Those things are not comparable. We imprison people to safeguard society and most addicts are harmless to society. There is no rapist who is harmless to society.

People who think addicts are irredeemably evil are just irredeemably bigoted and hard of thinking. We should make that a crime.

if somebody said Russell Brand has a psychological problem we should help him with and hope he gets over it

We absolutely should help him and hope he gets better. That doesn't mean he shouldn't suffer the consequences of his actions, and be kept out of society until he has done so, and ideally is judged to no longer be a threat.

The justice system should be about rehabilitation.

This is much more about being pragmatic than anything else.

First for your argument to be true you would have to assume that people lack complete agency over their actions AND decide that they should never be punished for it ONLY helped. This would than go for every single crime no matter who no matter what.

I hope that we both agree that people do have agency and i hope we also agree that people have to pay their debts to society and that the threats of punishment is reflected in the desicions thst people make.

Further I hope we also agree that our solutions to problems in society should be effective.

When we help drug addicts we reduce the harm to society on all fronts and we can of course also make a moral argument that drug users hurt themselves the most and that addictions are mostly a complex beast that didn't come into beeing purely bc the addict wanted this to happen. We DO NOT ABSOLVE THEM of the crimes they commited bc of their addiction, they are still legally and socially punished for stealing or robbing or whatever else but we also reduce the need for these crimes by having these programms.

Rape on the other hand is a completely differnt crime, not only because of the harm they are doing to others but also because there is no actual dire situation where you need to do it and as far as i know, there is no "illness'' that makes you a serial rapist. Rape is about control, they want to hurt others, the hurt is the point and even if you want to classify this as an illness there is no real therapy for that. They COULD HAVE partaken in consensual rape play if they wanted to and when we have a rich guy they had all the money in the world to do so.

For an example, a pedophile should get all the help there is BUT as soon as they do harm to others they kinda lost that priviledge because they have proven they aren't safe for society. A pedophile does not NEED to rape a child they can live their whole lives without ever touching one, they might not like it but they absolutely can.

Not every crime is the same and not every bad person is mentally ill just because you think a normal person would not have done this.

Drug abuse and sexual assault aren’t really comparable things, though. Typically drug users aren’t hurting anyone besides themselves.

Drug addiction causes direct physical harm to the user. If you remove the monetary cost, the other social harms are mostly resolved. There is very little danger to anyone other than the user if we treat substance addiction as an illness in the way described in this Tumblr post.

Sexual assault, by definition, harms other people besides the person who has the psychological problem. There is not really a way to treat it as an illness that mostly resolves the social harms.

I think that violent offenders should be kept away from the rest of society to reduce their ability to harm others. I think some of them are truly remorseful and can be rehabilitated, and those people can and should receive treatment and be reintegrated after they are no longer dangerous to others. I think some offenders are psychopaths who cannot be rehabilitated, and the only way we protect our society is to keep those people imprisoned indefinitely.

All of these things can be true at the same time, but internet forums are usually not conducive to nuanced conversations about complex topics.

I haven't followed Russell Brand's legal case. Has he expressed remorse and sought help, or has he just denied having committed a crime? I don't think we can help anyone until they admit that they need help.

Well he has psychological issues and should seek help for them...but a lot of people have psychological issues and don't rape. Yes, even people with sex addictions. So they're kinda two seperate things

Any rate, part of recovery for addiction includes acknowledging what you did to get your hands on it and how damaging it was, and doing so in a way that gives you 'useful' remorse instead of spiraliing out again