Quote from: semaforo on July 18, 2013, 03:37:42 PM

Any other comments on the idea I described?

Quote

I've been working on an idea for a while, this seems like a chance to put it up for comment.

It's basically hybridizing the refuge camp and the prison. The idea is that if you group criminals together, they are going to become more criminal. If I hang out with southerners, eventually I am going to develop a drawl- peer group influences behavior. So criminals need contact with people who they can learn good habits from. The US accepts refugees all the time from places where there are wars or oppression going on, and the idea is to get these people working in small facilities on patches of land, say, a house with 8 bedrooms each with 2 to 4 bunk beds, a big communal kitchen and living area, a workshop and a farm. Maybe a few goats and cows, chickens, vegetables, corn and potatoes and some fruit trees, beehive and duck pond. Maybe a workshop for furniture, window frames, clothing. Take 10 low risk inmates selected for the program because of good behavior in prison, and 10 recent immigrants from Africa and Asia, and 4 -6 staff. The immigrants can get green cards based on good work results, and the inmates can get their sentence reduced.

This way there is a majority of non-criminals in the work group, so the momentum of peer pressure in the groip will be towards non-criminal behavior. Since the immigrants and the criminals can both work for less than minimum wage to secure their early release or green card, the projects can be self sustaining. Currently eajch prisoner costs over 20k a year- a project like this could cost half that, since they would produce their own food, and the food and crafts could even be sold at a profit. In the mean time people would build relationships, learn work ethic, and learn non-criminal thinking. Bad behavior or violence would mean getting sent back to prison or having the visa revoked. Prisoners could be tracked with a tracking chip, so if they run off they would be easily found again. There would also be cultural exchange and people could learn about other parts of the world and maybe broaden their horizons.

This would just be a way to reduce the number of people in prison and kind of decentralize the system.

I've heard of stuff .... kind of like this before that is done in other countries, and my response is kind of "meh". I remember watching a news clip on how in Norway, their prisons are set up like little dorms and prisoners do in fact garden within the prison bounds. It works for Norway because they happen to have a small, wealthy population that doesn't have the deeply ingrained problems that Western society has, so I don't know how that'd work here.

Then again we already have minimum security prisons for low-risk prisoners in the U.S. anyway, so I don't see how this could really rehabilitate the people whom, if we accept the premise of the topic, need to be rehabilitated more -- the violent, dangerous criminals. And they're the ones who'd put the immigrants in the program you propose in the greatest danger.

The truth is that there is a genetic component to the behavior of lots of violent criminals -- sociopathy, et. al -- that CAN'T be fixed, so unless this is looked at on a case-by-case basis and the system picks out the exceptions to the rules, all this talk about rehabilitation is just a waste of time, one that I feel is advocated by people who are only doing this to make themselves feel better and not for the good of society.