Do you actually believe that anyone who enters the prison system is "taught that their behavior is unacceptable?" Many sources indicate that the more common response to incarceration is "criminalization" - that this child has a high probability of connecting with negative forces which will push him further down the path of his darkness.
I recommend you read "Discipline and Punish" by Foucault - I think it would open your ideas to the genealogy of some of the ideals underpinning your beliefs and apparent faith in the modern justice system.
Frankly, given the choice of a rock and a hard place, it is better to have a criminal in jail half his life and terrorizing society half his life, then terrorizing society for his entire life.
We aren't looking at Jean Valjeans here.
I would never claim to know how to set up a working mental health system or a functional system of criminal rehabilitation. What I claim is that the properties that these institutions have in the U.S. are MAINLY determined by historical accumulation (trauma -> reaction) rather than by organic growth from well-defined principles. I advocate the decompilation of these institutions and the organic outgrowth of new, community-based (preferably non-governmental) institutions.
I agree that there may be cases in which a "criminal" (your word, not mine) must be separated out from society [1], but that these cases are far, far rarer than most people believe. Most "criminals" in the U.S. are ethnic minorities suffering under an incoherent and evil system of drug criminalization.
From an unsystematic/non-governmental standpoint, I also believe that society needs to do more work in increasing its acceptance of different psychological and mental needs from a younger age. I'm very lucky that I was put in a "gifted" program because, had such a program not existed, my rage would have been intense, long-lasting, and I honestly may have killed someone. If my talents had been treated as a "difference" in the way that most peoples' are (exclusion from social events, bullying, emotional and mental abuse, punishment, etc.) I would have turned out very differently indeed.
Perhaps the reason that I feel so strongly about this topic is that there is a great deal of darkness in me (I don't believe everyone is like this). I throw a tremendous amount of personal effort at overcoming it/transforming it/thinking about whether it's really "darkness." During certain periods of history (including this one) homosexuality was seen as "darkness" in many places - now we think back on these periods as being backwards/bigoted/wrong. I must accept that some of my personal darkness is NOT bad/evil (e.g. some of my perverse sexual tastes) but that it only APPEARS bad to many people in society. I have come, through discussion and queer community support, to accept parts of myself that I have been ridiculed for and told were evil from a very young age - which ridicule and torment drove me deep into despair and hatred.
I suppose that I am ultimately advocating acceptance of darkness because I don't really believe in darkness. I believe that if we accept what we currently think about as dark (ultimately, for instance, it would be great if we could accept death) then we will see that it is not so dark after all.
THEN WE CAN LIVE HAPPILY EVER AFTER, THE END.
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[1] Let me be clear, here. I can't even really name any. Maybe certain serial killers/mass murderers - but who else? Who, really, needs to be put in permanent time-out, anymore? Can you even name anyone?
If what you care about is the damage done to society, someone who spends half their life in prison and then gets out will (on average) do far more damage in that half-life than they would have done in a whole life spent outside prison. Prison is quite literally worse than nothing when it comes to preventing reoffending
(though community service is better than either prison or nothing, IIRC)
I do believe that prison systems can be good at rehabilitation. Maybe not in the US, where you seem to be from, but it's working in many other countries in the world, look at the Nordic countries' prison system if you want proof. And even if the prison system doesn't manage to rehabilitate the person, it serves as a punishment. I don't see what's wrong with punishing behaviour that has been deemed unacceptable by society. At least it's better than doing nothing, and in my opinion has more of an impact than doing nothing and surrounding him "with a loving community".
What did they do to earn that trust?
The concept that one class of humans is the "punishers" who are teaching the other class(es) underlies most (if not all) fascist/authoritarian/racist ideologies of the last 3 centuries.
Of course you don't see what's wrong with punishing behavior that has been deemed unacceptable by society. Unfortunately, behavior that society is largely OK with (e.g. drug use) is punished nontheless - unfortunately, society can (and has often been) quite wrong about what should be punished (homosexuality, female sexuality, prostitution, sexual "perversion," drug & alcohol use, to name a few).
The fact is that the kid involved in this story didn't do anything "wrong" that could be easily trained out of him. Probably he has a whole set of complicated complexes of problems. For instance, one thing that many people in the US and UK (and other places) seem to suffer from is sexual/touch deprivation. Maybe if the kid were getting laid instead of playing on his laptop he wouldn't have engaged in such weirdo behaviors. I'm just sayin' - legalize drugs and prostitution and 99% of these problems go away.
While I mostly agree with you, this statement is quite a long shot.
So I'm Hitler now.
>legalize drugs and prostitution and 99% of these problems go away.
Seriously?
As I said in another comment: personally I hope my kid will end up doing what is right because he believes it the right thing to do, not because of fear of punishment.
Not saying that punishment is never necessary (I am not sure). Obviously it works, because people (and animals) can learn from pain. You learn if you touch the stove that it is hot and will burn you, so you will not touch it again.
Smart people might realize that their parents or society punishing them is not quite the same as a stove burning them, though. The one is a law of nature (heat burns), the other is just man made laws that can be resented and broken. Once you have installed that resentment against society and obedience in a person, you might have a real problem on your hands.
My parents never physically punished me, but as soon as I was old enough to understand what was going on, just knowing that I'd disappointed them would make me feel extremely bad. There's no resentment there. They taught me how to behave in a way that is acceptable in society and if I misbehaved I was aware that I was wrong. Hopefully that's how everything would go.
But as always, there will be bad apples (and good ones, too). What do you do when someone's such a sociopath that they don't care when they hurt other people? That's when I believe that punishment should be carried on by the society and not the parents, in the form of jail, probation, juvenile court, etc.
Is there any empirical evidence that operant conditioning doesn't work on humans?
