Posted on 11/03/2022 3:22:28 PM PDT by FNU LNU
Why Have Penitentiaries Anyway?
Most people realize that the court and penal systems in North America are seriously broken and must be fixed, yet contemplating doing away with penitentiaries sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? Barely 200 years ago, an experiment began which has cost us untold billions of dollars. Just last year, this experiment resulted in 1.4 million adults incarcerated in federal and state penitentiaries (a figure which has quadrupled since 1980) at a cost of nearly $40,000 each.
As Alan Elsner pointed out in a recent Washington Post article, 2.2 million people are engaged in catching criminals and putting and keeping them behind bars, and "corrections" has become one of the largest sectors of the U.S. economy, employing more people than the combined workforces of General Motors, Ford and Wal-Mart, the three biggest corporate employers in the country. In many "prison town" counties, the number one employer is the Department of Corrections. This is a staggering expense of over $50 billion, an amount that increases by additional billions for each year of the last 25 years of explosive prison growth. As the prison population ages, the taxpayer is paying for medical procedures he can't afford for himself, and the victims of these criminals realize no compensation at all.
Few realize that the first penitentiary in the world was founded in Philadelphia in 1792. Jails had always existed for the purpose of holding the accused until trial, after which the guilty would pay a fine, make restitution to the victim, be banished, be executed, etc. However, the concept of warehousing criminals to cause them to repent was entirely new.
Imagine a criminal justice system where penitentiaries didn't even exist, but where a person paid for his crimes rather than having society pay to keep him incarcerated.
One such nation existed. If you stole someone's property, say a sheep, and were caught with the animal in your possession, you repaid the victim with two sheep, but you didn't go to a penitentiary. The victim also got a financial settlement, satisfying the desire for victim restitution in our time.
If you sold the stolen sheep, thereby being more involved in the crime, you paid the victim four sheep.
If you committed a capital crime, (murder, rape, kidnapping, etc.) you paid with your life, but you didn't go to a penitentiary. Such facilities didn't exist in this nation. They were not needed.
Such a system would completely do away with our newest growth industry, penitentiaries, and restore the victim of crime financially.
I'm not going to tell you where I got the idea for this system, but it's from a reliable source. Of course, it will never happen here because a powerful lobby has grown up around the prison system that will fight hard to protect the status quo. Correction officers have formed powerful labor unions, and their financial contributions to our politicians will easily outweigh the will of the people. I know, I know, I'm such a young man to be so cynical.
Samuel G. Dawson
I thought of the Far Side cartoon now on mugs and framed prints.
Psychiatrist listening to his patient babble on and on and you can see he has written on his pad:
Just
Plain
Nuts.
Why have penitentiaries? Dems would say “after we empty them out they’ll be perfect for putting conservatives in.”
When it should be the dems behind bars instead.
Traditionally, a tribe would exile its member that was convicted of serious offenses. This amounted to a death sentence for most, as most people are not self-sufficient enough to survive the wilderness with primitive tools by themselves for very long.
However, as society advanced and grew, it became much more difficult to exile them because they could just go elsewhere in society and begin again.
Penitentiaries are basically the modern day adaption to exiling somebody from society.
In my opinion, it would not be a bad idea to take away somebody’s citizenship when imprisoning them for serious crimes. When they get out, they have to go through the same process every other alien has to go through to become a citizen.
I think Heinlein had it right: pay restitution, get zapped by a very painful zapper, or get executed.
I don’t have a problem with trying to reduce the cost of incarcerating criminals. Here are a few good ideas: 1 - Capitol Punishment swiftly for murderers, rapists, child molesters, drug smugglers, high level drug dealers, and traitors like Jane Fonda and John Kerry. 2 - Shorter sentences for lesser crimes but make the prisons so that the criminals don’t want to be there: bread, rice, beans, and water the only food; no TV, no Radio, no phones, no computers, no internet, no conjugal visits, no visitors of any kind, no weight rooms, no libraries, no sports, no outside time, etc. You get sentenced to 2 years in prison and you spend 2 years in your very small cell. 3 - Three strikes and you’re out (see number 1).
Well, gosh, with what is going on on the streets of this
nation, who could see anything wrong with emptying
penitentiaries out? /s
Generally punishment by the government had three justifications: rehabilitation, restitution and retribution. The first justification is focused on the offender; the second focuses on the victim; the third focuses on society at large. Those foci have waxed and waned over the years but nowadays it seems to me that retribution is quite important. As a society we are jostled together constantly and offenses and slights and criminal acts tend to increase the general ennui, even to the point of instigating vigilante responses. When society as a whole feels the offenders are getting away with serious crimes, it places pressure on that society to take justice into their own hands. Even if it avoids vigilantism, anger grows like the steam in a pressure cooker and expresses itself in other ways.
Today’s “justice system” almost completely ignores the anger of the victims and community as it bends over backwards to accommodate the criminal. A good friend of mine lost her daughter when her former boyfriend begged the girl to come talk with him and he blew away her face with his gun, wrapped her body in a garbage bag and threw it into an irrigation canal. It happened seven years age and he was just last week sentenced to prison finally. All this time the notion that my friend and her family and friends deserved attention and timely justice (he had confessed btw) was almost totally discounted as though a victim statement would make it all up. My friend was largely ignored by the prosecution and deadlines changed constantly, each delaying the inevitable trial by months.
There is a biblical code of justice (which the writer referenced) but it was merciful compared to other extent justice systems. One system, for example, provided if you intentionally or accidentally cause a child to die, then your child was killed, unless you were rich and you could pay money to save your own child.
As another poster pointed out, justice was a little easier when the offender could be exiled outside the tribe, to Australia or Devil’s Island or to a sanctuary city, or there was a healthy sense of shame inculcated in the populace which subtly shunned the offender. We no longer have that luxury and have a find a way to protect society from hard-core human predators while allowing rehabilitation also.
Don’t know that we can eliminate prisons until we can effectively treat sociopaths and psychopaths...that make up 1 in 20 people in the country.
They will just become better at not getting caught.
Thus society will start having no privacy with cameras and tracking and perhaps implanted devices in everybody. We need to maintain an open society.
We have already determined that cruel and unusual punishment is not allowed but all inmates should be forced to provide labor to pay for their incarceration.
Two words. Joe Arpio.
We need to go back to hard labor for inmates.
Make it so they never want to get put back in prison.
Mr Dawson left out a significant part of punishments back in the day. Corporal punishment was for crimes that didn’t deserve death, but rather punished by either humiliation or pain or both.
A half day in the pillory or stocks would involve discomfort and shame, but rarely pain (unless your neighbors were really ticked off at you). A session in the dunking stool was humiliating but survivable (again unless your neighbors really didn’t like you).
Pain punishments could involve lashes, strokes of a cane, and/or branding. Branding, besides the pain involved also marked you for life. A ‘T’ on your cheek or forehead told the world you’d been convicted of theft. A nose or an ear might be cut off.
And for serious crimes, there was hanging.
The penitentiary, I believe was an idea by the Quakers who thought that corporal punishment was inhumane and replaced it with a place where, in isolation the criminal would repent of his crime. This was done in complete isolation and drove a significant number of inmates mad.
So what is more ‘humane’? Five or ten years locked up in a small cell surrounded by criminals and subject to their whims or twenty minutes of extreme pain, followed by a couple of weeks to recover from the injuries and then get on with your life?
What color is the sky in this idiots world?
CC
Just bring back the stocks
The Law of Moses exacted same-day punishment.
Just saying.
” Why Have Penitentiaries Anyway?”
To lock up hardened criminals ... DUH
It is. That's why they are determined to let them all out.
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