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highwaystar101 on 16 May 2011
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vlad321 said:
highwaystar101 said:
vlad321 said:
highwaystar101 said:


Ideally he would have, yes. But I guess you can only tell with hindsight in cases like these. Still, this man sounds incredibly dangerous and he needs help so that he poses less of a threat to people.

So he doesn't pose less of a threat to people when he is blind?

Well, yes. He could still pose a threat when blind. I'm sure he could hire someone or find a sympathiser at the very least if he actually wanted to cause more damage.

I feel that is just barely more plausible than him bribing a guard of the asylum to let him do other psychotic stuff. The end result  of both approaches is the same, he is significantly less of a risk than he was before.

If I was a sociopath who wanted to hurt someone, then making me blind would do little to deter me. And there are always ways to cause damage or hurt someone, even if you're blind.

However, providing psychiatric treatment to the person will break their sociopathis behaviour. It may be hard, they may try to resist like you say. But being persistent with the help will mean that one day they will be less dangerous.

Look at prison reform in the 18th and 19th centuries. Prison was a place of mental and physical torture, yet reoffending rates were through the roof. Back then people would have their identity stripped and were forced to perform manual repetitive tasks that kept them exhausted and in constant pain. Why would anyone want to go back to that? It was because when they were released from prison they were still in the same position as before. They didn't want to go back, but they couldn't change their behaviour.

The reformers found that to stop reoffending the cycle had to be broken, which is not accomplished by punishing. If a person was reoffending ebcause he couldn't hold a job, then you would teach them a practical skill in prison that they could use when released. If a person had a mental issue that drove them to crime then you did all you could to correct that issue so it didn't cause them to reoffend later on.