[QUOTE=Jolly Roger]
[ul]If you haven’t mastered basic math or english by the time you graduate High School your parents get fined $1000. Also your teachers lose a months pay. [/ul]
[/QUOTE]
Can I be your vice dictator? This is the only one I disagreed with, as the penalty doesn’t target the offender. Heck, I could see 12 kids conspiring not to learn a damned thing just to cause a teacher to lose a year’s salary. Personally, I would deny the student ever receive any sort of public welfare.
[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
I concede that. When we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of people, there are going to be some of them who are statistical flukes. But I’ll bet that 99% of people in prison fall into one of the two categories I described.
[/QUOTE]
Don’t know that I’d want to get into an actually number, but would agree that it’s realtively rare.
I wonder how the people who say just deal with it feel about medical marijuana. In California this is legal, by a vote of the population in a referendum, but the DoJ is very upset, and is sending threatening letters to clinics and doctors. Should a cancer patient arrested for using marijuana to ease the pain and increase appetite who gets arrested by the feds just deal with it? Is he wrong for violating federal law (while not violating state law?)
That might be closer to the civil rights example.
Can you give some examples of that actually happening? Are we talking about hundreds of such cases…or a handful. Or none?
I find it incredibly hard to believe that someone would be arrested for using MJ medically (i.e. they have a valid prescription)…especially if they are using it in their own house. In my own, um, experiences (I never inhaled) the folks most likely to get harassed by the police are those who partake in open, public places…or flaunt the fact they are using the stuff in the cops faces. About the same as those who feel the need to drink to excess in public, or drive about with a 6 pack on the front seat and a beer in their hands (and can’t understand why the police are harassing them!).
-XT
[QUOTE=ForumBot]
Thanks. I was hoping to avoid this getting into “pick apart what ForumBot believes” and stay within “wow, that’s not right.”
Something is seriously messed up if 1% of the population is in jail. We need to seriously reexamine our laws and punishments.
[/QUOTE]
Maybe not the punishments but the reasons why those people “steered wrong” in the first place?
Threat of punishment always sounds very distant, it’s not a very good motivator. What’s needed is better positive motivation for “doing things right” - and clearer definitions of “what’s right”.