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Comment by Sir_Cmpwn | Hacker News Reader

The purpose of prison should be to keep dangerous people out of society. It costs society to keep people in prison, so naturally this makes sense - in a way it's our tax for the privilege of not having dangerous people around.

Non-violent offenders should not be in prison. Punishing people with prison doesn't fix the problem, better mental health services and education (real education, not lies about drugs == devil) does much better. If you want to punish drug users, you're right (and in morally questionable standing imo) and you'll have to pay for that, but if you want to reduce the drug problem you're not in the right.

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> The purpose of prison should be to keep dangerous people out of society

Whatever happened to purpose of prison being rehabilitation? I mean... they are called correctional facilities. Are we so far gone now that we think criminals are beyond redemption and change?

There are better ways to rehabilitate non-violent offenders. Prisons should focus on rehabilitation, but what sets it apart from other methods of rehabilitation is that they keep dangerous people out of society in the meanwhile.

> Whatever happened to purpose of prison being rehabilitation?

You can't change someone's behavioral tendencies against their will. The criminal has to choose for himself to change and to be rehabilitated. The most you can do is to provide the resources and support he needs to carry out that decision once he's made it.

What you can do is (a) provide a disincentive for committing crimes and (b) separate people with a known tendency for committing crimes from the rest of society. Prison and the death penalty both accomplish these goals, but prison is cheaper and more reversible.

> The most you can do is to provide the resources and support he needs to carry out that decision once he's made it.

To the best of my knowledge, one of the problems with US prisons today is that the resources and support you describe are not widely available.

Yeah, and that sucks, and I'd like it to change. But I don't think turning American prisons into Norwegian-style resort hotel prisons is going to magically convince every American criminal to turn into a productive citizen.

I mean, presumably making it possible for them to be productive citizens would be a pretty good start.

Yup, I think I covered that in the first sentence of the comment you are replying to.

> But I don't think turning American prisons into Norwegian-style resort hotel prisons is going to magically convince every American criminal to turn into a productive citizen.

I think you're arguing against a strawman here. I don't think most people who support moving from the current system towards a more Norwegian-style approach are arguing that it is the panacea that will reform all criminals, only that it will do a lot better that the current system.

It’s not an uncommon fallacy to think that people only commit crimes because of poverty, desperation, or oppression, and that solving these problems is sufficient to stop crime. It’s also not an uncommon fallacy to think some sufficiently liberalized, rehabilitative form of incarceration would actually work for 95% of criminals. The fact that some people are just awful and need to be quarantined from society is uncomfortable, taboo, or alien to a lot of people.

Maybe this comes across to you as a straw man argument because you don’t live somewhere completely insane where there is political opposition to building jails and police stations in the first place because of wacky leftist ideology. Sometimes I envy people who assume I’m arguing with a straw man.

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