Reckoning With Violence

[MJ12 Commando]

Opinion | Reckoning With Violence

Hey @EmpressSquishette you like talking about how prison is awful and we should pretty much abolish it in its entirety even for violent crimes here's something for you.

Sentencing and criminal justice reform, if it actually wants to deal with the massive overcapacity problems American prisons have, is going to have to reckon with the fact that there are a lot of criminals in there who are in there because of violent crime, and you can't just fix the prison problem simply by removing nonviolent offenders from prisons and leaving violent offenders in there to rot. But non-prison interventions for violent crime seem to work okay, and they also seem to be preferred by victims for practical reasons.

Violent crime is basically a contagious disease-and exposure to violence makes you more likely to commit it. Prison is an incubator for this problem, and this gives you a practical and pragmatic reason to want to avoid sending people to prison whenever possible.

 

[Squishy]

It's funny. A colleague and I were having a wide-ranging discussion about crime today, both in the context of that paper you pointed me to the other day on the cultural defense and on the growing British press's fascination with knife crime, and I made an argument that's relevant here as well and that I strongly believe: crime is fundamentally a social problem, and prison is not a social solution. Unfortunately, it seems to be the only solution we can presently get funding for, and so with hammer in hand, every problem begins to look like a nail.

You see it everywhere. There's murder, of course, and pedophile priests, all the way down to people taking pictures of collisions on the motorway and dangerous philosophical treaties on revolution. In every case, the solution seems to be prison, or the threat of prison, and lots of it. It doesn't seem to much matter these days what the nature of the underlying offense is, and it's not to say that these things can't be harmful to people, but the line between behavior which is criminal and behavior which is merely antisocial is being rubbed away (to the extent that it ever existed). All that now remains is, as Dostoyevsky once said, crime and punishment.

I'm not convinced that restorative justice, such as it is generally described, is really the answer to this problem. Restorative justice I think has the tendency to go overboard in the other direction. It's true that today, victims feel swallowed up by the machinery of the state - a machinery that isn't there to protect them or to respect or repair the harm they've suffered. But at the same time, if we make justice only about the harm that victims suffer, we let go of the very real - and very important, in my mind - objective of state-sponsored criminal justice: the idea that justice also requires some distance between the judge and the judged. A system which exists only to address the concerns of the victims sometimes ignores the broader interests of society in maintaining peace and order. It relies on a kind of moral justice - an acknowledgement, as the article puts it, of moral wrongs - that can sometimes be problematic in a pluralistic society.

So I think that restorative justice is right in a way. The purpose of justice is not to imprison people; it is to build a better society. That begins not with police and courts and prisons, but with individuals and their interactions. Prison does not foster social accountability and encourage prosocial behavior. It does the opposite. It destroys accountability and encourages antisocial behavior. A system which succeeds must integrate victims and offenders, not force them apart. I think the flip side of that, of course, is that we must acknowledge that the principle of pluralism has a cost, and that some people will suffer harm as a result of what they feel to be moral wrongs, and sometimes they will never feel like those wrongs have been repaired - and we must accept that, too, is simply the nature of the beast.

 

[Zap Rowsdower]

The question is not, and has never been, "how do you get the majority of society to accept that". The question is "how do you get every individual to accept that", because there will be individuals who do not and decide to take justice into their own hands/community mob hands, and that way lies problems if it occurs in sufficiently large numbers.

Its ugly and not idealistic, but a decent chunk of the role of criminal justice as punishment is to placate the mob and stave off the vigilantism and proto-mafias, having nothing to do with the criminal but everything to do with calming the public.

If you want a different route, and I can't blame you, a solution for how to deal with the effects of not giving that emotional primal beast it's human sacrifice will have to be addressed, and addressed before it ends up undermining ability of authority to act.

 

[king208]

The question is not, and has never been, "how do you get the majority of society to accept that". The question is "how do you get every individual to accept that", because there will be individuals who do not and decide to take justice into their own hands/community mob hands, and that way lies problems if it occurs in sufficiently large numbers.

Its ugly and not idealistic, but a decent chunk of the role of criminal justice as punishment is to placate the mob and stave off the vigilantism and proto-mafias, having nothing to do with the criminal but everything to do with calming the public.

If you want a different route, and I can't blame you, a solution for how to deal with the effects of not giving that emotional primal beast it's human sacrifice will have to be addressed, and addressed before it ends up undermining ability of authority to act.

Click to shrink...

I think the goal should be to change societal attitudes to accept something other than a dark hole forever then. We did it before when (mostly) transferring demands for murder and maiming over to simply throwing people in a dark hole.

 

[Fouredged Sword]

It's funny. A colleague and I were having a wide-ranging discussion about crime today, both in the context of that paper you pointed me to the other day on the cultural defense and on the growing British press's fascination with knife crime, and I made an argument that's relevant here as well and that I strongly believe: crime is fundamentally a social problem, and prison is not a social solution. Unfortunately, it seems to be the only solution we can presently get funding for, and so with hammer in hand, every problem begins to look like a nail.

You see it everywhere. There's murder, of course, and pedophile priests, all the way down to people taking pictures of collisions on the motorway and dangerous philosophical treaties on revolution. In every case, the solution seems to be prison, or the threat of prison, and lots of it. It doesn't seem to much matter these days what the nature of the underlying offense is, and it's not to say that these things can't be harmful to people, but the line between behavior which is criminal and behavior which is merely antisocial is being rubbed away (to the extent that it ever existed). All that now remains is, as Dostoyevsky once said, crime and punishment.

I'm not convinced that restorative justice, such as it is generally described, is really the answer to this problem. Restorative justice I think has the tendency to go overboard in the other direction. It's true that today, victims feel swallowed up by the machinery of the state - a machinery that isn't there to protect them or to respect or repair the harm they've suffered. But at the same time, if we make justice only about the harm that victims suffer, we let go of the very real - and very important, in my mind - objective of state-sponsored criminal justice: the idea that justice also requires some distance between the judge and the judged. A system which exists only to address the concerns of the victims sometimes ignores the broader interests of society in maintaining peace and order. It relies on a kind of moral justice - an acknowledgement, as the article puts it, of moral wrongs - that can sometimes be problematic in a pluralistic society.

So I think that restorative justice is right in a way. The purpose of justice is not to imprison people; it is to build a better society. That begins not with police and courts and prisons, but with individuals and their interactions. Prison does not foster social accountability and encourage prosocial behavior. It does the opposite. It destroys accountability and encourages antisocial behavior. A system which succeeds must integrate victims and offenders, not force them apart. I think the flip side of that, of course, is that we must acknowledge that the principle of pluralism has a cost, and that some people will suffer harm as a result of what they feel to be moral wrongs, and sometimes they will never feel like those wrongs have been repaired - and we must accept that, too, is simply the nature of the beast.

Click to shrink...

I think that the context needs to not absolutely be the restoration of the victim's harm. I think the justice system need to keep their main focus on the bigger picture - how crime impacts society and the harm therein to the larger whole. Individuals are part of this larger picture, but the whole should not be abandoned in favor of the individual. Justice should be first concerned with preventing future crime, then with repairing the damage caused by the criminal to society, THEN aiding the specific individual.

 

[Kahing]

I think the goal should be to change societal attitudes to accept something other than a dark hole forever then. We did it before when (mostly) transferring demands for murder and maiming over to simply throwing people in a dark hole.

Click to shrink...

And quite frankly it should remain this way, albeit with the dark holes being relatively humane, until neuroscience gets to the bottom of criminal traits. Some sort of punishment needs to happen and it needs to be significant enough to act as a deterrent and placate the mob.

 

[Fouredged Sword]

And quite frankly it shoukd remain this way, albeit with the dark holes being relatively humane, until neuroscience gets to the bottom of criminal traits. Some sort of punishment needs to happen and it needs to be significant enough to act as a deterrent and placate the mob.

Click to shrink...

The problem is that sticking criminals in with criminals just makes the problem worse. We really need to be sticking criminals into well funded psyche wards and actually treating them, but we just lock them in boxes and send them back out into the world financially broken, homeless, and unemployable with new skills learned from other criminals and a fresh layer of trauma.

 

[Osteoclast]

Abolish the prison, bring back the stocks.

 

[Kahing]

Abolish the prison, bring back the stocks.

Click to shrink...

No, not cruel enough, death by Snu Snu.

 

[the atom]

The question is not, and has never been, "how do you get the majority of society to accept that". The question is "how do you get every individual to accept that", because there will be individuals who do not and decide to take justice into their own hands/community mob hands, and that way lies problems if it occurs in sufficiently large numbers.

Click to shrink...

I think once you reach a certain critical mass of acceptance social conformity does the rest

 

[TheArcanist]

I think once you reach a certain critical mass of acceptance social conformity does the rest

Click to shrink...

To be frank, the bloodthirst of the mob is only held in check if and when the state decides to actively enforce its monopoly on violence. In places where it pointedly elects not to do so(lynch mobs in the deep South come to mind), these people will inevitably come out of the woodwork regardless of the prevailing societal views on crime and punishment.

The real question, in my mind, is what we want the law to do. As it stands, criminal law stands as an institution meant to A) punish wrongdoers and B) deter would-be criminals from committing crimes*.

Note that I didn't say that criminal law attempts to punish people fairly. I do think there's a significant amount of bloody-minded vengeance in criminal law, insofar as the only justification for the punishments we actually have that makes any sense is 'because FUCK that guy.' There is little, if any, consideration for what that punishment does to the punished, nor is there any consideration given for the cost exacted on society for it being inflicted.

There needs to be a fundamental re-examining of what society wants the law to do and how it's supposed to accomplish those goals, because in the current paradigm the institution we've got is more or less the best version we're going to get.

*I recognize that there is a great deal of credible research to imply that increased punishment does not deter criminals. What that same research says, however, is that increased enforcement does, and enforcement is rather meaningless if there is no penalty for antisocial behavior whatsoever.

 

[Erebeal]

I would note though that the article appeared to be arguing that things like restributive justice can actually enjoy popular support and that the idea that people won't accept not throwing everyone in prison is possibly misguided?

This whole train is one of the things that the article was explicitly challenging as far as I can tell.

 

[the atom]

To be frank, the bloodthirst of the mob is only held in check if and when the state decides to actively enforce its monopoly on violence

Click to shrink...

The point here is that the mob should be less bloodthirsty. I don't actually know if that's achieveable but I was responding to the notion that you have to convince literally everyone in order to prevent vigilantism.

 

[Ritterin Sophia]

I figure crime is a failure of the society that it happens in. As such, I think the solution to our justice system is the perspective we approach is from. Rather than investing resources to house more and more inmates in a for-profit system that has no incentive to see any rehabilitation done, we should instead be focusing our resources on addressing the sociological reasons for those crimes in the first place. Most crime happens out of desperation, a better solution is to focus our efforts on attacking the causes of this desperation rather than responding to when disaster has already struck. It's also pretty well documented that the prison system is rife with mental health issues as well. And if we do have to incarcerate someone I'd like to see it done as part of a system that incentivizes the rehabilitation of those subject to it, less prison and more care facility. Further, the for-profit motive and prison labor need to be abolished. In continuing the "crime is a failure of the society it happens in" we need to abolish both prison labor and the for-profit motive, if society is depriving one of it's citizens of their liberties because that society failed them, then no one should be making money off of it, it's a cost the society needs to accept.