Sometimes, people need to be locked up. Period. Revolving door jails don't cut it.

The BBQ Pit
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This pitting is for the court system of Bucks County, PA who fucked up by continually releasing a sociopath into the community, despite two decades of criminal behavior. Now a Police Officer is dead, another is wounded along with an emergency room worker.

Assault and DUI seemed to be his basic repertoire, with a smattering of other violations thrown in for variety. Yet time after time, he’s back on the street to reoffend. This is horseshit, and I’m tired of the tough-talking only after a diligent public servant is slain. Robert Flor had already forfeited his right to freedom by nature of previous conduct, but the system failed to continue his incarceration.

After yet another DUI arrest, he grabbed an officer’s sidearm, and opened fire.

Rehabilitation, my ass. It isn’t a popular message, but some perps need to have their worthless hides in jail until they die of old age.

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Fixed first link

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Anybody know what the law is in Pennsylvania regarding habitual offenders?

It’s syuff like this that makes me reconsider my opposition to three-strikes laws.

What the hell is up with sentences of “48 hours to one year”?

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“Revolving door jails?”

Not because I disagree (except maybe with the “it isn’t a popular message part”), but just because of the coincidence, a story about this topic has been the New York Times’ top story all day. If you’re interested, I think you can read it without registering. It always confuses me when I see a story about a guy with a long record like this.

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From what I’m able to ascertain, PA laws refer to repeat or habitual offendors only within the contexts of motor vehicle, sexual, or controlled substance crimes. Hopefully someone with a better knowledge of Commonwealth statutes will enter the thread to comment.

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No, no, no-- you’ve got it all wrong:

(Either that, or “Joe” is a lousy judge of character.)

I mean, he may have been a drunk-driving, hair-pulling, woman-punching, guy-stabbing, grandmother-threatening, cop-clubbing crackhead, but he was good people.

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After reading the link, what really gets me is why he didn’t bite a bullet a number of years back. The AUG. 12, 1994 paragraph would (should) have been justification for lethal force by the arresting officers. If someone’d given him a gutshot (hopefully non-lethal,) he might have straightened out.

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The judiciary can only impose sentences that have been determined by the lawmakers, and if the evidence and conviction for more serious offences is not there, the prosecutors must go with what they have.

I work with revolving door prisoners all the time, and its quite often that I think that individuals are never ever going to make any positive contribution, and will likely make many more very negative ones.

I often think that it would be easier on society to simply lock them up until they are not longer criminally effective, but then, that is where the problems start.

Someone has to draw up criteria, and then review the cases, limits have to be drawn.
It’s easy for me to point out certain ones and say that a particular criminal deserves to be incarcerated to ever, but those are the obvious ones, and that comes from personal judgement rather than a systematic one.

There are sentencing boundaries for certain offences, sometimes I wonder if we should remove the upper limit by having some sort if index multiplier, whereby criminal collects multiplier points for every crime, and this is applied to any future convictions.
It would mean a criminal might have a multiplier index of two, and that his current car stealing offence would normally attract a term of perhaps two years, run the multiplier which accumulated across other crimes, and now it becomes four years.

The reason for the multiplier working across all crimes is that many criminals will switch their chosen crime once they know that they will hit the higher awards available for that particular offence. Ordinary folk would just give up on committiing crime, but the repeat offender simply shops around for another crime to commit that involves a a low risk of being caught and short jail term.

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While I agree that deadly force would have been justified (based on that summary), I don’t think it’s fair to criticize the officers involved for not using it.

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This really cuts to the heart of what the penal system is supposed to do versus what it does. The goal it is supposed to accomplish is the social, vocational, and emotional rehabilitation of offenders such that when they re-enter society they are no longer a danger and burden upon the public. How this can be accomplished–especially in the face of many who are either so terminally despairing or mentally disturbed that voluntary participation in any rehabilitation is out of the question–is the big question with no good answer and very little in the way of funding or popular support.

What the penal system actually does is warehouse felons for the specified sentence, attempt to minimize the danger to penal officers and (to a limited extent) to other prisoners, and make the most transparent and underfunded efforts to provide some kind of education and mitigation.

Some people make a dumb mistake–often based upon a personal history that didn’t teach them otherwise–and can, with a modest amount of assistance, preservere to become productive citizens. Some are chronic offenders who don’t know any other kind of life and don’t care to learn. And some are just fucked up people who wouldn’t behave in a civil fashion even if they knew they were being observed everywhere. Some felons–and particularly those whose crimes are violent or abusive in nature–are just clincally compulsive about their behavior, and should be removed from society without limit. But belling that particular cat is a nasty problem in both ethics and law.

Stranger

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Good post, Stranger. I’m all for rehabilitation of criminals into productive members of society, but there are at least two major problems:

a)Some people (I’m hoping a minority) can’t be rehabilitated, however heroic the effort, and
b)our justice system is not even close to being equipped to truly rehabilitate, educate, and resocialize criminals. And instead of confronting this and not releasing dangerous people while hunting for a solution, which is a hard, HARD thing to find (as Stranger said), dangerous repeat offenders simply get the revolving door treatment. That’s not a good system. If we don’t have an effective rehabilitation program, much less the funding or research for one, acting as if we DO have one is pretty damn irresponsible. Of course, part of the reason that this can happen, IMO, is the desperately overcrowded condition of American prisons, but that’s a whole 'nother Pit thread and debate…

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The biggest barrier in prison to effectively rehabilitating criminals is, other criminals.

Peer pressure is extremely powerful, and even the strong of character(which very few criminals are) will be led into a certain mindset.

Locking up bad persons alongside worse ones in a large warehouse presents an almost insurmountable barrier to rehabilitation, but its cheaper than addressing each one, having far more jails with far fewer offenders.

The public are not in the slightest interested in rehabilitation, except when it comes to the time fo release, and no politician is likely to win votes by spending lots of money on criminals.

It’s a matters of any closed society, such as the armed forces, residential schools, and such that it produces a type of behaviour which amplifies minor issues in ther subjects own head, paranoia is quite common, but amongst prisoners who are often of limited mental capacity and with every reason to believe the system is against them, its far greater, and that’s when the peer pressure is at its most effective.

There was an early Victorian viewpoint that held that criminals made up a class of their own, and if you could incarcerate and isolate them, crime would dissappear.
So we in the UK hanged them for what we’d call fairly minor crimes, and transported them for even lesser ones - it didn’t work.

There is the easy view that we should simply build more and more jails and just lcok them up for as long as possible, or even longer, but what we would actually do, especially is you add in zero tolerance, is create a gulag type of system, where entire demographics would be locked away.(obviously the word gulag has some nasty connotations, but here I mean incarceration of significant numbers on an industrial scale)

By the time a criminal has reached the part of the system where they meet people such as myself, its already a long was too late, they have been in offending mode for most of their lives, from 12 years upwards usual.

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Actually, that’s an extremely popular message. Politicians love to spout off on being “touch on crime,” and the voters tend to eat it up.

And look at where it’s gotten us.

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casdave, I wonder how many people making decisions about prisons have spent even 10 minutes in one.

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“The first thing we do, we jail all the legislators.”

Stranger

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Interestingly enough, last election my husband was assigned as the legislative liason for some of the newly elected senators in the state. He gave them general briefings on programs, costs, policies and procedures. As he was breaking down the budgets one of the Senators exclaimed loudly, “What, we give prisoners medical care?”

If that gives you an indication of what he went through then you understand the nature of the men and women we have entrusted as our leaders.

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I believe you meant tough on crime. I’ll vote for strong sentencing guidelines which remove and isolate those who aren’t capable or willing to participate in rehabilitative programs. I’m also pro-capital punishment, with a limit on appeals. Those incarcerated should earn their keep via public works projects, such that Joe Taxpayer gets a return on every dollar he’s spent for corrections.

Where it’s gotten us is fodder for debate and argument at length. Sound bites about being tough and actually following through so incidents like that in the OP don’t happen are beasts of differing color.

Flor is a career criminal. It’s a shame he didn’t do a better job of resisting arrest, thereby sparing me the cost of his trial and housing, along with hearing from everyone who wants to tell that he was a good guy, or troubled. Fuck them, and him. The business end of a Glock is what he deserves, IMO.

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Yup. Three Strikes laws, Meagans Law, GPS-based sex offender tracking, “life really mines life” sentencing, hundreds of executions, “supermax” prisons, reduced funding for inmate education and entertainment, etc.

All “sound bites.” :rolleyes:

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Here’s a link (registration undoubtedly required) to the New York Times story questioning the issuance of “life without parole” sentences.

What I find ironic is that for some time death penalty opponents have been busily promoting the alternative of “life without parole” sentences, as a means of reassuring the public that horrific offenders will never be able to threaten society again. Now the same crowd is trumpeting the inhumanity of locking such offenders up for life.
Hypocrisy, anyone?

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No, because if you (gasp) actually read the article you’ll learn that many of life sentences that are objected to aren’t ones that would have warranted the death penalty.