California has fixed one bad thing about this program, which is that after release the prisoners weren't eligible for employment as firefighters because of their criminal record. That's no longer true: volunteering for this program now lets you earn credits towards early release, and participate in a program that would qualify you to join local, state, and Federal wildland firefighting crews.
Readers know that I think our approach to crimefighting via prison is a proven failure that should be replaced top-to-bottom in a way that eliminates prison. (Readers who have forgotten the details may wonder how; I think we should replace it with a combination of fines, labor like show-up-and-clean-the-roads crews, corporal punishments, and a much larger use of capital punishment for cases where locking people up for decades or longer currently seems rational to juries.) Prison's promise of rehabilitation has empirically failed in most cases, and it causes us to employ a scandalous number of our citizens as prison guards. A free society shouldn't detail a lot of its citizenry to keeping even more of its citizenry unfree.
Nevertheless, here at least is an attempt to do something that helps the people in jail as well as the community at large. There's at least a chance that it might work sometimes.
7 comments:
It is a problem that has eluded solution, so the idea that it might work sometimes is not faint praise in my book. It might WORK for some people and communites, not just sound like it should work, or seem compassionate (or even "seem tough on crime").
All your suggestions, with all their very real shortcomings, are better than what we are currently doing. I never worked the prisons, but I worked forensic units in psych and had a lot of people sent to my caseload with extensive records.
Now that they have different populations, even Western European nations are having difficulty containing violent crime. They hide it, but it's there.
I have a tough time imagining a society that's prison-less. While I think there are many reforms that could work, one problem is that often the 'reformers' are working toward 'reforms' that obviously will not work, and we seem to have difficulty as a society in working out what will and won't, despite obvious failures. I'm not sure a slightly improved version of what we have isn't the "least worst" option, much as with capitalism, as the old saying goes.
Spoken like a true conservative, Douglas. My own views have become rather radical, I fear; but the impulse is one I remember from when I was younger and more hopeful.
I tend to think Grim has the right idea about this. Prisons not only fail to reform, they often contribute to giving criminals a more extensive range of criminal contacts and also help them develop their skills as a criminal. Prisons are positively harmful for society.
A good start would be to take prison off the menu for low level crimes, shifting them to paying damages and punitive fines, work details, and corporal punishment.
Something that would help keep people out of the criminal justice system, I think, would be shifting to vocational training for the last two years of high school for those with no academic inclinations. I believe some European nations do something like this where around 10th grade students decide to either go onto an academic track or a vocational track.
I would like to see how those two reforms played out for a few years before going further, but no doubt more would have to be done.
I should also add that I think private citizens should be allowed to protect their own property, with force if necessary. This alone should have some deterrent effect, I think.
Well, for me it's not abstract, this idea that not putting people in jail working. I live in California, remember, where we've been not putting people in jail, and even letting lots of them out and the effects? More crime, more lawlessness, more chaos. So when I say I have a hard time seeing how such an idea works, it's coming from practical knowledge, not theory. Now, I understand that California is also probably doing this in the worst possible way, but it's still a valid data point, I think. I do agree that more vocational training would be a good thing.
It’s a slightly different idea, “We should replace prison with other punishments including killing every violent criminal who genuinely might be harmful for decades to come,” versus “We should replace prison and even jail with nothing at all.”
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