If a man takes sexual advantage of a child, then we will take his manhood!
A man in Louisiana was not only sentenced to life imprisonment for raping and videoing children, but will also be involuntarily chemically castrated. Now, while I am not a fan of the death penalty, especially when conviction isn't completely fool proof, if a guy makes videos of himself raping children, well - that is beyond a shadow of doubt (as long as verified as not AI) and perhaps the punishment of castration is okay. However, why would it only be for the rape of children, considering that these days there is video evidence of many rapes that have taken place. Should castration be applied to all such cases where there is zero doubt?
However, in most cases, chemical castration is reversible, so perhaps surgical castration should be the go to method in these cases, so there is no opportunity to go back. I don't think there would be a major loss to society if they were taken out of the gene pool. I do wonder if the punishment for rape was severe, would it stop some people, or just stop them recording it?
The world is falling apart and I think we as a people are on average getting worse in a number of ways, especially when it comes to our desires and willingness to satisfy them, no matter how much suffering it causes to others. However, if we only focus on the worst, how are we going to improve at the other end of the scale?
For example, there are almost 200,000 people incarcerated on a life sentence just in the US, which is pretty incredible if you think about it. Most of those are for murder. It is likely that some percentage of them are innocent, but what percentage that might be is unknown. Still, those who are innocent of what they are locked up for, doesn't mean they are innocent of other crimes.
But think about this for a moment.
The average cost of housing inmates in the US is about $60,000 per year, and that is obviously going to go up depending on the type of incarceration required. Housing in supermax cells is about 75,000 a year, and there about 25,000 in those. But we can work with 60K for now. For those 200,000 prisoners, it costs 12 billion a year.
On any one night in the US there is about 700,000 homeless people. The cost of housing a homeless person with basic needs for a year is around 32,000. That means that if the money spent on life sentence inmates was diverted to housing the homeless, that would mean 375,000 people off the US streets.
What if a life sentence was truly a life sentence meaning that they were all death sentences. No wait thirty years before carrying it out, but making it say, after the first year of incarceration. Yes, some percentage of innocents would be killed, but at the same time, there would be hundreds of thousands of other innocents off the street. And for the record, around 134,000 of the homeless in the US are children. Maybe, rather than paying to keep people who harm children alive, the spending should go to helping children overcome adversity.
You want to know something interesting?
In Finland, the incarceration rate is around 63 per 100,000 residents. In the US it is 542 per 100,000. That is a 860% more per 100,000. That is incredible, isn't it? Stopping some of that crime and all the resources used to deal with it would definitely loosen up some funding for something else? But of course in the US, prison is a business.
We are dealing with a lot of problems in this world, yet a huge amount is being spent on handling the worst behaviours of society. It isn't only the cost of housing, but it is all the other costs that come along before and after. Why spend money to keep a proven paedophile or murderer alive, when the same money could be spent on the victims of these crime and preventing them in the future?
So much of our resources go into useless systems when they could go toward something that actually benefits society. Sure, a reformed prisoner is great, but wouldn't it be great to have a society where the prisoner wasn't created in the first place?
Research indicates that between 29% and 68% of incarcerated people experienced physical, sexual, or emotional abuse or neglect as children, depending on how abuse is defined and measured.
Charity might start at home, but it seems that future incarceration also may also be obtained in the same place. Maybe those who are convicted of severe physical abuse of their partner or children, should not only get a restraining order put on them, but also a dose of lithium to stop violent outbursts. Maybe it should be the same for all violent crime convictions with repeat offenders, where they are so hopped up on mood stabilisers they can no longer be angry at all.
Look, I am not actually recommending any of this, but I believe that we spend far too much resources on people and systems that add very little value to society. If we are to improve our wellbeing conditions, we have to start spending resources on what makes positive impact, rather than what limits negative. We need to create conditions that promote wellbeing, which will naturally reduce the various social disorders that we are seeing increase in society today.
If you don't make the world a better, you lose your place.
Intentionally harming others is a clear indicator.
Taraz
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