Quote:
Originally Posted by opendoor
It really comes down to how expensive and how dystopian people want things to get. If someone has a history of minor offences, should we just lock them up indefinitely? Even violent criminals are going to get out of jail at some point unless we just have indefinite periods of detention. The vast majority of violent offenders don't escalate their crimes to murder, and it's obviously not really possible to predict which ones will do so, so are we OK with just jailing them all indefinitely?
Or should we create a large mental health apparatus that can treat these people and basically commit them to that? We've had that in the past, but it was gutted through deinstitutionalization in the 1990s and 2000s to save money.
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For the record, I would prefer a system that prioritizes rehabilitation and balances that with risk to the public, as opposed to one that does a piss-poor job of trying to balance rehabilitation with punishment.
In a nutshell, I'd like offenders to be offered proper psychiatric/rehabilitation opportunities, but for violent offenders they would have to be assessed as a low-risk to reoffend before being released.
That said, I can't see this type of system being politically popular in Canada. It would result in some people being institutionalised for longer periods, but also shorter times for some offenders, which would be an unsatisfactory pound of flesh for certain segments of the public.