Prison Break

By Roderick Long On June 8, 2011 · 34 Comments · In Academic Philosophy, Left-libertarianism, Rights Theory

Fernando suggests (below) that rather than complaining that “the incarceration rate in America is too high,” we should complain instead that “America punishes innocent persons” (e.g. drug users).

Certainly the incarceration of people who have violated no rights is an important part of America’s prison problem. But I don’t think that covers all of it. There are also moral problems, I think, with the incarceration of rights-violators — which means that high incarceration rates are going to be something worth complaining about even when the prisoners are guilty as hell.

First, there are many prison inmates who, while they may have violated somebody’s rights, don’t pose any serious threat of violence to anybody. Seizing them and holding them in cages seems morally disproportionate (to say nothing of the expense). Why not focus on having them pay restitution to their victims?

Second, while there are rights-violators who do pose severe threats to other people, and there might accordingly be a case for incarcerating such people in prisons of some sort, the kinds of prisons that actually exist in present-day society are such nightmarish hellholes that incarceration in that context seems seriously inhumane.

And when we turn our attention from the ill treatment that such prisoners receive to the ill treatment they inflict, it makes little sense to trumpet incarceration as a way of stopping violent criminals from committing assault, rape, and murder, when they are allowed to go on committing assault, rape, and murder against fellow inmates once inside. (Being convicted of a crime does not mean one has forfeited one’s right not to be assaulted, raped, or murdered.)

Now my own view is that punishment per se (i.e., intentionally making criminals suffer — as opposed to doing things that as a matter of fact may displease them, such as forcing them to compensate previous victims or restraining them from attacking new ones) is unjustified, whether for retributive or deterrent purposes. For me this is a plausible corollary of the non-aggression principle: if the use of force is justified only in response to aggression, then any use of force that goes beyond preventing or undoing the aggression must be too much. (See my arguments here and here.)

But I don’t take the points I’ve just been making here to depend on my anti-punishment stand. One can believe in punishment without believing in excessive and inhumane punishment. Locking people in cages, even absent further abuse, seems excessive and inhumane when the crime in question is nonviolent; and incarceration in prisons as they are — rape rooms and torture chambers — seems excessive and inhumane for any case. Hence I think prison reform is a moral precondition for the legitimacy of incarceration of even violent offenders. (As for the best way to achieve prison reform, that’s a subject for another post. But top-down micromanagement is not going to be the answer.)

For those who doubt that incarceration counts as inhumane, ask yourself: if you had a choice between being waterboarded once and being imprisoned for several years, which would you pick?

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Anonymous

Just a few questions if I may:
1. “Rape rooms and torure chambers,” really? Do they have these at the various Club Feds around this country? At medium security prisons? What is your evidence that this is an endemic problem, as you suggest?
2. What level of civility/non-violence would have to exist in prisons before it is no longer immoral to incarcerate criminals in them?
3. What constitutes a “nonviolent” crime? Is arson non-violent? What about other crimes against property? Is it necessarily a more serious crime from the moral perspective to mug someone (with an unloaded gun?) for $50 than defraud that person out of his/her life savings?
4. You propose that we “focus on having them [criminals] pay restitution to their victims.” Don’t people generally become criminals because they don’t want to hold down a dull, steady job, and simply prefer criminal activity? Do you mean “force them” rather than “focus on”?

Anonymous

To #3: Violence here means to people. So arson is hardly ever non-violent, though certain instances could be argued to be (it generally involves at least reckless endangerment). Crimes against property, generally yes those are non-violent. It is not necessarily more serious to mug someone than to defraud them – Roderick’s distinction is not based on severity at all, but on reversibility. The most significant results of violent crimes against people cannot be undone, whereas the same is not true with property. Therefore the former justifies incarceration – prior restraint, if you will – while the latter does not.

To #4: It seems to me that not too many people support themselves entirely via crime, or at least not entirely via crimes that would remain crimes in a libertarian society. But the argument cuts harder against incarceration than freedom anyway: in prison, not working is a very viable option. It’s a lot more complicated on the outside. If someone wants to avoid work to avoid paying restitution, the simplest thing would be to let them. And we might find the vast majority of restitution eventually paid anyway. But I do think that forcing them to work and pay is morally defensible, if hazardous.

Anonymous

Well, since its his post, I was hoping for answers from Prof. Long. With all due respect, I don’t think you answers do him any favors. He makes the violent/non-violent distinction and indicates that particularly the latter sort of crime is not deserving of harsh punishment. You attempt to support his distinction by suggesting that non-violent (i.e. property) crimes are less serious because in theory they are “reversible.” But, in specific cases this is not even true in theory–with respect to unique items and those with sentimental value, and as a practical matter it is often false. The honest labor of Bernie Madoff and other con men is quite trivial compared to the billions and millions they swindle people out of. How is this loss reversible? Or some illiterate half-wit burns down my property for laughs–how do I reverse this?

Moreover, I think Prof. Long is a libertarian, and the whole point of Nozick’s “taxation is on a par with forced labor” argument, is that to destroy a person’s property is to steal the labor hours required to earn the funds to purchase that property. So, on libertarian grounds, the destruction of property is very serious.

With respect to restitution, you agree that force would be justified. But if inmates have stringent rights against aggression, per Prof. Long, why do they not also have stringent rights against coercion? Moreover, if force is to be applied it will be far more effective in a contolled setting, i.e. prison, than in society at large, where the criminal will likely re-offend. Finally, I think the whole idea is rather silly. Criminals weren’t willing to do honest work when they got to keep ALL the proceeds–how hard will they work for someone else’s benefit?

Thanks for trying, though.

Anonymous

I am making no assertion that non-violent crimes are less serious, less severe, less damaging, or any other such language. Nor am I asserting that they are always or completely reversible. And I am with you on the Nozick assertion, 100%. Nevertheless, a large and objective distance separates violent and non-violent crimes.

Though certain non-violent crimes can sometimes be difficult or impossible to reverse, *all* violent crimes are *always* impossible to reverse. It may cost me nothing at all to heal from an assault, but the economic cost of healing has little to do with the enormity of assault as a crime. Murder can go either direction based on the existence of dependents, but the irreversible loss of life itself is almost always the worst result. Just like in civil disagreements, this possibility of irreparable harm is what justifies prior restraint.

I want to respond to your question, “what if some illiterate half-wit burns down my property for laughs – how do I reverse this?” But I don’t want to discuss arson or half-wits. Arson because it is a crime which combines economic destruction with reckless endangerment, when a precise discussion calls for separate ideas relating to each of those forms of damage. And half-wits because it implies something about the likelihood of re-offense.

But the generic question is simply about the destruction of high-value property by a party who can never replace the value. And the answer to your question is: file an insurance claim. You cannot expect society to pay $40k/yr to keep someone behind bars, whose only crime is reparable economic damage. Are they going to cause over $2 million in damage in their lifetime? That’s what it would take just to break even. No – as far as purely economic damage is concerned, your best defense is a good insurance policy. And seeing as you need insurance against non-criminal events anyway, it’s hardly even much trouble to take. In an efficient insurance market the costs of replacing value lost due to property crimes will be just a bit higher than the total value replaced, and will be allocated across all property-owners based on the amount of property to be protected and the likelihood of property crime in their area.

Anonymous

Thanks for the detailed response. Please bear in mind that my questions were directed to Prof. Long within the context of his post. Thus, I don’t want to get too far into the weeds on your interpretation of his views. He made the violent/non-violent distinction in terms of the types of crimes that do/do not merit incarceration. You seem to agree that some non-violent crimes are more morally offensive than some violent ones. Therefore, as a CATEGORICAL claim, you are conceding that he is wrong. If he wanted to make the distinction that you are pointing to, perhaps he should have said that only “non-reverisble” crimes desrve imprisonment, or simply said that only certain crimes, examined on an individual basis, should merit incarceration. But this is not what he said.

I disagree that ALL violent crimes are impossible to “reverse,” at least if this term is understood in any sort of commonsense way. If I’m minding my own business in a bar, and a fight breaks out, and some numbskull uses the opportunity to punch me, I don’t think I’m going to be emotionally scared for life. I’ve been punched before, and got over it. I may even remember the incident with glee if I collect a million dollar litigation verdict from the nimrod who hit me. On the other hand, the loss of my life savings in a non-violent crime will certainly have a devastating irreversible effect. So, I don’t really know where you are going with this.

The insurance argument really doesn’t work. Yes, the first time someone vandalizes my property, I get insurance proceeds. The second time, I must pay way more for the insurance, and the third time I can’t get insurance. But beyond this, your comment acknowledges the great damage done to society by those who commit property crimes–higher costs–which is an argument for the justice of incarceration for such crimes, at least relative to the bar-punch incident.

http://pulse.yahoo.com/_QFHG5YDV35I5W6SPNO3F5KD67Y Christopher

For #2, the answer could be even if there is a zero rate of abuse in prisons, then it is still immoral to incarcerate.

We have to ask ourselves why do we punish criminals in the first place? Is it to deter crime? Or do we do it because punishment itself is a moral obligation in response to crime? If the answer is it is a deterrence, then as our understanding of human behavior increases, we may increasingly find better deterrents. And if we do, then should we not use those, and no longer use punishment?

I think the main purposes of a justice system are 1. deterrence, 2. eliminate recidivism, and 3. restitution to victims and to society. Some may think 4. punishment is another one, others think punishment is only a means to the end.

However I agree that compensating victims cannot be the basis of a justice system. For one example: this would never work for the murder of children, since parents are very often the murderers. It wouldn’t work for rape of children for the same reason. That alone is a glaring hole in compensation based systems which are how tribal justice systems work. Those tribal justice systems have proven they do NOT work to protect the weak, they in fact reinforce the idea that rich kids can get away with murder (literally).

So it has to be more than just paying back. But that doesn’t mean, in order to deter crime and stop criminals from repeating crime, we necessarily have to punish.

Anonymous

The interesting part of Prof. Long’s post is that he claims his argument works independently of our theory of punishment. If you simply assume w/o argument that retributivist arguments are wrong, then there is no point in even answering my second question. But if you proceed as Prof. Long does, then I do need an anwser, and your answer is, I think, unconvincing. Many law-abiding persosns live in nasty, crime infested areas. I don’t believe that Prof. Long wishes to employ the coercive power of the state to pay to move them to good neighborhoods. So, I don’t think prisons need to resemble Beverly Hills before we can justly incarcerate criminals.
Jared Appleton

I would disagree with your first two points of the main purpose of a justice system and though the other reasons may have problems I would rather live with those problems than with the social engineering that would be part of a primarily deterrence based system.Even with with the so-called barbaric eye for an eye standard, you at least know what you are getting if it is applied consistently.

As for whether compensation can be a basis for a system, maybe it cannot be effective 100 percent of the time, but then deterrence may not be workable all the time either. I would disagree that it is a glaring hole, also I think child rape could possibly be compensated though I don’t think it would be a good idea. As for whether it works, well I think works is a pretty subjective term anyways. Maybe it comes down to what society you would prefer and would tradeoffs you would be willing to take. I would, by the way listen to Roderick’s lecture on crime and punishment in his series of lectures on the Mises website as he does discuss the issue of the rich getting away with murder. Why not for example make compensation proportionate to how much the offender has. That’s not to say that I agree completely with compensation, I don’t it would be appropriate necessarily for murderers, rapists, and some other things.

As for the whole tribal mention, I see that as almost a way to discredit something. The irony here is that as Aaron noted regarding prison conditions,

“The cynic in me would put quite a bit of money on a wager that the public (taken as a whole) tends to think otherwise. Letting criminals prey on one another means that they do our dirty work for us. People who frighten us suffer, and we still have clean hands.”

It’s hard to see how that’s less barbaric, it is just as not as much in the open.

Jared Appleton

1. 1. “Rape rooms and torure chambers,” really? Do they have these at the various Club Feds around this country? At medium security prisons? What is your evidence that this is an endemic problem, as you suggest?

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/mar/24/prison-rape-and-government/?pagination=false

What I find interesting about the whole “Country club prisons/club fed” types are how many of those people will turn around and relish in scaring young delinquents about all these horror of prison life.

http://www.aetv.com/beyond-scared-straight/

Anonymous

Great post, but I think the final sentence was quite weak. I’d get waterboarded once for maybe $1,000. I think you’ve set up a very lopsided comparison that won’t demonstrate what you are hoping it will. To me the cruelest part of incarceration is the separation from family and friends. And to that extent it punishes the family and friends just as harshly as the convict. How can we conscience separating a 7-year-old daughter from her father for the remainder of her childhood, when the incarceration was hardly necessary to avoid re-offense for, say, embezzlement? The “don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time” argument isn’t sufficient here – we aren’t talking about the convict and his decisions. We’re talking about us and our own decisions. You can make the that argument about any punishment, but it still won’t absolve you for executing a litterbug.
Demented Duchess

Most places have non-violent drug offenders clogging up their prisons.

I think a lot of places are using forced incarceration for drug offenders (usually addicts) as a form of rehab. I know, personally, of one case. The guy was in prison twice for drug offenses…..1st 7 yr stint (possession, stealing peoples checks), he came out, was clean approximately 8 months and back in prison in little over a year for his 2nd stint, also 7 years (same type charges). He is currently out and in his 2nd year of sobriety but is finding it hard to get a job because of his criminal record and the stress is mounting. Will he maintain sobriety or will he be incarcerated again for forced rehab? And how many time are we going to all pay for his rehabilitation (including drug counseling, food, cloths, shelter, TV, weight room, college courses, computer lab, etc..)? I guess I am a little jaded. I am finding it hard to make sure my kids will have higher education but paying for these guys to have college degrees that they can’t use because of where they got them.

I personally believe that these offenses should not be forced incarceration offenses and we should all (if you can with what you can) start supporting private institutions and charities that help drug addicts and keep taxes out of it. Prohibition does not work……it gives rise to criminal organizations and violent crimes. A lot of police officers feel the same, especially ones who have lost comrades to this system. We have over reacted as a nation and made the problems worse…again. We are breeding better criminals.

As far as your question…..I might actually consider choosing prison….I could further my education, work out and get a break from the kids for a bit….LOL! (j/k)
Fernando Teson

I agree with the sentiments of the post, Roderick. But the conceptual puzzle remains. Many persons are unjustly incarcerated. This includes persons who have not violated rights and persons who have violated rights, as you say. All these persons are over-punished, for the reasons you give. But then, the state commits an injustice to EACH of these persons. If the morally right thing to do with someone who has violated rights but is not dangerous is to force him to pay compensation instead of locking him up in a cage, then locking him up in a cage violates his rights. If this is a correct reading of your position, then the incarceration RATE has nothing to do with it. The state could say: “Ok, I will just randomly free half of the prison population to cut the rate in half.” The rate would now be 50% lower (and thus make it comparable to other democracies’ rates, say) but the treatment of those remaining in prison would still be unjust. I guess one could say that the high rate of incarceration means that the state commits too many injustices. We would prefer a lesser rate, that is, less injustices.
Anonymous

Why not focus on having them pay restitution to their victims?

How would you set up a system that reliably allows people to earn money to pay? It seems that employers, driven by the public at large, don’t like having convicted felons on the premises. I suppose that a system of indentured servitude could be put in place, but I wouldn’t bet on us being enlightened enough to make that any less inhumane than the current system.

(Being convicted of a crime does not mean one has forfeited one’s right not to be assaulted, raped, or murdered.)

The cynic in me would put quite a bit of money on a wager that the public (taken as a whole) tends to think otherwise. Letting criminals prey on one another means that they do our dirty work for us. People who frighten us suffer, and we still have clean hands.

Now my own view is that punishment per se (i.e., intentionally making criminals suffer — as opposed to doing things that as a matter of fact may displease them, such as forcing them to compensate previous victims or restraining them from attacking new ones) is unjustified, whether for retributive or deterrent purposes.

I’m reminded of the man who shot his postman in order to be sent to the federal pen for life, having come to the conclusion that he was better off behind bars than facing the shambles his life had become. It might be worth pointing out that while many commentators thought the logic was pretty heinous, they understood the overall reasoning. And there have been other documented cases of people committing crimes with being sent to prison as the goal. While most of these were ex-convicts who simply couldn’t manage to re-adjust, not all of them were. I think that some people take away from this that prison isn’t harsh enough.

For many people, being a convicted criminal should be worse (perhaps much worse) than being law-abiding, but down-and-out. And since it seems that most of us are unwilling to help the down and out, it’s easier to just make convicts’ lives (those who frighten us, anyway) more miserable.

JW Ogden

Why not focus on having them pay restitution to their victims?

How would you set up a system that reliably allows people to earn money to pay? It seems that employers, driven by the public at large, don’t like having convicted felons on the premises. I suppose that a system of indentured servitude could be put in place, but I wouldn’t bet on us being enlightened enough to make that any less inhumane than the current system.
We have real cases where it is done and seems to work. It is of course true that there are some hard cases who must be punished through prison or some other means because they refuse to pay the restoration but as long as it works for a some number of people it is worthwhile.

Anonymous

Oh, I’m sure you could make it work for “some number of people.” My question is: How do you make it work for everyone who wants to participate? There were a million and a half or so people in prison in 2009. If 1/3rd of them wanted to participate, where would you find jobs for them, given that some 15 million other people were already out of work, and there were only about 4 million or so job openings in that timeframe? You’d have to give them jobs that no sane person would want, and I still think that you’d have problems with people complaining the work (and the pay it generates) should go to law-abiding citizens (as people already do now).

So while I think that a focus on restitution is a great idea, I think the economics of it are more difficult than we might give them credit for.

Anonymous

1. There is no solution that will work in every case. The best we can hope for is a solution that will work in most cases, and a system that is flexible enough to adjust that solution for unusual cases.

2. It’s pretty clear that the economics of our current incarceration rate suck. Surely there must be some alternative that, while surely imperfect, would suck less.

3. Suppose we put collecting restitution in the hands of the IRS. Say a criminal who owes restitution pays a tax of whatever the standard rate is on his income plus 5%, or plus 20%, or maybe the plus-amount varies with amount owed, expected earnings capacity, expected lifespan of criminal and victim, etc. (It needs to be high enough to generate real restitution but not so high that it drives repayors to work “under the table.”) Thus when the repayor is earning more he pays more, and when he’s earning less he pays less, and when he’s unemployed he isn’t re-imprisoned for nonpayment.

Anonymous

Being a convicted non-violent criminal wouldn’t have nearly the stigma it does today, if sentences never included prison time. It would be more a case of “you cheated, and now you’re paying the price.”

Anonymous

You put your finger on an important issue.

Imposing stigma is part of the point of the criminal justice system. Shame is a deterrent. But that same stigma makes it harder for the convicted to have a successful non-criminal life, and thus avoid the temptation to re-offend. Two sides of the same coin.

Opinions will vary re: whether, on balance, imposing stigma is good or bad.

Anonymous

True – but I think I see at least two kinds of stigma that can be separated. The first is the stigma of the crime itself: you tried to steal money from your employer. I don’t think you have to play up stigma beyond whatever naturally attaches to that knowledge. There is some, but it isn’t devastating to a new career outside of finance.

The second kind, which plays up the total amount of stigma significantly, comes from being handled by today’s criminal justice/punishment system. A perp walk in handcuffs, for example, is absurd for embezzlement as well as unjust for someone who is merely accused, which is when it happens. (A good recent article on that topic: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/05/hey-france-you-are-right-about-the-perp-walk/239158/ ) But that pales in comparison to the stigma that attaches to having spent time in prison. It says, “You have been utterly outcast from society. You have spent years living within a population of 100% convicts, some of them Really Bad Dudes. What did you learn? What did you come to accept as normal? How can I ever trust you with anything, ever again? I am scared to even talk to you. I don’t want you to know my home address.”

Anonymous

Good point.
Anonymous

I’m not sure that it is the state of being in prison that generates the stigma. I think it’s the idea that one has done something serious enough to be imprisoned for that does it, especially when you consider that certain people (O. J. Simpson comes to mind) were intensely stigmatized long before they set foot in the Big House.

But more to the point, I suspect that the stigma of prison will simply transfer to whatever the new program is. It’s just like any other euphemism. There is a campaign to eliminate the use of the word “Retarded” as if somehow eliminating the word will eliminate the stigma. But retarded was adopted in the first place because the previous term (which I believe was “moron”) had acquired a stigma.

So I suspect that dialing back prison terms will reduce the stigma in the short term, as people will need time to catch up to the idea that you can’t judge the relative seriousness of what someone was convicted of by how long they spent in the slammer. But they’ll get around to it, and then the restitution program will take on the same stigma, and you’re beck where you started.

What’s needed is an understanding that criminality is about choices, and that the fact that I may have made a bad choice yesterday doesn’t mean that I can’t make a better choice tomorrow. Still, when times are hard, and people are actively seeking someone to throw under the nearest mass transit vehicle, the desire to create an “other” than can be legitimately screwed over for whatever resources they might have will re-assert itself.

Anonymous

We could learn something by observing what other countries are doing. (Yogi Berra: “You can observe a lot, just by watching.”) Even other countries where drugs are illegal incarcerate a much smaller % of their populations than we do, so we definitely have an incarceration anomaly separate from drug prohibition.

How is a lower incarceration rate working out for other countries? Do they impose more restitution than we do, or less? Do they collect a higher or lower % of the restitution they impose? By what mechanisms? How does their recidivism rate compare to ours? Etc.The costs of our current incarceration rate are indisputably high–to the taxpayer, to the convicted criminal, to his family. Without knowing what alternatives are being tried, and how they’re working out, I don’t think we can even form a reasonable opinion on whether the benefits of our system are worth the costs. (But I suspect they’re not.)

All those questions may have different answers for drug and non-drug crimes. I favor ending drug prohibition, but as noted above that would not end the USA’s anomalously high incarceration rate.
Hyena

The issue with payment of compensation is that criminals are largely taken from the ranks of the poor and can’t. In this case, “punishment” is akin to road congestion: you pay with your time what can’t be payed with your wallet.

But there is a more fundamental issue, that you are essentially normalizing criminal behavior. Under a compensation scheme, your crimes come with a price schedule. For a person with means, this often implies ordering your bad behavior off the dollar menu: “I’ll take two petty larcenies, one grand theft auto, I’d like to punch a cop and add in some sexual assault, to go.” Whatever your argument from first principles, it would be difficult to see this world conforming to the aesthetics we imagine for a just world. That is, the principles are incapable of constructing a recognizably just outcome.

On a practical level, there can be no negotiation for compensation as the victim has no leverage. Having no leverage, there can be no negotiation and thus no real way to legitimate the compensation. That’s at least as problematic and, critically, reduces the compensation regime to a simple crime tax. It’s no longer a compensation scheme because there’s no true consideration of the victim’s demands or, really, a way to set up revealed preferences not to be punched, for example.

Anonymous

How is that different from the current system, which imposes both fines and restitution?

Hyena

It’s not that much different, except that your ability to pay has no real bearing and so we don’t have the dollar menu problem.

I’m not sure you can build a fully justified criminal punishment system. I think we need to look largely to deterrence because we cannot, in fact, actually make things right. Ever.

http://twitter.com/VelizCF CFV

For those who doubt that self-defense counts as inhumane, ask yourself: if you had a choice between being incarcerated several years or being killed in self-defense, which would you pick?
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Anonymous

I read somewhere that the difference between European and American incarceration rates lies mainly in the length of the sentence, rather than the rate of arrest or your chances of being convicted. For example, a conviction for burglary in America might get you five years, but only 1 or 2 in Europe. I have European friends who are shocked at the length of common American sentences, so there seems to be a large disparity in expectations and a sense of what is just or unjust.

I guess there are all kinds of ways to view it, but I think the primary purpose of punishment is not vengeance or incapacitation, but deterrence. The question should be how much punishment is necessary to have a good deterrent effect without being cruel. There is also an incapacitation effect from keeping burglars locked up, but the deterrent is what stops would be burglars from joining the trade.

It does seem to me that we’ve gone over the edge from deterrence to vengeance, which is why our prison population is the world’s largest by any measure. This is deeply incompatible with our idea of America as the Land of the Free, and we ought to back off before we become a full blown police state. We’re already part of the way there, and it depresses me to see how many of my fellow Americans want MORE vengeful imprisonment, not less.

We must also take care not to substitute probation, parole, and house arrest too much for prison time. These lesser measures are much cheaper, and we may find we can keep huge numbers of people under surveillance for the same amount of money. It would be a very bad science fiction future to find we’ve got 25 to 40% of the population under direct computerized surveillance and location tracking some day.

As for choosing waterboarding over prison time, who wouldn’t choose it? If you KNOW you are going to survive it, you’ll get through it and get on with your life. I’d take daily waterboarding for a month over 5 years in prison, no question about it.
Anonymous

There’s plenty I could say on this issue, but I wanted to address this:

First, there are many prison inmates who, while they may have violated
somebody’s rights, don’t pose any serious threat of violence to anybody.
Seizing them and holding them in cages seems morally disproportionate
(to say nothing of the expense). Why not focus on having them pay
restitution to their victims?

I’m not sure about restitution. Although I will point out that if we wanted restitution, frankly, we could have the government pay it, and still come out way ahead of the game without imprisoning people. If we assume that prison costs $20,000 a year, and people get, oh, two years for burglary…what burglar steals $40,000?

But, anyway, part of the reason we hold them in cages is to keep them from doing it again, even if they aren’t violent.

Which made perfect sense until we invent GPS anklets, and which point it became utter nonsense.

I want people to imagine a system of justice where we don’t generally use prisons for ‘keeping track of’ people. We slap a GPS tracker on them and use location monitoring. And not a single one of them can commit a crime without us knowing.

Of course, there would still be people we’d need to lock up. People who remove their anklets, for example. People who persist in committing crimes despite that. People who commit crimes that are too hard to track down, like pickpockets, or spammers. And, of course, if we’re going to keep victimless crimes illegal, I guess we’d have to lock those people up also.

Depending on the severity of the crime, people could be anywhere from
under virtual house arrest, to house+work, to freedom as long as they
didn’t leave the county. Some of the monitors might even have audio. Some might require hourly check in via phone also.

But all those details can be figured out. And, as a bonus, forget ‘bail’ or holding people until trial, and forget abuses of police power where they lock people up without any justification for 24 or 48 hours. No, instead, they can slip an ankle monitor on you for that amount of time. (Incidentally, I think we should treat these with exactly the same legal protections _as_ being locked up.)

And we could perhaps leave prisons for murderers, or at least, certain types of murderers. If you can cold-bloodedly plot to kill someone, you should probably be locked up for a few years away from people.

Although an interesting idea would be to build a ‘prison town’ for those people. A few hundred houses, a store or two, some sort of productive labor, and well off the roads. Yes, we could build an entire town for what it costs to run a prison for a few years.

In modern society, we seem to want to build a police state to monitor everything everyone does, and to lock away as many bad people as we can. Somehow, we failed to see the logical idea of just monitoring the bad people.

Now, some people will argue that this isn’t ‘justice’, or doesn’t ‘deter crime’. That is actually a fair point…if the only consequence of stealing a car is that, if I’m caught, I have to wear an ankle on my leg for a few years, during which I can’t safely steal another car…well, that’s not really much of a risk, is it? I didn’t really get punished, did I?

So if someone wants to invent some punishment on top of this, go for it, I have no objection. Perhaps criminals have to show up somewhere and watch Barney cartoons every day. I don’t know.

But this method keeps society from having to support criminals, and, what’s more, keeps the criminals in their legit jobs, if they have one. (Causing them to lose their legit jobs, while technically a ‘deterrent’, is obviously a very very stupid one.)

Joshua Katz

Or, even better, we can just put the anklets on everyone. After all, anyone can commit a crime, not just past criminals.

Anonymous

Nuke them from space. It’s the only way to be sure.

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Cody

Great discussion!

Societies work because everyone agrees to basic ground rules. Like do not murder. When people break those rules it disrupts things. For the most severe offenses, I think most people agree that at minimum the offender should be removed from the general society (in order to protect the public). In modern America, that usually means prison. In the most extreme case, the death penalty. If you’re a foreigner, it’s usually a combination of prison and deportation.

If prisons and the death penalty are immoral, that would make the next best option to strip their citizenship and deport them. With deportation, the public is safe and it eliminates the opportunity for criminals to reoffend. If you wanted to include restitution under this system, you could make a requirement if they wanted to come back (or even just visit).

So the obvious question is what country is going to accept murderers and rapists? I think it’d only be a matter of time before a few open-minded countries (and/or private companies) find a way to profit. For example, maybe the Republic of XYZ will accept you if you’re willing to live in a prison factory until you make $100,000 worth of goods. Or maybe MegaCorp Inc. will rent you an apartment on an unused oil platform in the middle of the ocean.

I suspect criminals would aggregate to the places most accepting of their crimes (i.e., who ever offers them the best terms). Their movement wouldn’t be limited per se and their families and friends would be free to join them wherever they end up.One downside is you may have to set up some kind of Island of Misfit Toys until a market develops (if it develops).

No idea if this would work, but it seems to meet most of the goals that prison is intended to accomplish and is more in line with libertarian values.