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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RobShanti" data-source="post: 7698150" data-attributes="member: 82745">Well said, Jester.It *does* make them horrible people, Dave.  YOU'RE the one painting with too broad a brush.  There's a huge difference between "incarcarated" in jail and "incarcerated" in prison.  Those in jail, as Ampolitor pointed out, are serving relatively minor sentences (one year or under in some jurisdictions, more in others, but relatively lower than prison inmates in all jurisidctions).  I'm an attorney practicing criminal law in a large American city, and I can attest that it's HARD to get even JAIL time (as opposed to "prison" time) for offenders.  You have to be pretty bad to go to jail.  You have to be horrible to go to prison.  Maybe not so much in Bumfuk, Arkansee, but true enough in most jurisdictions.  Rehabilitation is ONE reason why we punish.  There are many more, including deterrence, incapacitation and just desserts.  Prison is considered to achieve all of these, though criminological research varies on how much prison -- or indeed *any* form of punishment -- actually promotes any given one of these.  Incapacitation is not to be given short shrift.  If we can't achieve rehabilitation, deterrence, or anything else through imprisonment, at least we can incapacitate the criminal to a large extent.There you go!  There's Robert Nozick's Entitlement Theory of "Distributive Justice" that I talked about in my first post of this thread (Post #3).  Testify, JeffB!  Well, as I said in my first post (post #3), it depends on what the evidence that "inmates playing the game indulged in 'escapism' and became divorced from reality" really showed. This sounds like the writer of the article that used this phrase had already decided his opinion, and was framing the issue in a way that supported it. That may not necessarily be an adequate, or even fair, characterization of what the evidence showed. The court, which had the evidence before it first-hand, decided that this evidence was strong enough to support the prison's policy. We can't assume that the court simply fell into the same hysteria of the 80s over D&D. That may have had nothing to do with it, yet the author of the article brings that up as if to offer it as the court's rationale, when, in fact, it may well not have been.</blockquote>

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