Reply #30: No [View All]

A "maximum security prison" is an American invention that makes a concentration camp look humane. The guards are just as sadistic, the personal freedom just as abysmal, but the element of community is taken away. In Sobibor and Auschwitz, inmates could still interact on a human level with other inmates. In American prisons, even that is taken away, as they treat the inmates as specimens to be caged 167 hours a week and taken out once a week for a beating.

True, they are fed better and the medical treatment is better than Dr. Mengele, but the mental conditioning is far worse. Survivors of Nazi concentration camps were able to re-integrate into societies after the war; after a few years in an American maximum security prison, a man is useless, too violent with heightened sociopathic behaviors to ever be put back into regular society. They do an excellent job of turning every murderer into a Bundy or a Dahmer. Instead of processing every felon through the "maximum security prison" gauntlet, the justice system should decide who to banish permanently to a colony and who have some possibility of rehabilitation. Punishment and revenge should never be the motivators for "justice", only rehabilitation in a manner that is safe to the rest of society.