this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
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I think the right to vote is also taken away in a lot of cases, right? But the part about rights wasn't the main point I was trying to discuss.
I feel like reflection, reconciliation, rehabilitation, all those are processes that need to be facilitated to be effective, and at least from the outside, it doesn't seem like that's really happening in prisons. I'm not sure how prison can act as rehabilitation for murder in and of itself. I mean, in general, we know murder is bad, but there's a lot that can be behind an individuals decision to kill someone and I'm not sure how being in jail by itself deals with that. I'm sure we've all heard the examples of say, someone killing the person who they found out was abusing their child, and generally people seem more sympathetic there, but in the end, it is murder. And yes, this is a fringe situation but for the sake of fleshing out ideas, does this person deserve to be put in jail and into forced labor? I feel like most people would say no, which means that even in the case of murder, there's still some level of nuance as to what level of punishment is accepted by society.
The right to vote is usually taken away but like firearms, it depends.
The hypothetical circumstance you explained doesn't play out like you typically think, they don't always go to prison
Great! Which goes to show, murder is not always something society always wants to punish, so you can, in some cases, kill someone and walk free.
But that aside, we still have the question of should government money, people's tax dollars, go to housing and feeding criminals "for-free"? Again, if the idea is that money is paying for the service of rehabilitation, then yeah, the cost from taxes make sense since it will reintroduce productive people back into society, and we should totally pay. If we can introduce labor that can somehow work towards rehabilitation/education while off-setting costs, great! But from what I'm hearing, especially with the recent stuff in Colorado about inmate labor, that's not what's happening.