We are absolutely feeling the pain of a lack of social safety nets for all kinds of problems.
Unpopular opinion: I’m ok putting non-violent people in jail when they break the law. We need reform in the jails and prisons, not more lenient sentencing.
And because I’m sure it needs to be clarified, not every law breaker needs to go to jail immediately.
Why is jail necessarily the best answer? Fines and restitution, community service, court mandated counseling, "night jail" (must report to jail after work) and other tools would work better for preventing and correcting the harms of many (if not most?) types of nonviolent crime. Traditional jailing creates all kinds of assorted harms that actively prevent rehabilitation and which probably don't provide much deterrence.
Your suggestion of reform is indeed necessary, but some of the things I suggested above would fall outside of what most people would consider "jail." We are stuck on this singular "solution", and why? It doesn't seem to be very effective.
I agree with you so I should clarify what I mean by “jail”. The reform aspect is absolutely crucial and I am not advocating for simply locking people up as we do today. When I say “jail” I should probably say something like “adequate social safety nets supported by state mandated rehabilitation” but the marketing needs work.
I agree that some “non violent offenders” should go to jail if they break the law. I don’t agree on a lot of the laws that are on the books that stop consenting adults from making their own decisions. Some things that are currently illegal that shouldn’t be:
I only agree with 1 and 2 and to a lesser extent 3 in the presence of free universal healthcare and adequate safety nets.
If we simply legalized all drugs tomorrow I don’t think it would solve many problems. We have to also look at and treat the underlying cause of addiction and drug abuse.
Results matter. Incarceration is great for satisfying a need for punishment and vengeance, but as correction it has been clearly demonstrated to make problems worse. Jails and prisons function as networks for criminals to connect and share and are extremely effective at promoting gang activity. If we want to deal with problems then we are going to have to stoop to the kind of methods that are used with medical care such as pledging to do no harm and using evidence based interventions.
I clarified in other comments but we also need reform in our jails and prisons. What we do today is just release people to the street which also doesn’t work.
The point is if you break the law the state should have the ability to force corrections.
I’m completely in support of reinventing what those corrections are.
Fundamentally we should focus on rehabilitation instead of punishment. If the non-violent offense is theft in support of a drug habit then rehabilitation should be made available. It should not be optional.
If we're looking at addiction as a mental illness to be rehabilitated from, I would posit that forcibly housing them with a bunch of other mentally ill people, some of whom may be violent, would be traumatic enough to most people that it would more than negate the benefits of many rehabilitative interventions.
Rather than focus on what might not work I would rather put energy into finding what does. Things that do not work: what we do today. Things that might work: some form of rehabilitation.
If locking up drug addicts in a room and telling them to sort it out doesn’t work maybe we should try a new form of rehab instead of just saying “well I guess rehab doesn’t work”.
Unpopular opinion: I’m ok putting non-violent people in jail when they break the law. We need reform in the jails and prisons, not more lenient sentencing.
And because I’m sure it needs to be clarified, not every law breaker needs to go to jail immediately.