Quote:
Originally Posted by skizziks
i can only assume that the threat of direct bodily harm in response to bodily harm would deter a whole lot more criminals.
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This conclusion confuses me because it seems you're using an example of someone who was not deterred as evidence of a system that would produce deterrence...
In other words, you are saying that a guy telling you he was more concerned with being tortured by some people led him to be concerned about being in their custody and that his lack of concern with being in someone else's custody led him to think being held by US officials would be less dangerous to his personal health.
But neither of those considerations seems to have had any effect on his killing other people before you talked to him.
So you're taking the discussions these people had about their considerations of their personal safety and thinking it should deter them from doing something that would jeopardize their safety...but it didn't in actuality based off what they told you (i.e., they still did the act).
Interestingly, this is what the empirical data support (despite some claims in this thread that deterrence works and rehabilitation does not).
In criminology we have two types of deterrence:
general and specific
specific deterrence is the idea that when we blind this guy he will be so affected that he'll never blind someone else
general deterrence is the idea that when we blind this guy,
other people will be so affected they will never blind someone
when these theories are tested (and a ton of work has been done in the area of death penalties, and more importantly to some people's thoughts in this thread--publicized death penalties) we find that shortly before the punishment is enacted crime drops. After the punishment is enacted, crime drops even further. This is the point where severe, public punishment advocates can cheer for being right...such punishments
do in fact reduce crime so long as the saliency of the punishment is operating on the potential offenders.
The problem is that shortly afterwards, usually around a few weeks to a month, the crime rate not only approaches its previous rate but it actually rises higher and stays that way for a bit before dropping down to a rate similar to the one before the punishment.
Of course, specific deterrence for capital crimes has a high rate of success...the offender is not allowed to reoffend. The irony is that if left alone, completely alone, nearly all murderers never murder again or commit even lower crimes, for that matter. Statistically, murders occur in fits of rage or emotionality. Rapists and robbers do have a higher rate of recidivism, but we don't execute or maim for those crimes anyway. As we go down the list of seriousness of offenses, the amount of specific deterrence necessary to effect a change in behavior becomes exceedingly improbable to implement (i.e., chopping hands off thieves).
So in actuality, deterrence theory has very little traction among professionals as a solution to violent crime in the US. We actually have some of the most stringent punishment policies in the developed world and we also have THE (not one of) highest rates of violent crime and incarceration. Those two facts have to be addressed in any viable crime theory and if you pick up any book that seriously engages these issues it will lead off with what criminologists refer to as the true American "exceptionalism." There was a time where we were just barely trailing Russia in it's incarceration rate, but I believe we've surpassed them as the last data came from around 10 years ago and a lot has changed in Russia within the past decade.
So we turn to the claim that rehabilitation has failed in the US.
The data actually support the opposite conclusion, but at the same time are careful to point out that long-term rehabilitation has never been tried in the US justice system. The reasons for this usually boil down to lack of social and funding support. So what generally happens is that a bill is passed called something like, "The Prisoner Rehabilitation Bill" and everyone wonders about it...some support and others think it's a poor idea. But it goes into effect and maybe some of it will include things like job education, cognitive restructuring, and programming while in prison. But after some budget cuts and in some cases public outcry from both groups concerned about prisoners getting education and employment benefits that citizens don't have access to, and groups concerned over prisoners' labor being abused for 10 cents per day operating commercial call centers...
...what you get is a program that is usually eviscerated that leaves prisoners wandering around the prison working 40 hour work weeks for little to no pay and learning no trade skill since the work one can do around a prison consists of wiping floors and tables and cooking cafeteria food. The same kinds of jobs they can get if they didn't have a criminal record, which don't do much to keep them from using drugs and stealing/robbing/dealing for their habits (which comprise the vast majority of our prison population).
Then you get a bunch of people who haven't been rehabilitated in any sense of the word back out from prison and a population that believes the prisoners were in an environment trying as hard as it could to rehabilitate them yet failed.