Henryagainsthaters
Unlucky Member
Should our government choose rehabilitation over our standard retribution sytem. Tell me what you think.
Retribution or Rehabilitation?
- Thread starter Henryagainsthaters
- Start date
Naguru
Esoterically Discontented
I've always been mixed on this, in my opinion I believe a little punishment is in order and then some rehabilitation. However this could work against us because the same people who just punished you now want to help you, I do believe however that murder shouldn't be something the Government can even consider, in the end the murderer is dead and so are their victims and it seems like a big waste of life. If I had my way, a lot of criminals would die but it's because of this fact I don't want to ever be in a position to make those choices, so I don't think the people in charge of those kind of choices should be able to make that call at all. I'd gladly support a system that puts people who commit certain crimes in an environment that offers a little retribution along with a large dose of rehabilitation.
In the case of 'It has to be one or the other'. I'd go with rehabilitation for the fact that if it does it's job well, then we wont have repeat offenders who've finished up their little dose of retribution.
In the case of 'It has to be one or the other'. I'd go with rehabilitation for the fact that if it does it's job well, then we wont have repeat offenders who've finished up their little dose of retribution.
SapienObscura
One Time Luck
REHABILITATION
If you take a murderer and place him into a tiny cell in an environment where he feels oppressed and constantly stressed, he will only be worse upon release. But if you take him and deal with the underlying cause of WHY he committed the crime he did, you could save both his life and those of the people around him.
If you take a murderer and place him into a tiny cell in an environment where he feels oppressed and constantly stressed, he will only be worse upon release. But if you take him and deal with the underlying cause of WHY he committed the crime he did, you could save both his life and those of the people around him.
Renn Skye
Two Thousand Club
Neither, I think we need to set up a system of mental health care where we take care of people before these problems arise. We're treating the symptom and not the cause. In the US (and I will be speaking on the US as my example because, while I may have been raised in the UK for my childhood I'm living my adult life out in the states and it's where it effects me most directly) we treat mental illness as taboo. It's something to be ashamed of and not spoken about - something we brush under the rug. What we need to do is treat it as a public health issue - mental disorders are just as much an illness as the physical, but we don't treat it that way. I myself have been diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Mild schizophrenia, chronic, seasonal, and anxiety based depressions and heavy bi-polar tendencies - all disorders that make it very hard to get work, and which most people write off ("you're not even a neat freak you can't have OCD" "isn't being schizoid like where you have people in your head? Bring them out. Can't do it? Don't have it." "Depression? Shake it off, everyone gets upset sometimes" "You're not bi-polar, you're not crazy and you can't be taking lithium for it because you don't bloat up" "you're just doing it for attention") when they're all serious problems that make it very hard for me to function in society without medical help. We don't say "You have cancer? Shake it off" we don't tell people that they're having heart failure for attention. Why do we treat mental illness as a trivial, fake problem?
The majority of people who commit grievous crimes suffer from a (or many separate) mental illness(es), but we don't care to notice it until after a crime is committed - and sometimes not even then. Parent's with children who have extreme mental disorders usually get told to get their child (their child) convicted of a felony. They get told that "without a paper trail, there's nothing we can do to help you". As such, their child grows up without the help needed (because proper treatment can be expensive. Therapy is expensive, pills are expensive, all of it costs quite a lot and in some cases institutionalisation is required - and because of our set up here in the US it doesn't do much more than hold someone for a while before releasing them, without having received significant help, and unchanged). Without proper help that child is more likely to grow up and commit crimes from things as small as minor theft or as cataclysmic as murder. Something that could have been avoided if we just put an emphasis on helping our nations children with disorders cope. If we didn't treat them as if their very existence was something to be ashamed of. If we didn't teach them that we were ashamed of them because of the way they were born.
It's disgusting. Other countries treat mental health as a social and medical problem that should be dealt with with understanding, patience, and government supported aid. We treat it like a deep personal shame that should never be seen.
Rehabilitation shouldn't need to be the choice we make, because we should have cared for the people in need before the problem even arose. That being said, if I have to choose between the two, rehabilitation is my method of choice.
The majority of people who commit grievous crimes suffer from a (or many separate) mental illness(es), but we don't care to notice it until after a crime is committed - and sometimes not even then. Parent's with children who have extreme mental disorders usually get told to get their child (their child) convicted of a felony. They get told that "without a paper trail, there's nothing we can do to help you". As such, their child grows up without the help needed (because proper treatment can be expensive. Therapy is expensive, pills are expensive, all of it costs quite a lot and in some cases institutionalisation is required - and because of our set up here in the US it doesn't do much more than hold someone for a while before releasing them, without having received significant help, and unchanged). Without proper help that child is more likely to grow up and commit crimes from things as small as minor theft or as cataclysmic as murder. Something that could have been avoided if we just put an emphasis on helping our nations children with disorders cope. If we didn't treat them as if their very existence was something to be ashamed of. If we didn't teach them that we were ashamed of them because of the way they were born.
It's disgusting. Other countries treat mental health as a social and medical problem that should be dealt with with understanding, patience, and government supported aid. We treat it like a deep personal shame that should never be seen.
Rehabilitation shouldn't need to be the choice we make, because we should have cared for the people in need before the problem even arose. That being said, if I have to choose between the two, rehabilitation is my method of choice.
Skyflames
BLACKJACK!
So I did a paper about the penology system in the United States and it was definitely interesting. Basically when the Americas were still colonies, punishment was corporeal and it was in public. Whippings, beatings, hangings, all of that was in public and it worked as a scare tactic. It worked to keep society the way colonists wanted. And then urbanization happened. Cities grew tremendously, sometimes doubling their size in a couple of years and this method wasn't working. Strangers came and went, and views on corporeal punishment was changing; people found it very grotesque.
The solution then was to place individuals in their own cells, read from the Bible, and be forbidden to talk to anyone. And sometimes they were either crammed into a room with several other inmates or their face would be hidden with a mask. The idea was, reading from the Bible would rehabilitate the prisoners, and cutting them off from other corrupted people would prevent corruption from spreading.
It's no longer mandatory for inmates to read the Bible, but they are still locked up 24/7, and cut off from society. I don't believe locking someone up is going to help them. I do believe they should be punished for their crimes but it shouldn't be locking them up. And like Renn said, I definitely do want better mental health care so problems like rape, murder, homicide and the like shouldn't happen.
The solution then was to place individuals in their own cells, read from the Bible, and be forbidden to talk to anyone. And sometimes they were either crammed into a room with several other inmates or their face would be hidden with a mask. The idea was, reading from the Bible would rehabilitate the prisoners, and cutting them off from other corrupted people would prevent corruption from spreading.
It's no longer mandatory for inmates to read the Bible, but they are still locked up 24/7, and cut off from society. I don't believe locking someone up is going to help them. I do believe they should be punished for their crimes but it shouldn't be locking them up. And like Renn said, I definitely do want better mental health care so problems like rape, murder, homicide and the like shouldn't happen.
