IC - Questions and Answers

[sythyry]

Perhaps I have spent too long on some Herethroy farmers who aren't even traff. So, I shall answer questions to-day. Perhaps I shall answer them wisely and well, perhaps flippantly and falsely, and, if you are very lucky, you or I will be able to tell which I did.

But beware! If you ask me a question, I may ask one back, which you are morally obliged to answer as well as I answered yours, if not better or worse!

Comments

[foomf.livejournal.com]

We don't have the benefit of powerful healing magic, though our medical techniques are getting to be fairly good.
Beatings tend to cause damage that can become permanently crippling.

Imprisonment on my world comes in two flavors, private and socially imposed. Private prisons used to be the rule but they are now frowned upon as they can be used to enslave and otherwise damage others.
"Public" prisons, i.e. prisons run by governments, tend to have the following purposes:
1) to hold persons accused of a crime until they are judged,
2) to hold convicted criminals, either as part of their sentence, or until the sentence is carried out,
3) RARELY, to rehabilitate convicted criminals. My particular country is divided into a number of different states, which provide regional governance. Cities exist within (and occasionally, across) states. There are also subdivisions of states, which have various names, but are functionally the same thing: a regional government larger than cities but underneath the state.
In my state, in the not-too-distant past, people of clear vision and careful mercy realized that there were certain common factors to becoming a criminal. The largest of these was the inequity of wealth, such that the poorer people were likelier to become lifelong criminals - and the solution was not imprisonment but rather understanding why they were poor. VERY often it was due to the lack of education or usable job skills, and with being brought up with no understanding or respect for law. Since we have a reasonably fair system of law (or did) for the day-to-day lives of most persons, this lack could be addressed by education, training, and counseling in how to be a law-abiding person, and why. Prison sentences are limited in duration for most cases, and thus, rehabilitation became the primary focus of the prisons in this state... until the recent uprising of the smallsouled and demagogue-driven (think mass-targeted "destroc mentador" applied to the concepts of justice and "creoc illusidor + creoc mentador" for replacement of those concepts with something that results neither in justice nor benefit to the society.) Unfortunately, ignorance is not the exclusive property of the criminal. And to compound the stupidity of the punishment-mindset, the prisons (and their corresponding equivalents for young folks especially) are instead places where the skills of being a criminal are covertly taught with great success.

There are other reasons people are imprisoned than for being poor and breaking property laws. Being the wrong race, in some areas, will greatly increase your chance of being imprisoned. Holding and speaking the wrong political opinions. Being suspected of certain crimes can result in indefinite imprisonment in secretive places.

Governments, in some ways, are worse than private citizens as far as "vanishing" people. There has been an ongoing "war" between our government and an ideology, and the result of that war has been the indefinite imprisonment sometimes in secret, where citizens of other countries have been taken from their homes in those other countries, removed to secret prisons in other countries, and kept without trial or public notification. Certain of our own citizens, who have discovered and exposed corruption of this sort, have (because they were military) been placed under indefinite arrest, hidden away in a secret prison without the opportunity for interaction with others, and kept there for having the temerity to disrupt the status quo.

Of course the big lie on which the illusion of justice is built is that this "keeps society safe."

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

I suspect that, perhaps, you are not urging me to copy your world's justice system in Kismirth?

[foomf.livejournal.com]

Not that aspect of it, no. The Restitution and Rehabilitation parts work well when they are properly applied, but can (like all prison systems) be "gamed" by clever persons.

On an unrelated note, I realized I could create an "emoticon" glyph for at least two Prime species:


dO~! - khoyotsis

^o.o^ -sleeth (sort of, sub-optimal)

~oM> ~ - Zi Ri ... note the space between snout and flame.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

[Bard grins at the icons.]