Your comment was about "sentencing guidelines, judicial discretion", well putting in Legislators and Judges who are tough on crime, will certain fix those.
How does it “fix” them?
I am not sure if you caught it or not, but my presentation of these issues as problems was done with considerable sarcasm.
With all due respect, I’m not sure what it is you do for a living, but I suspect that it hasn’t much to do with criminal justice. Do you understand what the implications are of a criminal justice / judicial system that is devoid of sentencing guidelines, judicial discretion, etc? Do you understand that while those facilities permit problematic and lax distribution of sentencing and justice, they also protect against unilaterally obtuse administration of rule of law? It is judicial discretion that permits, for example, the bench to render a decision which takes into account mitigating circumstances when a citizen deploys his weapon in defense of life.
It simply baffles me that persons can delude themselves into believing they are advocates of the 2A rights of the people whilst vociferously advocating the erosion, and in your case I'd go so far as to say the disassembly, of the the fundamental infrastructure, the checks and balances, that protects those rights.
OK, exactly how is that ANY different than it is today? We HAVE a ton of folks already in jail today, just that we tend to let out the violent offenders and keep the white collar folks in there. We have LOTS of jails, already, we just need to re-purpose it in a more effective way.
While I agree with the general principle of what you are saying, your perspective is wildly, and I mean wildly, oversimplified.
Beyond this, I’m not sure how much contact you’ve had with the population of the various facilities located around your area of the world, but if you honestly believe that they are housing a predominance of white collar offenders you are living in a fantasy. I would love to be a fly on the wall and observe as you walked down the range of a state prison and attempted to make the decision as to who you personally felt should be released into the community without threat. And I would then love to witness your defense of those decisions to the community, the victims, and the tough on crime people whose presence on the bench and in the government you have advocated.
You may be right, but I can assure you that letting out all of these violent offenders ain't doing nothing for anyone. But if you really want to get down to brass tacks, there are a lot of inmates doing time for victimless crime. Letting those folks out sooner makes A LOT more sense than the way things are now.
No it doesn’t. Not necessarily.
When you actually have an understanding of the way that crime in this country works you begin to understand that the answers are not nearly as neat and simple as one might expect.
Perpetrators of “victimless” (which is in itself a highly contentious term) and non-violent crimes, incur on the people of this nation, by and large, a much higher toll than do the traditionally reviled violent offenders. We concentrate on violent offenders because of the immediately identifiable enormity of their actions. However, they represent the overwhelming minority of offenders overall. And when examined clinically, outside of emotion, it becomes apparent that our traditional beliefs and views of violent offenders do not necessarily coincide with reality.
Consider if you will:
Statuatory rapists are generally considered to be the most innocuous of sexual offenders. In fact many people believe that stat rape should not be considered a sexual offense at all. There is tremendous mythology regarding so and so’s neighbor’s brother, etc. who is a registered sex offender but has been married to his victim for the past twenty years.
Incest offenders are generally reviled and there is a pervading belief that the most effective treatment is community based delivery of a Gold Dot to the temple.
YET… when we actually examine the statistics surrounding these offenders, we find that in fact incest offenders are often very amenable to treatment, very, very low likelihood of displaying recidivist behavior, very low likelihood of graduated re-offense, and low likelihood of further contact with the criminal justice system in general.
Stat rapists on the other hand are among the HIGHEST risk of sexual offenders in terms of recidivist behavior, they are among the HIGHEST risk of graduated sexual offending behavior, they have among the LOWEST level of success in treatment, and their victims self-report EQUIVALENT degrees of loss and injury as victims of incest and stranger rape.
So is it better to let out the perpetrator of the "victimless crime", or the child molester who "deserves to die"?
Just because one believes (and truly wants) an issue to be simple does not mean it actually is.
First of all last time I checked guns are in-animate objects that need someone to USE them. Removing an in-animate object has NOTHING to do with crime. But I guess maybe you are just a little smarter than I am, so please tell me exactly how will taking violent offenders off the streets, NOT reduce violent crime?
Especially since every statistic I have ever seen says that violent crime is more often than not committed by repeat offenders.
It is not an issue of intelligence. It is an issue of exposure, consideration and understanding.
And the problem is not with the premise. The problem is with the principle underlying it.
The idea that removing guns from the hands of the populace will reduce crime presupposes that the problem of criminality is contingent upon the presence of an implement facilitating its display.
Most gun owners have successfully been able to wrap head around the idea that this is something of a thinking error. Part of the reason that they have done so is, in my personal opinion, convenience. I say that because a failure to transcend to that level of advanced thought places one in a position of being compromised in their ability to defend his or her right to own a firearm. There is inherent reward for doing your homework in this regard.
However, there is little impetus to move beyond this point. In fact it is convenient to remain there in that it eliminates the need to question much of the neatly packaged rhetoric that has been used to support the position of gun ownership. However for those people who are necessarily thrust into places where understanding the principles and mechanics of crime and justice is an imperative, this is simply not enough. It is not enough to hammer a fist and shout “do the crime, do the time” anymore. There needs to be better.
So… in that spirit…
We run into a problem, as we do with the guns=crime argument, when we face the felons in jail=less crime argument.
The reason that we run into a problem is that the felons in jail=less crime argument also makes a presupposition. That presupposition is that the problem of criminality is an intrinsic component of the individual as opposed to the society.
Basically, the idea that building more prisons and jailing more felons will reduce crime is contingent upon the concept that there is a finite, or at least stemmed, number of individuals in our society capable of the display of criminal behavior. It is based upon something of a martial model; the idea being that if we only get enough of them, if by attrition if by no other means, we will surely extinguish the larger problem.
This is an overly simplistic and shortsighted response to a very, very complex and pervasive social problem.
It ignores the fact that the problem of crime is not a problem of the individual per se, but one of the community. It ignors the fact that criminality is a condition created and propogated through a process of continuous manufacture. It is not innate. Our society, and the conditions herein, have become conducive to the production of persons willing to display criminal behavior. It is going to take much, much, much more than a bunch of prisons and "tough on crime" judges and pols to fix this problem.
We cannot hold the community responsible for the actions of the individual exclusively, but we also cannot address the problem in a vacuum exclusive of initiatives to address the underlying social maladies leading to rampant displays of criminality.
The argument you have forwarded is a very, very commonly held, but horrifically flawed, one.
There is no ”simple” solution TCB. The problem of crime in this country is a PROFOUNDLY complex web of economics, politics, morals, ethics, religion, race, gender,, etc., etc., etc.
No amount of protestation, no mass of prison cells, no amount of caterwauling and homespun remedies by Charlie Daniels is going to make that any different.
faces now.
