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Crime and punishment etc.
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
This is a follow on to the posts on the Jamie Bulger topic. They were getting pretty off topic, so I thought I'd start a new topic here.
Basically the two sides of the argument run as follows:
Jake thinks that people should be protected from criminals no matter what, that the solution is better law enforcement. Criminals are to blame for their actions because they know the law and choose to ignore it, and therefore deserve to be punished.
I believe that no people are inherently bad at birth, though some may obviously be insane. Insanity is really a seperate problem so I will ignore it for now. I believe that people end up committing crime through the effects of their environment, which is created by our society. Therefore, if we improve society, crime will correspondingly decrease. Since we are all part of society, and by the way we interact with it affect it, we are all responsible for the challenge of reforming our society, and all (indirectly) responsible for crime that results from it.
I also think that because traditional prisons and methods of punishment in general reinforce criminal behaviour, these are not the answer. Instead we must focus on the problems of poverty, education, etc.. Obviously a police force and protection of the public are necessary - in a fucked up society, real remedies take time and the existing criminals etc would obviously not stop offending while society sorts itself out <IMG alt="image" SRC="http://www.thesite.org/ubb/smile.gif">. However, to not address the problems underneath will not reduce crime. Happy balanced people, who do not have difficult but have full lives, where they enjoy society and respect others have no need or wish to commit crime. Problem is that this must be as a result of a process that starts from birth. Correcting people who have damaged morality or habits, who can't see any other way to live their lives, is very hard. Hence we should simultaneously try to help those who offend, and more importantly prevent children from ever needing or wanting to.
Any comments people?
Life is but a story with no end yet written. As the author of your story, you are the ruler of your world, if not of the process of finding the end
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Basically the two sides of the argument run as follows:
Jake thinks that people should be protected from criminals no matter what, that the solution is better law enforcement. Criminals are to blame for their actions because they know the law and choose to ignore it, and therefore deserve to be punished.
I believe that no people are inherently bad at birth, though some may obviously be insane. Insanity is really a seperate problem so I will ignore it for now. I believe that people end up committing crime through the effects of their environment, which is created by our society. Therefore, if we improve society, crime will correspondingly decrease. Since we are all part of society, and by the way we interact with it affect it, we are all responsible for the challenge of reforming our society, and all (indirectly) responsible for crime that results from it.
I also think that because traditional prisons and methods of punishment in general reinforce criminal behaviour, these are not the answer. Instead we must focus on the problems of poverty, education, etc.. Obviously a police force and protection of the public are necessary - in a fucked up society, real remedies take time and the existing criminals etc would obviously not stop offending while society sorts itself out <IMG alt="image" SRC="http://www.thesite.org/ubb/smile.gif">. However, to not address the problems underneath will not reduce crime. Happy balanced people, who do not have difficult but have full lives, where they enjoy society and respect others have no need or wish to commit crime. Problem is that this must be as a result of a process that starts from birth. Correcting people who have damaged morality or habits, who can't see any other way to live their lives, is very hard. Hence we should simultaneously try to help those who offend, and more importantly prevent children from ever needing or wanting to.
Any comments people?
Life is but a story with no end yet written. As the author of your story, you are the ruler of your world, if not of the process of finding the end
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Comments
Anyway, if you have read that then you know my views on criminals who refuse to respect society or justice. They deserve to get everything they do to someone else plus some more. If they rape then they are castrated, or somehow given a permanent reminder of their crime, e.g. having a tattoo with the word RAPIST on their forehead. I have extrememly left wing views on this subjject as I think criminals should be treated like criminals.
It wouldn't make me feel any better to have people around me with something like thief or rapist tattoed on their forehead. People often do things they regret later on, and if they change their mind, why make me want to feel insecure around them or make their lives so much worse than it already is?
I would rather want them supported to get them back onto the right track.
-Faf
Brennt barn forðast eldinn
They shouldnt be given another chance, once they have fucked up, they have fucked up. The whole idea of the RAPIST tattoo thing is to remind them of their crime, and when they walk down the street they know they are in for it if they dont wear a big hat. If they have the money that are allowed to remove it after say 2 years, but most people dont have the money!
Join the Army and travel the world, meet new and exciting people and kill them.
(Don't you actually mean "right wing views"?)
I agree that people make mistakes and that this might be taken into account but perpetual offenders (say, more than 3 offences?) should be taken out of society with extreme prejudice <IMG alt="image" SRC="http://www.thesite.org/ubb/smile.gif"> !!! Why make so much bother about criminals' human rights when they have no respect for our own? The effects of a simple burglary can lead to fear, anxiety and mistrust for the family concerned which can take several years to heal. F**k 'em! As I said, they know what the punishment for the crime is beforehand (usually too soft in my opinion) so they must accept the consequences of their actions.
One more quaetsion : Why does a bloke who steals £15 000 in cash go to jail for 3 years but a bloke that steals a £15 000 car will probably get a suspended sentence if it's a first offence? <IMG alt="image" SRC="http://www.thesite.org/ubb/frown.gif">
Punishment should be harder!!!! <IMG alt="image" SRC="http://www.thesite.org/ubb/biggrin.gif"> <IMG alt="image" SRC="http://www.thesite.org/ubb/biggrin.gif"> <IMG alt="image" SRC="http://www.thesite.org/ubb/biggrin.gif">
By the way, I was only joking about that before I start getting any hate mail ... <IMG alt="image" SRC="http://www.thesite.org/ubb/smile.gif">
I agree, maybe give them a 3 strikes and your out sorta thing. But you were right about the extreme prejudice thing, dont change your opinion just because you maybe scared of hate mail. If you do get it tell us and we can publicly humiliate them!
I thought it occurred to our society that this was a barbaric, inhuman and completely unworkable solution to crime, oh, about 600 years ago now. Oh but wait, puritanical religious nutters in new england c.1680 were making some women that remarried wear red letters to show they were sacreligious, and the Nazis got all those nasty criminal Jews to wear yellow stars to show how inherently bad they were...
Sure, if someone does something that contradicts our cultural value systems and morality and hurts innocent people in the process, then there should be some sort of consequences. That's clear. And whether they do it wilfully, ignoring the possibility of consequences, or accidentally (eg in the case of what our legal system might term "manslaughter" etc) is not the issue being discussed here.
If the whole legal system is based around the idea of revenge, we get the end result of state-sanctioned violence against the individual justified as a moral right of society. If you want to live in a place where they still do that, you can always move to Oklahoma or Tennessee. Quite frankly, i think you should be very grateful we don't have these sorts of punishments any more, and that you live in a country where you are able to express your opinion about such things. How would you feel about these sorts of punishments if it happened to you or someone you cared for? AND WHAT IF THEY WERE INNOCENT? Our justice system still makes a lot of mistakes. You might say that only hardened crims who admit their guilt should get these sorts of harsh punishments, but isn't it all a matter of opinion anyway? people thought very differently about certain crimes only a few years ago. Who's to say some things that are considered by our society as really criminal now (importing hash for example) will still be regarded as a serious crime in ten years time? What about crime considered to have no victim (same example applies here)? Or nicking twenty quid out of the till to pay your rent when the boss isn't looking? Maybe we should just send those people to Australia. Oh, sorry, i forgot that we don't do that either any more <IMG alt="image" SRC="http://www.thesite.org/ubb/wink.gif">
Forever stamping everyone who does something in contradiction to our societal norms, or doesn't fit with our personal opinions of what is politically or morally correct as an outcast means you believe people can never change, which anyone can see is ridiculous.
The vast majority of people who are convicted of crimes are from the parts of our society that have least access to money, opportunities, and all those material things that make us feel happy in, and valuable contributors to, our society. Why continue to force them into a life of permanently enforced slavery on the sole basis of revenge? Don't we have more practical solutions to the root causes of crime now? This is 2001!
I understand that people feel strong urges to "take an eye for an eye" when a particularly horrific crime occurs, but try to think about the bigger picture it in a HUMAN way, without resorting to getting all emotional about it. Emotions are normal, but is justice based on emotional responses really justice, or is it just lashing out in frustration and admitting you don't want to face reality?
In other words, i'm down with JB on this one!
cheers, ibs
It has nothing to do with morals. We have laws to protect society. If someone breaks a law then they are harming society. If people dont follow the rules then society will collapse.
I very much doubt that many things that are illegal now will be legal in the future. Rape will always be a CRIME murder will always be a CRIME, robbery will always be a CRIME. In case you didnt notice these people commit crimes. Against you, me and the rest of society. There is no such thing as a victimless crime, if an executive. embezzles money then an employee gets sacked in order to cover costs. we may live in a modern society but that doesnt mean crime should go unpunished, which it frequently does, and if it is punished it is usually with a minumum sentence. If you do something wrong, then you must repay your debt in full, whatever that maybe.
ikbensaai and JBs comments appear to presume that humans are some sort of special, noble creature on earth and that special rules apply. Very idealistic! But we're crap (no other species on earth commits the atrocities in the same calculating way we do). And when some people are more crap than others, flush 'em down the loo!!!! That way we can force the evolutionary process by just breeding amongst those of a less criminal disposition ... thus making a better society. Simple, hey???? ;-)
just a few comments in reply!
I think you're missing some of the points here. Criminal laws (ie "rules of the game") are generally written by those we pay to spend their lives thinking about these things to serve one of three purposes:
1. As you rightly say, to protect, by means of setting out appropriate PENALTIES for transgressors, innocent people from those who would seek to do harm to them.
2. To give those same innocent (well, until proven guilty anyway!) people firm GUIDELINES about what society considers correct behaviour.
3. To ENFORCE the accepted societal status quo. This involves giving authority and responsibility to certain sections of society to deal with a situation, ie the cops and the justice system.
In other words, our perception of what is right is the fundamental concept in many of our laws. Think of the Ten Commandments and how many of those are enshrined in our modern laws because of certain widely held views of morality. They are one of the main bases. Sure, most of those things seem quite logical to us when we're thinking about organising our modern society, but we don't stone people to death for committing adultery anymore.
The idea that society will collapse if people break the law now and then is a bit hysterical really. When was the last time you broke a law? I think i swore in public some time in the last few hours. I also rode my bike through a red light when there were no cars coming. The point is, we all break the law, wittingly or unwittingly from time to time.
Anyway, is our society really so great and wonderful in it's current form that it can't improve? What do you think of people that have muscular dystrophy who find that thc is the only chemical that relieves their pain? Are they anarchistic criminals too?
You can't honestly say this unless you can read the future.
In the Netherlands it was recently made legal for a mortally ill person, in certain very horrific circumstances, to be allowed to choose to die rather than continue to be fed a variety of (usually experimental) drugs and treatments to keep them alive. This is currently illegal in the UK. How do you know that it won't be legal in twenty years?
Similarly, different countries regard different crimes with different levels of magnitude, and all Western democracies apply punishments according to arbitrary decisions and VALUES IN THAT SOCIETY, which are based on morality.
For example, say we were both judges, and had to sentence someone who robbed a bank. You might say "Damn it, you robbed that video store and you knew it was against the law, the fact that you lost your job and had no money to pay your daughter's leukaemia treatment bills with is no excuse in the eyes of this court. So i'm going to give you ten years hard labour in a coal mine and tattoo your head with "robber" so everybody knows what you did."
See my point? This is also a reason why we have appeals courts.
If you don't agree with the values of post-war Western society, you are free to go and live in several countries where they still do stuff like cut people's hands off for stealing bread and so on.
The point is, while some things will undoubtedly continue to be illegal, societies attitudes to things change. You believe that we would all be better off under a system where the state dealt out harsh punishments for crimes, but forget that our society has already realised this never worked before, and we changed things. All leading thinkers in this field agree that crime in and of itself hasn't increased or decreased much in western recorded history, it's just the perception of crime that changes from time to time. Were we really a better society when we killed poor people for stealing a cow?
I totally agree with you that certain crimes like rape, murder, sexual assault and other crimes against the person need to be dealt with in a way that reassures the victims and wider society. Killing, literally or figuratively, the offender or making them into a societal leper is no answer tho, people will still commit crimes. I'd like to see your evidence that harsher PENALTIES result in a safer society. So far, no one has ever been able to show this convincingly. Sure, harsher ENFORCEMENT can be shown to reduce the incidence of reported crime, but it doesn't stop crime, and do you really want to live in a police state? Who would that really serve to benefit? The rich and those who already have access to wealth, at the exclusion and vilification of otherwise law abiding citizens whose only crime was to not be raised in such happy circumstances. What does work is addressing WHY people commit crimes. People do it for complex reasons, but it's also widely accepted that the nature of crime committed is often determined by the values you grew up with. Recently i read that in New Zealand a parliament-sanctioned study proved a clear link there between the incidence of unemployment and the incidence of crimes against property. So by this evidence, we can theorize there should be benefits, at least in reducing property crime, to increasing employment and access to those material things that we are taught we need to be successful.
"victimless crimes" i could define as, for example:
1. riding your bike through a red light when no-one else is around.
2. smoking a joint in the privacy of your living room when no-one else is affected by this action.
3. a businessman gets tied up by a dominatrix whom he pays amply for the pleasure. this is illegal in the UK.
4. saying "f**k the cops" to a cop. (how i cringe doing that star thing.)
5. burning a national flag.
6. drinking in a pub in London after 11pm!
none of these things in themselves hurt people. but they are still crimes. should "the revenge principle", i.e. the concept of cause and effect apply to these things too? they don't make society collapse, either, by the way.
Do you know why they give out minimum sentences? it's to allow judges to exercise restraint in sentencing when there are mitigating circumstances, while also taking into account the firebrand conservatives in our society who demand anachronistic responses to crime. Anyone remember Mary Whitehouse?! <IMG alt="image" SRC="http://www.thesite.org/ubb/smile.gif"> It's not to make life easy for crims at all. It's about being a society that thinks and reasons about the best way forward, not basing all our legal decisions on emotional responses. And sorry to all of those who would like to see "DOPE SMOKIN' SODOMISER" tattooed on convicted crim's foreheads, but our society is going to move forward with or without you.
respect.
ibs.