When you walk into some store, why don't you just take whatever you want and walk out? Perhaps you have some virtuous reasons: maybe find stealing ethically wrong, or maybe from a philosophical point of view since if everybody stole at their discretion that society would collapse, or maybe you just don't want to have a reputation as a thief. But what if somebody didn't care about anything at all like that? And try as hard as you might, you simply couldn't convince him of your train of thought. What then?
All that's really left is deterrence. In the past (and in the present in many places) if you steal then the first time something like a finger gets cut off, and the next time the hand comes off, and the third time - well don't steal three times. But of course that's barbaric, so we need to do things that aren't barbaric, but what? And so enters the idea of prison. Rehabilitation is of course ideal, but in reality some people simply can't be rehabilitated. So what do you do then?
Separation of those who can and cannot be rehabilitated would ostensibly be ideal, but it's interesting to consider that in doing this you'd effectively be going full circle and recreating the asylum type systems of times long since past. It's unclear that this would be desirable even in the best of times, and we're certainly not in the best of times.
I don’t think people think through the “deterrence” angle very well though. In order to make deterrence effective you need to have people who really stand to lose something, but like I was just listening to C.R.E.A.M last night (funny enough while playing chess) and Method Man raises an interesting point: “life in the world no different from a cell”. For someone facing seriously abject poverty, the potential rewards of crime may outweigh the costs. You can make prison progressively more horrible, but you can also make life outside of prison progressively better with IMO a similar effect. In the US we rarely discuss the anti-crime effects of social welfare policies, but they’re quite real. In a world without the kind of serious poverty we accept all over the US even 5 year prison sentence is a massive loss, because life outside is so much better. In a world where people are living in $10 a day then maybe 5 years in prison isn’t such a huge price if the upside risk appears big enoug
>For someone facing seriously abject poverty, the potential rewards of crime may outweigh the costs
This isn't the case because outside of prison you have upwards mobility. It is easy to escape poverty if you put in the effort. In prison you are stuck there for however long your sentence is.
All that's really left is deterrence. In the past (and in the present in many places) if you steal then the first time something like a finger gets cut off, and the next time the hand comes off, and the third time - well don't steal three times. But of course that's barbaric, so we need to do things that aren't barbaric, but what? And so enters the idea of prison. Rehabilitation is of course ideal, but in reality some people simply can't be rehabilitated. So what do you do then?
Separation of those who can and cannot be rehabilitated would ostensibly be ideal, but it's interesting to consider that in doing this you'd effectively be going full circle and recreating the asylum type systems of times long since past. It's unclear that this would be desirable even in the best of times, and we're certainly not in the best of times.