Why is Punishment almost always chosen over Rehabilitation?

A life that would take away more people's loved ones.

Social orthopedy, that's the only fucking thing that society really needs.

-Waste tax money to fill prisons.
-Deplete much needed human resources.
-Their "crime" was a mere misdemeanor that's really more about getting people to respect/obey the law than any violent and destructive crime.
-Draconian punishments can spiral to the point when any and every citizen can have fear being brutally killed by their governments, even the ones that are not supposed to.
-Creates a crime and punishment culture that makes the citizens paranoid and disregard much needed information and slowly saps away civil motivation causing society to decline (law enforcement is made to prevent shit like that).

I'd want to watch that person die but I'd know it'd probably be better overall if I forgave them and they were kept in custody but not tortured.

That's the liberal way to view it. Turns out the most productive societies have always been the most well behaved societies.

That spot is something people who studied and trained in criminology have seen time an time again though it's basically fact.

It does work though because the payoff is worth it in the long run and it doesn't cost a fuckton in the long run.

Yeah but how do you make the societies "well behaved" is the problem.

You kill or exile all the people who don't behave.

That leads to a lot of issues though.

>we should act based on revenge and bloodthirst!
>we should let our emotions dictate our system of law
The first step towards starting a discussion is being impartial and impersonal. You failed.

Which are all solvable by more killing.

Yeah but that emotion is what causes people to choose punishment over rehab.

You have a point there but now it's pretty defeatist. Why can't the person be rehabilited to a better person?

For most of history, you didn't really have "prison" for most crimes. Minor crimes would be punished by fines (for the upper class) or corporate punishment like beating/whipping/pillory/etc (for the lower class). Major crimes were punished by death or exile. Long-term imprisonment was a very rare thing (although "exile" could sometimes be tantamount to imprisonment if you were sent to a remote wasteland).

Middle Eastern countries kept doing that and all they get is terrorists and accusations of barbarism for their troubles.

More flies with honey than vinegar.

This sounds like the perspective of a fourteen year old who does not understand people.

>Kill people left and right
>Economy slows down due to lack of people
>People go into poverty due to the stagnation
>Those in poverty turn to crime
>Kill those people
>Economy slows down even more
>More people go into poverty

Repeat until your society is destroyed.

If I were murdered I would like for my loved ones to kill my murderer in return.

corporate punishment

Because people desire "justice" (read: retribution) for losess suffered, and setting someone back on the path to success does not deliver like destroying their lives .

On the other hand rehabilitation is hit and miss at best

No it isn't rehabilitation programs have worked in the past a lot. The reason it was abandoned was because some politicians mistook a study and interpreted it as "rehabilitation doesn't work".

It's more immediate and the effects are more obvious than rehabilitation. Why waste time and resources when you could have the instant gratification of punishing the wrongdoer?

The average criminal has no desire to be rehabilitated. You can't change someone who isn't willing to change themselves.
It also would reduce the barriers to crime. If the penalty is 2 years in prison im not doing it, no matter what. If the penalty is 2 years in rehab I'd give it some more thought, if I could gain much from getting away with it.

If they are a sociopath, yes. If not, there is a good chance with effective rehabilitation strategies.
The key is just screen for sociopaths.

>screen for sociopaths
That ain't easy.

Actually the average criminal does have a desire since most of the times they did their crimes out of mistake or desperation (they're petty thieves more then they are mobsters/serial killers).

Though the minority of criminals that don't want to are still worrisome.

Because those who enforce the law are no better than criminals themselves. Besides, why rehabilitate someone into society when you have already taken their worldly assets by means of civil forfeiture? Might as well deprive them of voting rights so they can't repeal the laws that enriched you.

grow up

Noone sets out to do evil. Crimes are either the product of need, desperation or greed. Few people WANT to be criminals, they just want something and are willing to become criminals in order to get it.

>More flies with honey than vinegar.
The whole point is to lure the flies in to kill them though not to rehabilitate them, don't forget that.

Grow a spine.

1. cost
2. no cohesive practice
3. reliability

Cost is the big one, incarceration is cheaper so you have to look at if the benefits offered by rehabilitation are worth the additional cost. For that you have to see the success rate in rehab for preventing recidivism compared to incarceration. Incarceration is not very good at deterring recidivism, that bar is pretty low, but rehab is held back by a lack of cohesive practice which makes proving whether it's more reliable extremely difficult. Because you could be comparing several different rehab methodologies against a more or less cohesive system of imprisonment. Countries vary in their standards for incarceration but there tends to exist A standard at least under a given authority. The same cannot be said of rehabilitation, it varies depending on the institution and the people running the programs. It just complicates the decision that much more.

So the result is prison remains the default for criminals, until a unified theory of rehabilitation becomes standard and has proven to DRAMATICALLY reduce recidivism, it wont' be more appealing than prison.

Punishment is primal. Rehabilitation is educated.

Anyone can punish another, even a baby. Rehabilitation is proposed only in educated nations because they understand the nature of crime is often due to necessity in life or failures in life or making mistakes or due to health conditions. All of those are fixable.

Even the so called pure psycopaths are fixable if given proper avenue and taught in controlled environment.

And psychopaths.
Even then, there is some practice of just giving some psychiatrist medication to help a bit.

With medication and massive behavioral therapy...I don't think the cost would be worth it. Tbh, I think we would have to agree that they are just genetic duds that may need to be trashed...
Luckily, antisocial personality disorder is pretty rare.

It's actually more cost effective to turn a liability into an asset than it is to waste it away in a prison or pay to have it killed.

>because they understand the nature of crime is often due to necessity in life or failures in life or making mistakes or due to health conditions
I am a firm believer in the potential for rehabilitation but this is just naive. Most criminals choose to be criminals. 99% of the time nothing forces them into it. For every sob story of a guy who had to steal to put food on the table for grandma or whatever there's 1000 thugs who grew up idolizing gang-bangers and couldn't wait to drop out of school to be just like them. Most criminals are uneducated and don't want to be educated. They revel in their ignorance and see nothing wrong with their lifestyle. To rehabilitate such a person you have to fundamentally alter their worldview and instill the values that should have been there when they were a child. You can't control what conditions people are born into, but with enough effort you can drag them into the light of decent society and make them worthy of it.

is rehabilitation honestly even a deterrent? if people thought they wouldn't get punished, and would only have to go to comfy rehab, it seems like they would be MORE likely to commit crimes

The cost of not doing that is rampant crime problem and expensive jail systems with high recidivism. US jail is the most expensive per capita out of all and its a failure to reform.

So put those gang bangers through school. Teach them trade skills.

They will then use that skill to make money and then on have an incentive to keep working.

Except that's demonstratably false. Countries that focus their penal systems around rehabilitation show less recitivism rates than countries that don't.

Why? Because most crimes are crimes of necessity, by people with substance abuse, and by the mentally ill.

Instead of attempting to solve crime as the problem and instead as a symptom of a deeper problem, which it mostly is, you reduce crime.

>youtube.com/watch?v=zBHcut1Ux-4
US is doing some experimental rehabilitation methods.

>youtube.com/watch?v=yiw2NULDjKM
However the Japanese method is more superior. Simply because its not just boot-camp, but also teaching skills and breaks down the person's mental barriers.

>So put those gang bangers through school. Teach them trade skills.
What part of
>they don't want to be educated
Did you not get? They spurn attempts to educate them. Most of them drop out before completing high school, some even earlier. That's how little they value education. They lack the proper values system because they grow in in areas infested with other criminals and that is all they aspire to be. You can say "well just get them out of that environment" but that's a problem social welfare has been trying to fix for over 100 years with pretty much zero success. If you find a solution please contact the United States Department of Health and Human Services and then standby to receive your Nobel Peace Prize.

Before you can educate them you have to get them to value education and see the benefits of living an honest life in decent society. Most of them don't, so they see no reason to stop being a thug.

Wrong video
>youtube.com/watch?v=iBd5WhTi_CI

>be law abiding person
>work hard to undergo training and build a career at great personal expense
>invest countless hours and money into starting a family

>some slacker does none of those things
>finds himself short on cash so he robs a liquor store
>while fleeing from the police his car crashes into yours killing your entire family, leaving you partially crippled and incapable of doing the work you trained yourself to do

>Instead of imprisoning or killing this piece of human waste the "justice" system "rehabilitates" him by giving him the same training you had to go into debt to get, for free
>After completing his "rehabilitation" he takes the job you just got fired from
>as recompense for your loss he gives you a "heartfelt" apology and offers to shake your hand

This is justice to the overly socialized.

American social welfare is woefully incompetent at best and intentionally made worse by some states due to political ideological differences.

Better examples are states like Nordic countries where social welfare is done in correct way as well as rehabilitation system.

Teaching can be done to anyone unless they're blind, deaf, mute, and disabled. There are plenty of methods of breakdown these tough guy personas who claim to be a thug. And we know this because America excels in it or knows someone who excels in it.

From a societal point of view every person is more valuable as a contributing member of society than as a non-productive body that has to be fed, housed, and clothed on tax payer dollars. Rehabilitation makes sense in that the cost of rehabilitating is eventually repaid in what that person produces as a contributing member of society. He can never undo what he did, but he can at least work towards making up for it by contributing to society.

The urge to punish and take vengeance is only to satisfy an emotional response and doesn't provide real tangible benefit to anyone.

Muh feelings man. What about MUH FEELINGS.

>From a societal point of view every person is more valuable as a contributing member of society than as a non-productive body that has to be fed
There is no "societal point of view", if you mean utilitarian then say utilitarian instead of just spewing rubbish.

>itt Americans believe they can opine on penal systems when they have one of the most expensive and least effective in the world while incarcerating the most people in the world.

Lel at least get it right before you decide to talk shit.

I do not disparage the feelings of the victims or the bereaved in the case of murder, I simply disparage using the entire justice system as an instrument of closure or vengeance. Vengeance is best exacted in civil courts where feelings are routinely translated into dollar values. Money can't undo the past either but it sure makes life easier.

More flies with shit than honey

>There is no "societal point of view"
There is if you live in an actual nation and not a remote desert island. The whole concept of prison exists to satisfy a societal need, which is to remove dangerous/unlawful people from the general population. The ideal is that they reflect on what they did while in prison and then during parole hearings they have a chance to show contrition and their reformation, the parole procedure was created to give people who sincerely want to do better a chance to make good on that intention, their sentence is cut short because its only purpose is to keep them out of the general population as long as they are harmful to the function of society.

Rehabilitation is a more active approach to this, rather than just leaving reform up to the criminal it puts them into a program which actively tries to mold them into a productive citizen. Because that's really the ideal goal of prison made into a more realizable form.

Oh common now this is just ignorant. Many of them do out of highschool because they are poor and don't see the point and their education system is shit. They just need to steer in the right direction early on. Hence why juvie even exist in the first place, it is the prime example of the importance of rehabilitation as a focus.

>He can never undo what he did, but he can at least work towards making up for it by contributing to society.
and that out-weighs the fact that it creates a system that incentives criminal behavior while de-incentivizing responsible productive behavior how exactly?\

When you offer free training to criminals, while insisting law abiding citizens pay for it, the law-abiding will inevitably stop ask themselves why they're bothering to follow the law when they stand to gain more, at a lower cost, by breaking it.

>Just make the training free for everyone, law-abiding and criminal alike!
There's no such thing as free. The law-abiding will still pay for it through their taxes, while the criminal evades taxes and continues to have access to the "free" training the law-abiding citizens pay for.

You also get monetary compensation so it's not an total loss dude.

>Better examples are states like Nordic countries where social welfare is done in correct way as well as rehabilitation system
Countries which are homogeneous and have very little crime to begin with do not make very good test cases for correctional systems. America's crime rates have actually gone down significantly over the last 2 decades, but there are many contributing factors to this besides just how prison works. I'd say America, due to having such a high crime rate for a first world nation, is perhaps the most ideal test subject for experimental correctional techniques. It has the largest prison population on the planet after all.

>incentivizes criminal behavior

Citation needed. Because data from countries that focus on rehabilitation actually shows that is false.

Not only do you have less crime, you have less criminals returning to prison and instead becoming law abiding citizens. Whereas countries that focus on punishment show the exact opposite.

The only nation that I know of the successfully institutes a maximum penalty society successfully is Singapore.

>Many of them do out of highschool because they are poor and don't see the point and their education system is shit
Nobody is forcing them to leave school. They choose to do it. Fact remains there is nothing actively coercing most people to become criminals, they simply live in an environment that approves of the lifestyle and they have very little pushback against that view in their lives. But there's no real way to fight that. How do you combat an entire subculture that actively hates the culture you're trying to instill in them? The answer: you have to have control over them and force them to change. In other words by the time you're able to do it they're already so far gone it's unlikely you can help them.

>and that out-weighs the fact that it creates a system that incentives criminal behavior while de-incentivizing responsible productive behavior
I've never heard of any study claiming this. In fact it doesn't even follow logically, because rehab still denies criminals of what they want, which is easy material gain and satisfying destructive impulses. Rehab isn't any better than prison to a hardened criminal, they're still told what to do on a daily basis and are punished for misbehaving. In fact in many ways it's worse for them because they actually have expectations put upon them, where as in prison they're free to just lounge around doing nothing all day and get to hang out with their fellow gang members during exercise time and lunch. In rehab they are given actual tasks, things they have to do, it keeps them busy. Of course, it's voluntary, so if they don't want to do it you can't force them. If they flat out refuse to better themselves then they just rot in prison.

And also, there's so many different rehab programs that I'm not sure you could even find a cohesive study on their supposed effectiveness. That's one of the main drawbacks right now in implementing rehab on a larger scale.

Its gone down because prison rate has increased exponentially.

That doesn't follow because if more people were being arrested that would mean there were more crimes being committed to warrant those arrests. Instead you have less crimes being committed, which means less people being arrested. Our prison population is humongous though, so it does show that prison helps in cutting down crime after a sense, but it's terribly inefficient at it from a cost and general resources point of view. Rehabilitation would solve both prison population problems and the eternal issue of recidivism, but I outlined in my original post why prisons, at least American ones, are reluctant to try rehabilitation.

That's just because the "rehabilitative" systems in question are still relatively young, we'll see how well they continue to function as the tax burden increases over time.

>data from countries that focus on rehabilitation actually shows that is false.
Most of those countries don't have very high crime rates to begin with though. The drop that results from rehab could also just be a rounding error for all the noticeable impact it has. That's why to see some serious testing it needs to be implemented on a wide scale in a country like America. Maybe just in one State. Like Michigan.

>In fact it doesn't even follow logically, because rehab still denies criminals of what they want, which is easy material gain and satisfying destructive impulses.
I'm not talking about increased criminal behavior among career criminals, I'm talking about decreased respect for the law among the law abiding who will be more willing to engage in criminal behavior when they see how little it costs criminals.

Criminals exist as stated earlier due to various circumstances. All of which are fixable. And in very rare cases, not fixable.

Stricker prison system we have in the US simply puts those types of people in prison longer and for more often. Thus it looks as if crime has gone down. And it has, to a degree, but the main change comes from the fact that prisoners are kept more often and there are more prisoners.

But I agree with you, this system "works" but is horribly inefficient. Its not only more expensive on keeping them like this, its also expensive in that they do not contribute anything back to the society. A double negative doesn't, in this case, make a positive.

Unfortunately people are too emotional in this and they simply want punishment and do not consider the benefits of proper reform system. Less tax to be paid, less crimes to be had, more infrastructure for the social needs, safer place, stronger economy, etc.

Except it doesn't. You are still removed from society, you are still incarcerated, and you are still punished for poor behavior.

The only real difference is that the prison will mold you into a useful citizen rather than letting you be molded into a career criminal.

You seem to think that all criminals are the Joker or something when that simply isn't the case and you've still yet to show any evidence for your claim..

>I'm talking about decreased respect for the law among the law abiding who will be more willing to engage in criminal behavior when they see how little it costs criminals.
Prison right now costs you your freedom and definitely whatever job (if any) you had, and makes it much harder to find work or participate in decent society. So let's say there's some guy who is only held in check because prison is worse than his life right now.

How would rehab be an improvement? He still loses his freedom, he still would lose whatever job he currently has and would probably burn bridges with most of the respectable elements of society. Pretty much all the social penalties of prison still apply. The only difference is, instead of just letting you spin your wheels doing nothing, rehab allows you to direct your energies toward some productive end with the goal of reforming you into a productive member of society. You probably won't be able to get a nice job, but you'll at least have A job of some kind to work off your debt to society. And I mean that literally, because the cost of rehabilitating you will be turned into a debt that you have to repay by working.

>Prison makes it harder to work and participate in decent society as a productive member
>rehabilitation makes it easier to participate in society as a productive member
???

>You probably won't be able to get a nice job, but you'll at least have A job of some kind to work off your debt to society. And I mean that literally, because the cost of rehabilitating you will be turned into a debt that you have to repay by working.
So what incentive exactly does that give a criminal to rehabilitate, if you've just given him a debt he will never pay off and a permanent status as second class citizen? Why wouldn't he just go right back to crime?

>You seem to think that all criminals are the Joker or something when that simply isn't the case and you've still yet to show any evidence for your claim..

You sound like a fucking woman.
>Oh he's not bad, he's just misunderstood I can change him!
Sorry I'm not going to support your self-destructive social love affair with reforming bad boys at the expense of law abiding citizens.

Some people simply aren't worth the resources.

If your dog bites a toddlers face off, it's going to get euthanized because its life has no intrinsic value and trying to rehabilitate it is a waste of time. Humans aren't really any different, some people just aren't worth the bother.

>All of which are fixable
And yet crime still exists in every country on Earth regardless of culture or correctional methods. If it were possible to simply "fix" the source of crime there would be no crime. Period. The American government spends hundreds of billions on developing weapons for hypothetical wars, it would not hesitate to drop hundreds of billions to solve crime forever given the huge overhead cost it creates for maintaining the largest most elaborate prison system on Earth.

>Stricker prison system we have in the US simply puts those types of people in prison longer and for more often.
This doesn't follow as I said. If more people were being arrested there would be more crimes to correspond. Instead there are fewer crimes and thus fewer arrests. It doesn't "look as though" crime has gone down, crime HAS gone down. It's measurable, demonstrable fact. It's not just because sentences are longer and paroles are less frequent, new policing methods that started in the 90s had a big impact on it too. New York City in particular had a drastic change in how policing was done from the 80s to the 00s that transformed it from one of the most criminal cities in America to one of the safest big cities in the country.

The current system is inefficient, but its costs are easy to predict and create budgets for. Having a massive prison population is fine as long as its relatively stable and has predictable, controllable growth, which is the case in America. Yes its expensive and necessitates building more infrastructure as years go by, but you know well in advance when this is necessary and can plan for it. What I'm getting at here is that while costly, it's something that is easy to plan around. Rehab right now isn't that easy to plan for, it doesn't have a cohesive system in place and the ultimate costs aren't known and can't be planned years in advance.

That's why more testing is necessary, to build faith in the rehabilitation system.

>???
I'm not sure what you're confused about. Having a person be unable to participate in society after being released from prison is literally the EXACT OPPOSITE of what you want. If they can't get a job, can't participate in society meaningfully, that actually incentivizes them to go back to crime. Because that's the only way they know how to get by. Ideally you want people when they are no longer judged to be dangerous to society, to become productive and contribute to society. Having a correctional system that does the opposite: turning people into career criminals because it ruins their prospects of finding honest work, is detrimental to the goal of the justice system.

Rehab is basically prison that turns people into working citizens by the time they leave it. Because that's what you want. Criminal goes in, tax payer comes out. Government is happy for new source of taxable income, people are happy there's one less criminal.

>So what incentive exactly does that give a criminal to rehabilitate
That's the problem I was talking about earlier. The worst of them don't want to rehabilitate so it's basically a waste to try right now. More experimentation needs to be done on aggressive methods. A lot of criminals that are impossible to rehabilitate right now could be salvageable with different methods probably, but the field is still so nascent we don't know what's really possible with a big budget behind it.

>New York City in particular had a drastic change in how policing was done from the 80s to the 00s that transformed it from one of the most criminal cities in America to one of the safest big cities in the country.

That drastic change wasn't a shift toward rehabilitation though but an increase in authoritarian policies. Authoritarian policies which are now being rolled back and to no great surprise the crime rate is increasing accordingly.

There are no perfect systems as we are imperfect beings, but we can still get to the 99.999% rate with proper prison reforms.

I'm confused by the fact that you're simultaneously saying that prison restricts their options while broadening them.

>Because that's what you want. Criminal goes in, tax payer comes out
Actually what I'd prefer is criminal goes in, nothing comes out other than perhaps whatever resources we're able to extract from them before they expire, but I admit to being unreasonable regarding this issue.

Yet nobody can even get close. Starting from the premise of "crime is easily fixable" is, in my opinion, utterly worthless. Thousands of years of human society prove you wrong. Start from a more practical place, like "turning criminals into working citizens is possible with a general program". That's something you can pitch to people without sounding like a lunatic idealistic with no grounding in reality.

>Nobody
Japan and Nordic country's prison rehabilitation system are much closer than US is by miles. They're not close to the perfection zone yet, as they're still human and they're operating within the range of limits. Each of those systems can be vastly improved as well.

Their systems are much better than ours, so equating our system with their system are false. Just because none of the countries on earth have a near perfect system doesn't mean they're all equal. Some are much better than others and some worse. This is the fact. There's still room for improvement. Just because they're not all near perfect its hopeless to ever change to a better system.

>I'm confused by the fact that you're simultaneously saying that prison restricts their options while broadening them.
It doesn't really broaden them. For rehabilitation to work you need to have work available for them, so that would likely mean getting companies that are willing to hire reformed criminals to cooperate with rehabilitation programs. It's hardly giving them freedom or opportunities, it's more just putting them on a track to work at this particular job and become productive rather than just rotting in a cell.

>Japan and Nordic country's prison rehabilitation system are much closer than US is by miles
And what do those have that the US doesn't? Racially homogeneous populations and cultures that respect the law. Japan's culture in particular produces extremely law abiding people. You can literally leave your wallet on an outdoor cafe table in Tokyo and come back 3 hours later and it will still be there. Of course crime exists in Japan, and a part of their low crime rates is due to a lack of proper police reporting, but even accounting for that they are far and away one of the most law-abiding countries in the world, and they have been for a long time.

If you look at the US we have very high racial tension here. 12% of our population is a historically persecuted minority ethnicity. This group tends to be seen as criminals by the dominant group regardless of their actual behavior, and the minority group utterly despises the culture and order of the dominant group due to generations of mistreatment. The result is the dominant group is constantly policing the minority group due to perceived latent criminality, which only worsens their mistrust of the dominant group and causes them to reject the dominant group's culture and rules that much more fiercely, which causes more policing... and so on. You cannot just "fix" that with a rehab program.

Because Fefes

...

>most countries with the least crime have rehabilitative systems
>most of the crime-ridden ones adopted a "tough on crime" approach

Sure correlation doesn't mean causation but is there really a country where crime increased when a rehabilitative service was implemented?

You basically spelled out "I lost the argument. I have nothing left to say"

>He thinks he sounds smart with his laughably stupid argument

>Rehabilitation is harder and doesn't work
Tell that to scandinavia.

>I'm confused by the fact that you're simultaneously saying that prison restricts their options while broadening them.
He was probably saying that retributive justice restricts them while rehabilitation broadens them.

What argument?
The purely emotional driven belief that criminals are just like everyone else and aren't prone to short term thinking, low empathy, low intelligence and violence?

"Rehabilitation" is female thinking full stop. There's no reason these people should be handheld through life while actually product citizens are forced to take up the slack.

>The purely emotional driven belief that criminals are still humans
Ok.
>is female thinking full stop
Oh there we go, you're one of those