by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright June 2014
Sending people to jail and prison has deep emotional roots. It has to have because otherwise the huge cost to the American community in particular would be considered more fully and alternative solutions devised and implemented. In this it has much in common with its social companion, the War on Drugs.
Prison is a form of exile, which is a common practice in the Neolithic Village environment as a form of dispute resolution. In the prison form it is mixed with the "cooling off" concept of keeping temporarily insane people confined until their sanity returns. Think Westerns of the 1950's and 60's with the drunk sleeping it off a jail cell in the sheriff's office.
What this essay will explore is how post-snap communities will want to handle these deeply emotional issues of dispute resolution, exile, rehabilitation and enfranchisement. These are all issues swirling around the current criminal systems.
The questions of what is a crime and how to deal with it date to pre-history. An example of how instinctive this issue is: The crime and punishment play in young child's play. The ritual of commit a stylized crime, get caught, go to jail for a while, then get released is part of child's play around the world.
A related phenomenon that Neolithic Villages had to deal with was temporary violent insanity. This could be due to over-indulging in mind altering, ravages of disease, mental disorder, passionate rage, and other reasons. If the person was likely to recover their sanity and again be a contributing member of the community, they would be restrained in some fashion while they "slept off" the violent phase of their insanity. If recovery seemed unlikely death or exile were alternatives.
Fast forward through many iterative alterations and we get to today's criminal justice, jail and prison systems in civilized communities. Because of the powerful instincts involved there is a lot of ritual built into the justice and criminal systems, and that means a lot of waste is tolerated.
Using America as an example: Americans are taught we are and should be a tolerant society. But the harsh reality is that many communities are quite willing to exile many members over their:
o mind-altering practices -- War on Drugs
o treatment of children -- Sex Offender Registries
o ways of talking about other people -- Hate speech rules and regulations
The result is contemporary America has far and away the largest exile population (prison population) of any civilized country. This is tolerance in action?
And as has been pointed out for decades by those who want to make the prison system work better, these people in prison don't do much. They don't rehab much, they wait.
Historically, exiles went somewhere else. In the new place far away that they went to, they would get a fresh start and either learn from their mistakes or repeat them. If they learned they became valuable members of their new community. If they were repeaters death would catch up with them because no community could find value in their being around.
As late as the 1960's, when the US Army was still a conscript army and Vietnam was calling, judges would sometimes offer young male offenders the "Three or Two" choice -- sign up for two years in the army or get sentenced to three in jail. Joining the army was a form of exile and rehabilitation.
Nowadays, because the world is so interconnected, it's hard to go somewhere and get that fresh start, and current community members today don't recognize that that option was often successful -- instead they are reminded painfully of the times it was tried and failed because that outcome makes a juicy media story.
Related is how much Americans are entertained by courtroom drama. Afternoon law shows are plentiful and the OJ Simpson trial captured the nation's attention for most of a year in 1995.
The current criminal systems of the US are swirling in popular ritual. This means that change will come as what people take for granted changes, not because of some change in harsh reality affecting affordability. What people take for granted will change how they want a ritual conducted. An example in the criminal context is how to conduct a public execution -- which these days often includes not conducting it at all. An example in a non-criminal context is how what marriage is about changes from one generation to the next and one community to the next.
This means that prison systems around the world are likely to grow. From the point of view of providing basic necessities, it doesn't make much difference if those are being provided to a person living in a parent's basement or in a prison cell. The prison version is more expensive, but as a community's prosperity grows, that alternative becomes more and more affordable.
What may happen in the future is more specializing and customizing in exile forms -- there can become more different kinds of prisons and sentencing. What will be consistent is that changes will depend mostly on community emotions surrounding the exile ritual, not on costs or outcomes of the exile program.
How cyber lying and other technology surprises will fit into this, I'm not sure. Parts of mankind have consistently looked for a "demon" or "criminal gene" that could be exorcized and make a person "good" again. The Eugenics Movement of the early 20th century became famous for that aspiration turning sour. And the totalitarians of the 1930's were also searching. It's emotion-based, so that search will continue, but since "being criminal" is so arbitrary it's hard to imagine much useful coming from this search.