Let's reserve prison for people that absolutely cannot integrate with normal society
Are you really making the case that no white-collar criminals should go to prison? I guess I can see where you're coming from, but I personally think that we need more financial fraudsters behind bars. You know, the whole "rule of law" and "deterrence" business.
Personally, I think "deterrence" has an incredibly awful success rate. I also think that, if prisons should even exist, they should only be for physically dangerous people. Never for "money" crimes. Being locked away from society for years, your life destroyed and likely abused or even raped seems beyond "cruel and unusual" to me.
Personally I think the whole concept of prison is primitive and should be done away with. If someone is violent then they have something wrong in their head and should be treated. I know that currently asylums can be worse places than even prisons, but once we move away from this draconian "people must suffer so I can feel better about wrong in the world" strategy we can move much more focus on getting treatment and detection right.
Being locked away from society for years, your life destroyed and likely abused or even raped seems beyond "cruel and unusual" to me
You know that politically-correct killjoy who always speaks up about how distasteful and offensive prison rape jokes are? I'm that guy.
That seems like a compelling case for reforming the prisons into a place where you're punished for your infractions against society, but not abused or raped. Prison shouldn't completely destroy someone's life, either. We need to have meaningful ways for prisoners to re-enter society as productive citizens. Otherwise, things never get better.
As someone looking in to USA society from outside - it certainly seems that at least investigating non-incarceration methods for dealing with most of your "prison population" would be worthwhile. There's a gigantic industry entirely funded by taxpayers - there's no doubt at least some of the "military industrial complex $1000 hammer" type behavior going on. That industry is legally required to "increase shareholder value", rather than minimize the cost-to-the-taxpayer.
The prison system shouldn't be about either "increasing shareholder value" or "minimizing cost-to-taxpayer". It should be about rehabilitation, justice, and public safety.
Part of the problem is that it's really hard to win an election against someone who has positioned themselves as "harder on crime" than yourself. As a result, we have legislators pushing for tougher and tougher prison sentences, mandatory sentencing, etc. I don't know how other countries deal with this pressure, but I would be eager to see the United States do better.
Your counterpoint is way off topic… What you're saying about the business of prisons here is 100% true, but you could increase prosecution (and imprisonment) of white collar fraud by 10X and the effect on the overall US prison population would be small.
This is probably more about our overcrowded jail system sucking up huge amounts of taxpayer money. The point is likely supposed to be that its one more person in jail, which is bad, but because that person happens to be a CEO, suddenly its about how he shouldn't go to jail because he's a CEO. It's a matter of unfortunate implications.
If we decriminalize recreational drugs and release all of people imprisoned for non-violent drug charges, we'll have more than enough space for crooked executives.
Are you really making the case that no white-collar criminals should go to prison? I guess I can see where you're coming from, but I personally think that we need more financial fraudsters behind bars. You know, the whole "rule of law" and "deterrence" business.