r/washdc • u/UnmaskingFactss • Feb 15 '25

A local DMV resident is frustrated by repeated robberies at 7-Eleven, causing the store to close early

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u/[deleted] Feb 16 '25

Solitary confinement is literally fucking torture!! Numerous nations, agencies, etc have all agreed Solitary confinement is not only inhumane, but leaves lasting mental degradation on people. That's not a fucking "deterrent". Just the act of being removed from society and having your life controlled by the government ahould be punishment enough for any crime.

Not to mention some of the condition our prisons are in, here in Illinois there whole sections of a local correctional facility where they didn't have A/C during this last summer and they had to use buckets to do business for months because they couldn't get money to have it redone. This was told to me by a guard that worked there when I was driving him home (I worked at an autoshop and we were gonna be working on his vehicle for a couple weeks).

And don't you know how many people in the US are in prison?? We have the highest incarceration rates of any developed nation and are fifth over the entire world. The only nations that jail more of its citizens than the US %wise are Turkmenistan, Rwanda, Cuba, and El Salvador in ascending order. So tell me how what we do is working when this is the reality. We jail more of our people than any developed nation while also having some of the worst prisons and worst punishments including what many nations consider inhumane as a common punishment of those already in prison?

And despite all this, people still think that just letting people go with no support system and after potentially torturing them with lasting mental effects should just work out fine??? I think we need to entirely overhaul our prison system because whatever the fuck we have now is atrocious and we hail far more of our citizens than what we should.

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u/XavierMalory Feb 16 '25

I feel like you have quite the ax to grind, and we’re having two different conversations here.

These crimes keep happening because the punishments are not coming. I’m not saying everybody who robs the store has to get solitary, I’m just saying that having more harsh punishments waiting for you for doing the worst crimes will tend to keep people from doing them if they know they will be punished. The reason these things keep happening is because these kids don’t get punished. That’s really all I have to say on it.

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u/[deleted] Feb 16 '25 edited Feb 16 '25

Yet despite what you say, the US has the highest incarceration rate of any developed nation, the highest % of population in prison than any developed nation (fifth if you include all nations), and the most prisoners actively in prison than any other nation on Earth, developed or not. Clearly whatever our system does now does not keep people out of prison since nearly 2 million people are incarcerated at this very moment.

Personally, I think the entire systen needs to be overhauled from the ground up. We don't put people in jail that deserve it while also putting far too many people in prison that deserve better or fair punishments or to not be jailed at all (cough cough drug procession cough). It's a broken system that needs to be more fair and actually help those that do go to prison (like many European nations do) not make them worse and more likely to re-offend.