Sorry, but I can’t provide an honest answer to a faulty premise.
Well, he’s 80 years old. I can’t believe he wanted another term as Sheriff.
We have a lower crime rate these days than 30 years ago because we have so many of our criminals locked up – largest incarcerated population in the world, by percentage. The purpose of incarceration is neither deterrence nor rehabilitation, the purpose of incarceration is incarceration – it takes people with criminal propensities out of circulation for a while, that’s all. That said, I see no reason to make the experience any more uncomfortable than strictly necessary – suffering or not suffering, the incarcerated remain out of circulation, so why make them suffer?
And, yet, the voters of Maricopa County just re-elected him. For a sixth straight term. At the age of 80.
And that is why.
:mad:
Cite ?
Dude, we were this close to a Big T v. Starving Artist Showdown, and you head it off!? You are worse than Hitler and Joe Arpaio combined. :mad:
NM
Yes, it’s a shame people aren’t thoroughly traumatized by regular jail experiences. Probably all those lobster dinners and games of golf in other jails that causes recidivism.
[Moderating]
BigT, saying “Fuck you” to other posters is a violation of the Pit’s language rules. Please avoid doing this in the future.
No warning issued.
[/Moderating]
and Norway has a 20% recidivism rate compared to the US’s 67%. While Norway has one of the most comfortable prison systems in the world.
I’d like a cite for that. I wouldn’t have any problem with such a concept, if coherently applied. My most authoritarian position is that there should be tests for psychopathy and paedophilia on criminals and anyone failing such a test should be institutionalised for life. However, declining crime rates in the US accompanied declining crime rates in other countries such as Canada, so a causal mechanism cannot be extrapolated. Nor would it explain the differences in punishment for crack vs. powdered cocaine usage.
Anyway, forcing prisoners to wear pink underwear is a tactic of deindividuation and emasculation which ossifies outgroup hostilities between prisoners and guards. If you want to learn more, check out Zimbardo’s “Lucifer Effect”.
In all fairness, if she was intelligent, her fear of driving under the influence would involve a realization that she could injure, or worse, innocent people and their property. If she fears it due to the possibility of getting caught and going to jail, she’s really not all that bright.
Cool! Then since we have a Democratic president and a Democratic Senate we ought to be able to spend a few hundred billion tax dollars [del]bribing[/del] working out a deal to send our criminals to Norway for incarceration. Then they’ll come back all shiny and new and be ideal citizens.
Right?
Or is there is a flaw somewhere that makes that idea unworkable?
You know, something like the difference in our society and that of Norway which would turn our shiny new citizens right back into assholes? Norway has nowhere near the societal disfunction and conflict and impetus to commit crimes and keep committing crimes that exists in this country. If you think throwing gangbangers and drug dealers and wifebeaters and girlfriend/child murderers into hotels for a few years is the solution to criminal recidivism in America, why, you must be a Democrat!
But I say that in the teasingest way possible! 
Plus I quibble with the entire concept of rehabilitation when it comes to murder. Norway is proud of the fact that its murderers serve an average of 14 years, and that it stresses rehabilitation over “retribution.” Well, what Norway calls retribution I call “justice.” Where’s the fairness and justness in allowing someone who’s deprived other human beings of a lifetime of marriage and child raising and holiday celebrations and just plain breathing (not to mention the horrific pain and suffering the victim’s family and loved ones will experience for the rest of their lives) to continue not only drawing breath but going free after 14 years (or 21 max if they’ve killed, like, hundreds of people - although in fairness they can be kept for 5 more years if they’re…wait for it…dangerous!
So, you can off a few dozen or a few hundred people when you’re in you’re in your late teens/early twenties and you can be out in time to have a career and be earning a comfortable pension by your mid-sixties! How enlightened is that? In the meantime all the people you’ve killed are still not breathing, not enjoying their spouses and children and holidays and lovemaking, and their families are still suffering. But thanks to your wonderfully enlightened government - so superior to that of those neanderthal retributioners - you have now earned your free pass by virtue of your decade-and-a-half in a hotel room and you can now go happily about your life as though it never happened. Too bad the families whose lives you ruined won’t be enjoying the same blissful existence, but what do they matter as compared with salvaging your ability to continue to live your life…or as your would-be saviors would put it, “contribute to society.” Funny, I’ve yet to see a society so bereft of contributors that it must rehabilitate its murderers in order to ensure its survival.
If Arpaio defenders are so enamored with unnecessarily harsh and cruel punishments, why not just support full on torture? Caught stealing, we saw your arms off. Rape = castration. We can burn people at stakes and execute people for shoplifting too!
The point is that Arpaio institutes unnecessary and harsh punishments for crimes that do not warrant it. His defenders only care about recidivism rates, but lack the moral and intellectual capability to understand that it is a violation of human rights to be forced into needlessly cruel and unusual punishments. Arpaio is a petty tyrant appealing to the lowest form of mob mentality. If he were born in Africa, he would probably be a warlord terrorizing the population
Then let me reply to you in all fairness as well. Intelligent people do foolish things all the time. Do the names Patreaus and Broadwell ring a bell? Or Lisa Nowak, who Broadwell kind of reminds me of? Those people are excruciatingly smart, every one. And yet look at the terribly foolish things they’ve done.
It’s fallacious to conflate foolish or impetuous behavior with intelligence. In this case the woman in question has an I.Q. of 151 and moved to Phoenix to take a position overseeing a number of clinics which specialize in a difficult field of medicine. I don’t want to get more specific than that in order to protect her privacy, but you can trust me when I say that she’s intelligent.
Having said that, away from her job, she is quite the colorful character and a lot of fun. Knowledgeable on and interested in a wide range of subjects, with a playful and ornery sense of humor and a love life that Anais Nin would envy, she’s certainly dodged more than her share of bullets when it comes to getting stopped by the police. But it caught up with her this time, and a month in the land of hot tents and pink underwear has taught her a lesson big time. She absolutely will not get behind the wheel if she’s had so much as a drop of alcohol, and that’s still the case a year or more after the fact.
Then why, SA, does Norway have such a low recidivism rate? I mean, that’s the main thing, making sure criminals don’t do crimes again, right? Since we can’t exactly un-do the ones they’ve already done…
I mean, surely you’re not advocating that, as a system, we should accept the burden of increased future crime so as to more brutally punish past crimes, right?
Simply put, those of us who approve of Arpaio’s tactics don’t agree that they needlessly cruel and unusual. They are certainly unpleasant and humiliating but that’s the idea. Arpaio says as much himself. Jails are supposed to be unpleasant places that people should want to avoid being sent to or coming back to.
As has been mentioned before, we have soldiers in the Middle East living in worse temperatures and carrying full gear in head to toe dress at the same time. His jailers experience the same temperatures and dust storms and so forth that his inmates do. And I’m sorry, but we find the idea that having to eat baloney sandwiches, wear pink underwear, not have porn or be able to lift weights to be synonymous with torture to be laughable.
There’s a very simple solution for anyone who doesn’t want to wind up in Arpaio’s jail. I’m sure you know what it is…all together now: DON’T BREAK THE LAW!!!
How hard is that? Millions of us manage that very thing every day!
As for sawing people’s arms off and so forth: ridiculous. You could make the same argument about imprisonment itself. Why not just toss them in cells and throw away the key? I’m sure there’s a name for this type of fallacy but I can’t be arsed at the moment to look it up. Suffice it to say that just because a person favors a certain type of punishment it’s nonsense to suggest he automatically favors applying it to its utmost extreme in every case.
Yup.
And fer chrissakes, STOP BEING BROWN!!!
In my opinion it’s primarily because we don’t have the same societal difficulties. If Norway had the same proportion of disaffected and economically disadvantaged minority groups, drug and gang activity that we have, plus the same amount of personal freedom that we have (it’s my impression that people in European countries are considerably more restricted by their governments as to how they’re allowed to behave than we are here in the U.S.), then their recidivism rate would likely be more like ours. In my opinion our recidivism rate is due more to the fact that most criminals go right back into the same environment and the same activities they were in before they went to prison, and I believe Arpaio’s approach is far more likely to stay with former inmates and make them want to go straight more than would treating them as they would be treated in Norway.
Sorry, but the one doesn’t follow the other. The fact we can’t undo the one doesn’t mean we can keep more from happening in the future. The purpose of prison is and always has been punishment. Secondarily it has also been to protect society by segregating the miscreant for a while, and thirdidarily there has been the vague hope of rehabilitation.
But there is no way that any prison can “make sure” a criminal doesn’t commit another crime. Especially not when the criminal is going to go right back to the same neighborhood and the same associates and the same activities and the same culture he was in when he went to jail in the first place.
No, I’m advocating that we adopt unpleasant yet humane policies similar to Arpaio’s which have the result of making inmates actively desirous of staying out of jail because it’s so unpleasant and humiliating rather than merely something to be endured as a cost of doing business in the event one gets caught.
You are missing the point, S.A. You are stating that she has ceased drinking because of fear of punishment rather than fear of actually doing harm to someone.
If she fears the former, rather than the latter, well she might be ‘smart’ but she sure as heck is self-centered.
Now, being arrested and jailed can be a wake-up called to persons who DUI frequently, but her attitude should be “If I keep this up, someone is going to get hurt” and not “If I keep this up, I’ll have to spend 3 months in Arpio’s Tets!”.