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Crime and Punishment (Not the Book)
Quid
Definitely not a bananaRegistered User regular
Definitely not a bananaRegistered User regular
Spinning this off from the terrorism thread.
There are some clearly different opinions when it comes to criminals and how to treat them. Some want retribution, some want rehabilitation, etc. The discussion was sparked by the story of five afghan teenagers raping another teenager.
I personally find the sentence surprisingly short but don't contend to be an expert on what Sweden's more rehabilitation oriented criminal system is capable of. Swedish law also has the option of extending their sentences which they've made use of in other criminal cases. So ultimately I don't see a problem unless they're released before they're rehabilitated.
There are some clearly different opinions when it comes to criminals and how to treat them. Some want retribution, some want rehabilitation, etc. The discussion was sparked by the story of five afghan teenagers raping another teenager.
I personally find the sentence surprisingly short but don't contend to be an expert on what Sweden's more rehabilitation oriented criminal system is capable of. Swedish law also has the option of extending their sentences which they've made use of in other criminal cases. So ultimately I don't see a problem unless they're released before they're rehabilitated.
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For the first part: What Sweden's ability to extend sentences has to do with these particular people is that your claim Sweden doesn't extend sentences is false. Extending sentences allows for them to increase the time they spend being rehabilitated which is what would actually solve the problem. You otherwise propose what I would view as a cruel and unusual punishment which I don't agree with.
For your second part I understand that they are not Swedish citizens. I don't care. They're people. And as far as I'm concerned no person should be subjected to cruel or unusual punishment. Human rights should apply to everyone regardless of where they were born.
1. The age of consent in Sweden is 15
2. The age of majority in Sweden is 18
This means that while its legal for you to consent to have sex with anyone at 15 you are still considered to be a minor. Some (or all) of the rapists in this case are under 18 and therefore treated as minors which limits the severity of available punishments/incarceration.
To top it off, he has entered a troll not-guilty plea, claiming this woman he never met before totally offered herself up for sexytimes at random, then tragically committed suicide by hanging herself in the back of her car. But not before bequeathing all of her worldly possessions to him, of course.
So now a public defender is going to have to deal with that garbage too, wasting public resources that are already stretched pretty thin.
Right now, off of the back of that story, I'd love for this fellow to get the Batman treatment. But humans think in short terms; we want immediate gratification for our impulses. I do not think it's a good idea to have a state apparatus operate with likewise whimsy - especially not when it comes to matters like judicial systems or public safety. We tell the police to go beat this scumbag up in his cell because we're mad today, he has to live with the injuries for the rest of his life & we have to accept the oversight of the snap-judgement / eager for violence system as it hammers-out carnage over multiple decades. We end up with things like this as permanent fixtures in society, even after the villainy that led us to create such an institute has long faded from memory.
All of the data we have suggests that the best prisons & justice systems are ones that aspire to treat lawbreakers - even the vile ones - with dignity & strive for leniency in sentencing. These systems reduce the number of terrible crimes that occur each year, while systems that aspire to create dungeons & treat criminals as a subhuman underclass seem to aggravate the number of terrible crimes that occur each year.
Can you post/link that data please? This is a topic where emotions tend to well in play so we definitely should share data on crime stats and recidivism etc. I think that would help keep this thread alive and not deteriorate into a mess of derptitude.
If you start deciding ahead of time that someone isn't worthy of having a public defender, then you're effectively sentencing them without a trial. It's in the best interest of the public if the defender puts up with the 0.01% of cases that are like this so that the other 99.99% of cases that are legitimate are also fairly tried.
And the last thing this country needs is more policemen or corrections officers abusing their power.
Recidivism in the U.S. results in 67~ percent of released prisoners being re-arrested for offenses within three years of release, while the Netherlands gets about 27~ percent of it's released prisoners back within two years.
You do have to be very careful with direct comparisons because the recidivism reporting structures in every country's system is either incredibly flawed or incredibly biased or both - however, nations like the U.S. & Russia have (as a example) ridiculous prisoner per capita ratios that support the high recidivism data, while Switzerland, India & Norway rest around the bottom of that chart. Some of the U.S.'s specific prisoner per capita ratio is due to systemic racism as well, and this takes some of the blame away from the cruel prison system, but the Ukraine & Singapore suffer from similarly large (proportionally) prison populations without the stark ethnic divide. Caning & hanging people in the great city square doesn't seem to scare away criminal behavior.
There are always further complications to the story the data tells, of course - it is illegal to be gay in Singapore, for example, to that probably pads-out the figures to some extent. But there is a strong confluence of results that swirl around countries that explicitly use brutal & hard line justice systems to stomp-out criminal activity: lots of people end up in jail, those same people often re-offend and the justice system often begins to buckle under the weight of trying to process so many criminals.
Ender, do you know if job applications in the Netherlands have questions about the criminal history of job applicants?
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Funny you should ask that; the Netherlands recently launched a program designed to incentivize employers to hire people who just got out of prison.
It's also worth mentioning that Dutch prisons operate on a multi-tier structure; you go into what you might see as a more conventional western prison (albeit one without the bars or wanton trappings of cruelty), and you graduate out of that into much more communal institutes where you're taught work trades & social skills. These institutes are also positioned to be partially incorporated into neighborhoods. I don't doubt that there is nevertheless still an inherent prejudice against hiring criminals (you do still get a criminal record & employers can still check it), but these sorts of programs help to mitigate the impact.
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The ability to extend the sentence makes sense in this context. I'd compare it to Ethan Couch, who many people think "got off" because he walked with a decade of probation for killing four people in a DUI. He didn't get off though, he got a sentence that allowed for the possibility that he was able to rehabilitate, and that perhaps prison wasn't even the best place to do that. However, probation also means he had greater government scrutiny of his life...and he violated that probation, which means now he is in prison for that crime (or was), and his probation was extended even further.
Amen. Things happen, and there are some weird ass people out there.
Criminals do not exist in a vacuum. There are a ton of people that are completely terrible but most didn't start out that way.
There are some that are true threat to society, and your system needs some way to to deal with them. In the Dutch system (TBS), where if a court convicts you of this you basically only get out if you served your time AND go through a very lengthy psychological evaluation track (which averages 5 years, but 40 years has happened....) before you are cleared. There are details wrong with it that are out of scope here probably.
The USA is actually a prime example that the threat of severe punishment is a terrible deterrent. You have over 10x the people per capita in prison than Scandivian countries, yet your rate of crimes are mostly the same. (Apart from guncrimes which are like 5-10x depending on the stats, another story, but not impactful for the total prison population). The recidivism is also way higher. No matter what the actual punishment is the USA, chances are your life is ruined.
Over here people do not have a criminal record, as much as that any employer can ask an employee to ask the government "Is there any indication that person X cannot be trusted with task Y" (Called a Declaration of Behavior). The broad categories are money, privacy, taking care of the vulnerable (elderly, children, young people) etcet. And you get back a paper that says "There is no indication" or you don't get a paper at all. This can potentially close some avenues, but it doesn't end your career.
The courts should not be blind that a part of the punishment is retribution, but it should keep the whole of society in mind too. Long prison sentences are not ineffective, they are expensive and probably harmful. Bad prisons create career criminals.
To me, this is the very first and possibly only thing that needs to be fixed to change the criminal justice system for the better. I just don't see it ever really changing as Othering is basic human behavior and takes a constant, conscience effort to prevent yourself from falling into that trap and I think that's just asking far too much from the American public.
I had a disagreement with some of my relatives about this Othering over the holidays. They brought up how Obama has pardoned a bunch of people and were spouting some spurious claims about how he was pardoning violent offenders or whatever which I wasn't about to start looking up on my phone in order to counter but then they mentioned something about restoring felon's voting rights and I asked them: Why should someone lose their voting rights for their entire life, after serving their time? You could be in jail for 3-5 years at age 18 and never be able to vote, ever. How can that possibly be a justifiable punishment, where someone will live 50+ years but because they had a little weed on them in college they will never be able to vote?
They just kept saying "well they shouldn't have done that", the implication being that all punishment is justified. They couldn't parse that their niece or nephew could easily end up with a charge like this, because they are "good kids" which means that people who commit crimes are bad and are always bad.
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wrongfully conviction
Tried as adults
With similar effects for likelihood of stop and greater sentences than white defendants
One thing that could help is making sure that juries are racially diverse.
People outside of Sweden might not realize the xenophobic weight this these statements carry due to how that argument is being used solely by the extreme right and neo nazis here. So I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt but like, think about how you express yourself. It matters, especially if you want to make a point about an issue. Shit like that statement is found only in neo nazi media and in statements from neo nazis here. It's a point they're very keen on making over and over without any indication to it being the truth in any significant number.
Agree. I think part of the problem is everybody...at least among those in the upper social classes...thinks it cant happen to them or someone they love and care about. Until it does.
I've seen it happen both ways. People get more or less harsh towards criminals depending on how crime affected them personally.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
People are strongly committed to the just world fallacy.
What's the status of the Louisiana public defenders basically going on strike, anyways?
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Waiting basically. Locally it looks like the city council is going to take money from the DA to give it to the public defenders office, but that's nitna guarantee. A few people on the council were pissed that the DA was asking for more money since they take 90% of the cases presented by a police department that is being smacked around by the feds for being terrible. I think it will only be resolved once it hits some federal courts though as I am pretty certain they are doing this to give their potential clients standing to sue.
Also not a full strike so much as refusing to take on more than x amount of cases because they can't adequately provide legal council past a certain caseload. Mostly to clarify for those following along that weren't aware.
Could you go into a bit of detail about "Quaker Pilgrim Justice™" and how it pertains to any actual history involving the Society of Friends and their ideas about justice and the reformation of criminals? I mean, there's some kinda fucked up history involved in how best to reform criminals, an early misbelief that isolation and silent reflection taken to extremes is not actually really harmful, but somehow, I think... that's not what you are talking about.
Seriously... what are you talking about? Because I'm pretty sure it is about 180 degrees opposed to what Quakers currently teach and what they have historically taught. The fact that you are associating them with a puritanical group that founded Massachusetts Colony, where quakers were hanged for their religious beliefs, would seem to belie your gross ignorance of this topic.
Luckily (for terribleness), American Protestantism is was more than happy to pick up that ball and run with it.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
specific individuals dedicate themselves to advocating for accused and convicted criminals.
It's actually pretty damn offensive to see them attacked by someone who the sum total of their knowledge of Quakers quite possibly is taken from an oatmeal box and the fact that other, not particullarly related, religions also have practitioners in Pennsylvania. That this level of knowledge is the norm is frustrating.
Post edited slightly to be less aggressive. I am sort of interested in what sort of thing related to reality the Quaker bit there is based.
Eastern State Penitentiary, which I believe is the first such place to call itself "penitentiary" but I may be wrong, was built in Pennsylvania and a lot of its design decisions were inspired by Quaker religious practices.
That's where the link comes from, historically.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Yes, and even then the point of the system was not to punish but to reform, and when they figured out it didn't actually work they stopped it, and it had nothing at all to do with the Calvinist-ish belief in predestination--which the pilgrims held, Apothe0sis was describing, and I'm 99% sure Quakers at no point failed to reject.
The whole be quiet and reflect on god and yourself thing is how quakers actually practice their faith. Comparing that to abusive forced labor prisons, it's not hard to get around to thinking "doing this all the time will make people better", instead of "being isolated for 24 hours a day makes people insane". It's more they were wrong about what people need to fundamentally be people, then trying to create a horrible punitive system to punish bad people.
It's also a good example for why using isolation either a punishment(the hole) or standard operating procedure(many supermax setups) in modern prisons is harmful and probably almost always counterproductive.
I'm definitely not placing any blame on modern Quakers, as I've never met one that wasn't very progressive and humanist in their outlooks on criminal justice. But it's their word that's still on our modern mass prisons, and that comes with some baggage in these discussions.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
I wasn't describing predestination or any explicitly religious belief.
I worded a thing poorly and meant to imply that Quakers with the appeal to reason and opposition to corporal punishment were the ones persecuted. There isn't an especially good reason I did so, though in the future I will have to reread things more carefully before I post them, especially the drafts that are saved by the forums. I meant no offense, I sincerely apologize and didn't mean to derail the thread. I'll edit the post.
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NYC has, what, 8~ million taxpayers? So, a hundred bucks a head per year to keep a reasonable justice system up? Egads, oh woah, such costs!
NYS has around 20 million folks so it's even less than that.
I've been leery of Cuomo for awhile but most of the other stupid shit had a patina of reasonableness about it. This is just straight up fucking "I WANT TO BE PRESIDENT" bullshit. Along with his winking tolerance of the "Independent Democrats" I'm willing to vote for pretty much anybody else next time around.
Cuomo maxed out the dickweasel sensor when he helped keep the legislature split between Rs and Ds. This is such a horrible move that the only way it'll help him on a presidential run is if he does it as a Republican.
Example- a Pennsylvanian woman adopted a teenage orphan together with her boyfriend, then raped and murdered her over the course of over 20 hours as part of a shared sexual fetish. I believe that what these two have done puts them beyond any conception of mercy or leniency and that they should be put to death as soon as possible.
Most of you here would probably disagree. So I ask you, how can you rehabilitate monsters like these? Why should society spend its limited resources on the attempt?
Perhaps most importantly, why should we let those who kill children live? This also applies to other particularly evil crimes- slavery, serial rape, serial murder, cannibalism, etc.