My personal frustration with American law enforcement and the justice system aside, it's a good question.
If an individual is an accumulation of events, is it fair to punish people? Is incarceration a logical social reaction for the commission of a crime?
My answer is, and always has been, pretty flat:
No.
I don't answer that way because it gets attention. I answer that way because its true.
If the theory, as presented, is correct, and if an individual, as they exist at any given moment, is really the result of an accumulation of events (the product of the pushes and pulls of personal perturbation), it is not productive to simply imprison an individual in an environment even more prone to violent crime than the general population.
This is a serious problem with the theory of incarceration as retribution, which our justice system operates on. It's also one of the reasons why the criminal justice system has failed so miserably at rehabilitating criminals, and why prisons are subject to massive overflow, and are filled with repeat offenders.
The prison system operates on a central premise that I am attempting to undermine. That is:
Each individual has an inherent and constant nature which, while it can be changed under extreme circumstances, is relatively static.
My objection to this is simple. People don't change (generally speaking) when they're subjected to perversity, they become perverse.
Individuals have a tendency to embrace the environment they are a part of, to put themselves in positions that recreate experiences they've had before. There are plenty of reasons that I could justify this (many of them are semi-Freudian and, as a result, absurd, but many are viable, logical and simple).
Victims of pedophilia are far more likely to become pedophiles.
Why?
The logic of prisons suggests that exposing individuals to the harsh nature of hostile environments corrects them (assuming that "correctional facilities" are meant to be correctional, and not retributive; retribution may seem to fit the just prescription, but it does little to address the individual).
Given the prison method of logic it seems that one subjected to the suffering of sexual abuse, who understands how horrible and destructive and traumatic it is would be the last person to commit a sex crime.
This is, simply, not the case.
Rehabilitation, correction, or whatever term we're interested in using, needs to acknowledge that the nature of the individual, the state that the individual is in at the moment and the circumstances which dictate their future acts, are better off if an individual is exposed to circumstances which are, in short, a drastic improvement over the life they had before, not a crippling view of what life might become in a society of criminals (which is the "Dante's Inferno" or "Ghost of Christmas Yet-to-Come" approach that the prison system is about imposing).
Am I saying we should improve the lives of those who commit crimes?
Yeah. As a matter of fact I am.
What's wrong with a justice system that shows a person who steals a television that they can develop skills and get a job and buy their own television? In my opinion (and you are entitled to disagree, if you feel the urge) the notion of locking a person up so that they are in a small cell with only a few hours of sunshine a day, only to let them out, is more ridiculous.
When they get out, they still want a TV (maybe even more than they used to). They still don't have any money (because they couldn't get a job). Their circumstances are exactly the same as they were before. Why will their decisions be different?
If this sounds utopian, it is in a lot of ways.
There are cases where individuals will have to be incarcerated because they cannot be rehabilitated, their behaviors cannot be changed. It is not a universally effective method, but it is worth trying, given how large scale the failure of the modern techniques has been.
