Comment by chki | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chki | Hacker News Reader

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In my opinion this is exactly what prison should NOT be. There are of course different theories on why we put people in prison but the main thing to achieve should not be to punish and scare people. The aim is to keep crime rates low and therefore to properly resocialize prisoners.

By putting them in solitary confinement you are doing the exact opposite: not helping them but actually turning them further away from society because you are actively hurting them. Changing the prison environment to a place where criminals can actually get out of the vicious cycle they're in is the way to go. Not putting the failure to do so on them.

Apart from that I also strongly believe that solitary confinement is inhumane in itself and so are life long prison sentences. (Corporal Punishment is wrong on a completely different level) The only time that people should be locked up for life is if they are mentally ill or pose a concrete threat by the time they would be released.

That's why the solitary confinement sentences would be drastically shortened, especially for first-time criminals and non-violent criminals.

My other hypothesis is that people commit crimes for only 2 reasons:

1) They don't think they will get caught. For these types of people, the punishment won't be a deterrent because they believe they will never suffer the consequences. You could literally raise the punishment level to death and it wouldn't affect these people from committing the crime because they don't believe they will get caught.

2) They don't care if they get caught (ie. they don't think or care about the consequences of their actions). This can be split into 2 subgroups: a) They simply don't care about the consequences (ex. acts of passion or they are ignorant to the consequences). b) They think the consequences are "worth" it.

Punishment really only will affect group 2B. The other two groups (1 and 2a) won't be deterred no matter what. So the question really is, how do we optimize deterring group 2B? Solitary confinement, to me, is a more cost-efficient way of increasing the scale exponentially while still not being drastic. Some might say that 90 days in solitary confinement is worse than a few years in jail. If that's true, then it's really cost efficient, and would serve as a cheap, quick deterrent and might prevent recidivism.

I don't see how literally denying a person anything resembling a stable basic existence makes sense for helping them become productive people again. Norway has it right on this: their prisons are highly structured and rehabilitative, and they have the lowest recidivism rate of any nation.

Cognitive behavioural therapy and changing habits beats solitary, any day.

You can have solitary confinement followed by re-socialization. Confinement, when prepared the right way, is rehabilitative, like people imposing exile on themselves or meditation. It's the freeness of the will that makes the difference, hence preparation.

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