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The paradox of prison is that if you jail an innocent man, and imprisoning an innocent is a crime, then you are a criminal, and therefore you should also be imprisoned.

Imprisonment cannot undo the crime that was done, and you cannot know the future actions of anyone. So it is pointless as a means of fixing past damages and preventing damages in the future.

Imprisonment cannot act as deterrent because people commit crimes for three reasons, passion, compulsion, and selfishness, none of which could be affected by the threat of prison. If passion, then the crime was not committed from the rational mind that would consider the consequences, if compulsion, then they'd commit the crime even knowing the consequences, if selfishness, they commit the crime with the expectation they'd get away with it in order to read the rewards of doing their deeds, this the consequences won't matter since they aren't anticipated.

False Imprisonment happens often, for many reasons, and the falsely imprisoned can never get that time back, or unlive those experiences.

Hurting people just because they've harmed others is just causing more harm.

Imprisonment may actually help to spread the ideas of the criminal, by making a martyr of them.

If people are good, then why is prison needed? If bad, then why bother with prison at all? If neither, then then what purpose does prison serve?

Prisons cost things, time, energy, resources, wouldn't ot be better tonallow those things to be put to other purposes than doing harm to others for no logical reason?

Can you say that it's right to take someone and lock them up? Ever? Especially if they've yet to do anything to you, and aren't threatening to do anything to you?

If the state locks people up, and we all support the state, then the state imprisoning people makes us all complicit in the taking of their freedom, whether we want to be involved or not, that's bad in itself, but add to it that innocentnpeople, through no fault of the own, get locked up against their will, makes criminals of us all.

Prison is terrifying, traumatic, and causes irreversible damage, people are encouraged to feel good about the stripping of the freedoms of others. That these people are less than themselves and thus reserving of such a fate.

In case you don't notice, most of these are the arguements you'd get from Penn and Teller in their episode on the death penalty, they all apply to prison as well, and to the police on top of that, and to any form of punishment at all, or to the very concept of punishment.

My assignment is to argue for or against any of the points mentioned above. Feel free to do so with logic or evidence. Let's see how well you can take apart this obvious pile of dogshit arguments, or if you are able to make a suitable defense for them.