Does Prison "Pay the Debt"?

[JohnB]

A comment by Phi in another thread got me thinking.

 

A couple of years ago, Florida greatly increased the distance registered sex offenders could live from a school. Sounded great, sounded right, but it effectively meant that RSOs couldn't live in ANY populated area, since the overlap of school districts cancelled out available homes and apartments. RSOs (which included those who'd been caught urinating in public and charged with indecent exposure) had to join the ranks of the homeless (iirc, they couldn't leave the state either), living under bridges at the city outskirts. These were people who had already gone to prison and been released, with their debt to society supposedly paid up.

(Emphasis mine.)

 

I admit to being on the fence a bit with this one. On the one hand I have to say that once the term is served, then yes the debt is paid and the person should get a new start with a clean slate, otherwise what was the point of prison anyway? On the other hand, if I was a parent I'd want to know if serial sex offenders were moving close to my kids school as well.

 

This isn't meant as a thread as to whether jail is a good option or not, but regardless of the punishment chosen, when does it end? When does the person stop paying for their crime?

[iNow]

It often seems those professing to value forgiveness tend to have the most difficult time doing it.

[GammaTheGreat]

This is an interesting issue with a bit of a Les Miserables theme.

 

On one hand, sex-offenders such as pedophiles, it is widely-believed, can not stop being pedophiles. It is simply their sexual orientation, not to belittle the seriousness of their offenses. To allow them to reside in close proximity to a school is to put children in danger and to put them in a position of temptation.

 

However, if they have done their due time, such time that is deemed necessary to punish or rehabilitate such offenders, then should they not be deemed rehabilitated? Not to put the two offenses on equal levels, but to my knowledge, those who have been convicted of some sort of large-scale robbery of a commercial institution and complete their sentence are not barred from living near commercial areas, and they are not banned from all stores. So, why do we view one person as rehabilitated and the other as a marked man?

 

The reality of it may be, as aforementioned, that sex offenders are likely to commit more sexual crimes once released, but it cannot be the answer that they must be forced live in destitution. Realistically, forcing someone into poverty is a great way to cause someone to act criminally.

 

The answer, in my opinion, is that, while the legislators may mean well, the law has overstepped its practical and ethical bounds.

[ewmon]

forcing someone into poverty is a great way to cause someone to act criminally.

The term is called "marginalization". It happens to RSO's as stated, and it happens with many more people returned to society if their crime is one of the severe ones (murder, manslaughter, kidnapping, etc).

 

In addition to having done their time, the situation is compounded. It involves seeking living arrangements, employment, transportation, and even education ("going back to school").

 

Someone guilty of a serious crime spends serious time in prison. Even if they were only 18 when they committed the crime, they might be getting out when they're 38, with no real work experience for 20 years and no real work skills to offer. Add to that the fact that prison makes it difficult to maintain relationships, and family and friends tend to fall by the wayside and/or move away by the time 20-plus years rolls around. Mom & Dad might be living in an over-55 community, or they may have retired to a trailer in Florida. Siblings are married with kids, and they'd rather not take in Uncle Joey ... you know, for the kids' sake, and all that.

[iNow]

This isn't meant as a thread as to whether jail is a good option or not, but regardless of the punishment chosen, when does it end? When does the person stop paying for their crime?

I know you don't really want to discuss the effectiveness of prison in the treatment of crime, but that really gets to the heart of the issue, IMO. It's like you're asking us to discuss obesity without mentioning the issue of caloric intake.

 

I'll try to be brief since I realize this goes against your wishes for the thread. Quite simply, jail is not about rehabilitation. It's about punishment and retribution. In a nutshell, that's the core of our problem here. If we sent criminals to be rehabilitated, then releasing them back into the population would be much less troublesome and much more successful, and we'd concurrently be better able to avoid having them continue "paying for their crime" via burdens such as those you reference after their time has been served.

 

The challenge is that they don't get rehabilitated in prison, they simply get punished and segregated from society. A dog who pisses on the carpet doesn't learn to stop just because you locked him in a closet when he did so. You have to teach him, and reward him for the right behaviors. It's not my intent to refer to criminals as dogs, only to illuminate that the same basic conditioning and reinforcement mechanisms that apply to pets apply to humans (in a broad sense, at least).

 

In fact, I'd go so far as to argue that prison makes these issues worse, as in prison they often learn little more than how to be a better criminal (if they went in with a basic grade school in criminal activity, they come out of prison practically having a PhD in crime). In these conditions and circumstances, releasing them back into society is to re-insert the original threat (and potentially even a greater threat than they posed originally), so consequently treating them differently is often a necessity.

 

Even if we were to quibble on some of the details above, my primary point is that if we actually sought to rehabilitate instead of to punish criminals, we'd have more of a chance of successful re-integration with society post release, and all without the need to impose any additional social burdens or penalties or restrictions. Essentially, you can keep putting a band-aid on those blisters on your feet, but until you change your shoes or put some pads in the ones you have to treat the root cause, the symptoms will continue to recur.

[ewmon]

jail is not about rehabilitation.

Ditto. Out of incarceration's three objectives to: 1) protect society, 2) punish the criminal, and 3) rehabilitate the criminal, the rehabilitation takes a very distant third place.

 

This happened roughly during the 1970s to 1980s when the crime rate skyrocketed and the public clamored for a response by the authorities. For example, in Massachusetts, double bunking (two men in a 6 by 8 cell) went, from an emergency "warehousing" response to overcrowding, to the norm in most jails and prisons, which added to the punishment aspect. Educational programs were reduced or eliminated. Lifers and long-termers who had accepted and settled into their prison life, and thus were allowed to live in the relaxed conditions of lower security institutions, were punished by bringing them "back behind the wall", that is, returned to higher security prisons.

 

Prisoners also became a whipping boy for those criminals who were unknown to authorities, and thus, beyond the reach of the law. For example, at the end of the 20th Century, unknown, young, black, urban teens were committing black-on-black drive-by shootings in Boston, where both intended victims and innocent bystanders were being injured or killed. In response to the public outcry that authorities do something, they turned around and made life more miserable for those criminals already incarcerated to try to frighten the would-be drive-by shooters from committing these crimes. The result was that, not only did this whipping-boy style of deterrence not work, but the authorities were helpless in other ways (more patrols, outreach, rewards, etc) in curbing this brand of violence. Drive-by shootings came to an end only after community and religious "leaders" spoke up and took the issue to the community itself.

 

Sadly, incarceration remains a seriously under-rehabilitating experience for those who cannot follow society's rules, and simply gives them more years under harsher conditions to try to rehabilitate themselves. Even among prison staff, there are those with a strong protect-and-punish-only mentality who make work difficult for those employees, such as principals, teachers and librarians, who attempt to bring any sort of rehabilitation to the prisoners.

[GammaTheGreat]

I agree with both of you, iNow and ewmon. You're views on rehabilitation and marginalization as it relates to corrective institutions and society are spot-on. Sorry, I was unclear that when I was speaking to "rehabilitation" I was merely using the term in the way the State views it. I only wanted to grant them that in order to address the separate issue. Sorry for the lack of clarity.

[John Cuthber]

At the risk of complicating the subject:

"More than 70% of the prison population has two or more mental health disorders. (Social Exclusion Unit, 2004, quoting Psychiatric Morbidity Among Prisoners In England And Wales, 1998)"

from

http://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/help-information/mental-health-statistics/prisons/

 

"According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 56 percent of state prisoners and 45 percent of federal prisoners have symptoms or a recent history of mental health problems."

 

from

http://www.hrw.org/news/2009/09/22/mental-illness-human-rights-and-us-prisons#_Mental_Health_and

 

Incidentally, I suspect that the difference between the 2 percentages may relate as much to the relative sizes of the prison populations (730 per 1000,000 (USA) vs 156 per 100,000 (UK)) as it does to intrinsic or diagnostic factors.

 

Do these folk actually have a debt to pay?

[GammaTheGreat]

I'm not sure that to say criminals, mentally ill and well alike, have a "debt" to pay is entirely fitting. That being said, depending on the state, a person can be found to lack the mental capacity to stand trial. Also, depending on the state, it is possible that the defendants' mental disabilities were not seen as severe enough to render the person without the capacity to tell "right" from "wrong," or "legal" from "illegal" in the case of what may be an amoral law. I also take into account that a mental disorder can be defined as an impairment or pattern of behavior that causes mental distress and significantly affects one's ability to function normally. With that definition, nearly all people who behaves in a way that winds them up in prison could be said to suffer from a mental disorder of some sort.

 

But they very well might not deserve to be held responsible for their actions. However, the problem is that the current system doesn't hold people responsible in the correct way, which is, as aforementioned, rehabilitation. The current system promotes a sense of "justice" in correctional facilities.

 

I am hesitant to speak out against any form of "justice," and I must say that the principle of justice has its rightful place in the Judicial system, however, not so much in the general correctional facilities. I'm not saying that criminals don't deserve to be punished, because I think it's necessary that they are. I do not think, however, that it should punishment be for the sake of revenge or retribution, rather it should be for punishment that serves toward crime prevention and criminal rehabilitation.

 

Good point John, that's something you should throw up in another thread. I can see that stirring up interesting ideas.

Edited June 26, 2012 by GammaTheGreat

[JohnB]

Don't you hate it when a long and detailed post gets deleted when you hit the wrong key? Sorry if the next bit seems a bit abrupt, but I lost about an hour with the delete and I don't have time to do it all again in detail.

 

Before anybody gets too excited over that 70% who suffer from 2 or more diorders the full report is here.

 

They count "Anti social" as a personality disorder and "Excess drinking" as a disorder, so the 70% is made up mostly of antisocial drunks and antisocial drug addicts. Those with what most of us would call an illness make up about 7%. The relevent sections are 5, 9 and 12. By all means help the sick, but druggies and boozers have to take responsibility for their actions. The choice to drink was theirs, so the responsibility for the results are also theirs. This might sound harsh, but if the individual is not responsible for their own actions, then who is?

 

The other thing to consider when considering this sort of survey is that the very first thing inmate are taught is what to tell the social worker/psychiatrist. If you can get them onside with drugs or alcohol as "mitigating circumstances" there is a good chance at a reduced sentence. Be polite, act contrite and promise to get help for your drinking/drug "problem" and you can quite often walk free. In short, prisoners lie.

 

iNow, so long a good discussion comes from the OP, who really cares? I asked the question because I thought that if people really believed that the punishment "paid the debt" then they would act differently. So if punishment doesn't "pay the debt", then what would? It's like we both believe in the "presumption of innocence", but if we're watching the news and see somebody arrested for a crime and think "They got the bloke that did so and so" then do we really? Haven't we just convicted the person in our mind?

 

Your comment about dog training was very Heinleinian, ever read "Starship Troopers"? He uses the example of training a dog to show why punishment is required as well as reward. I personally think that corporal punishment, direct and short is preferable to incarceration. Put bluntly, punishment only works if it effects the offender, so if the offender doesn't care about spending 6 months inside for his 23rd drink driving offence then there is no punishment or deterrent effect. I think an escalating scale of number of lashes would have a far more immediate effect.

 

Much is often made that we concentrate more on punishment than reward, but that makes sense. How do reward a drink driver for not drink driving any more? Buy him a new car? I think a lot of people that are incarcerated on minor offences would be far better off with corporal punishment and release. At the very least they will be thinking "Sh*t that hurt. I don't think I'll do that again."

[John Cuthber]

"They count ... "Excess drinking" as a disorder,"

 

Good.

http://apps.who.int/classifications/icd10/browse/2010/en#/F10.2

[iNow]

Your comment about dog training was very Heinleinian, ever read "Starship Troopers"? He uses the example of training a dog to show why punishment is required as well as reward. I personally think that corporal punishment, direct and short is preferable to incarceration. Put bluntly, punishment only works if it effects the offender, so if the offender doesn't care about spending 6 months inside for his 23rd drink driving offence then there is no punishment or deterrent effect. I think an escalating scale of number of lashes would have a far more immediate effect.

Actually, no. Punishment is quite ineffective. As a general rule, it really doesn't prevent people from engaging in the undesirable behavior. It teaches people how to get away with it. In order for punishment to be effective, it would need to happen within milliseconds of the behavior we seek to minimize, otherwise the association between the activity and punishment is never properly formed on anything greater than an intellectual level. When it comes conditioning of this sort, it needs to happen at a much deeper level in the brain and not just in the higher coritical regions like the prefrontal cortex. Either way, punishment tends to teach us how not to get caught, it does not generally prevent us from avoiding the wrong behavior. Let me elaborate with an example.

 

If someone were to grab an old ladies purse and got shocked within a half second of doing so, they'd quickly learn to stop grabbing the purse. If someone grabs a purse, runs for 30 minutes, and is apprehended by police later that night, and not sent to prison until a month later... that association never forms. They learned that they should have done more not to get caught... Not that they should have avoided grabbing the purse.

 

Another example. We have highway patrol policemen looking for speeders and issuing hefty fines when they see some one surpassing the speed limit. Does that cause us all to obey the speed limit? Nope, it causes us to buy radar detectors so we can avoid being caught.

 

Punishment is an incredibly poor approach to changing the intended behavior. Unless it is delivered within milliseconds of the activity we're seeking to extinguish, it does little more than change peripheral and tangential behaviors.

 

 

Much is often made that we concentrate more on punishment than reward, but that makes sense. How do reward a drink driver for not drink driving any more? Buy him a new car?

That's a more complex question, but just because it's difficult to answer does not mean that a quality answer is unavailable to us.

Edited June 28, 2012 by iNow