The Gaslighting of America & The Utopian Prison System: Part II
PART II: The Utopian Prison System
RALPH YARL, KAYLIN GILLIS, THE GASLIGHTING OF AMERICA & THE UTOPIAN PRISON SYSTEM
PART II: THE UTOPIAN PRISON SYSTEM
…This article is a continuation of the previous post: “Part I: The Gaslighting of America”…
The Utopian Prison System
If we are going to truly address this situation over any significant stretch of time, we have to get all the way down to the core principles of the problem. There is rot in our judicial system, and at its core there is a rot in our prison system… Not the rot in our prison system that the dominant political class claims, seeking to dismantle our prison system—precisely the opposite: our prisons are corrupted, neutered, and ineffective.
Dealing first with the prison system, then, the best solution centers around the establishment of prison systems that are far more effective in first punishing the criminal and protecting society, and second rehabilitating the individual guilty of committing a crime. We must establish what I call a Utopian Prison System. It’s a vision for how prisons could reasonably and actually operate in our society today, grounding the health of our judicial system in a simple and dynamic system of imprisonment. The principles undergirding this theory of prison system are three and they are clear:
1. Universal solitary confinement.
2. Voluntary (limited) communal participation.
3. Aesthetic beauty.
Our jail/prison system today is one that is a conduit of chaos instead of being a mechanism of restoring peace. You’ll hear it said everywhere that people “enter into jail a petty criminal, and leave a hardened—and more connected—criminal.” This is, correctly, a sign of a disordered prison system.
But our dominant political class’s solution to this conundrum is to increase chaos by not imprisoning those guilty of crimes. It’s exactly the wrong answer—and it flows from their own faulty premises of what a prison system’s purpose is. In order to decrease the chaos in our society our jail system has to be far more grounded and far more effective in doing the two principal things that prisons are supposed to do: first, punish crime; and second, rehabilitate the criminal—and they must emphasize those principals in precisely that order: the punishment is primary; the rehabilitation is secondary.
Principles of Justice
We have a society that is plagued by moral disorder that stems from widespread intellectual disorder. Very few people today have a grounded justice-system worldview. They have eradicated the principle of punishment and they have disproportionately emphasized rehabilitation as the primary purpose of prison systems. To confuse a secondary principle with a primary principle is the substance of an intellectual error/disorder. This punishment-rehabilitation inversion error stems, like most of our intellectual errors today, from the philosophy (and error itself) of individualism—where the individual is more significant than the whole. If the individual matters more than the greater society, then their individual rehabilitation will be more important than the protection of the society. Individualism was not a profound realization of the west, as Jordan Peterson types would have you believe, it is a grave philosophical error. The whole is always greater than the parts.
The proposed solution that we should form our prison systems based entirely on rehabilitation is the bad fruit of this rotten tree.
It’s worth noting as well the effect that malice, and not just ignorance—or intellectual error—, is most certainly having on all of this. Malice is the desire for evil for its own sake because of the excess of pleasure it gives you. Malice craves cruelty. There’s no doubt that the proliferation of malice in our society has also contributed to these inane proposed solutions.
To recap:
1. The primary purpose of any system of imprisonment is to punish crime for the restoration of peace in the larger society. Punishment signals that what was done was wrong; it provides both the victim, and the larger society, reprieve from their aggressor; and it imposes a costly consequence on the guilty individual, which is objectively good, even when the person who incurs the cost most definitively does not see it as a personal good to them.
2. The secondary purpose of any system of imprisonment is the rehabilitation of the individual criminal, and this only optionally and conditionally. It’s a good bonus, but it is not the raison d’être of a prison system—punishment is that. Whether a criminal goes to jail and is rehabilitated is dependent primarily on the internal disposition and transformation of the criminal, and that is beyond the scope of our deliberate influence, as a society, to accomplish. We can try and incentivize it, but we cannot assure it. Contrast this with the removal of the criminal individual from society (i.e. punishment), which is within the societies scope of power, and it is not subject to incentives/disincentives.
Universal Solitary Confinement
Focusing more intently, then, on the role of prisons for the good of the whole society, the logical next step, if nothing else, is that those individuals that enter jail/prison do not leave more criminally connected than they entered. This has to be of central importance to how we set up our jail systems. With that in mind, the solution readily proposes itself: our jails should be exclusively solitary confinement.
It is not possible for a person thrown in jail/prison, in an exclusively solitary jail/prison system, to come out of jail/prison more connected than they entered. It is a definitive impossibility. And that is an impossibility we should work diligently and deliberately to ensure.
Aesthetic Beauty
We ought to complement this solitary condition with things that do not cruelly, or excessively, destabilize the individual criminal—and this can be done by building our prisons, and the solitary cells within them, with a measure of aesthetic beauty to them. That is why “aesthetic beauty” is one of the three pillars of the Utopian Prison System. Without the beauty the solitary system is a non-starter. The hell that we would make our prisons would become a plague on the souls of everyone outside of prison. We must infuse our prison system with an ordered charity that contributes to the flourishing of the whole society. By making the jails/prisons beautiful, we do not make solitary confinement an inhumane gesture: we make it an earnest gesture seeking the good of the whole community in hopes of the individuals concurrent rehabilitation. This vision then means that jails/prisons are made in a grand architectural style (i.e. neo-classical), with robust windows providing ample natural light, and a general aesthetic sense that raises the soul of those in the jail/prison to the grandeur of human potential and a sense of how aesthetics can inspire reverential fear.
Voluntary (Limited) Communal Participation
The mode of interaction for the individual prisoner should be insightfully considered: voluntary programs/groups/classes they can participate in (and lose the ability to participate in with abusive behavior); regular individual interaction with psychologists/social workers/religious chaplains; opportunities to expand their freedoms should they choose, and earn the right to do so, or remain peacefully in solitude as well, without further punishment, should they choose. The ultimate objective, however, from the perspective of the criminal, must be central to all that informs the establishment of our Utopian Prison System: the criminal must not leave more criminally connected than they entered into jail/prison. Providing only voluntary (and meritorious) opportunities and communal interaction facilitates that objective.
Possible Outcome 1: Reduced Jail/Prison Sentences
By subjecting those people guilty of crimes to mandatory solitary time, we even make it possible to reduce the length of jail sentences and increase turnover in our jails, if need be. The solitary stay would be a stop gap in their criminal momentum, and from a rehabilitative perspective, may not necessitate the length of stay otherwise considered. We’d still have to balance this with the primary purpose of jail/prison as restoring the peace of the greater society, but that balance may well be shorter than it is now given the societies security that a person will not return to society a more criminally connected and habituated individual than when they entered jail/prison.
Possible Outcome 2: Reduced Recidivism
We could well hypothesize that recidivism rates would even go down, as solitude is unnatural to humans as social creatures, and innate familiarity/comfortability with a solitary prison life wouldn’t be a concern. There would be no one that feels “at home” in prison, and that would act as an intrinsic disincentive toward doing things that subject one to prison time. The most basic freedoms of the outside world—in particular: the freedom of association and movement—increase in perceived value in light of the solitary prison system and provide a proper incentive for people to avoid jail/prison in a healthy manner.
Reply to the Utopia Objection
Jailing people guilty of crimes in this way would make it reasonably possible that their time in jail/prison conduces to their psychological, emotional, and behavioral reformation such that they come back into society not merely well-adjusted—but in many ways, more excellently adjusted—than the average citizen. Their time in solitude would provide a context for a more grounded internal life than many common members of society experience. To those that worry that people might commit crimes just to get the opportunity at this solitary time—the response is readily available: first, they are likely precisely the people that ought to be in jail on account of their willingness to commit a crime for their own benefit; second, it would serve to highlight the rot in our hyperactive, secular, consumerist society; and third, if this became a sincere model of how our society strove to live, that would be a good thing.
If the least among us become the model of what the greatest of us strive for, we are living the Gospel in all truth and goodness. This vision is one in which those who are humbled can be exulted by their genuine internal growth. This is the central hope & promise of the gospel: the reformation of the sinner into a saint.
Police & Prosecution
With a sanely established system of imprisonment, we can then institute the two-pronged policing and prosecutorial initiative that would actually work to resolve the criminal problem in our society. 1) We more vigorously pursue suspected perpetrators of crimes (policing); and 2) We more widely and decisively sentence those who are found to be guilty to jail/prison time (prosecuting). The result is the only thing that can restore peace to our communities: the immediate reduction of the active criminal element in our society (policing), and the long-term reduction of the potential criminal tendencies in our society (jailing).
Chaos or Peace
There is far too much fear in our society as a consequence of enabling criminal behavior, inverting justice into injustice, gaslighting the masses, and bullying the innocent into doing nothing. They’re right that this problem won’t be fixed overnight—but beware of solutions that will only increase the chaos in our society. Confiscating civilian guns, withholding criminal prosecution, and bullying those who speak out against all of the above, is causing, and will certainly perpetuate into the future, only more chaos.
All three of the shooting incidents laid out at the beginning of this piece are tragic scenarios that are the consequence of hyperreactive fear. Should it be established that the victims were innocent, doing the things they say they were doing, the shooters deserve to be punished, for their victims were innocent, and disproportionate violence against innocent people is a crime. But the society at large needs to do work on the actual “root causes”: gaslighting, malice, enabling criminal behavior, dishonest efforts at prison reform, etc.. Those root causes are a disordered understanding of the role of imprisonment, a conflation of secondary violence with primary and complex violence, and a vicious idolization of criminal behavior. We must uproot these problems and errors to regain sanity and peace in our society.
Protecting the victims of actual crime; reducing the chaotic reactive violence in our society and honing it for good; imprisoning those guilty of crimes with greater profundity and insight: these are the things that can reshape our world for the better. +