this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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Well I think the article author did a poor job here. But the essential question is whether our purpose in justice is to punish and blame or to reduce harm and fix people.
While I think some people are broken well beyond our abilities to help and fix them, such that justice requires removing them from society, many I think are not and I think we all might be surprised how capable normal seeming people are of committing wrongs and crimes.
I think the argument you are making makes sense. Harm reduction and rehabilitation is the way, not this dumb prison system we have.
But it's a reallllly far stretch if I read the article assuming this is the message. Or at least, he's being intentionally obtuse about it, specifically causing the conflict he claims to want to avoid. Maybe 40 years is just too long to ponder the same question haha.
This article is saying that none of it is in our control which is just silly. Plenty people having a really rough time not taking their cars while drunk and killing people. And that's the key difference, where not everyone in the same situation will need the same kind of support from society, or be affected by strife the same way. Some of that is in our control, or at least not inherently a societal/cultural problem we can solve.
I believe you mistake an aspect of his argument. I don't believe he meant to insinuate that prison and harm reduction are mutually exclusive, rather he says that the question is whether prison is punishment or harm reduction. If there's no free will there's no reason to punish, but there's certainly reason to reduce the possibility of harm, and jailing an individual that is causing harm (and will continue to do so) is one way of doing that.
As someone else in this thread put it, if we could jail hurricanes to prevent them from doing harm, we would.