All Episodes
Previous Next
Feb. 22, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
38:01
654 Crime and Punishment Part 2: Theories
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Good afternoon, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's 5.42 on February the 22nd, 2007.
And thank you for those who helped me with some implant advice.
But actually, my boobs are fine.
It was more my teeth that I was thinking about.
But that's probably because you may have seen me in profile and realized that with 40 comes not only tooth problems, but sagging bubbies as well.
So we shall survive.
But thanks. Thanks anyway.
So let's move on to the gripping and terrifying world of incarceration and see if we can't throw some theoreticals in execution at the problem before we see the results, right?
So if you have logical problems with your proposed solutions to problems or to issues, then the execution is going to be a mess.
And if that execution involves...
A force without consequences, a lack of voluntarism and coercive monopolies and so on, then the result is going to be not metaphorically but specifically genocidal.
So I don't really have the stomach I was going to do this, but I don't really have the stomach to do it just now.
In the morning we will chat about some of the things which occur in the prison systems, which you may or may not be aware of.
But for now, let us simply have a circle around the logical problems involved with incarceration.
And I'm going to widen this net to include the...
The problems of incarceration that would accrue to a free market society or to a DRO-based society as well.
So this is not just an attack upon the state.
This is at least my attack upon incarceration as a principle, as a way of solving problems to do with human criminality.
So I don't believe that we coddle criminals.
I don't believe in any of that kind of stuff.
So I will ping out a few chest hairs later on in the series.
But for now, just if you don't mind, I'm not going to attack the state, which is, you know, not the most difficult thing in the world.
Of course, the state solution is terrible.
But what I'd like to do is have a go at the whole incarceration problem.
So to see if we can sort of figure these things out.
Now, the first paradox that I see going on in the realm of penalizing people through the penal system...
Is that there is an acceptance on those who wish to impose punishments on others.
There is an acceptance of the fact that there are bad people in the world who wish to do others harm.
There are bad people in the world who wish to do others harm.
There are sadists.
There are brutal, vicious sociopaths.
There are all of these kinds of people.
And because there exists in the world people who wish to do us harm, We have to confine them and keep them away from everybody else so that we can remain safe.
Now, there is of course a paradox in here.
There is of course a paradox in here.
And the paradox is sort of composed of two layers.
The first layer is the turtles all the way down issue, which is that, yeah, sure, absolutely, there are sadistic, evil, brutal, nasty, bastardish people in the world.
I'm not going to argue that.
I was raised by a few of them, so I'm certainly not going to gainsay that.
But the problem, of course, is that you can't separate these people into criminals and guards.
The paradox which you face or which sort of pro-prison people face is the paradox that, yeah, absolutely, there are really bad people in the world and we need to find ways to protect ourselves from them.
And so if the result is to give others...
Near infinite power over those individuals.
And let's not kid ourselves. You and I have no clue what goes on inside of a jail in a public or private setting.
If it were DRO system, what the hell would we know?
Yeah, there'd be some activists, there'd be people who demand videotapes, and there'd be lawyers suing and so on, but that all happens right now as well.
It doesn't... Rise to our consciousness, what occurs in jails, until it's too late, if, God forbid, we're ever thrown into one of those dismal Dantean hellholes.
If you are afraid that people have the capacity to be sadistic and to do harm to one another, then you face the challenge of trying to figure out exactly who is going to watch the prisoners.
Who is going to watch the prisoners?
It's the same thing that occurs with the state.
The state says, there are bad people who wish to steal your property.
It's like, okay, so you want a monopoly of power because there are bad people out there who want to steal my property and harm me.
Yes. Well, how do I know those bad people aren't going to end up in the government?
I mean, come on, people.
This isn't that complicated anymore, is it?
So, if you're really interested in...
Dealing with the dangers of violent sociopaths, then I don't really see how you can guarantee that those violent sociopaths aren't going to end up as basically manufacturing workers on the production line of increased and more dangerous sociopathy.
Because prison is rarely a one-way street, and the prisoners get out.
The prisoners get out.
And unless you're willing to say it's a permanent, perpetual, indeterminate, indefinite, unending, eternal life sentence for jaywalking, then you're going to have the problem that people...
are going to go to jail, and since you cannot slice and dice the human population and ensure that no sadistic, crazy, evil people end up as prison guards, then you basically have a training ground for psychopaths, a training ground for sociopaths,
and you have the infliction of such enormous harm on people through this prison system and through the sadists that are in the prison system in the forms of guards and wardens and so on, You have the infliction of such a high degree of trauma and violence on people that they come out far more dangerous than they went in.
And I'm not talking about the sociopaths who go in.
We'll get to those people later in the series.
I'm just talking about the people who go to jail for whatever.
Some right-collar crime, they stole a car, some kids joyriding, or whatever.
It seems to me that if you are a dumb sadist, then you become...
A criminal. If you are a sadist of medium intelligence, then you go into the army or you go into the corrections facilities or you become a cop.
If you're a sadist of high intelligence, then of course you go into politics or become a priest.
If you want the really thread-thin but exquisitely bejeweled torture of wrecking somebody's consciousness rather than sticking just a shiv into their leg or having a dog bite down on their calf, if you want the real delicate and juicy human agony, then you go into the corruption of adult citizens who are dependent and helpless and stupid because they've gone through public schools, or, even more juicy for the highest level of sadism, you shred a child in body and mind through the infliction of religion.
So I've never heard, maybe there is a satisfactory answer, I'm not sure that I would hold my breath through one, but I've never heard of a satisfactory answer to the problem of punishment.
The greater the degree of fear of evil people, the greater the desire to punish, but the more you believe that evil people are prevalent in society, Then the more likely it is that they're going to end up as sadists in the prison guard uniform.
So I just don't think that it's a particularly logical position.
If there are lots of dangerous people in society, then surely prisons are about the worst idea in the world.
Because those crazy, evil, sadistic people are going to end up swinging the truncheons in uniform.
And if there are not that many crazy evil people in society, then the smartest among them, of which there are not a few, are going to end up as the same sort of prisons and wardens and so on and get paid for sadism.
Normally, if you're a sadist, you've got to go and pay somebody to have you inflict pain upon them, some prostitute or something like that.
But if you're a smart sadist, and again, they're not uncommon, If there's only a few of you, then the first place you're going to gravitate towards is those occupations where you get paid for your brutality.
It's not just a hobby, it's a job.
Do what you love and you'll never have to work a day in your life.
So... In no logical circumstance can there ever be a justification for setting up a confinement scenario where people have pretty much unlimited control over others.
And it's not that Prisons, by their very nature, in every conceivable circumstance, would end up as brutal torture chambers.
It's just that most of the people who seem keen on prisons seem keen on turning them into torture chambers or seem keen on, I'm a tough guy, their murderer has now chosen the consequences, and he's the worst guy in the world, and dogs can rip off his nuts, and I will just sit there eating my popcorn because he's such a bad and unholy guy.
So if protection of the citizenry from the dangerous sociopaths is at all important, then of course you don't want to give those dangerous sociopaths control over people who may or may not be dangerous sociopaths.
Not everyone in prison is a sociopath.
Not everyone in prison is evil.
There are those who are there by mistake.
There are those who are there because they were railroaded.
There are those who are there...
For racist reasons, there are those who are there because they just pissed off some cop.
There are those who are there genuinely, of course.
You can't separate them very easily.
There's not enough smoking guns in the world to fill a small knapsack when it comes to proven crimes.
But... That sort of particular issue, I've never seen a very good solution for it.
So the more that you rail at me about how evil murderers are and how evil, evil people are, then the less logical justification you have for the institution of prisons.
Just as the more you rail against how selfish and mean and nasty people are, the less justification you have for government, because, of course, those mean and nasty people, if they are as prevalent as you say, will end up running the government, and then I will have no defense.
So, I don't think that that is a very good and logical approach to the problem, and I promise not to go through it one more time.
Making a prison of repetition for you, spinning my little web.
So, that's sort of the first paradox.
Now, the paradox also, as I mentioned before, comes in that these people are going to come out of prison.
These people are going to come out of prison.
And the more they are traumatized and brutalized in prison, the more they are going to inflict harm upon others when they get out of prison.
Likely. I mean, there's definitely a correlation between the experience of brutalization and the capacity to hold down a nice, boring, middle-class job, like most of us do.
So... Without a doubt, given that prison is a trampoline, if they go in as relatively not-so-dangerous people, they're going to come out as much more brutalized and dangerous people.
So, I don't think that if you're at all interested, even if you don't buy the argument about the sociopaths becoming prison gods, which to me is axiomatic, but I'm not going to sit here and pound your head with it, But,
clearly, you are going to set up a situation where, if not the prison guards, then the other inmates in the sort of current environment of the state-run prisons are going to brutalize and torture mentally, physically, all of the other people in the prison, which is only going to make them tougher and meaner and scarier and more sociopathic and more dissociated and less empathetic and so on.
So the more that you have hatred for and wish to punish the evil people, the more that you create the evil people that you claim to hate and fear.
This is the paradox of the unconscious.
This is how the false self tricks you and reverses every intention that you have.
So it's not logical to take that approach.
And, I mean, I'm with you as far as we've got to find ways to protect ourselves from these people and so on.
Absolutely, totally and totally and completely understand it.
I also think that it's entirely possible, in fact, I think it's highly plausible, that people exist in this world who have done such evil that they are beyond recovery.
I'm absolutely completely and totally convinced of that, though I'm not going to say that it's proven, of course.
I mean, it would be nonsensical to claim to prove that in the absence of, I don't know, significantly advanced psychobiological knowledge and, I guess, a fairly large survey.
So, I'm totally there.
I don't believe that you hand a criminal a flower and away and ahoy he becomes a little Girl Scout who just skips around being happy and planting daisies.
So, to me, the major issue that is distorting The problems of crime, naturally, of course, is state profitability and a lack of financial consequences to those who breed criminals.
A lack of financial disincentive, shall we say, to those who breed criminals.
So, to denigrate the noble institution of children, look at it this way.
If I have a pit bull...
And I torture that pitbull with coat hangers and forks and turn that pitbull into a raging, mean, evil, nasty beastie.
And then I starve it for a couple of days, and then I stick a hot poker up its ass and throw it into a schoolyard.
Would I not be...
Well, I pretty much think that I would be liable for the resulting carnage and would probably get sued into the Stone Age.
In any rational sort of society, that would be how things would work.
So, to me, it is quite logical that if you are a parent and you breed a sociopath, you are such a bad parent and you take so little care of your child, that when you brutalize and abuse your child, or if not you personally, you leave that child open to brutalization from others...
Who then nimbly and handily, as they always do, step in to fill any gaps that you might have left in the abuse of the child.
It takes a lot of work to make a child into a criminal.
It takes a lot of work to turn a child into a criminal.
And just, you know, flip on old Dr.
Phil just about any day of the week and see the genesis of this kind of stuff.
Screamings, beatings, like it takes a lot of work to turn a child into a criminal.
And then those criminals are turned loose on society, or those young men and women, mostly men of course, are turned loose on society, and they go to work and they go to town messing, everybody's lives up, hitting and kicking and biting and screaming and sleeping around and getting people pregnant and all the disordered and messy stuff and passing AIDS along or other VDs and just the whole mess that occurs when somebody like this is placed into prison.
Society. Now, it's not inevitable, and it's not absolute, and I don't sort of...
I'm not even remotely competent, I'm not sure anyone is, to probe the gray areas around this.
Certainly, early abuse is not a guarantee of criminal behavior, but it is a very, very, very strong marker for criminal behavior.
If a parent cripples a child through violence...
Then the increased medical costs that that child is going to incur, it would seem likely to me, should be born by the parent.
Should be born by the parent.
Anybody that, if I don't have insurance and I cream some pedestrian in my car, then clearly I would be, I mean, assuming that the pedestrian is crossing with the light and isn't like jet black in the middle of the night and all this kind of stuff.
Then it would seem fairly just that I should pay for that rehabilitation and all the stuff that I'm sure we're all fairly agreed upon.
So, if I injure my child, then surely I must pay for that child's medical expenses.
If I injure an adult, I must pay for that adult's injuries.
If I torture a pitbull and throw it into a playground, I must pay for the resulting children's injuries.
And if I raise a child and brutalize a child to the point where that child becomes a danger to others in his teenage years or beyond, then surely, surely, surely I should pay for that.
Surely I should pay for that.
Now, of course, there is a bit of turtles all the way up here insofar as you can be a 40- or 50-year-old guy and your kid does something bad and then you say, yeah, well, my parents were bad but they're dead and I can't sue them.
It's like, well, that's true. You can't sue them.
For sure. But...
There is kind of like an acid test, you know, for good or bad parenting, which is that if your child is willing to sue you for being a bad parent, then you were a bad parent.
I mean, what could compel me to sue my wife, who I love to death?
No, nothing. It would be impossible.
Unthinkable. So she is perfectly protected by her virtue.
That's not really an issue.
So the question, of course, is that wouldn't the criminals who had committed a crime just say, oh, it's mom and dad's fault.
I'm going to sue you. Go sue them.
And there would be some maybe logical cutoff at 25 years of age or 30 years of age or something like that.
And there would be some proportional something, something, something.
But these things can all be relatively well predicted.
It's not like people who become criminals just up and become criminals out of nowhere.
They're not in Harvard studying political science and then just decide to drop out and become crack dealers.
That's not how it works, right?
I mean, the markers are all there very early on.
All the markers are there very early on.
So this is not a huge mystery.
You don't have to wait until someone's 30 and then say, gee, you know, he's been an accountant for 10 years, but I just don't know.
He might snap and go on, actually no, an accountant might go on a shooting rampage, but somebody else.
I'm talking about like criminals, not crimes of passion, but the sort of career criminals that are the most dangerous.
Crimes of passion almost always only inflict themselves upon those who are around the lunatic who does such things.
Not to say it's not wrong, but it's not as scary or dangerous as the career criminal to the general population.
You can protect yourself just not by hanging out with weirdos, but, you know, the guy who just sticks you in the ribs in a subway to take your wallet.
It's not so much you can do to protect that.
So, you know, we're all about the protection.
Now, at the moment, of course, there are no negative financial consequences to the problem of crime to those who raise the criminal.
Or, assuming you're not O.J. Simpson, or to the criminal himself or herself.
So, would parents be less likely to abuse their children if the child committed criminal acts before the age of 20, and all criminals will do it, if that parent could then get sued for the costs of incarceration, of restitution, of this or that or the other?
Would that have an effect? Well, sure.
Of course it would. It's the million-dollar proposition from very early in the podcast series.
If you pay the most evil of parents a million dollars to not abuse their child for one day, can they do it?
Yeah, of course they can. So financial incentives alter people's behavior.
It's the basis of economics. At the moment, society pays the cost.
Taxpayers and the victims pay the cost for criminal behavior, not the parents who've abused the children and so produced the criminal.
So, it seems to me that the first thing that you'd want to do is find ways to make the parents pay for this sort of stuff, which would then make the parents less likely to be overtly abusive.
And it's most often physical abuse.
Emotional abuse will lead people to white-collar crime.
Physical abuse leads them to crimes of property and violence and so on.
So, there may be some more verbal abuse, but there's always going to be that fear.
Always going to be that fear.
Like, well, if my kid does go, I'm pushing this kid pretty hard, I'm beating it up pretty bad.
If this kid goes haywire, I could lose my house.
Well, I think that would make parents a little bit more interested in finding decent parenting classes and finding solutions, right?
There's a threat there.
So, that to me seems like a pretty reasonable solution.
To at least some or one of the problems, one of the many problems of criminality.
Now, as far as how it works economically, well, I've talked about this in an article in a podcast very early in the series, in terms of caging the beasts.
But basically, there is the rejection of the ability to form any kind of contract through a unified DRO or group DRO front.
And through that...
Rejection of one's ability to be able to enter into any contracts.
You're basically exiled from any kind of decent society.
You live in a Mojave Desert or Navajo Desert in one of those horrible tin can baking sauna places.
Trailer park homes.
And good luck with even that, right?
That's going to be tough too. You're going to go to the grocery store unless you start farming yourself.
You're banished from society, basically.
If you can't enter into contracts with people, and that's just how it could work, right?
That's just how it could work. I'm not saying that's how it will work.
God knows I'm not smart enough to invent even one-tenth of one percent of a future society, but this is just one possibility.
So, if nobody will enter into contracts with someone, or they have to sort of go into some bizarre alternate underworld, then at least they're removed from the general society that they may threaten.
So that's sort of one possibility.
Now, the other, of course, which we've talked about before, is that you, as used to be the case in common law, something called the Ware Guild, that you would pay money if you did things that were bad, right?
You steal someone's horse, you pay them $50 back, or 50 pounds, or 50 shillings back then or something, even if you return the horse and it's only 25.
If you touch a woman's breast without her wanting it, you've got to pay 5 shillings.
You know, there's all these sorts of things that you incur a financial debt.
And that is something that of course doesn't occur anymore because the government has taken over it all.
So now all the money flows to the government and the government only wants to produce more criminals.
So there's no financial incentives in this realm.
So the costs of criminality is not borne by the criminals other than sort of emotional and in a sort of lost income or lost opportunity for income situation.
But they're not incurred by the people who breed the criminals, the people who sort of, quote, poke the pit bulls and then release them in the schoolyards.
And so there's just no economic incentives.
And where there are no economic incentives, you always get the expansion of bad behavior or negative economic incentives, right?
It's the issue with war, right?
I mean, when war is subsidized, war becomes possible.
When the peaceful taxpayers have to pay for the violent soldiers, then war becomes economically viable for the minority who profit from war.
If war had to be self-funding, in other words, if the soldiers had to pay for it, war would collapse economically.
War is only possible because the money is extracted from the taxpayers.
War is only profitable because other people are footing the bill and a small minority of people are gaining the rewards.
So it's the same, of course, with prisons.
Prisons can only exist because people are forced to pay for them and a minority of people profit from them.
The Abu Ghraibs that litter the world, the civilized and the eastern world, more civilized, they only exist because the taxpayers are forced to pay for them.
There is no conceivable way that this would ever be economically viable, that vengeance would ever be economically viable.
And this is the problem of capital punishment.
If you say to somebody whose kid gets murdered, well...
You can either have this guy put to death, or you can have him work for 30 years and give you three quarters of his income.
And he's going to be marked out as a murderer, and that's going to be common knowledge to everyone.
And if he decides that he wants to flee, then he's going to be barred from any human contact, anything like that.
Or he may have a contract with his own DRO that causes him to have his property forfeit if he commits these kinds of crime.
Anything like that. Then most people would say, okay, I'll take the couple of mil that this guy is going to earn over the course of his life that can come to me.
Oh, the $500,000 or whatever.
And if they feel like they're having their kid's life paid for or something, then they say, okay, well, if you don't want the money, will you at least put it towards a charity that's going to try and prevent this kind of stuff from happening in the future, this and that.
A criminal is a resource.
A criminal is an economic resource.
And to just lock them up and to just have them raped and beaten up and shiv stuck into their side and terrorized and bought and sold and turned into God knows what.
I mean, what a ridiculous waste of an economic resource.
There's no conceivable system that would ever find that to be a productive use of human capital.
So that's sort of how it would work from or how it could work from the victim standpoint.
People don't mind justice in this kind of brutal eye-for-an-eye kind of way.
They don't mind it as long as someone else is paying for it, or at least they're not being paid to not do it.
People are all thunderous about the death penalty because they're not being given any rational option.
We have to pay taxes either way, so let's just kill the guy.
But if it was like, well, if you want the death penalty, it's going to cost you $300 a year, and if you don't want the death penalty, you're going to get paid $1,000 a year because of the labor that whatever, whatever, right, the criminals can provide to you, then people will find themselves magically transported to a sort of more, quote, tolerant and beneficial kind of realm.
Now, let's have a look at it from the viewpoint of the criminal.
And I'm not going to talk about a change of heart and I'm not going to talk about being born again or resurrected into a more virtuous life or anything like that.
I'm not going to talk about any of that kind of stuff.
What I do want to talk about is the practical consequences of criminality and the best ways to put incentives in place that will help people to not commit again.
I mean, obviously we would rather criminals not commit a crime again.
We don't punish people who steal cars because they've stolen a car.
At least that's not the exact reason for it because that's already in the past and you can't change that.
We punish people who steal cars so that cars will not be stolen in the future.
It's sort of an interesting question.
If you knew for sure if a criminal would never recommit the crime in the future, would you bother punishing them?
Well, I don't know.
I don't know. And nobody else would ever know whether they were punished or not.
I don't know. I would sort of lean against that.
But I don't claim to have all that worked out or anything.
So just look at it from the science standpoint of the criminal.
Well, what is it that the criminal lacks?
Well, clearly, the criminal lacks a marketable trade.
There's no question about that.
The criminal lacks something that people want on the marketplace.
What have they got? They've got criminal skills.
They're a cat burglar.
They're a drug dealer or whatever.
I know drug dealers shouldn't be illegal or whatever, but of course it wouldn't be even a criminal occupation if they were legal.
But he can punch people.
He can break people's kneecaps.
He can steal stuff.
He's really nimble as a pickpocket or whatever.
He's got skills that people don't want to pay for.
And he doesn't have skills that people do want to pay for.
So that's pretty much inevitable.
Now, the DRO that is going to garnish his wages or deny him the right for any contract is going to want not to put him back to work as a pickpocket or a thief or whatever, is going to want him to perform productive labor.
Labor which they can exchange for other goodies in the marketplace.
So they're going to put him to work as a carpenter or waiter or something like that.
Something which doesn't require him.
They're going to become a brain surgeon.
They're going to pay for 10 years of schooling or whatever.
They're going to try and put him into a situation where they can gain economic value from him.
And they're also going to want to...
So they're going to have to train him. They're going to have to train him.
Assuming he's got no job skills at all.
They're going to have to train him. Which is a good thing, right?
I mean, criminals get out of prison, right?
They get out of wherever they are, so training in a viable job skill that people want is kind of a good thing, I think.
Simply because we don't want them to recommit, right?
If we can get them not to recommit their crimes, and you can't control that, but you can certainly provide very strong incentives, and you can minimize the possibilities of a relapse into existing criminal behavior.
So teaching them a skill that people actually want in the marketplace to trade for is a good thing.
It's a very, very good thing.
And, of course, the DRO is going to know that if they teach the guy just some completely brain-dead task, then given that criminals tend to be people with high stimulus requirements, then teaching a guy to stamp out license plates for 20 years is just going to turn him completely mental and make him more dangerous as well.
They're going to have to do something that's going to keep the guy engaged because they know that when he gets out of prison, if he's totally bored and hates every kind of occupation he was ever offered, then the Carlitos Way temptation is going to be that much greater for the guy to go back into a life of crime.
So they want to teach him a job, not only that it's as economically productive within the constraints of having to train him as possible, but they're going to want to teach him a job that he likes.
That he likes.
So the temptation of going back and being a criminal and being a bad guy again is going to be that much less.
So teaching him something that he is going to enjoy, that is economically viable, will not only provide the greatest opportunity for profiting from his, quote, incarceration or whatever, But it's also going to...
It's a triple hit, right?
I mean, they get to make money.
They get to pay off the money for the person who was wronged.
And also, last but not least, of course, they get to train the guy on something that he enjoys so that his chances of becoming a criminal when he gets out of jail is going to be that much less.
Now, the other thing you want to do, and this is so ridiculously simple that it takes the state to not do it, right?
You want to keep the criminals away from other criminals.
I mean, that's pretty important. You don't seat all of the mean kids together in class, right?
I mean, you want to keep the criminals away from other criminals.
That's fairly basic. And we don't sort of have to get into how that could be achieved.
I'm sure you can puzzle out some things for yourself, but locking them all, locking all the crazy sociopaths in a big box and then leaving them mostly unsupervised and locking them two to a cell or three to a cell is definitely not a very intelligent way to deal with the problems of criminality.
I mean, you want to put them with as decent a set of people as you can rather than have them just all over each other reinforcing their crazy sociopathic nasty evil behavior.
Now, it is also a good idea that when somebody gets out of prison, that they have some money.
They have some money.
Obviously, if they have job skill, regular work ethic, and so on, all the better.
And they haven't been around criminals to build up their contacts and learn new ways of being bad and so on.
It's not going to be perfect, but it's obviously infinitely better than what we have right now.
So it would seem to me that there is some economically productive aspect to having somebody work for the DRO or work and turn over some percentage of their income to the DRO but to pay for their crime that, of course, they get to keep a portion of that money.
And maybe the DRO keeps some portion of it to be released to them upon the completion of their whatever term or whatever you want to call it.
And then you have, I think, about the best...
I don't know whether counseling would be viable or valuable or not.
I couldn't really tell you.
I don't know enough about it.
But if it was, of course, if the cost-benefit of counseling versus a repeat offense was viable, then counseling would be provided.
If counseling costs more than it reduced crime, then it wouldn't be offered.
But people would probably be searching for better or more counseling in order to be able to achieve that.
So, the guy gets out of prison, and what does he do?
Well, he's got a place to stay, because maybe he stayed in his own house, and he's just won an ankle bracelet or something like that.
And he's got some money, he's got some job skills, he hasn't been around other people.
But he has in fact instead been around people who actually work for a living and who can teach him skills.
And he's had maybe counseling, if that's going to be an effective way.
Part of the caste has been born by his own labor.
Part of the caste has been born by his parents.
The victim is to some degree restituted.
And when he gets out of prison, he's got better emotional skills.
He's got regular work skills.
He's got a job that he enjoys as much as he can or as much as has been figured out that he can.
And he has some money and, you know, that's got to be about the best possible situation that could result.
It's got to be about the best situation that could result from a person who is, obviously, who's had a brutal childhood, who's had lots of violence, who's had lots of hideousness, and yeah, they've become a bad guy, no question, no doubt.
But the entire purpose of having any kind of sensible punishment system is to turn bad guys as much as possible into not-so-bad guys.
And you don't do that by locking them in a big vault and having other bad guys brutalize and assault them in perpetuity.
So I hope this has been helpful.
▲
Export Selection