Crime & Punishment Discussion

[kingdom hoop]

Let them rot

Now to me, such a statement is criminal. So will I let you idly rot, unloved, dehumanised, forgotten, make you sit in your cell watching TV for ten hours a day for ten years and then come back to you and presume you'll have magically changed your outlook, ready to set sail on a new course of living? Or would I take you aside, talk to you, see what interests you, read you the bible, ask you to set up a mini-league or teach those that are less educated than you, show you the power of love and forgiveness, give you hope that there is a lot more to life, be it this one or the next, than you'd imagined?

It's attitudes like yours (apologies for the pigeon-holing from one sentence) and Pete's (ah, apologies you feel the way you do!) that hold back needed reform in the prison service. 'Ah shur they're only prisoners, they'll never change, what's the point in doing anything for them, we'll leave 'em have their mobiles and their drugs, keep them quiet.' Rubbish. That will only lead to a culture that fosters recidivists (re-offenders), costing us more money and at the same time we lose out on what a rehabilitated criminal could add to society.

I think I'll take it upon myself (unless someone else wants the job :p) to dip my toes a little deeper, maybe even mustering a paddle, into this murky sea for the sake of our community. I'd appreciate the odd bit of feedback as I go on my rambles though. :)

[anto1208]

Now to me, such a statement is criminal. So will I let you idly rot, unloved, dehumanised, forgotten, make you sit in your cell watching TV for ten hours a day for ten years and then come back to you and presume you'll have magically changed your outlook, ready to set sail on a new course of living? Or would I take you aside, talk to you, see what interests you, read you the bible, ask you to set up a mini-league or teach those that are less educated than you, show you the power of love and forgiveness, give you hope that there is a lot more to life, be it this one or the next, than you'd imagined?



Its bad enough in jail !!!

While some people can be turned around people need to understand that some people are just bad and need to be kept locked up , i think the death penalty is pointless it costs more to kill someone than to keep them in jail and i all ways think that they are getting off lightly they should be made suffer and kept in jail untill they die off natural causes .

Nobody commiting a murder stops & thinks to themselves i wont get the death penalty for this only 12 years so i may as well do it !!!

[Lim till i die]

i think the death penalty is pointless it costs more to kill someone than to keep them in jail

Eh?? :confused:

[osarusan]

Now to me, such a statement is criminal. So will I let you idly rot, unloved, dehumanised, forgotten, make you sit in your cell watching TV for ten hours a day for ten years and then come back to you and presume you'll have magically changed your outlook, ready to set sail on a new course of living? Or would I take you aside, talk to you, see what interests you, read you the bible, ask you to set up a mini-league or teach those that are less educated than you, show you the power of love and forgiveness, give you hope that there is a lot more to life, be it this one or the next, than you'd imagined?

Because religious people never kill anybody.

One of my favourite religious quotes -

Kill them all, God will know his own. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnaud-Amaury)

I fully agree with your sentiments regarding rehabilitation, but I think that the bible has no place in any rehabilitation program.

[osarusan]

Eh?? :confused:


The study counted death penalty case costs through to execution and found that the median death penalty case costs $1.26 million. Non-death penalty cases were counted through to the end of incarceration and were found to have a median cost of $740,000.

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php?did=108

[anto1208]

Eh?? :confused:

In addition to the stuff below you have the effect on the people involved witnesses the gaurds the guy that flicks the switch the family of the criminal.

It doesnt act as a deterent it is a completly pointless


http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php?did=108&scid=7

http://www.ascdeaf.com/blog/?p=304


Report to Washington State Bar Association regarding costs

At the trial level, death penalty cases are estimated to generate roughly $470,000 inadditional costs to the prosecution and defense over the cost of trying the same case as an aggravated murder without the death penalty and costs of $47,000 to $70,000 for court personnel.

On direct appeal, the cost of appellate defense averages $100,000 more in death penalty cases, than in non-death penalty murder cases.

Personal restraint petitions filed in death penalty cases on average cost an additional$137,000 in public defense costs.

[pete]

My impression is that current Irish system makes no effort worth talking about to reform therefore it seems to be about punishment which clearly it does a hopeless job at. Seems the only way the system attempts to reform criminals is by having lenient sentences.

I think you need a bit of both. Attempts to reform small time criminals but then harsher sentences to punish violent & repeat offenders. There should some sort of prison company for getting them to work & learn a skill. Using the Frank Ward guy in the news the cliche of throwing away the key is the only solution - I would guess he a guaranteed re-offender once to released.

[Dodge]

But you can't caim he's the standard convict.

[John83]

Am I the only one who opened this thread expecting a debate about Dostoyevsky?

Can I just throw out a question: does anyone know of a good model prison system anywhere in the world? One with a very high success rate of rehabilitation or something of the sort?

[anto1208]

I was thinking of a system of "payback" set a certain amount of money to be paid to the criminal for doing a certain job. (Will only really work for petty crimes)
Add bonus payments for taking part in the schooling system in there. (Getting you’re leaving cert/learning a trade etc)
Bonus for getting off drugs.
Bonus for good behavior.
Have a list of things that show the criminal is trying to make a better life for himself and also contribute to society.

So here is how it would work say the guy goes out and robs a car worth 10,000. The guy who looses his car is down ten grand so the government pays the victim the 10,000 as a loan from the criminal and he has to pay back the ten grand to the government through this system.

The length of the sentence is dependant on how long it takes to pay back that loan

Say a days work = 25euro (10,000/25=400 so that’s 400 days in jail)
Say good behavior bonus = 1000
Trade = 1000
Clean from drugs =2000

So his bonus = 4000 amount to be repaid then = 10,000-4,000=6,000 / 25 =240 days or 8 months

So this way the Victim gets his compensation from the criminal something that doesn’t happen now.
The criminal actually pays for what he has done something that doesn’t happen now
The criminal actually gets a chance to better there life when they come out as he is now clean/ has a trade etc.

The criminal gets a sense of worth and a sense of what he did was wrong rather than letting him rot in a cell thinking the whole world is against him and thinking of ways of making them pay.


The money saved be releasing him early and of course the job he does would probibly save the goverment the initial 10 grand any way

[Lim till i die]

Am I the only one who opened this thread expecting a debate about Dostoyevsky?


On Foot.ie ?!?!

Why Yes, yes you are :)


Can I just throw out a question: does anyone know of a good model prison system anywhere in the world? One with a very high success rate of rehabilitation or something of the sort?

I know it's not the same thing but I'd imagine the re-offending rates in some of those Arab countries are pretty low

[Lim till i die]

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php?did=108

Ah but that's if you do it the namby, pamby way :p

[micls]

Now to me, such a statement is criminal. So will I let you idly rot, unloved, dehumanised, forgotten, make you sit in your cell watching TV for ten hours a day for ten years and then come back to you and presume you'll have magically changed your outlook, ready to set sail on a new course of living? Or would I take you aside, talk to you, see what interests you, read you the bible, ask you to set up a mini-league or teach those that are less educated than you, show you the power of love and forgiveness, give you hope that there is a lot more to life, be it this one or the next, than you'd imagined?
The people Im talking about(not just any criminal) are people I would have no problem leaving rot in prison for life. Some things are imo unforgivable.


It's attitudes like yours (apologies for the pigeon-holing from one sentence) and Pete's (ah, apologies you feel the way you do!) that hold back needed reform in the prison service. 'Ah shur they're only prisoners, they'll never change, what's the point in doing anything for them, we'll leave 'em have their mobiles and their drugs, keep them quiet.' Rubbish. That will only lead to a culture that fosters recidivists (re-offenders), costing us more money and at the same time we lose out on what a rehabilitated criminal could add to society.
Im not talking about prison in general. I specifically mentioned people I would consider 'scum'. Of course there is a need to try to reform the majority of prisoners, they will be on the streets again and need to learn to live differently. Also i'd take away the mobiles and the drugs ;)

[kingdom hoop]

Anto, I like your thinking a lot, fair play for the bit of innovation, the world needs more of your sort! The great thing about your idea is how incentivized it could be. The harder a prisoner works/more bible classes, whatever initiative, they do then the sooner they would be released, and the harder they work the more they get into a routine of working, enjoy the simple pleasure of it and overall are far less likely to waste their lives upon release.


I think that the bible has no place in any rehabilitation program.

Au contraire mon frere, it is essential! :) Conventional wisdom (if you do something wrong you need assurance it won't hang over for ever, life goes on) and this video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7M0EXV3M_S0)* I just rooted out of the YouTube mire would suggest that the Bible can play an integral role in rehabilitation. For anyone not bothered watching the video, in summary, it details how the most notoriously violent and dangerous prison in the US, Angola in Louisiana, cleaned up its act to become the vanguard of maximum security prisons thanks to a major focus by the warden on religion. Somewhat bizarrely, there's a real loving atmosphere there now. I just watched another video with the warden, Burl Cain, and he reckons moral rehabilitation should be the main focus in reforming prisoners, with meaningful work also very important. Interestingly, he reckons out of the 5,000 serious criminals he oversees that definitely a couple hundred would not re-offend, and he seems a very forthright fella so I'd take his word for it!

I acknowledge that the prison involved is for serious crimes - something like 85% of the inmates die there - so in that case religion becomes more relevant as the prisoners, generally, realise that they actually have something to be repentant about. Whether it would be quite so successful for less heinous crimes I'm not so sure given the shorter outlook, but I definitely think the principles can be carried over to a certain degree.

I believe that if such a culture of love (:eek: I know, but I think the more incongruous the atmosphere in the prison the better as the 'hard men' would hate going back and those on the borderline might begin to see the light) could permeate our prison service things would dramatically improve. Because lets face it what are criminals but compassionless souls, understandable when they've likely never been loved by anyone. Love and all the bible teaches is exactly what they need to reform, or rewire if you will, themselves. If we could begin to make such headway then the rising tide will raise all spirits, look at the lads in Angola prison, there's a real joyous atmosphere, people hugging each other and everything, so if that began to seep in those on the periphery could well take the 'if you can't beat them join them approach.'


Finally, for a bit of Irish insight, (ie bang your head off the wall) I found a pretty good article (http://www.cfj.ie/content/view/135/3/) where the author's view is that the younger offenders are the one's we need to target as they're still developing so he spends time in St. Patrick's Institute, which he says is "a disaster, an obscenity and reveals the moral bankruptcy of the policies of the Minister for Justice." It's worth reading if you get the chance, basically it shows up the lack of focus on rehabilitation in our prisons.



*(Well well worth watching if you're in doubt as to the relevance of religion in rehabilitation. One thing, there's just music for the first two minutes so, although nice and tranquil, you might like to let it load and come back to it.)

[osarusan]

Au contraire mon frere, it is essential!
I just watched another video with the warden, Burl Cain, and he reckons moral rehabilitation should be the main focus in reforming prisoners, with meaningful work also very important.
Because lets face it what are criminals but compassionless souls, understandable when they've likely never been loved by anyone. Love and all the bible teaches is exactly what they need to reform, or rewire if you will, themselves. If we could begin to make such headway then the rising tide will raise all spirits, look at the lads in Angola prison, there's a real joyous atmosphere, people hugging each other and everything, so if that began to seep in those on the periphery could well take the 'if you can't beat them join them approach.'


Right, I've watched the video, and I've put some parts of your post in bold

Firstly, "it is essential". This is getting into the territory of the Dawkins (http://foot.ie/showthread.php?t=73670) thread on here, but it is not essential to be religious to be moral. Indeed, I believe that not doing something wrong because you are afraid of God's punishment is less moral than not doing something wrong because you think it's wrong.

"Moral rehabilitation". Again, there needs to be a distinction made between "moral reform" and "religious reform". The two can be, and often are completely unrelated. Religious people, as far as I'm concerned, have no innate superiority when it comes to morals. To be blunt about it, you don't need to be afraid of God, or even to believe in God, to know what is right and wrong, and what the consequences are of crimes. You can be an anti-theist, and still a moral person. And you don't need to believe in God to be able to be truly repentant of a crime.

The idea that they have never been loved.......to be sure some do come from broken homes, and broken families, but there are many others who grew up in a loving home, with a true sense of love, who still went on to become violent criminals. And indeed many criminals have had families, wives, children, who have testified to their parental/spousal love, while at the same time they were committing heinous crimes.

"teaches"......this word is usually used for the imparting of something not previously known. "All the Bible teaches".....what does it teach that we don't know already. Again, ideas such as love, compassion, charity, forgiveness - non-religious people can identify with these things too. I dare say that all the inmates at Angola have both shown and been the recipients of all of these, at some point in their lives, yet have still committed crimes.

Finally, regarding the "spirit of love" we see in the video, and its effect on crimes......others have a different opinion.
http://www.talkleft.com/story/2005/05/19/793/53911

Angola is no longer the most violent prison in the country, even though it only takes prisoners serving 50 years or more. The prisoners are too old. At Angola, they call it "criminal menopause."

In short, I'm all for rehabilitation (although I do feel the element of punishment should not be overlooked). I'm talking about teaching practical skills, social and communication skills, instilling a sense of respect for others and of respect for themselves. I don't think that God is necessary to do these things.

[jebus]

Indeed, I believe that not doing something wrong because you are afraid of God's punishment is less moral than not doing something wrong because you think it's wrong.



But thats in your life Osarusan, you have to realise that a lot of prisoners feel they are bad in nature, that morally they are bankrupt, and they need help from someone in this respect. So if they start believing that God is with them, and that all they need to do is ask for help to make the right choices it gives them a fresh outlook on life, that maybe they can change and they will be able to make the right choices. As for death row prisioners the Bible, Koran, whathaveyou is useful in sending these people to their death with some possible hope that they might be saved after all. In those respects I agree that religion is very useful in helping to turn someones life around, honestly I think it's why I respect religion so much, that they don't wash their hands of a human being, even if everyone else is.

Personally I think the way forward for prisons is to stamp out drugs, but allow things like cigarettes, offer more classes and courses for the inmates, increase the prisoners out of cell time and allow them to access to better fitness facilities (I hear the ones in Irish prisons are a joke), libraries and things like musical instruments, art rooms, and even gaming rooms. Basically encourage these people to change for the better at every given turn, and then provide the means for them to do so

[Bluebeard]

On Foot.ie ?!?!

Why Yes, yes you are :)


Actually no, no he wasn't:(

John - Let us pave the way together for the Great Foot.ie Dostoyevsky and otehr Russian Authors of Note Thread!