars, a smelly loo, and the constantly observing armed guard for a few years preserves human dignity and causes reformation of the character, while giving these men a few lashes and letting them go may negatively affect their feelings and even set them on the wrong path. Somehow corporal punishment in schools is OK in 20 states of the union, but judicial flogging is untinkable, degrading, abusive, etc. Go figure. I bet 90% of the prison inmates would trade their pens for flogging any day. The truth is that the prison are justly considered to be more degrading and demeaning than corporal punishments and so were gradually chosen over it.

[eta_ta]

you have an outdated image of a prison

[chaource]

You call the introduction of prisons a "utilitarian idea", with obvious disdain. You yearn instead for the "natural rights" or for the implementation of biblical teachings. And yet you criticize prisons because, as you say, they do more harm than good, i.e. you criticize prisons from a utilitarian point of view. Are you a utilitarian in disguise?

[shkrobius]

Abuse of natural rights predicates these results. You do not have to invoke these results to declare the approach wrong, but these results would follow. If you deny human nature its rights, the results are entirely predictable, thought the particular form is not. I do not see the contradiction there.

[shkrobius]

I have already discussed it several times before eg

[eta_ta]

As someone who actually designed a prison (a prison-lite - juvenile detention center) and who knows how much it cost to the taxpayer, in capital improvement plus maintenance, I'd be all for enslaving the criminals and getting them into the most rotten gutter.

They don't deserve what we do for them. Their punishment looks more like an unearned award.

[shkrobius]

I am sympathetic to prisoners and I do not tink they deserve to be locked, yet I think the same. These people broke the law and yet it is US who should spport them while they are being PUNISHED - isn't it supremely ironic? Why the heck should I support people who areperfectly able to support themselves if they'd be doing something productive rather than being idle or doing some demeaning jobs to drive them crazy. I was thinking of a "criminal county": a city where the convicts are left to their own devices. They can support themselves in any way they want and be as free as they want - in the company of their fellow convicts

[eta_ta]

you might think of making this comment into a novel.
it is that potent.

[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