Do you support Private or for-profit Prisons?

[Meursault]

As I reject the concepts of 'punishment' and 'rehabilitation' as being either achieved in the present punitive regime or as being meaningful psychological concepts (both are loaded terms designed to justify existing practices), this is a false dichotomy. As for what should be done, why not exile, stripped of any pretense of redemptive purpose? The State already justifies itself through the penal discourse: it can surely justify an exilic discourse instead. But this requires a reversal of the Christian belief that purity of soul can be obtained through monastic confinement.

[Meursault]

Again: why not exile as a viable alternative to penalization? Do we genuinely believe that concentration into a single rigid social structure will 'purify evil'? Then we have advanced no further than medieval mendicants. Many of those currently incarcerated have natures predicated much more strongly towards nomadism anyway. So give them a free space in which to wander and borders beyond which they shall not pass.

[Meursault]

Not space - not yet- but to the billions of acres of currently-fallow land held by governments the world over.

[Meursault]

Absolutely I would. And I'd hold that anyone willing to destroy the environment in the name of energy production has no ground to object to its destruction in the name of social amelioration. Better the Alaskan wilderness be homesteaded and improved by those who would otherwise waste away in captivity than be exploited by Exxon.

[Meursault]

In this thread? No. But it's an unspoken assumption in Ernest's counterargument to exile in particular, as a supporter of Keystone - that development of public land for energy production is fine, but using it to alleviate the conditions in the prisons is not.

[Meursault]

Given the choice between a two-room cabin on the taiga with a communal well and a chance to see the mountains and a cell on the block, I suspect most prisoners wouldn't need much coaxing to finish out their sentences in exile. A handful of guard towers with a small staff should suffice in preventing violence.