In British prison, one of our most notorious peadophiles has a PS3, Wii and cable. He gets x mas dinner and access to sport facilities.
Josef Fritzl is in a "prison" where he gets his own cell, television and can play tennis whenever he wants.
Tennis and Wii, as much as it sounds like it, aren't the only things you need to make your life happy. The guards aren't very friendly, often, the food isn't very good. Most importantly, those people are locked inside for a very, very long time. They can't do what they want to do, they can't meet who they want to meet, they have no power whatsoever over their own lives. They have to deal with violence and insults every day, they have to deal with guilt... Also, I read that pedophiles get the worst treatment from their fellow prisoners, and they are sometimes even murdered in the prison because the other criminals hate them so much (at least that's the case in Finland. I don't know about the rest of the world, though). If you were to lock those people there without even a book to read or something, without any positive social encounters and nothing to take their mind off things, they wouldn't take very long to go totally nuts.
Also, I think that kind of total isolation is used as a means of torture somewhere. I don't know for sure, though. Does someone know?
Yeah, though I actually understand your point quite well. Some prisoners seem to enjoy their lives there, which kind of isn't the point. It makes me annoyed, too, to hear that for example, prison food in Finland costs more per serving than school lunches (we have free school lunches in Finland. They're not very good, but they're something). But, I want to note, that not a single person is actually evil. There are many cases in which a murderer or a torturer was a good parent to their children or something of the like. Those people are still
people and they have some good characteristics. The bad things they've done can't counter all their good points. If someone murders a person, they don't instantly become these evil things that should be locked in a room with no windows and nothing to do. They're still human. Therefore, they have to be treated like a human.
That's my opinion, at least.
Starom said:
Additionally, what good does killing these people actually do? Seriously. You just add another death to the tally. And, introduce suffering to another group of people. Say some guy killed a random, young child. That child's family, friends and community will probably mourn them. The suffering is truly immense. Then, if the death penalty existed, the guy is executed. Doesn't it occur to supporters of the death penalty that, say, the father of the killer won't have had anything to do with it? Or the mother? Or the siblings? Or his friends? Or his community? By killing that man, all you is make other people suffer whilst another life is wasted. I don't really see how that is any better...
Exactly. I didn't think of that, but it also adds to what I'm trying to say here. You should never forget that those people don't cease to be people even if they did something horrible. They still have families, they still want to be free and have a clean conscience. They don't instantly become some kind of cruel, horrible, inhumane things that should be just sweeped away. Also, I don't think many people commit murder just out of spite. Often, there's some kind of motive behind it. Who know, maybe it would be better to help the people who commit crime instead of putting them in inhumane jails and making it even worse?
In a certain Finnish prison, they did some kind of test. The prison bought domestic animals like goats and cows for the prisoners to take care. After the criminals got to take care of the animals, they became more gentle, more happy and also recieved better results in psychological tests. No-one hurt the animals or anything during the trial time, so they got to stay.
According to the psychological tests, their likelihood of committing more crimes after they got out got lower. I don't know how trustworthy those tests are, but based on this, I think I really like the idea of happy prisoners.
