Prison healthcare exists but is by no means a gold standard. It just needs to be good enough to not be negligence or abuse in terms of obligations. The stories are still rare enough to warrant their own news articles.

There is a long history of infamous "donut holes" in medical coverage via things like Medicaid on state by state basis. Even without the benefits people become better off as a write-off to collectors than to attempt pursuit, a state somewhat derogatorily called judgement-proof.

Yep. IIRC, if you've been incarcerated in the past year, that's an automatic in to state healthcare. They don't exactly advertise this, but it's pretty well-known.

Punishment isn't any sort of compensation. Victims receive compensation. Compensation replaces a portion of the loss represented by crime. Perpetrators receive punishment, and it doesn't replace anything. It actually represents even more loss (in the US to the tune of something like $40K a year per prisoner.)

edit: Punishment for the victim is like a gift-wrapped empty box. It doesn't fix anything that the crime did, and the system pretends like they're doing it for the victim. The system punishes perpetrators in order to stop the victims from doing it themselves. It's not a favor.

A model like this is prone to devolving into forced servitude or even slavery.

Also any non trivial work requires a degree of care by the laborer to ensure quality, how does this model enforce quality? Physical force? Extending servitude?

I am far from a fan of incarceration state. However criminal justice discussions frequently ignore or discount the drawbacks of proposed solutions.

I disagree. Victims of assault aren't after "revenge" - they're after safety. The goal of prosecution and jailtime specifically is to ensure that the perpetrator doesn't do it too them again, and to society to ensure the perpetrator doesn't keep doing it.

Most victims would prefer absolute assurance the perpetrator cannot come near them again - i.e I suspect if offered "give them jail time" or "force them to stay out of your half of the country, with GPS tracking to ensure compliance" then almost all would choose the latter.

> There's some studies that shows that while effective at changing behavior, it also teaches the kid that violence is sometimes necessary, a lesson that I'm not sure if we should be teaching them.

Isn't that true, though? Violence is sometimes necessary.

Teaching a child that violence is never necessary is just as bad as teaching the child that violence is always necessary.

> Punishments are absolutely necessary …

No, this isn’t true at all. My teenager has never been punished once in his life, and he’s turning into an excellent human: hard-working, compassionate with self and others, honest.

I would define punishment as “intentional infliction of suffering for purposes of behavior modification.” As stated, that’s flatly unethical, especially with your own family.

Now, he experiences consequences of his actions all the time. Scratch the counter-top? Win an afternoon of helping me refinish it. That works because it’s directly connected to his actions, and because I treat it as a learning opportunity rather than yelling at him or banishing him.

There are more possibilities than “punishment or permissiveness.” Kids need structure and to understand and experience age-appropriate consequences for their actions. But that doesn’t mean they need arbitrary suffering imposed by people they’re supposed to love.

> To change a person's behavior. If someone keeps lying, cheating, and stealing in society, we want to make them to stop so that they can reintegrate and become a beneficial member of society.

I think a common criticism of this stance is, that it does not ask why a person does something that others want to punish. Obviously there sometimes are no answers, but often it's poverty and lack of options. So this begs the question, why people come to steal and murder etc.

I personally don't believe that "punishment" is usually well invested in a person. Rehabilitation and support structures are probably the better option.

I am also realising that it gets very interesting for white collar crime "without a victim" such as tax evasion or manipulation of stocks. My intuition is to punish exactly these crimes, but I think that's my bias showing.

> Anyone who has ever trained a dog or other animal knows how to use animal psychology / punishments / rewards to change the animal's behavior.

Use of punishment in dog training is actually pretty hotly debated. Not that it doesn't work, but that it has consequences beyond what are intended and that substitution, redirection, and rewards result in a happier and more obedient pet.

As well, we need to clearly distinguish "punishment" and "revenge".

Revenge is an emotional response by those who have been wronged in the past.

Punishment can mean many things (so perhaps we need more specific words), but I believe in this context it is meant to be a rational, conscious act to influence behaviour - though there are other kinds of punishment, and it can be difficult to distinguish. A parent may raise their voice very intentionally, without actually being angry, to gain attention, distinguish and underline a point, or elicit quick obedience (i.e. a "STOP!!!" when a child is about to dart on the road), but they may also raise their voice out of impulse, emotion, frustration, with no specific goal in mind and thus no clear direction or "win conditions".

(I've only recently learned of the phrase "omnidirectional ass-chewing" [1], which is a very intentional demenour and environment for receiving marines to put them into a constantly stressful environment to train focus. It LOOKS like random angry yelling, but is in fact extremely studied, careful, and intentional. )

1: Section 6, "Yelling" https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/03/why-is-boot-camp-so...

>>Perhaps we've gone too far with jail times in the USA

Perhaps? I dont think that is even debatable at this point. I would encourage you to research actual treatment of prisoners in the US, we in the US are critical of nations like Russia, and China while willfully ignoring the abuse that occurs every day in US prisons.

>Anyone who has ever trained a dog or other animal

This right here is the exact reason for this abuse, it is common for the US prison system, and the correctional officers to dehumanize the prisoners and treat them like animals, not cuddly pets or dogs, but like the worst animal abuse stories you here from the traveling carnivals that used to keep Elephants and Loins for show.....

We need MASSIVE reform of both the criminal system, and prison system. I am not talking about being "weak" on crime like seems to be the norm today, refusing to prosecute crimes, and letting people out immediately but "tough on crime" does not have to involve the dehumanizing treatment, and outright abuse that occurs that leads to nothing productive, no rehabilitation, and more often than not non-violent criminals go in non-violent but come out extremely violent.

There is NOTHING redeeming about the US Prison system

Negative Reinforcement ≠ Punishment. This is a common mistake. Negative Reinforcement is the removal of an adverse stimuli. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement#Negative_reinfor...

A lot of adults punish children, because it makes them feel good. They do it again and again despite kids behavior not getting better.

People often punish out of anger and their kids are badly behaved as a result.

> Have you considered that maybe there is a reason that otherwise different societies have almost universally evolved to impose harsh punishments?

The linked article suggests that this sentiment actually comes and goes historically.

How do you know that in the long term, we're not evolving in the opposite direction, to not impose harsh punishments?

Have you ever been wronged in a substantial way? Something that shook you so much, that you carried it with you for months or years afterwards? It's the kind of thing that when it happens, you think: "I wish nobody else had to go through what I did".

If you haven't, consider yourself lucky. Some of us aren't so.

I'm on the same boat as you. I feel like when we do things that would be emotionally satisfying as a reaction to something, it is almost always the wrong thing to do in the bigger picture. The space of possible reactions is infinite, and picking the first choice coming to mind just feels totally wrong.

it's definitely a base instinct. When I'm stressed and preoccupied, lashing out is certainly easier than when calm.

I also wonder how people rationalize seeking punishment. More often than not, no forced act can undo wrought damage, particularly emotional damage, and people don't really feel better seeing others suffer, even if that's what they believe they want.

People also are extremely prone to forgetting the core intent of society's justice system and prisons, which is (or should be) reform, which is sad. Many balk at the idea that prison is humane in any dimension. We have a lot of growing to do :(

I think revenge probably evolved first and foremost as a deterrent. While it might feel satisfying to cause pain to someone who has hurt you, the damage has already been done and you can’t undo whatever damage you suffered. But you can show that there’s a cost to messing with you, which could prevent future aggression. I’d guess that’s why we feel the desire to punish in the first place.

No matter how many times my dad beat me or my mom yelled, it didn't instill discipline, just resentment. What worked to give me discipline was getting a job and living on my own. Simple incentive is all that's necessary to ensure people show up and do work.

> I worry that the collapse of discipline, among other things, leads to a great number of young people about to enter the world with totally misaligned expectations about surviving and thriving as an adult.

Is this not already the case? I’m not entirely sure how one might measure this, but boy does my gut tell me that its already happened.

I teach my children primarily to fix things by righting the wrong. I fully realize that not all wrongs can be righted, but it is a valuable starting point. So many times I've had the pleasure of seeing my children come up with genuinely ingenious ways to right a wrong.

In disputes where I'm playing referee between two of my children, I gravitate away from deciding who is right and who is wrong. Instead direct conversation around, what happened, what people need, and how we can satisfy those needs within the creative realm of reasonable possibility.

As a baseline for issues that don't have a clear needs-based line to follow, I consider the systemic issues involved and re-engineer systems to incentivize good behavior and disincentivize bad behavior. Most often this takes the form of natural consequences.

Finally, I don't have angelic children. The reason it works is because we've been doing it for years, not because my children are more compliant, or I'm some saint. We all get upset, angry, and do things we regret. What we are all invested in is having a shared desire to make things better than we found them.

What I am skeptical of, however, are responses which attempt to frame children as willfully non-compliant. That says more about the person describing the behavior than the behavior itself.

Personally I don't want to punish but rather inform: if you do this, this might/will happen. It doesn't imply that they're a bad person for doing what they did, just speaks more to the cause and effect of actions.

I think this may actually work better for kids. I think so often we praise/shame them, and they can get caught in a cycle of unpredictable self-worth. I dunno, for me, I like to let people know how I will most likely react to certain actions and tell them that even if I react that way, I will still love them. Punishing (with the intent to hurt them) often hurts me, so I'd rather not try to hurt them. That being said, I do want people to know if they punch me in the face, I may punch them back, leave the bar, or strongly distance myself from them physically. I just want people to be more aware of consequences rather than feel like they're a bad person for choosing their actions.

> How do we discipline without punishing? How can we discipline our kids but avoid making them feel bad?

It's not clear what those questions mean.

  discipline verb
  disciplined; disciplining
  transitive verb
  1 : to punish or penalize for the sake of enforcing obedience and perfecting moral character

What type of discipline do you mean? The self discipline to behave in a way that enables you to live a good life? Or external discipline that makes you behave in a way (not necessarily a good way) out of fear of punishment?

Which of these are desirable?

Is it possible and efficient to instill the former using punishment?

Today’s anti-moralist stance is very moralist itself. It’s funny how cultural colonialism is going at full speed today. Yet many people think this brings post-colonial justice.

I agree that it's a potentially slippery slope, which would need to be carefully addressed and constantly balanced. Not all laws need to be eternal, some just apply to the current social status.

I think your principles also come from us not defining any clear separation between minor violence (a slap, a shove, anything that completely heals within a week and is a singural episode) and major violence (breaking a bone, acid attacks, etc) -- in the same way there is a distinction between asault and battery.

Punishment is actually not my intented point, it's having negative repercussion for a large class of antisocial behaviour.

Being rude and verbally abusive in many situations for instance gives you a stricly positive outcome, from a game theory perspective. I'm arguing to add something in the mix to make that outcome negative, and corporal punishment and shaming are the only things I can see.

Yeah, or imagine what effect adding 50 lashed to the CEO on those $100 million fines that get easily paid.

There definitely is an element of vengeance in capital punishment as well. "Eye for an eye".

I am not fully on board with that, but, on the other hand, I cannot pretend to myself that I'd consider "Eichmann being hanged" somehow morally bad or evil. In a sense, he had it coming, like many of his peers. More recently, the people who raped and killed their way through Bucha, deserve the same treatment.

But I can see that them hanging won't deter further butchers of next Buchas. People commit such crimes while feeling virtually sure that they won't ever be punished for them, and they are often right - too many war criminals expired in a luxurious bed at home. Notably, Stalin's executioners were never tried by an international tribunal unlike their Nazi counterparts, because the USSR won the war.

If the butchers of Bucha were to hang, it would be mostly motivated by vengeance.

Capital punishment certainly works as a deterrent in the sense that a dead person commits no crime. But the way its conducted and the number of false positives makes me not a fan, in most cases. I imagine there are some situations where it is highly effective, but only if done immediately; I cannot fathom the whole "death row" thing for those hypotheticals. I believe strongly in innocent until proven guilty, speedy trial, due process, beyond a reasonable doubt, preponderance of evidence, trial by jury of peers, and all that fun stuff, and I acknowledge even all that goes wrong sometimes. However, assuming full uncoerced confession and irrefutable evidence and eyewitness testimony, why do we still make a (say, serial killer) suffer in death row instead of just execute them immediately? Revenge?

Sure, that's exactly my point: capital punishment is over the top, and prevention would have been achieved with much less.

If light corporal punishment were shown to be just as efficient at prevention as a 1-year in jail sentence, would you consider it?

Interesting that you're ok with some system of social credits. Even in the ideal scenario, I see two major issues with it:

1. People often don't perceive purely numerical losses properly, just like credit cards make people overspend compared to cash.

2. It sounds like in order for it to be effective, it would need to have very low forgiveness. If the punishment has a high duration, it makes rehabilitation difficult.

We do need to figure out deterrents for minor bad behavior in modern society, and first need to have a list of criteria by which to judge these deterrents.

It sounds as if you lived in a place where the rule of law was also absent, and you are right that violence can often spiral. Could you say where this was?

What is was envisioning was a decriminalization of minor violence as long as we can't criminalize general rude behaviour and I just wanted to explore that idea.

I suspect there are still consequences here, but GP commenter does not regard them as punishment. I can't imagine parenting without any consequences. Like, I'm going to grab your arm if you run into the road, obviously. Where you draw the line on that depends on the parent.

Lecturing being a punishment is too flimsy a proposition to build a credible argument on top of. Hardly anyone could see it that way for more than a few seconds without pulling a muscle. At worst it's simply asserting your status as the parent.