I hate prisons and imprisonment.
“But you don’t want criminals running free, do you? What about the children?”
I don’t want to be robbed to fund caging people who rob. That’s stupid in the extreme.
Obviously, it is evil to cage a person who has only violated some counterfeit “law”, but prisons, and the punishment fetishists who support them, make no distinction.
And what of those who legitimately harmed the innocent with an act of negligence or carelessness, rather than through ill intent? I don’t see how this can be considered a crime, and I don’t want them caged, either.
If you lock someone away as a result of an accident that the State has decided was a “crime”, you’ve shut the barn door after the horse ran away. Worse than that, you’ve locked the horse out of the barn and thrown it to the wolves. The horse will either be eaten, or it will become a wolf in order to survive. This is why prisons are actually Criminal University; training facilities to teach the socially rejected how to commit more and worse actual crimes. Prisons are a net negative.
I don’t even approve of caging actual murderers and robbers, thinking it’s better to leave them in a society who knows who they are and what they did. And, yes, I mean letting their crime hang around their neck all the time for all to see, until they are either killed in defense, shunned to death, or have proved they learned their lesson and can live without archating.
I would much rather have criminals running free, and risking being shot by their next intended victim. Or, have them learn to behave due to fear of actual, real-world consequences. The way it is done now is a major load of FAIL. The prison guards are just as bad as those they guard, on an ethical and moral level. The prison administrators are even worse.
If you want to fund them, go ahead. Leave me out of it. Not on my behalf!