Can/should murderers and rapists be reformed?

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Last time I saw data on it, it happened disproportionately to white male non-violent drug offenders usually performed by a group of black males out of mostly racial motives. It is to my knowledge quite common for these men to commit suicide, contract HIV/AIDS or other STDs, sustain injuries that require medical attention and/or surgeries, but I'm sure Aspieotaku thinks it's perfectly fair that being brutally gang raped, having your teeth knocked out, so that you won't bite while a group of mainly black inmates rape you repeatedly both orally and anally for days, months and even years on end.

The more I learn about the American prison system, the more I start to figure out that any American who doesn't fight against it is an accessory to rape, and thus should be murdered, which includes AspieOtaku, so I'll be waiting to see your face on the 6 o clock news now Otaku.

My guess is (although I am not an expert on US "justice") is that the US prison rape problem could be fixed quite swiftly if states (or the federal government) were always held absolutely liable for any prison rapes and if the rape was considered a tort. The resulting damages (imagine the reaction from a jury faced with an 18-year old gang rape victim who got thrown to prison for smoking marijuana) would probably instantly bankrupt any prison that did not make the prevention of prison rape a top priority.

Perhaps, but as far as I've read the problem is proving that the events took place combined with a strong reluctance on the part of the victim to report the crime as he will most likely suffer even worse if he presses charges. The problem would be fairly easy to solve though:

- Stop housing non-violent offenders with violent offenders.
- Stop putting non-violent offenders in prison period, and utilize other programs.
- Institute mandatory firings, negligence, tort and criminal charges for any corrections officer found to have failed in keeping prisoners safe.
- Single rooms only, with 24/7 video surveillance of each entrance.
- 24/7 video surveillance of all common areas within the prison.
- Construct prisons in a cylindrical form thus drastically increasing the corrections officers opportunity to keep an eye on the inmates.

The problem isn't just rapes, it's all violence against inmates period, they were sentence to serve time in prison, nowhere in that sentence was putting an inmate at high risk for violence.

Now now I never really said there is no crime in china just the rapes murders and child molestation rate is by far much lower reason being that the laws are by far harsher! When it comes to corruption fraud and piracy thats a whole different story![youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr2K5RSnnr4[/youtube]Heres a video of a foreigner who lives in china and telling how much lower crime is opposed to most other places.Only major issues are scams and such.

You did not address my criticism of the validity of Chinese crime statistics.

I think it depends on the reasons for doing it and what the person feels after committing the crime and how many times it happens. There's more chance of rehab I think if the crime was a "crime of passion" than if it was a meticulously planned scheme.

I've never quite understood the objections to the Panopticon design, it just makes sense to me. I guess it stems from Foucault's essay, but if we are to have a prison system, why not have the most efficient form of surveillance in it? We're in the situation where we have a Panopticon on the streets with CCTV cameras, but not in prisons where the idea was intended to be used. I'm not a fan of the idea in schools and mental institutions, but if anyone deserves to be subjected to constant surveillance, it's prisoners.

I agree with your other points, as well.

Last edited by puddingmouse on 03 Nov 2012, 8:36 pm, edited 2 times in total.

I'd like to see this data.

People affiliate by race in prison. That is how you protect yourself. When you first get there, an "ambassador" from the the gang of your racial group will tell you all the rules and offer you protection. The white gangs in prison are the most vicious, despite often being the minority. The Aryan Brotherhood for example commits more violence/murder than any other prison gang, and is considered the most feared and ruthless, despite often having the least numbers. Whites are actually a minority in prison, even though they are a majority outside of it. Hell, 20% of the people in American prisons are Mexican citizens (plus all the Mexicans/Hispanics who aren't Mexican citizens), and 40% are black.

The closest thing to an actual Panopticon design (at least according to Bentham's original definition) is this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidio_Modelo

Several prisons have adopted several features of the model though:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chi_Hoa
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stateville ... -chicago-2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelican_Bay_State_Prison

The rationale for this particular type of architecture has diminished with the invention of CCTV, however.

And a circular construction is rarely an optimal use of space, but sometimes security trumps such concerns.

http://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/prison/report.html

In support of all of TM's arguments (the racial make-up of prison rape, criminal history of victims, risk of STDs, suicide).

Well at the onset and in reply to some other recent posts, I don't even know what the purpose of prison is to be frank. It is a lazy solution, we feel no accountability to what lands people in there to begin with, and penitentiary is a place where you perform penitence for the crime you committed, but where is it? People don't feel any different about the victim, they're just mad that they got caught, or hate on the system for making them into the monsters they've become. We need prisons but why is it a value-free institution?

But to your point, we are going to differ on whether a murderer is redeemable. And IMO, a persons goodness or badness should not weight for or against a murderer's punishment. Do I for one second think that a reformed murderer will murder again if they've demonstrated for decades a life committed to fighting injustice, promoting peace, and making sure others don't follow the path that lead to him taking another's life? NO. There's even a possibility that he'll be a blessing to many many others if we let him come back to society, he could start movements or support existing ones that help reform others before they take the path that he's taken, he could become a leading advocate of gender equality, or environmentalism, or atheism, etc. That is not the issue. You robbed someone else of their life and all that that means... WHICH IS HUGE! You don't deserve to keep your own. If we value life as much as we say we do, we must attach the appropriate punishment to those who rob others of it.

Judaism teaches that you make right those you wronged. It is not up to society to apologize to you on behalf of a rapist, or force you to move on about the issue if you've had a family member murdered. The principle is to make right those you have wronged, and there are a million of ways we can go about doing that, but currently, its not really much of a part of the imprisonment process... You live for free on taxpayer subsidies, work for next to nothing if its a privately run prison, you can get a degree, watch tv, it is an expensive waist that socially amounts to a whole lot of nothing. No one is corrected, everything stays the same.

Nope. Rape is always wrong, a principle a few members here could stand to learn.

As Viper alluded to, I suspect it has to do with construction costs/optimal use of space more than anything. You can see the same considerations creating other issues such as shared cells (in effect locking a victim in with his or her abuser in many cases for 8 - 12 hours a day). Creating large blocks where its likely for gangs to form, very hard to create a "power balance" between such groups and where riots can escalate much easier than they could in blocks of lets say 20 - 50 prisoners.

It's simply not cost efficient to run a prison system consisting of in excess 2 million prisoners in the way that it should be run. Ideally, you'd want to segregate the prison by race, offense (violent/non-violent*) and duration of sentence (5 years or less, 10 - 20, 20 - 40, 40 - life).

I'd even go as far as to utilize a form of shock collar on the prisoners (in case of riots or violent behavior) and 24/7 video surveillance every inch of the prison which cannot be disabled under any circumstance,

As I mentioned in an earlier post, you could cut the U.S prison population in half rather quickly if you released all non-violent offenders, all victims of moronic drug laws, got rid of 3 strikes laws, decriminalized marijuana, and changed the law so to avoid locking up people who do not need to be locked up. The idea of how much consumption and labor the U.S loses every year from it makes me cringe. I should probably also mention that most of the harsh drug laws that came about under the Reagan administration and are linked to "The War on Drugs" disproportionately targets African Americans and Hispanics.

Of course, doing this is political suicide since no politician wants to be seen as "soft on drugs" or "soft on crime" because most people can't see longer than the tip of their nose, and thus neglect to think "If we view our prisoners like animals, put them in a situation for years where they are treated as and have to act like animals, wouldn't that make them more likely to act as animals when they get out?"
The whole notion that "Prison should be a deterrent" seems to be utterly wrong, if we look at recidivism rates, secondly, if you don't do a crime because you don't want to go to prison/don't want to go back to prison, isn't that a lot like being a Christian because you don't want to go to hell?

In the sense that rather than focusing on the positives of being a productive member of society, making a positive impact in people's lives, bettering your own life, the focus is on negative consequences of behavior.

*Note on non-violent offenders; I don't think non-violent offenders should be put in prison, but if they have to be, then minimum security would be the best with no mandatory minimum sentencing. Other options for sanctions include public service (in the case of professionals with sought after expertise), financial sanctions or similar.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diminished_responsibility
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battered_person_syndrome
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provocation_%28legal%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-defense_%28theory%29

And those are just what I could find through a superficial Google search.

One common misconception is that everyone who commits a murder is a bona fide psychopath. This is not the case.

In fact, I might suggest that the US disproportionally puts normal people in prison while disproportionally electing psychopaths to public office.

Those who argue that all murderers are sick or psychopathic must also argue that people who do extreme goodness are also sick or psychopathic... an argument that is never made, it seems that people think murder is mentally ill in some way because they assume the human's nature to be good in the first place. I never argue a murderer is mentally corrupted, it is as normal a human institution as rape or slavery.

The US does disproportionately imprison normal people, and the inverse about politicians I agree with, but only emotionally.

I don't think you actually adressed my point. Do you believe that people who kill other people in acts of provocation, self-defense, diminished responsibility or when suffering from battered person syndrome should be put to death?