The Human Rights of Child Killers.

[IAN 2411]

So basically, you're saying employers should hire prisoners (at markedly reduced rates, of course) to perform labor instead of hiring law-abiding citizens? Won't that lead to higher unemployment and, by extension, more crime?

Not really i was thinking more on the fact that this is 2011 and enterprise is the thing. I know that there are factories that because of the Chinese market have had to close down in the UK because they could not compete. If these factories were turned into work houses, [yes i do know they went out with the prison reforms and look at mess we are in.] the prisoners could still make these products, and if the goods sold at the competitive price the Chinese throw at the west, it could be a useful to bring down the cost of keeping them. It could be controlled by government and independent watch dogs, so that there is no exploitation of the system. Ok it would not happen overnight but there has to be a safe way to introduce this, if anything it would only be more reform.

Be well IAN 2411

[Thorne]

if the goods sold at the competitive price the Chinese throw at the west, it could be a useful to bring down the cost of keeping them.

Wouldn't it be better to place higher tariffs on imported goods? And even higher tariffs on domestic companies who ship their production overseas? Make it easier for companies to produce in country? But that's getting into economics, not prison reform.

It could be controlled by government and independent watch dogs, so that there is no exploitation of the system.

Oh, sure, that would work! Everyone knows government bureaucrats and "independents" appointed by them would NEVER exploit the system!

Sorry, but I don't trust politicians or the bureaucrats they appoint.

One thing which I have repeatedly heard from former prisoners is how important it was to them to do some kind of meaningful work. That's why I feel it should be held out as a privilege, not as a punishment. And there is plenty of work that can be done within the prison system itself, thus helping to reduce the costs of running the prisons. Plus there is outside work, in emergencies, which can be further incentive for inmates to try to reform themselves. Right now in the US Midwest there are dozens of communities trying to dig out from either tornadoes, floods or both. Those prisoners who have shown themselves to be trustworthy and working to better themselves can be used in those kinds of jobs, but as a reward, not a punishment.

[leo9]

REHABILITATION

There are a lot of issues mixed up here, so I'm going to try to tease the threads apart and make it clearer, and I'm going to label them to keep them separate. One of the most important ones, which so far as I can see everyone has breezed past so far, is the oft repeated factoid "rehabilitation doesn't work." People who advocate the sort of policies described here have to believe that, or their arguments break down, but that doesn't make it true.

The fact is that there are well established systems of rehabilitation which have been trialed many times over many years with a wide variety of subjects in many different institutions, and they work. They don't claim to turn a villain into a saint, but they do reliably show a massively lower rate of re-offending than any purely punitive regime. In other words, if the object of a judicial sentence is to prevent crime by preventing criminals from re-offending, rather than to make people feel better by making someone suffer, rehabilitation works better than anything except punishing every crime with death or life imprisonment.

The reason these methods have been successfully trialed so many times but never applied is that they involve such things as treating convicts like people, talking to them sympathetically, rewarding them for good conduct, and a range of similar things that Ian would call "being soft on villains." So despite the many proofs that this would be the best possible policy for reducing crime, no politician would dare to even suggest rolling it out over the prison system, because they know the storm of tabloid outrage that would sweep them from office long before the benefits of the reform could be seen.

Unfortunately, the result of this official cowardice is that we now have the worst of both worlds, with a system that is too brutal to be reforming and too lenient to be punitive.

[leo9]

Child Killers

The thread has drifted away from the original subject, probably because child killers are such a useful source of outrage to fuel a general rant about prison policy, but true predatory paedophiles are a special case because they are arguably insane. The most immediately obvious corollary is that increasing the gravity of sentences will not have any deterent effect, because the decision to commit such a crime is not the result of rational calculation. (Besides, given that child-related offenders in normal prison conditions have the choice of solitary confinement or daily risk to life, it could hardly get much more severe.) In fact, as Ian has pointed out, more extreme sentences simply increase their motivation to kill, since it can't make their fate much worse.

And the next corollary is that using them as the basis for general prison policy is as unhelpful as basing your treatment of murderers on people who chop off their neighbour's head because the demons from space told them to.