Failure to sign the Ottawa treaty (anti landmine) and the international criminal court agreements, execution of minors (and execution at all), assassination of opponents even if citizens (via drones), torture, war crimes, illegal invasions, use of phosphorus (probably comes under war crimes), continual killing of civilians in non declared wars, massive prison population, secret prisons, outsourcing torture, supporting some of the worst governments of earth etc. Who sees the US as a leader in human rights? No one I know.
It's easy to distill these issues and hold a self-righteous opinion, but I personally find most too complex to form anything resembling an educated opinion.
Take land mines. I've heard that they play a critical role in South Korea's defense, which was a major reason Clinton didn't sign. Military experts talk about how it's an effective tool that, when used responsibly, can benefit civilians more than harm them.
They also kill and maim people.
Intellectually, both sides seem reasonable to me. Of course, emotionally, one is passively helping people (or so we are told), while the other is actively harming them, so, ya, I lean towards being anti land mines. But, I fundamentally can't shake the feeling that I have no clue what's going on, so maybe I shouldn't be too quick to judge.
Further, there is a big difference between long term persistent land mines out of a plane into a civilian area (what the treaty is meant to stop), and keeping a careful inventory of (mostly wire controlled) mines in a controlled area just south of the border.
The former will kill tons of non-soldiers and persist long after the war is over. The latter will kill NK soldiers moving south and can be easily collected in the event they are no longer necessary.
> It's easy to distill these issues and hold a self-righteous opinion, but I personally find most too complex to form anything resembling an educated opinion.
Ah, yes, complexity explains everything from the role of private oil companies in Iraq to the ties of the Bush family with the Bin Laden family.
> But, I fundamentally can't shake the feeling that I have no clue what's going on, so maybe I shouldn't be too quick to judge.
I think a very safe way, given the histoy over the last decaded, to form an opinion, is to consider everything the US defense industry-slash-ministry proclaims an outright lie and only accept very small points as true when they have been verified.
> It's easy to distill these issues and hold a self-righteous opinion, but I personally find most too complex to form anything resembling an educated opinion.
The problem is the other extreme of not expressing an opinion where you have reasonable doubt will lead to leaving the discussion to everyone else. And there will always be a huge crowd of people who will voice their very uniformed opinion no matter what.
Even worse, you become extremely susceptible to malign publicity tactics. For example I would not see it beyond the US government[1] to argue with South Korea's defense even if the land mine treaty explicitly had an exception for these well cataloged mines in narrowed down locations [2]. They would of course word their public statement carefully so they can later refuse to acknowledge a causal connection between the two in case their bluff is called.
[1] And my government on other topics.
[2] I'm assuming the best case here. I don't know how the mines along the border are actually distributed, or even if there are mines at all.
Point being (I believe), it is expensive to take a moral position. It costs you money and thoughtful action. You could secure the South Korean border without landmines. It just would cost a lot more money.
You could do a lot of other things (or rather not do them), but it might cost you your political standing.
So point being - playing the moral high card, as the US do around the world, should not follow the line from a Genesis song:
"Do as I say, don't do as I do..."
At least in my humble opinion (the same goes for my Governement, the German one by the way.)
The point being whatever you want to make of the similarities in the human rights records between the US and North Korea.
Perhaps you think what North Korea does is the proper way to interact with the world, perhaps you think that the US should be the moral lead for countries like the Sudan, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Afganistan, and Croatia instead of the moral follower.
Three-strikes laws are dumb, but so are you. Take your anti-US agenda somewhere else. I suggest North Korea, China, Venezuela, Iran, Russia, or any of the other countries not allied with us, so you can see how much "better" they are.
The phenomenon where people like you act as if anyone with something critical to say about the United States lacks patriotism is the very thing that is destroying our nation. I'm a moderate conservative and a Soldier, but your "love it or leave it" attitude is sickening to me. Its ruining our country, so please stop.
Sure many countries are horrible places to live compared to the United States, but if we ignore our problems as you would have us do, that might not always be the case.
Our founding fathers knew from the very start that government is but a necessary evil. One that requires constant monitoring and modification in order to keep the power in the hands of the American people, which is where it belongs. Patriotism is about loving one's country, not worshipping the government.
I don't agree with every criticism of the United States that appeared in this thread, but I do agree with some of them.
Here is the US, we're allowed to criticize the government. If you're unhappy with that, maybe you'd like to move to North Korea, China, or any of those other countries where people like you are allowed to shut down critical thinking.
I keep wondering how people can possibly defend what Snowden did. He used social engineering exploits in his job as sysadmin on a large scale, then published the resulting information. He apparently even compromised personal accounts of the people he was supposed to help.
Are we seriously suggesting letting people do this if they think the goal is just ? It seems so. I shudder to think what the consequences of that would be.
Maybe we should create a "politically correct NSA" that spies on everyone who might be involved in unpopular politics ? How about spying on every company and violently extracting their labour practices ? I'm sure quite a few European unions wouldn't mind doing that (and at least in .be and .nl that would be a legal grey area, illegal but not punishable).
I keep wondering how people can possibly defend the government's conduct.
>Are we seriously suggesting letting people do this
Do what? Expose evidence of government corruption? It is written in the law that this is exactly the case. There are numerous examples of the failure of the laws meant to protect us from this scenario.
> if they think the goal is just ? It seems so.
There is no justice in following unjust laws.
>I shudder to think what the consequences of that would be.
An informed electorate? Backroom-dealing politicians have to work harder to conceal their works? We should be so lucky.
> Do what? Expose evidence of government corruption? It is written in the law that this is exactly the case.
The law does not permit breaking the law to further expose corruption though. That is the role of an appointed (and trained!) inspector general. Or, if necessary, a special prosecutor.
It would be one thing to reveal evidence of wrongdoing that one happens to fall into as part of their normal duties. Going further beyond that is illegal for good reason, as otherwise those who are impersonating high-ranking officials for purposes of espionage would be literally indistinguishable from those impersonating the same officials for to "dig for dirt".
Put another way, if your logic applied Google would have not merely the right, but the obligation to constantly scour through their GMail archives, G+ private messages, and everything else they have access to, for evidence of wrongdoing. Is it your position that Google should be doing this?
>The law does not permit breaking the law to further expose corruption though. That is the role of an appointed (and trained!) inspector general. Or, if necessary, a special prosecutor.
The Inspector General is empowered to break the law? Or is that a bit of a bait-and-switch?
This is a very silly bit of circular reasoning. The State has effectively made it illegal to expose The State's own illegal conduct. You suppose we should all ignore the State's lawbreaking, because it took Snowden's lawbreaking to expose it, as if citizens are to be constrained by judicial rules of evidence?
Or, are you invoking the "not my job" excuse for abdicating one's responsibility as a citizen (to hold the State to account for its actions). We've had this argument before. I remain unmoved by your opinion.
>It would be one thing to reveal evidence of wrongdoing that one happens to fall into as part of their normal duties. Going further beyond that is illegal for good reason, as otherwise those who are impersonating high-ranking officials for purposes of espionage would be literally indistinguishable from those impersonating the same officials for to "dig for dirt".
I would have hoped that the NSA were competent to the degree that a Snowden wouldn't have been able to betray the them so thoroughly and completely. Hawks such as yourself ought to be especially furious at the level of organizational incompetence made evident by Snowden's disclosures. Even after being personally embarrassed by my government's shameful conduct in spying on everyone, I am again embarrassed by its obvious lack of competence. It apparently hopes to ensure the security of The State with thuggish threats, and nothing more. It must change or it is destined to fail.
>Put another way, if your logic applied Google would have not merely the right, but the obligation to constantly scour through their GMail archives, G+ private messages, and everything else they have access to, for evidence of wrongdoing. Is it your position that Google should be doing this?
Except that logic does not apply to Google, nor have I attempted to apply it to Google; because Google is not an agency of the State, especially not a part of the Judicial Branch, and therefore not the arbiter of the law in this country. Even if Google were an agency of the State, they still are not empowered to violate citizens' rights under the Constitution.
Yes, you are right, it would have been much better if we did not know what NSA does, and to what extent it violates our rights. NSA officials lying to congress, no big deal. A man standing up for what he believes and releasing the truth about a corrupt, lying, and out of control governmental organization. By god, that fucker needs to die!
Are we seriously suggesting letting people do this if they think the goal is just ? It seems so. I shudder to think what the consequences of that would be.
This is actually a significant part of why we have trial by jury (according to some; others argue that it's just silly); they can decide that the accused did commit the crime and still return not guilty.
Yeah he's in the leagues of Thomas Jefferson and the signers of the Declaration of Independence who used social engineering exploits in their jobs as legislators to undermine the authority of the crown.
Yes, I'm seriously suggesting that following orders contrary to good conscience is immoral and illegal, but luckily the better part of the world agrees with me in the precedent set at Nuremberg.
Criticism of government has it's limits. Snowden is questionable because what he said was not public knowledge and had crippling negative effects towards security of the state, but say, expressing your criticism of government by blowing up a federal building...
Similarly to how China would react to someone talking about Tianamen Square which isn't public knowledge but knowledge of it would cause a massive shit storm that would undermine the security of the state.
It's not what happened, it's the idea of one man standing up to the state that strikes fear into their hearts.
I would wager that almost every educated person in China knows exactly what happened at Tiananmen Square. Certainly every chinese person I've ever really gotten to know knew all about it. The politics around it is complicated, but there is an acceptance of sorts that there's some items the government does not want dwelled upon, and that's one of them.
Don't underestimate Chinese political sophistication, especially amongst what we might call the middle class (a <10% minority in China). There is a common feeling, if not outright belief, that a strong government is necessary to hold the country together, especially during its current transition period with its massive inequalities. I am no expert but my impression is that the people who do know - the middle class educated, with internet access (firewalls are trivial to get around) understand or at least play along with the idea that from a stability point of view, some information is best not fully shared.
I see some interesting parallels between Chinese political censorship and the debate about the NSA revelations, by the way. Both are about concealing information of great public interest in the name of some alleged greater good. The only real difference is that the events in Tianenmen Square happened outdoors.
So releasing documents that prove that US Government is knowingly violating its citizens constitutional rights is equivalent in your mind to killing a lot of people with an explosive?
I think that falls under the "yelling fire in a crowded theatre" rule [1].
Yes, the US has freedom of expression, and you can claim whatever you want about the government (you can even lie). But if you yell 'fire' in a theatre with 500 people and 1 small exit, or 'allahu akbar' in a TSA line, you deserve to get sued and punished for that. That is not legally considered to be freedom of expression.
Personally I don't find that very controversial. If you lie to get someone else's kid into your car, that's not freedom of expression either. Lying to private security during an emergency is not freedom of expression either. Reporting a bomb threat because you have a math quiz is not freedom of expressoin. If you commit fraud on a contract, that's not freedom of expression either, whether or not "it was a joke".
Summary - the case involved was not a principled exception to free speech, but the diametric opposite; a judge basically ruled that you can't criticize the government during wartime because it would undermine the state.
> Holmes, writing for a unanimous Supreme Court, affirmed Schenck's conviction on the theory that this expression could be punished in wartime even though it merely urged "peaceful measures such as a petition for the repeal" of conscription, on the theory that the government could suppress speech that might interfere with the draft.
That stupid and overused quote comes from an opinion by justice Holmes. "Holmes, writing for a unanimous Court, ruled that it was a violation of the Espionage Act of 1917 (amended with the Sedition Act of 1918), to distribute flyers opposing the draft during World War I." - Wikipedia.
Read the case before you quote it. American Supreme Court has done a lot of injustices in its time. And this is one of the more egregious once.
So what you have said is that if someone says "God is great" in a TSA line they should be sued or punished.
Does your opinion change if it is spoken in English? Or is it just Arabic? Should it be taken more seriously if a person is wearing a turban or not? Or maybe their skin color… does that matter?
My country of birth, New Zealand, has plenty of dark secrets of its own. It's not as simple as being with us or against us though, surely? There are plenty of countries that are worse than the US and there are also a fair few who are better. However there aren't any countries who have a bigger international profile everywhere I have ever been. Its a pity this isn't used to create more good.
Actually, it is. I mean "partisan" as in "parted into parties" which is the same as "us versus them" rather than more jargony "national political parties inside America".
It is usually extremely partisan. It is fairly rare for an entire country to be violently nationalisic, even if the ruling party is. Also, as saraid points out, it is by definition being partisan, just internationally rather than internally.
That is an appropriate reaction, but the ACLU's focus on life without parole sentences grossly understates the savagery of US sentencing schemes. Tens of thousands more inmates are serving life with the possibility of parole for non-violent crimes. These inmates may very well never be released, and if they are they will have served so long that they will never be able to recover.
In Nevada, for example, 1 in 5 prisoners is serving a life sentence with the possibility (but no guarantee) of parole. Our version of the 3 strikes law, which is used in several other states as well, enables any three felony convictions to qualify an offender for a life sentence. This can and has included repeat drug offenders (including those who were not dealing), those committing multiple relatively minor property crimes (vandalism, theft, etc), and those with multiple DUI's that never resulted in accidents.
Simply put, US habitual offender laws defy all sense of logic, humanity, and reason. The political will to change this does not exist within either of our major political parties, so the problem is likely to expand over time.
Multiple DUIs do deserve a severe punishment IMO, because that is attempted murder basically and they are a danger to the public. The rest I agree are ridiculous. Huffing drugs three times does not deserve permanent incarceration.
Oh come on. I've lost my license for what you'd call DUI - made a stupid decision to drive the 1.5km back home from a pub, got a 1 year ban and a hefty fine. Yes, it was a stupid thing to do and I deserve what I got, but attempted murder? Don't be ridiculous.
At most repeated DUI is criminal negligence, and negligence on the part of whomever supplied the offender with the vehicle. It should be met with driving bans and escalating punishments if those are ignored. Life imprisonment is an amazingly harsh and expensive over-punishment for a stupid but usually non-malicious crime.
I've got a massive 7 inch scar across my face from when a drunk driver plowed into our car when I was 8 years old. I had over 100 stitches in my head and my face was a criss cross of zipper scars for years. The only thing that saved my life was that I was reading a book when we were struck - the book literally saved my life by blocking the glass from slashing my throat.
So, yea, murder. That's how serious DUI (or texting behind the fucking wheel) is.
Unless you cause a accident, then you can get attempted murder, or murder (depending on the outcome).
Then people will say: "Oh, but the driver had no intention to murder someone." here the most common argument from the judge is: "someone that knows that driving under influence is dangerous and do it anyway, is taking full responsability for the fact that it might accidentally kill someone, thus it is not accidental, since the person is on purpose gambling away with other people lives."
TL;DR Breathalyzers are based on dubious science, system is unfairly tilted in favor of conviction. Guilt is presumed & punishment issued even before trial.
Fantastic. I wish they were put behind bars even longer. I have no sympathy for people who drink and drive, and no sympathy for people who text and drive.
I cannot tolerate anyone who would plow around our roads in a 2,000 pound bullet and either be drunk or looking at their phone.
Are you aware that people can be convicted of DUI for such things as sleeping in your car while drunk, or standing 10 feet from your car with keys in your pocket while drunk?
But... murder implies intent. The driver did not get in the car to say "I'm going to try to kill silverbax88", or even "I'm going to try to kill someone".
If you get drunk and get behind the wheel of a car, it's the same to me as walking around with a loaded gun and firing randomly. Does it matter that you didn't set out to shoot someone?
Unfortunately, this is not the case. You still are conscious of your decisions when you walk into a bar and fire randomly. There is a reason its considered rape if you have sex with someone who is intoxicated; they can no longer provide consent. The no longer have the ability to reason for themselves.
Are we going to argue that you're a murder if you drink to excess while your keys are still in your pocket? Because that's when the decision was made, not when you get in your car drunk. At that point, its not you making the decision.
And why the hell should intent matter? It's the outcome that is relevant. My grandfather was killed by a perpetual drunk driver. I don't give a shit what his intent was, he obviously had no regard for the safety of the innocents he was putting at risk. He deserves to rot in prison.
repeat offenses should be factored in to sentencing and charges just as much as intent. regardless of your particular situation, our legal system (and most) have the concept of intent built in (manslaughter vs murder, etc.)
Grabbing a stat off of Wikipedia, almost 18,000 people died in drinking-related vehicular accidents in the US in 2006. Maybe attempted murder is a little extreme, but I think negligent homicide would be right on the mark.
Yeah, not trying to downplay its seriousness. I honestly did not know how much alcohol impairs one's driving ability - I would have thought maybe 2 or 3 times, turns out it's more like 20x. Well, I learned my lesson.
I was just saying that attempted murder is when you actually attempt to murder someone. It's not the same, not at all.
As a whimsical thought experiment, care to explain why the other 60% of fatal accidents should not be classed as criminal negligence by one party or another? : P
edit: since this got a few upvotes, I'd like to expand. I'm in my late thirties; I got my drivers' license in the early nineties. I was never really educated on drink driving the way people are today.
I didn't take it seriously enough. I thought it would be OK; I didn't know the risks properly, and I certainly didn't know the penalties. I had no idea that being a couple of times over the limit led to a 20x+ increased risk of accident. Maybe I was stupid to not know that, nonetheless I had never properly internalised that fact.
Maybe everyone here is smarter than me - it certainly seems like that most of the time - but I am not completely stupid, and my internal risk profile was totally wrong about this. If you're of a similar age as me - earned your license decades ago, in a more permissive time - I beg you not to make the same mistakes I made. Drink driving is never an option. It is not even on the table. You are endangering yourself, the community, your reputation, and everyone you love. Catch a god damn taxi, like I wish I had done that night.
Drink driving - not even once. From one hacker to another. Please.
I learned to drive in the mid 90s and it was repeatedly hammered into my skull that drunk driving is extremely dangerous. That included in school testing on a table showing impairment as a function of weight and number of drinks. This was all standard as part of the licensing process in suburban NJ at the time.
No, it's not "you've been drinking" -> 20x more dangerous. Much idiocy has been put forth by people who are unable to understand basic layman's toxicology/pharmacology. Drugs have effects. More of the substance has more of an effect. Step functions where a little of a substance has zero effect, shifting to a major effect with a little more, are extremely rare. It is never the case, for example, that a dose of ionizing radiation goes from "not dangerous" to "dangerous" suddenly - we may measure a low dose at 5 cancers per 100,000 and a high dose at 5,000 cancers per 100,000, but there is always presumed to be some effect.
And yet we have media organizations saying things like:
"
Washington (CNN) -- A common benchmark in the United States for determining when a driver is legally drunk is not doing enough to prevent alcohol-related crashes that kill about 10,000 people each year and should be made more restrictive, transportation safety investigators say.
The National Transportation Safety Board recommended on Tuesday that all 50 states adopt a blood-alcohol content (BAC) cutoff of 0.05 compared to the 0.08 standard on the books today and used by law enforcement and the courts to prosecute drunk driving.
The NTSB cited research that showed most drivers experience a decline in both cognitive and visual functions with a BAC of 0.05.
"
Of course we have a decline in cognitive and visual functions - that's what a depressant does. At any dose. So long as we have drinking as a major societal institution, and we have bodies that slowly process alcohol, and we have an automotive-mobile culture, there is some nonzero number of deaths we will prefer to tolerate every year due to drunk driving, whether it's 1,000,000 or 10,000 or 100.
---
While there may be some distribution of how well people deal with a certain degree of drunkenness, the basic objective fact that we possess to measure impairment is BAC. Limits vary geographically and through history - in the US we have had experience with thresholds at 0.05%, 0.08%, 0.1%, and 0.15% in various eras and places.
A BAC of 0.01% doesn't significantly harm anyone - it is barely detectable. A BAC of 0.05% poses some minor statistical increase in danger, and is generally the minimum people seek out to 'get a buzz'. A BAC of 0.1% indicates moderate impairment - about what you thought, several times more dangerous. It's only when you get to a BAC of around 0.2% that it becomes 20x more dangerous. At a BAC of around 0.3% and up, on the other hand, one generally loses consciousness. Death from alcohol intoxication (assuming no complications) occurs at an average of about 0.45% BAC (that is the approximate LD50).
Every vehicular accident where any party has any sign of drinking is counted as "drinking-related". If a drunk guy jumps out in to a busy street and is hit by a stone-cold sober driver, that's "drinking-related", though obviously not a case for further-strengthening DUI laws.
It's not negligence because you are an active participant. But, ok, let's meet in the middle and call it attempted manslaughter because you had no mens rea.
The goal of this idea is to encourage you to not attempt manslaughter with your vehicle, so if you were faced with life imprisonment perhaps you would think long and hard before you do it the third time.
I see what you're driving at (ha!), but "attempted manslaughter" is a contradiction in terms. Attempt implies intent; manslaughter is by definition without intent.
Look, I can see your point of view. There needs to be a deterrent, yes. Locking someone up and throwing away the key, though, should be reserved for only the most heinous offences. In my opinion, you should not be able to achieve that using only a six-pack, a car, and zero dead bodies.
There has got to be some other solution that doesn't utterly ruin the person's life, and the state's finances.
"Attempted manslaughter" is an actual legal concept [0]. Gotta love the US legal system :)
I think DUI three times is particularly heinous. Maybe life in prison is excessive, but the third time you do it you are well aware that it is potentially lethal, and the punishment should be on the level of attempted manslaughter. If that gets you nailed with some three-strikes thing, I think your argument should be against the three-strikes aspect.
But my original point was to disagree that DUI is the same class of crime as drug use in general, since it's incredibly dangerous for the other members of the public.
It is hard to disagree with you about the third-time DUI. I guess I am against "automatic" laws in general; it reeks of populism and "tough on crime" rhetoric, ignoring the human variables - see above article for examples. Trying to legislate judicial discretion out of the equation is, to me, a foolish idea.
Couldn't agree more on the drug use issue. They should not even be in the same category of crime.
> in Virginia a few traffic offenses can be classified as attempted manslaughter. Such as, speeding well above what classifies as reckless driving or driving sufficiently intoxicated. I think the reasoning is that if one were to kill someone under those circumstances it would be manslaughter, and any reasonable person would know that excessive speeding or driving drunk carries a high risk of killing someone even though that person isn't exactly trying to kill anyone, therefore, even though they didn't kill someone, they still basically attempted to in being so careless. IOW, you really should be charged with manslaughter, you just were lucky enough to have no actually killed anyway
> I think different jurisdictions probably punish those actions similarly, they just may call it something other than attempted manslaughter, like maybe reckless endangerment or whatever.
Reckless endangerment - I admit that strikes me as a better term, although I now understand the reasoning behind "attempted manslaughter".
How would it be less fair to permanently imprison a repeat DUI offender than it would be to wait until he's actually killed someone before locking him up for good.
Perhaps I'm misguided, but it seems to me that its more fair to impact the life of the offender than it would be to allow an innocent person to die.
Fortunately, there are more than two options. The best idea I can come up with would be to permanently suspend driving privileges for anyone with a second DUI conviction.
> The goal of this idea is to encourage you to not attempt manslaughter with your vehicle, so if you were faced with life imprisonment perhaps you would think long and hard before you do it the third time.
This is the worst part of excessive penalties -- that people think they would actually be effective. Most defendants have absolutely no idea what the penalties are until after they've been charged with the crime, which makes any deterrent effect of increasing the penalties quite impossible.
Even if you ran some kind of expensive continuous education campaign (which naturally can't work for every category of crime because there are so many types with such complicated penalties that no one could keep track), you're assuming that people engage in planning. If people planned ahead then they would all have a ride home from the bar in the first place.
Yeah, I am going to side with the attempted murder interpretation. You should have lost your licence permanently as well.
But hey, that's just my opinion.
Driving is a privilege granted by society, not a right. If you Demonstrate that you no longer deserve that privilege, then yeh you should lose it for life.
"Driving is a privilege, not a right" is just something MADD made up to justify unusual penalties. You could just as well say "fire is a privilege, not a right" and claim that arsonists should be prohibited from heating their homes in the winter. As a policy it doesn't make any sense.
It's weird you chose that strawman because actually people do need a permit to operate large fires in public and I am pretty sure a convicted arsonist would be denied this privilege.
An analogy is not a straw man. Moreover, I can identify at least two problems with your rebuttal.
First, the existence of a bad policy somewhere does not excuse the existence of similar bad policies everywhere. You can't justify the penalties under the CFAA by comparing to the penalties for crack cocaine possession, because they are both excessive.
Second, you'll notice that your discovery (if such a prohibition for arsonists indeed exists) breaks the analogy with a prohibition on driving for those convicted of a DUI, because it isn't a prohibition on all fire, when it is a prohibition on all driving. Which makes your argument the straw man, because a prohibition on large public fires is a minor inconvenience, whereas a prohibition on burning fuel to heat one's residence, like a prohibition on driving whatsoever, is a life-altering situation that may require you to find a new job and residence while doing very little to combat the evil in question supposedly justifying the restrictions.
> Life imprisonment is an amazingly harsh and expensive over-punishment for a stupid but usually non-malicious crime.
Then again, death is an amazingly harsh and expensive punishment for an innocent who happens to get killed in a driving accident with somebody who's drunk...
That said, attempted murder doesn't really fit. Attempted Manslaughter or something like criminal negligence (of the sort that endangers people's life) maybe?
While the outcome is a tragedy in either case, there is a significant difference in whether it was truly an accident, or if one of the parties involved in the accident willfully and knowingly significantly increased the chances of an accident by, say, being drunk or texting while driving.
As a society we realize that certain risks will always remain, and due to bad luck accidents will always happen: We accept that and live with that. What we do not accept is behavior which unnecessarily endangers a person's life.
It's perfectly reasonable from a moral point of view to hold people accountable in proportion to how reckless they are acting.
Take a good look at your city's crime logs. At least in the US, it's not unusual for most DUIs to be repeat offenders; and again, not unusual for people to drive with revoked licenses. Revoking a license does nothing to protect society from those willing to flout the law.
If anything it makes it a lot worse, because now whatever car they're driving doesn't require them to breathe into it in order to start it, and now when they drive into your parked car (or worse) they have a huge incentive to commit a hit and run to avoid being caught driving with a suspended license.
Murder, or attempted murder, is an intent crime in most states in the US. Generally speaking, that means that in order to be convicted, it must be proven in court that the defendant had the specific intent to cause the death of another person when they undertook the act that caused the death. That's why most traffic-related deaths are charged as manslaughter, or under traffic-specific statutes such as vehicular homicide or DUI resulting in death (depending on the specific state and circumstances).
The ACLU page is rather manipulative in that they construe the facts very favorably to the convicted. E.g. "After serving two years in prison during his mid-twenties for inadvertently killing someone during a bar fight." Oh yes, he just accidentally killed someone in a bar fight. Happens all the time really, right up there with leaving your credit card with the hostess after getting a little too tipsy.
It would be less biased to show statistics for the kind of people sentenced under the three strikes law, but that wouldn't tug the heart strings as much. California's law is particularly dysfunctional, because it applies to any three felonies while most states limit their laws to serious felonies. As a result, about half of three strikers in California are in for non-serious or non-violent predicate felonies (burglary, robbery, and drug possession). But in other states the law is more limited. For example, the Georgia law only applies to: (1) Murder or felony murder,
(2) Armed robbery,
(3) Kidnapping,
(4) Rape,
(5) Aggravated child molestation,
(6) Aggravated sodomy, or
(7) Aggravated sexual battery.
Besides that, what you're missing is that nobody is really intending for these specific, cherry-picked, people to be kept in jail for their whole lives. Their sentences are the unintended consequences of three-strikes laws that offer no discretion to sentencing judges.
When legislators voted for these three strikes laws, with public support, they were thinking of people who are "irredeemable." Hardened convicts who end up in jail on three occasions. What they didn't count on was the fact that there are people living on the edge who rack up a number of felony convictions for relatively minor things even though they're not the kind of hardened criminal legislators were thinking about. If you live in the ghetto and have friends who engage in gang activity, it's pretty easy to get drawn into some bad behavior that results in a couple of felony convictions, so that "one mistake" later in your life can bring you under the three strikes law.
Why don't these laws get repealed? Because Americans are really not sympathetic to people living on the edge. Ordinary people don't live in the kind of circumstances where they might wander into a felony conviction from a minor lapse in judgment. They don't have drug dealer boyfriends or friends who try to recruit them into burglarizing a house. It helps that 75% of people sentenced under California's three strikes law are black or hispanic (45% are black despite only 6.5% of the state population being black). Americans are particularly unsympathetic to racial minorities living on the edge.
I think sentences in the U.S. are deeply dysfunctional, but I hate this sort of publication by the ACLU. It makes people who support sentence reform seem dishonest by cherry-picking the edge cases, instead of trying to paint an accurate picture with statistics.
It would be less biased to show statistics for the kind of
people sentenced under the three strikes law, but that
wouldn't tug the heart strings as much.
Perhaps we could aspire to have a law that works right in outlier cases, not just on average?
One of the most basic principles of system design is that there will be edge cases. Every engineer knows that. In a country with 300 million people, enough will fall into these edge cases for the ACLU to put together a pamphlet with a few examples. That's inevitable.
That said, with three strikes laws, you don't need to resort to sob stories. The statistics are evidence enough: about half of three strikers in California are in for non-serious or non-violent offenses. That's much more persuasive, to a rational thinking person, than a few examples of people who fell into the edge cases of the system.
> That's much more persuasive, to a rational thinking person, than a few examples of people who fell into the edge cases of the system.
The problem is not convincing rational thinking people. Are there really some nontrivial group of informed rational people without an ownership stake in a private prison company who genuinely believe that three strikes laws are good policy?
The problem is not the rational thinking people at all. The problem is politics and rational ignorance. It's the swarms of busy people who don't have the time or the education to understand the statistics, who consequently go back and vote for the people who enacted these laws.
I get where you're coming from. The world would be a better place if all policy decisions were based on evidence and reasoning rather than emotion. But when you have the prison lobby heaping the corpses of teenage girls on their side of the scale, you need to put something visceral on the other side to shock complacent people into realizing that something is very wrong here.
Politics is a popularity contest. It's important that the side with the best argument wins, but how do you get that to happen when people have limited time and limited resources and the winner is decided by voting rather than correctness?
If the last 25 years or so have taught me anything, it's that politics is _never_ about rational, thinking people voting for their own best interest. It's pretty much just emotion and/or fear for the vast, vast majority (of the tiny minority of people who actually bother to vote).
Irrational emotion bred these laws, they will only go away via the same pathetic process. The ACLU is just playing the game with their appeal to emotion.
>One of the most basic principles of system design is that there will be edge cases. Every engineer knows that. In a country with 300 million people, enough will fall into these edge cases for the ACLU to put together a pamphlet with a few examples. That's inevitable.
What if you are the next edge case in this system? with nobody to remember that you even exist, if its fair..
Just one person beiyng this edge case is enough to put the whole system down.. as every engineer knows this is what we call a bug, and can make the whole system irrelevant, and work agains its own purpose..
And that is what happens to the justice system.. the worst thing is that its all about property.. its f#$% stupid.. its unproportional, and minimize that is pure lack of humanity.. and its the real reason why things are still working that way.. because if you are not one of those "edge cases" you really dont care
And thats so many human lifes wasted, not only the people behind bars, but also their families, how they kids will grow up.. how can they support their families..
No, one person being the edge case is definitely not enough to put the whole system down.
If we get, say, 1000 edge cases every year - then it's completely acceptable unless you can provide another system that will have much less edge cases. And if you're not sure, you don't switch until you are sure. If you simply "switch off" the system, then you get random 'mob justice' which whill have much more problems than the current situation.
The big difference here is, mandatory minimum sentencing is an aberration which is engineered from the start to create more injustice. There is a reason that in a normal case, sentencing takes the history of the individual and the circumstances of the crime into account, instead of following a rulebook saying "Theft: 5 years in prison, no early release".
Three-strike laws exist to quench the mob's appetite for blood (as public execution is sadly no longer acceptable, the mob has to settle for life sentences), and get politicians get elected on a fearmongering & repression platform. But on a humane level, it's not far removed from judicial amputations.
If only we could have a system where a real, live flesh and blood person could make decisions regarding punishment upon a guilty conviction... we could call these people, I know, judges.. they could judge on a case by case basis and make appropriate decisions.
I know, now the problem lies with these judges having poor decision making skills... if only there were a process to removing or overriding their decisions.. like an "appeals" process.. or a way of electing new judges and "voting" them in and out of office...
Neah, that's crazy talk.. we need absolute maximum/minimum sentencing guidelines like three strikes so we can keep those privatized prisons full, and making money.
The biggest problem with broad judicial discretion is that you get wildly varying outcomes with identical facts depending on which judge you get and even what kind of mood he's in.
If anything the system still has too much discretion (in the hands of police and prosecutors) that lead predictably to discriminatory outcomes.
The problem with restricting judicial discretion is that a judge always has a living breathing person in front of him or her, and a sentencing committee never does. This leads to inflated sentences across the board.
instead of trying to paint an accurate picture with statistics.
People are even more unmoved by accurate pictures painted by statistics than they are of "minorities living on the edge". That's the problem here. The ACLU is trying to relate to people on a human level so that they can build some support. So what if they end up producing something very biased? Is this a scientific paper in peer review? I think most people are aware of the fact that the ACLU is a civil liberties advocacy organization and that this naturally biases towards the left wing.
> people are aware of the fact that the ACLU is a civil liberties advocacy organization and that this naturally biases towards the left wing
Does it? I can think of any number of civil liberties which I would associate with the "right" wing of American politics. Right to bear arms, for example, freedom of speech and religion, right to life. The "stand your ground" phenomenon, a very American thing, is definitely right-wing.
It seems to me more that the "right" and "left" have adopted certain civil liberties for their pet causes, and the ACLU, a left wing organisation for sure, advocates for their favoured issues. But let's not confuse that specific organisation and their agenda with the general concept of "civil liberties" per se.
I can think of any number of civil liberties which I would associate with the "right" wing of American politics.
The ACLU, for example, was a leading plaintiff working to get the Citizens United ruling in favor of freedom of speech including corporate advocacy. The same ACLU is a strong Second Amendment supporter.
And the NSA reform bills in the Congress have about equal support from both parties.
>The same ACLU is a strong Second Amendment supporter.
Could you tell me specifically what definition of "strong supporter" you're using here? I can't think of any reasonable one that would make your claim true. Supporter, maybe.
But a "strong supporter" is not someone who endorses a watered down version of the Second Amendment, and then spends zero effort defending infringements of that.
Disagreeing with your interpretation of the Second Amendment does not mean they do not support civil rights. Nor does spending their money and time defending civil rights that don't have massive organizations devoted to defending them.
Yeah, I get that the ACLU's actions regarding the 2nd Amendment are defensible.
That wasn't the topic.
The topic was the claim that the ACLU is a "strong supporter" of the second amendment. Do you know a definition of "strong supporter" that is appropriate for the ACLU's actions regarding the Second Amendment?
No, I don't want to hear about how great the ACLU is.
No, I don't want to hear about the ACLU really does support civil rights.
No, I don't want to hear about how their position on the 2nd amendment is reasonable.
No, I don't want to hear about all the other people who can protect the second amendment.
I want something responsive to my question: in what sense is the ACLU not just a "supporter" but a "strong supporter" of the Second Amendment?
Don't have anything to say about that? Then please stay out of the discussion rather than changing topics and blurring the issues. Thanks.
I think they're a strong supporter of the Second Amendment as per the way they interpret it; they have filed a number of briefs in support of cases that fit their definition.
Let's stop with the farce: your complaint is that you don't like their interpretation, and so you choose to change the topic and blur the issue on a completely different thread to grind that ax of yours.
No, my complaint is that there's a difference between "supporter" and "strong supporter", and that if the latter is to have any meaning at all, the ACLU doesn't meet it.
How do you differentiate a "supporter" from a "strong supporter"? If I firmly believed that the First Amendment only protects pro-government speech, and filed the occasional legal brief in defense of those prosecuted under this interpretation, would that make me a "strong supporter" of the First Amendment? Would you talk about how crazy wicked cool it is that a nutty right-winger like me paradoxically has a thing for protecting the first amendment?
Or, to avoid the issue of weak interpretations of amendments, how about if I had the "normal" 1st amendment views, and had a "pro-Bill of Rights" group that spent only a token amount of effort protecting infringements on speech (or the other 1A stuff), and never to represent any such client? Still a "strong" supporter? Or just a "supporter"?
In a smaller example, the ACLU recently supported my father-in-law's small church in its suit against a local government ordinance restricting their ability to pass out literature on public sidewalks. Religious proselytizing usually falls more under the domain of the right than the left.
People sometimes like to paint their side as "for freedom" and the other side as "wants to restrict you", but the reality is far more complicated, changing issue-by-issue and occasionally covering legitimate tradeoffs where both sides might be considered "for freedom".
I think the problem is that modern conservatives have gone so far to the right that organizations which are traditionally conservative are now considered left wing.
Ordinary people don't live in the kind of circumstances where
they might wander into a felony conviction
Ohh I think you should be shocked at the number of felonies a person could commit on the course of everyday life. Felony is not just used for serious crimes. Almost every state have what are referred to a "catch all" felonies that can be brought against just about any one at any time if you piss off the right person in power.
dont fool yourself into think the legal system is anything other than a tool for oppression and control
Piss off the right person, and you may find yourself getting pulled over on some deserted road where officer Clancy "discovers" a felonious amount of a controlled substance concealed in your car or on your person.
I guess your life is way more interesting than mine. You can also add that NSA will tap your phone/email/web activity and find child porn, CIA will track all your foreign trips to find that you talked to Bin Laden and PETA will report that you feloniously tortured puppies.
Vast majority of white/asian people in this country are so far removed from that life that chance of getting underserved felony is as likely as getting hit by lightning. It can happen but definitely not three times in the row.
That is because the Vast majority of white/asian people are simple sheeple doing what their masters in government tell them to do, never rocking the boat, never expressing any opinions.
When government says Jump, they respond with "How high master" , the government says "Give me 50% of your labor" they say "Yes Master"
The vast majority of people, not even white/asian, just people, are useless sheep being lead complacently to slaughter
You're construing the facts against the convicted. You didn't even finish the sentence you quoted. After he went to jail, that guy turned his life around and became a productive valuable member of society. They say he killed someone accidentally because there's an important distinction between accidental and intentional homicide, not because it's an easy mistake to make. He's exactly the kind of edge case that shows the stupidity of three strikes laws. Instead of being an irredeemable criminal, he was a criminal who actually showed clear signs of rehabilitation. Really not someone who should be shoved in jail forever at the taxpayer's expense.
I agree. While I sympathize for the people in the stories, the publication by ACLU is much like typical spinning of facts done by marketing firms and politicians.
> Americans are particularly unsympathetic to racial minorities living on the edge.
AFAICT, it's about neurological differences, not racial or cultural differences. White people with low IQ or poor impulse control get shafted just as hard, they are just a smaller proportion of the population. Gypsies and trailer trash are just as screwed as minorities of color.
"Gypsies and trailer trash are just as screwed as minorities of color."
I thought it really funny to be so "politically correct" when speaking of black people, yet quite happy to refer to "people with less color" as "trailer trash."
Almost sadder is the fact that if these people were ever released, they're in the exact same position as every other ex-con. Which means that finding a job goes from being a challenging task (for most of us) to almost impossible.
If you manage to find the very rare employer willing to overlook a felony conviction, there's also the challenge of finding an apartment with a criminal record (apartments can and do reject ex-cons from leasing).
Never mind the emotional hurdle of reuniting with family (if you're lucky), and the huge challenge of socially re-integrating with society.
Does anybody else constantly live in a state of guilt? So many lives lost and wars fought just to get us to where we are, and we reap the benefits. I feel so guilty for having a good paying job in the city. I'm not adding any value to the world, none at all. I tinker with a few codes every day and make silly amounts of money, when there's people struggling to put food on the table working 18 hour days.
I need to do something, something meaningful. Sure I send a few bucks every month to a few charities but that just makes me feel worse, like I'm loosely patching holes of my guilt with plaster that will fade the next day.
What can I do? I don't belong here. I'm just another waste of space.
Take some of your money and travel. Go to Cambodia and don't be shy with your cash. Visit the landmine museum, do some crying, and see how the resilient people are (slowly) making a comeback. Buy all the trinkets and crap off the swarming children. Hire a guide. Stimulate their local economy, then come back with a greater appreciation of everything in your life. Vote (I suggest independent, since mainstream are different shades of the same color), focus on your friendships, and find yourself a more challenging and fulfilling job, and don't read so much bad news. Everyone plays a role in the world, and yours doesn't have to be one of direct savior. You can and do add value in innumerable ways that you don't even notice.
This is a beautiful answer, thank you. Here's a twist that I read about from Tyler Cowen, from marginalrevolution: for reasons a child of your comment has pointed out, handouts to the people asking for handouts creates something of a perverse incentive; Cowen recommends going to random people in third world countries who seem to be in need but are _not_ begging for money, and give them your money. Not sure about the practical effects of this (there's a whiff of the kind of paternalism that economists, including Cowen himself, debunks in other economic domains) but thought-provoking nonetheless.
Would you advocate for the same 'top-down' approach to stimulating the economy in the US or another developed country? I think the concept of 'hawkers' could be easily applied to startups. Do you believe a good consumer should be supporting big corporations or fledgling startups? I'm just genuinely curious of your position and if you think the analogy applies in the first world.
I am not so sure it is such a good analogy. The "business model" of these hawkers in third world countries like Cambodia or Laos is to explicitly present themselves as impoverished, and then pressure or guilt-trip you into buying something from them as a gesture of charity. The OP seemed to encourage such behaviour, even admitted it was "crap" they were selling (it is).
I'd suggest that any startup worth its salt is actually offering something of real value, not explicitly a charity case, so the analogy completely breaks down. I fully support encouraging the startup ecosystem.
And I'm not even sure about using a term like "top down". Hotels really do employ locals, as do restaurants, and by patronising them you send a strong signal of support to the local tourism industry. With that assurance they can make plans, invest, advertise, expand. It's not about making the rich richer, not at all. Giving a small regional tourism industry the confidence to plan for the future is a wonderful thing.
> to explicitly present themselves as impoverished
That's not the least bit true, in my experience. I've watched them come over from where their families are working and attempt to sell trinkets, then go back to their families (or friends' families).
As for "crap", yeah, it's crap. Because you don't give children appliances and automobiles to sell. It's no different than the stuff you'll buy from American children going door to door, trying to raise money for their school.
I think you're really looking down your nose at people. You have a choice when traveling in areas like this. You can either act like you have to guard your precious money from all these street urchins trying to cheat you, or you can simply accept it as part of the experience traveling in a very poor area, and embrace the reality that you can make some small difference in an individual's life.
You talk as if denying individuals some income is somehow helping their long-term tourism. Yet Thailand, which is decades ahead of Cambodia in terms of development and wealth, still sees foreigners as wealthy, pesters them for sales and rides, and they have a very healthy tourism industry in spite of this. A country can't force its way into a $500/night resort industry. Thailand has tried for years, and it's not happening anytime soon. Cambodia doesn't even have a reasonable highway infrastructure.
> Hotels really do employ locals
To give an interesting regional example, are you aware that the Thai island of Koh Phi Phi is controlled by the Chinese mafia?
Do you have a source for the Ko Phi Phi claim (reason I ask is genuine curisoity: I had a long conversation with a Thai bar owner a couple of years ago where he observed that one of the attractions of Phi Phi is that unlike Phuket or Samui, it wasn't mafia run). The mafia "protected" parts of the Thai tourist industry still employ lots of working class Thais, not to mention the Burmese diaspora.
The wider issue with buying stuff off Cambodian street urchins is that you really don't want to encourage a state of affairs where the most aggressive child beggars/vendors earn far more than their parents... and then need kids of their own once they hit their mid-teens and no longer appeal to tourists' sympathies.
> The "business model" of these hawkers in third world countries like Cambodia or Laos is to explicitly present themselves as impoverished, and then pressure or guilt-trip you into buying something from them as a gesture of charity.
The fact that they even have to do this speaks volumes.
I really liked this "own a problem" perspective from an HR post (1). Pick a problem to help solve, prioritise that and deprioritise everything else to solve it.
You can also shift to work for an institution which is genuinely trying to do good, such as the World Bank or a not-for-profit. Or you can do what you can from within your own organisation to get them to be working to improve the world rather than take advantage of it.
<update - my apologies, there is a registration requirement for the article. The lightbox appears after a little wait, so you should be able to read it>
Just keep in mind the World Bank is considered by many as an instrumental part of a quasi-colonial system of institutions that is set up to exploit the third world through their advocacy for unfavorable debt and a certain economical bias.
I'm sure they also do some good, but they are at least a somewhat ambiguous organization.
What can I do? I don't belong here. I'm just another waste of space.
Isn't everyone? Why is working 18 hours of labour a day inherently more valuable or useful to humanity, the planet, the universe, anything? Why is someone struggling inherently a better, more worthy person than anyone else (and by what standards?).
Would you really prefer a world where everyone has to struggle to survive, because that's where it sounds like your comment is leading.
The feeling of guilt is an echo in your head. It's not actually an objective measure of your worth, it's not really some outside deity judging you and finding you unworthy, even if it feels like it is. Because of this, there's no saying there is anything you can do to assuage your feelings of guilt if you go with them. Maybe it's a while loop that says "while (bad_things_happen_anywhere) { feel_guilty(); }". You ask what to do as if there's bound to be a corresponding "if I do X then I can feel less guilty" pattern in your head waiting to be triggered - but maybe there isn't.
What you can do is work on it as your problem, your suffering, your mental issue that needs addressing in your head. You're not unhappy because the world sucks for a dirt poor person. You're unhappy because of a "be unhappy" thought stuck in your head. Don't change the world to stop this suffering, change your thoughts.
I worked for an investment bank before for a year. I work for a genome sequencing centre now. In both cases building / maintaining databases. The work is paid less, and there is less opportunity to earn lots in the future, but I do feel better about myself for not being part of the corrupt self serving finance system. Many of our projects are involved in cancer research, so its doing the tiniest bit towards helping the world.
I am a third worlder currently living in Cairo - if you think a bit of poverty here and there in the US is bad, here in this city we are surrounded by it.
Being poor is not a moral flaw and I see people everyday go out of their bed and try to win most of their days. Still people manage to find happiness within the most dire constraints.
You cannot do everything and nobody expects to. Take comfort in that. We are all doing out bits to repair the world (There's a wonderful Hebrew phrase for this: Tikkun olam).
But when you have the means, go travel. Meet the others who occupy this world, who have different perspective of living, who struggles with different things that you do. They will be happy to meet you.
I have visited, amongst other places, Cairo. I wouldn't be able to live there for the guilt it would instil in me. Sadly, Cairo is by far not the worst place (compared to New Delhi, government services are quite good in Cairo. Yes, really), and several "first world" locations are, at best, a degree of difference with Cairo (Hong Kong would be a good example).
People don't seem to be able to imagine just how bad life is in the third world for the majority of people.
And frankly, sorry to put it so bluntly, but here's a thought people should think about. Given you are a third-worlder, would you want to be one of the exploited or one of the non-exploited. Given that in practice most third-worlders still choose what job they want, the answer is obvious : with very few exceptions, people want to be one of the "exploited". Visit a third-world city, turn a few non-approved blocks, and you'll understand why.
Btw: one of the things that amazed me about Cairo is that they've created a "fake" city center, where the poverty you see is almost absent, in a way that I've seen nowhere else. So in Cairo, you definitely have to turn a few non-approved blocks.
Contact representatives in government bodies every so often. I'm not sure it makes a difference but I always figure that at a bare minimum it occupies some of their time (at least it does here in New Zealand, as the replies are not canned as far as I can tell, and they aren't from assistants either usually) which prevents other work getting done. I have a faint hope that it achieves more than this, but hope is about all.
There is hope. Software is the key to addressing a great deal of injustice in the world. I believe that software programmers who want to make a difference can do so by collaborating on open source projects intended for use by government at every level.
Consider: if we can write the software that cities, states, and even the federal government uses to do it's job, then we can also have a material impact on transparency, usability, etc for the users.
Take the judicial system. It is badly underfunded, especially in California, which has the largest civil court system in the Western world. What if an enterprising group of civic minded programmers simply wrote awesome, free, open software to run a state courtroom, complete with a self-help web interface?
Such a project would not necessarily be fun. But it would be useful, and it would arguably contribute greatly to society.
> it would arguably contribute greatly to society.
It would contribute to the system that is perpetuating these kinds of injustices. Recall that a good portion of these people serving life sentences for non-violent crimes are in state prisons. How is helping them build their software systems going to find justice for a man in jail for life for stealing some tools?
By the way, this is not a rhetorical question: I'm honestly trying to understand this point of view.
In this case, technology could have helped in (at least) two places:
1. In the courtroom. These people could have received a faster, more painless, and more just trial. The proceedings could have been more open, easier to search and data mine, and hence easier to react to faster. Additionally (and somewhat science-fictiony) I personally would like to see us experiment with alternative juries - particularly much larger, distributed juries. If justice can't be crowd-sourced, then I don't know what can.
2. In the legislature. Although the creation of bills is an intensely collaborative process, too often the details are delegated to underlings, and those details are seriously misinformed by the facts. So one piece of software that is needed world wide are better document collaboration tools that are tied to accurate sources. The legislature in particular should be obsessively concerned about how the justice system is applying their laws. Better visibility into what's happening, in real-time, would make the legislature a) more aware and b) more responsive to injustice.
I wasn't asking about how could technology help these poor people (I agree that it could possibly help, or at least holds that promise), I was asking how helping the court system build their software would help them.
Don't do it from a place of guilt, find something that you feel passionately about, cut back on the meaningless and lucrative tinkering and start tinkering for your passion. Your most valuable contribution to the world is your time, arrange your life so that you can spend as much time as possible, without burning out, on something meaningful to you.
Find a local (and hopefully small) charity you like. Start giving to them, as much as you can. Volunteer with them. See if they are looking to add trustees. Find every way you can help.
It's hard. It's not just giving $10 to Oxfam (which you should do anyway), it's a real dedication of time and care. But you'll meet people, you'll support something you are passionate about, and you'll have a lot less time to think about how you're a waste.
I second volunteering. Donating your time makes you feel much more involved than if you donated an equivalent (or even greater than) your wage for that time. It also is a visible show of dedication to a cause!
But what you describe does not sound like an honest or clear assessment of the world. It sounds more like depression. Which is real and serious and treatable.
The world is often tragic. It <em>is</em> wrong to live comfortably and be willfully ignorant to tragedy, but it is not wrong to take care of yourself and make yourself whole. So, yes, seek something meaningful to make the world better, and start by taking care of yourself.
You are a waste of space. But committing suicide is so boring—I don’t recommend it. You are going to have to figure out the point you want your life to have. So quit complaining on the internet about your privileged guilt, save your silly amounts of money for a while, then spend it executing your vision. The best any of us can hope to do is to mean something to somebody.
> Anthony Jackson has a sixth-grade education and worked as a cook. He was convicted of burglary for stealing a wallet from a Myrtle Beach hotel room when he was 44 years old. According to prosecutors, he woke two vacationing golfers as he entered the room and stole a wallet, then pretended to be a security guard and ran away. Police arrested him when he tried to use the stolen credit card at a pancake house. [...] Because of two prior convictions for burglary, Jackson was sentenced to mandatory life without parole under South Carolina's three-strikes law.
Emphasis mine. I can't get too worked up about a system that sentences this guy to life in prison. What would be the point of letting him out? He knew he wasn't supposed to walk into other people's hotel rooms and take their wallets. At what point does society get to tell people "you know what, knock it off"?
> After serving two years in prison during his mid-twenties for inadvertently killing someone during a bar fight, Aaron Jones turned his life around. He earned an electrical technician degree, married, became an ordained reverend, and founded the Perfect Love Outreach Ministry. Years later, Aaron was hired to renovate a motel in Florida, and was living in an employee-sponsored apartment with two other workers, one of whom had a truck that was used as a company vehicle by all the co-workers. Jones decided to drive this truck home to Louisiana to visit his wife and four children. When Aaron's co-worker woke up to find his truck missing, he reported it stolen. Aaron was pulled over by police while driving the truck.
I don't understand this one at all. Shouldn't the truck owner have testified on his behalf? Declined to press charges?
I made a cursory effort to look up the case itself, but I have no idea how to do that.
You should try looking at prison differently. It's incredibly expensive to lock someone up for their life - that's four walls, meals, space to exercise and guards for say another 40 years. We shouldn't spend that unless the alternative would cost a lot more (say violence against another person, a person's life).
he woke two vacationing golfers as he entered the room and stole a wallet, then pretended to be a security guard and ran away
Crime is often impulsive, irrational. Now this guy had poor impulse control and started from a difficult position in life. He then did stupid things like petty crime. The loss to these golfers was probably $100 - balance that against the cost to society of a life in prison. I disagree that's a worthwhile trade or is protecting society to any significant degree. It costs huge amounts of money, throws away a life that could be turned around, results in disproportionate and inhumane punishments, and doesn't even help the victims. This is little better than deportation for stealing an apple.
The US has 1.6 million of its population in jail, and that figure rose very rapidly in the last few decades, probably due to laws like this and jailing people for minor drugs offences, I'm not convinced that has saved US society any money or even made it much safer.
U.S. violent crime rates have plummeted in part because of higher incarceration. A lot of people on this list don't remember when cities like New York and Washington, DC were very dangerous places and all native born inhabitants were leaving.
That's not true. Take Sweden for example. Violent crime has plummeted there as well, and they are closing prisons because they are putting _less_ people in jail.
It's even more viable to explain violent crime as being directly correlated with popular drug price. As the price of popular drugs rise, dealers have more incentive to maim and kill; as it falls, more reason to write off a small stash and focus on the next trick.
"Changes in incarceration and crime are significantly related during the period under consideration. Increases in state prison committals per 100,000 residents tend to reduce crime the following year, whereas increases in the number of persons released from state prisons per 100,000 reidents tend to increase crime the next year."
The National Research Council's "Understanding Crime Trends Workshop Report," eds. Goldberger, A. and Rosenfield, R.
It's tricky to isolate other social trends in the research though. Steven Levitt did a major study of prison overcrowding legislation, which can suddenly change incarceration rates if the legislation is successful, but not if it fails, a bit of a coinflip not directly connected to social or demographic shifts. He found evidence of a link under these conditions.
Levitt, S. The effect of prison population size on crime rates: evidence from prison overcrowding litigation.
Obviously those aren't the only two studies on the subject, it's been a focus of criminology research since it's been a discipline. Levitt followed up with a good meta-analysis that covered ten different explanations for the reduction of crime over the last few decades:
Levitt, S. Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990s: Four Factors that Explain the Decline and Six that Do Not. Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2004. pp 163-190.
He cites John DiIulio (ie, DiiuLio) in that work. DiIulio has written a lot on the subject as well, usually arguing that incarceration rates have an impact on crime rates, but adding the nuance that three strikes laws rarely do much good.
Crime rates are very complex, and tied to many complex factors. Incarceration rate appears to be one such factor.
I've never seen evidence of a hard correlation between incarceration rate and crime rate, it sounds intuitive if you assume everyone has equal chances in life and has other options, but do you have figures?
If that were the case, the US, Cuba and Rwanda should be the safest countries in the world (all near the top in incarceration rates) and Sweden one of the worst. The opposite is true if you look at (for example) homicide rates. I'm not sure there is any evidence of even a good correlation between higher incarceration and lower crime.
Also because of lead control, vaccines, expansion of the earned income tax credit, the shift from the extroverted thrill-seeking 80s to the cocooning 2000s, and many other factors.
Where do you draw the line? I bet you wouldn't go for life in prison for someone who get three speeding tickets. Once we agree that there is a line, then it just comes down to which side of the line a particular crime is on. I don't see wallet theft as being all that serious. Yeah, it sucks to be the victim (been there, done that) but it's fairly minor in the grand scheme of things.
Ultimately, the point of letting him out is that he is still a human being who deserves freedom unless we can show some very good reasons why he doesn't. What would be the point of keeping you out of prison?
> I bet you wouldn't go for life in prison for someone who get three speeding tickets.
Sure.
> Once we agree that there is a line, then it just comes down to which side of the line a particular crime is on.
I actually don't find this to follow, because your example is exceptionally poor. I don't favor speeding tickets at all; as far as I can see, they're just a way for governments to capriciously collect extra revenue from people without giving it the politically unpopular name of "taxes".
Repeated-burglaries guy is obviously opting out of functioning in society. If the cost of keeping him out of it exceeds the cost he inflicts by his presence, I'd say we should keep him incarcerated and spend less, not just tell him "OK, burgle all you want".
> I don't favor speeding tickets at all; as far as I can see, they're just a way for governments to capriciously collect extra revenue from people without giving it the politically unpopular name of "taxes".
> Repeated-burglaries guy is obviously opting out of functioning in society. If the cost of keeping him out of it exceeds the cost he inflicts by his presence, I'd say we should keep him incarcerated and spend less, not just tell him "OK, burgle all you want".
So reckless, dangerous driving is part of being a functional member of society, but 3 (apparently) non-violent and (in the scheme of things) minor thefts over 44 years gets someone thrown in jail for the rest of their life. That could be 30+ years on the dole. We (the taxpayers) are paying for his feeding, his clothing, his medical, his guards, his shelter. I seriously doubt another 3 thefts over the remainder of his life is worth that cost.
The thing is, it's not just the financial cost of a theft, it's the emotional and practical cost too.
Having had 5 laptops stolen in one hit - because I was updating staff that weekend and the guy got lucky - the cost of changing passwords, and the nagging feeling I may have missed something somewhere and I may get hit with another internet theft....
Then the feeling that the guy(s?) were in my house while my partner and I were sleeping. Na. People who do this need to be taken out of society.
For the speeding point, you can kill people at 30mph if something goes wrong with the car or you do something stupid.
Best I can tell it's an issue of philosophy. Many people in the US (my people, lucky me) are fearful and angry. We really seem to like our vengeance (consider the country music songs that were coming out post 9/11 as we entered Afghanistan and Iraq). When it comes to crime we don't bother with "rehabilitation". When it comes to mental health, that's clearly a lack of personal responsibility. If I can tell that they aren't really a knight in King Arthur's court on a holy quest, then they should be able to realize it too. Lock them up, throw away the key.
- Driving below the speed of surrounding traffic is much more likely to cause an accident than driving at a "high" speed. The speed of traffic is essentially always above the speed limit. (Which might itself give you pause in characterizing it as "reckless, dangerous driving".)
- Reckless, dangerous driving is an independent offense, which can be (and is) charged separately from speeding.
Oh come on... Speeding clearly implies more risk, in the case of an impact (in the city for example) the end result can be much worse.
On the other hand a guy who has comitted 2-3 non violent crimes in his life because hes probably broke and has mental issues. I am not saying thats ok, but spending the life in prison for that? He wouldnt even have to go to prison for that in the country i live in.
Burglary is punished so severely because, like you said, the end result can be much worse than just stealing property. Can you honestly say that chances of speeding causing any harm what so ever are comparable to chances of burglary turning into an assault, rape or murder?
It's quite worrying that a country seems to do some sort of precog on these people; i'm sure there are cases where stealing a wallet goes on to assault, rape or murder. I don't think locking people up because that could happen is a brilliant plan. Why not lock up a lot more people? I mean little boys who torture (and kill) animals turn into killers? It's pretty vague and weird to think like that.
This guy obviously has issues and they need to be looked at; locking him up has no use whatsoever besides 'making the public feel safe'. While it makes things less safe; if I know I'll go to jail the rest of my life, i'll make sure to kill the people in the room so I have a chance of escaping; what have I to lose? This guy didn't think like that, but with this kind of strangely harsh punishment, why would I hold back on any crime I commit?
Indeed, it's very stange to think like that. We don't punish some future consequences. We punish dangerous and harmful behavior. "Dangerous" does not mean "correlated with some future harmful developments". It means the immediate possibility of harm. This is why torturing animals is not dangerous (for humans at least), speeding is a minor danger and burglary is a severe danger.
Also, I believe you are implying that the guy from the OP got life in prison for the single burglary. I appologize if I get it wrong but in case you really are: even OP says it is not so. It's been his third strike i.e. he had been convicted for two more violent/gun/drug related crimes before (more burglaries in his particular case).
> Burglary is punished so severely because, like you said, the end result can be much worse than just stealing property.
Also you:
> We don't punish some future consequences. We punish dangerous and harmful behavior.
Please help me make these two statements make sense together. In this case, the severe penalty is only justifiable with a view of what might happen or what might have happened (that he might steal again, that he might become violent in future thefts, that he might have hurt those men). Now to the first might, I'll grant it's actually pretty likely. But to the second might, it's hardly clear, every summary I found suggested none of the past thefts or youthful cocaine charge (possession? couldn't find specifics) were violent. And the third might is the justification you offered in the earlier post. Which means, what, punish people for how bad their crimes could have been rather than how bad they actually were? I was in a car accident (my fault, rear ended a guy), it could have resulted in a fatality had it been at higher speeds (we were, at most, moving 10mph), should I be treated as if I had committed vehicular manslaughter?
What might happen in a crime ought to be irrelevant, what did happen is the important part. And again, in this case it appears that violence didn't enter into the equation. Might the victims have felt there could have been violence? Sure, but fear of violence (in this case he didn't even threaten violence, he came up with a lame story and ran off) is not the same as being the victim of violence.
I guess the problem is that you are conflating this particular burglary and burglary and general. I only meant burglary in general.
Also, we don't punish every possible outcome of every action. We, however, punish more likely and more harmful (= more dangerous by definition) outcomes more. In your example, if you had been at higher speeds or if you had been drunk you'd had been punished more even for the same outcome.
>What might happen in a crime ought to be irrelevant, what did happen is the important part.
You are free to believe this. I hope you vote libertarian to remove all kinds of licencing (starting from driving and ending with medical), various safety inspections, crimes like stalking, conspiracies to commit other crimes, blackmail, death threats etc.
1) I've not seen the numbers, but I'll concede that's likely true, particularly on highways.
2) For someone who wants long sentences for other offenses, it seems odd that you don't see that control of speed (particularly on city streets, my view on highway speed limits is different) and ticketing of speeders is also a pretty effective mitigator of reckless driving on those same streets. It doesn't stop it, we'll never stop crime until everyone becomes a saint (IOW, never), but reducing the occurrence is a nice tradeoff.
Now that that's out of the way, care to respond to the part where you suggest the cost of life in prison (to the taxpayers) is worth preventing 3 more non-violent burglaries (if he keeps to his average)?
What about the huge time cost of replacing everything that was in the wallet, if replaceable, and the intangible emotional feelings of insecurity that result from letting wallet-stealers run free stealing wallets? Probably doesn’t exceed $1.5 million, but to say the cost of a wallet theft is only $50 shows absolutely no sympathy for a victim, and is not that far removed from saying, “well, the guy who stole it probably needed the money more than you do.”
> If the cost of keeping him out of it exceeds the cost he inflicts by his presence
You do realize that it costs $40,000+ per year to incarcerate someone, right? So to meet your justification for imprisonment, this guy would have to be an excellent criminal. Why not just give him $40,000 per year and let him be free? He'd probably not need to burgle anymore.
As I understand it's substantially more than 40k GBP per year per prisoner. If the American system is costing less in the order of half what we're paying it must be absolutely horrendous.
Which is a side point to the absurdity of whole-life mandatory sentencing. It's incredibly expensive and pure vengeance; there's no way the cost to society in cash or emotional harm terms is minimised by spending MILLIONS of dollars depriving these people of their liberty for decades. So why does the Land Of The Free do it? Short, often community based sentences with strong rehabilitation would be orders of magnitude cheaper and have a very similar effect on the ultimate crime rate.
> Why not just give him $40,000 per year and let him be free? He'd probably not need to burgle anymore.
If we did this, I suspect we'd see a sharp rise in burglaries.
As to the figure itself, another commenter noted that the low end of prison costs seemed to be Lousisiana, in which operating a prison cost $13K / year. That would make the per-prisoner cost much, much lower than that.
I may be missing something as I've just skimmed this thread, but 13K has got to be referring to the per-prisoner cost. Unless the prison has no utility consumption, no services, no food, and has one employee who's a part-time janitor.
As a second point, and speaking without knowledge, it's conceivable for a prison to be bringing in revenue such that it only operates at a loss of (for example) $13K annually.
Plausible. The other comment doesn't actually specify what kind of costs it's referring to; I initially thought it was per-prisoner costs and decided on second thought that $167k per prisoner per year in new york made no sense at all.
Food for a year is barely even noticeable in $13K; if they cost $5 / day to feed that would come in under $2K / year. Where's all the money going?
Well, it's not without controversy, surely. You're (a) focusing on the very short term; presumably people would only commit one burglary under this model over their entire lifetime; and (b) you're not being generous to the original case but taking it at a very literalistic level. It would be more generous to the point to suggest that the $40k/year would be spread out to support low-income folks who might have otherwise needed it. So, about 1% of American adults are imprisoned (and about 2% are on some form of probation or parole). On the other hand, 16% of our population lives in poverty. So we might reasonably expect to instead reduce the prison population by, say, half, and kick back that money to the impoverished. The salient point is that this would give a (1/2) * 1% / 16% = 1/32 dilution of the money, so we're talking about giving all the poor people in the US $1k - $2k per year in order to reduce the rate of crime being committed. This makes their finances at least 5% better (the poverty line is about $20,000 for the 16% statstic).
So the more-generous question is, would being at least 5% better off financially reduce crime more than the 50%-shorter sentences for crime would increase it? I have no idea.
there is a difference between pickpocket and breaking and entering. I'm guessing if someone else came into your house or place you were staying you'd be pretty scared and think that it was pretty unacceptable behavior deserving of some serious jail time. After 3 times, it seems reasonable to escalate the penalty a bit. Perhaps life is too severe, but it should be for a long damn time.
come on now. this article is intentionally downplaying the severity of the offenses here. breaking and entering is a serious crime. it isn't a speeding ticket. "inadvertently killing someone" is code for beat the shit out of him and he died, but i didn't mean to kill him. only maim. again, not a speeding ticket.
My theory: Hacker News has been allowing more political stories through, which attracts a certain kind of poster, which has the effect of lowering the level of discourse overall (even among erstwhile "good" commenters). The actual political threads themselves, like this one, tend to be a little ahead of the curve.
The strong aversion to politics was one of the things I liked about Hacker News. A lot of political issues are important, but they always turn discussion sites into dull point-scoring. Hopefully the moderators clamp down before it's too late.
The noteworthy politics-related stories I've seen in the last months almost always deal with either the NSA scandal or other attacks to basic human rights, including this one.
And I don't see any reason for these stories not to be on HN. Human rights matter for everyone.
Yes, human rights matter to everyone. So do urination and defecation — we quite literally could not live without them — but those aren't appropriate in all situations either.
When I say something doesn't belong on Hacker News, I don't mean it's unimportant or doesn't matter. I just mean that it isn't what this site is for. There are many, many stories that are relevant and important to me personally that are still not appropriate for every site I go to.
Think about it this way: Would you go on a My Little Pony fan site and post this stuff there? Human rights are just as crucial for My Little Pony fans, but it's easier to recognize that they aren't appropriate for a single-topic site. Hacker News is not a single-topic site, but it is still a site with a focus. If you look at the guidelines, politics are explicitly called out as being off-topic.
I read political stories here, as the responses are generally a lot better thought out than the kind you will get on Reddit. (To be fair you get decent responses on Reddit, but they are tucked away amongst a lot more noise).
I see your point, chc. And you are right. Talking politics on a site like HN is defacto undesirable. But the NSA dogs made feces mandatory conversation--if we want to live our lives *shit free--and so the door once opened just gets wider. It is sad. All this stuff is really sad.
People do talk about politics though. They do it everywhere all over the place and even those who claim to not want to talk about politics end up talking about the politics of not talking politics. I am not sure it is possible to stop them.
Granted, this specific submission can be qualified as off-topic under the guidelines. But I seriously doubt this for any NSA-related submissions, given their impact on the whole US tech/startup sector.
The NSA submissions are more of a mixed bag. A lot of them are still not a good fit as they are more outrage than information, but yeah, a lot of them are relevant to the site. (I still think even the relevant stories have a negative impact on the signal:noise ratio by encouraging people to post important-but-irrelevant stories like this one, but you're right, the NSA stories do belong here.)
all i said was "come on now." Sorry if I came off too defensive. I was simply pointing out that these crimes are clearly on the other side of that line.
No, you repeatedly told me that his crime was not a speeding ticket. Here's your last sentence: "again, not a speeding ticket." You clearly thought I was comparing the two.
No it should not; then most sentences would be torture and/or murder at which point the system stops working. If someone breaks into my house and steals something while making a mess/destroying stuff etc I want to break his/her legs. A lot of people would want to shoot him (on the spot) and even do so. I'm happy though that's not the actual punishment they get as there is a lot more behind the story than this and most criminals can be rehabilitated. There are exceptions with (some sex crimes), but even there are different methods (like chemical castration which doesn't hurt) than these over the top measures that come from 'imagine you're the victim'.
That's the kind of thinking that gets you amputations as punishment for theft, torture as punishment for murder, and mob justice on innocents who really really seem guilty.
I can't get too worked up about a system that sentences this guy to life in prison.
Is that seriously the best fucking option you can come up with? A massively expensive revenge-trip that causes far, far more damage than the theft of a wallet?
Perhaps there's some kind of much, much more effective way to get him to stop taking things that don't belong to him. I say perhaps; of course there are. Lots, that are cheaper, more effective and build a better society; but no, (parts of) the US is happy doing this. Cutting off its own nose to spite its own face and destroying a life in the process, behaving like children.
You got me thinking - it would be 'cruel&unusual' and invoke flashbacks to barbaric times, but a '3-strikes' policy that would put a permenent, visible brand "i'm a thief" or "i'm a con-man" would probably deter opportunities future crimes.
It's not humane and it restricts liberty - but it's more humane and less liberty-restricting than the corrent "solution" of permanent imprisonment.
Are you kidding me? What do you want to do instead, cut his hand off?
The sheer lack of imagination and knowledge you exhibit is astonishing. If I don't think it's smart to imprison him, I must want to cut his hand off? Let me guess; you're a US citizen and you don't travel much, so all you've ever seen regarding prison policy is identical US politicians posturing over who can be more "tough on crime"?
I wonder what his three strikes are ? I thought that for three strikes you're only fucked if at least one of those strikes involved violence and a victim ?
> At what point does society get to tell people "you know what, knock it off"?
You're thinking about this the wrong way.
First, ask yourself: Why is there the justice system and prisons?
The answer: To reduce occurrence of crime.
Now why are prisons meant to help reduce crime? By scaring people into not committing crimes? That obviously doesn't work, especially when many people live lives so bad that they can't see a way of improving their lives but by committing crimes, which is pretty much all the people in that document.
Now how would you actually get those people to stop committing crimes? The document actually shows that:
Educate them. Once they know enough to actually be able to meaningfully participate in modern society they see life entirely differently.
Only problem is: These people have reached that point and are barred from actually acting upon it.
>> The primary way prisons reduce crime is by people who commit crimes.
You realize there's a virtually unlimited supply of people that could potentially qualify to be locked up because they are criminal for violating some more or less arbitrary law, right? Are you proposing locking up each and every one of them to get to a crime-less nirvana where all criminals are behind bars, and everyone outside is perfectly pure and honest?
The fact that there are people here defending the idea you should be sentenced to life for 3 offenses like stealing a wallet makes me sick. He who is without sins throw the first stone, some of you saying things like this would probably be in jail yourselves if this kind of 'justice' was the norm
There is not an unlimited supply of potential prisoners. As wmil says, imprisonable crimes are generally those arising from poor impulse control and low intelligence. (If you want to learn more, Russell Barkley has some informative books on the connection between brain executive function, intelligence, and life outcomes.)
If we made wearing socks a three-strikes-eligible law, the same people would go to prison. Normal people would adapt, impulsive and dull people wouldn't. American criminal law is basically a test of certain neurological abilities. If you fail the test, they hit you with the banhammer. Psychiatrists would be cheaper and better, but democracy produces popular myths, not rational plans.
Proclaiming theories as fact is not a very nice way to proceed in an argument.
That said, please consider a counter-theory to your theory: Due to the fact that many people imprisoned for long terms do end up obtaining their GED and one or more vocations, it seems quite probably that american criminal law is a test of education more than one of genetic factors.
Alas, no. Mental tests in childhood and early adolescence predict subsequent educational failure. The effect is independent of race, culture, parental socioeconomic status, etc.
It merely proved a correlation between mental ability and educational success in the current educational system.
It does not show whether the cause of crime is the actual lack of mental ability, or the failure of the education system to properly prepare them for adult life.
In other words: You've not shown that more effort to educate people would result in the same crime levels as with the current effort.
The point of the justice system is to adequately determine punishments for crimes committed.
The point of prisons is to provide a place to isolate people from society that have been deemed not fit for society (permanently or temporary.)
Neither one is there to reduce crime. They're reactive not proactive systems. Society uses them as examples to deter future crime, but that does not make that their job.
> I don't understand this one at all. Shouldn't the truck owner have testified on his behalf? Declined to press charges?
Maybe, just maybe, the ACLU account is deliberate fuzzy on the details? It's difficult to conciliate the claim that the accused "borrowed" the truck with the allegation that the co-worker found the truck missing.
At what point does society get to tell people "you know what, knock it off"?
In other countries, much, much later. And they have less crime. Blanket laws with such severe penalties always have more downside than upside. The ability to dispense such severe sentences should be in the hands of a judge that can weigh each case individually.
If you believe someone deserves life in prison for two burglaries and a case of theft, you are being inhumane. You need to change the system or these people, such that they don't feel the need to steal. That takes time and several moments to check whether it worked. Hell, most countries don't even have true 'life in prison' sentences and they manage to be safer than the US.
It surprises me how often what it takes to answer a "how do we fix this social problem" is to look outside of the US border, see how other people are fixing it. Yet it seems like it's the last idea on anyone's mind.
Your lack of empathy in these cases is frightening. Do you really feel that spending the rest of your life in prison is an appropriate punishment for stealing? I could probably concieve of some edge case where it would take some slight effort to argue against it, but none of these cases are anywhere near that.
Personally, I would rather just be shot and get it over with, than spending 40 years with no personal freedoms. You are literally condoning a fate worse than death for non-violent offenses with a relatively small impact on the victim. Please take a step back and listen to what you're saying here.
I was writing essentially the same response when I noticed yours. I completely agree with the sentiment.
What baffles me most is the idea that someone can value 'stuff' so much that the resulting damage (be it emotional, financial, or practical) justifies such a harsh punishment.
Sure, 'stuff' can be important. If someone cheats you out of a large sum of money that you've been working hard for, the damage can be considered large. But I don't think that's what we're talking about here. And even then I'd say 40 years in prison is way out of proportion.
Theft is a bad thing but hardly deserving of a life sentence, even with a history of burglary. The economic cost of this crime is at most a few thousand $, probably much less. The economic cost of incarcerating the guy for 30-40 years is going to be a few million.
depends on where he is. cost of prisons varies wildly by state and city, which i find to be a bit bizarre. According to some quick research, it can be as low as 13k a year (Louisiana) to as high as 47k a year (California) and even on smaller levels 167k (New York City).
30 years in Louisiana is just over 2 years in new york city.
True, but bear in mind that elder/end of life medical care tends to be especially expensive, so I think the total is realistic.
I don't find it so odd that cost varies - consider land price, cost of living (for prison staff), heating (much more expensive in northerly latitudes), and so on.
I don't find it odd that it varies, just that it varies so wildly. well over 10x seems unreasonable. If it is an area that is that expensive, perhaps it makes sense to transport the prisoners a bit to a less expensive area.
There are often legal barriers to transferring prisoners out of a state, not least that it imposes a significant burden on their families who may be unable to visit them (and who have rights of their own, regardless of how one feels about the prisoner).
I should have mentioned that states like NY als have more extensive rehabilitation programs (which cost money); on the upside, as far as I recall NY has one of the lower rates of incarceration and recidivism (but I might be wrong, don't feel like delving into the stats right now).
> "When Aaron's co-worker woke up to find his truck missing, he reported it stolen"
What could have happened: Aaron requests truck for a day from room-mate. Room-mate agrees. But the company finds out about it and frowns. Mate says Aaron stole the truck, out of fear.
There are any number of ways this might have happened; and perhaps the case docs talk about it. But, in any case, life sentence seems harsh.
Since the recession hit here in Spain, I have had my wages cut 7% for two years running. That's to basically to pay for the cock ups the bankers made, through bailouts, and their crap investments. No one went to jail there, but I have lost money an order of magnitude bigger than if I had had my wallet stolen.
If the article is to be believed, it was understood among the men that the truck was for everyone to use, and it was his intention to return the truck as they always did. If that was the case, I don't see how it meets the common definition of theft. (It may not be the case. The fact that he got convicted seems to fly in the face of the situation they describe.)
> What would be the point of letting him out? He knew he wasn't supposed to walk into other people's hotel rooms and take their wallets.
How do you end up concluding that petty theft is a good reason to torture this guy for the rest of his life? People do things they're not supposed to all the time.
I suspect it had something to do with driving a "company vehicle" to Louisiana from Florida, without telling the actual owner of the vehicle. There are some details missing obviously.
His prior convictions were armed robbery, negligent homicide, and issuing worthless checks. According to the ACLU, the docket number for the LA court of appeals is supposedly: 2000-KA-2117. I couldn't find anything on it though.
> Only prosecutors can decide whether they want to press charges in criminal cases.
Yes, but it generally helps if they can produce someone who says "yes, my truck was stolen".
> in most cases, i think details are pretty important. here, not really. let's say he straight up stole the truck. does he deserve life in prison? doubtful
This is reasonable, but I think the details I wondered about are important to another issue, that of "how the heck was this guy jailed at all?"
Lacking any other evidence, I tend to lean toward the theory that he did straight up steal the truck, and the ACLU is whitewashing him, which (a) is weird, since they're not apologizing for much less sympathetic prisoners, and (b) implicates a third important issue, "can we trust the ACLU to describe its own cases?"
I think at the root of this is a very prevalent attitude among a many people in America toward "not letting people get away with things"
I don't think you can look at this in a vacuum - you need to see these punishments as simply another manifestation of this attitude. This is not a "this group vs. that group" thing; you may find this among "fire and brimstone" Democrats just as often as your "Limburgh Republicans".
I've often said the difference between these groups is: given 100 people asking for a free meal, the liberal will take satisfaction in feeding 99 hungry ones; this type of conservative will fret over the one person who "got away with" getting a free lunch he could have afforded himself.
(Side rant: these people tend to be among the loudest Bible-thumpers, and think "the Good Lord helps those.." is an actual biblical passage.)
Rehabilitation as a way of dealing with miscreants doesn't work in the US for the main part because there is too large a segment of the American populace who feel that these various programs equate to giving them a reward for bad behavior. Why should they (the convicted) get a free hand with job placement when no one else is "being coddled"?
(The wonderful quote "born on third base and thinks he hit a triple" always comes to mind here.)
So you see, Americans understand perfectly well all the logical and economic aspects of this issue. The fact is, it is built into our culture to punish people. We get satisfaction from it. We're not after what's best for the country, we're after revenge.
It's ugly, but I've been around for many years & I stand by that statement.
There is this attitude, but there is also the other thing: economic and racial social conflict. It cannot be ignored that in California, which has only 6.5% black people, almost 45% of offenders sentenced under three strikes laws are black. Americans not only hate letting people get away with things, but they have particularly little sympathy for policies that disproportionately affect racial minorities. This is the legacy of segregation and suburbanization: it's hard to care about what happens to people in other racial and economic demographics when you're living in a racially and economically homogenous suburb and never actually encounter these people except to hear in the news about crimes in their communities.
That said, I don't think these attitudes arise because Americans are bad people. America genuinely has a crime problem. London's murder rate is about 1.2 per 100,000. Chicago's is 15.9 per 100,000, while places like New Orleans and Detroit are around 50-60 per 100k. It's not particularly surprising Americans are less sympathetic than Europeans when it comes to punishment.
Americans are fascinated with race. It's used as an explanation for practically every kind of social injustice. To me, economic situation is much more important here. After all, outside of a serious mental illness, a wealthy person will not go and try to break into someone else's house.
There are cultural aspects that have developed to support certain behaviors within an economic setting, there is plain ignorance, but all these can be addressed with proper economic support for the impoverished populations.
In California, LA stands as the biggest source of the 3-strikers[1], order of magnitude larger than other urban centers. Part of this is the sheer size of the population, part of it is the size of the economic strata occupied by the majority of 3-strikers. Of the 6.5% (is this even accurate?) "black people" you reference, what % live in utter poverty? Of the 55% of non-black 3-strikers occupy the same strata?
I don't have a source of these statistics, but to me it seems very intuitive that you will find that the vast majority come from the same economic situation, and race plays less of a difference than you might think.
As for the suburbs, I fail to see the reasoning - are you proposing that we limit the free choice of people of where they want to live? Most people I know who chose to live in suburbs and endure horrific LA traffic did so not because they do not want to be next to other races, they did it because they want their children to have a yard to play in and breath fresh air. Schools with a smaller classroom size are an issue too, but that goes back to the economic situation - large lots/more expensive houses result in greater tax income and therefore better schools.
Race is simply the most identifiable trait. Everything else, you have to actually work at finding root causes, this is why people gravitate to issues like that - it's easy, it's horrific and everyone immediately knows the solution. Unfortunately, that is also why we have made very little progress on the issues, despite making the subject socially-radioactive. Instead of feel-good/feel-bad rhetoric, it would be nice to see a tangible plan for improving the economic conditions in the blighted parts of LA for a change... If that happens, I'm willing to wager that crime will drop with poverty, and such horrific stories will become non-existent.
Moreover, it's hardly unique to Americans. Racial and ethnic conflicts are common across the whole world. The U.S. is still dealing with a legacy of slavery and desegregation that ended only recently. When the Governor of Alabama promised "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" Bill Gates would've been about eight years old. He would've seen on TV when Governor George Wallace physically blocked two black students from enrolling in the University of Alabama, and had to be moved aside by a National Guard general under the orders of the President. This isn't ancient history, it's a sociological blink of an eye.
Other western countries have to deal with the legacy of their repression of particular ethnic groups, but the U.S. is unusual in that its repression of blacks was particularly brutal and long-lived, ended very recently, and left a very large number of disaffected people among the population of the country (12-13%). The treatment of the Irish by the British might come close, but is mitigated by physical separation. What would the politics of England look like if London was 40% Irish, confined largely to ghettos in the city?
> To me, economic situation is much more important here.
In the U.S., race and economic situation is inseparable. That's the legacy of segregation. When Bill Gates was a child and going to school in the 1960's, most of America's black children lived in the South where they went to segregated schools, ate at segregated restaurants, etc. Economic segregation is a natural consequence of this very recently ended racial segregation.
> As for the suburbs, I fail to see the reasoning - are you proposing that we limit the free choice of people of where they want to live?
No, my comment is descriptive rather than prescriptive. Suburbs are segregated, by race and socioeconomic status. Voters living in the suburbs never see the impact their support of particular criminal law policies have on poor people and minorities, who disproportionately live in cities.
This is a race map of Detroit and its inner suburbs: http://cdn.all-that-is-interesting.com/wordpress/wp-content/.... The Detroit metro area is 70% white, but the city itself is 80% black. How much exposure and insight do you think those red dots have into the lives of those blue dots? When those red dots vote to support criminal policies that disproportionately affect the blue dots, do you think they even get any feedback about the ramifications of their decisions? This is the impact of segregation and suburbanization. People naturally have trouble empathizing with people who are different from themselves. Suburbanization exacerbates that natural phenomenon. People have particular trouble empathizing with people who live somewhere else that they never see or meet or interact with on a daily basis.
I'm afraid you are missing my point. History is history, what happened happened and there isn't anything we can do about it. My point is simply that non-discrimination policies without tangible focus on economic wellbeing is meaningless and will have zero impact.
Yes, on average black population is at an economic disadvantage when compared to white. Yes, there are historic reasons for that. But the problem is not that they were disadvantaged, but that they stay disadvantaged, much of it through somewhat self-sustaining social processes.
What I mean by self-sustaining, in this case, is the cycles of criminal activities/violence many of these communities are gripped by. The three strikes law hurts these communities the most not because they are black, but because the economic situation is such that people are compelled to steal or commit other crimes. Not only that, but it is socially acceptable to be involved in criminal activity. Both make repeat offenses more likely.
On the flip side, the suburban voters are acting very rationally. It's all in how you ask the question. "Should a repeat rapist be prevented from hurting anyone else?" Most people will answer yes. "Should a person convicted repeatedly of serious violent crimes be prevented from hurting anyone else?" Again, most people will answer yes.
Now, break these statements into what lawmakers and law-enforcement can actually implement, and you get something a long the lines of "people that commit multiple felonies should be sentenced to life without parole". Then the same lawmakers start expanding what a "felony" is to include non-violent crimes, and so on... Everyone appears to be acting somewhat rationally, but the end result is a lot less clear cut.
What we really need to focus is changing the economic situation, then the cultural aspects will follow, and only then we will have fewer stories like this and fewer victims in general.
> History is history, what happened happened and there isn't anything we can do about it.
We can't change history, but that doesn't mean we can't look to history to understand how the present got to be the way it is. Moreover, just because history has happened and we can't change it doesn't mean it doesn't have ongoing repercussions.
> But the problem is not that they were disadvantaged, but that they stay disadvantaged, much of it through somewhat self-sustaining social processes.
The problem is that they were enslaved, and then actively repressed. Those are facts that have repercussions in the present. Anecdote: my grandfather was trained as both a doctor and a lawyer, and was a wealthy man. My family didn't inherit any money, but my mom inherited an education from a private tutor and I grew up hearing about him and being shaped by those stories. Well the grandfathers of black people alive today were systematically repressed, denied education and denied economic advancement. What kind of stories do black kids grow up hearing, and how do those stories shape them in the present? The problem goes far beyond economic disadvantage. It's one thing to prevent a group of people from accumulating capital. It's another to destroy their social structures, actively prevent them from bettering themselves, and use the authority of the state to segregate them from the majority population. That results in cultural devastation that goes far deeper than simple economic loss.
> The three strikes law hurts these communities the most not because they are black, but because the economic situation is such that people are compelled to steal or commit other crimes.
Crime isn't a simple function of economic status. There is a wide variety of crime rates within communities of identical economic status. Crime is a function of social cohesion, the vitality of social structures, community respect for authority, trust, etc. Those things are deeply tied up in race as a result of the legacy of segregation. You don't think there is a difference between a poor black community and a poor white community when it comes to respect for authority? When that authority was, until just a few decades ago, fighting tooth and nail to maintain segregation and repression?
All valid points, but the reason I disagree with race as the main factor, is that I have had the privilege of working with and befriending many people who are either black or mixed. All of them had made the choice to work hard and gain education. In the end, in today's world there are choices. This is why I focus on the economics - to enable more people to make better choice, black or white.
I think people's sense of personal safety is a bigger driver than revenge. In general, people want a hard line on anything that impacts their sense of personal safety. In order to feel safe, people want punishment to prevent others from committing the same crime.
(Of course the flaw in this thinking is that punishment does not always prevent criminals from committing a crime).
I think the flaw in this thinking is that it's emotional. An alternative would be to do things that actually reduce crime statistics as proved by evidence, rather than things that people instinctively think might work.
Unless it turns out that the statistics work out otherwise?*
I tend to think the answer is evidence-based reform. Check out what works and do more of that. As far as I can tell, the best results are had by rehabilitation type systems.
* What I mean by this is it might be a tautology that someone locked up in prison forever can commit no more crimes, but I'm not sure it's as simple as that. If you lock someone up:
a) You deprive their community of that person. Maybe their children will now become criminals.
b) You deprive their community of their spending power and work. Maybe it will become poorer.
c) They have the chance inside prison to share experiences with novice criminals and teach them how to become old hands, increasing crime when their cell-mates get out.
Now if that person is a negative on all the above values, maybe there is a point in not letting them out. Maybe they have broken homes, never work, and teach others about crime anyway. But that's not the person I'm comparing them to.
I'm saying the criminal in their community has a negative effect on society. Putting them in jail makes it zero. Actually rehabilitating them makes it positive.
If we could get rehabilitation to work, everything gets better. Personally, I think evidence from round the world suggests this is possible.
The problem remains that we have a prison system that serves to punish, not rehabilitate.
If you take a defective part & try to fix its deficiencies, it has a better chance of fitting back into the machine it was intended for.
If you toss it into a box full of other rusty parts and let it sit neglected for several years, it is more likely to come out rusty & more defective rather than useful. If we were discussing machine parts, no one would ever argue otherwise.
If your entire policy is based around putting that part back in the box over and over, then blaming the part for being bad & eventually throwing it away, then you're not being honest about trying to fix the part.
A country that is as full of smart people as the US is, that has accomplished as many things as that country has done, and that cannot come up with a system better than what it has, cannot be honestly trying to "fix its parts".
I say it is that way because people are not interested in fixing the parts; that they simply want to throw them away. They want punishment, not improvement.
Am I the only one here not seeing this as propaganda with nicely worded articles masking a lot of the reality here? Some of them seem a little unreasonable I'll agree, but lets go through a few of these:
"taking a wallet from a hotel room" - we blame it on the court appointed lawyer. He's already been convicted and sent to jail twice for burglary and he continues to break into other peoples places and steal their stuff. Poor guy just took a wallet from those rich vacationing golfers. Screw that. If I was there I'd be scared to death. How many times do we let him keep doing this. Stop doing it stupid.
"stealing tools from a tool shed" - oh he was just riding along. sure he was. already been convicted multiple times for burglary. The fact that he desperately misses his children does not make him less guilty of continuing to break into other peoples places and taking their things. Stop doing that stupid.
"borrowing a co-workers truck" - i think there is clearly more to this story. generally speaking, people don't normally drive other people's trucks 3 states away without letting them know. If it really was harmless, i'd expect the other guy to not press charges or testify on his behalf. Hey guys, it was just a misunderstanding I thought someone else took it. Also, "inadvertently killing someone" is a really nice way of saying he beat the shit out of someone in a fight and the guy died.
Perhaps some of these don't deserve life, but I don't really have that much of a problem with it. Maybe we could lower it to 20-30 years, but I have no problems with escalating penalties. If you are a productive member of society this isn't a problem. These mini-articles are all worded as if these people didn't do anything wrong and just made a tiny mistake this one time and now they are in prison forever. Not the case. Most of them made pretty big mistakes, and they made them repeatedly.
Please, please take a step back and read what you wrote. Now, for each of those instances you described, please assume this is your uncle, brother, cousin etc? Do you still feel the same?
No one is saying these people did nothing wrong. The main issue is that the punishment does not fit the crime. That's it. Simple.
Where do we draw the line? Obviously for you the line is ok where it is at. But, frankly, all these cases, I have an intuitive sense that the punishment does not fit the crime. There are many people, I would assume that also have this intuitive sense.
Why is this? I would make a guess that when I see someone like Martha Stewart getting less than a year in prison for securities fraud and someone "taking a wallet from a hotel room" getting life, well, it just doesn't jive right. Obviously this is just one example. The unevenness of it makes it wrong.
Imagine someone pricking you with a pin. And doing it repeatedly. For years. The crime is tiny, but you'd anyway want him to stop permanently.
So the question is what do we do with people who commit small crimes as a lifestyle, and have proven repeatedly in practice that our rehabilitation doesn't work on them? On one hand, harsh punishment doesn't fit the crime, but on the other hand, allowing to continue to offend all the time (we locally had an underaged teenager that was caught stealing 20+ times in less than a year, but was always released because the legislation doesn't expect imprisonment in such cases) is stupid as well, since it hurts victims.
What should we do with such people? I've no idea. Exile from society seems somehow appropriate, but we can't do that.
> So the question is what do we do with people who commit small crimes as a lifestyle, and have proven repeatedly in practice that our rehabilitation doesn't work on them?
Do you think the US system offers sufficient rehabilitation mechanisms to make the case that rehabilitation doesn't work?
Personally, I don't. To European eyes, it looks revenge-heavy, and rehabilitation-light.
you clearly don't know me at all. I have a cousin that has stolen large sums of money from and threatened bodily harm to my grandma along with several other convictions that i'd like to stay in prison for a long time. I've got an uncle that I have similar feelings for.
Also, you should re-read what I wrote. I also said that perhaps these don't deserve life, but "a long time" does seem reasonable.
Finally, how is securities fraud worse than breaking and entering? How is securities fraud worse than "inadvertently killing someone?" Really? Yes yes, I know we hate the 1%. Terrible rich people. Insider trading is not worse than breaking and entering or killing someone. Come on now.
Breaking and entering: $1000's of damage, per instance. Insider trading: $100,000's of damage, per instance. Enforcement level of insider trading is also low, so a person can commit many more times the crime of insider trading before they're caught.
Breaking and entering - very traumatic to someone.
insider trading - traumatic to no one. I'm not sure what these "damages" you speak of are. Someone wanted to buy or sell stock, and an insider bought or sold it. Sure, they have more information, but someone always has more or different information. carl icahn and warren buffett have more information than me about a lot of things. yet we trade on the same market everyday. many economists argue that it should be legal, and it is a victimless crime. "Other critics argue that insider trading is a victimless act: a willing buyer and a willing seller agree to trade property which the seller rightfully owns, with no prior contract (according to this view) having been made between the parties to refrain from trading if there is asymmetric information. The Atlantic has described the process as "arguably the closest thing that modern finance has to a victimless crime""[1]
i can't imagine how someone can suggest that insider trading is a worse crime than breaking and entering.
also, FWIW, if you want to get mad at insider trading, don't get mad at martha stewart. She went to jail for it. Get mad at the fact that it is completely legal for politicians to insider trade. I mean WTF. They get non-public important information on a regular basis and for whatever bizarre reason we decided that they can trade on it but nobody else can. WTF?
Losing a job is traumatic. Enron though, wasn't about insider trading. Yes several of the guys at the top were charged with insider trading, but they were also charged with fraud, money laundering, conspiracy, bank fraud, making false statements to banks and auditors, securities fraud, wire fraud, money laundering, obstruction of justice, among other crimes. Insider trading, not the thing that caused trauma, and in fact I believe most of them were actually acquitted on the insider trading charges. And, fwiw, the guys found guilty of these things did end up with significant prison terms for the trauma they caused.
So despite listing all the extreme damage they did, you still think it is reasonable that they got "significant" prison terms and the guy who stole a wallet gets life?
You just suggested that Enron was insider trading so I don't think you have a great handle on what insider trading is. It is not traumatic for someone to enter into a stock trade that they are planning to make. The fact that the person on the other end might know more than you is a fact of life for every stock trade ever made. There are prominent economists that think we should let people insider trade. It is a victimless crime.
Just because the damage is spread out to thousands of people doesn't mean it's a victimless crime. I'm trade stocks and I'm a victim, too. The damage to the share market's reputation may scare off some people, they will lose an avenue for investing their savings, as a result suffer a reduction on the return of their capital over their lifetime, with a significant chance of relying on the society for their retirement, because they were put off from investing, causing an increased drain on society's resources as well as a permanent reduction in their self esteem due to their lack of self reliance. In terms of damage to people's emotional state I still think insider trading is more insidious than breaking and entering. My home has been broken and entered into twice but I'm still more angry when insiders traded off private information in a company I invested in.
ah quick edit there. I'll leave my response below. We can agree to disagree, but let me make a few more points first :-) I'll be civil I promise.
He didn't get life for stealing the truck. he got life for stealing the truck in addition to the 2 other convictions. It's also not "any severity," but felony level severity. You can argue that the line in the sand has been drawn in the wrong place, but the line in the sand is for bad offenses. Stealing a chocolate bar is not a felony, it is a misdemeanor (pretty much everywhere as far as I can tell. Generally speaking, shoplifting is not a felony until is it several hundred dollars worth, usually $500).[1]
You can argue that the "felony" label is too broadly applied to things that aren't "that bad." You can argue that life is too harsh of a punishment. Those are reasonable arguments. But in general, felonies are "severe" and not comparable to speeding tickets or chocolate bars.
>Realistically if the first two strikes were horrendous the person would already be put in jail for life and a long time. There would be no opportunity for a third strike. By your logic, the courts got it wrong the first two times and now they are getting it right with the life sentence.
I'd say it's more along the lines of we'll give you a couple chances, but only a couple. 1, go to jail for awhile and think about what you've done. 2, I told you not to do that and you kept doing it anyways think about it longer. 3. Dude, seriously. We warned you, and now we've had enough.
Some felonies on their own are in fact worthy of life. Murder someone and you generally get life. They idea behind 3 strikes is that on their own maybe they aren't worth that long of a sentence, but they are bad and we gave you several chances.
>Also, I am sorry, personally for me 20-30 years in jail is as good as life.
perhaps. how about 10-15? I have no idea what the "right" amount of time for any crime is. All I'm suggesting is that it isn't that unreasonable to have that time scale for people who repeatedly prove that they aren't being productive members of society.
You may find it interesting that there's a guy in California who died in prison under the three strikes law for attempting to steal a candy bar, because a petty theft can be prosecuted as a felony for people with previous thefts. Another guy, who was never arrested for theft or violence of any kind, has been in prison for 20 years and will likely remain there for life after getting arrested with 13 sheets of LSD. The cost of keeping someone in prison can be over $100,000 a year. Regardless of the seriousness of the crimes committed by the people presented in the ACLU link (and I don't disagree with you that they are not trivial), the fact remains that we have the most overzealous criminal system in the world.
also, fwiw I probably agree with you that the line on felony should be moved in some cases, specifically related to drug offenses. I do think that many of the things in the article should very much be felonies. specifically the breaking and entering and the "inadvertent killing" seem reasonable.
> The main issue is that the punishment does not fit the crime.
The punishment certainly does not fit the description of the crimes given. But what were "the crime[s]", and how accurately have they been represented in the descriptions given in this article?
It seems to me that the article has been written to be lenient with the truth, so I think it's acceptable to question the truth about the crimes represented here.
We should have more information about these specific crimes before judging these specific cases.
There's a principle in justice: A punishment fitting the crime.
As the document points out, people who raped or murdered, sometimes more than once, can leave prison after 5-15 years, depending on behavior. Meanwhile those people listed will never be able to leave, even if they spend 50 years with impeccable and absolitely perfect behavior.
Crimes. Plural, not singular. Three strikes laws exist for a reason.
Does stealing a wallet justify sitting in jail for life? No.
Does getting caught committing your third burglary? Well, that's a much more interesting question and everyone is obviously entitled to their own opinions. But no one is entitled to completely twist the facts and then demand everyone agree with them or feel sorry for their own positions on it.
Can I ask where the document states that? Ctrl-F doesn't seem to find the word rape and says nothing about 5-15 years. That being said, I am not for anyone convicted of rape or murder being let out after 5-15 years. Being ok with someone convicted repeatedly of things being sentenced to long terms does not mean I want short terms for even more serious crimes. Feel free to argue for longer terms for rape and murder. Unlikely to find too much dissension. This article on the other hand is for shorter terms for different crimes. The two things don't REALLY have anything to do with one another.
The three strike laws make some sense as long as people conflate "felony" with genuinely serious crimes like rape or aggravated assault. If someone commits three consecutive rapes...well, who would complain about locking him up forever?
The problem is in the increasing meaninglessness of the term "felony". If they limited it to grievous crimes, there wouldn't be much controversy.
Also, it's weird to have something presented as "news" when The Simpsons covered it satirically about 15 years ago:
So what is a reasonable punishment for a serial rapist? Seems to me that no one should get the chance to be convicted of rape 3 times. They should have been locked up before that 3rd one happened. I might, might let you out at some point after 1. After 2, screw you. You clearly didn't learn and you are a danger to society.
> So what is a reasonable punishment for a serial rapist?
Forced placement in a facility for treating mental illness until his doctors determine he is sufficiently well to be reintegrated into society, followed by a public-service program as societal (note: not personal) recompense for his actions. That would be after the first time, though, not the third. Because this person needs help and is plainly not getting it--and he will never get help in an American prison.
But because enough people are more interested in vengeance than justice--and your posts pretty firmly demonstrate that you're in that camp--it will never, ever happen.
You are suggesting that everyone who has ever committed rape is mentally ill. That seems like a stretch to me. I'd suggest there are a lot of people that are simply bad people who like to have forceful sex with someone who doesn't want to have sex with them. I also don't think all murderers are mentally ill. Some people just have a motive and are willing to cross a line.
I'm not interested in vengeance, and nothing about my post suggested I am. I don't want people who are a danger to society to continue to be a danger to society. If I was one of the people interested in vengeance, I'd have said something like they should get raped repeatedly with a broom in prison. I didn't, I just said they should be locked up. Nothing vengeful about that at all. I just want them to not be near my loved ones.
Being "willing to cross a line" is mental illness. It's the fucking definition of antisocial personality disorder. Get them the help they need, train them to be productive members of society (like we should for everyone), and guess what? The problem goes away. You will certainly have an incurable segment of the population who, after actually being treated by professionals and educated, cannot integrate with society--but it's not going to be a third of the population of black males being locked away for at least part of their lives and being primed for further criminality by their experiences in prison.
Putting someone in a concrete box where one's safety is utterly left up to chance is nothing but vengeful and retaliatory. It is designed to inflict misery and nothing else. It saddens me that this obvious fact escapes so many of my fellow Americans but I've become resigned to the fact that those of us with privilege are just kind of shitty human beings when it comes to anybody unlike us.
Certain crimes are deemed inexcusable. Murder someone because they're black: Horrible. Steal a wallet because you have an addiction: forgivable. Rape someone after being convicted and released from two prior rapes: Inexcusable.
Not every "mentally ill" person is curable, nor can every mentally ill person be trusted at an attempt for re-integration with society.
Funny how you're defending the right of serial rapists to seek help and therapy while you "resign yourself" to the fact that people who don't "get it" are shitty humans.
Being "willing to cross a line" by itself is not mental illness.
A huge part of our crimes are things that are hurtful to society and unfair, but completely natural for dominant primates to do to other primates in their group - i.e., take their stuff for own benefit, or violently attack a competitor. Doing evil stuff is evil, but most evil stuff isn't mentally abnormal, and isn't really curable.
Also, crimes such as 'stealing to feed your family' do cross the line, but are neither sign of mental ilness or even evil. Sure, it hurts others as well - but it is a completely sane decision to prioritize suffering of you and your family over wealth of others; if there is a lack of proper social support and a real necessity, a mentally normal person can easily be stealing 365 days a year.
Are you suggesting that there should be no prisons at all, and just mental hospitals?
what do we do with "You will certainly have an incurable segment of the population who, after actually being treated by professionals and educated, cannot integrate with society"?
Also, what do we do with those that are extremely violent and prone to escape? It seems reasonable that a tougher layer of security is warranted in some cases.
>"Putting someone in a concrete box where one's safety is utterly left up to chance is nothing but vengeful and retaliatory."
First, I'm not convinced that our prison system is quite as bad as that statement. It seems a bit of hyperbole to me. I'd agree that it certainly isn't great, but perhaps not quite that bad.
Also, it seems that we don't really have to disagree about anything, you are just reading too much into what I've said. I'm in favor of trying to rehabilitate people, and I'm also in favor of improving our prisons. I'd classify someone convicted of rape several times as "an incurable segment of the population who, after actually being treated by professionals and educated, cannot integrate with society."
I also think there are way too many people in prison in general, specifically in relation to the absurd war on drugs. I suspect we agree on that.
>It is designed to inflict misery and nothing else.
I think it is designed as punishment for crime. That mostly seems reasonable. I think while we're at it, we should work to try and rehabilitate them better than we do, but no need to put them in a penthouse suite. Part of it is deterrence. All crime is not mental illness. I promise you that. Much of it is committed by highly intelligent people who just didn't expect to get caught. Much of it is committed by not very intelligent people who just didn't expect to get caught.
Where serious crimes like rape and murder (but not manslaughter) still come with heavy sentences (like 15-25 years) but in a place where you can be rehabilitated so when you get out it doesn't come to a second strike. (Also, the fact that rapists often get sentences under 10 years in this country is pretty ridiculous, and is what allows them to actually get around to committing the crime 3 times. (15 year sentences 3 times starting at age 15 would make you 60. How are people committing 3 rapes in the first place?)
Basically I'm fine with the 3 strike laws as long as we fix the root problems in the first place. (And also fix the definition of felony to not include non-violent, non-serious crimes).
I'm not a criminologist but my understanding is that murder is almost always a personal crime of passion rather than a general psychopathy, and that the repeat offending rates in countries which allow murderers back out of prison (such as mine) is tiny. So while I understand the high-tariff sentence for murder, they're not really a benchmark offender category for social transgression and rehabilitation because they (usually) lack the reoffending tendency that requires rehabilitating.
The U.S. and Canada have very similar cultures, so comparisons here have some meaning. The U.S.'s per capita incarceration rate is 6.28 times Canada's [1] and the per capita number of police officers is 1.26 times higher in the U.S.[2]. However, the intentional homicide rate of the U.S. is 2.94 times that of Canada[3]. Certain types of offenses (e.g. drug offenses) are higher in Canada, but the violent crime rate is lower.
It's worth asking what is going on here. I'm no expert on law and punishment, but it seems like the U.S. is throwing more resources at the problem (perhaps prodded by for-profit prison lobbyists) and getting poorer results. The cultures are too similar to explain this away by saying Canadians are inherently less violent. As Canada considers harsher prison sentences and expanding prison capacity, it's imperative to understand if this will produce the intended results.
Many people don't appreciate how much a solid social net does to reduce crime. Even the poorest Canadians have access to good health care and education.
In America, I have no doubt in my mind I'd steal to pay for an operation on my kids. Hell, I'd rob a bank at gunpoint if it came down to it.
I worked in the poorest postal code in Canada (http://goo.gl/maps/hzKct here's how bad it gets, this intersection is called Wastings and Pain by many), it's a walk in the park compared to the bad neighbourhoods of many US cities. I've never felt like I was in the 3rd world in Canada, there are parts of the US that make you wonder...
We generally take care of our people and don't use the prison system as part of the social safety net to the degree the US does. Ironically, in Montreal in the winter, you pretty much have to kill someone to get sent to jail if you're homeless.
I'm afraid I have to call BS on the ol' "Blame Harper" schtick. The Conservatives, Liberals, and NDP all have exactly the same platforms and would likely be doing exactly the same thing if in power. Canada's political parties have stopped running on the merit of policy and are running purely on the basis of personality. It's really starting to annoy me.
Slightly off topic but I would like to recommend you to read Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. In it, he posits that the advent of television is the primary driving force behind image-based politics. It's full of astute observations and generally relevant frameworks in which to discuss these types of effects in society. It was also written in 1985 but everything is even easier to observe now.
One thing that disturbs me, after reading the comments here, and after hearing attitudes expressed by people in general: I think normal citizens massively underestimate how harsh these sentences are. Look around at your life and picture how much damage might be done by just a 6 month stint in jail. You would likely lose your job, you might lose your house, your kids. Even a month in jail would be a serious bummer for most of the people posting here.
Now, think, really picture, what a 3 year sentence would do. How hard it would be to recover from losing those years.
Now picture a 5 year, 7 year, 10 year, 15 year sentence. There is a reason Norway generally restricts its sentences to 21 years for even the most heinous crimes. The sentencing here in the US is truly draconian. It only seems proportional because we are measuring relative to what is already going on, so in context this stuff seems "not that bad."
There is so much injustice with our prison system right now. There are countless people being locked up for their entire lives over petty crimes -- the same crimes that relatively comfortable white boys like me could easily get away with because I can afford a decent lawyer. It's racism and wealth discrimination disguised as justice.
The US is leading the world in incarceration and the privatization of prisons is a big contributor to the problem. Corporations have a financial incentive to incarcerate more people and lobby to keep strict drug laws.
Meanwhile we make jokes and laugh about things like prison rape. I believe we will look back at prison rape the same way we look back at slavery. How barbaric are we that we think that's somehow okay?
For things to change, we’re going to have to change public perceptions and start demanding change. I wish we were a little less eager to deprive people of their most basic right to freedom.
I don't think the underlying problem is privatized prisons. The underlying problems are our unconscious biases, political pandering ("tough on crime!") and weaknesses in our educational and healthcare systems.
Sure, but privatized prisons would be just as happy to house rich white people as they would be to house poor immigrants. They want their prisons full, but that doesn't explain why people commit crimes, how people are caught, arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced.
Privatizing prisons generally reduce the financial incentive to incarcerate more people.
In non-privatized states, you generally have a prison guard union. The prison guard union lobbies for more prisoners and gets more money. Simple as that. A non-monopolistic prison corporation spends their own money lobbying, and all the other prison corporations get to reap the benefits. Classic collective action problem.
I understand that we don't have the kind of problem that a8da6b0c91d mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6743406 however I really don't understand the common sense of the US judicial system.
If I were to be caught breaking some computer misuse act against a UK company it's more than likely a slap on the wrist would be handed down to me. Abuse a US corporation and I would expect extradition and 10 years or more in one of your comfortable prison cells.
This is pathetic. What country that claims to be a leader in human rights can justify this kind of justice? I'm American, and am continuously appalled to hear these types of stories. these stories are sadly not isolated either, and have come to almost be accepted. We are nearing a tipping point where we need to stand up for a better America. Screw the prison industry, and screw lobbyists, screw bipartisan squabbles. We need to stand up for ISSUES that matter to us.
> What country that claims to be a leader in human rights can justify this kind of justice?
They claim to be the leader in a lot of things when it's plainly not true. Unfortunately, the only people that believe the marketing spin are those inside, or those in the poorest of countries. Everyone else knows it's a crock of shit.
This is poorly focused. I'm absolutely against 3 strikes sentencing laws and mandatory sentencing escalations that can put petty criminals in prison for life.
On the other hand, I'm perfectly OK with some criminals dying behind bars, such as the recently sentenced Whitey Bulger, and so are most other people. By making the headline about the undesirability of custodial life sentences in general, they'er losing a large chunk of their potential audience straight out of the gate.
So, question- if you actively support putting people behind bars with the intent of seeing them die there, why not just kill them right away? If the intent is for them to not cause any harm to society, then that'll get the job done while saving money for society and making them suffer for a shorter period of time.
Unless the goal is to make them suffer for their entire life as punishment; in which case, why not just torture them? That seems like it would be more efficient.
I'm legitimately curious as to why one would support prison if one does not believe that society should aspire to transform criminals into better, law abiding citizens.
Personally, I would support hanging them high instead of putting them in prison for life... except I do hold certain relevant beliefs about the future of humanity. I think there's a decent chance that before this century is out, us humans will have mastery over our brains (which may or may not be the same gooey brains we've always had), and I think it would be tragic if we put even a bad man to death instead of imprisoning him for several decades then fixing his brain when the technology comes along. If prisons become too costly for the rest of us to support or if it's going to take a lot longer for the tech, then mass cryogenic suspensions would be better than straight up executions, and for free people cryonics would be better than dying of old age... Of course if I thought humans will never gain mastery over the brain, then sure, why not have executions for those with life sentences, who ideally are those where "education" and rehabilitation are impossible due to the way their brains are?
Killing someone actually ends up costing more than imprisoning them for life (Just an FYI). I do however agree with your point about what the goal of prison should be.
It's less the cost of death vs life imprisonment, more the cost of appeals. Death is permanent, the appeals process is thorough (tragically, not thorough enough) in an effort to ensure that only those who are guilty are killed. Doesn't work very well, thus the moratorium and banning of it in some states when their leaders finally acknowledged the severity of the situation.
This is a nicety that might ring hollow to someone who spent the time between turning 22 and turning 60 in jail, only to finally be released on evidence that the prosecutor framed him. In the same way that you can't resurrect the wrongfully executed, you can't restore the vitality, family, or place in the world that the innocent guy would have had.
I don't find the death penalty especially sui generis for that reason.
I'm legitimately curious as to why one would support prison if one does not believe that society should aspire to transform criminals into better, law abiding citizens.
Deterrence. Not that trying to reform criminals is a bad idea, but it's not the only goal of the system.
Well, my points about torture and death penalty hold for deterrence. One could even argue that they'd be even more efficient, especially if performed publicly!
Because evidence might come up later that proves them innocent. Because killing someone deprives them of all of the rest of their life, whereas life imprisonment offers them some fraction of it.
I actually do think there are some people we should just hang-- after due process, of course-- but definitely not everyone who has a long sentence.
Also, a "life" sentence usually just means 20 years in the US, for whatever reason.
>On the other hand, I'm perfectly OK with some criminals dying behind bars
Lots of people from similar backward countries are perfectly OK with this.
I mean, if I recall correctly you even still have the death penalty. Heck, it's only like 4 decades since you ended racial seggregation (in paper).
Hopefully, in 3-4 decades you'll turn to more modern and humanistic views on justice, catcing up to most Western European and Skandinavian countries.
Meanwhile, some can cheer and advocate for minor BS changes to laws like the gay marriage (talk about a upper middle class issue, if there ever was one), while others rot in prison for "crimes" such as the ones described in TFA, blacks constitute the lion's share of prisoners, prisons are turned into private for profit enterprises, 16 year olds are sentenced to death, SWAT teams get employed for BS offences, etc... Talk about not seeing the big issues...
The largest word in the title is "what", as part of the phrase "for what?", making clear that the focus is on the reasons for--as opposed to the mere existence of--custodial life sentences.
This 3 strikes law reeks of injustice. I too am fine with certain violent offenders spending life behind bars, but this is just plain stupid and frankly not cost effective[1].
Let's save the jail space for murders, pedophiles, rapists, and violent offenders then put money into programs to rehabilitate folks.
1) I still get mad when I hear other small government folks who are ok with this crap. I'm against the death penalty because it costs too much and I don't trust the government to be 100% right.
Please don't lump pedophiles in with murderers. Many of them are in prison simply for downloading a file from the internet. In some cases, the content is perfectly legal and harmless but was edited to be sexually suggestive and the people caught with it end up in prison. That's not to say some don't actually abuse children, but many do not.
Sorry, let be clarify, when I say pedophiles (as opposed to some of these "sex offenders"[1]), I mean adults who molest children. Since I don't believe (although courts seem to think the other way) that lists after release are constitutional, I am one of those that believe dangerous people need to stay in jail. Those people need to serve a long, long time.
I am not up on the psychology of adults who look at suggestive pictures of children, but I don't think that is healthy.
1) some 17 or 18 year old having consensual sex with their 14 to 17 year old partner is not something I count. That should be a parents discussion and not the courts. 100 years ago, that was marriage age.
This highlights the necessity of putting yourself in a good financial situation, otherwise be put in prison or just be black I suppose. This situation is unfathomable .
You can have cute little Norwegian jails with light sentences when the population is Norwegians. But America is not Norway. We have a large underclass of people capable of destroying whole communities. Have you seen those pictures of Detroit in ruins? Crime in the 1970s got out of control. Stuff like this played a role in turning it around.
Everyone agrees that violent crime is in decline. But the cause is a hotly disputed issue. I personally don't find compelling the idea that tough on crime laws are the cause.
Well, quite a lot of politicians and pundits seem to think otherwise. It is getting a bit tiresome. Also, I was responding to someone who wanted a citation of the stats.
Freakanomics has a long section on it that contradicts Gladwell and I am inclined to believe the Freakanomics since they back it up with stats.
This isn't scientific but It just seems like the 70's had a very chaotic vibe with a lot of external stuff hitting the US. The economy wasn't strong and we were going into a massive transition (factory -> office). Nixon (scandal & economy) and Carter (personified weak) didn't help a whole lot. A lot of in decline thinking causes a lot of unrest and crime.
I would rank most tough crime laws as a cause not a cure.
I wish the up arrow was bigger and the down arrow was moved after the [link]. It would save a lot of hassle and provide a guidance that up is nicer than down.
For example, Steven Pinker looks into this a little in "The Better Angels of Our Nature", long story short there's nothing conclusive, and a sufficiently motivated person can find reasons to doubt it (e.g., the big drop in crime happened some ten years after the ramp up of incarceration rates, Canada experienced a similar decline in crime over that period without the corresponding increase in prison population), however, Pinker himself thinks that when all is said and done it seems likely that incarceration was one of the reasons. One other contributing factor was a large increase in the size of police forces during Clinton's presidency. On top of that, he argues the culture just for some reason shifted to being less violent.
(I want to also mention that he debunks quite convincingly the theory that the decrease in crime had anything to do with legalizing abortion.)
I see the noun "underclass" here more as a factual description. Blacks and latinos are (especially in NYC!) treated like 3rd-class citizens, and they're far more likely to end up in jail for stuff a white person would just get a slap on the wrist.
I won't specifically defend life sentences for non-violent crimes, but I would defend very harsh sentences for repeat offenses. The profiled people demonstrate terribly poor self restraint and judgment. I strongly suspect they were ongoing severe burdens on their communities in many unmentioned ways.
> I strongly suspect they were ongoing severe burdens on their communities in many unmentioned ways.
You're painting a picture that's not connected at all with the information we've been provided and you're using it to support your personal stance.
Yes, the ACLU article is presenting their story in the opposite way; but just because they're painting these people in a positive light doesn't mean that they're hiding a series of continual, unrepentant actions of which these particular crimes are the ones they were caught for. In fact, in one of the cases, the article argues that the judge didn't want to give the sentence that he gave, but his hands were tied by standards.
From the map it seems like all the cases are in the Southeast. Is the Southeastern United States sort or a 3rd Word Country within the U.S. ? It seems like every time I see something like this it is in the Southeast. It seems to me like the rift from the Civil War has never completely been resolved. Just an observation, does anyone else feel the same way?
I'm from France; when I lived there, I used a network of cheap state-subsidized subway and trains to get around the country and see friends and family; I attended a good university for a mere few hundred euros a year; I would buy fresh food at the local market every week; my friends from poorer families got free meals at the university, housing stipends, and so on; my healthcare was covered; and many other things that escape me right now.
I also lived in Louisiana; besides New Orleans, what I've seen are old decrepit roads that haven't been restored in decades, public transportation only used by the very poor and mentally ill (very often correlated), neighborhoods next to the university campus that I've been told to never cross for risk of getting shot, almost half of the people being dramatically ill (overweight), lifeless minuscule downtowns. And heck, even New Orleans is still a shitshow.
Present all the economic arguments that you want, as someone who has lived in both places, a lot of the south of the US feels like a terribly dreary place to me. And I've lived in plenty of places, and have found things to like in all of them- this is not just me being close minded, I just found the south of the US to be in a terrible state for being a part of the world's leading superpower.
I've been living in California for many years now, which is orders of magnitude more pleasant and which I love in many ways (although rife with flaws as well; notably the shameful income gap in Silicon Valley).
You want per capita, otherwise you'd think China is wealthier than Switzerland. And you want PPP (though it doesn't make that much difference) since that reflects what people can actually afford. If you made $1M a month but the prices in your country were such that it would only buy dry bread and water, you'd still be poor.
It depends on where you are. Certainly on average there are more poorer areas, but there are plenty of nice areas as well. Atlanta, Nashville and a few other places are really nice.
Edit: Also 3rd world is a bit hyperbolic. Even the bad areas of the southeast aren't comparable to most of Africa and the real 3rd world.
Look at a map of "percentage Black". The number of issues associate with race, will be correlated both with how Black people are treated, but also the number of Black people.
In England, especially in the eighteenth century, we had a somewhat similar, though harsher regime where one strike against you on a charge of petty larceny could lead to imprisonment in HM prisons. Of course the prison population swelled as hangings became less fashionable, and the temporary prison ships were unmoored to sail to places like Australia. Transportation for the theft of a loaf of bread.
Ironic that that country, along with its New World cousin the USA, claimed ideals of freedom so strongly. Much more so in the USA. Mandatory sentencing has it's place it can be argued. This seems antithetical to first principles however.
Wait, are we actually supposed to get worked up over this? The ACLU so clearly tip toed while writing the descriptions of these cases as to clearly walk a line between lying about the case and giving us the context needed to understand why these people are in jail for life.
"Patrick had no violent criminal history and had never served a single day in a Department of Corrections facility" - Right, but he obviously had a drug problem since he did NA in prison and probably got in trouble previously, just not enough to go to the Department Of Corrections facility (what his crimes and punishments were are left as an exercise to the reader)
The other stories have similar issues. Blame it on the abusive and threatening boyfriend, not the previous drug convictions and a three strikes law. Life in prison for borrowing a truck from a friend that accidentally reported it stolen?
Look, innocent people get in trouble for things they didn't do. Not innocent people get in trouble for things they didn't do, but were just in the wrong place at the wrong time due to the other things that they did do. It's an unfortunate part of the system and I'm all for things that minimize overcharging and punishing innocent people.
But anyone who can't read between the lines on these is either a sap or just believing what they want to. They even led into it with a statistic about race to soften you up. There are three strikes laws for a reason. There's massive amounts of context missing from these. It's a shame, I generally like the ACLU and what they do, but this is awful.
Three strikes on drug convictions is unfair - especially given the disparity in sentencing for crack cocain vs. other drugs. Do you have any idea how many privileged celebrities would be in jail (some for life) if drug crimes were enforced fairly and uniformly?
So for drug convictions it's unfair? possession or distribution? what about manufacturing? is the crime for possession change depending on amount? what about the type of drug?
i think the way our country approaches the issue of drugs is not only pointless but down right dumb. about as dumb as breaking the law 3 times when you know that there's a three strikes rule on the books. i just don't have sympathy for people that can't learn from their mistakes. these laws are in place for a reason, these people knew they were in place, and now we're all supposed to feel bad for them about their decisions making? sorry, i don't buy it.
as for celebrities, i don't think we can really model the entire country around how they're treated. i'd prefer they be treated like everyone else too, but money buys lawyers and not all lawyers are created equally.
Let's stick with drug possession. Up until 2007, first time conviction on possession of 5 grams of crack cocaine, a drug supposedly used predominantly by blacks (supposedly, but not really), would result in a mandatory sentencing of 5 years [1]. If you were lucky and got caught with powder cocaine instead, you would have to have 500 grams in your possession to suffer a similar fate. This was the 100 to 1 sentencing disparity that was reduced to 18:1 in 2010 [2].
That's not all. Roughly 80% of those convicted for possession of crack cocaine are black, only 10% are white [3][4]. Yet crack cocaine usage within both races is about the same [5].
If you analyse conviction rates vs use for different classes (rich vs poor), I bet you'll find similarly outrageous numbers.
A throwaway thought: one of the (many) problems with 3-strike sentencing laws may be that the escalation curve is too quick to have the desired curbing effect.
It is obvious (to me) that some kind of exponentiation would be more effective. 2x - 3x elongation per offense would be plenty harsh, harsh enough for the offender to understand it's going to be much worse each time, without it having to be life in prison.
EDIT: On second thought, formulaic sentencing is bad. Sentencing is hard, consistency is hard, but to remove human judgment and discretion from the sentencing process seems obviously wrong.
Yes, but that isn't what the comment i replied to said at all. And while perhaps life is overkill, I think repeatedly breaking and entering does in fact deserve a long time in jail.
perhaps you are right, but "stealing a wallet" is minimizing the severity of what happened. Breaking and entering is different than being a pickpocket. Grabbing a wallet off a table in a restaurant is different than someone breaking into your house. That seems obvious to me.
I'd also hope that after your "long time of 6 months in jail for stealing a wallet" you'd realize that it was a poor choice and not do it again. Certainly after the 2nd time you were convicted and sent to jail it should sink in right? If 3 times isn't enough, where do we draw the line?
I feel a man could steal 1000 wallets and not deserve 10 years in jail, much less life in prison. even if he never, ever, ever, learned his lesson. I personally would not send a person to prison for life for a property crime, and a small one at that.
This phrase is repeated often in this thread, "draw the line," but some people will not conform, some people will commit petty criminal acts, for a lifetime. IMHO that is no justification for locking them up indefinitely.
Think of marijuana legislation, one minute you can be locked up for life, the next minute it is legal. No matter what the crime, there is an element of subjectivity, fashion, culture, in what punishments we apply. Yes, some people may not rehabilitate. But that fact alone doesn't justify life in prison. Or even a severe sentence.
Compassion is real. It is important, even when it is inconvenient, even for people who suck.
"I feel a man could steal 1000 wallets and not deserve 10 years in jail"
After, say, 100 wallets stolen how do you prevent the next 900 victims from suffering? The victims have absolute rights for protection and compassion; but a repeat offender has intentionally chosen to throw away whatever ties with society he had. There's a social contract about things we do and don't do to each other; we generally don't take others stuff, don't hurt each others and we show compassion to others in our society - so if you repeatedly choose to break the social contract, by taking others stuff and not showing compassion; then why should others show compassion and refrain from hurting you?
If someone can go to my house and take my stuff, why should I be forcibly prevented by police from going to his house and taking his stuff?
If someone is an unquestionably repeat offender, then preventing future crimes is a mandatory goal; respecting the offender is important but, if we can't do otherwise, it's optional. If there is a more humane way to solve it than permanent isolation from society (life sentence, permanent mental institution, execution or exile), then I'd like to hear that and would greatly support it.
I think the point is that for each wallet stolen we would send a guy to jail for, say, two days. If we think that the guy has stolen approximately 100 wallets we prevent the next 900 from suffering by imprisoning him for the most part of a year, and that's it.
What I haven't seen yet is a comparison of cash, not to the cost of imprisonment, but to the cost of getting a job. That is, if someone is in prison for 200 days, that costs a few tens of thousands of dollars to the US taxpayer, so the arguments being advanced in these threads say "this should be a response only to someone who is stealing $10,000 from us, otherwise the government is taking much more from us in taxes than the guy was taking from us in crime." That makes some amount of sense. It ignores certain problems (like "who do the taxes come from?" and psychological damage from getting mugged and so on), but it does have some core "thrust" to it.
On the other hand, to be an effective deterrent to crime, you'd figure that we'd want to make the crime net-unprofitable; that is, you'd want the 9-to-5 job at $7/hour to be a more profitable way of living than stealing $100 wallets. So this would suggest that for an expected number of 100 wallets stolen you should really incarcerate for, say, 2 years or so, so that the original crime "really doesn't pay", in the sense that you lose job-access for a total sum of more money than you gained. (That punishment might also have to be increased if the chance of catching someone who steals 100 wallets is not 100%.)
You can't ever make crime not net-profitable for people who just cover basic neccessities, and there are a lot of them.
You work for a month? You get a month's rent and food. You're in prison for a month? You get a worse bed but a bit better food - the lack of freedom sucks bigtime, but financially there's no difference.
I don't agree that prevention of future nonviolent crimes is a mandatory goal. Think about a routine drug user. It is a crime, but I am not willing to imprison someone just for repeating that crime. Some crimes just don't have enough social impact. It is unjust to viciously enforce compliance simply because some behavior is illegal.
Nonviolent != victimless. My point is not about 'should X be punished' but 'how do we handle definitely punishable small crimes repeated ad nauseam'.
Think about a routine drug user (say, heroin addict) who regularly (daily/weekly) performs theft to sustain the habit - car radios, shoplifting, maybe an apartment if he gets a chance. It is a very common scenario in many places, if the user can't quit (or always restarts a few months after therapy/quitting) and the needed drugs are all illegal & expensive; as the only real non-crime [here] alternative they have is prostitution and many of them consider theft as the more pleasant option.
Even a small, friendly village community who know everyone and help each other would likely vote [for laws] to imprison him in order to stop the behavior. Rehabilitation is another option, but the idea is that after 3-strikes you have to admit that your rehabilitation (however good or bad it is) doesn't work and you have to do something else.
Or think of a genuine kleptomaniac. Unless it's successfully treated, you still need to take some measures to prevent repeated crimes.
I don’t understand. What do you mean when you say “deserve”? Do you think this is the most effective (in way of deterrence, cost-effectiveness and humane treatment) way to do it? Or are you just in it for the punishment, no matter the consequences?
I'm going to be honest and say that in general I am anything but a compassion. I have every bit of sympathy, however, for (relatively) innocent people being victims of things like bureaucracy, human stupidity, laziness, or sheer scumfuckery. It's hard for me to imagine what was going on in those judges' heads, but chances are it's something I despise.
This one was the worst for me:
> When he was 22-years-old, Lance Saltzman was charged with breaking into his own home and taking his stepfather’s gun, which his stepfather had shot at his mother and repeatedly used to threaten her. He was convicted of armed burglary and sentenced to prison for the rest of his life.
I'm pretty sure that story is missing some important details. First, how can you be charged with breaking into your own home?
It sounds like he broke into his stepfather's home, stole a gun and likely because of his criminal past got the book thrown at him. Breakings law is bad enough, but doing it while armed will get the book thrown at you.
I'm not saying mandatory minimums are right, they aren't. Why have judges if you aren't going to let them do the judging.
However, these stories don't seem to pass the sniff test.
EDIT: A few more important details about Lance..
"In March 2006, when he was 21, Saltzman came home to find his stepfather, Toni Minnick, and his mother, Christina Borg, were in a heated argument. His stepfather took his gun and pointed it at his mother. He fired it near her. His mother called the police. Police seized the gun then returned it to his stepfather days later. There were no charges filed. Again, his stepfather pulled the gun on his mother and threatened to kill his mother.
Saltzman decided that his stepfather should no longer have this firearm. He was likely to shoot and kill his mother. In June, he removed the gun from his stepfather’s bedroom and then sold the gun, according to evidence, to “feed his drug addiction.” It was later used in a burglary.
His stepfather found the gun missing and notified the police. Police found the gun “in the possession of the young man who had committed the burglary.” Saltzman was then charged with “armed burglary, grand theft of a firearm, and being a felon in possession of a firearm—all for breaking into his own home and taking his stepfather’s gun.” Police also found cocaine in his car and he was charged with possession of cocaine."
Would you consider these people so dangerous that you would personally build a small concrete box and forcibly keep them inside for many hours a day for the rest of their lives? Or, is that how you would treat your children if they committed some minor, nonviolent, kinda-maybe-bad act?
No reasonable person would - the moral decision above is clear. Would you pay for someone else to do this?
We are brothers and sisters in humanity, and we elect people who write these laws and treat fellow people like this (and/or refuse to reform the US Sentencing Commission). We are to blame.
If the judge simply orders a sentence below the minimum, what happens? While the Government can appeal the sentence, then it comes to the next judge up the line to stand up for justice.
For example, California's 3-strike law counts non-violent felonies, which sweeps up a lot of criminals into 25 year sentences that they don't deserve.
"The California law originally gave judges no discretion in setting prison terms for three strikes offenders. However, the California Supreme Court ruled, in 1996, that judges, in the interest of justice, could ignore prior convictions in determining whether an offender qualified for a three strikes sentence." [1]
But these so called "mandatory" sentences are not actually that, it's just that most judges simply don't have the guts to stand up for justice. A judge can use their discretion in setting sentences, but then can be challenged if Government can show the sentence is unreasonable. While following the guidelines is presumed reasonable, simply not following the guidelines is not presumed unreasonable.
Lois Forer was a judge in Philadelphia facing just such a decision, and he explains the process better than I can [2]. In the end, the man he tried to save was resentenced by another judge to serve the balance of the "mandatory minimum" five years. This is a system which is ultimately perpetuated by the judiciary.
I don't blame the legislature for enacting laws that get them re-elected. I do blame the judges for letting a sentencing law unjustly destroy some peoples lives.
- Many former judges are prosecutors. Prosecutors are trained to get the maximum 'sustainable' sentence. This means looking at what the law says and enforcing it. Fault: legislature.
- If the law says that sentences should or must be X long, sentences are going to be around X long. Outside of the 3 strikes system and the California Supreme Court's ruling, how is this the judiciary's fault? There is a severe lack of empathy among the public, legislators, and in the judiciary for sure, but the legislators passed the laws.
- How much, really, does sentence length have to do with re-election? Maybe a few really informed voters on either side will vote on the sentencing issue only but I really doubt this.
How much, really, does sentence length have to do with re-election?
If you mean, with the voters? Almost nothing.
It you mean, in the ability to get votes in the next election through adequate funding? It means a lot.
The prison union (among others) is a heavy, heavy funder of politicians here in CA (and I assume other places). Obviously they benefit from having more customers^Hprisoners; hence, politicians are willing to vote for legislation in their favor, to keep the money flowing for the next election.
Sure, but the crime and punishment attitude was around before private prisons. They are more like contributors to the problem than the original cause.
It would be great to shut down the private prison industry but let's be realistic about the extent to which lobbying dollars influence the maximum sentence in legislation nation-wide. I would attribute long sentences mainly to poor thinking.
Additionally, I don't understand why mandatory sentences aren't considered a blatant violation of the Constitutional separation of powers. Was it really the Framers' intent that the judiciary's traditional sentencing discretion could be overruled in this way? Maximum sentences are one thing, but Draconian minimums are quite something else. I wish some judges would simply refuse to impose them when they are obviously unjust, even at the cost of their judgeships. And yes, if the Eighth Amendment helps them do that, by all means let them invoke it.
I gather that at the federal level, minimum sentences are now once again considered recommendations; but that hasn't filtered down to the states yet.
If there are filters like archaic three strikes laws to take out human decision making on repeat offenses, there should be sanity filters on the other end. Laws that say noone, ever, should serve more than X amount of years for non-violent crimes and that is probably or should be a low number, single digit. Life for non-violence is very sad as a society.
I am against prison or jail for any non-violent offense beyond fines or 'outpatient' like corrections, they cost much less and might actually help. They keep the individual contributing and don't subject people to a further life of crime locking them up, especially drug offenses when it is really most likely an illness or a non-issue.
If, when they gave a sentence, they reported the projected cost of that sentencing maybe some of this would change?
Things to try to help this:
1) Create common sense filters for sentencing so non-violent criminals or repeat offenses serve no more than x amount of years for a crime or remove jail/prison for non-violence altogether.
2) When sentencing is handed down, the projected cost of that sentence should also be read with the sentence except in extreme cases of violent sentencing. All non-violent sentencing should have a price right next to it so people understand what it really means. i.e. caught with a small amount of drugs = 10 years * 30k per year = 300,000 to put this person away for nothing. Right after that it lists their projected income and loss in taxes. Then a net benefit total which in this case is probably around 500k of economic value for this one offense.
Technology changing society is another side to this. In the past, laws were not only there to dissuade people from doing undesirable behavior but were also more lax and harder to get caught. Nowadays everything is tracked and aggressive laws are now problematic because it isn't just a dissuading factor anymore it is a certainty. If there is something that probably shouldn't be illegal but is based on this past we could be in trouble. So all laws or things like this with non-violence being locked up and a private prison industry run amuck, we need to change drastically soon. People are human and they can mess up, our systems for corrections sometimes mess up the rest of their lives for one momentary lapse of reason.
I know this is a bit of a 'libertarian fantasy', but I think the constitution ought to be amended to contain something like the following:
1) No person shall be subject to any criminal penalty exceeding one year of incarceration or $300 in fines for any non violent offense relating solely to the possession, sales, distribution, manufacture, or purchase of an intoxicating substance.
2) The purpose of this article is to limit the scope of criminal penalties that may be applied to "non violent drug offenders". It's provisions shall be interpreted with such intent in mind.
3) This article applies to all jurisdictions with the Several States, the United States, and any territories or possessions thereof
4) Any forfeiture of assets resulting from the conviction of a "non violent drug crime" must be limited to:
a) The intoxicating substances constituting the "core element of the crime"
b) Any asset materially and predominantly used for the manufacture, production, and possession of such substances.
Provided that such seized assets do not also have reasonable, fundamental, predominant, and legally authorized uses. In such case any seizure must be subject to the provisions of "eminent domain".
5) Congress, or the states, acting within the provisions otherwise authorized by this constitution, may adopt measures to ensure assets actually used in the commission of a "non violent drug crime", when not seized in accordance with this constitution, are only used in accordance to lawfully authorized purchases.
> for any non violent offense relating solely to the possession, sales, distribution, manufacture, or purchase of an intoxicating substance.
I find it somewhat ridiculous as a species we even consider writing into the absolute law of the land anything to do with growing or selling plants that aren't fatally toxic. And even then, you don't need to say "don't sell toxic plants" you just need to say "don't hurt or kill other people with toxic plants". Or in general.
And the point is the general - don't be specific to intoxicating substance. Better yet, ask why the fuck someone is in jail without committing some violence. Implicit to a crime being nonviolent means all parties engaged (including those unknowingly, because committing fraud can still be a felony because you are harming the unknowing parties you actively lie to and deceive to benefit from).
If all parties are privy to something, you really need to sit back and ask why the hell you are throwing people in jail for participating it. If there are no losers without bringing police and prison sentencing into the picture, you are probably doing it wrong.
But I really hope something like this isn't worthy of a constitutional amendment. If anything, you should seek out and fix the direct empowerment in said document that enables rampant abuses of the legal system like this in the first place. Or you need to ask how the hell enough of a majority of your citizenry support it that may call into question the functioning of democracy, because if there is nothing wrong with the system then the people are to blame.
It says that there is no hope for these individuals.
... Why? Why can't they be brought out of their situation? I know some have been in there for 22 years already; but, why can't they be helped from this? I just... it doesn't make sense to me
ACLU doesn't understand the difference between burglary and theft, apparently. Breaking into an occupied hotel room and stealing a wallet is hardly best described as "taking a wallet".
Burglary is a terrifying experience that can leave the victims with life long PTSD. This man is lucky he wasn't immediately shot to death by the occupants. Every day he spends in prison alive is still a gift after that.
I would encourage anyone who hasn't already, to watch the brilliant documentary 'The House I Live In' by Eugene Jarecki. It's available on Netflix (in the UK at least).
It follows the War on Drugs in the USA. As an outsider (Irish living in London) I found it genuinely eyeopening on a topic I knew next to nothing about. For example did you know that the only difference between cocaine and crack cocaine is the addition of baking powder and heat. Although the later will get you 100 times the sentence of the former. There are 19 year olds being put away for the rest of their lives for the possession of a few grams of this stuff.
I don't care what stand you take on the legalisation/criminalisation of drugs, that is insane!
Instead of trying to reduce the rate of reoffending once released, it seems many states go out of their way to marginalise convicts so that virtually no law abiding avenues of employment remain for them. Talk about a vicious circle. That's not evening taking into account the effect of incarcerated parents has on the generation that follows.
It's pretty disappointing to see so many comments praising what most people here would describe as "absurdly disproportionate sentences" and "probably something out of North Korea". Especially when the same people were up in arms not long ago about Aaron Schwartz.
The 3 strikes law system seems beyond ridiculous. Not being a US native, does this mean that I can get three tickets for shoplifting and go to jail for life? What about 3 speeding tickets?
The three-strikes law significantly increases the prison sentences of persons convicted of a felony who have been previously convicted of two or more violent crimes or serious felonies, and limits the ability of these offenders to receive a punishment other than a life sentence. Violent and serious felonies are specifically listed in state laws. Violent offenses include murder, robbery of a residence in which a deadly or dangerous weapon is used, rape and other sex offenses; serious offenses include the same offenses defined as violent offenses, but also include other crimes such as burglary of a residence and assault with intent to commit a robbery or murder.
So, since speeding is not a felony, it has no relevance here. Shoplifting might be a felony, but it would only invoke three strikes if you already had two prior felonies which also happened to be violent.
By the way, I'm not defending three-strikes laws, just describing them. I think they are a bad idea. I also think the ACLU is whitewashing the records of a lot of the people involved here.
Sadly, because it's cruel but not unusual. Oversentencing is so common in America that you can't make the argument in absolute terms, and some conservative judges are hostile to comparisons with extraterritorial penal policy - eg Justice Scalia got rather annoyed about such comparisons being made in a case about whether the death penalty could be administered to minors.
From a European perspective some of these things might not even being custodial. European countries don't suffer higher crime rates because of their more lenient punishments.
I think the problem is that on a manifesto a three strikes proposal looks very good especially for those concerned about law and order, the reality is these horrible injustices..
"After serving two years in prison during his mid-twenties for inadvertently killing someone during a bar fight, Aaron Jones turned his life around ...". To be honest, at that point I kind of wondered whether I was reading a parody piece or not. The 3-strikes laws are not totally irrational provided the legislators carefully decide what counts as a "strike". Even so, "inadvertently" killing someone during a bar fight should count as a strike in my book. Granted, having such laws in a legal environment where almost everything is a felony or can be charged as such, results in great many wasted lives and a huge societal cost. But it's the felony character of some of those underlying offences that should be questioned, not the three-strike principle per se.
> He did not want to sentence her to die in prison, but his "hands [were] tied" because of her prior convictions for minor drug offenses three years earlier
This part struck me. There was grellas' comment on the Google vs Authors Guild thread were the judge decided to go against the 'mechanical' application of the law and took time to come up with a sensible interpretation to handle the case. It's crushing to think about a mother of two in prison for life for a crime the judge itself thought wasn't worth the sentence, potentially leaving her kids in the hands of an abusive husband (I hope they got sheltered at least)
I don't understand how mad those judges should be to send those people in jail for life... Life imprisonment for that... It's like the ultimate punishment (because death penalty isn't worth it) for evilest people. Or is it mad laws? I understand when two adults are sentenced for life because they were torturing and killing random homeless people just for fun (real example from my city). They are very dangerous to the society and should be kept away forever, that I understand. But I don't see how driving a company's truck is an immense menace for the society.
This really shows the unjustness of "three strikes" laws. There is nothing magical about committing three crimes. In my opinion, sentences should reflect the crime you actually committed an not much else.
In an effort to be more civilized we have inadvertently come up with more barbaric punishments than the past. Locking someone away for life for stealing is worse than cutting off a hand or tattooing the forehead.
I think the interesting discussion point here is this..
In the US the prison system is a huge, profitable and influential industry. As the pharma industry will encourage doctors to prescribe their medicines the prison industry will encourage and lobby the legal system to increase the amount of prisoners.
I felt like the title here was misleading. They weren't sentenced to "death," as in, given a death sentence, they were sentenced to life in prison, which in some cases means they will die in prison, this is pretty different, though no less a tragedy.
Not some cases, all cases, as it's a life sentence without parole, meaning they can behave all they want in prison, they are never coming out, period. I think it's clear why this is just as good as a death sentence.
I hate to say it but: Don't go to the Southern parts of the US. Don't go to Texas. Don't go to Florida. Don't go to the Carolina's. Certainly don't go to Mississippi, Alabama or Louisiana. If you live there now, leave.
Wow. This is incredibly fascinating and frightening. I didn't believe that things were nearly this bad in the US...and that's saying something, seeing as I am very critical of lots of things that go on these days.
Am I understanding this right? These people have been given extreme sentences because the law requires it? If that's true why are the judges in these cases not being called out for not protesting these kinds of convictions?
Because of that anchors bar I first thought, watching that video is what got someone behind bars for life - 'what, has America come this far already?'.
This is sad, put your self in their shoe. It's hard to imagine a life like this. I wish things could change in this world and humans cared for one another.
In general this only applies to dangerous or violent felonies. In Colorado for instance, the applicable felonies are:
arson, robbery, burglary, kidnapping, sexual assault, or a class 3 felony sexual assault on a child
If somebody or a group of people are participating in these activities and somebody ends up dying, they should certainly be held liable for murder due to the reckless and malicious nature of the crimes being committed.
if prisons were by law NEVER private entities, and instead ALWAYS funded by and of the society from which the people interned were taken from, and that the cost of housing a person would not end with their life, would we be so quick to lock so many up forever?
solve the problem that led to the person doing what we do not like.
unless that problem is unique to this specific individual, removing the person will not stop the problem manifest on another individual.
If I had to choose from facing life in prison (and maybe being raped there) and sharia punishment for stealing someones wallet I'd probably prefer having my hand amputated.
That's how irrational and absurd this law is, the Taliban look like humanists compared to that.
I can't imagine reading this and not feeling tears well up.
No sense of what I would call humanity. From what perspective does this make the world a better place?
What am I missing about being human that this fits into that I don't understand?