In addition to what Lissa just said, not all child molesters are male; what would you cut off?
You know, Susanann, it is possible to criticize some aspect of U.S. law, government, or society without asserting that the United States is the most evil society in the entire history of the human race.
You could make a perfectly good critique of the U.S. criminal justice system; you could compare us to other industrialized democracies–of course we don’t want to be in the same league as totalitarian dictatorships, or even in the same league as quasi-democratic states like post-Soviet Russia–and we come off pretty poorly. But instead of arguing sensibly, you indulge in breathless hyperbole; then, instead of backing down gracefully when you’re called on it, you start flailing around wildly.
OK, the topic is, “Which is worse, the United States or Soviet Russia?” You opened with the U.S. prison system, I saw you (and raised you) with the Gulag Archipelago. You counter with the Indian wars; I raise you the Sovietization of Outer Mongolia, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the conquest of the Baltic states, the Russo-Finnish War, the annexation of eastern Poland, the Katyn Massacre, the seizure of Bessarabia, the NKVD “blocking detachments”, the behavior of the Soviet troops who overran eastern Germany, the satellitization of Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, the establishment of North Korea and support for the North Korean invasion of the South, the suppression of the Hungarian Uprising, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the invasion of Afghanistan…and that’s not even getting into all the pre-Soviet Russian imperialist aggression which resulted in the Russian Empire (plus assorted Tsarist internal oppressiveness, anti-Jewish pogroms, and support for the most reactionary elements of Europe in 1848); or the post-Soviet levelling of Chechnya.
I mean really. This is just plain silly.
It’s odd the extent to which convicted felons have been dehumanized by many of the participants in this discussion.
Lissa said “Violent felons may be evil, horrible people, but they’re still people.” I’d even go a step further and just leave it at “Felons are people like any other, except that they have been convicted of a felony.” I am horrified by suggestions of torture and exile.
False.
Why?
You really believe that serial child molestors are the same as the parents that raise the child??
Are kidnappers the same as the housewife who has raised three kids and is now working to put them through college?
Is the guy who is willing to cut your throat to get the $30 in your wallet the same as the doctor who is going to bust his ass trying to save your life?
Violent felons are not merely people who have been “convicted” of a crime. It’s not like they are in jail because they won a raffle. They are people who have shown a blatant disregard for human life. At the very least, they are different than other people merely by the threat they pose to society.
::disclaimer follows::
The previous post is directed at VIOLENT felons. I would not included non-violent offenders who broke laws prohibitting consensual behavior. I would have just a slightly different take for non-violent white-collar thugs who are just as low as violent thugs. (but just in a slightly different way)
This isn’t about what I believe; it’s about you expanding on your monosyllabic post, which you have now done; thank you.
Somewhere in this thread, there was a question asked about alternatives to incarceration, before we learned so much about what’s evil in America.
Someone raised an SF story by Robert Heinlein, and I’d like to do a similar thing, bringing up “A Clockwork Orange” by Anthony Burgess. It is exactly about this subject, talking about “curing” criminals. It’s a brilliant book, and was a brilliant Stanley Kubrick movie. Bottom line - there is no cure, you have to learn to live with it. Jail-time is just a way of lowering the opportunity for crime, not of stopping individual criminals from doing their thing. The longer they’re inside, the fewer crimes they will commit. Once they’re out, it’s back to square one in the vast majority of cases.
Just another observation - America has a larger rate of incarceration because they define “crimes” differently. Britain, as a specific contrast, has much lower jail rates, but they get there by moving the goal posts, progressively reducing the number of criminals by reducing the number of things that are called crimes. A piece in the WSJ last week said that London today is one of the most dangerous cities in the world at night, on a par with Johannesburg.