Punishment of criminals.
Jul 19 2006 06:09
I do not believe in punishment, I think that it is a necessary measure to control a society in which received morality is unethical and is founded upon injustice. I do not believe a communist society will require punishment, if someone commits a crime the aim wil be to repair any damage caused and to prevent it happening again.
It will still of course be impossible to replace a murdered person for example, but the desire to punish the killer will do nothing. If we have no intention of rehabilitating the killer then we should just execute him or her as it is far more efficient than prison.
I'm horrified by the idea of letting victims speak to juries. Does this mean that killing someone with no friends or family will lead to a lighter sentence? Will the prosecution begin coaching family members to give the best possible performance of grief to ensure a longer punishment?
I despise this society for its fetishisation of grief and its commodification of people's pain. Where Sarah Payne's parents are endlessly trotted out to show their raw pain to the world, as that is the only reason anyone cares in the slightest about them.
Myra Hindley for example was not released because the home secretary feared a public outcry, this has nothing to do with justice or rehabilitation. Her level of involvement was up for debate and we'll probably never know the true facts, but just because she did something terrible does not mean that she deserved to spend her entire life in prison. If she was truly evil and should never have been released then she should have been executed. And her non-release had fuck all to do with whether she was still dangerous or felt remorse, it was entirely to do with shit stirring hacks.
Grief is a private painful thing, it requires support and fetishising it and exposing the wounds to stir up the public's blodlust is disgusting to me.
Either we rehabilitate or we punish. If we punish then we should bring back the death penalty.
Jul 19 2006 07:53
#2
Jef Costello wrote:
If we have no intention of rehabilitating the killer then we should just execute him or her as it is far more efficient than prison.
cock 
Jef Costello wrote:
Either we rehabilitate or we punish. If we punish then we should bring back the death penalty.
cock
said like a true communist
raw
Jul 19 2006 08:19
#3
Jef Costello wrote:
I do not believe in punishment, I think that it is a necessary measure to control a society in which received morality is unethical and is founded upon injustice. I do not believe a communist society will require punishment, if someone commits a crime the aim wil be to repair any damage caused and to prevent it happening again.It will still of course be impossible to replace a murdered person for example, but the desire to punish the killer will do nothing. If we have no intention of rehabilitating the killer then we should just execute him or her as it is far more efficient than prison.
I was with you up until this point. Who gets to decide who's guilty and who isn't, and how likely are they to be infallable? Even a democratic vote is hardly infallable. I'd rather they were kept apart from society (but in pleasant conditions) or allowed in society under supervision. "Sorry" sounds so empty when you are apologising to a corpse.
And if it's efficiency you are concerned with, maybe you should start up an execution corporation run on free market principles -- I hear that markets are very efficient! 
EDIT: OK, it looks like I may have misunderstood you. I thought you were arguing that if we don't want to punish, and if (for some reason or other) we also don't want to rehabilitate then we should execute people. But the last sentence (which I didn't get as far as) read "Either we rehabilitate or we punish. If we punish then we should bring back the death penalty." Which seems to be an argument against both punishment and execution. My bad.
Jul 19 2006 08:26
#4
your taking the piss right raw? his first sentence was this:
Jef Costello wrote:
I do not believe in punishment
Jul 19 2006 08:32
#5
Nemo wrote:
"Sorry" sounds so empty when you are apologising to a corpse.
Indeed. an awareness of fallibility is essential lest a revolutionary movement slip into anabaptist earth-cleansing (somebody's been reading Q )
Jul 19 2006 09:38
#6
Hi
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I do not believe in punishment
I don't believe in anything. I think punishment is alright though…
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I think that it is a necessary measure to control a society in which received morality is unethical and is founded upon injustice
Injustice and ethics are subjective. Regardless, received morality is at least as ethically sound as the individuals who consume it. There’s a rumour that as individuals we’re more pro capital punishment than the elite. Our social conscience is more humane than our individual conscience, which may strike many as obvious.
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I do not believe a communist society will require punishment, if someone commits a crime the aim wil be to repair any damage caused and to prevent it happening again.
Having “beliefs” is reactionary. It is not for revolutionaries to speculate on what a communist society will or will not require. Given that communists have yet to conceive a coherent economic policy, it strikes me as inappropriate for them to take a position on crime and punishment.
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but the desire to punish the killer will do nothing.
It depends on what the “punishment” is. If by punishment you mean the application of a penalty then it could act as a deterrent, provide entertainment or improve industrial output.
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If we have no intention of rehabilitating the killer then we should just execute him or her as it is far more efficient than prison.
Not true. They could be used for experiments or gladiatorial combat.
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I'm horrified by the idea of letting victims speak to juries
I agree. If this was allowed then you’d have to let the accused explain why the “victims” deserved it and introduce a new verdict of Pardoned. That would be pretty good actually, so maybe I’m not horrified by it at all.
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I despise this society for its fetishisation of grief and its commodification of people's pain.
Horses for courses. Some people really dig that sort of thing. What about filming the reaction of the loosing team in the World Cup, that’s as much the fetishisation of grief and its commodification of pain as anything. It’s not wrong, just non-communist.
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If she was truly evil and should never have been released then she should have been executed.
The heat is getting to you.
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Grief is a private painful thing, it requires support and fetishising it and exposing the wounds to stir up the public's blodlust is disgusting to me.
The fetishisation of “non-oppressive behaviour” and an individual preference for grief to be marginalised and unsullied by rank ambition doesn’t make punishment wrong.
Love
LR
Jul 19 2006 12:36
#7
Um, quite why people are jumping down Jef's throat is is bewildering. He's using execution as an example why we should not punish and to make the 'punishment by incarceration' argument seem ridiculous, not as a view he'd necessarily espouse 
.
Jul 19 2006 12:44
#8
I read a book once (I think by Marge Piercy?) in which she envisions a kind of future science fiction society that is clearly supposed to be an anarchist utopia. In it there are no prisons, but repeat serious offenders (murder, rape etc.) are executed.
If you are against prison in any form I don't see what other options there are - some people are beyond rehabilitation, so unless you declare all serial violent offenders to be insane and put them in some kind of secure mental hospital (which would then obviously become a prison in all but name) then execution or prison are the only options for some people.
Jul 19 2006 12:49
#9
Hi
Quote:
He's using execution as an example why we should not punish and to make the 'punishment by incarceration' argument seem ridiculous
Thereby harming the case of conventional anti-punishers and so incurring their dander.
Love
LR
Jul 19 2006 12:58
#10
I think the 'punishment vs rehabilitaion' debate is not the whole story. Prison also allows a society to incarcerate people who are a danger to the public in a place where they cannot be dangerous. So even if someone is not able to be rehabilitated there is still an argument for imprisoning them, so they cannot cause any more damage. Of course executing them would achieve the same aim with less expense, but whether a society thinks that is acceptable is another debate.
Jul 19 2006 13:07
#11
Hi
I don't see why we should have to wait for someone to do something bad before locking them up. I think it's OK just to do it for a laugh. I think it's alright to punish people just for being unpopular. I mean, I rely on other people to do the whole “social conscience” thing to be honest. If it’s cool with them, it’s cool with me.
Love
LR
Jul 19 2006 13:17
#12
magnifico wrote:
I read a book once (I think by Marge Piercy?) in which she envisions a kind of future science fiction society that is clearly supposed to be an anarchist utopia. In it there are no prisons, but repeat serious offenders (murder, rape etc.) are executed.
Woman on the edge of time, I think it's called.
Dreadful, dreadful book.
Jul 19 2006 13:31
#13
Lazy Riser wrote:
HiI don't see why we should have to wait for someone to do something bad before locking them up. I think it's OK just to do it for a laugh. I think it's alright to punish people just for being unpopular. I mean, I rely on other people to do the whole “social conscience” thing to be honest. If it’s cool with them, it’s cool with me.
Love
LR
well aren't you a Socratic scrotum.
Tedious cunt.
Jul 19 2006 14:07
#14
All arguments against punitive or retributive justice aside I do think that we should keep hold of the option of gladiatorial combat if only so that we can pair Lazy up with someone really huge and murderous. I am fairly sure that even being accused of being a "socratic scrotum" should carry an appearance in the arena as its penalty.
Jul 19 2006 15:00
#15
Jef Costello wrote:
I'm horrified by the idea of letting victims speak to juries.
so am i.
but i'd like to repeat my oft-stated opinion that victimizing behavior isn't the product of capitalism, tho' capitalism certainly exacerbates some forms of victimization. no socio-economic re-organization is going to eradicate the desire of some people to fuck over other people, for their own profit or for the sheer pleasure of it. how will we deal with them, especially the ones who can't/won't stop it?
Jul 19 2006 15:06
#16
to be honest I'm actually quite happy to have some degree of punishment.
Let the fuckers suffer.
Revenge is given a bad press, I just like to think of it as existentialist karma.
Quote:
Donald wept through the proceedings. His tears soaked through the canvas that cloaked his twisted face and they stained his orange jumpsuit where with such rare distinction he once displayed the evidence of his outstanding contributions to the maintenance of a kingdom come. But those days are gone. He’s nothing more than a number on a docket thick with shareholders, engineers, PR firms, politicians: war-profiteers. How the fuck did I end up here? This just isn’t fair. Ain’t no place for a millionaire. He searches for the words to stop this table in mid-turn, like “we are but old men” and “we only did what we were told,” but the laughter from the gallery drowns out these vestiges of a profession’s oldest defense. The court will direct the record to reflect compliments from the bench; you sir, are central casting’s crowning achievement. And for your outstanding performance in a comedic role, I’d like to dedicate the findings of the jury to the dead. But how can one man ever repay a debt so appalling? Can’t gouge 10,000 eyes from a single head so I think we should observe a sentence that will serve to satisfy both a sense of function and poetry: so you will spend the rest of your days drenched in sweat, with your face drawn in a rictus of terror as you remove another buried land mine fuse. Meanwhile, 100 yards back behind the sandbags, a legless foreman pulls the trigger on a red megaphone. Squelching feedback. Drunken laughter. Broken English. His dead daughter’s picture. Time and tide, no one can anticipate the inevitable waves of change
Jul 19 2006 15:18
#17
Hi
revol68 wrote:
to be honest I'm actually quite happy to have some degree of punishment. Let the fuckers suffer.Revenge is given a bad press, I just like to think of it as existentialist karma.
revol68 wrote:
well aren't you a Socratic scrotum.Tedious cunt.
Quite.
Love
LR
Jul 19 2006 16:24
#18
Jef Costello wrote:
I do not believe in punishment.
Great for you. Personally i don't care either way, if people want a degree of punishement in society, which ten to one they will, then i don't have a problem with that.
Assuming that many people, if left to their own devices with no threat of punishment, would not behave in an utterly selfish way is hippy daydreaming, with no basis in reality. Sure we don't murder people in their beds all the time, because we don;t want to live in a society where that could happen to us, but if we thought we could get away with something and there'd be no consequences, whos to say some of us wouldn't do it.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the concept of legally constituted authority, the problem is who weilds it and how and what the cl;ass basis of this authority is. In short capitalism corrupts ''justice'' to its own ends, but this does not mean that a democratically decided legal code could not be applied.
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Either we rehabilitate or we punish. If we punish then we should bring back the death penalty.
Flawed logic on all counts, firstly it doesn't neccesarily follow that punishment= death penalty and secondly, why is the death penalty such a bogeyman anyway. It would be neccesary in a revolutionary situation don't you think? As a last resort perhaps, but still political violence is still sadly essential even if it should be as limited as possible.
Jul 19 2006 17:44
#19
theres a difference between punishment and consequences, i wouldn't conflate the two.
Jul 19 2006 19:54
#20
magnifico wrote:
I think the 'punishment vs rehabilitaion' debate is not the whole story. Prison also allows a society to incarcerate people who are a danger to the public in a place where they cannot be dangerous. So even if someone is not able to be rehabilitated there is still an argument for imprisoning them, so they cannot cause any more damage. Of course executing them would achieve the same aim with less expense, but whether a society thinks that is acceptable is another debate.
#
Agreed. For me, nothing more needs to be said. Word. 8)
Jul 19 2006 20:08
#21
cantdocartwheels wrote:
Assuming that many people, if left to their own devices with no threat of punishment, would not behave in an utterly selfish way is hippy daydreaming, with no basis in reality. Sure we don't murder people in their beds all the time, because we don;t want to live in a society where that could happen to us, but if we thought we could get away with something and there'd be no consequences, whos to say some of us wouldn't do it.
Punishment and protection are surely entirely different?
Jul 19 2006 20:10
#22
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why is the death penalty such a bogeyman anyway
I think that an institional death penalty is granting all sorts of rights which ought not to exist.
If anyone is going to be arguing for killing people, I suggest they model their rationalization on political violence, something about myth maybe, or oppression.
And the difference between killing somone, and permanently imprisoning them, is clearly obvious. Sure, if conditions were semi-apocolyptic, but I thought that communism=abundance
Jul 20 2006 09:20
#23
Jack wrote:
cantdocartwheels wrote:
Assuming that many people, if left to their own devices with no threat of punishment, would not behave in an utterly selfish way is hippy daydreaming, with no basis in reality. Sure we don't murder people in their beds all the time, because we don;t want to live in a society where that could happen to us, but if we thought we could get away with something and there'd be no consequences, whos to say some of us wouldn't do it.Punishment and protection are surely entirely different?
Well I suppose theres a differnce between punishement to achieve some sort of hypothetical ''moral balance'', and punishment used simply as a deterrent. If you mean the moral balnce scenario, then fair enough i don't personally think its that great, but don't have a problem with it existing in society. As for the detterent scenario well then no then protection and punishment are utterly different, protection simply implies that the person should be prevented from reoffending, and as such isolated from society in some way, however pleasant or unpleasant this isolation is is simply a side effect of the preventative measure, so logically it should be as pleasant as possible. Punishment on the other hand implies that it is right that this isolation should be unpleasant to a certan degree because the individual is being punished for a crime they committed, this acts as a detterrent. In this sense i don't have anything against punishment for violent crimes.
Jul 20 2006 09:25
#24
cantdocartwheels wrote:
protection simply implies that the person should be prevented from reoffending, and as such isolated from society in some way, however pleasant or unpleasant this isolation is is simply a side effect of the preventative measure, so logically it should be as pleasant as possible. Punishment on the other hand implies that it is right that this isolation should be unpleasant to a certan degree because the individual is being punished for a crime they committed, this acts as a detterrent. In this sense i don't have anything against punishment for violent crimes.
Nonsense.
Detering people from mugging or whatever is clearly protecting society.
Jul 20 2006 09:34
#25
lem wrote:
Quote:
why is the death penalty such a bogeyman anywayI think that an institional death penalty is granting all sorts of rights which ought not to exist.
If anyone is going to be arguing for killing people, I suggest they model their rationalization on political violence, something about myth maybe, or oppression.
And the difference between killing somone, and permanently imprisoning them, is clearly obvious. Sure, if conditions were semi-apocolyptic, but I thought that communism=abundance
Personally i'd argue against it, and i'd hope that it would slowly be got rid of in a communist society (well once that society had become established anyway) but i don't see why its looked at as some great divider between a free society and oppression, a lot of people around the world view it as part of any stable justice system and will continue to do so for a long time, theres not much you can do about that and decrying anyone who beleives in the death penalty as barbaric isn't going to do much good.
Jul 20 2006 09:38
#26
Jack wrote:
Detering people from mugging or whatever is clearly protecting society.
Deterrence is an interesting one. It can only possible apply to pre-meditated crimes, and there the very pre-meditation takes more into account the apprehension of consequences rather than the severity of punishment. These consequences could just as easily be restorative as punitive, e.g. if a mugger thought it was highly likely she'd be caught and made to make amends for their crime they probably wouldn't bother.
Jul 20 2006 09:42
#27
Jack wrote:
cantdocartwheels wrote:
protection simply implies that the person should be prevented from reoffending, and as such isolated from society in some way, however pleasant or unpleasant this isolation is is simply a side effect of the preventative measure, so logically it should be as pleasant as possible. Punishment on the other hand implies that it is right that this isolation should be unpleasant to a certan degree because the individual is being punished for a crime they committed, this acts as a detterrent. In this sense i don't have anything against punishment for violent crimes.Nonsense.
Detering people from mugging or whatever is clearly protecting society.
yeah ok you're right in that sense, but that wasn't the original point of the thread which is why i said it depends what you mean by punishment
Jef costello wrote
Quote:
I think that it is a necessary measure to control a society in which received morality is unethical and is founded upon injustice. I do not believe a communist society will require punishment, if someone commits a crime the aim wil be to repair any damage caused and to prevent it happening again.It will still of course be impossible to replace a murdered person for example, but the desire to punish the killer will do nothing. If we have no intention of rehabilitating the killer then we should just execute him or her as it is far more efficient than prison.
My original point was that he's referring to punishment as simply the idea that a criminal should only be rahabilitated ro prevented from reoffending under communism, and that the need fro a threat as a ''neccesary measure of control'' only exists under capitalism, which is what i disagreed with, because it seems to be founded on the nonsensical notion that under communism, we'll all be nice to each other.
I largely agree, but the distinction between punishment/vengence and rehabilitation/justice is a qualitive one, insofar as the acts involved, e.g. temporary confinement/restriction of freedom can be quantitively equivalent.
you could still argue that 'beyond reasonable doubt' is never certain, and thus execution leaves no room to amend for mistakes - the liberal pro-punishment argument.
I think the obvious libertarian communist approach to crime has to be a radical one, literally, as in to the roots. Liberal criminology diagnoses social causes for crime then seeks to reconcile criminals with the sick society by chucking a few grants into deprived areas. We obviously want to uproot the (anti)social relations that perpetuate the dialectic of crime and punishment, but the issue of what to do about crime in a libertarian context, now or 'after the revolution', is a vital one. Punishment is a crime, so that leaves us with restorative justice.