According to "Fire kills 16 inmates during prison protest in Guyana" (2016), prisoners who set fire to their beds after a police raid for banned personal property caused a fire that killed at least 16 of the prisoners being held in prison in capital city of the South American country Guyana. The BBC News article says that the prisoners "were protesting about overcrowding and delays for prisoners awaiting trial."
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My Yes/No question is:
Is it moral to use prison to punish people?
My answer is:
No, but it is morally OK to use prison for other reasons. Because people who commit crimes could not have done otherwise, it seems to me morally wrong to punish them. We do not, after all, punish 10 day old babies who knock an expensive glass off the table and smash it. Nor do we punish people who, for example, have a brain disease or psychological disorder that makes them kill people. What we do do in such cases is perhaps imprison them in a psychiatric hospital so that they are no longer a risk to other people. I think this needs to be applied generally. The only reason to lock people up in prison is because they are a likely threat to others in the future, not for anything they have already done in the past.
This might be the shortest blog post I've written this week. Actually, as I was having my morning coffee a bit late after a late night last night, I was browsing the news as usual, and I wanted to write one more example of a blog post responding to the news, but I didn't want to blog an article I thought that a student might want to use; this one seemed safe. I would normally skip over news from South America, but when I saw the title, the question immediately came to mind. I liked the question because it is, I hope, controversial, And controversial is good: it gives us something to disagree about with reasons and arguments to be presented and answered in the following comments and replies. That was also something I had had in mind when I wrote the blog post yesterday arguing that all drugs should be legalized, and with which no one has yet disagreed!
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Yes, it is moral for general cases of criminal fairly and correctly convicted. Your question, especially the word people, seems a bit ambiguous for me due to broad interpretation. That can mean people with mental disorders or normal people or babies who commit or do not commit crimes. Still, I like the reasons you support your answer, making me clearer.
ReplyDeleteIrrespective of someone who is mentally suffered or babies, it would be okay to punish those who are normal people committing crimes by using prison for two reasons. One is to stop future crimes and stop to threat other people. The other is to make them realize that they were wrong and should have not committed crimes. I do believe every criminals knows what happened if they do illegal activities, but they still continue due to many reasons. Most of them would be avarice or irritation. Some actions might result from social pressure or necessary reasons for surviving like stealing money for paying debt. However, there are a number of good, legal means to do instead of stealing money from banks or shops.
So, no matter what reasons lead them to commit crimes, they never care about morality at all although they know they are misbehaving. Yes, prison is one of the appropriate ways to punish them as criminals.
This post was probably prompted by my having another piece of work in mind that I'm thinking of using in the Reading and Speaking class this term. And Feem's comments usefully foreshadow a couple of the relevant issues.
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