PLEASE CHECK THIS OUT. Our own Aeronmelon is going through some shit at the moment and could use some help. Check it out here and consider an upvote or a comment to push it into activity. Sorry, not something I do often or will be spamming. But I care about my friend and if I can get a couple more eyes on his situation then I’m going to try to do what I can. (Last one I promise. Just twice. Not going to spam but dude is a big part of the Lemmy community, especially with Trek, and he deserves the help. And to the mods, if this doesn’t fit and you want to remove? Go for it. I completely understand it and I am sorry)
Edit: Oh wait I’m the mod here. Well, I say it is fine
I can agree to the major stake on your claim about mental illness. And I’m sure that definitely exists and is a factor for a number of people…
However, you’re dismissing two other major categories and groups of people: power and taboo.
Its been studied and reported that many rapes/sexual assault happen, not solely for sexual attraction/gratification but to dominate. To have power over another. Not a mental illness or attraction, just a want to exert power.
Another group would be those into the taboo. The exotic chaser types. The thrill is in doing something forbidden.
And when those two groups collide with someone who has a lot of money and live consequence free, you end up with Epstein. Rich people who want to do something forbidden, to exert sadistic power over others. Its not a mental illness, its not an attraction. Its because they can.
This is the context in which it’s relevant to recognize that Jeffrey Epstein was not a pedophile by the actual definition of the word. He and his kind have something else wrong with them that you already recognized: they are sadistic and wish to exert power over others. I can’t armchair diagnose them, but I do know that something is wrong with their brains to make them want to hurt people. A normal, healthy human exhibits empathy so strongly that it’s even applied to members of other species and inanimate objects.
I don’t mean that we need to have any sympathy for them or any other abusers, or that our disgust with them is wrong. But intellectually I think it’s important to know the reason I don’t hurt people for fun is because I don’t want to in the first place. I could just as easily have ended up like them if I had fewer cooperative social instincts intact. We have to restrict their freedom for public safety, but actively punishing them for their flaws is as cruel and pointless as beating an aggressive dog.
I wish more of our society looked at it in such a rational way. The point of imprisonment should be either rehabilitation or removal from society. And we should be clear about what works in which cases. Permanent imprisonment should definitely be on the cards for some kinds of people, simply because they will never be fit to be let out. But people get this all muddled up with outrage, hatred, an emotional need for othering, punishment, justice, retribution. And then further muddled with the flip side of forgiveness, of having paid a debt to society, of rehabilitation through religion, of the kind of misplaced empathy that assumes we’re all the same on the inside. Of course there’s a whole bunch of political and financial incentives to maintain the confusion.
i just want to point out that permanent imprisonment also doesn’t have to be particularly bad for the imprisoned person, we could totally just “imprison” people in a quite nice 4-room apartment and let them live as normal lives as possible while keeping them separated from others.
Let them get groceries delivered, have normal (if monitored) subscriptions and internet access, and go on walks with an actually friendly warden who just keeps an eye on them while actively trying to make the person feel normal.
even nordic prisons which are famous for being not inhumane are still quite terrible places to be, largely because we can’t be arsed to spend more money than what we consider bare minimum to not qualify as torture.
It’s understandable and a good thing that we have these feelings because they evolved to motivate us to be able to kill or expel bad actors from our social groups. Without those feelings we’d just be enabling everyone’s abuse all the time. It’s not like I don’t get mental images of going all John Wick on bad guys. We just have to set aside our feelings and consider what results in the best societal outcomes, regardless of what seems fair or what would feel good in the moment.
Didn’t a study find that a good chunk of the population is sadistic? Something like 40% of subjects sverved to hit a turtle with their car iirc.
They went out of their way to hurt animals, I hope they get prostate cancer, and rot inside the prison that is their body.
Now, what if a desire for power over others and the desire to engage in the forbidden (with no executive function to regulate it) were also due to mental illness?