i was about to sleep… but a quick glance at the entry told me that i have to write this:
i should state the premise of our discussion and the relevant positions you have undertaken, notwithstanding the positions you have taken on the abortion debate, which lead to this rehabilitation vs punishment debate (i feel a strong need to do this before re-arguing my points, because you have decided to ’suffer’ from ’selective-memory-disorder’ when you wrote the entry):
1. You claimed that rehabilitation will work better for those who have committed ‘crimes’ (you assert at various times during our discussion that crime is only crime as it is asserted by society, a point which you have reinforced in your entry and i quote:
lawmakers decide what crimes are. some guided by society’s demand for action, others by religious or political believes. but the indisputable fact is, laws are a social construct. while it may be the be all, and end all, there will be elements of society that disagrees with the imposed structures.
2. You claimed that the penal system ‘lock away’ these offenders of ’society-imposed-law’ (read: your POV), thus effectively taking their rights to be part of society (read: this is how i observed your position).
3. You also claimed that all offenders regardless of the crimes they have committed should be send for this rehabilitation until they are ‘cured’. This also effectively impose into our society a view that all crimes are equal in the eyes of the law, because they render equal ‘punishment’ or ‘treatment’ as you like to refer it as. (this POV is also something that you readily concurred during the debate).
Based on the above premises, let me re-argue my case, and let history judge (im of course assuming the eternal existence of our blog i.e. when i say ‘our’ it refers to your blog and my blog) whose position will still be defensible through the test of time:
penal system, jail or gaol has negative connotations attached to them, thus in this modern day and age, a lot of legal systems refer this kind of institution as ‘correctional facilities’. but given you have negative sentiments towards the institution per say, let me entertain your supposed view of ‘locking away’ these ‘people’. what is so different about putting these people in a ‘rehabilitation institution’ or ‘correctional facility/jail’. they are after all, being locked away. people in both institutions have access to psychologists, food, medical treatment, etc. i still dont understand which part of the ‘locking away’ part is soo different? i asked you whether those people in the rehabilitative instition will be allowed to roam freely in the street like normal people do? apparently, you said no. wouldnt this mean they are ‘locked away’ anyway? the difference is which institution?? do you realise that the rehabilitative institution is pretty similar to correctional facilities, maybe they use different names, different doors, but people in rehabilitative institutions are also chained, refraining them from hurting themselves or others who are trying to treat them.
further, you are assuming that all people that commit crime has to be psychologically treated through rehabilitation. what then would be the standard of who is ‘cured’ and who is ‘not yet cured’. there are two anomalies here:
1. there are people who do not have the psychological problem but still commit crimes through errors and ommissions. equating these people (i.e. those who didnt pay parking fines, those who didnt pay tram tickets, those who killed others because the victims didnt pay their debts, and those who killed others because of psychological disorders) is just flawed argument in itself. further, in committing these crimes, there are those who dont agree with the law that they have committed the crimes. so eventually you will have a high probability of this situation happening: one guy who doesnt pay the parking fine imposed by council because he thinks the area in front of his house is his property will be in rehabilitation forever because he doesnt ‘repent’ whereas a catholic priest who has molested a child will be ‘freed’ from rehabilitation because he has repented and thus cured.
2. rehabiliation is at its most dangerous when it is applied in the context of actually carrying out the punishment of imprisonment; that is, when it is used as a criteria for release decisions. For how can any prison staff, parole officer or even psychologist ever tell that a person “has reformed” or “probably will not offend again”? Indeed, on what basis can they make any fair, sensible decision? The sad answer is that, since one can never tell if an offender is “cured”, having “rehabilitation” as the goal forces the decision to be made be based on statistical ‘risk factors’ like whether the person belongs to a racial group that is statistically likely to reoffend, or whether the person belongs to an economic underclass that makes him statistically likely to reoffend. Of course all this does is to double-penalise the offender for something he cannot help, such as his race or his poverty. Afterall, the final date of his release depends entirely on parole officers or prison staff.
you obviously decided to neglect the purpose of ‘punishment’ in its first instance. A sanction should not merely be helpful – it should treat the offending conduct as wrong. The purpose of punishment is to show disapproval for the offender’s wrongdoing, and to clearly condemn his criminal actions. This is why we punish; we punish to censure (retribution), we do not punish merely to help a person change for the better (rehabilitation). We still have to punish a robber or a murderer, even if he is truly sorry and even if he would really, really never offend again and even if we could somehow tell that for certain. This is because justice, and not rehabilitation, makes sense as the justification for punishment.
Why is justice and censure (‘retribution’) so important? Because unless the criminal justice system responds to persons who have violated society’s rules by communicating, through punishment, the censure of that offending conduct, the system will fail to show society that it takes its own rules (and the breach of them) seriously. There are other important reasons as well: such as to convey to victims the acknowledgement that they have been wronged. Punishment, in other words, may be justified by the aim of achieving ‘justice’, and not by the aim of rehabilitation.
Crime is not the product of circumstance and it is not certainly the product of coincidence. It is the result of choices made by the individual, and therefore the justice system must condemn those choices when they violate society’s rules. To say otherwise (i.e. to say that criminals are merely the product of their unfortunate circumstances) would be an insult to ideas of free will, human autonomy and individual choice – it would be to deny the possibility of human actors making good decisions in the face of hardship.
This ‘free will’ or human autonomy concept that you so wrongly has condemned through your post, and i quote:
it is a crime of society to allow the cycle of proverty that many of these offenders are in. the very act of ignoring that the cycle of poverty as a catalyst to a cycle of crime can be considered criminal negligence in another context.
doesnt appeal to an inherent sense of right and wrong. Your comment doesnt respect humanity because it fails to recognise that persons are indeed fundamentally capable of moral deliberation, no matter what their personal circumstances are.
because society fails you doesnt ‘excuse’ you to commit crime. to argue otherwise is just a state of hopelessness. At the end of the argument, i could only say to you: ‘i just hope that when you live in the rehabilitative society you dream about, you wouldnt wish soo bad to come back to the current society you live in”
