We seem to be living in an age of ad hominem attacks. Do they advance anyone's cause? Do they move the ball forward? It seems they polarize and make enemies. I'm not speaking of here in these comments but in our wider society. They seem to describe the speaker more than the targets. It's hard to consider the merits of a comment when it's salted with such words. Removing that distraction, the question remains: do we need prisons?
Prof. Lloyd seems high in two psychological traits, if I may say so. One is Agreeableness and the other is Openness. His agreeableness seems evident in his apparent willingness to go along with the prevailing flow of thought and assumptions in his particular academic environment. His echo chamber, if you will. To my ear, he seems to parrot a lot of the approved language of the group of whom he seeks approval and their feathers he hopes not to ruffle. Does this contribute to public safety? Does it contribute to a stable society where people can get on with life and create lives for their families? No. So does it suggest we don't need prisons? No.
Indeed, he seems to be endangering his students and our communities by perpetuating tropes which just aren't real. And the farther we are led down imaginary paths, the farther away we get from practical solutions.
The Openness thing seems evident in a willingness to abandon the present way of seeing and doing things. I get it. There has always been and will always be a (hopefully) healthy tension between traditions and the past vs. new ideas. It's the depiction of the ying and yang we often see. Unbridled Openness, however, especially when matters of community safety are concerned, and especially cooked up in environments where unreal orthodoxies are worshipped and dissent is effectively outlawed, can be very dangerous.
Once again, it seems Prof. Lloyd has very little experience in the sometimes violent communities he speaks much about. The ordinary person might well just shake their head and say, "You just don't know what you're talking about. You clearly have no real solutions and therefore have no business popping off or teaching rubbish to our young people." We need to move on.
As for Glenn and John's questions, some might greatly benefit from going back and listening again. What they did was give Prof. Lloyd all the rope he needed to make very plain what his views are, as impractical, perhaps horrifying and wrong headed as they are. It's actually a very effective cross examination technique. No one put words in his mouth. He said it all. It gives we, the jury, so to speak, a very clear picture of his case and makes our choice clear. I don't think any of us could have done better.
We still need prisons. For many offenders the present model is a lost opportunity. But to Glenn's question, the answer remains yes.
I agree with everything you are saying. As to prof. Lloyd, I would not say that he talks in this way merely because of his lack of experience with violent communities. I think that because of the popularity of the prison abolition ideology he fails to understand that "community solutions" to crimes such as murder have nothing in common with justice.
How would he feel if someone killed one of his family members and then merely had to listen to the rebukes of the community elders/leaders and do some community work? One does not need any experience with violent communities to understand that the feelings of the murderer are not much more important than the feelings of people s/he has harmed and that there are far worse things than being incarcerated.
I, too, really liked Glenn and John's questions. I think that it would have been a great idea to ask Vincent Lloyd why he centers the feelings and the vulnerability of the person who has committed a serious crime like murder. Even if a murderer is a victim of e.g. childhood sexual abuse, one can't assume that s/he was unable to control his/her actions.
The murderer (or the rapist, or the domestic abuser etc.) should not be centered at the expense of the victim. The incarceration of a violent criminal should never be seen as a tragedy, especially if the crime has been ruthless. The incarceration of people who kill or seriously hurt others should not be portrayed as "putting someone in a cage". And prisoners can actually learn and change their lives, they are not merely kept in cages.
And I agree with your points. I do believe Prof. Lloyd is out of touch but agree his ideologies are the stronger drivers. They do seem to come from a place of unreality, which is why it seemed to me he lacked certain life experience.
Yes, he most probably lacks certain experiences, but one does not need these experiences to realize that killing someone is a very serious crime and telling a killer "return to your community, do some community work and try to become a better person" is not only extremely utopian, but also shockingly unjust to the victim and the victim's loved ones.
And of course the belief in the healing power of the community is dangerous in itself. Even if a community happens to be close-knit, it can be very lenient towards popular people and harsh or even cruel towards people with a low status. People - especially family members and friends - can be very influenced by their emotions and can perceive even dangerous individuals in a distorted way. It is often very difficult to accept that one's grandson, cousin or neigbour may be a deeply damaged and ruthless person.
And what about crimes such as rape or sexual abuse? How many victims would be ready to inform their own community about what happened to them? And how many people would try to defend the perpetrator or even claim that the victim must be lying?
All excellent points. Forty years ago, in law school, we considered the subject of deterrence. Keeping it short, do you know who is most deterred by penalties? Law abiding people. Prosocial, we might say.
This came to mind often, later on, when watching how "community court" actually functioned. Do you know for whom community court yielded a positive outcome? It was with the people who were already prosocial and honestly were sorry for the low level harm they caused. They actually wanted to fix what they broke or defaced. (Of course, no violence was allowed in.)
These people are not the ones you and many others are describing here in comments. You're referring to serious crime. And yet Prof. Lloyd, who I think we might all be thinking of as representative of the ideologies you identified, seems to suggest any system which leads to incarceration should be replaced with smaller, community models. Putting it mildly, that's batshit. For the reasons you state and more besides.
And yet, it remains true that a significant amount of antisocial behavior can stem from the perception that the game we all must play is not a fair game. That's a sociological phenomenon I mention dispassionately. It's a thing to contend with.
Rape, sexual abuse and on to domestic violence are different matters and belong in a whole separate conversation. They certainly do not belong in community tribunals.
Oh, I forgot to mention, the various distorting relationships you identify are among the most basic ones which disqualify perspective jurors to hear a case. And for all the very clear reasons you suggest.
I fully agree with you. As you say, community-level solutions can work for people who are already prosocial. One simply can't have the same solutions for a shoplifter and a murderer, someone who stole a car and someone who brutally raped a woman.
One should also reject the naive illusion that everyone is a decent and caring human being - some people are very seriously emotionally damaged. A man has recently cruelly murdered a woman in London; allegedly his first memory of his father was when he was trying to drown his mother in a bathtub. The murderer is probably a severely traumatized person, but he was capable of beating an innocent stranger to death.
We seem to be living in an age of ad hominem attacks. Do they advance anyone's cause? Do they move the ball forward? It seems they polarize and make enemies. I'm not speaking of here in these comments but in our wider society. They seem to describe the speaker more than the targets. It's hard to consider the merits of a comment when it's salted with such words. Removing that distraction, the question remains: do we need prisons?
Prof. Lloyd seems high in two psychological traits, if I may say so. One is Agreeableness and the other is Openness. His agreeableness seems evident in his apparent willingness to go along with the prevailing flow of thought and assumptions in his particular academic environment. His echo chamber, if you will. To my ear, he seems to parrot a lot of the approved language of the group of whom he seeks approval and their feathers he hopes not to ruffle. Does this contribute to public safety? Does it contribute to a stable society where people can get on with life and create lives for their families? No. So does it suggest we don't need prisons? No.
Indeed, he seems to be endangering his students and our communities by perpetuating tropes which just aren't real. And the farther we are led down imaginary paths, the farther away we get from practical solutions.
The Openness thing seems evident in a willingness to abandon the present way of seeing and doing things. I get it. There has always been and will always be a (hopefully) healthy tension between traditions and the past vs. new ideas. It's the depiction of the ying and yang we often see. Unbridled Openness, however, especially when matters of community safety are concerned, and especially cooked up in environments where unreal orthodoxies are worshipped and dissent is effectively outlawed, can be very dangerous.
Once again, it seems Prof. Lloyd has very little experience in the sometimes violent communities he speaks much about. The ordinary person might well just shake their head and say, "You just don't know what you're talking about. You clearly have no real solutions and therefore have no business popping off or teaching rubbish to our young people." We need to move on.
As for Glenn and John's questions, some might greatly benefit from going back and listening again. What they did was give Prof. Lloyd all the rope he needed to make very plain what his views are, as impractical, perhaps horrifying and wrong headed as they are. It's actually a very effective cross examination technique. No one put words in his mouth. He said it all. It gives we, the jury, so to speak, a very clear picture of his case and makes our choice clear. I don't think any of us could have done better.
We still need prisons. For many offenders the present model is a lost opportunity. But to Glenn's question, the answer remains yes.
I agree with everything you are saying. As to prof. Lloyd, I would not say that he talks in this way merely because of his lack of experience with violent communities. I think that because of the popularity of the prison abolition ideology he fails to understand that "community solutions" to crimes such as murder have nothing in common with justice.
How would he feel if someone killed one of his family members and then merely had to listen to the rebukes of the community elders/leaders and do some community work? One does not need any experience with violent communities to understand that the feelings of the murderer are not much more important than the feelings of people s/he has harmed and that there are far worse things than being incarcerated.
I, too, really liked Glenn and John's questions. I think that it would have been a great idea to ask Vincent Lloyd why he centers the feelings and the vulnerability of the person who has committed a serious crime like murder. Even if a murderer is a victim of e.g. childhood sexual abuse, one can't assume that s/he was unable to control his/her actions.
The murderer (or the rapist, or the domestic abuser etc.) should not be centered at the expense of the victim. The incarceration of a violent criminal should never be seen as a tragedy, especially if the crime has been ruthless. The incarceration of people who kill or seriously hurt others should not be portrayed as "putting someone in a cage". And prisoners can actually learn and change their lives, they are not merely kept in cages.
And I agree with your points. I do believe Prof. Lloyd is out of touch but agree his ideologies are the stronger drivers. They do seem to come from a place of unreality, which is why it seemed to me he lacked certain life experience.
Yes, he most probably lacks certain experiences, but one does not need these experiences to realize that killing someone is a very serious crime and telling a killer "return to your community, do some community work and try to become a better person" is not only extremely utopian, but also shockingly unjust to the victim and the victim's loved ones.
And of course the belief in the healing power of the community is dangerous in itself. Even if a community happens to be close-knit, it can be very lenient towards popular people and harsh or even cruel towards people with a low status. People - especially family members and friends - can be very influenced by their emotions and can perceive even dangerous individuals in a distorted way. It is often very difficult to accept that one's grandson, cousin or neigbour may be a deeply damaged and ruthless person.
And what about crimes such as rape or sexual abuse? How many victims would be ready to inform their own community about what happened to them? And how many people would try to defend the perpetrator or even claim that the victim must be lying?
All excellent points. Forty years ago, in law school, we considered the subject of deterrence. Keeping it short, do you know who is most deterred by penalties? Law abiding people. Prosocial, we might say.
This came to mind often, later on, when watching how "community court" actually functioned. Do you know for whom community court yielded a positive outcome? It was with the people who were already prosocial and honestly were sorry for the low level harm they caused. They actually wanted to fix what they broke or defaced. (Of course, no violence was allowed in.)
These people are not the ones you and many others are describing here in comments. You're referring to serious crime. And yet Prof. Lloyd, who I think we might all be thinking of as representative of the ideologies you identified, seems to suggest any system which leads to incarceration should be replaced with smaller, community models. Putting it mildly, that's batshit. For the reasons you state and more besides.
And yet, it remains true that a significant amount of antisocial behavior can stem from the perception that the game we all must play is not a fair game. That's a sociological phenomenon I mention dispassionately. It's a thing to contend with.
Rape, sexual abuse and on to domestic violence are different matters and belong in a whole separate conversation. They certainly do not belong in community tribunals.
Oh, I forgot to mention, the various distorting relationships you identify are among the most basic ones which disqualify perspective jurors to hear a case. And for all the very clear reasons you suggest.
I fully agree with you. As you say, community-level solutions can work for people who are already prosocial. One simply can't have the same solutions for a shoplifter and a murderer, someone who stole a car and someone who brutally raped a woman.
One should also reject the naive illusion that everyone is a decent and caring human being - some people are very seriously emotionally damaged. A man has recently cruelly murdered a woman in London; allegedly his first memory of his father was when he was trying to drown his mother in a bathtub. The murderer is probably a severely traumatized person, but he was capable of beating an innocent stranger to death.