This is not a question of about parroted nonsense and cultural norms. I mean what end product do they produce that justifies their existence in the first place.
I’m physically disabled and have been living in a prison like situation for nearly 11 years. How does my situation balance into the ethics of prisons? I’m on a path to homelessness and a premature death due to institutionalized neglect and abuse from US institutions. Criminals are housed and fed in exchange for similar isolation, abuse, danger, insurmountable debt, and a largely unemployable and destitute future. These seem to conflict in ethics.
Since I’m not a psychologist or even (alas) particularly empathetic, I will leave aside the fact that this post appears to be a veiled cry for help, and answer the actual question.
Prison exists to protect society from dangerous individuals, but also because it’s the simplest form of non-corporal punishment. Flogging and flaying and chopping and mutilating and so on are all well and good but at some point in humanity’s march to civilization such things will start making the rulers queasy and it becomes more palatable to just lock the problem up for a while.
Personally I have a radically liberal take on this. I think that the purpose of punishment (other than protection, as mentioned) should be not retribution but rather restoration. In my ideal world, prison sentences would mostly be swapped for various forms of community service.
We’ve decided morally, that killing is wrong. So if killing is wrong, but we have to keep killers out of society, then we’ve got to put them in a place away from society. Somewhere along the way, we decided that killing isn’t the only thing that requires you be separated from society.
You haven’t committed a crime, therefore are free to succeed or fail at life all on your own. Society hasn’t judged you, therefore society hasn’t seen the need to take care of you either.
With a few exceptions of life sentences, this is not how prisons works. We have prisons to separate the bad apples for a while, and we use that time to rehabilitate the apples. Its not a perfect solution bit it works better than without prison.
Edit to clarify that this is about prison
Pretending that people get rehabilitated in prison, LOLOL
That’s some LARP level imagination you got there.
Norway has one of the lowest recidivism rates in the world, around 20% within five years of release.
This clearly says US Institutions.
I’m on a path to homelessness and a premature death due to institutionalized neglect and abuse from US institutions.
This person wouldn’t be posting here if they were from Norway.
The question was about prisons in general, their personal experience being the basis of them questioning the ethicality of the concept of prisons.
For that matter the Norwegian example is a perfect antithesis to the punitive American system.
Therefore they were absolutely on topic. You may freshen up on comprehensive reading.
Norway is an exception to the rule. Not a generalized example. Calling out an edge case, doesn’t change all of the generalized cases.
Yes thats what an antithesis is.
