Quote:
Originally posted by Kadath
I don't find that hard to believe at all. What would work, though? Are criminologists just throwing up their hands?
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We aren't throwing our hands up; we have some good evidence of what does work, people just aren't ready to hear it yet!
For example, we examine how other countries have systems in which convictions eventually drop off people's records which allows them to not be stigmatized by society after their sentence has been served--better job opportunities, less stress, less recidivism.
We look at who the recidivists are--unfortunately, they aren't people who commit murder. Only 6-10% of the prison population account for what we view as heinous, cronic repeat offenders. But that certainly isn't the image of who you suspect fill the prisons. If we concentrated on incarceration for those criminals and placed the other 90% on regulated house arrest and close supervision that would fundamentally alter our prison composition.
Finally, I specialize in reshaping political and public legal discourse. For example, the most heinous crime on the streets accounts for a fraction of the cost of crime overall.
When a man gets on the subway and shoots three people it's a massacre in the media. When a businessman cuts costs and safety procedures and 100 mine workers die in a collapse that was expected to occur eventaully we conceive of it as an accident.
Part of that comes from our cultural expectations that every person is responsible for his or her actions and life--but that shouldn't absolve corporate executives to risk the lives of the people who work for them.
We know that people who work, have ties to their communities, and generally "something to lose" from committing crime are much less prone to committing illegal acts--certainly violent acts. Prison, however, and especially long prison terms, does not facilitate those types of community bonds. It is structured to fracture those bonds, punish the individual, and stigmatize the individual.
Now you might have a legitimate moral feeling that criminals deserve all that--I'm not making a moral argument. Since non-offenders are, by definition, the victim of crime and must also pay the costs of crime it behooves society to find economic and structurally feasable means to deal with crime.