Oh, please. For decades we’ve made a practice of springing or getting violent offenders off on the merest of technicalities. I remember being struck in watching The First 48 (a crime show about the first two days of murder investigations) by the fact that virtually every murder investigated and solved was committed by someone with multiple serious and/or violent crime convictions on their rap sheet and out walking the streets while still in their twenties and thirties.
And while I in now way hold the silly view you attribute to me of equating weed possession or sale and prostitution with murder, the fact remains that the people so convicted have been committing crimes that they deliberately chose to commit. And they don’t ‘make mistakes’, they deliberately choose to flout the law and assume the risk of consequence should they be found out. What was it your parents taught you when you were young (supposedly)? They either taught you or should have that you don’t get to pick and choose which laws to obey. You obey them all, and if some are unjust you work to get them off the books.
And since when has any Democrat flinched in the face of taxpayer expenditure? That element of the district attorney’s program is a cynical and bald-faced attempt to minimize punishment by virtue of the knowledge that most people go through life thinking that crime happens to the other guy and therefore be put off at the prospect of having to pay to keep lawbreakers incarcerated.
The end game for liberals is always to minimize criminal punishment regardless of the seriousness of the crime. Witness the vaunted Norway, where you can kill 77 people and get only twenty years. Upon reading some of the British news sites the last few years it’s apparent they’re heading down the same road, with violent and serious crime drawing a virtual slap on the wrist while the most passionately and strongly enforced laws are those of a PC nature.
As with efforts at gun control being a first step toward banning them, everyone knows that steps like Krasner are proposing are a foot in the door to even more criminal leniency down the line, with Norway or worse as the ultimate goal.
It’s amazing to me that anyone wouldn’t admire the achievement of a much higher rate of successful rehabilitation of criminals (i.e. lower recidivism). That’s a worthy goal, and I expect most conservatives would agree, even if you don’t. And Anders Breivik is never getting out of prison – his sentence can and will be extended for his life (the 20 years is a myth).
Yeah, it would be nice (and about as likely) to have world peace and an end to hunger as well. :rolleyes:
But back to reality and as I said, overcoming the problems caused by diversity and by racism require time and effort. We’re not there yet, and our crime rate is one of the results of that. Thus it’s not racist to state that the non-homogeneity of our population is responsible for the fact that what works in Norway won’t work here. It’s a simple acknowledgement of fact. I have a considerable number of friends who are black, and I’m acquainted with even more, and they are all super people and I hate that they have to go through life burdened with problems related to their race. So I’m not arguing from an anti-black mindset, I’m arguing from a this-is-reality mindset. And until our society has progressed to the point that there’s virtually no difference between the races and we’ve attained that 100% human society you mention, we will continue to have problems that more homogenous countries don’t have to deal with.
Explain this, then:
The demographics of Toronto, Ontario, Canada make Toronto one of the most multicultural and multiracial cities in the world. In 2016, 51.5% of the residents of the city proper belonged to a visible minority group, compared to 49.1% in 2011, and 13.6% in 1981.
A 2017 ranking of 60 cities by The Economist ranked Toronto as the fourth safest major city in the world, and the safest major city in North America.
Also, one might note that the greater Toronto area (GTA) has a population of around 6 million, and Toronto plus the densely populated corridor between Toronto and Hamilton (the GTHA) a population of close to 8 million – all highly diverse, lots of ethnic and racial minorities, and all relatively low-crime.
So how about we just judge you as holding beliefs contradicted by the facts?
Oh, and the thing that started you on this sidetrack of blaming minorities was an article cited above stating that the US has one of the highest recidivism rates in the world at 76.6% and Norway one of the lowest at 20%. It’s not just Norway. Here are stats from Philadelphia (the subject of the OP) compared to the above-cited racially and ethnically diverse area – unfortunately I couldn’t find anything specifically for the GTA or GTHA, but these are stats for Ontario overall, more than half of whose population is in the GTHA:
In Ontario it was 37.4% for those jailed 6 months or longer, and 21.4% for those sentenced to community supervision. Sentences in Ontario generally tend toward leniency and rehabilitation because of all those danged liberals in charge, so there you go.
Do you argue that our justice and corrections systems are perfect, and there is no need for any improvement at all? Do you argue that there’s no possibility to lower our sky-high recidivism rates? If not, then you might consider that some of the proposals the OP refers to might actually make good sense in improving an imperfect system.
It’s not a myth, it’s a fact. And who knows what the bleeding heart justice system of Norway will convince themselves of twenty years down the line. It’s by no way a given that he won’t be considered rehabilitated and set free. I’m no proponent of murderer rehabilitation anyway. If you deprive someone of their life and condemn their family and loved ones to lives of misery, you deserve to die. It’s unjust in the extreme that someone should be allowed to murder people and after serving some set period of time allowed to walk free and live as though it never happened.
This thread is about the justice and corrections system as a whole, not just murderers, which make up a relatively very small part of it (even in the US).
There are lots of cities and countries around the world that are fairly liberal in their politics. Why aren’t all these cities the same as Toronto or all these countries the same as Norway? The answer? Differences.
And my comments aren’t about just murderers either. All violent criminals are what I’m concerned about, and we’ve been springing them right and left for decades already. Naturally I’m not too het up about adopting practices which will undoubtedly end up unleashing them at an even greater rate in the future.
This sounds to me like the Joker’s defense from the end of The Dark Knight. Rather than admit the ugliness inside himself, he put forth the idea that everyone is as ugly as he was on the inside, and he was the only one “honest” enough to admit it, while everyone else was just in denial.
The problem is that both the Joker and you are just plain wrong. Not everyone is filled with ugly opinions that won’t “admit out loud.” That’s just you projecting.
Well, all I can say is that one man’s ugly opinions are another man’s facts.
Crime occurs more often in blighted areas caused by racism. This is indisputable and it occurs in every country where racism has been a practice and minorities have been minimized and excluded from the mainstream. Thus these countries experience societal difficulties related to that history that countries without such a history don’t experience.
To say this isn’t racist. It isn’t dishonest. It isn’t bigoted. Like the universe, it just is.
Ignore that if you want if it makes you feel all unbiased and superior and shit, but the reality is that you just look like someone insisting we all stick our heads in the sand and pretend that reality doesn’t exist. The trouble is, and whether we acknowledge it or not, reality will bite us in the ass. And the fact that what works in Norway won’t work here is one of the ways it bites us in the ass.
Okay, so you believe our system is perfect, and our recidivism rate (sky high compared to other countries) can’t be reduced even a little bit.
I disagree. I think maybe our system isn’t perfect and might be able to be improved, with the ultimate goal of better rehabilitating criminals and lowering the crime rate. I think some of the proposals in the OP make sense and I look forward to seeing the results.
The lenience on DUI. I have no particular axe to grind on this but it just seems to me such a recklessly dangerous thing that I think it should be smacked down.
The dollars and cents justification of a sentence. Given all of the things that need to be taken into consideration in order provide something meaningfully for each case would be more than onerous.
Other than that I hope that he gets a second term so that there is time to see the effects of his reforms before some myopic idiot cries “bloody murder” supplants him, reverses the reforms and makes things worse.
That’s a pretty facile non-answer that seems to be trying to evade the question. Why do you think recidivism rates are almost a quarter in Norway of what they are in the US, and around one-third in Ontario of what they are in the US (less than one-third if one includes community sentences, sentences imposed for the kinds of crimes that in many US jurisdictions would lead to long jail terms instead)? Never mind about the social factor influencing crime rates, which are lower in all these other places as well. We’re talking here about the future behaviors of those actually convicted and sentenced.
Are you denying that justice and sentencing policies actually make a difference, and that the evidence is that the outcomes are the exact opposite of your ideologically-driven policy preferences?
You are 100% right. Areas populated by historically persecuted people tend to have higher crime rates. Mass marginalization of a group breeds poverty and poverty breeds crime and, by definition, criminals.
This does in fact tend to become self-perpetuating and thus rates of criminality tend to rise over time amongst the traditionally mass-marginalized.
So anything that acts to interrupt this cycle of incarceration and focus on re-entry to society without the lifelong stigma of a record - or the lifelong trauma of prison-life - can only help.
“To say this isn’t racist. It isn’t dishonest. It isn’t bigoted. Like the universe, it just is.” <— I couldn’t agree more.
Here is where you lose me. You took the same facts, did the same math and came to a distinctly different answer.
What I’m saying is that if Toronto and Norway had the answer, it would have been adopted by other cities and countries more liberal than the U.S., and yet it hasn’t. And I’m saying that the reason for this is that what works (allegedly, I haven’t drilled down to see if the claims are legit and/or take everything germane into account) in Toronto and Norway is unique to them and for innumerable reasons not duplicatable.
So if it did work, somebody would have already done it. The fact that it hasn’t already been done successfully (cue straw men and moving goalposts) proves it won’t work.