#yknow what no reblogs either this remains the reading comprehension website

[otatma]

alright so the consistently excellent @curlicuecal challenged me in a thread about justice and prison reform after a weird comment. and the more I thought about it the more I realized there's a pretty large rant there which I definitely started in the middle of.

so, I'll put more of that rant down here. yes, on the reading comprehension website. (if you are a minor, or if you have any concerns at all about the limits of your reading comprehension, I implore you to keep scrolling and not click the readmore. this is a messy topic.)

I'll try to keep it as straightforward as I can while remaining lucid.

the first thing to address is the definition of crime.

if a ceo sails in to some company, sacks half their workforce, kicks years of products out the door that actively hurt people, tanks all their goodwill, dumps gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere, drives species to extinction, ruins hundreds of thousands of lives, and so on... that is crime on a planetary scale.

if some politician systematically sabotages their own nation's ability to respond to a deadly plague, and then tells countless lies about how that plague is actually harmless, leading to millions of preventable deaths from that plague, that is also crime on a planetary scale.

if a spree killer blows up a building and kills a thousand people, that is a massive crime.

if some politician were to tell countless lies, spend vast resources on propagating those lies, cultivate a population of brainwashed people who believe those lies over reality, and then try to overthrow a lawful government by whipping those brainwashed people up into an angry mob, that would be a crime.

if someone commits murder or rape, that is a crime.

if someone grows a thousand pounds of marijuana and sells it to people, that is not a crime.

if someone fucks nasty and needs an abortion one or nine months later, that is not a crime.

if someone amuses themselves or manages their pain with heroin or methamphetamine or nanobots or some amazing new thing that someone invented last week, that is not a crime.

if someone steals a loaf of bread or a blanket to keep themselves from starving or freezing, that is not a crime. likewise for squatting in unoccupied housing, etc.

if someone decides that their gender assigned at birth isn't the right gender for them, that is not a crime. same deal if we feel weird about what they do to present the right gender for them. same deal if we for whatever reason feel weird about the people they like to fuck. those are not crimes.

if someone has a disability, visible or otherwise, that is not a crime.

if someone writes a fiction story where any of the above is depicted, even in loving detail, that is not a crime.

fairly simple stuff, but it bears repeating. the first and most important thing that needs fixed is the way we define crime. right now the worst criminals are running the world, because many of our definitions of crime are screwed up. right now millions of innocent people are imprisoned and enslaved, because many of our definitions of crime are screwed up. (and kept that way by the interests of vulture capitalism, but I digress.)

most of the human beings in prison right now shouldn't be there, and the reason they shouldn't be there is because many of our definitions of crime are screwed up.

the second thing to address is the way crimes are tried.

I don't like our court system.

I don't like judges running a court the way a captain runs their ship. (racist judge? racist judgments.)

I don't like voir dire. I'm not even entirely sure I like jury trials, given the state of education in our society (but I digress).

I don't like forcing people into plea bargains against their own interests.

there are myriad problems with the way we actually try crimes and the way we get verdicts out of that process. it needs reform. maybe we could start by throwing out every idea that we inherited from European settlers and putting something together from what remains. maybe that's stupid. I genuinely don't know. but what we're doing right now is super not working.

the third thing to address is the way we treat those we've convicted as criminals.

sticking someone in a big stone and metal box with a bunch of slave drivers doesn't fix them, it makes them worse. we've proven this many times over. 99% of convicted criminals need a hand up - assistance from social workers, better opportunities, a change in circumstances (e.g. not forced to find a place in a society that is wildly prejudiced against them), release from the demands of a vulture capitalist system (again I digress), etc.

so, given all that, I do still see a need for at least one prison in our society. this is the fourth thing to address.

there comes a point where a society needs to stop someone from doing the thing they're doing. this is why I led with the examples of the berserk CEO and the narcissistic politician.

the scale of their ability to cause harm makes their rights secondary to the rights of the people they are hurting, in that many more people will get hurt if they're left to do what they want than will get hurt if they're restrained. this is the point where it no longer matters if we make them worse - because ignored, they will make everyone else worse.

in a society where the ideal is that everyone should be treated the same under the law, leaving berserk CEOs and narcissistic orange politicians free to run around mass-producing lies and harm violates that ideal.

THOSE are the only people that belong in prison. the corrupt, prioritized in order of the scale at which they can cause harm. not to reform them. not even to punish them. simply to stop them until the right specialists can figure out what their deal is, and the least harmful method of taking their power away for keeps. This is the only defense I can offer in favor of prisons.

our ongoing failure to treat honestly with this problem and enact a working solution is a massive miscarriage of justice. it isn't as bad as enslaving millions of innocent people and ruining the prospects of hundreds of millions more, though.