Jubbergun wrote:
Ouch, my feelings. Prison seriously has no deterrent effect. Sure, there's the stress of "please God, don't let me get shanked/raped today," but outside of that your every need is met. It's not like we're making people do hard labor while sleeping in sweltering cells in the summer and freezing cells in the winter.
No, really, you're objectively retarded. Prisons are incredibly scary and dangerous places.
Having one's every need met, as in you get three less-than-square meals a day (prisons deliberately underfeed prisoners to keep them weak), a bunk to sleep in and a pot to piss in means very, very little. The lack of any kind of physical freedom or privacy, for months or years on end, is an incredibly crushing experience. Besides, of course, the fact that prisons are...really scary and dangerous places.
Prison doesn't have a deterrent effect because the kinds of people who do things that result in getting put in the pen are crazy. No one is seriously going to go ahead with jacking a car or murdering someone because they rationally believe that however long in prison isn't a big deal. In another place and time, these people didn't see the "deterrent" in being lashed or thrown to the lions.
These are people who are either demented or feel they have nothing to lose.
Battletard wrote:
I'm fed up with how quick people are to call for the blood of others, and then how anally buttfrustrated those same people get when crazy people do crazy things.
The world is fucked up. Acknowledging that our savage attitude towards the mentally ill and prisoners exacerbates the issues is not the same as condoning the behavior.
This 100%. This is what I wanted to say but you really did say it better than I could have.
