This conversation is closed. Start a new conversation
or join one »
eradicate punishment from the law system. instead, teach.
we as a species should learn to teach right from wrong instead of simply casting away our own species into seclusion, and hoping the problem will go away.
popular law and politics dictates that we should make examples of people who commit a crime to show other people that an action shouldn't be done through means of fear.
in my opinion, fear does not work for the long-run, especially in modern times where upon the public doubts governmental law and even politicians/law-makers themselves.
i propose that methods should be developed that involve mandatory psychologists and sociologists to attend court cases with follow-ups on individuals who are jailed, periodically with the intention to develop reports on as many elements as possible that led up to the crime itself.
with privacy kept in mind, reports could then be made publicly available and delivered to current law-makers/politicians to change or remove elements of a recipe for popular crime.
in cases where societal elements themselves are part of the recipe for a crime, and can be changed or removed, politicians and law-makers have the power to do so via means of education.
to do so through schools is a start, but humans don't ever stop learning throughout their lives, so other ways of educating people who have committed a crime _and_ the public (potential crime-committers) should be made available to change or remove elements of society that lead to a crime and eventually remove the crime itself.
EDIT: as Christophe Cop first mentioned, removing some people from society is necessary. while these people can still learn, i still think that they don't need to be punished in order to do so. for further information to back up my belief please see this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement#Positive_and_negative_reinforcement
Closing Statement from griffin tucker
i closed this idea early, simply because the amount and quality of feedback has led me to want to re-write the idea.
while many people demand justice by way of punishment, i believe the idea of punishment is not the best way to solve a re-occurring problem, but instead increases the likelihood of it happening again.
positive reinforcement simply works better than punishment in any case, but due to the current model of western society, there are certain restraints that mean there are more immediate demands at hand that require attention. so, other methods including punishment are used instead of positive reinforcement.
i believe social policy needs to be changed as a result.
according to the model of 'systematic evidence-based preventative social policy' (i think it needs a new name) it is what is proven to be working better than existing methods by means of already existing objective evidence.
in other words, if it works, and it's proven, the idea will be started. but this is not democracy.
currently, law-makers work on the assumption that if they don't get enough votes at the next election, they will lose their power to make laws - and since the easiest way to keep their power is to do whatever the majority says, this is what they have a tendancy to do.
law-makers react to popular opinion, but is popular opinion necessarily more correct or incorrect than evidence-based social policy? i don't know, myself.
thank-you all for your contributions.
Showing single comment thread. View the full conversation.
Showing single comment thread. View the full conversation.
Anca Tiurean 10+
griffin tucker 10+
i don't disagree that negative reinforcement teaches people. what i disagree on is that negative reinforcement should be the way to teach. although it may be harder to teach someone that putting a hand in a fire will burn the hand, in a positive way instead of negative, i still believe it is a better way.
as i've said before - i agree that some people need to be removed from society in order to learn. the idea hasn't been completely shaped yet, and since the original idea has been proposed, parts of the idea, including not 'simply casting away our own species into seclusion' has been modified.
myra noll
The best way to teach implies the best choices between positive and negative reinforcement, and positive and negative punishment. These choices depend on many factors - like the topography of the behavior, the urgency of the behavior change, the resources available and so on.
Prison was never meant to be a place where society puts its outcasts in order for them to learn its rules. Prison is just a place where society puts those that do not follow its rules so that it can maintain its structure. It is a very easy solution on the short term but ends up very costly and ineffective on the long run, and I think here lays the problem: we don`t need to lock people up if we have the knowledge we need in order to change their behaviors, but we need a place where we can control those that are a threat to us and for which no known behavior modification technique works.