A series of posts in another forum and this discussion here got me thinking about prisons and shit.

A prison should ideally do three things

• Punishment of criminals
• Protection of general populace
• Rehabilitation of those criminals who can be rehabilitated

Most people seem to agree that our current system has holes you drive a truck through.

My prison scheme is the following:
Every cell is a solitary confinement cell. A prisoner will essentially live out his entire sentence inside his cell. There is no contact with any other prisoners or the outside world, no form of entertainment and only minimal contact with prison staff i.e. occasional health checks and delivery of food, etc. which will be irregular, to completely destroy the prisoners sense of time.
The prisoner will have light, food, drinking water, cleaning water and waste removal.
The food will be nutritionally balanced but designed to be bland fare.
To prevent suicides (I expect cases of psychosis to be inevitable until the second stage of the process begins) We'll try not to give prisoners methods of suicide, food will be finger food really so no cutlery, the cell will be tough and smooth (i.e. no blankets, clothes or protusions to facilitate hanging), some conceivable ways of killing oneself might be consuming ones own waste products to the point of sickness but constant checks and medical care should hopefully prevent that, choking yourself with your own hands or bashing your head against the wall :frustrated:, padding the cells might help with that although expense to the taxpayers would be significant for the inital construstion.
The essential idea is to make a prison the most unappealing, dull and demoralising place on earth to the point of madness. This is cruel I admit, but punishment is meant to be cruel, that's the whole idea, we're meant to be discouraging people from reoffending and making prison an all expenses paid vacation isn't the way to do it.

So that's the punishment part, what about rehabilitation?
About 3/4 of the way through a prisoners sentence he gradually gets reintroduced to human contact. With psychological counselling and rebuilding and maybe even a bit of brainwashing (even with just petty theft, a couple of months of no human contact will tear anyones' psyche to shreds) plus training and teaching, those that can be reahbilitated will hopefully be able to reintergrate with society, those that re-offend obviously don't need human contact. Ever. and can be locked away for all time.



*puts on asbestos suit*
Let the flaming begin (or post your own ideas, improvements to this scheme, etc.)

Your ideas intrigue me and I would like to subscribe to your magazine.

Every prisoner should leave prison having learnt a skill of some sort (if they didn't already have one), so they have something to do on the outside. The government should help them acquire work when they leave prison. Exceptions are white collar criminals and such for whom this wouldn't help.

Every prison sentence above 15 years should be either lowered to 15 years or raised to life in prison. My logic here is that if you're going to release someone, it's on the basis that they're (supposedly) rehabilitated and won't be back a week later. I highly doubt that if 15 years in prison doesn't do it, 20 or 30 will.

As a sidenote, my grandfather was awarded a gold medal from the Queen for his work helping prisoners. Pretty cool guy, also liked barefoot waterskiing (and lost a few toes doing so :().

Indeed, with this system I expect psychological conselling will be fairly long term for shorter sentences.

For life sentence of around 20 years, that equates to 5 years of therapy and training in the prison itself.

For something much shorter then the in prison therapy time is too short given the psychosies I expect to occur, like for a few months the therapy would only be a couple of weeks, not enough to make a significant dent in any problems.

That's the biggest flaw I can think of for this scheme.

If your aim is to create a whole bunch of psychoptaths then great. Making someone insane then attempting to rehabilitate them is about the most retarded thing I can think of.

Your system relies on the presence of a horrible punishment to prevent crime in the first place. This doesn't work. People don't commit crimes intending to get caught.

The vast majority of people in prison are from impoverished backgrounds. Taking this into account is the key to reducing crime.

Any attempt should include a massive overhaul of current social structure. Removing poverty would reduce crime more than any form of punishment or rehabilitation could do. Increasing the minimum wage to a non poverty level would be a good idea.

There is also a massive difference between criminals. Labelling them as 'criminals' and not taking further investigation into account is severly hampering any attempt at reducing crime. Someone who makes the mistake of turning to crime to help them provide for their family, intending no harm to another human being, is incredibly different from say a serial rapist. Labelling them, and treating them as the same is plain old stupid.

People, such as the thief mentioned above should be treated with all humaneness. Most will lack an adequate education, providing them with this will be invaluable to insuring they don't recommit. Providing adequate skills to gain employement outside of prison is the key.

More serious offenders, murderers, rapists etc should recieve indepth mental evaluation.

It's late and i'm going to bed. Discussion will continue from here whenever and if ever.

You first point has some merit I agree. But I am attempting to break the prisoners will through isolation, crushing their spirit and then attempting to teach them the error of their ways to at least make them think twice before doing something that may land them back in my little hellhole.

The next part of your argument is superfluous. I never said you shouldn't attempt social reform at the same time.

Even the current system regards all criminals equally no matter the motive. Motive will affect the duration of the sentence but otherwise I consider it irrelevant in regards to the corrections system. Motive is the domain of the legal system.

They have broken the law and are disregarding society's rules, in my opinion they have forfieted the majority of their rights by their acts. My treatment borders the edge of 'inhumaness' but I don't believe it crosses it. Except for witholding human contact, which may be regarded as cruel and unusual punishment, the prisoners are treated fairly well. They get everything they need to survive at a basic level. Perhaps total isolation is too harsh, but again I say prison shouldn't be a day camp. Prisoners should be isolated to be discouraged from thinking of it as a place where they can band together in a mutual disrespect of the law.

My system begins education and therapy at the point in their sentence when they should be most eager to cooperate with authorities and most receptive to learning some trade or another to avoid a return visit.

And push up the cost of living, negating much of what it was intended to do. Educating people so they can earn more than the minimum wage is a better approach. In my ideal world people should only work in jobs that pay min. wage while they're still kids/students/in an educational course, after which they would be upskilled to earn more.

Attempting to rehabilitate the recidivist criminals that make up the heart of our prison population is a waste of time. It is just fucking ridiculious for judges to have to deal with morons with 33 prior convictions. If we cant kill them, these kind of people need to be put 'on ice' for the rest of their lives. They need to be incarcerated in the most cost-effictive manner possible, and never freed.

Yeah, nice going America!

I agree. Demo man rocks. I think we should have a system whereby if you commit e.g. 8 violence related crimes then you are executed without delay.

p.s. Demolition Man rocks!

Synopsis, I presume your post was taking the piss. Because, for one, Simon Power and the National Party are actually wrong about something: the current justice system in New Zealand isn't actually in that bad shape. Sensationalisation of news stories about repeat offenders, something that happens in every society including the United States, the UK and China, and the media are over a handful of cases that seem to prove the entire country's prison system is failing.

Crime is the lowest as it is in 20 years; the common attack against this fact is that people aren't reporting crime statistics, which is yet another element of irrationality, because if crime statistics are not correct, then how do we know employment figures are correct, how do we know economic growth isn't being falsified by the Government? (Even though the government doesn't even compile the shit, it's civil servants).

.

That's interesting. So do you believe in the whole 'Three Strikes And You're Out' policy where you get chucked in prison for 10 years no matter what three crimes you commit?

That's one of the first times I've heard someone actually talk about a dystopia as a utopia. Clearly you aren't working for the minimum wage anymore, MrT. The irony is what you said is already the case for the most part (last time I remember hearing a statistic about numbers of people working for the minimum wage it was 300,000).

EDIT:

Uhh, what the fuck, do you understand how inflation works? This is not microeconomics 101, nor is it National Party Economic Policy: this is a real world, macroeconomy that has millions of potentialities, internal and external factors that contribute to inflation.

Increasing wages aren't even the most important element in creating inflation, and even during Prime Minister Robert Muldoon's price freeze in 1982 onward, there was skyrocketing inflation (even though all prices, wages and rents were frozen...).

Did you know that the money that is given to workers is already in the free-flowing money supply, thus making any change about who actually controls the money more or less irrelevant because it's still going to be spent if needed?

Additionally, increasing minimum wages (and increasing the basic average income) is most likely going to result in increasing asset ownership by New Zealanders (which will increase the value of our economy, and thus actually contribute to deflationary measures).

In some respects I do think our prison systems have holes in it. When people prefer to go to jail than to go out and get a real job or whatever sounds like a big hole to me. And there are people who do this. Not all but there are some. This to me says that they are getting things a bit easy. Having Sky TV in prisons seems ridiculous. Prison should be a place where they think about what they have done, punishments. Not TV, etc.

Prison is not a nice place, how many of you have actually been to a prison? Talked to the guards, or even the prisoners?

I have and its not a place you want to be.

Oh ya totally agreed but doesn't it also depend on the type of prison it is. I would imagine there are differences between maximum and minimum security prisons. And different prisons themselves.

Very true, I have witnessed high security (Paremoremo), its nasty shit. Although NZ's most dangerous person is a really nice guy :P

If I was an employer I would raise my prices / cut my costs rather than take a cut of my profit, if I was forced to pay my employees more (Pay rise for employee = pay drop for employer? no thanks!).

Who's this guy?

If you've seen the movie Office Space, you'll realised that you get raped at both of them, and even low security prisons are always fucking awful places

Are you implying that the majority of employers cannot afford any change in the wages they pay to their staff?

Here in NZ we should return to National Party triparite wage bargaining of the 50s 60s 70s 80s that allows the Government to indicatively control wages.

Then again, once the minimum wage is raised to 12 dollars (while simultaneously allowing certain concesssions to industries, as is done already with apprenticeships), and if we have good public policy that facilitates asset creation and repurchase from foreigners, we'll be in a better situation than we are now.

No, I'm implying that employers don't want to take a pay cut. Why would employers want to take a pay cut?

Also wouldn't increased incomes drive up asset prices, i.e. house prices, as more people can afford to buy homes (in the short term at least).

You've identified a problem, MrT. Someone needs to force employers to take a pay cut, but the problem is, if there aren't shareholders to force them to take paycuts, then only the Government stands in their way...

[EDIT: With regard to wage reises having a short term inflationary impact on housing] I think it would be the reverse, in that in the short term you'd have increased asset purchases of houses with limited affect, but in the longer term, it would have an inflationary aspect that would mildly affect the housing market, yes. But we should all know enough about the housing market to know that it doesn't behave rationally, and that you can have skyrocketing house prices due to pure speculation in a context where there is major deflation (i.e. negative inflation). So in that particularly instance, I wouldn't be concerned.

Perhaps more private prisons would be purchased :eww:

True but there is always the rapist and the person on the recieving end. If you arethe rapist chances are you are high on the prison food chain and more likely to like prison if you have that much power over the other inmates.

Hahaha, well, I don't think the rapist would actually like prison. If they're raping other men in prison, they probably are doing it simply out of sexual desperation.

Very true, but then it comes down to motivation. IS it for sexual tension, or a power play??

Probably a mixture of both, I guess. I'm not really into prison sexual psychology admittedly, and part of my dislike of the places is I don't want any humble man to drop the soap and get a bit of an unhealthy surprise.