Prisoner Education

Oh. Well, now that you've explained it, I get it.

Married to someone who deals with the health concerns and costs of the indigent, I suspect your method would burden society a lot more than it would relieve it. Creating, and then caring for, indigent people is much more expensive than incarcerating them. Not to mention that this is a particularly brutal idea, unfit for a civilized society. (Or even one that pretends to be.)

 

You do?

I don't think that public assistance at the general assistance or homeless shelter level costs anywhere near the per-person cost of keeping offenders in prison. You used the prison-cost argument yourself, up above.

What's more, you are ignoring the deterrent effect. You said yourself that today's prisons don't deter, and I just pointed out that there are lower cost options that probably do.

Look Rich, I've said that providing social rewards to people for preying on others is evil. Nobody has yet seen fit to respond to that. But everyone nevertheless feels free to employ their own moral intuitions.

I think that this selective invocation of ethics needs some explanation.

If people can reject the idea of "brutal", than I can reject the idea of rewarding those that brutalize other people. Criminals are brutal too. If the brutality of my suggestion is to be rejected, then presumbly brutal criminals are equally to be rejected. More so in fact, since criminals brutalize the innocent.

In other words, if we let ethics intrude into the discussion, you have to address the ethics of embracing brutality, because in effect that's what you are proposing that we do.

But if we ignore the ethical issues and try to argue on purely utilitarian grounds that embracing violent inmates reduces the social costs associated with crime, I've pointed out that there probably are more efficient ways to reduce those costs, such as traditional Islamic corporal justice.