Nothing is ever that simple as the people of Norway are finding with Anders Behring Breivik who as far as I can tell has converted to Nazism and is getting a bachelor's degree in political science from University of Oslo after murdering 70 people.
As I recall a couple years ago he made public complaints that the prison had not yet given him a PlayStation 3 to replace his current PlayStation 2, because it offers more suitable games to his playing style. Probably has it now.
Punishment should fit the crime is the model in the US but since the 90s ever since sentencing became a political football that model has broken down.
I find that rehabilitation is a word that comes easy to people who have never been victims of an actual crime. Prison time should never be population control/engineering but it should be a deterrent.
I believe that no one is beyond rehabilitation, with the right conditions. Further, I believe this belief to be fundamental to any functionally human rights-oriented, pan-state democracy.
Some people believe they help people imagine creative solutions.
I find counterfactuals, especially in history, to be devoid of any meaning and used by pseudo-intellectuals who don't really want to pursue the hard work of finding actual causality.
Huh? Actual causality is meaningless without counterfactuals. "Hitler caused Holocaust" means that if Hitler wasn't there, Holocaust wouldn't have happened.
Not really but sort of. Counterfactual historiography at best represents a sort of "reproducibility" for historians. They can't conduct experiments on the past.
So, when someone asserts "Hitler caused Holocaust" some enterprising graduate student comes along and writes a thesis on Hitler's willing executioners and argues counterfactually that if Hitler wasn't there, Holocaust still happens.
That doesn't mean at all that Hitler did not cause Holocaust or that the "eliminationist antisemitism" German culture caused Holocaust. I wish you had chose a less value-laden example.
I don't know much about Breivik, but would venture to guess that killing 70 people is a result of severe mental illness.
Using prisons as a warehouse for the mentally ill is another problem. These people should be handled differently than general population in a prison.
IMO, you go to prison to reflect on your choices, work on underlying issues and come out a stronger person. It's _very_ hard to do so with mentally ill roommates, rape, gangs, etc all around you.
I am a "victim" of an actual crime. My younger brother was hit by a car crossing the street. The driver was distracted and going >10 mph over the limit in a residential area. This individual had no insurance. No lawsuit was ever filed.
Honestly why should it bother anyone if prisoners are treated well? A video game costs nothing compared to other costs of incarceration. The only thing that matters is that people can be rehabilitated if possible, and isolated if not.
And the last people who should define punishments are victims of crimes, because our own instincts for revenge are wholly miscalibrated for modern society. I've had thousands of dollars of irreplaceable equipment stolen from me, some of which I designed myself, and yet I rationally accept that the perpetrators (never caught) shouldn't be strung up in the proverbial town square for all to see.
As I recall a couple years ago he made public complaints that the prison had not yet given him a PlayStation 3 to replace his current PlayStation 2, because it offers more suitable games to his playing style. Probably has it now.
Punishment should fit the crime is the model in the US but since the 90s ever since sentencing became a political football that model has broken down.
I find that rehabilitation is a word that comes easy to people who have never been victims of an actual crime. Prison time should never be population control/engineering but it should be a deterrent.