Commenting specifically on the possibilities of a technical solution, using technology we already have available to us - there is something dystopian about the idea of putting GPS trackers on people, but if you're regularly jailing people who haven't been convicted of any crime (pre-trial detention!) then you already live in a dystopia, so maybe there's hope for a technical solution here.
Although I can't help but think that they'll be plenty of stories of people sent back to prison because their GPS tracker malfunctioned ("it says here you fled to Mexico at 500 mph, then jumped back 10 seconds later") or because they were unfortunate enough to be strolling past the scene of a crime as it happened - also, I'm unsure if a GPS tracker alone would be enough deterrence in the heat of the moment.
The idea of a "Slap Drone" sounds like something that could only happen in a world of ubiquitous surveillance - maybe it's a good idea, although it seems like it's filling the role of a parent in a way I'm not sure if I feel comfortable with? You know, as a wise experienced voice preventing you from doing things against your better judgement, whether you like it or not? But maybe that's what people need?
I guess I'm also not very confident in a psychiatric solution - it seems to me that the only difference between prison and involuntary psychiatric commitment for antisocial personality disorder is that a prison sentence has to be proportional to the crime. There's a classic C.S. Lewis lecture pointing out that the principle of retribution constrains the punishment, whereas a more utilitarian approach to crime can be as harsh and as indefinite as it deems necessary.
In theory a retributivist approach constrains the punishment. In practice, I see a lot of people on Twitter who use it to justify pretty much indefinite punishment for any serious crime, e.g.:
(Murder) "The person will never come back to life, never let them out!"
(Serious financial crimes) "The damage will never be repaired- 20 years at the minimum!"
(Assault where the person was even arguably trying to kill their victim or indifferent to the possibility of death) "They tried to end someone's life, why let that dangerous maniac on the streets!"
(Rape) "The victim will live with that for the rest of her life, why shouldn't he!"
Also, the absence of a victim should, logically, constrain the retributivist- but in practice it never does. They're keen on punishing victimless crimes too.
There might have been times in history (e.g. the Georgian period where they were executing kids for stealing hankies) when retributivism might have constrained punishment, but we're long past retributivism and lex talonis being the humane option.
Good point, I suppose I associate the punishment of victimless crimes with the kind of cost benefit analysis that says that drugs are bad and so we need to make an example of drug users as a warning to everyone else. I was mostly talking in theory, although I can think of times where the kind of people who are very retribution focused object to a particularly excessive punishment, although usually only when the victim is sympathetic.
I wonder if part of the issue is that nobody is entirely sure what the point of the criminal justice system is, so if you are in favor of locking people up then you can seamlessly transition from "blood cries out for blood" to "we did a cost benefit analysis, disregarding the costs imposed on the people being sent to prison".
I'm personally on the side of prison being necessary, but should be as much like Norwegian prisons as possible - i.e. humane and focused on reform, dare I even say repentance and redemption (will note that there's variability in prison conditions in any country, Norway included). I feel like we can all agree that the ideal outcome is that former prisoners are released as productive members of society (setting aside the people who think they should never be released at all, I guess). I think if I'm really charitable there are people who think that if prison is really unpleasant nobody will want to go back there, but I suspect they're just letting the vengeful part of the brain ignore the fact that propensity to crime has a lot more to do with poor impulse control than with rational consideration of the consequences.
I think most people refuse to engage with the full complexity of the issue, on both sides. It's far easier to see prisoners as dangerous monsters or as helpless victims than it is to see them as the complex people that they really are, mostly just people who made bad decisions in unfortunate circumstances. I've met people who've been to prison, and I've also heard a lot of first-hand accounts (I would recommend the Ear Hustle Podcast if that's something you're interested in - the story that most stuck with me was a father and son rebuilding a relationship while both in prison). I get the impression that a lot of people who were sent to prison recognise that they needed some sort of intervention in their life, probably a forceful one, but that prison was clearly not designed with their situation and needs in mind. I just have no idea how to really shift that status quo on this, although I do hope that recent concerns about the criminal justice system might eventually translate to a better system.
I think your article is interesting and brings up some valid questions that society should be attempting to answer. I would like to propose another question and that is a question that is not about the environment of a particular act of criminality, but the environment that creates crime in the first place. To look at this environment we also begin to look at the environment that creates mental illness and the environment that creates mental detachments from the society.
I would like to suggest that all of the above is created by people who are being left out of the generally accepted society or feel deprived by that society, When society rejects some, for whatever reason, mentally inferior, racially inferior, sexually inferior--then many will become depressed, suicidal, vengeful.from their feelings of displacement. Such displacement leads to ,or can lead to, any or all of the depressions and detachments that we determine are societally disharmonious, including even those who might feel the society of democracy itself may be to blame.
Since it is obvious that feelings of displacement are increasing resulting in increased mental illness, suicide, and crime. And let's face it, mass shootings are calls for help by those feeling depressed or displaced. The same for election deniers, etc.
So my question is who, or how, is the environment being created that leads so many people incapable of adjusting successfully to that environment they feel displaced within.
i just wanted to slightly disagree with the iron-rod analogy, if you might have read 'Everything is Fucked' by Mark Manson, in which there is a Newton's Laws of Emotions, the 1st law is "For Every Action, There is an Equal and Opposite Emotional Reaction", so basically it speaks about moral gaps caused by actions.
for eg: getting punched in the face. As soon as we get hit, we begin our response. It could be hitting the person back, calling the police, or verbally reprimanding the person. Regardless of our response, Manson writes, we feel a rush of negative emotion in these moments
this happens because we want to equalise with the person, we want to equalise the emotions felt by us as we were punched unfairly. We want him to feel the same pain we felt, and once some form of pain is dealt unto the wrongdoer the moral gap closes.
In the case of the iron-rod analogy, if we as an external entities were allowed to beat a wrongdoer and he is not allowed to retailiate (ofc), then this will create a moral gap in us unless we're sadistic.
We will feel a sort of guilt as that person never really did something to us, thus to avoid such a moral gap to be created we will avoid the action of beating him.
The thing with a prison is, someone else is delivering justice to him and not us so it doesnt really matter to us as we ourselves aren't going through the creation of a moral gap as we're not really inflicting pain. Thats why we sometimes as kids are asked our friends to trouble kids who were annoying , because we wanted to avoid the creation of a moral gap.
The considerations you laid out sound very sensible. One thing that has always troubled me is how the pragmatic rationale for imprisoning people as a necessary evil (containment, public safety, rehabilitation) gets arbitrarily folded into a moralistic rationale (punishment, justice, "responsibility"). There may be a formal legal distinction, but if you look at how things actually work it seems that the first tends to serve the purpose of the second, when really it is the former that should be systematically prioritized. Ideally this would occur in a way that can facilitate some soul-searching and a proportionate sense of responsibility, but ultimately it's up to that individual whether they take genuine responsibility - the state cannot legislate personal ethics for them. And a collective retributivist ethics simply erases the individual.
Maybe one possibility is to at least give convicts a choice: they can go to prison, or alternatively they can go to work (for a generous living wage, with decent housing and living conditions) on any number of urgent national infrastructural projects preparing for climate change: shoring up seawalls, repairing wetlands, building new communities in the Arctic, agriculture. I would like to think there is a way to enlist people in this kind of service work without it becoming de facto slave labor. I don't pretend to know how to solve the practical difficulties: they would have to be kept them from freely mixing with the public, and if entirely new communities were created in remote areas consisting only of convicted criminals that could be a highly volatile situation. I know virtually nothing about Australian history, but I assume the importation of convicts there in the 1800s was not especially humane either.
Commenting specifically on the possibilities of a technical solution, using technology we already have available to us - there is something dystopian about the idea of putting GPS trackers on people, but if you're regularly jailing people who haven't been convicted of any crime (pre-trial detention!) then you already live in a dystopia, so maybe there's hope for a technical solution here.
Although I can't help but think that they'll be plenty of stories of people sent back to prison because their GPS tracker malfunctioned ("it says here you fled to Mexico at 500 mph, then jumped back 10 seconds later") or because they were unfortunate enough to be strolling past the scene of a crime as it happened - also, I'm unsure if a GPS tracker alone would be enough deterrence in the heat of the moment.
The idea of a "Slap Drone" sounds like something that could only happen in a world of ubiquitous surveillance - maybe it's a good idea, although it seems like it's filling the role of a parent in a way I'm not sure if I feel comfortable with? You know, as a wise experienced voice preventing you from doing things against your better judgement, whether you like it or not? But maybe that's what people need?
I guess I'm also not very confident in a psychiatric solution - it seems to me that the only difference between prison and involuntary psychiatric commitment for antisocial personality disorder is that a prison sentence has to be proportional to the crime. There's a classic C.S. Lewis lecture pointing out that the principle of retribution constrains the punishment, whereas a more utilitarian approach to crime can be as harsh and as indefinite as it deems necessary.
In theory a retributivist approach constrains the punishment. In practice, I see a lot of people on Twitter who use it to justify pretty much indefinite punishment for any serious crime, e.g.:
(Murder) "The person will never come back to life, never let them out!"
(Serious financial crimes) "The damage will never be repaired- 20 years at the minimum!"
(Assault where the person was even arguably trying to kill their victim or indifferent to the possibility of death) "They tried to end someone's life, why let that dangerous maniac on the streets!"
(Rape) "The victim will live with that for the rest of her life, why shouldn't he!"
Also, the absence of a victim should, logically, constrain the retributivist- but in practice it never does. They're keen on punishing victimless crimes too.
There might have been times in history (e.g. the Georgian period where they were executing kids for stealing hankies) when retributivism might have constrained punishment, but we're long past retributivism and lex talonis being the humane option.
Good point, I suppose I associate the punishment of victimless crimes with the kind of cost benefit analysis that says that drugs are bad and so we need to make an example of drug users as a warning to everyone else. I was mostly talking in theory, although I can think of times where the kind of people who are very retribution focused object to a particularly excessive punishment, although usually only when the victim is sympathetic.
I wonder if part of the issue is that nobody is entirely sure what the point of the criminal justice system is, so if you are in favor of locking people up then you can seamlessly transition from "blood cries out for blood" to "we did a cost benefit analysis, disregarding the costs imposed on the people being sent to prison".
I'm personally on the side of prison being necessary, but should be as much like Norwegian prisons as possible - i.e. humane and focused on reform, dare I even say repentance and redemption (will note that there's variability in prison conditions in any country, Norway included). I feel like we can all agree that the ideal outcome is that former prisoners are released as productive members of society (setting aside the people who think they should never be released at all, I guess). I think if I'm really charitable there are people who think that if prison is really unpleasant nobody will want to go back there, but I suspect they're just letting the vengeful part of the brain ignore the fact that propensity to crime has a lot more to do with poor impulse control than with rational consideration of the consequences.
I think most people refuse to engage with the full complexity of the issue, on both sides. It's far easier to see prisoners as dangerous monsters or as helpless victims than it is to see them as the complex people that they really are, mostly just people who made bad decisions in unfortunate circumstances. I've met people who've been to prison, and I've also heard a lot of first-hand accounts (I would recommend the Ear Hustle Podcast if that's something you're interested in - the story that most stuck with me was a father and son rebuilding a relationship while both in prison). I get the impression that a lot of people who were sent to prison recognise that they needed some sort of intervention in their life, probably a forceful one, but that prison was clearly not designed with their situation and needs in mind. I just have no idea how to really shift that status quo on this, although I do hope that recent concerns about the criminal justice system might eventually translate to a better system.
I think your article is interesting and brings up some valid questions that society should be attempting to answer. I would like to propose another question and that is a question that is not about the environment of a particular act of criminality, but the environment that creates crime in the first place. To look at this environment we also begin to look at the environment that creates mental illness and the environment that creates mental detachments from the society.
I would like to suggest that all of the above is created by people who are being left out of the generally accepted society or feel deprived by that society, When society rejects some, for whatever reason, mentally inferior, racially inferior, sexually inferior--then many will become depressed, suicidal, vengeful.from their feelings of displacement. Such displacement leads to ,or can lead to, any or all of the depressions and detachments that we determine are societally disharmonious, including even those who might feel the society of democracy itself may be to blame.
Since it is obvious that feelings of displacement are increasing resulting in increased mental illness, suicide, and crime. And let's face it, mass shootings are calls for help by those feeling depressed or displaced. The same for election deniers, etc.
So my question is who, or how, is the environment being created that leads so many people incapable of adjusting successfully to that environment they feel displaced within.
i just wanted to slightly disagree with the iron-rod analogy, if you might have read 'Everything is Fucked' by Mark Manson, in which there is a Newton's Laws of Emotions, the 1st law is "For Every Action, There is an Equal and Opposite Emotional Reaction", so basically it speaks about moral gaps caused by actions.
for eg: getting punched in the face. As soon as we get hit, we begin our response. It could be hitting the person back, calling the police, or verbally reprimanding the person. Regardless of our response, Manson writes, we feel a rush of negative emotion in these moments
this happens because we want to equalise with the person, we want to equalise the emotions felt by us as we were punched unfairly. We want him to feel the same pain we felt, and once some form of pain is dealt unto the wrongdoer the moral gap closes.
In the case of the iron-rod analogy, if we as an external entities were allowed to beat a wrongdoer and he is not allowed to retailiate (ofc), then this will create a moral gap in us unless we're sadistic.
We will feel a sort of guilt as that person never really did something to us, thus to avoid such a moral gap to be created we will avoid the action of beating him.
The thing with a prison is, someone else is delivering justice to him and not us so it doesnt really matter to us as we ourselves aren't going through the creation of a moral gap as we're not really inflicting pain. Thats why we sometimes as kids are asked our friends to trouble kids who were annoying , because we wanted to avoid the creation of a moral gap.
The considerations you laid out sound very sensible. One thing that has always troubled me is how the pragmatic rationale for imprisoning people as a necessary evil (containment, public safety, rehabilitation) gets arbitrarily folded into a moralistic rationale (punishment, justice, "responsibility"). There may be a formal legal distinction, but if you look at how things actually work it seems that the first tends to serve the purpose of the second, when really it is the former that should be systematically prioritized. Ideally this would occur in a way that can facilitate some soul-searching and a proportionate sense of responsibility, but ultimately it's up to that individual whether they take genuine responsibility - the state cannot legislate personal ethics for them. And a collective retributivist ethics simply erases the individual.
Maybe one possibility is to at least give convicts a choice: they can go to prison, or alternatively they can go to work (for a generous living wage, with decent housing and living conditions) on any number of urgent national infrastructural projects preparing for climate change: shoring up seawalls, repairing wetlands, building new communities in the Arctic, agriculture. I would like to think there is a way to enlist people in this kind of service work without it becoming de facto slave labor. I don't pretend to know how to solve the practical difficulties: they would have to be kept them from freely mixing with the public, and if entirely new communities were created in remote areas consisting only of convicted criminals that could be a highly volatile situation. I know virtually nothing about Australian history, but I assume the importation of convicts there in the 1800s was not especially humane either.