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.
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.
So you have incentivised crime against society for survival.
That actually happens btw. There are homeless that will commit crimes, so they get arrested, so that they have a couple of free nights of not freezing to death in the cold.
I haven’t incentivized crime, but yes our current institutions do so.
It’s a little jarring seeing a post like this alongside a post celebrating the possibility of jailing people for doing a nazi salute. Anyway to answer your question, some people cannot function in society. They are dangerous, and the only way to prevent them from harming others is to isolate them from society.
Punishment, rehabilitation and removing someone from public life due to the danger they represent are the three most common reasons to imprison where I live.
The end products would be: society getting its “pound of flesh”, a better educated and matured person upon release and the protecting of the public from dangerous individuals.
(In practice though, most of our prisons are just universities of crime)
Prisons serve to remove a person from society (in the civilised world).
Removing a person from society has two subtly different justifications:
- Prevention: their offence against society is such that society must be protected from them.
- Punishment: their offence against society is such that society wants them deprived of society.
Consider the difference between violent crimes (1) and nonviolent crimes (2).
Note that some societies expand (2) to include more punishment than just separation from society.
There are different ideas about the purpose of imprisonment but the ones I’m aware of are exclusion, deterrence, punishment and rehabilitation. The second two are predicated on prison being worse than freedom, which obviously doesn’t hold for people in a lot of situations. In fact I’ve heard of people comitting minor crimes so they can be let into prison.
Unless prisons can get really good at rehabilitation then the only way they can be effective is if life outside of prison is healthy and prosperous.
I found https://daily.jstor.org/the-invention-of-incarceration/ by using https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=punishment+before+prison&ia=web
My assumption before even reading that was: I expect it’s because people wanted a punishment that wasn’t a monetary fine, corporal punishment, enslavement, death, or “death but we’ll pretend to not see you running away, and we might pardon you in 10 years, but if we see you before then we’ll kill you” (exile). I knew those were the only punishments in ancient Rome (and people weren’t held for long before facing a trial), and it seems that not much had changed until the idea of long term incarceration was conceived: https://romanempiretimes.com/crime-and-punishment-in-ancient-rome-justice-and-inequality/ https://factsanddetails.com/world/cat56/sub408/entry-6360.html
They were embraced by the left to rehab criminals and by the right to keep criminals off the streets
We gotta put the poors somewhere…/s
In the United States, they are largely used for slave labor.
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.
