[piercehawkeye45]

Originally Posted by 9th Engineer

In order for criminals to become productive members of society, they must want to do so. We can talk with them, provide counselors to give them a chance to work out issues or grudges, but unless you can get them to want it, you might as well set fire to your money.

And you don't think many criminals wouldn't want to be a productive member of society if they had the chance? As Dana pointed out, you are generalizing all criminals into one group which is about as far from the truth as you can get. Some people, I actually know one person that almost did this, commit crimes out of desperation and are very moral people when they are not pushed to the edge and others turn to drug dealing because it is more profitable than working a minimum wage job. Are these people bad, no, just that they just choose a life of crime because a life without crime is not reasonable or worth it.

If you had to make some educated guesses about what makes a person not want to be a productive member of society, what would you say pierce?

Hopelessness, social environment, and that a life of crime is more reasonable and profitable for the non-anti social people. Anti-social behavior can not be changed so you have to a separate group fro that. This starts to get into the topic of how poverty affects crime levels.

As for the length of prison term, how would altering that affect how they view society?

I never said change the length of time.

If a person is so delusional that doing the time for their crime makes them hate their victims even more, then we're screwed.

It is how they are doing time, not the actual process of being punished for crimes. If you look at prisoners right now, many are turning to religious extremism as a way to make their lives worthwhile. That gives a very good insight about how criminals view their lives, hopelessness usually, and if you take away that hopelessness, things can change for the better. If you take two people that committed the same crime with the same social background prior to the criminal activity and lock them up, one with a feeling of hopelessness and one with a feeling that you can get back on your feet if you choose too when released, the outcome of the two people will most certainly be different when they are both let out. What I am proposing is to change prisons from a general feeling of hopelessness to rehabilitation so they can back on track when they leave and you have not addressed that point. Of course some people will not choose to change, but separation of those two groups should be relatively easy and those two groups can get separate punishments.

If we don't punish them, they continue to commit crimes. If we punish them, they get out and commit worse crimes. Your only option would be to either execute them or lock them up and forget about them.

You are making an assumption that those are the only two options...

I need to hear the answer to one main question. How do you see the majority of criminals and prisoners? Are they misguided delinquents who are misguided and can be 'shown the light' of honest labor and contribution to society? Do you see them as stupid clods who never learned where to draw the line and need to be reeducated? What about people of normal intelligence who know what they're doing and see it as a lifestyle?

You can't clump all criminals into one group or even a majority because there probably isn't a majority. There are very smart criminals that have chosen a life a crime because it suit them best, some are stupid clots, some are anti-social (link to article on real anti-social behavior) in nature and are hopeless to reeducate, some are misguided, some are there because of accidents and so on. There should be a system to separate the ones that can be helped from the ones that can't and work on both groups separately.

The best thing we could do for the prison system would be to decriminalized illegal drugs.