On prisons – Clive Stafford Smith in TLS:

‘The concept of “prison” comes up quite frequently. While most people have been led to believe that putting criminals in prison is necessary to make our society safe, when we look at history, mass incarceration as punishment is a fairly modern concept – and it is, some students believe, madness.
While Jacob Abolafia is much too seasoned an academic to use this kind of language, his latest book is a compelling historical – and often ancient historical – argument for my students’ position. “Changes like mandatory sentencing guidelines, three-strike laws, and radicalized patterns in policing and prosecution all had more to do with the electoral winds of ‘penal populism’ and politically motivated ‘wars on crime’ than with political philosophy”, he writes. This is true. In the 1980s American political vogue told us that capital punishment would solve many of society’s problems. Of course, many social studies found that it had no such result.’

(…)

‘Despite this, Bentham believed his proposal was a step forwards for civilization. And he is not the only one whose well-intended ideas have turned out to be catastrophes. While I make no claim to be a Jeremy Bentham, I am guilty of that as well. When I tried my first capital case in Georgia in 1985, one year out of law school, I was manifestly unqualified and the jury predictably returned a death sentence. Because in the US one can talk to jurors, I interviewed them afterwards to learn from my mistakes. I was aghast to discover that they suffered from what you might call Private Slovik Syndrome. This is the phenomenon named for an American deserter executed during the Second World War after being found guilty by a group of jurors, none of whom really believed that the sentence would be carried out. Yet Dwight Eisenhower decided to make an example of him and declined to commute his sentence.’

(…)

‘We would do better to turn our focus away from punishment for punishment’s sake (a hard enough concept for any philosopher compellingly to justify) and ask instead what interventions would prevent harmful behaviour today, and in the future. There is a number of options to explore here – too many and too detailed for this review – but mass incarceration is not one of them.’

(…)

‘Progress might be slow, but perhaps we should begin by sending fewer of those who are loved by someone else to a punishment cell. While the question then becomes what we do with the incorrigibles – the range of answers, whether they be for the corrupt politician or the murderer, will have to await another article – at least we know the direction in which we should travel.’

Read the article here.

I mostly agree, but not because the detainee is loved by someone else.

Incarceration is expensive and ineffective. The next question is: should revenge be part of criminal law?

And what to do with those people who transgressed society’s standards in such a way that we cannot say: let’s act as if nothing happened