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Plato On Punishment Analysis

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I think that the penal system needs to be driven not only by the need to deter crime, but also by the need to rehabilitate. The act of doing a crime becomes bad programming and punishment is just deterrence for bad programming. In Plato on Punishment by Mary Margaret Mackenzie, she explains “Conditioning. Here the penologist aims to establish, by more or less crude means, a response in the criminal which will inhibit him, in the future, from committing crimes. At one extreme, conditioning is aversion therapy: the prospect of recidivism makes the criminal, literally or figuratively, nauseous, so that he will not be tempted to repeat his criminal behavior.” (The Humanitarian Approach, page 59) Rehabilitation is just reprogramming. The lack of

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