(01-24-2018, 12:55 PM)tg63 Wrote:(01-23-2018, 07:11 PM)nebraska Wrote: Why not just put every American in prison when they're born?
you should ask this of people who have actually spent time in prison ... I'm sure they think it's pretty much the same outside as inside ...
Indeed, the one thing that prison does badly is to prepare offenders to be non-offenders. Prison is intended to scare people from doing certain things, whether stealing cars, using or dealing in drugs, or (in some countries) expressing ideals inimical to the interests of the rulers or the Master Class. (For a real scare, the government might have the gallows or a firing squad available -- and at times even an Iron Maiden, breaking wheel, predatory animals, or burning alive). Ex-offenders rarely learn how to fit the usual acquisitiveness and hedonism one expects in people once they are no longer under the control of a prison. Prison compels a concern for day-to-day existence at a low level of need (avoid getting into big trouble with the bureaucracy or worse, other offenders), a level at which few employers operate.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.