Peterkin

I've continued to respond after i realized the futility, yes; you're right about that. You may have expected a new engagement when you joined in, but I simply haven't the energy to start over. If you're interested in anything I've said on the subject, or any of the statistics I've cited, you can find them. If not, I'm sorry to disappoint. Depend on who "we" are. I've listed the essentials, enormous bodies of work in social sciences have been published on the particulars. This is not a new issue. Yes. The insurmontable issue.

I have attempted 6 pages of intelligent conversation about this. I'm pretty much conversed out. Ending poverty and disparity, promoting physical and mental health, providing children with education, guidance and opportunity... In a wealthy advanced nation, that's an achievable plan. It has been proposed, repeatedly, by more knowledgeable people than i am. And shot down repeatedly, by more powerful factions who have their own plan for those resources. So it can't be done. And I have outlined it broadly. Not in minute detail, since this thread isn't about the fine points of social reform, but about "what people deserve". I think everyone deserves a chance at a reasonable life, and no-one deserves to grow up in fear. I think that if those basic requirements were met, "crime" would decrease to the point where resources became available to treat seriously disturbed and disruptive persons far more effectively.

Well, I know they let their governments make some bad decisions, but surely the entire US population can't be criminals!

Maybe you can't, but industrial societies certainly can. I elaborated further down, but it doesn't matter. Nothing can be done, because one prisoner in 100,000 will never be rehabilitated, so we have to keep the prisons in their present state for that one, and as long we have to have prisons, we might as well fill them with all the other people who have broken various laws but won't become habitual criminals until they've been to prison. In many possible and several certain ways. Bumper stickers win election.

You would need extensive wetlands - in a time when water is unreliable: scarce in some places, overabundant in others. It's a large plant with a low yield: you'd need some generations to breed it or gene-splice it up to an economically feasible food crop. And if it were then cultivated in commercial quantity - and especially by the usual industrial methods, the wetland in which they now thrive would be trashed in no time. However, North American natives did make extensive use of them both as food and material for making containers, boats and shelters. As part of a versatile diet, it could be extremely valuable for a new civilization of humans - as long as their numbers were much, much smaller than the current one. Unfortunately, that part has to be dried and pounded into flour (for the bun). The protein content is not high, but the shoots are green and the roots are sweet.

I'm looking for an improvement of a 10% reduction in avoidable incarcerations and a 10% increase in the rehabilitation rate of not-capital offenders ion the first five years of UBI, universal healthcare, well-equipped and staffed public schools and comprehensive family services. If, after ten years, the saving on crime and punishment doesn't balance the cost of resources added to social welfare, you will have some evidence that my proposal doesn't work. I'm looking at the whole system. You seem concerned only with the fraction of a % you have designated incorridgible. Different perspectives.

Do you mean, you don't know who, in your own community, is responsible for taking care of kids? I'm proposing: Pay a lot less attention to, spend less money on, give less public infrastructure, equipment and manpower to, wars of choice or convenience or profit. Pay less attention, devote less administration, bestow less reverence on the accumulation of great wealth by a few. Put a lot more effort, thought and care into the welfare of the young and troubled, ill and old, vulnerable and volatile. Even more simply: social justice is the better part of criminal justice.

No, there are no magic bullets - and that includes throwing away keys. As I asked before: Has nobody ever noticed anything odd about this boy before he committed this horrendous crime for which he is now famous? Why not? We'll never understand anything by punishing it, but we might understand what happens in a child's mind, what influences alter his course in in life, if we pay attention. Who makes decisions about autistic children, dyslexic children, children with any kind of problem? The parents, guardians, educators and health care professionals who monitor his condition. Taking care of children who exhibit anomalous behaviour or difficulty conforming to social standards isn't exactly a novel idea. It's just that the structures for helping/correcting them as it stands now is 90% cracks, through which far too many fall. A child who is spectacularly injured, mutilated or killed is the subject of a tsunami of maudlin sympathy for fifteen minutes. The other 10,000,000 are invisible.

I don't get this eternal dwelling on how to punish the rare, spectacular crime - after it has taken place, and how to prevent the next one, with no consideration given to preventing the first one. Didn't anybody ever notice anything odd about that boy at any time before he committed that one heinous act? I think this is a large part of what Dimreepr has been advocating for. If there are babies born irremediably evil, we should sequester them long before they do so much damage. If they're not born evil, we should prevent them turning bad. Shouldn't we be paying attention to how our children are developing and what kind of people they're growing into?

No points. Just discourse on the situation. If we can't or don't want to think about what our political leaders face once we put them in office, on what basis can we decide which ones to elect next time?

It's hard to say no to army brass. It's hard to understand very different cultures. It's hard to decide whether a war of choice is a good or bad choice. It's hard to extricate oneself from a fraught relationship of any kind (You've all been there, right?) It's hard to know the most politically advantageous thing to do. When you're in one of the many seats in a great big room full of democratically elected representatives of 30-some percent of the people, it's easy to go with the flow. When you're in that badly designed office, all alone, you make some very difficult decisions. Agreeing, certainly. Taking exception, no. Just wondering what you imagine doing in his place. It's kind of an uncomfortable thought-experiment.

Of course he's struggling. Each new president inherits the bass-ackward incompetence and crappy decisions of the six or seven preceding administrations, and the same brass-bound, uncommunicative, recalcitrant military hierarchy that leaves all the messy splats on the ground and swaggers away. This president is at least doing something, even if he was pushed into it unprepared. Do you know what he's doing behind the scenes? I don't. What do you think he should do that's within his power to do? I have no frickin idea.

I don't know about Beecee. Since retirement, I work as many and whichever hours I want, mostly on the computer. The little work I do is done to an exacting standard.

Both of those are largely cultural matters. Whether people who have been wronged by their fellow citizens desire revenge or restitution or penitence or redemption of the wrongdoer depends on the belief-system of the community in which their mind-set and relationships were formed. Even within a complex and diverse large society, local communities may vary considerably in their attitudes. Society at large is best served, not by validating a viewpoint - that is, beyond its constitutional principle - but by finding the most practical solution to its problems. No solution will consist of a single legislation (unless it's a monster omnibus bill) or a uniform response to the different manifestations of lawbreaking. I do make a distinction between those words, lawbreaking and wrongdoing. To label them all "crime" is to obfuscate the subject beyond any hope of discovering its causes, and without understanding of the cause, there can be no solution. I also make a distinction among different types of lawbreakers and wrongdoers. The legal system does make such distinctions, but doesn't have nearly enough scope even to define, let alone discover the differences and implement the appropriate procedure in each situation. That AAF study is worth glancing at.

Gwynne Dyer's latest column on that subject. (He's written many.)

Doesn't that depend on the work they're doing? I assume that they get satisfaction from completing whatever tasks they've taken on, and doing them accurately - as do I. I assume they would be happy to perform work they consider beneficial and constructive - as do I. There is self-esteem, too, in earning one's wages and pulling one's weight on a team - as I found during my employed life. And, of course, if the work requires the best use of their talents and skills, it's pleasurable in itself. Work for its own sake - I doubt it.

This is from a right-of-center think-tank on public policy, in the biggest of the western democratic nations with a constitution that reveres equality. https://www.americanactionforum.org/research/incarceration-and-poverty-in-the-united-states/ Prison doesn't seem to be working very well.

Never mind. My most important thoughts are the ones I haven't expressed.

I find that troubling and impossible to answer. So I guess you win.

Which others? You made the accusation; I would like to see your evidence. I called your source unreliable, only after checking its reputation with sources I do consider reliable. And that is politically extreme? In what way are unasked questions blameworthy? Okay. Nobody's argued against compassion for victims. Yes. But they're not necessarily all the same people, and you and I might not have the same perception of who fits into which group. No, we have not agreed on prison - at least, not the kind of prison in which we are accustomed to storing, destructive, unpopular, inconvenient and disruptive citizens. No, I didn't miss it. Nor did I oppose it. Some of those approaches might work. And I applaud the Sydney police for their good and proper actions. I appreciate your position, even though I don't share all of you assumptions about our reasonable societies. Please state it succinctly, without embellishments. Again, the crucial question is: Who does the defining, designating and separating, on what basis. I don't see what that has to do with formulating a concept. The Taliban have theirs. You have yours. I have mine. Kamala Harris has hers. Grimreepr has his. It doesn't look as if we'll have any consensus. You're citing Norway? The same politically extreme bleeding-heart softly softly Norway I used as an example on page 1? Doesn't seem fair somehow....

Indeed, the shared value system and basic understanding of how the people in a community are interdependent makes the administration of criminal, as well as social justice relatively simple. But surely, the size, diversity and complexity of our societies shouldn't be an insurmountable obstacle to formulating a concept of justice - or even to reconciling social and criminal justice, at least in principle.

What end of which political spectrum has been represented here? Please show "extreme rhetoric" in this thread. I've asked questions, expressed my personal opinion and linked statistics from respectable (mainly government) sources. That's a good reason to try to improve them. I'm not sure we agree on exactly who the "evil bastards" are, or which ones need to be separated from whom. And I don't agree with your notion of the form that 'separation' should take. What I most particularly disagree with in our admittedly imperfect justice systems is the sheer number of my fellow citizens being caged and to some degree brutalized, for a great variety of mundane offenses that bear no resemblance to horrific crimes you cited. I am, have been all along, and continue to be, convinced that different crimes, different criminals, should be treated differently. Not more or less of the same ineffective punishment, but a different approach. PS - The concept of justice extends far beyond punishment for acts deemed unacceptable by those with the power to enact laws.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27924967/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/09/mr-death-penalty/379858/ Not an entirely unbiased source, that.

It depends.

I Believe justice should be concerned with everyone, not just the extremes. There's a novel thought. At least, it seems to me a departure from what you have been saying. Do you mean that incorrigibles don't turn up at the same rate and in the same numbers in all societies, regardless of social, economic and political organization? Current events are produced by the people living them, just as historical events were. Current, like historical, events play a part in shaping the next generation of people.