> Someone who committed a crime at 19 is a wholly different person at 50.
Not necessarily, some people are just bad or damaged to the extent that they can not live a normal life within society.
I remember kids I knew as a child who were just evil, such as cruelty to animals, violence towards females, etc for no logical reason and these are all people who ended up in prison for some crime or another.
There has to be a sanction for this kind of destructive behaviour and the remote chance that some random violent criminal has a potential to be to be some of saint, if only they have one more chance, is robbed of this opportunity is a price worth paying for the greater good..
> remember kids I knew as a child who were just evil, such as cruelty to animals, violence towards females, etc for no logical reason and these are all people who ended up in prison for some crime or another.
Yes, but did you ever follow up to see if all of these people you knew as kids were still evil as adults?
I did a lot of crazy shit when I was younger that I would never do today. People do change as they grow older. And even if there are exceptions, that is not a valid reason to imprison any particular individual with no hope of redemption.
> I did a lot of crazy shit when I was younger that I would never do today.
Did you torture a hamster because it was funny, like throwing it hard against a wall to see if it would bounce?
Did you beat the shit out of a 5 year old girl because there was no one around to stop you?
No? There is crazy shit and there is just evil. And yes, those people did end up doing much worse things because society just kept giving them that chance to turn into a saint.
I really don't want to get into the details, but yes, I did things that horrify me today, including causing pain and injury to animals and other humans. This is why I don't want to get into details. These are exceptionally painful memories. I had some pretty serious anger management issues.
Note BTW that what matters here is not whether I was actually evil (I don't think I was) but whether my behavior could lead someone to think that I was and treat me accordingly. And the answer to that is an unequivocal yes. I got very, very lucky that the people around me were not inclined to seriously entertain that hypothesis.
Such information makes best sense in context. For example, if we learn that 40% of criminals were abused in childhood, we will interpret it certain way. But if we afterwards learn that 40% of non-criminals were also abused in childhood, now the previous interpretation does not make sense anymore.
So we should start from the point "how many kids you know who were abused in childhood" and then ask "and how many of them later became criminals".
This is the kind of bullshit trick that many terrible, violent criminals like the Menendez bros try to pull when they get caught: “It isn’t my fault I murdered/raped/etc, my upbringing was poor.”
whoa there, you made a big jump. I didn't remove culpability from them. I'm just curious if there were any recognizable patterns between the parenting and the future bad behaviors.
I hear you, and I simply stated that I don’t like where that line of reasoning can go.
I’ve spent plenty of time around people who have been incarcerated for serious crimes and many of them are life-long con artists who take no responsibility for their actions. Their profession seems to be manipulation and manufacturing endless excuses.
The trouble is that there are far too many naive people in the world that believe their bullshit stories and end up feeling sorry for them. The most charismatic of them are usually the most dangerous.
The saying “give them an inch and they will take a mile” applies perfectly to this type of criminal sociopath.
I believe I read a study showing how this relationship is not causal. It's actually the shared genetic code that makes both the son be violent and the parents neglectful and abusive, not the abusive parents changing the son's behavior.
And then there’re people who commit robbery and serve time. Then not long after release they commit worse crime like murder, which could’ve been prevented if they’re still in jail. It’s not that simple man. Sure people can become better, or they stay the same, or they get even worse.
This is a form of argument that I call "Proof by horror story". It is a logical fallacy, a specific instance of a broader category of logical fallacies called faulty generalization [1]. To debunk it we only need to observe that just about any behavior can be predictive of committing a serious crime if you are willing to ignore false positives. But I'm not willing to ignore them. I think it's worse to incarcerate an innocent person than to let a guilty one go free.
If you're willing to imprison a thief for life because there is a chance they might go on to commit murder, why not imprison their family as well? After all, they might have the same bad genes as the thief. For that matter, why not keep everyone in solitary confinement? That guarantees that no one will be free to commit murder.
People's behaviors are unpredictable. Having some people occasionally go rogue is just the price we sometimes have to pay to live in a free society. If you don't like it you might want to consider emigrating to North Korea. Very few guilty people go free there.
An individual's behavior is unpredictable, but in groups it's pretty predictable.
Recidivism is a major issue and there are ways to address it, but they have to actually be worked on (and they will admittedly fail at times, people have to accept that).
Many (most?) of the jail-to-good-citizen pathways have been closed down or restricted over the years.
Well they don't need to be a saint, as none of us are. They just need to learn how to function in society. I think rehabilitation is possible for the majority. Norway seems to show this in that they do not instate capital punishment or life imprisonment, yet have extremely low recidivism rates (especially compared to the US).
If we set the criminally insane aside (a small portion to be sure) the majority remaining need training, motivation, assistance, and separation.
1. Training - many people in prison never learned how to "live productively" if you will - this includes things like job training but also basic life training, etc. Nobody should leave prison with anything less than an high school equivalent education, and training and knowledge on how to cook, clean, etc for themselves.
2. Motivation - the "why bother" needs to be shown and instilled - why bother doing a job when you can just do a crime or drugs instead?
3. Assistance - we shouldn't just dump people out of prison on the street - they don't know where to go or who to contact and it's likely the people they DO know are other criminals, which doesn't help. There should be "outpatient" assistance provided that gets them a job, housing, etc. Call it supervised release as part of the sentence and you could do quite a bit. Provide incentives and security for companies to hire ex-cons, and continue to assist as long as necessary.
4. Separation - it can be vitally important to help ex-cons separate their "con life" from their future life, whatever that may be. Many of the successful ex-cons were in prison for an "accident" (e.g, unintentional murder because they drove drunk, etc) and so their support groups are non-criminals, but the ones who only know other criminals may need to be moved elsewhere for a time.
I wholeheartedly disagree. People can change and people do change. People can receive therapy. I was a very different person 5 years ago. I can't imagine how I will change in the next 20.
> I remember kids I knew as a child who were just evil, such as cruelty to animals, violence towards females
If they exhibit all of that as kids, they need intervention as kids. This sort of stuff happens when kids are abused by their families and don't get help.
It may be unfixable at some point, but the original of it is adults in those kids lives.
Not necessarily, some people are just bad or damaged to the extent that they can not live a normal life within society.
I remember kids I knew as a child who were just evil, such as cruelty to animals, violence towards females, etc for no logical reason and these are all people who ended up in prison for some crime or another.
There has to be a sanction for this kind of destructive behaviour and the remote chance that some random violent criminal has a potential to be to be some of saint, if only they have one more chance, is robbed of this opportunity is a price worth paying for the greater good..