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Originally Posted by willravel
How terribly original, but no. Mental illness that has virtually no hope of any kind of healing is very rare, and most of the people in our prisons have no mental illness to even speak of the begin with. As has been stated, things like drug related offenses are quite common, and theft which can directly be linked back to poverty is also quite common. Each of those two things has a very simple solution.
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Poverty is not a cause of crime, the great depression showed that. A for drug related crimes, I assume you think that making drugs legal would make drug related criminals into upstanding citizens? Perhaps for the users, but the dealers and gang bangers would have to find another source of easy money. Finally some individuals are simply violent. The prison system is full of them. They tend to stay violent until they get not older and wiser, but just old. When the hormones turn off and the slowness of age catches up.
Added I have no problem with a vengeful punitive system, though I'd be all for a little public corporal punishment and humiliation compared to jail time for the non-violent, non-habitual offenders.