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griffin tucker

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jails should be more widely known as schools

some correctional facilities are becoming a business or already are a business, the future of these businesses depends on more people to commit crimes.

the idea here is to give incentives for correctional facility businesses to fully rehabilitate people into society by means of ensuring they don't re-offend.

one incentive in western society is money.

while giving money to one of these businesses from the tax-payer for each individual that doesn't re-offend may seem like a good idea, there are many problems with this idea. one of the problems with giving individualised incentives is that the future of the business would still depend on repeat or new offenders.

however, if the tax-payer were to give incentives to a correctional facility business based on how successful it was based on statistics, eventually the rehabilitation facility would effectively be a school.

this idea was inspired by a conversation i had with Colleen Steen.


EDIT: the main premise of the thread was intended to be an effective realistic way to utilise the commercialisation of prisons, and in the process improve society, but perhaps i didn't word the topic's title very well.

instead, i have changed the topic title to better suit the conversation, just as Salim Solaiman suggested.

Topics: courts and cases crime cultural evolution law law evolution moral psychology sociology
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    Robbie O'Brien

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    Oct 13 2011: I think this is a great idea but the fundamental problem with the prison system (and really the justice system in general) is that we actually have a very confused idea about what we want out of it. We want to punish as a disincentive but prisons are not frightening enough to really do that... in fact the threat of having your hand cut of or being hung wasn't enough to stop crime. We want revenge, though we don't like to admit it we want people to 'pay for what they've done.' And prisons are not close enough to 'an eye for an eye' to satisfy our need for a symbolic balancing of the scales. Plus a key part of 'paying a price' is that once it's done it's done. You steal something, you get a spear in the leg, then it's forgotten about. Our most modern idea is that of rehabilitation. Clearly that's the best way to stop people re-offending and improve the character of society and just as clearly our prisons do not do that... in fact they generally make people 'more criminal'. We can never really do that though because our nature will not allow us to see people get counselling and a good education in return for committing a crime. Until we can love and feel compassion for those who wrong us we cannot rehabilitate them.

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