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I'd argue that Bernie Madoff is not a normal person - stealing all those dollars wasn't done out of desperation. A normal person would not keep a scam of that size going for thirty years so there must be some screw loose in that guy's head. If that's true, he can be rehabilitated and if he's rehabilitated, he'll go in front of a parole board. And the parole board will hear about how he's not a threat to society (considering no one will trust him with a cent again) and how assuming would his release would fail to deter other crooked money handlers is flimsy reasoning since the crime is so atypical and rare. The damage was done and he's toothless now.
So why not parole Madoff right now?
1) Rehabilitation facilities for people who have demonstrated a dramatic departure from our society's moral norms but have given no evidence that they are fundamentally beyond help. People would only go to such places until the staff were confident that they weren't a danger to themselves or others and were capable of re-integrating with society.
2) Psychiatric care facilities for those who are too profoundly detached from society to ever successfully re-integrate.
3) Dentetion communities like those in parts of Europe where convicts are allowed to lead basically normal lives but have enforced curfews, for people who are not immediately dangerous to themselves or others and can lead productive lives but are from backgrounds or have temperaments which would, if left to their own devices, just lead them back into crime.
Anyone who doesn't absolutely need to be removed from society in order to keep either the criminal or those around them safe shouldn't be. Taking people out of the real world and putting them into cages full of fear, de-humanization, and bizarre micro-cultures isn't going to ever help anyone become a better member of society. Our existing penal system isn't set up to rehabilitate prisoners, it's set up to give victims (and fearful voters) a sense of justice from the idea that the criminals are being punished and to act as a deterrant. Which is ridiculous because punishment without rehabilitation doesn't actually do any good to anyone and the vast majority of crimes are either crimes of passion, crimes of desperation, or crimes due to psychological impairment.
If we had a rational system rather than one based on fear and greed then whether or not a 15 year old should get a life sentence without parole wouldn't be an issue. He'd go to the same sort of facility as any other person who comitted murder, where medical professionals and counselors would decide what root cause the action had and, on a periodic basis, whether it is safe for him to graduate from being under constant guard to a more relaxed theraputic facility and on to a detention community or full freedom. If he has a serious mental disorder that he can't overcome with treatment, therapy, or counseling then he would stay in a managed facility for life because it's the safest place for him to be, not because a room full of people who likely don't know thing one about his mental disorder decided, one day in 2011, that he should.
Moving to this sort of system would not only have a non-zero chance of actually rehabilitating some criminals, but by replacing incarceration as a punishment for all kinds of crimes that aren't immediately damaging with fines and community service you'd end up providing the state with money and free labor instead of costing millions and millions in tax dollars to get pot-heads raped in the shower.
But as has already been said in the thread, none of it will happen any time soon because being 'soft on crime' is political suicide in the US.
Also, talking about whether or not a 14 year old is aware of the ramifications of their actions is stupid. Obviously a 14 year old should know that killing is wrong, what murder is, and why he shouldn't shove a kid off a roof. And that doesn't mean that he should also get to vote, have sex, drink, and drive a car. We pick ages of majority and consent for a reason, and we don't decide them on a case-by-case basis because it would be both wildly inconsistent in terms of accuracy and vastly costly to do so. But we can decide on a case-by-case basis whether someone under the technical age of majority is culpable for an action in the same manner that somone a year or two years or 4 years their senior would be because it doesn't come up as frequently. Nobody in full posession of their faculties honestly believes that you magically become responsible, intelligent, thoughtful, and socially capable on your Nth birthday.
You are mistaking "incredibly cruelty" for instinctual need/urge to protect our way of life or self-defense or fighting because you believe your cause is right.
Not all of these are mutually exclusive to incredible cruelty, but that doesn't mean humans are by nature evil, no matter what 4chan says to make the hurting stop.
So, politicians and the American public saw the results and decided the only way to deal with criminals is by increasing punishments. Which is what we've been doing for the past couple of decades, and the crime rate has steadily been going down. We've lost the desire to mess around with rehabilitation and aren't bothered by criminals spending a long time in jail. The current system works well enough and there's no real movement for change.
Rigorous Scholarship
Except given that crime rates have been going down across the globe, including places that haven't taken anything like the US stance on crime, there's absolutely no reason to think the 2 are at all connected.
What.
The.
Fuck.
Let's start with something simple, and say a middle school history book. You might want to notice that there were a couple things going on during the 60s and the 70s that'd show no, your factually suspect claim about the trends in criminal justice are indeed a big load of BS.
Or the increase in crime statistics could be due to better enforcement and reporting mechanisms combined with the criminalization of previously legal activities. I'll give you 3 guesses as to when Nixon declared war on drugs.
But hey, I'm sure America is doing it right, even though most countries with far better crime rates than ours don't use our terrible system. I guess being ranked last among developed nations is a point of pride or something.
Except the fact that crime rates grew in the 80's.
Sociopaths fundamentally lack certain personality elements that other people have, and they don't have great records for rehabilitation.
Are you suggesting that we should render judgments based on our immediate emotional reaction to the crime?
I don't really buy into the emotional catharsis theory of justice.
That's absurd. "Nature" is red in tooth and claw. It's only in recent years in a select group of societies that cruelty is on the wane. Perhaps you're unfamiliar with the world outside your immediate circle of friends.
But, the average American doesn't really see much of a problem with the curent system. Sure, convicted criminals and their families might not be happy. But they tend to be poor and socially marginal. No one really gives a shit what they think.
If someone is proposing overhauling our approach to crime and punishment, they're going to have to make a strong argument that change is better than the status quo.
Rigorous Scholarship
Violent crime rate.
Property crime.
Canada as comparison. Forgive the crappy gif.
There are a bunch of hypothesis about the crime rate rise before the 1990s, but the ones claiming less punishment haven't held up to analysis. Crimes are mostly dealt on a state and local, especially in the 1960s. Crime rates rose everywhere, even in conservative hellholes. I haven't seen any evidence that states that mete out harsher punishment suffered less than the states without them, and most of the studies I have seen suggested other reasons for the rise and drop. Conservative law and order crap was popular in the 1970s with Nixon even having it as an important campaign theme, but that didn't stop crime rates from rising back up during recessions. The drop in the 1990s affected everybody, not just the individual states that passed harsher sentencing laws.
http://www.pbs.org/fmc/interviews/currie.htm
There is also a difference between deterrence and punishment for the sake of punishment. Punishment can be done as a form of rehabilitation.
Punishment mainly lowers crime rates through incapacitation during the age in which a person is most likely to commit crime so longer punishments when a person is unlikely to reoffend or has been shown unlikely to reoffend are fairly pointless and costly as California is finding out. The harshness of the punishment outside of length usually means jack shit.
http://battlelog.battlefield.com/bf3/user/Mort-ZA/
@MortNZ
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
Nope, hes already appealed all the way up to the state supreme court so hes pretty much fucked.
I don't have a problem with it being a component. The fact that people are emotionally affected by the callous execution of crying children is what enables them to function as moral members of society, and makes the murderer in the OP a problem.
Emotional appeals absent rational facts are a problem, but using a clear dividing line between emotionally healthy people (people who would be discouraged from murdering crying children) and emotionally unhealthy people (people who do not mind murdering crying children) is a useful way of separating out dangerous individuals.
If you mean to say that the pleas for mercy from the victim should be mentioned during the trial, Id agree as they go to the mental state of the accused. But to use emotional appeals during sentencing seems wrong - the crime was murder, not murder of someone begging for mercy. The fact that the victim was pleading for mercy doesnt change the fact that the crime murder (probably in the first degree) was violated. Im just not sure that extra time should be added to a punishment when theyre not stated in the law.