With Amy being released from the good job she had after just two months because she "asked to many questions" (it was through a staffing agency, so they could do that), we're surviving on a net of, at most, $800.00 a month, most of which we're mercifully able to save up for when we have to find a new place in September. And the government just fucked me over with financial aid. I am not committing crimes. And as a matter of fact I would continue to not commit crimes even if I ended up homeless. Humans are willfull creatures. I am quite capable of folding my legs up in an alley and quietly starving to death, come to it.Alyrium Denryle wrote: As for your proposition, it will not do a damn thing. If prison does not deter things like robbery, assault etc, then public caning probably wont. And the field of behavioral psych agrees with me. One-time punishment does not work for dogs, kids, or adult people. You need consistent positive reinforcement for good behavior. Alternatively, you can address the root causes of most of these crimes.
Social mechanisms of support for people (grain dole, charitable hospitals of the Catholic Church were universal, etc) were much better in ancient times but crime still existed; nowhere near the levels it does now, however. The point of corporal punishment incidentally is to humiliate the offender in the eyes of society. This is where the positive benefit comes from--corporal punishment is spectacle, and society lives and breathes spectacle. It is the triumph of Law and Order over Criminality, played out on the town square with the caning post in the plain sight of all, a reinforcing mechanism which worked in keeping crime rates within acceptable levels for only 5,000 years without removing people perpetually from society as our current methods.
I don't see why socio-economic factors are relevant to the nature of punishment. They're just relevant to reducing the number of criminals. I have no problem with attempts to reduce the number of criminals; it in fact sounds quite nice. The problem, dear Aly, is what to do with the people who do commit crimes. And letting them interact with each other and produce a prison society and prison gangs is not acceptable--recidivism is simply through the roof in those cases. Isolating them is torture. What does that leave us except a sharp two dozen strokes of the cane and a few years' monitoring and probation?The vast majority of crimes are the result of poor socio-economic conditions. Gang membership and subsequent violence is a natural outgrowth of poverty. If you reduce poverty, you reduce those crimes. If you train offenders in a skill or heaven forbid give them an actual education, you will drastically reduce recidivism. More expensive. But a hell of a lot more effective. Now, there are some crimes, like killing one's wife for the insurance money, that do not fall under this. In situations like that, your argument might carry some weight. But you are still over-simplifying the issue, which is your primary problem whenever you open your mouth about politics.
The ones who commit crimes, you jackass, have committed crimes. Especially since their mental illness predisposes them to be unable to function in society--that is a serious consideration. IF we can treat them, good, but the recidivism rate is so extremely high among serial killers and child rapists that there is no way we can ever let them into society again because the risk of heinous crimes if we have failed to fully fix them is too great. The greater social and ethical value is in gently and kindly putting them out of their misery. We frankly have far more effective poisons we could use than the ones we do now, and for cases like these poor pathetic things perhaps someone ought give them a hug while the needle is slipped in, but we can't risk ever letting them out, and confinement is torture.So... we should execute all the mentally ill then? What separates those that commit the crime from those that dont? Why not identify them and execute them pre-emptively? Because that is where your argument leads, to jack boots and totenlager.
Much more immoral than hanging. Hanging is the end of one's existence--confinement is the transformation of that existence into a life of repetitive isolation.Less immoral than hanging....
No you would not. As a matter of fact the first execution after the 1970s moratorium was someone who requested to die. So have been a great many executions since--there are many inmates who refuse their appeals to speed up the execution process.I am pretty sure inmates would disagree with you there, and considering that we are talking about executing them, we should probably see what they might prefer. In fact, I think you could probably ask death row inmates what they would prefer and get a universal answer of "I would prefer to live, thanks"
There are a few ways you can do this. You can remove them from society as a whole. That maintains the precious order. You then separate them based on several factors, crime, motive, likelyhood to re-offend etc etc. You then tailor a program to these criteria. You will probably need a pilot program and some trial and error to see what works. But through this, you can give those criminals that need it education, a trade, and instill civic values that make recidivism low. For individuals where this is less likely to be useful (white collar crime for example) there are techniques similar to what the military uses to rebuild someone's personality that you can use (probably with less physical pain, you can probably use these techniques on the vilent criminals as well... and no, I am not suggesting weapons training)
Proactive justice systems, lower recidivism, but get under-funded and cut by politicians desperate to appear tough on crime. Combined with proactive social measures you can reduce crime overall until you are left with a systemic crime rate that will probably never go away.
You give people hope for the future and the ability to make good on those hopes and they are less likely to re-offend. You spend less money, make people better citizens, and you dont need to beat people with reeds.
Or this could be done as part of systematic education reform and socio-economic provision to normal citizens, minimizing the crime rate to the greatest of our ability, and then severely punishing those who commit crimes anyway. This would be more effective since you'd be preventing people from being introduced to criminality in the first place, and then dealing with those who are going around committing crimes anyway in a sharp and terrible fashion.
Then we just have a prison gang with military organization and discipline, you dumbass. That leads to things like MS-13. Now you can rape people and sell coke with a covering squad of guys with smuggled AK-47s!Remove the motivation and force them into situations where they have to work together. One of the best ways to make people stop killing eachother is to give them a common goal. It is how you can get people from disparate backgrounds to work together in a military unit, that, combined with certain somewhat invasive brain-washing techniques. But considering these techniques are used on volunteers I doubt that it can be considered torture.
Again, crime rates were substantially lower in the past, and humans respond well to extremely tremendous sorts of spectacles that public and corporal punishment provide. Also, crime rates are much lower in places like Singapore which retain corporal punishment. Nobody has studied this issue, so I admit my evidence is circumstantial, but whereas your studies are of a system never fully implemented, my considerations are on a system that was universally used for 5,000 years.There are other ways one could do this. My proposal might even be sub-optimal. But yours has NO chance of actually being effective.
Bullshit. You know me well enough to know i would never advocate something so terrible. I had assumed we knew eachother well enough that you would know that. It appears I was wrong.
*blinks* We've talked maybe 20 times on AIM since Amy mentioned she was your friend.
Anyhow, this is SD.net, and it's not like I hold your cute little liberal views against you--once we're done swearing at each other everything's back to normal, after all. You naive fuck.
