Shorter prison sentences don't work. It is a simple matter that if criminals are not punished for their crimes, they will keep doing the crimes.
Your conclusion doesn't follow your argument. Study psychology. Hell, study dogs and cats. Immediacy of the punishment after the offense is a primary factor in how effective the punishment is at deterring future acts. The more immediate, the better.
http://www.businessinsider.com/report-says-long-sentences-dont-deter-crime-2014-5http://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/rsrcs/pblctns/ffcts-prsn-sntncs-rcdvsm/index-eng.aspxAfter about 7 years of prison sentence, you're no longer teaching them a lesson - you're warehousing them.
We should look at what crimes we are focusing on and punishing, but harsher punishment does work. It is basic human nature.
No, actually, it's not human nature. I agree with the first part, but I think that
catching criminals would have a greater effect than punishing them more harshly when we do.
Certainty, consistency, and predictability of punishment has a much larger effect on behavior than the harshness. If a kid gets a swat
every time he goes to cross the street without looking both ways, he'll get in the habit much more quickly than if he's switched 1% of the time.
Or, to put it another way, 'harsh' punishment doesn't work all that well, at least not compared to figuring out what's broken in that specific criminal and working to fix that. To put it another way - I consider the cruelest punishment to be the one that
doesn't work. Because that means you're going to have to punish them again. Nothing is 100%, but let's go for the high success rate ones.
Yea, you just play one on the internet.
Only on this board. On my other ones, I'm regarded more as a raging conservative. Oddly, my positions aren't changing.
Moving criminals into low crime suburbs and subsidizing them with tax dollars is neither conservative nor libertarian.
I think you're confusing my actual positions. To be fair, I haven't exactly kept on topic. I don't advocate what you said I did.
My actual position is fairly complex, because when it comes to criminals, the government is going to get involved no matter what. So I attempt to seek the lowest cost method. In the sense of an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, I see that going to a reasonable effort to that has a reasonable success rate at preventing further criminal acts to be the least intrusive - prisons are expensive and impact our pocket books. Crime's expensive and impacts our pocket books and lives(at times). We need to find a reasonable minimum.
It might not be your style of libertarian, but it's my style.
Destroying property rights (and property values eventually) by forbidding property owners to take into account credit scores and criminal records when leasing their property is neither conservative nor libertarian.
Nope, and again, not something I endorse. You have to realize that just because I point out a misconception, doesn't mean that I'm making a statement of support. Additionally, I'm seeing a disturbing trend of straw-manning me - I haven't mentioned credit reports at all, and here you are, implying that it's my position.
The proposed rule change isn't that you can't use credit reports and criminal background checks. Heck, it's not that you can't disallow somebody for their criminal behavior. It's simply that you can't use the
mere presence of a criminal record to disallow them. You can't say 'You've been convicted of a felony, nope'. You have to open the report and say 'denied because you're a murderer/rapist/thief/ahole'.
Note that the previous paragraph isn't a statement of position. It's a clarification of the proposal. I find it interesting, but I think landlords should be able to set criteria as they will. The only exception would be if they accept government dollars for whatever reason, as those dollars can come with rules. That being said, there's too many dollars out there distorting things.
At the same time as you get rid of those dollars, you need to get rid of the rules that prevent providing affordable housing without those dollars. Size restrictions, weird build rules, land restrictions, etc...
That being said, if I have to be the token liberal here, so be it.
Fewer males in the prime crime committing age brackets IIRC as well as a good percentage of a sub group of that demographic, who commit a disproportionate amount of crime, being in jail.
Don't forget reduced lead poisoning. Seriously, the lead-crime connection has a very consistent
22 year lag.
And the prison populations are aging as a result of the longer sentences passed out in the '80s-'90s period, when there are fewer young violent criminals going into them. The drop was so steep that there are empty prisons out there that were built to house prisoners that never materialized.
Sure they do, Fox. Every day spent in prison is a day they are unable to victimize the rest of society.
Except they're victimizing society to the tune of $30-60 thousand/year just by being there.
Are you not aware that China is chock full of Chinamen? AKA, "The demographic on the face of the earth with the lowest rate of violent crime?" NE asian decent crime rate is a smallish fraction of the white/euro crime rate. On the scale of 0.25 to 0.33 relative to white/euro rates. But, America is also ~13% black (~8.0 vs white) and 13+% hispanic (2.5 vs white), with their higher rates of violent crime.
At 4.5 times our population, and an oppressive regime - they don't just jail people for violent acts there, after all. We also have a higher prison rate than Russia and pretty much everywhere else.
Prison reform is not cheaper. Oh, maybe in gov't expenditures, but the cost to the citizens of crime is much, much more than that. The cost of crime victimization is almost never accounted for. And almost never comes out of the hides of those proposing the "reforms."
Note that my 'reform' plans are hardly simply kicking prisoners out earlier. It's a policy of addressing the problems with each prisoner that increases the odds of further criminal acts. Uneducated? Educate them. Involved in gangs? There are specific anti-gang programs. Mentally unstable? Get them on the drugs they need. Etc...
And yes, life in prison for career criminals is cheaper, if we take into account the cost of crimes imposed on victims.
Slightly UP since 2010.
By a statistically insignificant amount. Hell, look at the years, starting in 2010: 5.7, 5.6,5.9,5.6,5.7
The difference between 2010 and 2014 are
Statistically insignificant. Especially compared to the 1972 high of 18.5, or '81's 17.2. Hell, murder rates are off by half from the early '90s.
But, since this is Georgia, most of the increase in murder victims is in the black community, who cares as long as the gov't is spending less? Amirite?
Given no real increase in murder rates, the fact that the government is spending less money is good for everybody. Amirite?
Nice shot at trying to imply that I'm racist though. I thought conservatives were supposed to be 'better' at predicting 'liberals'?
Most rate calculations carried out to FIVE significant digits. But not murder, the most reliable (for many reasons) index of violent crime. Only TWO significant digits.
How long has it been since you took a statistics class? Significant digits isn't everything. They took everything to 1 decimal point. Or, to explain further: you use significant digits when multiplying/dividing to decide how many numbers to keep(if you're not being given a margin of error). You use least significant digit when adding/subtracting - IE number furthest to the right of the decimal, but take the largest in the set.
Plus, the larger the data set, the more accurate you can be. Murder is the lowest crime category tracked, so you can't actually just extend more significant digits - because they're not significant.
That allows the data compiler to show no change between 2010 and 2014. "5.7 per 100k" Well, if you go out to THREE significant digits, as would be usual mathematical practice when the operation's number with the fewest sig digits is three, you see the rate tick up a smidge. Granted, this is barely shading hte numbers relative to many other manipulations.
While not in the table, it's probably that the creators looked at the annual variance and found that more than 1 decimal point amounts to noise.
Given that law & order is one of the few legitimate powers of gov't, I don;t mind paying to keep "Feral Americans" locked up.
I don't mind either, I just think that they can be trained out of feralness, and that's the cheaper option, at least for a select number.
Funny how that drop coincides with the drastic increase in incarceration.
Actually, the incarceration increases hadn't been working. It's not like the demographics of the average criminal has changed all that much - young males are still the primary offenders. They're just offending a lot less often, even without prison.
Besides, keep in mind that my argument isn't that increased prison sentences can't work - it's that there are cheaper and more reliable alternatives.
It may be cheaper for gov't. And the most reliable crime stat--murder--did not show improvement after implementation.
Didn't get worse, either, which is a net positive.
Do you meet many "homeless" people? Most are nucking futz and a small proportion are in their right mind, but scam-minded. And another small proportion are actually folk who rolled snake eyes, but have hte capacity to recover. Plainly put: the majority belong in an asylum.
Odd, I've proposed re-opening those before... But to get back to my point and not the straw man, getting them reliable shelter helps get them to the point that you can start treating them. And that's cheaper than leaving them out there.
My whole adult life I have chosen to live within 1000' of a school, means that sex offenders can't live in my neighborhood.
Only the convicted ones, and only legally. They've found that the restrictions in some areas have become so huge that the convicted end up living under a bridge. Problem being, living under a bridge, when you can't leave the county because you're restricted there as part of your parole, sucks. So they end up moving elsewhere and just breaking the law.
They should just nut up and build a 'released sex predator' colony somewhere out of the way, give them some sort of work to keep them busy. If they're not going to simply keep them in prison for the rest of their lives, but the re-offense rate for pedophiles is surprisingly low after conviction. You have more to worry about from the uncaught pedo...
