Would you support an alternative prison climate via chemicals?

Sounds like a trick question to me.
But no. People need to learn how to deal with reality, not how to navigate highs.

No. Among the many reasons is that those drugs don’t always have the desired effects. I know someone that was made incredibly aggressive and horribly nasty by several drugs given to help reduce stress levels.

^^ If they (the authorities chose to use drugs like heroin, opium, Thorazine, or LSD, etc, that would “zombie” them out, would you go for that better? ^^

No, I don’t criminals abrogate their rights to be chemically altered without their permission.

Prozac is an antidepressant. Even assuming that the entire prison population was suffering from depression, studies have shown that Prozac works about as well as a placebo for the vast majority of the population. So it wouldn’t even work unless you told them that they were being medicated, and they also wanted the medication to work.

Perhaps you were thinking of something like a tranquilizer instead. Either way, I think it’s a terrible idea.

@Hypocrisy_Central no, whatever the drugs, it is a bad idea.

80+% of the prison population are already on psychotropic medications.

And then you release an army of engineered drug addicts that are almost guaranteed to slide back into crime to finance their addictions, and because their addictions make them unable to lead a normal life.
Great Idea. Would you also like cyanide with your fugu fish?

I believe they should be allowed tranquilizers if they so choose, with a doctors permission, but not surreptitiously.

I would prefer to see prisons operated more like schools, where the prisoners attend classes or job training courses.

Prisoners usually have access to whatever drugs they want on the inside anyway.
What prisoners need is access to (and a thriving culture of) education. Nothing less.

Most of the people involved in perpetrating mass killings use those drugs to start with. If they would work in a prison environment, then why not do it to questionable people on the outside? And maybe they wouldn’t find themselves in prison in the first place.

Oh, right…they are doing that already.

No I wouldn’t support that. They still have rights as human beings and without their knowledge and acquiesence, that sounds like a Dr. Moreau experimentation.

@YARNLADY I would prefer to see prisons operated more like schools, where the prisoners attend classes or job training courses.
I would believe that a better way too, but we live in the real word. Any ex-felon would have to be eight times as good to win a job away from a C student of 20yr old coming out of Jr. College with an AA degree. Education is useless if you are not given any real chance of using it; same with any job training. If it comes to the choice of some 30something ex-felon with a MA degree and a record stretching back to his high school days and a squeaky clean young person with a marginal AA but no arrest or prison record; how much more talent or skill would the ex-felon need to have to overcome his/her jail or prison record to outpace the person with no record?

< navigates highs

Medicating all prisoners without their informed consent is unethical. I can’t comment on what the USA of the 21st century still considers illegal. I would have thought the even convicts still have some rights.

I would strongly support something other than the status quo, but probably not that, at least not unwittingly.

In general, since nothing else seems to work very well, I’d get behind the proposals by @YARNLADY and @ninjacolin: education and maybe therapy, with positive results in each perhaps resulting in lessening of sentences.

I know, I know that many would game the system and pretend to results (or cheat) to appear to achieve the positive results that they didn’t actually attain, but there’s a certain hard-core criminal that we’re just never going to reach, anyway, I’m afraid. And since we can’t kill them outright and can’t extend their sentences for minor offenses indefinitely we have to risk releasing them with the general population. But it would be helpful, wouldn’t it, if we could keep those misfits from turning the entire prison system into clones of themselves, wouldn’t it?

@Hypocrisy_Central What can it hurt to provide them with the rudimentary skills necessary?

@CWOTUS In general, since nothing else seems to work very well, I’d get behind the proposals by @YARNLADY and@ninjacolin: education and maybe therapy, with positive results in each perhaps resulting in lessening of sentences. One way to keep them from brawling and shanking each other is to give them what they crave most if they behave; a two day trailer visit with a sex surrogate. People would fine that as much or even more unethical than just sedating them.

@YARNLADY @Hypocrisy_Central What can it hurt to provide them with the rudimentary skills necessary? I see nothing wrong with that. If they actually get a chance to use them in some productive way once free and they realize that in a real and palpable way, I say go for it.

@Hypocrisy_Central A hearty YES to the conjugal or sex surrogate visit for good behavior.

yea, I’m betting that the more information and culture you feed a mind, the greater its chances of coming up with a more productive behavior/career choice.

They don’t need surrogate or conjugal visit sex in prison. They can get that any time they want. And they can get high whenever too. There is no bribing these people to act right.

@woodcutter I have heard that some prisoners bribe guards for favors, but I highly doubt they can get female sex or get high whenever they want to. What evidence are you basing your statement on?

@YARNLADY The resourceful inmates can run empires behind bars. Drugs are smuggled in, weapons made inside, and female sex….pfft. Probably most of those animals would take a woman in the backside if given the choice.

@Hypocrisy_Central A hearty YES to the conjugal or sex surrogate visit for good behavior.

Shit, we don’t even get that on the outside! A sex surrogate for good behavior while in prison? Excuse me while I go break some laws!!!!

If pussy is supposed to tame the lion heart then are violent felons incarcerated due to blue balls?