On prison and Christian thought

Recently someone posted the note below on my post regarding prison and recidivism. However, I forgot to answer it, so here it is in full:

Great post. Would that we all would take chances on those in prison. So often we stop after visiting the, if we even do that!

I wonder if Orthodox thought has addressed the fundamental idea of prison. To me the premise seems fundamentally flawed. Sure, perhaps some people need to be kept away from society if they are a real danger to others, psychopaths, hardened murderers and the like.

But is it really appropriate punishment for the petty thief, the marajuana user or other criminals who pose little danger ot the rest of the world to lock them away and waste years of the precious life God gave them away from their families, their friends, the productive work they could be doing?

It seems the punishment of stealing a man’s life for his crime is absurdly harsh and there must be a better solution.

This raises a second question, does stealing a man’s life for a few years really in any way “pay his debt to society?”

Does he really owe a debt to society in the first place? If he stole, did he steal from society, or from one man? If from one man, does he not owe a debt to one man, which he should pay back and then be free?

As I said at the outset, the whole system seems fundamentally flawed to me. Any thoughts, Father?

There is little doubt that old-time punishments were harsh. Capital punishment, forced servitude (permanent or temporary), floggings, etc. But, there were also compensation punishments in which the person had to restore the value stolen plus a penalty to the victim. Please note that I am not defending the old-time punishments. In merry olde England (as well as in Europe), they were grossly creative. Punishments such as hanging, drawing, and quartering (in England) and breaking someone on the wheel (Germany) were not uncommon, let alone branding, burning alive, etc.

In reaction to the deliberate torture punishments and torture capital punishments that had become common in Europe, our founding fathers insisted that punishments could not be either cruel or unusual. Please note that flogging was still allowed as well as the stocks and capital punishment. Their definition of cruel and unusual was different than ours. Nevertheless, it was a very significant change from what had been common in Europe. Frankly, it was a change that was needed in that Europe had extreme and unusual punishments.

So, how did we get to our current position of incarceration? Well, long-term incarceration, as the main form of punishment only dates to the end of the 18th century. Incarceration came from a movement started by the Quakers:

The notion that imprisonment corrects criminals is a surprisingly recent idea. Before the 18th century, prisons were mainly used not to punish but to detain the accused or hostages-the debtor until he paid, for example. To combat crime, Europeans castrated rapists, cut off thieves’ hands, tore out perjurers’ tongues. England boasted 200 hanging offenses. When crime still flourished, reformers argued that overkill punishment is no deterrent. In 1786, the Philadelphia Quakers established incarceration as a humane alternative. Seeking penitence (source of “penitentiary”), the Quakers locked convicts in solitary cells until death or release. So many died or went insane that in 1825 New York’s Auburn Prison introduced hard labor-in utter silence.

I have deliberately quoted an article from 41 years ago. Before the current system of prisons had reached its 200 year anniversary, already that article pointed out what was acknowledged even back then. The Quaker ideal had fully failed. Notice that within 40 years of the beginning of the “penitentiary” movement, the rates of death and insanity in the prisons had grown so high that prisons were forced to give the criminals something to do in order to keep them alive and sane. That should have given a warning. What the Quakers did not realize was the power of solitary confinement to destroy a person. In fact, solitary confinement is actually a rather cruel punishment.

The Quaker idea was rehabilitation. Though that idea is still technically in vogue, it really reached its heyday by the 1970’s. The opposing idea in penology was retribution. So, the USA kept the idea of prisons, but there is little doubt that the public switched to a retribution model. In the 1980’s, under an increasing crime rate, penalties increased in harshness and more and more reasons were found to keep people in prison for longer and longer time. England may have boasted 200 hanging offenses, but we have hundreds of offenses for which we can put someone in jail for life, and, increasingly, life without parole. Moreover, under the impact of the victims’ rights movement, we now have victims and victims’ families competing in open court to see who can aver the more serious damage in order to convince the judge to increase the sentence.

What has been the result? We have both the largest number of people in jail and the largest proportion of people in jail of any country on earth. Both in gross number and as a percentage of the population, no other country can match us in the statistics for people in jail. More than that, we are only one of a couple of countries that allow children as young as 11 to be tried and sentenced as adults in court.

But, more than that, in the long run the system, as it is currently run, has caused damage to both secular and Christian culture in the USA.

===MORE TO COME===