i dont have anything against other people being kind to criminals, and actually i support people who want to do this. but i personally dislike people who commit crimes such as rape and murder, i am judging of them, i dislike them on a personal level and want nothing to do with them. there is an element there that they have been screwed by a system that did not care for them or educate them properly, but then again, many people who have the same unkind upbringings manage to grow up fine and work towards something they believe in that contributes to society. and additionally, there are people who become rapists and murderers who have achieved respectable professional standing and family lives and have had no apparent disadvantage in their past at all. i admit sometimes people are driven to commit terrible crimes by traumas in their past that have turned them into aggressive and angry victims, and actually, i live with a person like that! but a lot of the time, criminal perpetrators are just absolute jerks, full stop. and i think it is disrespectful to the real victims in the equation, to indiscriminately perceive criminal perpetrators as victims, it voids the responsibility of the criminal act. "we are all victims here" just doesnt seem fair to the legitimate victims. and i dont think its accurate.
if recidivism rates are anything to go by, punishment by incarceration isnt a very effective way of preventing repeat offense. if anything it probably gives criminals more opportunities to identify themselves as criminal in more ingrained ways and to form connections with other criminals where they could learn more effective ways of committing crimes. im not saying that all people who are incarcerated are like this, or even that there is a better system for dealing with this than incarceration, just that i think punishment as education is totally misguided and ineffective. i understand that victims want retribution but i think that we need the system to be "bigger" than that. no amount of punishment can ever undo the damage that has been caused, or assist the victims to integrate understandings and implications of what has happened to them in meaningful and lasting ways, and for those reasons i think it is almost completely futile to inflict punishment in pursuit of retribution. imprisonment represents an expense to the state and its primary function should be to remove people who represent a threat to society until they can be determined as no longer representing that threat, until they respect the rules of society and play nice by those rules.
not intended to respond to all the arguments presented in the thread. just my 2c.
