Keep prisons for violent offenders and diddlers…
Don’t have harsh punitive measures for people with drug problems, and for god sake legalize weed already…
Why would it be? If I say that I want to make the population more tanned, I suspect that killing office workers would accomplish that. They’re pasty-white because they work inside, not because pasty-white people are genetically inclined to office work.
Just as a question, but isn’t that inevitable, because you’ve sentenced them to longer terms? Let’s say there’s some crime that’s punishable by a year in prison, and each year a hundred people go to prison for it. So in year 1, there are 100 people in prison, year 2, 100, year 3, 100, and so on.
They then make the penalty harsher…to 5 years in prison, and lets even say that has a deterrent effect, so that only 80 commit the crime each year. Now, in year one, there are 80 people in prison, year 2, 160, and year 3, 240. So over those three years, the prison population has more than doubled, even though the harsher penalty has decreased the number of people committing the crime by 20%.
Well you have to think about the supposed benefits of crime deterrance of prison.
The right wing advocates suppose that prison deters crime, and long prison terms will perfom this task better than short prison terms. If this actually worked, then the deterrant effect would reduce crime and work against the rise in prison populations, or at least moderate the effect.
This has not happened in the slightest, the prison population was around 50k in 1996 and it’s now 90k, and would have been far higher were it not for the inventive ways that are used to release prisoners under differant rules.
These early release schemes have absolutely nothing to do with successful offender rehabilitation, and everything to do with overcrowding, and the inability to build enough prisons, recruit and train enough suitable staff - which are actually the hardest resource to find.
To give you an example of the effect of this massaging of figures,here is something from the prison systems own internal intranet. The projected prison population for 2012 was originally set at 110k (low) to 115k(high) estimates, that is our own Home Office making those predictions. We simply did not have enough build planned to accommadate this population, so we started one of the early release schemes, and by the end of this year we are expected to have no more than 90k in prison with a maximum of 96k projected for the future.
Clearly, someone at very senior levels has already decided that building more and more prisons does not work, and the early release schemes hint that long prison terms are not effective, nor a deterrant.
Study after study shows that if you wish to deter crime in any specific offence, the best deterrant is to increase the liklehood of detection, just about every criminal believes they are so clever that they will not be caught, so the question of prison and the terms involved are irrelevant to them.
We now have so many street cameras montiring our town centres that certain types of violent crime if being reduced, only to be moved elswhere. The effect of DNA testing and the fact that crimes can be detected with certainty decades after the event has an effect on certain types of crime. The original perpetrators of these offences all those years ago would not have carried out these attacks had they had any inkling of how effective advances in science would become.
It may come as a surprise, but advances in DNA detection have also dramatically increased the chances of detection of burglaries, and repeat offenders are switching their crimes of choice as a result, the increased liklehood of being caught works well and it is the one area where the frequent offender program combines effectively to reduce this offence. In other words, deterrance works best when being caught is more certain, and then you add the increased severity of punishment, but the detection must come first.
You will have observed that so far, in all of this particular post, that this has been all about dealing with offenders, and not with prevention. I think most folk would have to agree that prevention is way better than rehabilitation. This is where employment opportunites, social divides, poor education and rubbish parenting - all the social issues matter.
If you truly wish to reduce crime than you have to understand that education for all people requires differant inputs, some will learn faster, others more comprehensively, others are encumbered with dreadful backgrounds, and running our schools and training in the ‘mass production’ education systems that we have for the mass of our population cannot cater for this diversity.
I know that many will criticise this for being a political partisan point of view, but truly, it is how we teach, develop and train our populations that will have the greatest effect on crime, and that really does mean education, education , education. It means that we treat differant children differantly according to their needs, it does mean some children will require far more resources than others. Unfortunately the right wing factions seem to feel that this is unfair and that every child should have the same resources expended upon them.
This is incredibly naiive, no matter what anyone thinks, all children are differant, some will take in information more readily, others need a differant approach, and immediately it becomes apparent that there will be those who cost less to educate and train than others.We are not born into some unspoiled state, with inherant goodness, we have to leanr to become a useful parrt of society. It is not true, we are not all born equal - Rousseau was an anti social dickhead who abandoned his 5 or so children to an orphanage and left one wife destitute, quite some time before making that famous statement, yet we somehow trumpet this soundbite as meaningful, when our histroy and daily observances demonstrate the lie to this meaningless platitude.
You want to reduce crime? then treat each person according to their needs and direct resources accordingly - does not play well with the self reliant attitutude of the wealthy and those insulated from true hardship, but it is the only logical thing to do.
A ridiculous argument. We are talking about sterilization, not killing. And even if we were, that’s hardly an improvement.
Let’s close all the mental institutions. Just think of all the money we can save! With those savings we should just about be able to make the down-payment on all the new prisons that Joe Knuckle-Dragger will demand to stockpile all the mentally-ill “trash” running loose on the streets.
We can’t sustain an economy on the housing bubble anymore so hey, why not switch to building prisons en masse? Plus you’d need to staff them with doctors, psychologists, guards, cooks, janitors, etc. – win-win!
Yes, but in the fictional scenario I set up, the longer sentence did at the same time both deter crime (the crime rate dropped by 20%), and caused the prison population to more than double in 3 years.
I think what he’s trying to say is that you don’t have to believe that poor people are genetically inferior to believe that making sure that people don’t grow up in poverty will reduce crime.
I think an injection of facts is necassary here,
Throughout the last century, the prison population has grown in average by around 2.5% per year, but since the ‘prison works’ policies of the previous conservative government, this has accelerated to 3.8%. It will be extremely difficult for any subsequent government to change this, as the reasons for this rise are largely the result of changes in statute law, and this cannot be readily changed - it would not play well politically and the legislative process is a long one.
There was a significant drop and levelling out in our prison population between 1990-95, and yet this is exactly the period that our government was changing the laws to ensure that prison terms would be longer, and that more would be locked up. This might be traced back to a weak government, supported by shrill media, trying to use crime and percieved toughness as part of a populist campaign, which ultimately failed to convince voters, and has since led on to the current prison population crisis.
Despite the increasing length of prison terms, one of the significant reasons for this rise is that offenders are being detained for more serious offences, seems to me that all the increase in prison terms has done is, far from deterrance, it has prompted criminals to take greater risks, with more violence in order to try reduce their chances of being caught, or at least to make the prospect of a significant prison term worth the cost.
You will also note that up to 2002, prison terms awarded by courts (rather than on licence recalls and parole breaches) had been steadily increasing, and since then, probably because of the alarming rise in numbers, the average sentence served in prison has reduced, however the IPP licence terms have been used much more widely.
You will note that I remarked earlier that IPP sentencing is something that causes prisoners great concern, they fear it as they can be recalled to prison anytime during their release licence which lasts for 10 year after release from prison - they can be recalled to prison for minor breaches, such as not turning up on time for parole appointments, or minor driving offences.
Small changes to large numbers can have a major effect, when I mention increased prison terms, the averages amount to around 14%. This may be dissappointing to those who fear crime, I imagine that most folk think that increasing prison terms means doubling or tripling the time spent in prison, all I can point out is that this 14% increase in prison term has been responsible for this rise in populations from aroun 50k to 90k, so imagine the sheer scale of what we would have to do to house a population where we did double the prison term.
I then invite you to consider the cost of this, both financial and social. We should find ourselves with a US sized problem, and doing the numbers it would mean our population would rise to around 400k or more, with a consequent quadrupling in cost.This is a significant underestimate, because those prison places have to be constructed first, and the last information I had stated that the recently curtailed program to build around 20k places would cost around £3.9 billions. This has changed somewhat as part of this program was cancelled - the ‘Titan’ prison project is no more. However I would hate to imagine the cost of providing another 300k places, let alone the day to day ruunning costs.
Currently it costs £37500 to keep one prisoner incarcerated for one year, around £3-4 billions in total, so to have the US scale of prisoners it would cost the UK up to £12 billions, and right now we are in a situation where prisons are expected to cut £300 millions from their operating costs.
It may have escaped some folk, but, these cuts will lead to prison riots, and this will ultimately cost rather more than the £300 million savings, it will reduce the number of behaviour modification programs - so we will end up with more crime, and this will in turn feed into a higher prison population. It will take maybe 3-4 years for this rise to begin but it will happen.
As usual, short termist politicians, and ignorant public that does not care to educate itself about the way the country actually operates will prove costly.
So, in conclusion, longer prison terms do not deter crime, they just encourage criminals take more extreme measures to avoid detection, cuts to prison budgets will lead to less training and education, and a greater probablility of disorder, and in turn an increase in the prison population.
Dealing with offenders is the wrong tactic, and it always has been, and will always be so. Crime can only be adressed before the person takes up crime in the first place, it is so obvious it should not need the reminding.
The ugly truth is that prisons are only there to deal with the failings of our society, the failure to educate and train, the failure to provide opportunities, the false raising of expectations and the failure to meet them, failures in mental health provision. All prisons can do is hope to try keep some sort of lid on society, they will never ever be in a position to make significant inroads to a rubbish social system.
The mantra of ‘build more prison’ is to try construct social dustbins in which to discard people for decades, instead of the hard task of improving society - which is not glamorous, does not make headlines, and holds few oportunities for the self publicising politician.
I will also add a link, missed the edit window,
This demonstrates the cost of various options of dealing with offenders, from simple incarceration, through to incarceration with various treatment programs, to non-custodial options.
It can readily be seen that in terms of cost/benefit, that prisons comes low on the scale. This is one more reason why ‘build more prisons’ is just a stupid option.
http://www.matrixknowledge.com/wp-content/uploads/matrix-prison-report-dec-08-web.pdf
We were talking about whether something is genetic or not. A correlation of crime to poverty is true. Pointing out that correlation does not imply that poverty is genetic.
But insisting that the poor be sterilized does. That’s what the drive to sterilize the poor in in America has always been about; the conviction that the poor are genetically inferior. It’s classic American eugenics.
** Captain Amazing**
Firstly , I need to mention just how weird it is to be typing your board name as I am rarely Amazed by anything at all 
Your scenario fails on a couple of counts, first, you set a scene where there are a fixed number of offenders and there is no resupply. This does not happen, it is only the minority of offenders and offences that are successfully detected and there are always more willing to join them.
Next, as you can see from my previous two posts, the prospect of a prison term is no deterrant to the offender who does not think they will be caught, and given the detection rate it is not an unreasonable assumption, I believe that for many offences it is less than 5%.
Next, the increased prison terms mean only that the offender will be released later rather than sooner, it does not mean that they will stop offending, in effect you are only delaying things, the offence-incarcreation-release loop is merely longer, the number of offenders has not changed, all you have done is disable the offending capacity for a greater period.
Next, longer prison terms have prompted more serious crime, we see lesser offenders more prepared to involve themselves in more violent or more lucrative offences and they come back again for longer prison terms.
Your scenario might work on the extreme ends, as in, lock them up for many decades, but that gets back to the argument about the current US prison population, which is pretty much a model of what you have proposed, and as I have explained, this would increase our prison population by a factor of 4 or 5, plus the capital costs of constructing the capacity to house such numbers.
Not only would this not be politically acceptable, it is financially unacceptable and what a waste, spending money on locking up people instead of using the same money to invest in schools, reducing class sizes, improving mental health services - there are much better ways to spend this sort of money.
The idea that we can eliminate a class of people - the poor- is right wign social Darwinist rubbish if I ever heard it. The practical ways of operating it would be extremely dangerous for our society, and what would we do if poor people had the temerity to have children? What sort of sanctions do we impose?
Do we only ensure sterilisation of existing criminals, or do we try to predict which people may become criminals and sterilise them as a precaution?Who sets the criteria, what right of appeal is there?
There is no solution that works for all people or all offenders, there is no simple fix, it is complex, it is not exciting, it is hard work but will most likely involve people in their early years, it will require state intervention, from teaching -eople just how to behave, to educating people to becoming better parents, and dammit, teaching good manners and all the other social conventions that make living in our soociety worthwhile such as consideration for others.
Now get off my lawn!
A) Underlining things doth not a cite make.
B) Past intentions need not be present intentions.
C) As stated on the previous page, the intentions behind an idea have nothing to do with its merit. If it is a wise thing to do, regardless of the intentions of the person who proposed it, it is still a wise thing to do. If it is a stupid thing to do, it is a stupid thing to do regardless of the intentions of the person who proposed it. Debating intentions is irrelevant to any discussion of the merit of an idea and is nothing more than a fallacy.
Let me just note that item A is Proof by Assertion and B is Ad Hominem, for those keeping score at home.
No True Scotsman, not Ad Hominem. :smack:
Not to say that homage isn’t being paid to old AH.