I fully agree with you regarding situations where people get put into the system. Our justice system in practice, if not philosophy is very much based on punishment rather than rehabilitation. In my personal opinion this is medieval and really needs to change.
However, what GP I suspect is seeing and what many others have seen as well, is a recognition that the system is broken, and thus a reluctance on a part of authorities to move forward with prosecutions for certain people. The goal of not institutionalizing them and setting them up for a difficult future is noble and laudable, however, I worry that this will ultimately be counterproductive. It is going to cause a swing much like what we are seeing, where people conclude that we are not tough enough on crime and thus we need to get more extreme, more punishing, and more authoritarian, which is the exact wrong way in my opinion.
I would much rather we focus on fixing a monstrously broken and outdated system, rather than trying to work around it. That also makes for much more equality and Justice, because then you don't have to hope that you are one of the lucky ones for whom The system looks the other way.
It doesn't have to be a massive revolution either. We can iterate towards it in a progressive manner, starting by removing absurdities like mandatory minimums, victimless crimes or crimes for whom the victim is some nebulous "society", and other things like that.
> The goal of not institutionalizing them and setting them up for a difficult future is noble and laudable, however, I worry that this will ultimately be counterproductive. It is going to cause a swing much like what we are seeing, where people conclude that we are not tough enough on crime and thus we need to get more extreme, more punishing, and more authoritarian, which is the exact wrong way in my opinion.
I totally agree. I also worry that people will continue to push for more extreme forms of punishment. It's gross that we accept how prisoners and ex-cons are treated as it is. I think there are still a lot of people who would already prefer if our legal system was even more cruel, but even if most of us want reform all we can really do is vote for the people willing to do it. Our strongest point of leverage here is jury nullification, but I wonder how popular that would actually be with jurors and since most cases never reach trial we're denied the opportunity to use nullification to prevent defendants from being subjected to excessive, inhumane, and unjust punishments anyway.
To reiterate what you just wrote in the second paragraph: Punishment ruins lives, so people vote against ruining each other's lives, so a group of people (who are but you did not refer to as fascists) who are disappointed with the amount of lives not being ruined will increase the level of punishment even further to maintain or exceed life-ruining equilibrium?
It may be true or false, that I don't know, but the blame for it should lie squarely on the people who seek to increase life-ruining instead of the people who seek to decrease it.
> the blame for it should lie squarely on the people who seek to increase life-ruining instead of the people who seek to decrease it.
I don't disagree, but assigning blame won't get us anywhere. In fact I think it actively works against us because:
1. It just further causes divisions. If people feel like they're being blamed, they will get defensive which usually also includes a double down and a shift to amygdala-based reasoning rather than PFC-based reasoning.
2. It shifts the conversation to a debate about "whose fault" or "who is to blame" rather than "is the system ethical, efficiacious, and what can we do about it?" That debate will then take all the energy, and even if it got resolved it's all wasted because simply assigning blame doesn't do anything toward solving the problem.
Then don't punish. Reform, correct, fix. A lot of people will still see that as punishment (like they would see army bootcamp as punishment), but then we would just start disagreeing.
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. It can be difficult to sync on terminology and philosophy though because in theory for most people the justice system is supposed to be about rehabilitation. The idea that you should serve your time and return to society is almost universally agreed saving the most extreme cases. Yet our system doesn't achieve that because a lot of the structures are based on "punishment" and "deterrence." Simply raising awareness and following the trail of logic is usually enough to find a lot of common ground. But it being a systemic problem, there isn't really anything an individual can do (that isn't IMHO counterproductive, see earlier thread about the unintended consequences of well-meaning DAs and LEOs letting people go to avoid the pitfalls of the system). It's a tremendously challening problem.
It's also one many other countries don't have, so we have plenty of examples to benefit from. I'd say a few "easy" patches would be things like: treating people with mental health issues, treating addicts, housing homeless people, clearing most people's records when they've severed their time/making it illegal for most employers to ask about past arrests/convictions, providing better assistance to people post-release and lessening or delaying some of the additional burdens we put on them (fines, fees, inflexible meetings/appointments), etc.
The biggest challenge will be convincing the fearful and the revenge/punishment fetishists that more and harsher punishment isn't the solution and that they aren't being endangered by making the needed changes.
However, what GP I suspect is seeing and what many others have seen as well, is a recognition that the system is broken, and thus a reluctance on a part of authorities to move forward with prosecutions for certain people. The goal of not institutionalizing them and setting them up for a difficult future is noble and laudable, however, I worry that this will ultimately be counterproductive. It is going to cause a swing much like what we are seeing, where people conclude that we are not tough enough on crime and thus we need to get more extreme, more punishing, and more authoritarian, which is the exact wrong way in my opinion.
I would much rather we focus on fixing a monstrously broken and outdated system, rather than trying to work around it. That also makes for much more equality and Justice, because then you don't have to hope that you are one of the lucky ones for whom The system looks the other way.
It doesn't have to be a massive revolution either. We can iterate towards it in a progressive manner, starting by removing absurdities like mandatory minimums, victimless crimes or crimes for whom the victim is some nebulous "society", and other things like that.