Mepsi Pax
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jan 1, 2020
Counterpoint: The US penal system is full of awful garbage people, overlapping with simply broken and/or insane ones, and large scale rehabilitation is a utopian fantasy. Something like 30% of convicts don't re-offend (on average within X years or whatever the criteria was for the studies) and that doesn't seem like such a bad number if you know what the block looks like from the inside. Being locked in a cage surrounded by shitbags is actually pretty good motivation to reform, in fact I'd argue that it's more effective for those who are smarter and more capable of introspection. It's rehabbing the 89IQ morons that was always gonna be a crap shoot.There are many cultural, political, and economic reasons for America's broken justice system, but none are fitting excuses for why it isn't working. The United States has more incarcerated citizens per capita than every other country on the planet, yet boasts one of the highest recidivism rates in the world. People go into prison as petty criminals only to come out as hardened criminals, and you have a private prison industry which incentivizes ever greater levels of mass incarceration (the US prison population has grown by 500% over the last 40 years), often for non-violent crimes, or as a consequence of dodgy plea deals.
The truth is that guys like Baked Alaska aren't going to be rehabilitated by the American prison system. He's a mentally ill man who resorts to unhinged and reckless behavior because he craves the attention it brings him, and he evidently lacks the ability to properly appreciate the consequences his behavior has for himself and others. In a sane world, he'd be involuntarily committed and sent to a psychiatric hospital for treatment; not sent to prison where he'll likely come out even worse.
That said I don't think baked is gonna get enough time on this one to get the message. County daycare where by the time the anger and shock wears off and the blues set in, it's already time to grab your street clothes. Let him sit out a full year and he'd probably keep his big nose clean for quite a while, especially if they pinged him into the hole for a week (at least you get a bible, very trad).