DamianaRaven wrote:Lindvaettr wrote:To be totally honest, there's a degree of "You hurt society, now you need to pay society back" that, I personally believe, needs to be accounted for in prison labor wages.
This raises a
damn good point, so I think another thing we can agree upon is that this debt to
society should NEVER be collected and pocketed by private industries. As I've said before - I don't know if it was to you or someone else - I would have much less objection to this practice if the profits (or savings) from these programs were actually invested in crime-reduction strategies... ones more practical and effective than "give all the top brass giant pay raises." My problem is the using of forced labor (by whatever name you want to call it) for no other reason than tax breaks and corporate profits.
I agree 75%-80% with this. I don't necessarily think all prison profits need to go towards crime-reduction (I think changing the oil on police cars is a legitimate use of prison labor, for example, as would be the old license plate stamping, or cleaning highways, etc.), but I do think that prison labor should be used in a way that benefits society as a whole, and not corporations. Private prisons are rife with corruption and abuse, and I'm adamantly opposed to them. Given adequate (probably very extensive) regulation with strict enforcement, private prisons could be workable, but I would guess (without evidence) that the creation and enforcement of those regulations would result in publicly funded and operated prisons being better even from a cost perspective (I think they already may be, but I'd have to check).
DamianaRaven wrote:The reason we can't do this is because our society is FAR more interested in retribution than rehabilitation. Give a prisoner literally anything that would make their life better upon release, and people start throwing fits about it with claims that amount to "rewarding crime." Why should someone who stole a car get to come out of prison with a free associate's degree when IIIIIIIIIIIIIII had to go straight to work out of high school?
"Tough on crime" is one of those examples of political rhetoric that started out being a good thought as a way to reduce crime, and has devolved into an end in itself. I do believe that criminals should be punished, and that they should be required to pay society back, in one way or another, for their crime. We don't owe assistance to people who break the law. However, rehabilitating criminals, and giving them the skills necessary to be productive doesn't only help them, but helps society by removing one more criminal from the chain, and creating a newly productive member of society. it's to everyone's benefit to rehabilitate prisoners, and we do a terrible job when we try, and (as you mentioned) we rarely do try.
Ideally, I would be in favor of a system that requires (possibly full-time) labor (possibly at zero wage). This would be balanced out by providing prisoners with well-run rehabilitation programs that allow the prisoners to succeed upon release. Essentially, incarceration would serve as punishment, rehabilitation would serve as aid, and labor would be a catch-all of paying for living expenses + paying for the education they get from the rehabilitation. Then everyone, including the prisoners, end up better off.