I don’t. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure when I am preventing my own troubles (wearing a seatbelt, eating well, wearing shin guards or helmets, etc).
So far, as much as I can tell, our society is structured to punish transgression of what it considers wrong, and to discourage transgression in the first place. Now you would have us enact bans on child-bearing.
I guess if we can ban one behavior (snorting cocaine) we could ban another (people who have been convicted of such-and-such may not conceive children) by some stretch of existing reasoning. But I still don’t see this as a reason to surgically alter them.
Sure it is, I see that. But in this case, I think, the cure is worse than the disease.
and again, won’t prevent what you think it will. PReventing procreation will not prevent any person from being ‘a parental figure’, be it adoptive, shared housing w/the parents, etc.
So, it would punish people horrifically for a possible future crime while not really preventing that future crime
To sum up[ul][]Won’t change behavior[]Won’t eliminate the possibility of being a parental figureIs cruel and unusual[/ul] Did i miss anything, wring ol’ chum(ette)?
wring, I said above that I assumed it would be obvious that people who would be sterilized on this proposal would also not be allowed to adopt, but it was in a response to someone else (Darwin, I think) so perhaps you missed it. Regarding marrying a person with children, I’m not sure what to do about that case; I’d have to give it more thought than I have time for right now. But, unless it’s the case that all (or almost all) of the people who would be sterilized on my proposal will marry people with children (which I think is false), it will prevent many instances of those people’s parenting children. If, of every 100 people who would be sterilized, 50 go on to marry someone with children, 30 would not have had children anyway if not sterilized, and 20 would have had children if not sterilized, then my proposal prevents 20 instances of parenting children (I think the numbers are more like 30, 5, and 65, but anyway…). To me, that’s enough.
So to summarize my responses, as eris did for “your” side: [ul] 1. won’t change behavioral tendencies; will prevent many instances of those tendencies being carried out on children, which is the point
2. will sufficiently reduce the likelihood of being a parent and is the most effective way of doing so
3. is not cruel and unusual (ethically speaking, not “as defined by current law”) [/ul]
“It will prevent…” again, assuming that you’re correct that some one in this scenario will always be a threat but only to those children whom them supervise.
And I’m finding that impossible to believe. (by the way, you’re also forgetting the other option of some one merely sharing a residence, in/out of a romantic relationship).
Nope, sorry, after however many qualifications you’ve attempted etc, I’m still with the basic :
if they are that serious of a risk, they should not be out of prison.
If they are not that serious of a risk, they shouldn’t be tortured by being foreced to have uneccesary surgery w/o their consent.
This is something that I have been fighting a long time. And I may have come to a conclusion that it may not be a feasible punishment. First, reproduction is a very complicated issue, because I don’t really believe it is a right or a privilege, per se. The reason why I am saying it really isn’t either because reproduction generally requires two people, and two people can disagree. A rapist could agree that he has a right to reproduce because that is in his nature, and while reproducing is part of our nature, there is a time and place to do so, and that reproduction has dramatic consequences. Animals rape all the time, but we are not animals, we are something more. If I were to choose between right and privilege, however, I would say that reproduction is more of a right than a privilege. Who is to say that a male panda has the right to mate with a female panda? Well, humans do. We decide for them, and sometimes we try to make decisions for humans as well, but I digress on that. We typically can reproduce spontaneously, but to whom, that is probably the only thing about privilege. We cannot mate with whomever we want, therefore, if you want to mate with someone, and they give you consent to mate with them, then that is a privilege.
Because of this, I find it hard to know how we can castrate humans humanely. I don’t think it is a good idea to do so involuntarily, unless there are extreme circumstances. But, I believe we should give the person a choice, to sentence reduction but with sterilization, or normal sentencing. I wish to reduce sex crimes, and violent crimes as well, however, if the person is innocent, but found guilty, and he was castrated, and then was found to be innocent, he could sue for many more millions for state-induced mutilation. Instead of a $90k/year reimbursement, we are looking at a $50 million mandatory payout. No court in the US would ever sentence a person to be mutilated, and could fall under the cruel and unusual punishment clause.
Drug offenders that commit crimes (beyond using illegal drugs) like theft, rape, and murder deserve jail, those that do not commit crimes do not.
I don’t know why that’s a difficult concept for some folks.
How ridiculous - if we saved that much per prisoner there’s not a chance in hell it would be spent on education, rehab, or reparations, under the current US society it would be converted into tax cuts for the wealthy.
No, they’re not, at least the procedure to do so is highly unreliable. Among other things, a man’s body can create antibodies against his sperm after a vasectomy so his own immune system forever destroys the machinery to produce sperm even if you could re-connect the plumbing. The longer the amount of time since the surgery the more likely this is to occur.
Your assumption is in error. Tubal ligations and vasectomies should be considered forever permanent.
So, you’re saying it’s OK to punish the innocent in an attempt to get the guilty? Isn’t that the reverse of the principal that it’s better for a guilty man to go free than for an innocent man to lose his freedom?
Egg storage is unreliable. Who is going to pay for this storage? If it’s 30 years down the line then would a woman even be able to carry a child to term (again, this punishment is disproportionately harsher for women, requiring major surgery and having greater impact on a “reversal” after the passage of time).
Because we had a eugenics movement in the early 20th Century that turned abusive and clearly targeted the poor, minorities, and the otherwise disadvantaged in a bigoted manner. A bunch of people were sterilized for no damn good reason other than they were poor, the wrong color, or some doctor thought “their kind” shouldn’t reproduce. Babies were sterilized, often without parental consent or against the wishes of the parents, often for “reasons” that were later found to be mistaken or incorrect.
In other words, we tried that and it turned into a mess.
All this talk of undesirables and bad stock is kinda double-edged. A future society where just plain folk rule might decide intelligence, unequal and therefore unfair beauty distribution, a disposition to High Culture, and anything denounced as elitist, were undesirable traits to be ‘removed’. Pure Democracy.
Even in previous [ puritan — and generally puritans love education, mostly because they love the sound of their own voices ] America many working class people aided in their own suppression by rejecting education as unneeded for such as they, and hindering their children from wasting time reading books.
And of course, Pol Pot tried to achieve a purely meritocratic happy society where intellectuals were redundant and elitists non-existent.
Incidentally, here’s a story that was in the papers this week, about a judge’s offer to reduce time behind bars for inmates who “volunteer for vasectomies”.
I disapprove - saying “if you get a vasectomy you can get out early” is little different than saying “if you refuse to get a vasectomy you’ll be locked up longer”. The “choice” here is not truly a choice and you can’t eliminate a coercive element in the situation.
As for the — elected — judge, he seems mentally ill. Prolly qualifying him for a free vasectomy.
But from the article I loved the Law blogger’s comment: Hell, he probably has some phrenology training and knows a genetically predisposed criminal baby when he sees it.
Thought experiment: If you think the State should have the power to prevent bad parents from having more children, even if they want to, do you think it should also have the power to compel good parents to have more children, even if they *don’t *want to? If not, what do you see as the difference between the situations?