Those who were around, say 3 years ago would remember me opening a thread about prisons and the morality of them.
Most people went on to say they're necessary and I remember virtually everyone I talked to about the horrors or prisons laughing at me.
My father has a degree in criminology and used to work as a safety warden, it's about as close to a policeman as you can get, and I'd remember him telling me about how locking people up with others doesn't work, and it's completely true.
We've been treating violent offenders as evil people, doing whatever we can to torture them, killing them in some places of the world and it doesn't work.
I recall laughing off a lot of your ideas. I even remember this one. In most cases, I actually came to agree with you bit by bit as I became more educated. This one definitely has my vote.
Not a tendency (I think that's what you meant), a root cause, which is different.
The point is babies aren't born violent (unless some prenatal syndrome causes them to be), it's learnt by the human as a means of survival. Even people with "violent genes" don't necessarily become genetic and those without "violent genes" do.
Also, Gilligan is offering real solutions to stop violence, not throw em in a cell and hope they calm down for 20 years.
I argee that prisons are what alot of people advoid going to by hearing so many horrible stories about them. But if they want to lock all the bad people together what do you expected?
I think the inability to control emotions (root cause or tendency, whatever) such as anger is usually a form of weakness, not of evil. This is also not new information, as you will no doubt notice. It is, in fact, so old that one would wonder why Lord XYZ's thread wasn't a topic of discussion two centuries ago. It has yet to be "popularized. Personally, I think it's because people prefer to satisfy their sense of anger against criminals rather than simply treat the root problem. If so, it makes the general population guilty of the same "emotion over logic" attitude as the prison population.
But what is this "treatment" you are talking about? You can't very well get people to stop humiliating or taunting each other. And what are we suppose to do with them after they commit murder?
There are actually rehabilitation clinics in the world. Norway's prisons are like that, and Gilligan talks about a programme where some violent people have been sent to a non-violent society to learn non-violent ways.
Quark is right, none of this is new, but Gilligan has strong evidence to support this position. In England we had a Geordie called Raul Maut a few months ago that broke free from jail. This guy was a former bouncer, came from domestic violence, 6'6, huge guy with a gun and scared even the police, and had a vendetta against society. His best friend was a alcoholic mentally unstable former footballer. If his childhood was violent, and his job was violent, then it's natural to assume he would turn that abuse outward against his environment.
Gilligan's subjects were the same. When a person is so deprived of human compassion they become hard criminals.
But are the genes the ones causing the violence? I don't think so. These types of people turn up everywhere, the only connection is the unequal environment, and the more inequality in the country, the greater the populous.
So we send them to a "non-violent" society? What does that mean? We have a camp or something set up where everyone is nice? We would have to at least have guards posted to keep them there, and that is still a "violent" environment, at least potentially.
I see the thought process, I'm wondering what this "environment that makes reform easier" is. There are already programs out there that try to "reach out" to criminals in prison. It sounds like the idea is to not send criminals to prison, so where?
KMC Community Forums
Jul 15th, 2011 08:35 PM
How is this new information?
