I am a Doctor now

[grue]

it may be wishful thinking but i think without structures imposed by capitalism far less people will need to be actually punished. will there still be people who rape and murder? absolutely. i don’t know if i believe someone can be born evil but i think that you can be predisposed to violent acts. but i think the main motivation behind those crimes behind everything else is entitlement and exploitation, both of which would be drastically reduced if not eliminated

in cases of sexual assault and things like that yeah the perpetrator needs to be isolated. id like to say i think rapists can be rehabilitated. intellectually i know it’s possible. emotionally idk. either way the victim shouldn’t be forced to encounter the person who hurt them just so the person could potentially be rehabilitated.

yeah proactive detainment is fucking goofy you can’t just assume someone is gonna commit a crime. prevention is a social thing that everyone should take part in, everyone should make sure others know to respect people’s bodily autonomy and that violations of that won’t be accepted (of course this is just about violent crime again. i won’t ever believe that petty thieves or like drug users deserve any type of significant state punishment)  but of course my solution to this is also communism lmao

idk about over there but here im sure you already know all about the school to prison pipeline and how slavery is allowed in prisons via the constitutional amendment that “outlawed” slavery. bet u can guess why i think the theory is incoherent from most people (ill tell u it’s because there’s no deeper analysis of capitalism involved in it)

I think it's fair to say that imprisonment goes hand in hand with the rise of capitalism yes, as with the modern state. it's the whole demographic control thing, structures of discipline spread through society (school / hospital / factory / prison) to organize people in discrete arrangements

as for the psychology of violence, there's yet another can of worms; actually one of the reasons why I like this subject so much is that it intersects so many areas that you simply can't go at it alone - I can personally say I've met some particularly vicious people and it's some eerie shit, it's hard to distance yourself emotionally from the evil in the other person, absolutely. and I'm thoroughly uneducated on the subject, and gladly so, it must be so brutally taxing to be a psychologist in this field I can only admire ones who go for it

BUT criminologists do keep hammering that there's a lot of nurture in dissident behaviours, though not necessarily as one would expect. one perspective that I like to entertain is to adress violent areas as extensions of capitalism on a thoroughly unregulated level. there was a french sociologist that said delinquency is ultimately a pure form of comformity - it's being a part of a market economy but outside of the access to its regulations. so gang violence, drug trade, human traffic can be seen as extreme forms of engaging in capitalism. of note here is how prisons don't do anything to curb these markets but instead act as a check or damper that prevents lower classes from going "up"

which though, doesn't adress the fundamental concern of "evil people" and what to do with them. I... don't know. and it's hard to sympathise with them, which shouldn't affect how one thinks of these issues but I can't lie and say it doesn't. but I at least think that punishment doesn't really solve any problem either. we need to think outside of this, I guess christian, mentality that says "bad thing + punishment = balance". It's simply not true that extended punishment solves the initial problem - there's the instant gratification of sending a bad guy to jail, and the comfort of anulling a threat, but we're missing the "what to do with this person" part of the equation. it's an open question, and the debate is hardly being had

also just to clarify my point, when I mention proactive detainment I don't mean arresting without a crime (I don't see how that could ever be a good thing); instead, it's the delivering of proportionally harsher sentences and incarcerating by default, usually to target certain behaviours. there are some areas where that's a good thing - in domestic violence cases, it's common practice here to arrest the agressor even before trial, because there's a sense of urgency; but the same processes are used to incarcerate minorities at higher rates than others, because there's the bias of perceived risk. note how "tough on crime" lawmakers that defend the harsh policing (and killing!) of black people all default in explaining that by them being "more criminal" than others. there's a cold rationality to it, like they're not working on bias, just numbers (the numbers that fit that narrative, that is). it's some muddy shit I agree

edit: there aren't talks around here of a school-to-prison pipeline but there are direct relations between prison populations and certain urban neighbourhoods - the Bairros - where if you're born there you're very likely to end up in jail or at the very least visit it very frequently. but again, our proportion of incarcerated people pales in comparison with the USA. the USA's prison system is a very unique beast, last time I checked there were more prisoners in the USA than in the rest of the world, both in absolute numbers and relative to its size. to put it in perspective, there are more people in prison, like the actual number of prisoners, in the USA than in India or China, though these have triple the population. it's insane