A mother teaching her teenage son to drive was killed in a road-rage shooting

BigNastyCowboy said:

Penalties are not a deterrent and there isn't enough jail space to hold all the felons. In addition, those incarcerated get free dental. medical, room and board, rehab, access to libraries, television and sometimes limited Internet access with more and more "visits" by televideo like Skype.

Ex-cons have a hard time finding a job or an apartment and are very resentful that they have paid their debt to society and yet they are still ostracized. Additionally, prisons are fraught (new word of the day) with drug abuse on the inside and felons leave with that dependency and the need for funds to buy more.

With no job, money has to come from crime. It's a vicious circle and recidivism (I worked hard to get slip that one in) is high. Some ex-cons prefer prison to "outside."

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Square Target 2 nailed it with "that makes two of us". If the bad guys prefer jail and we agree, then let's give them jail.

Penalties absolutely are a deterrent. Look at thievery rates in Saudi Arabia. I've read that no one even locks their cars and, in fact, they even leave the keys in them. There are penalties that will hugely reduce crime.

Of course there's enough prison space to hold the felons. The idea that we don't have room to keep them in prison but we have the room to put them back in prison is simply ludicrous. We put them in prison and they get out and commit more crimes and we put them back in prison so there was clearly enough room for them.

In fact, each prisoner in the US gets an average of 72 square feet. They need about 28 square feet - that's about 3x7 to sleep and 1 foot wide to walk to the toilet. No exercise yard is required because the physical labor of making little rocks out of large ones is exercise enough. But prison crowding would go way down in a generation as the bad guys get the message we're serious crime will drop way down and we might even close prisons.

You're right, though, about how justice involved individuals who become returning residents do have a stigma. They have a stigma because they weren't away on their State funded vacations for long enough and their time involved with the Justice System was too pleasant for them to be effective in its purpose.

When prison is made so terrible that people don't want to come back then we'll have more trust that those returning residents will no longer want to be justice involved and we'll happily take them under our wings.