In the United States, misdemeanor jail time ought to be replaced with significant rehabilitation.

First of all, your value and value criterion were identical. Or what is the difference between "Societal Good" and "Utilitarianism" (defined "greatest good for the greatest number")? I accepted your value (as is common in LD debates), and necessarily your value criterion, vague as they (it) were (was). You had one contention, essentially: Contention 1/Contention 3. The "Reasoning [Reason] for Repeat Offenders" is of course that "Prison is ineffective". You spend Contention 1 trying to establish the title of Contention 3, and you spend Contention 3 repeating Contention 1. And what exactly does "ineffective" mean? From reading and rereading what you wrote and rewrote, I can only see it as meaning "ineffective at significantly rehabilitating prisoners". But isn't that just a presupposition of the resolution? It is as if the resolution were "football should be replaced by baseball" and your contention "football is ineffective at being baseball". I cannot and will not disagree. What you failed to do was to demonstrate that rehabilitation as you define it would be more utilitarian PER SE, as opposed to simply more useful for its purpose. Consequently, I got to my own arguments right away and did not bother refuting the irrefutable (and irrelevant). Contention 2, by the way, was not a contention at all. It was a plan, and I know how you feel about plans. 1) Is it true that anything other than "helping the members of society who turn to crime as a measure of desperation and that we need to help them become upstanding members of society" "would be an entire different policy debate"? The resolution does not get so specific, nor does your value, nor does your criterion. There are two utilitarian reasons why spending scarce resources on rehabilitation would be wrong: Negative Deterrence: In your anecdote, the convicted chose VIETNAM over incarceration. When rehabilitation, as in your plan, doesn't involve the threat of death, won't it be even MORE attractive? Won't your "boot camp" serve as even less of a deterrent than Vietnam, which in turn was less of a deterrent than the current system? Jail is not "letting criminals off easy". A free education and high-level job is letting them off easy. Opportunity Cost: If there is recidivist crime, there is first-time crime. There will never be a day in which there is a recidivism problem without a problem of first offenses. Scarcity dictates that to say, "Misdemeanor jail-time should be replaced with significant rehabilitation," is necessarily to say, "At a certain point, we should give up on preventing first offenses." If education and jobs prevent recidivism, wouldn't they also prevent first offenses? The difference is that when you focus these charities on the AT RISK COMMUNITIES, you provide an incentive NOT TO commit crime. When you focus on CRIMINALS, you provide an incentive TO commit crime IN THE FIRST PLACE. The day there are no first-time offenses, rehabilitation will have no meaning, so I must reject the resolution as an anti-utilitarian use of scarce resources and as having its priorities in the order opposite what deterrence demands. "Jail time" is cheaper than your plan and thus leaves more money for early prevention or even worthier causes. Sorry to be so vulgar as to mention money, but it is because of the vulgar criterion Utilitarianism. 2) If a repeat offender is less savable than a first-time offender, doesn't it follow that a first-time offender is less savable than an innocent? Your reason for helping people before they've been caught for their second crime is my reason for helping them before they've been caught for their first: the more crimes people have been caught for, the more "stubborn in their [criminal] ways" they likely are. But though we have identical reasons, you've made the arbitrary choice of the assumedly second crime as the one to focus on preventing. And your rhetorical question, "What about crimes that they weren't caught for", is a double-edged sword. What about the crimes the "first time offender" wasn't caught for? They'll be quite a lot, probably, with all your plan's lack of deterrence. And let's remember that the only reason your plan can only be cheated once per person is that you only give people one chance to be rehabilitated. But yet we know that many people aren't rehabilitated until they've been through the process several times. So second is the only chance people really get, and if your rehabilitation were more "significant" it would be even more lucrative for the criminal. 3) One thing from Round 1 that I should clarify is the effect I called "social mobility by criminality". It is not only anti-utilitarian in the sense that the promise of social mobility is incentive, but also in the sense that social mobility is power. The money for rehabilitation will presumably be coming from society, through taxes, not out of thin air. So it is appropriate to speak in terms of relative social mobility. 4) Let's talk about "desperation" as a cause of crime. Desperation causes people to disregard long-term consequences. Especially before your plan is enacted, the long-term consequences of high-risk incidents of crime tend to be negative. By rewarding crime as you propose, we elevate criminals to a level of less desperation, at which there is little for their moral weakness to combine with to yield high-risk crime. Such a criminal, the "rehabilitated" kind, will not likely get caught very often from now on. In the future, his crimes may even be so sophisticated as to be technically legal. 5) What will happen to the general value of an associate's degree and especially the value of an associate's degree to men and minorities? As it is, people have to get associate's degrees during the normal struggle of life, amidst the normal temptations and distractions, and using their own finite supply of time and money. It shows they have a fair amount of intelligence and reliability. Whereas it may have taken an exponent of your system 10 years in associate's degree boot camp, but that's all expunged. Now again, as "Societal Good through Utilitarianism" is tautological nonsense, Pro has not offered a "valid Value and Criterion". I see no need to go outside of the broad category utilitarianism in order to prove my point, and therefore I will continue to challenge neither the Value nor its rewording the Criterion. Con also continues to violate the resolution (replacement of misdemeanor jail time with rehabilitation) with his glaring exception: repeat offenders, the primary recipients of current misdemeanor jail time. He turned this into a policy debate with his manifesto "The rehab process". He even put the debate in the wrong category and gave it a wrong time limit, for Christ's sake. My only hope is that the judges take mercy on Pro and allow the debate to be won or lost on substantive grounds.