Coming from Denmark where life is max 16 years and where people rarely go to jail just because society does not know what else to do with you and then moving to the US, the justice system when it comes to petty crimes, always seemed very draconian and counter productive.
For most people — just the mere notion of being in conflict with the law — is enough to send chills down their back. How sad that something that could have been used to actually function as a mild punishment ends up completely destroying a life and the potential of being part of society.
In a hundred years from now people are going to look back at things like the war on drugs as one of the most barbaric, absurd and useless pieces of legislation ever to have been implemented. A war which ended up destroying more lifes than it saved.
I for one applaud Obama for finally taking a stanse against this unnecessarily strict legislation and hoping that normal otherwise law abiding citizens wont get their lifes completely destroyed for things anyone could have done. I love the US but the legislation I could certainly do without.
I'm not from Denmark, but not very far from it. Don't you get civil disorder every time a high profile, widely hated criminal gets off with a sentence that's much lighter than people get in the movies? Where I live, every time that happens, populist and right wing parties rise in the polls. At this time, they're maybe one incident involving a Syrian refugee away from winning the elections. It's inevitable, with so many thousands of them, there's bound to be one who crosses the line at some point.
The US has a different kind of democratic tradition. Some will say they're more democratic, but I think it has a lot to do with the "winner takes all" principle vs. "proportional representation". Deep down inside, it's what a significant chunk of the population wants: "as long as there are still people whom I can't identify with out there breaking the rules, we're still not tough enough on crime". The largest group is the one that gets represented, and doesn't have to share power.
I think those kind of things are culturally dependent. I am from Norway and I noticed that Americans and Brits typically people from Anglo-Saxon cultures were most angry at the sentencing the terrorist Anders Behring Breivik got in Norway. Victims and their families were not revenge oriented towards Breivik the way Americans and Brits were who were not even at the receiving end of his crimes.
I notice a clear difference between cultures in how this is perceived is in the view with respect to good, evil and punishment in general. I think in Scandinavia in general people don't really believe in good and evil, at least not in the American sense. We don't divide the world into good guys and bad guys.
All the way back to Viking times Scandinavians have practices much milder punishment than the Anglo-Saxons. It might be a Germanic thing. The dutch also were much milder than the British historically. In fact the english seemed almost offended in the 1700s by how mild punishment was in the Netherlands.
I think anglo-saxons have simply been conditioned more strongly to desire revenge and retribution.
When I initially read your reply I was going to suggest perhaps the homogeneity of Scandinavia might be a contributing factor. There is less of "us vs them" whereas in the UK and the US, there are many different groups of people, most of them are conquered people. In those cases, it's quite easy to see why there's such a sharp contrast. However, upon greater reflection, China also has very harsh sentences and a strong desire for revenge and China is pretty homogeneous so my initial theory doesn't make sense. One thing I wonder about is whether Scandinavia is the norm or the exception. To someone like me, a Chinese-American, harsh sentencing and "good vs evil" is the social norm, even if it's incredibly naive. I am now really curious as to what lead to the difference.
I think your premise is wrong. Scandinavia isn't as homogeneous as you think, and the UK and US aren't as diverse as you think. I can only assume China isn't as homogeneous as you think either. What it is, is that we are all conditioned to recognize a lot of diversity in what's familiar to us, while communities of strangers seem more or less the same to us.
I remember how relatives from the US visited a central European capital, and were surprised how little diversity they saw. To them Hungarians, Germans, Slovenes, Poles, Russians, Turks, Roma, Bulgarians, Greeks etc seemed all pretty much the same. I remember how I first visited a couple of north American major cities and was surprised how little diversity i saw. To me they seemed all pretty much the same.
I always find the disproportionate concern for the criminal at the expense of the victims fascinating. People say they show compassion for the perpetrator, but it is not the perpetrator that deserves compassion but the victim(s). To show compassion for the perpetrator is false compassion and unjust.
However, more to the point: why do you believe that all retribution is necessarily unjust? That's too broad a stroke and I think the problem has to do with modern sensibilities and also with semantics, i.e., words like "retribution" have taken on very narrow and pejorative meanings. Naturally, there are instances of retribution that are evil. These are instances of cruelty motivated by pride (understood as vice) and hatred of the other, or ones which are excessively harsh in relation to the crime committed. However, not all retribution is of such a nature, and indeed inadequate or deficient punishment is evil and unjust.
Of course, we cannot know absolutely what motivates a jury or a judge, but these are third parties that ideally have no personal stake in the matter and thus not as susceptible to acting out of hatred for the offender. If the punishment is on par with the crime committed and is done out of a desire for justice, a desire to reform the offender (when applicable) and with the preservation of the juridico-social order, then there is no issue with retribution. Indeed, it is in this case a virtuous thing.
In Switzerland it is used as a political instrument by the right wing parties. They call it 'Kuscheljustiz' ('cuddle justice') and the tabloids are happily using the term too.
It got a new height with the 'Durchsetzungsinitiative', a popular initiative we get to vote on in a month. It wants to enforce the result of the popular initiative on the (automatic) deportation of foreign criminals which got accepted by 52.3 of voters (and 17.5 of cantons) in 2010. The party behind both says that the governement and parlamental chambers are stalling the implementation of the initiative and do not adhere to its meaning hence the second one (which says they have to do the original one word by word).
The stuff happily ignores some principles of the law like proportionality, higher up international law and such.
Yeah, the combination of the so called cuddle justice and foreigners has been proven to work very good to get votes here (works even better now with more refugees).
What's happening here is the following phenomenon. Suppose the establishment lies to you about something. But that something keeps growing, and eventually you see through the lie. Now someone comes along and actually tells you you've been lied to, and reveals this truth to you.
The general reaction to this situation is to trust this newcomer more than the establishment, since he had the guts to reveal the big lie. (This is a logical fallacy, but emotionally it's awesome.)
The establishment left in Europe, from what I can see, is lying about the problems of Muslim immigrants and crime/other social problems. Witness the attempts by various politicians to sweep Cologne under the rug, for example, or removing ethnicity from crime statistics in Sweden. It's hard to keep a problem like this completely under wraps; eventually something like Cologne will hit the internets and eventually the media won't be able to ignore it.
If you want a left wing solution to the problem of Muslim immigrants failing to assimilate, robbing and raping people, the left will actually need to acknowledge the problem and propose a solution. If the left continues ignoring the issue, then folks will naturally turn to the racist right wing folks who seem to be proposing solutions rather than lying about the problem.
(Note: don't interpret my criticism of the European left as support for the racist right. And if you think I'm factually wrong, I'd love to see crime stats demonstrating this. Obviously not from Sweden...)
I think both the left wing and the right wing are generally wrong. Left wing for downplaying the effect culture and rightwing for overplaying it.
However I agree the biggest problem right now in Europe is the left wing not actually recognizing the problem expect in a few countries (Denmark being one of them)
Only then will it be possible to look at the problem and come up with alternatives to what the far right is proposing (which is basically we are just going to send them all home)
> The establishment left in Europe, from what I can see, is lying about the problems of Muslim immigrants and crime/other social problems.
Could you quantify how severe you see those problems as being, how they're lied about, and what sort of solution you think might be possible?
My impression (as a leftish European, so discount it as you please) is that no one denies that some Muslim immigrants commit crimes, nor indeed that some Muslim immigrants are terrorists, but that the usual lefty view is:
1. This, in itself, no more calls for action against Muslim immigrants (or against Muslim immigration) than the fact that some people with beards commit crimes calls for action against people with beards.
2. Overreaction to fear of Muslim immigrants is a bigger problem than crime committed by Muslim immigrants. (E.g., crimes with Muslim victims are commoner than crimes with Muslim perpetrators, and this sort of fear is one reason why.)
3. Accordingly, asking "what can we do to stop unassimilated Muslim immigrants killing and raping and robbing?" is a bad question in the following senses: (a) if it's the main question you're asking about relations between Muslim immigrants and the rest of the population, that probably means you have an unbalanced view of what's going on, and (b) asking it loudly and publicly is liable to do more harm by encouraging anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant bigotry than it does good by promoting measures that reduce crime by Muslim immigrants, and (c) actually taking the measures one might come up with when answering the questions is also liable to do more harm by making Muslims' lives harder than it does good by reducing crime.
A few notes. First: I don't know whether the parenthesis in #2 is actually correct. My impression is that it is, but I don't have all the statistics that would be needed to check. Regardless, I would guess that most of the lefty types you have in mind share my impression that it's correct. Second: something can be a bad question as in #3 but still be a question it would be good, in principle and all else being equal, to know a good answer to.
Third: appreciating the European-lefty mindset on this may be easier if you try replacing "what can we do about violent crime by Muslim immigrants?" with "what can we do about financial malfeasance by The One Percent?" or "what can we do about computer crime committed by evil hackers?". In all these cases, there are some actual crimes (and not-actually-criminal wrongdoings) that we'd be better without. In all these cases, people unsympathetic to the group being targetted are liable to overestimate the actual magnitude of the threat, and there are unscrupulous journalists and politicians stirring up fear to further their own agendas. In all these cases, trying to prevent those crimes and other wrongdoings runs the risk of messing with people's civil liberties. (But, for the avoidance of doubt, I am not claiming that these cases are parallel in every respect.)
How large is the issue? I don't know. There don't seem to be much in the way of good crime stats. A quick google search suggests rape has risen 15x in Sweden since they started letting in large numbers of immigrants. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3317978/Torn-apart-o...
The issue is being lied about because rather than giving out stats to answer the question of how much of that 15x is due to immigrants, the Swedish authorities decided to stop tracking ethnicity of perpetrators instead. Similarly, witness the attempts by the mayor of Cologne to blame the victims and avoid disclosing the identity of the attackers. (A quick google search suggests similar incidents happened in a Stockholm music festival and other places.)
The fact is that left wing Euro politicians control access to the data and are locking it down. They also make claims like "overestimate the actual magnitude of the threat" - but if the data supported that claim, wouldn't they release it rather than hide it?
I'm not proposing any solutions. I'm not even claiming to have a solid grasp of the statistics (unlike, say, a similar discussion of US crime). If I'm wrong and Muslim immigrants to Europe actually commit crimes at the base rate, by all means post stats proving me wrong. I'm only saying that it looks like there is a real problem, and it looks like it's being hidden from us.
Under such circumstances, people turning to the racist right is a pretty natural thing to do. At least these guys aren't liars, and see our problems, right?
(Again, that last sentence is not my view. A quick search of my comment history will suggest that I'm pluralistic to a degree that only an extreme capitalist can be.)
If the Daily Mail published an article saying that snow is white, I would check the next winter in case I've been wrong all these years.
In the present case, even if it weren't an issue perfectly calibrated to suit the Daily Mail's preferred varieties of shit-stirring, that 15x figure should cause doubt. Those immigrants would have to be impossibly rapey, or else the previous inhabitants (even though some of them were presumably immigrants) would have to be startlingly un-rapey.
A more likely hypothesis is that something else changed; perhaps the Swedish authorities changed where they draw the boundaries between rape and other sexual assaults? Or perhaps some procedural change has made Swedes more willing to make accusations of rape? I can think of several other hypotheses, all of them more likely than that immigration made the rate of rapes go up by 15x.
So, let's look a bit further. First of all: this comparison is between 1975 and 2014. Forty years is a long time, and many things have happened in Sweden (and everywhere else) since 1975. Why blame it on immigration? Well, because someone wants to blame it on immigration, so far as I can tell.
Well. Did Sweden change its definition of rape, or its treatment of people who report rape, or its thoroughness in collecting statistics, or anything of the sort, since 1975? Yes, apparently they did. For instance, near the start of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_in_Sweden you will find this: "Sweden reformed its sex crime legislation and made the legal definition of rape much wider in 2005, which largely explains a significant increase in the number of reported rapes in the ten-year period of 2004-2013."
And, a little further down, this: "Sweden also applies a system of expansive offence counts. Other countries may employ more restrictive methods of counting. The Swedish police registers one offence for each person raped, and if one and the same person has been raped on a number of occasions, one offence is counted for each occasion that can be specified. For example, if a woman says she has been raped by her husband every day during a year, the Swedish police may record more than 300 cases of rape."
I know you've got a data-science background. Put on your analyst's hat for a moment and think about that claim of a 15x increase. Do you really find it credible? At all?
There may indeed be lies being told about immigrants and crime. I would not advise you to assume that they're all coming from the same side.
There are many hypothesis. Too bad the data which could allow us to evaluate them (namely the # of crimes broken down by ethnicity) is deliberately hidden. That's why I'm suspicious of the establishment's claims, and why I expect many Europeans are as well.
I don't find a surge in crime relating to changing demographics implausible. In the US we have widely varying (read: 8-10x) crime rates between ethnic groups, so if our ethnic composition changed we could get significantly more crime as a result. Perhaps Sweden has similar effects. Or perhaps not; but if the data proved otherwise, why would the establishment hide it?
Even if those nasty scary brown-skinned immigrants have 10x the crime rate of the rest of the population and make up 20% of the population, that couldn't do more than about double the crime rate.
(Muslim immigrants do not in fact make up 20% of the population of Sweden.)
> left wing Euro politicians control access to the data and are locking it down.
In the same sense as left-wing and right-wing politicians everywhere control access to crime data and are locking it down.
> if the data supported that claim, wouldn't they release it rather than hide it?
Let me describe for you a hypothetical world. I don't know how closely it resembles the real one. In this hypothetical world, Muslim immigrants are 2x more likely than other people to commit violent attacks such as rape, make up a small fraction of the population, and are widely hated and feared; violent attacks on Muslim immigrants are 3x more common than violent attacks by Muslim immigrants; the fear many people feel of violence from Muslim immigrants is -- if, e.g., you calibrate it against other kinds of violence they fear -- far out of proportion to their actual risk of being attacked by Muslim immigrants. So, in particular, if the public knew and understood and internalized that 2x figure, they should actually be reassured by it because the risk they face is very small; but, just as in the real world, the public in our hypothetical world don't always respond with perfect rationality.
Now imagine you are a politician (of the left or the right, I don't care), you're aware of these numbers (or have guessed at them), and you are trying to decide whether published crime statistics should break out Muslim immigrants as a separate category of offender.
I suggest that you are likely to think as follows: "If we do this, every right-wing anti-Muslim anti-immigrant group in the country is going to seize on that 2x figure and make hay with it. It will widely be taken as confirming fears that Muslim immigrants are a terrible threat to public safety. Violent attacks on Muslims will go through the roof. Lots more people will be hurt and killed, and any sort of integration will become more difficult. Which will probably lead to more crime by Muslim immigrants in the future, too. Even if by some magical process releasing those numbers made rape by Muslim immigrants completely go away, it would still lead to a lot more harm than good."
I'm not saying you'd be right to think that. Maybe actually "better more data than less data" is a universal principle that trumps everything else. Maybe releasing the numbers wouldn't really have such bad effects. Maybe it actually would somehow lead to a big decrease in crimes committed by immigrants. I don't know. But the point is that I just sketched a perfectly plausible process by which politicians might decide it's better not to publish potentially inflammatory numbers, even if those numbers indicate that anti-immigrant politicians and journalists exaggerate the actual magnitude of the threat.
> If I'm wrong and Muslim immigrants to Europe actually commit crimes at the base rate
I doubt that. I bet Muslim immigrants to Europe are, e.g., systematically somewhat poorer than the population as a whole, which would probably mean more violent crime and (e.g.) less embezzlement even if there were no cultural differences at all. I bet they drink less alcohol, which would probably mean less of some kinds of violent crime and e.g. far less DUI. Etc. I'd be astonished if there weren't all kinds of differences in the rates at which Muslim immigrants and (say) Christian multigeneration natives commit all sorts of crimes.
> it looks like there is a real problem, and it looks like it's being hidden from us.
Suppose someone has a theory that financial misconduct like fraud and embezzlement and insider trading are much more widespread among the rich than in the general population. If they point out -- correctly, so far as I know -- that official crime statistics don't break out the richest 1% of the population when reporting rates of these crimes, are they justified in saying that "there is a real problem and it's being hidden from us"?
> And if you think I'm factually wrong, I'd love to see crime stats demonstrating this.
Sure. Only recently, the German BKA released numbers [1] on crimes committed by immigrants. As you can see, until September last year, the number of immigrants (the red line in the first graph) increased faster than the number of crimes committed by immigrants (the green line in the same graph). Generally, immigrant criminality is dominated by petty offenses (shoplifting, fare evasion) and immigration-related offenses (such as forged passports). As far as nationality is concerned, immigrants from Balkan countries dominate the lists of suspects (on a per capita basis), while crime among Iraqis and (especially) Syrians appears to be disproportionately low.
Note that this does not mean that immigrants do not commit less crimes than residents. Low socio-economic status alone means a higher propensity to commit crimes (and poorly integrated, low-income immigrants have been a concern since forever, whether that was Turkish guest workers [2] or the Russian-German immigrants of the 1990s [3]). But there is no evidence that Muslim immigrants are more likely to commit crime, either. In fact, technically the (predominantly Christian [4]) Balkan countries seem to be far more likely to turn out criminal immigrants.
Note further that most of the suspects in Cologne seem to belong to or be affiliated with pre-existing crime groups [5] from Morocco [6] and Algeria, people who were either there illegally or were using the refugee crisis as a cover. While these should be deported, this is difficult, because their countries refuse to take them back.
In general, traditional criminogenic factors seem to be plenty sufficient to explain immigrant crime, and that's really not all that surprising. Whereas ethnic and religious factors seem to be either sourced from anecdotes or the result of incidental correlation.
Completely separate from that is the challenge of integrating such a huge number of immigrants into German society. Not to put too fine a point on it, but that had been botched twice before; there is the language barrier, widespread skill gaps, and the difficulty of cultural acclimatization to deal with.
> The establishment left in Europe, from what I can see, is lying about the problems of Muslim immigrants and crime/other social problems.
If that hypothesis of yours were correct, then in Germany, this would not just be the establishment left, but also plenty of establishment conservatives. While politicians did botch the response to New Year Eve's events, the simpler explanation is that they were worried about attacks on refugees by the far right (which also promptly happened). While not exactly pogroms, far right violence has also been a persistent concern and many people still remember Solingen [7] and Rostock-Lichtenhagen [8].
I don't see anybody lying or otherwise dissembling about the problems related to integration; it is no secret that previous immigration waves were far from successful in this regard (as noted above), and nobody expects this to be a cakewalk.
[6] Morocco in particular encourages emigration to Europe; it reduces unemployment and results in more cash transfers to Morocco. However, because Morocco is far from a free country, asylum requests still have to be taken seriously.
I unfortunately do not read German. I guess the core questions are:
1) What is the crime rate committed by Muslim immigrants, as compared to natives? (You suggest it's higher. How much higher?)
2) What's the crime rate for Muslim immigrants of low socio-economic status, compared to Germans of low socio-economic status?
3) How many additional robberies/rapes/murders/etc will result from allowing in 1000 extra immigrants? (Compute by projecting from existing crime data.)
And how much public acknowledgement of these facts can we expect from the establishment?
While politicians did botch the response to New Year Eve's events, the simpler explanation is that they were worried about attacks on refugees by the far right (which also promptly happened).
Perhaps. But when the racist right points out this "botched response" (designed to hide the truth), surely you can understand why this gets them extra credibility with voters? And similarly, does anyone besides the racists have a plan to prevent another Cologne?
Let me again emphasize that my criticism of the lying left is not intended as support for the racist right. It's just my explanation as to why people are taking the racist right seriously.
> 1) What is the crime rate committed by Muslim immigrants, as compared to natives? (You suggest it's higher. How much higher?)
No, I don't suggest it's higher. I suggest that there is no obvious correlation between religion and crime rate. The lowest crime rate (by far, as in a factor of three or so below the average) is among Syrians (a predominantly Muslim country), then Iraqis (another predominantly Muslim country), then a mix of other countries (predominantly Balkan countries with a Christian majority, but also Afghanistan). Most criminals per capita come from Serbia, by a huge margin (and still make up a relatively small fraction of Serbian immigrants). The natural conclusion is that crime rate is correlated with other factors, not religion.
> 2) What's the crime rate for Muslim immigrants of low socio-economic status, compared to Germans of low socio-economic status?
Nobody has dug that deeply into the data yet. Partly because religion isn't something that's accurately known (even in Germany, only a minority of Muslims self-identified as Muslims in the most recent census, for whatever reasons; whether the rest acted out of privacy concerns or because they have been secularized, I do not know). I do know that one study (a couple of decades ago, mind you) that tried to adjust for social-economic factors between Turkish immigrants (predominantly Muslim, though you have to distinguish between Sunnis and Alevites) and Germans did not find any real measurable difference after that.
> 3) How many additional robberies/rapes/murders/etc will result from allowing in 1000 extra immigrants? (Compute by projecting from existing crime data.)
You cannot extrapolate, because so far the projection is not linear in the number of refugees. This probably has a number of reasons: for starters, violent crime appears to be concentrated within refugee reception centers as the result of people living close together with little room for privacy and under less than ideal conditions; but as the number of refugees grows, the number of refugees within reception centers doesn't. For another, other serious crime appears to be concentrated within criminal organizations that do not grow at the same rate as the number of refugees.
Most importantly, it's not like there's an actual policy option for allowing or not allowing them in. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the refugees are coming to Europe now because other countries are overflowing and can't take any more. Unlike America, Europe isn't surrounded by oceans to keep refugees out. Any credible attempt at controlling the influx of refugees has to begin with the border between Greece and Turkey, which is difficult for a number of reasons (starting with the quasi-cold war between Greece and Turkey and the fact that you cannot just let refugees drown). Even if the border could be controlled, there is no guarantee that refugees would not find a way through, say, Russia (which is already happening, after all, and it's not like Putin wouldn't have an incentive to show them the way). Any policy that assumes that you can make a major dent into the refugee influx is pure fantasy, IMO.
> Perhaps. But when the racist right points out this "botched response" (designed to hide the truth), surely you can understand why this gets them extra credibility with voters? And similarly, does anyone besides the racists have a plan to prevent another Cologne?
The racists don't have a plan to prevent another Cologne. Not a credible one, anyway. They live in a fantasyland where you can just push a button and immigration stops.
In the end, what happened in Cologne is like a mass shooting in the US: individually, a horrific event, but one for which there is no quick and easy public policy response, and in the end, does not pose a much bigger statistical risk than being hit by lightning. The best public policy response to Cologne is probably to recognize that the suspects primarily belong to existing organized crime groups and therefore to deal with these gangs. That, unfortunately, does not have an easy solution, but comes down to pretty traditional police work. The biggest problem in this area is that budget cuts have hit law enforcement pretty hard; Germany could definitely use quite a few more police officers.
In any event, the biggest public policy challenges lie in the civil sector right now: for example, teaching refugees the language and teaching them skills that make them employable is one of the biggest concerns, but there's a shortage of teachers.
No, I don't suggest it's higher. I suggest that there is no obvious correlation between religion and crime rate...
Sorry, I misinterpreted this phrase as being a suggestion that it's higher: "Note that this does not mean that immigrants do not commit less crimes than residents."
So what are the numbers, for immigrants and Germans?
The racists don't have a plan to prevent another Cologne. Not a credible one, anyway. They live in a fantasyland where you can just push a button and immigration stops.
Most politics is pure fantasyland. Consider Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders here in the US - both are spouting pure fantasy that appeals to the emotions of their base.
In the end, what happened in Cologne is like a mass shooting in the US: individually, a horrific event, but one for which there is no quick and easy public policy response, and in the end, does not pose a much bigger statistical risk than being hit by lightning.
Eyeballing the numbers, this seems unlikely. As far as I know, tens to hundreds of people were not struck by lightning in Cologne, and similar numbers at the Swedish music festival "We Are Sthlm" every year since 2014.
So on the one hand, we've got left wing types denying reality as you do above. Then we've got right wing types at least acknowledging the problem and proposing to do something about it.
Unless left wing types can compromise on ideology and actually acknowledge reality (Muslims raping women is a vastly larger problem than lighting strikes), people will turn to the racist right for solutions.
> So what are the numbers, for immigrants and Germans?
I don't know of any recent study, as I told you?
> Eyeballing the numbers, this seems unlikely. As far as I know, tens to hundreds of people were not struck by lightning in Cologne
But you need to amortize the numbers over time and the population of the country. The biggest problem in Cologne was that the police got caught flatfooted, something that's unlikely to happen again (German police normally have plenty of experience of dealing with nasty crowds, see the hooligan problem). 9/11 was also a horrible event, too, but there's pretty much zero chance that any terrorist will ever again be able to fly a passenger plane into a building, so the statistical risk of experiencing that when boarding a plane is essentially nil (and was extremely low even beforehand).
> So on the one hand, we've got left wing types denying reality as you do above
First of all, I'd be careful with categorizing me as a "left wing type" (except by US standards, but David Cameron would probably count as a "left wing type" there now). In this area, my stance probably comes close to classical liberalism, which is traditionally considered a centrist position (plus, my overall positive view of law enforcement tends to not win me many friends on the far left). More importantly, I like to base my judgement on facts, not anecdotal media reports.
Second, I'm the one who has cited actual statistics that at least so far seem to disprove your thesis that Muslims seem to be disproportionately prone to crime and to which you haven't offered a counterargument (remember that a single counterexample disproves a universal thesis). Conversely, you seem to base your claims solely on anecdotal evidence (the plural of which, I remind you, is not data).
Note that I haven't disagreed that immigration will likely negatively affect the overall crime rate in a measurable way (if only because of the low SES of these immigrants; other factors may come into play, too, but that would be pure conjecture at this point). I have also pointed out that it is likely to cause social problems in general because of the known difficulties with integrating a large foreign population with limited resources across a language and culture barrier with (often) considerable skill gaps.
> Unless left wing types can compromise on ideology and actually acknowledge reality (Muslims raping women is a vastly larger problem than lighting strikes), people will turn to the racist right for solutions.
I did not make a statistical comparison between Muslims raping women and lightning strikes; I referred specifically to the events in Cologne, which do not appear to have had a religious motivation or cause.
You explicitly disclaimed the idea that you disproved my hypothesis in a previous post: Note that this does not mean that immigrants do not commit less crimes than residents.
I'm glad you've provided stats, I just unfortunately don't read German.
Also living in Switzerland, I've noticed a scary involuntary alliance of journalism with what you might call the US-style conservatives (which is right-wing to far right-wing here):
Critical journalists who tend - by a variety of factors like age and education - to be on the more 'left' side of the political spectrum write a large amount of critical articles about those various conservative initiatives, like the one mentioned above. The attacked parties gain an incredible amount of publicity and they've taken the tabloids as their "publicity hostage".
Combine this with the diffuse resentment of those readers/people not feeling represented by government, those conservatives easily win at elections and votes - even when some of those initiatives are in clear disarray of everything the country stood and stands for.
I always think of Woody Allen's "Bananas": By tomorrow the official language will be Swedish (same as Switzerland ;) ) and people have to wear their underwear on their heads. But at least its against the establishment.
The death of those sometimes outrageously stupid political ideas could be easily achieved by simply ignoring them and their pundits. This might force the political players to get back to actual problem-solving concepts and lead to healthier debates in the media.
>> I've noticed a scary involuntary alliance of journalism with what you might call the US-style conservatives
I thought that this 'alliance' was called ownership. Rupert Murdoch et al whose political agenda is less government control and more control for the private sector which translates into private control by fewer (and fewer) people with less accountability. Essentially what we are going through, world wide, is a consolidation of wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands.
This consolidation suites the purposes of the ownership of media companies, and it is the media companies that set the tone and content of their reporting. Over the last 50 years there has been a massive consolidation in the ownership of media companies, with a corresponding massive shift to a very right wing perspective in popular reporting.
I can not think of a single time that a strike by a Union has been reported in a favorable light, for example.
> with what you might call the US-style conservatives (which is right-wing to far right-wing here)
Your comparison doesn't make any sense. I'm guessing you don't understand the right wing in the US very well.
That far right in Switzerland and you get into neo-nazi ideology, fascism etc. which is represented in the SVP and New Right types.
US conservatives are mostly not like that. US conservatism is a mainstream ideology that represents upwards of a quarter of all Americans. Most are in favor of vastly reducing the size of government (but not reducing the military or spying). Ted Cruz for example is not a nazi sympathizer and rather than in favor of a huge government ala fascism, would prefer to cut it in half. Fascism favors dramatically increasing the power of government, and the power of government over the economy; US conservatives typically are against that (even if it's not very well represented in the politicians).
In America, neo-nazi types, the KKK, skinheads etc have practically no power or representation in politics, they are fringe outcasts that are not accepted in any major party. That has been the case for decades. Unlike in countries such as Sweden for example, where neo-nazi parties hold elected power.
The Koch brothers are considered far right wing in the US - they're libertarians that believe in high degrees of social liberty, ending mass-incarceration and the war on drugs, and a small government.
I agree that my comparison is not very accurate. I didn't mean "far-right" in terms of neo-nazi and other extremist ideology, but parliamentary far-right - strictly geographically speaking. (And although they like to create a martial vocabulary, I tend to disagree that the SVP/New Right is anything close to neo-nazis... at this point in time - after all the SVP-styled conservatism does represent at least a quarter of Swiss votes)
It strikes me as the biggest parallel between US- and CH-far right (as described above) that their voters seem to be less critical of the political suggestions their political leaders make. Harsh punishments and swift deportations of foreigners that are pictured as potentially criminal/dangerous/job-threatening are just an example of this kind of rhetoric.
So, when journalists condemn a certain "deportation/punishment" ideas of such a politician, IMO all they are doing is giving him a platform to communicate those ideas. Which was the point I was trying to make in terms of the original post about punishment.
You conveniently ignore the evangelical aspect to the hard-right. Christian Dominionism is part of their game plan, and there is definite influence in government by its proponents.
Nah, not really. Hard-right evangelicals have been dwindling in power in America for decades, and I'd be surprised if most conservatives could pick "Christian Dominionism" out of a police lineup.
In Denmark it is as far as I can tell still acceptable to publicly discuss and vent about the issues concerning both crime and immigration. In some neighbouring countries it has been mostly put down by left wing "moderators" under the seemingly well intended excuse of not wanting to cause stigma (stigmatizing the critics in the process), instead causing huge amounts of frustration and a sense of betrayal in large parts of the general public. This is what makes otherwise regular people turn to parties much further to the right than they would otherwise.
I think Denmark will come out on top in this, other countries should take a cue from them.
Note: I live in a neighbouring country.
Edit: Moderated "general public" to "large parts of the general public"
Considering the rise of Dansk Folkeparti in Denmark (sort-of a "nicer/cleaner" version of Sweden Democrats), and the very low quality level of the current Danish political debate, I'm not sure the Danish approach is doing much to defuse right-wing populism through letting people air their grievances. They can, but they just they do that in addition to voting for populist-right parties, not instead of. In any case it seems to be a much broader phenomenon than the political discourse norms of any one country. Right-populist politics, in the various local flavors offered by DF/SD/Trump/Szydło, are gaining across many countries despite quite a few differences in those countries.
Dansk Folkeparti (Danish Peoples Party) arose because of the established primarily left leaning political parties completely ignored and froze out the party to begin with.
The biggest political party, the Social Democrats (also likes to call itself the workers party) lost touch with it's voters when society in general went from production sectors to service sectors. A rising unrest about immigration manifested itself in a lot of voters who didn't benefit from the immigrants coming and taking jobs or just living of welfare that many danish voters felt they paid for (Denmark have extreme taxes)
And so while the political establishment tried to ignore them they slowly grew to become now the second biggest political party in Denmark. However now for other reasons than muslim immigration. The reason now is that DF is the only party that really takes the average joes concerns seriously no matter how primitive they might seem to many.
Today most parties are in line with DF as they have recognized that you can't just take in a lot of people and then expect them to become a natural part of society.
Denmark has one of the most honest debates about immigration and it speaks volume about the level of political corectness and control over the media in other countries that even though Denmark is one of the countries who take most immigrants and refugees, spend most money on immigration both domestically and internationally and has some of the most extensive rights for immigrants it still had to defend it's political line in the EU.
Denmark is fairly clear on what it's doing. There are many bad things I can say about my home country but I actually think that debate wise we have some of the most free and civilized debates especially considering the hot topics we often discuss.
I think right wing populists benefit a lot from the general feeling that the established parties and the media refuse to even admit that there might be a problem caused by mass immigration.
Contrary to _dilerium's answer, I think this, in at least Sweden, was a quite significant factor. But that must(?) have changed now. During the last wave of immigrants coming to Sweden, the whole range of parties, except for the Left Party, made a 180 degree turn and agreed with the Sweden Democrats narrative. Even the Social democrats are now saying that Sweden is under a social and economic collapse due to immigration which was lauded by the Swedish Democrats.
I'm skeptical that's a significant factor, because right-populists seem to be gaining even in countries, like Denmark and the USA, which have a large portion of mainstream media and politicians hostile to mass immigration. In that case, immigration opponents can't claim that nobody takes their concerns seriously, or that you're not allowed to criticize mass immigration, because many mainstream outlets and figures are doing so. But the media support seems to if anything just help their cause: years of Fox News harshly criticizing illegal immigration from Mexico feeds well into Trump's strategy of doing the same thing, but with the rhetoric amped up a few notches.
> I'm skeptical that's a significant factor, because right-populists seem to be gaining even in countries, like Denmark and the USA, which have a large portion of mainstream media and politicians hostile to mass immigration.
The populist complaint against rightist politicians in the United States is that they claim to oppose illegal immigration, but that's actually just a scam to fool the rubes into voting for them. When push comes to shove, they quietly endorse the current (Democratic) administration's policies on the matter and make sure that efforts to block them always fail. Given that, the factors behind Trump's support aren't so different from the factors behind support for populists in Europe.
Right wing isn't gaining in Denmark. Not sure where you have that from.
DF is gaining because ordinary people are seeing their jobs being outsourced or underbid by eastern european citizens. In fact this is today the primary reason for why parties like DF gets more and more power. They are the only parties who actually takes peoples concern seriously. There is a much much bigger fraction of the western society who do not stand to benefit from technological progress, multicultural society and globalized workforce.
If anything what is happening right now is a national conservative trend where people who aren't benefitting will vote on the parties that are sceptic to progress.
I agree with that. Fears about globalization's effects on the working class / blue-collar middle class, which in Western Europe post-WW2 had a reasonably good and stable economic position, but is now becoming much more precarious, are a big economic driving force behind the right-populist parties. I think that's a much bigger effect than any worries about the media or political correctness.
> In some neighbouring countries it has been mostly put down by left wing "moderators" under the seemingly well intended excuse of not wanting to cause stigma
And still, conservatives and racists are routinely
headlining most popular medias and public debates. They don't have any problem to express their point of view.
What is rightfully "put down" is incitement to ethnic or racial hatred (which is also illegal in most Europe countries).
> in large parts of the general public.
I assume what you call "large part of the general public" are the usual 20% that vote for far right parties.
Most parties with few exceptions share 90% of Dansk Folkepartis immigration policy. Even under the previous center-left government most shared this view. They disagree on some very important areas but all the stuff you read about in the newspapers (much of it planted by danish politicians not in agreement) there is political consensus about.
But go back 20 years in Denmark or just a couple of years in Sweden and you will see a different pictures. They were the parias of society.
Despite the huge success Sveriges Demokraterne had at last election the other parties decided to completely ignore them and to keep them out of power.
Swedish police has not been allowed to put ethnicity into reports even when it was relevant.
Sweden (and Germany) invited immigrants and fugitives to just come. Now Sweden sobered by reality closed it's borders to Denmark because they can't have anymore.
I am not a big proponent of DF and personally I am an "open borders, but no money" kind of person. This is one of the things I believe works really well here in the US.
But they were wrong about it becoming an issue. Especially since Denmark have so lucrative social benefits as they do (which the fugitives and immigrants go after and I don't blame them)
But this is a much more complicated discussion than just right wing racist parties vs. the good people on the left.
The discussion in Europe right now really is about how the EU makes sure that it balances it's international obligations with it's obligations over it's citizens.
> What is rightfully "put down" is incitement to ethnic or racial hatred (which is also illegal in most Europe countries).
In my opinion, this is not the case. Even criticism based on reason and facts with legitimate concerns tend to get flogged for being racist and hate speech. The climate seems to be changing now, though, with major news corps and public figures starting to express more concern than they ever have (also claiming they always have been critical, so it's quite pathetic in my view).
> I assume what you call "large part of the general public" are the usual 20% that vote for far right parties.
I may have a clouded memory, but I don't think 20% voting far right is anywhere near usual when speaking of Scandinavia in a historical context.
Also, even what's considered to be right wing politics in Scandinavia has traditionally been quite socialist.
>And still, conservatives and racists are routinely headlining most popular medias and public debates. They don't have any problem to express their point of view.
I think the argumentative tactic is to claim that you are leftist/cultural-marxist/whatever who is "being silent about problems" if you don't portray the issues exactly the same way as they are doing. It works because in the beginning the left did not want to talk about the problems.
Interestingly, the first possibility isn't self-contradictory. If you agree to work for a very low salary, you'll bid down the wages for everyone else and require public assistance to stay afloat. From what I've heard, it's happening with Walmart workers in the US.
> Don't you get civil disorder every time a high profile, widely hated criminal gets off with a sentence that's much lighter than people get in the movies?
It might be a cultural thing to average levels of criminality from the top and bottom. Much like Americans believe some things to be binary or some things to be a spectrum, perhaps in Denmark criminality is binary, either you are and they throw the average sized book at all of them, or you aren't.
As an anecdote this is the same Denmark that went insane over a retailer selling Marmite, costing many thousands of euro in fines and punishments. That would fit the pattern of once the binary switch flips from non-criminal to criminal, a medium sized book is thrown at all miscreants.
Another possible anecdote is I know their neighbors, and probably the Danes also, punish drunken driving similar to how attempted murder is treated in the US. That would also fit the theory.
Drunken driving is essentially an attempted manslaughter, but Scandinavian treatment of it is fairly lenient. In most cases you get away with a huge fine or a short prison term.
> That's not true in the slightest, drunken driving laws don't measure the drivers impairment but BAC.
They measure the impairment and BAC is an instrument to that. Otherwise it would be of no interest. There used to be other impairment tests, like walking the line, before breath testers became commonplace.
> And in any case, attempt implies intent.
As manslaughter is an unintentional killing, I thought the metaphor was fairly obvious.
You know drunk drivers are prone to committing manslaughter other variables being equal, you do it anyway: well that's an attempt. Rationale behind it is irrelevant, just like noone cares you needed those money badly when you killed that cashier.
Given that I moved my entire family here, just got my green card and isn't planning to move any time soon I would agree that it's the best democracy in the world :)
But this is not a discussion about democracy and actually not so much about the length of sentences (although that does matter) this was more a discussion about what constitutes a crime that you go to prison for and what constitutes stupidities that might be illegal but shouldn't treated as if you are on the verge of becoming either a mass murders, criminal mastermind or drug overlord.
I have two kids, one which is american citizen the other now with a green card and I am hoping with time to apply for american citizenship (Denmark allow dual citizenship). My concern is that my kids grow up in a society with these kind of laws and I don't want them to be caught in some Kafkan universe which there are plenty of examples of here.
With regards to Civil unrest in Denmark. Then no. There is of course debates and there are people who think the rules are too lax. And so the justice system needs to find a balance where it's primary function is to deter people from committing crimes to begin with and then make sure the victims of crimes feels the offence adequately punished.
This is not an easy task and Denmark is not perfect but as much as I feel free in the US I am a thousand times more afraid of the US justice system than the Danish. It's the one thing I fear here and I am by all intents and purposes of the word a law abiding citizen.
..."go to jail just because society does not know what else to do with you..."
The purpose of putting to people in jail stems from the 3 Rs: Retribution, Removal, and Rehabilitation. Retribution: punishment for the crime. Removal: removal from society so no further harm can be committed by the individual. Rehabilitation: make the individual a better person so they don't commit more crimes and become better citizens.
Unfortunately, we usually don't accomplish all 3, but 1 of the 3 usually gets done.
Sure but thats not the point I was trying to make.
I am less interested in the harshness of the crimes than in the defintion of the crimes. This to me is much more important.
Where the actual sentencing becomes important (and potentially problematic) is when you are defining too much as a crime as it forces you to go even harder on other on harder crimes.
The feeling of justice isn't an absolute system it's a highly relative one with some upper and lower bounds. There are plenty of examples of female victims of violent men who feel vindicated by being able to tell the violator what he did to them or to understand why he did it. Just as an example of a punishment which is less deterministic in outcome than many of the rules we see in the US.
And one more reason: deterrence. Supposedly, would-be criminals are deterred by seeing others get jail time. Depending on the crime, that purpose is rarely accomplished as well.
Deterrence exists, but all the research (in the US) suggests it's caused by certainty of punishment, not magnitude of punishment. A two-week stint in jail that's almost guaranteed will do far more to deter criminals than a ten-year stint that almost never happens.
Unfortunately, it's much easier to crank up the penalties and posture as "tough on crime" than it is to make sure police are actually closing cases.
Specifically, the US tends to be obsessed with the first R, not just in jail terms but also how the law is applied. Especially with "values"-based laws.
Not only is that true, but the first R is also the one providing the least value to society, aside from sating the vengeance-lust of generally uninvolved parties.
When I said values I didn't mean "value" as in "benefit" but moral values (which in the US were heavily shaped by Puritan Christianity). Vengeance is a part of that, reimbursing the victims for their suffering by punishing the offender (and thus making them suffer "in return").
As an example, in capital punishment allowing specifically members of the families of the victims to sit in on an execution is solely based on vengeance. Neutral observers, sure -- to document it. Relatives and family, sure -- to allow them to say goodbye. But the victims' involvement ends with that of the judges. If it weren't for the aspect of vengeance, the execution would be "not for them", it's just carrying out the sentence.
In France, where you have a high level of common criminality, and where the justice system is trying to keep criminals out of jail but for the most violent crimes, the results are absolutely disastrous.
The police doesn't even bother charging criminals as they systematically walk free. Criminals accumulate dozens of offenses on their criminal records in complete impunity.
Denmark, Switzerland, Norway or Sweden can afford to have very lax justice systems because they have a population that commits little crime. But with a different population these systems would just fall apart.
This is disingenuous. Crime is low in Denmark, Switzerland, Norway or Sweden in large part due to how society is organised. You can't say that put a different population in and it would fall apart. Rather let a different population grow up in these countries and they would simply do less crime.
From the things I know about France I can see many obvious reasons why crime might be higher. It is a very strict society compared to e.g. Scandinavia which allows e.g. children and youngster a much freer life. The French are more likely to engage in almost psychological terror against their children. Well behaved children who don't make noise and sit still is valued in France, while Scandinavians are far more tolerant towards the natural behaviour of children and perform very mild sanctions towards bad behaviour.
France is also a more elitist and technocratic society, while Scandinavia is more egalitarian and cares more about the common man than the elite. The dehumanising vast monotone areas built in France which are now rife with crime would never have been built in a Scandinavian society.
I know I sounded very negative now. I didn't include all the wonderful things about France, because the whole point was to highlight why it isn't just a matter of having different people. The organisation of society creates the people.
The same could be said about the US. It is a society organised to produce violence.
First, this is very exaggerated. Criminals don't walk free. If you have an afternoon to spend, I recommend you go to a courthouse and see by yourself. You'll get a better sample than what some politicians may tell you.
Second, France isn't a war zone and most of us live pretty safely and happy over here.
More importantly, do you know for sure that the situation would be better with harsher prison sentences?
More seriously, the problem is not so much homicides than common criminality. Courts almost always give suspended sentences for petty crime, and even when the judge does not suspend the sentence, the policy is to automatically suspend it behind the scene afterwards if it's less than 6 months (juge d'application des peines). And if a criminal still ends up in jail, he would only ever do between half and two third of the sentence. The whole system is designed to be toothless.
The example of New York City under Giuliani is a pretty spectacular example of the impact of a tougher penal policy against crime. I am not suggesting this should be the only response but I do think that no response will be efficient without it.
Very interesting. On a similar note, John Donohue and Steven Levitt theorized that the result of Roe v. Wade and the resultant availability of abortions resulted in a drop in crime beginning roughly 18 years later:
http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/DonohueLevittT...
Having a quick look at the crime statistics, France doesn't seem to be a hotbed of crime and violence at the moment.
According to what I could dig up from Google, it's had a homicide rate of 1.2 per 100,000 people and a serious assault rate of 299 per 100,000 people over the last couple of years.
Those are respectively slightly higher (1.2 vs 1.0) and significantly lower (400 vs 299, although data collection methodologies may be different) than the UK where I live, which is generally considered to be a reasonably safe country crime-wise.
(Didn't really have time to dig into other crime categories - would be interested to hear if they buck the trend.)
Not claiming your statement isn't true, but unless I'm misreading the statistics the effect doesn't seem to be a massive crime wave.
The problem is not homicides which have been consistently decreasing over the years. The problem is rather assaults, theft, cars burnt, burglaries, etc. Many of which do not even get reported anymore. For that reason the official statistics are not a good indicator. Alternative indicators that rely on surveys are rather used to measure the evolution.
That's right, but only if what was stolen was insured and worth doing the paperwork. So cars burnt are usually fairly reliable (but the gvt often tries to publish the statistics with long delays to hide the extent of a violent episode). Burglaries a bit less, depending on the damage to the property and what was stolen. But someone stealing your mobile phone or punching you in the face because you looked at them the wrong way, not so much. In fact most of the time the police tries to discourage people from filling a complaint, as it creeps up their crime statistics, and worse than that, their unsolved crime statistics.
The flipside of that is having people with lenghty but minor criminal records doing life without the possibility of parole for drastic offenses such as being the middleman for a $10 marijuana transaction, or stealing a $160 jacket [1]. I would gladly accept a rise in petty crime to not live in a country where such barbaric sentences for nonviolent crimes are even possible.
Is that actually the law or some kind of convention?
Wikipedia says otherwise:
In Denmark, a life sentence (Livsvarigt fængsel in Danish) theoretically means life without parole: that prisoners will spend the rest of their lives in prison. However, prisoners are entitled to a pardoning hearing after 12 years.... Prisoners sentenced to life imprisonment serve an average of 16 years, more for cases considered to be particularly grave.
I think in many European countries the maximum prison sentence is about 20-25 years, even for the worst crimes and even for multiple crimes combined, because they are usually not combined at all. Only the highest sentence is taken into account. There's no such thing as 200+ year prison sentences in Europe because you combine 15 offenses.
I don't even know what's the point of such sentences. Is it for PR purposes? "Look at us, we gave Osama Bin Laden 1,200 years in prison! Aren't we tough?!" Because it makes no sense to me. Just like it makes no sense to get a few years for rape or murder but be even charged with 30+ years for some online crimes.
Europe has many countries with many different legal systems so you can't make such blanket statements. Especially depending on how you define Europe.
>I don't even know what's the point of such sentences. Is it for PR purposes?
It is not for PR purposes, usually.
It is so that if a person is acquitted of one of the crimes they still stay in jail for the others. If someone gets 50 years for rape and murder and is later acquitted for murder, but not rape, they still serve their rape sentence.
The judge can decide if the jail time is served concurrently or consecutively.
It seems silly to give someone 3 life sentences, after all, you only have one life. But that means they'd have to be acquitted of 3 different crimes to get out of jail. The other reason is if those life sentences come with the possibility of parole after x years - by stacking those life sentences consecutively it would delay the parole hearings until after the person is dead.
Buy sometimes it is used to emphasize the crime's severity. Such is probably the case with the 40,000 year sentence for the Spanish terrorists. Even though they will only serve 40 years - the max allowed by Spanish law.
You can't lump all of Europe together, they all have their own justice systems, very different from each other. Three terrorists in Spain were sentenced to about 30 to 40 THOUSAND years each.
The situation wasn't much different in the U.S. a few decades ago. The average state prisoner served a third of their sentence. During the crime waves of the 1970's and 1980's, people voted to virtually eliminate that practice.
I just want to mention that this is within the ordinary system. If you're considered exceedingly dangerous that's just crazy. Better give you a treatment-sentence. That means a REAL life sentence.
Denmark had a guy who killed 4 policemen. They let him out 33 years later on a pardon; by then he was 71 and had server about 33 years.
My understanding is that they'll generally keep you if the experts have good reason to believe you're still a threat to other people, otherwise you get pardoned at some point.
There aren't very many of these sentences, I think you can find the complete list here in the Danish article on Wikipedia:
I thought I'd never hear of a country with sane incarceration policy - by golly, don't imprison people past the point where they are dangerous, because then you are just spending money on pointless incarceration. Go Denmark!
> "Coming from Denmark where life is max 16 years..."
What's the rationale for that limit? Is that the maximum time it takes to reform someone? The time after which anyone's being a threat to society expires? The magic number of years for just retribution for all (combinations of) crimes?
I believe most European criminal law is divorced from the concept of retribution. Only deterrent, the 'reeducation' of offenders and the active prevention of keeping a dangerous person locked up are valid reasons for incarceration.
On a practical level, I believe the idea is that longer sentences do not provide any additional deterrent. Nor do they provide better opportunities for reintegration. Both effects probably see decreasing marginal utility with longer sentences. Even more practical: most violent crimes are committed by males aged 18 to 30. 18 + 16 = 34.
On an ethical level, European law often relies on the concept of 'dignity' which is ill-defined but (for this purpose) interpreted to mean that even hideous crimes do not justify the destruction of all of a person's future.
So if imprisoning people for beyond 16 years doesn't provide better opportunities for rehabilitation or reintegration, isn't that a reason to continue imprisoning them beyond 16 years in order to protect society from them?
As a family of concepts human rights often rely on the concept of dignity, so all law (or ethics) -- European, American, African, Samoan, Caribbean, Peruvian, whatever -- that is based on or significantly influenced by human rights often also relies on the concept of dignity. But yeah, as you say, the concept is so broad and, without a substantiating framework, generally empty of meaning that I can imagine that (though not how) some could use it to say that even 1) planning and intentionally murdering 77 innocent people and then 2) going on to remain unreformed and unrepentant of it shouldn't "justify the destruction of all of a person's future". (Though, thankfully, as far as I know, people who think like that so far either 1) lack the courage of their convictions or 2) lack the power (or both) to actually impose that view of 'dignity' on any society.)
The rational for such limits in Europe is always the same: the law of diminishing returns. Increasing the max sentence after a certain point no longer has any impact on crime rates, so why do it? It costs money and creates unnecessary human suffering.
Notice that Europeans do not place the same importance on retribution as Americans do. You hear less talk of "paying your debt to society" and such things. The modern European justice system is mostly seen as a mechanism of deterrence. I suspect that this is because Europe is more secular.
That relies on the fundamental assumption that all criminals will reform their way after a few years in jail and therefore deserve a second chance. Most criminals should but I don't think everyone agree that all criminals should. The alternative to the death penalty for the most dangerous criminals is to be able to lock them up forever or until such age that they cannot cause any more harm.
In that respect I see these short sentences for very serious crimes (multiple murders, etc) to be more dangerous than helpful.
Obviously it's only a problem in countries where you have significant levels of violent crimes.
Even in countries that have maximum prison sentence length, people who are considered dangerous are still not let out into the public. They'll stay until they are considered rehabilitated. For dangerous people that have mental health problems, they don't get a prison sentence at all, but they will be forced to stay in a treatment facility until they are no longer dangerous to others.
At least that's how it works in Finland. The whole system is designed to get people to become productive and healthy citizens with minimal suffering, not to provide retribution.
However, what's wrong with retribution? If my daughter was raped and murdered, how should that person be 'rehabilitated?' My daughter would still be dead and the criminal would be able to resume his life. That isn't fair by any definition.
What happens to a victim of any crime is never fair and you will never restore that fairness with any punishment.
You can accept that, adjust your goals and move forward or deal with the inevitable frustration and anger of being unable to get vengeance for the rest of your life.
On one version of retributive thinking, retribution isn't really about restoring fairness, about balancing out cosmic scales of justice. It's about giving a person what's due to him or her. We call it reward when what's due to her is a result of good she's done, and we call it (retributive) punishment when it's as a result of evil she's done.
On that view, it's generally just right to reward people for good and punish them for evil. Consequences -- even grand ones like balancing the cosmic scales of justice -- don't enter it.
But the primary purpose of justice is to punish criminal behaviors. We may want as a secondary goal to reduce recidivism but it cannot be at the expense of the primary goal. I strongly disagree with the idea that criminality is a form of mental disease and that prisons are just a sort of hospital to cure criminals.
For the same reason the severity of the sentence should be driven by the aversion of the society to the crime committed more than considerations on what will happen to the criminal after the sentence has been executed.
The purpose is neither to punish, nor to rehabilitate: A perfect criminal justice system is one that prevents future crime, while at the same time minimizing how many people aren't doing something useful with their lives. Imprison or kill someone that could be helping society, and you are failing too.
Punishment and rehabilitation are just parts of achieving the goal: Punishment tries to prevent further crime, both by the person being punished, and people that know what will happen to them if they are caught. Rehabilitation is great when it succeeds: Sending a rapist out to do more raping isn't so great.
All of our policies about punishment, rehabilitation and enforcement quality are tradeoffs, and the question is what's the best tradeoffs. The biggest one, IMO, has little to do with the size of the punishment (they are all pretty big), but with deterrence. Nobody is going to stop killing someone because they'll "only" get 15 years in jail. 15 years in jail is horrible for most people that aren't living in terrible conditions outside. The real kick is in chances of getting caught. The criminal believes that he won't get caught, so the size of the punishment is not necessarily that relevant, other than in keeping the person that committed the crime away from doing the same again outside of jail (crime vs other immates happens!). Improved enforcement quality, and making sure that people just don't even want to do criminal things, regardless of the punishment, is where it's at.
The problem with that is that enforcement itself is a tradeoff: We could do a lot to prevent crime in NYC if 25% of people were in some form of law enforcement (including policing the police), but it'd be a tradeoff we'd all be unwilling to make, because it'd be very wasteful.
Why punish people? That's not a goal, not a moral value or something anyone should have a desire to do.
The goal is peace. It has to be peace. You might never reach that goal entirely but you can try and you want people that ensure peace exists and people that restore it once it has been violated.
Quite clearly exerting vengeance through the justice system is not the best way to achieve that goal, in fact it's obviously by far the worst.
The only form of primitive justice is the law of talion. The problem with the law of talion is that it relies on the capacity of the offended party to retaliate on the offending party. If the offending party is too powerful, there is no justice.
That's why from feudal to modern societies, the Lord / King / Judge renders justice. The system becomes just again by the retaliation being decided and executed by a higher form of authority.
If someone beats me up, and we both go in front of the judge and the judge decides to do nothing because of some procedural reason or because doing nothing would benefit some greater social good, this is the very definition of injustice.
I am not saying that a justice system shouldn't care about rehabilitating criminals after they serve their sentence, but that negating the punitive role is negating the very reason why the justice system exists and is accepted.
I'd argue that the purpose of justice is to ensure that a society can be sustainable in the long term.
That means justice is combination of deterrence and rehabilitation to a. discourage behaviours that are detrimental to society as a whole and b. to ensure that the offender ceases that behaviour and becomes a productive member of society again.
'Punishment' can play as small or as large a part in point (a) as you want, but the more you make it a large part of (a), the less success you will have with point (b). And failing at point (b) means you effectively fail point (a) - ie offenders coming out of the justice system who can't integrate back into society often reoffend.
Retribution serves you, it does not serve the community.
There is also a quote of Gandhi I cannot find. So I'll paraphrase: If you are angry at someone, and he did not intend to hurt you, you should not be angry. If he did intend to hurt you, he is not as wise/it's in his nature, and you should not be angry.
Let's take an example, which is actually not that theoretical (this happened several times in Europe). Say a Saudi prince, in one of his depraved cocaine trips to London, rapes a British girl. He is arrested, presented to the court. If he is sentenced to jail, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia will react very badly and blacklist the UK from all future contracts, resulting in hundreds of people losing their job in the UK, and hardship for their families. The British govt asks the court to be lenient and to let the prince go. The court obliges. Is this justice?
If we follow your logic it is. Retribution would only serve the British girl but not the community. The community has nothing to gain from punishing the prince but everything to loose from loosing all these Saudi contracts. If you think justice is only about serving the community, not about retribution then you will happily approve the decision of the court. My personal position is that it is the very negation of justice, and that behaving this way jeopardize the acceptance of the judicial system by the population.
As for Gandhi, it's similar to the Christian "if someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also". But I am not sure that a recipe that worked well against a democratic British parliament will work as well when facing a violent thug.
> There is also a quote of Gandhi I cannot find. So I'll paraphrase: If you are angry at someone, and he did not intend to hurt you, you should not be angry. If he did intend to hurt you, he is not as wise/it's in his nature, and you should not be angry.
What? Why shouldn't I be angry if a fool intentionally hurts me?
That isn't fair by any biblical definition, but luckily not everybody cares about that.
The way people are treated shouldn't be based on what the most emotionally invested people want. What makes the person rehabilitated is that they don't do the crime again, and nothing else. You can't cause wrongdoing to someone who is dead, so the only downside to releasing the person is you might feel sad. Only if you dwell on it for the rest of your life. But you won't, people move on.
Wait. So, on your view, it's fair -- "Treating people equally without favouritism or discrimination" or "Just or appropriate in the circumstances", according to oxforddictionaries.com's top two definitions -- for a rapist-murderer to be able to get on with his life (maybe after 20 extremely frustrating but possibly also fruitful years for him) while an innocent young lady's is tragically cut short?
And you think it's an indictment on Biblical (and, apparently, also Oxonion) definitions of "fair" that they'd disagree with you on that?
Neither of those definitions disagree with me. I mean, if you read it with your apparently biblical bent, then "treating people equally" probably means the rapist should be raped and killed. But no sane society thinks that's a good idea.
"Just or appropriate" doesn't actually say anything about what should be done in a case of rape+murder. Who's to say life in prison is appropriate? I don't think it is. It's a waste. The young lady wasn't put in a hellish environment for a lifetime. And what do we as a society gain by wasting money on prisoners for exactly zero return on investment? We're basically punishing ourselves to spend that money. Better to wait until the problem is solved (i.e. we don't think they'll do it again) and let them out where they can do something useful.
We could make all sorts of assumptions and appeals to common sense, but we would be wasting our time because we have statistics.
The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world, the largest prison population in the world and a much higher violent crime rate than the vast majority of western countries. Objectively, the justice system in the US is inferior to the European system. This is not a matter of opinion or ideology, there is strong empirical evidence.
The U.S. had much more violent crime long before its current incarceration policies. At the start of the 20th century, the homicide rate was several times higher than in the UK. Meanwhile, the rise in incarceration in the last several decades lagged the rise in crime over that period by about a decade. It wasn't until 1998 that incarceration caught up to the increase in violent crime since the 1960's, though it has overshot since then.
The problem with these types of comparison is that you are comparing very different populations with very different cultures.
If you could compare populations like that, then for instance the idea of banning guns to reduce the number of shootings in the US would be defeated by the example of Switzerland where pretty much every man has an assault riffle at home, and where you see little to no crime, and certainly no mass shooting. But the reality is that Swiss citizens behave differently than US citizens.
> The problem with these types of comparison is that you are comparing very different populations with very different cultures.
The comparison shows that it is possible to have low violent crime rates and low incarceration rates. After seeing that this is possible, I cannot understand why a country like the US would not go after these two goals. I am inclined to suspect that it has something to do with turning the prison system into a private business and the predominance of puritanism in American culture.
And let's not exaggerate the cultural differences between the US and Europe. We are talking about western democracies, stemming from the same intellectual source (the Enlightenment) and the same genetic source: the US was created by Europeans, and mostly consists to this day of people of European descent (yes, including "hispanics", as the name implies).
> the idea of banning guns to reduce the number of shootings in the US would be defeated by the example of Switzerland
The idea that banning guns is a requirement to have a peaceful society is effectively defeated by the Swiss example. It show that private gun ownership cannot be the ultimate cause of the problem.
By the way, the graph that is shown somewhere else, comparing incarceration and violent crime rates, shows no correlation between the two. A concept of "eras" has to be introduced to allow one to talk about these two metrics together.
> the US was created by Europeans, and mostly consists to this day of people of European descent
Yes, but the statistics for violent crime in the US break down in interesting ways once you start looking at "genetic source", whatever that is. There is lots of discussion as to the _why_, of course
"Hispanics" in the US includes people of nearly pure European descent, nearly pure Amerindian descent, mixes of the two, etc. It's a pretty useless demographic category, really.
> That relies on the fundamental assumption that all criminals will reform their way after a few years in jail and therefore deserve a second chance.
First of all, most countries with a life sentence does not have an upper bound (would be silly to call it life inprisonment), but rather a practice with an average sentence of such a length. There is nothing that prevents someone who is consideered dangerous to be kept in prison longer.
Second: Those who are kept the longest behind bars are those who are sentenced to psychiatric treatment (It's actually odd that you can be sentenced to psychicatric treatment, but you can in many european countries). That is essentially "you'll get out when you are no longer dangerous to yourself or others", which in many cases can be much longer than even the longest prison sentences. Many mass murderes and similar will be in this category.
Third: the idea behind short sentences is diminishing returns, the responsibility of the system to reform the convicted (if they fail it's their fault) and perhaps most of all - econonomic reasons. Unless I see concrete evidence that longer sentences are actually cost effective for keeping me safer, I'm not going to allow politicians to make such laws.
Cost effectiveness is key. One can't just argue that longer sentences automatically makes the streets safer, since it costs a lot. You have got to compare, dollar for dollar, with the effect spending the same money on (for example) Police, Drug treatment, Education, Job creation, ...
So the fundamental assumption is not that all criminals will reform, but that most will, others will at least reform enough to not be dangerous enough that the cost of keeping them in prison is worth it to society - the money can be better spent elsewhere.
In Northern European countries rehabilitation of prisoners to enable reintegration back into society is viewed as the primary goal of incarceration. So if they're unable to rehabilitate someone after 16 years that's viewed to an extent as a failure of the system. The number of people who can't be rehabilitated after 16 years of such a system is likely to be tiny.
Also worth noting that most long term prisoners will not serve their whole sentence in a normal prison with bars and such. They will be moved to a quasi open prison where they get limited freedom to roam, work, structure their day and so forth. At least in Norway. Most people, criminals or not, are not clinically insane axe murderers.
So 16 years is the magic point (for Danes? for [Western] Europeans? for all human beings?) beyond which imprisoning people has no impact on crime rates. Do you have any evidence that 1) that's actually the case for Denmark or anywhere else, and 2) that's actually the reason the Danes and others have set that limit?
That's a strange use of the word "secular", for which the Oxford dictionary that Google uses lists as "not connected with religious or spiritual matters". What's particularly religious or spiritual about the idea that the justice system ought to be about meting justice?
It's a very religious idea that "the justice system ought to be about meting justice", particularly a Protestant / Christian idea. The very phrase "meting out justice" is a biblical one.
Secular societies are more interested in the outcomes than the moral righteousness of the system.
Not all secular societies or people are consequentalists. Some are at least as interested in the moral righteousness of a system -- in its means, in its processes, in what it does on the way to its ends -- as they are in what that system accomplishes. There are secular humanist deontologists and virtue ethicists.
Not sure how it works in Denmark, but in Sweden the life sentence is also usually refereed to as being "max 16 years", or some similar number between 10-16 years.
However that is not quite the whole story. In Sweden, a life sentence is a sentence with no upper bound on the time, if you were immortal, you would be there forever. But, usually you are considered rehabilitated after, say, 10-16 years, if you indeed show signs that you have rehabilitated. Then there is no need to keep you locked up.
The "max X years" is meant as the number for which it took the longest time for someone to be considered rehabilitated. In the Swedish sense of it, it is not a "magic" number, but a case-by-case number.
EDIT: the user "nl" quotes the wikipedia article for Denmark in another reply which indicates it is more or less the same.
I just want to mention (as I've done elsewhere in this thread) that this is within the ordinary system. If you're considered exceedingly dangerous that's just crazy. Better give you a treatment-sentence. That means a REAL life sentence.
Denmark had a guy who killed 4 policemen. They let him out 33 years later on a pardon; by then he was 71 and had server about 33 years.
In a hundred years from now people are going to look back at things like the war on drugs as one of the most barbaric, absurd and useless pieces of legislation ever to have been implemented. A war which ended up destroying more lifes than it saved.
Here in the US, most of us think of Prohibition in exactly those terms.... but that didn't stop us from doing the exact same thing all over again and calling it good.
Most people don't think Prohibition was bad because it's a bad idea to outlaw a substance. They think it was bad because they don't think alcohol should be illegal. Similarly, while a majority of people now support legalization of marijuana, an overwhelming majority of people still support keeping cocaine and heroin illegal.
Yes, it's being bad at abstract thinking. There's not much that cocaine, heroin, or even meth can do to you that alcohol can't. It's indisputable that we've made poor decisions regarding what drugs to ban -- marijuana as a Schedule I drug? Really? -- and IMHO the reason for that goes back to the fact that we didn't have an appropriate basis for banning any of them in a supposedly-free society.
As other posters have suggested (and been duly modded down for it), prohibition isn't really about the drugs.
Is it really? The vast majority of Prohibition era issues were relatively substance independent, and given that we've seen the EXACT same public response, political/buzzword currents surrounding the pro-prohibition movements, and emergent criminal enterprise, I think it's fair to say that "prohibition of *" is a reasonable class to abstract by.
(Watching Ken Burns "Prohibition" is something I'd strongly recommend to just about anyone, not only is it a fantastic documentary as par for the course for Burns, but it was a steady stream of "HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF" in such stark terms as you rarely see.)
I hope history doesn't look at the war on drugs as having anything at all to do with drugs. It was all about having a way to lock up blacks and hippies for reasons that seemed legit on paper. Drugs were ancillary. Then of course it morphed into a for-profit industry and is the clusterfuck we have today.
Yup it started out as Richard Nixon's war on the counterculture, imagine if Steve Jobs had been taken out in the war on drugs we'd all be stuck using windows 10 at work instead of having nice macbook pros lol.
Before I watched it I thought "how could people be so stupid as to think they would ever ban alcohol". After I watched it I was like "oh wow, people drank on average 1.5 bottles of hard alcohol a week? Drunks were everywhere? Opening a bar was super cheap because the alcohol companies subsidised them. Ok, maybe I get why people would vote for prohibition".
I'm not saying it was a good idea. It was clearly stupid idea which the rest of the doco made clear and is directly analogous to the war on drugs.
Another POV that gave me a new perspective was the idea that legal drugs (alcohol) kill way more people than the war on drugs kills. 3+ million a year die from alcohol. (http://www.who.int/substance_abuse/facts/alcohol/en/). Legalizing a bunch more drugs may have the unintended consequences of killing an order of magnitude more people than the war on drugs.
I'm not saying I'm for the war on drugs. All the unintended consequences of that are horrible as well. The USA's police state, seizure laws, militarization, etc. But, the idea that we'll end up possibly causing 10x more death from legalization makes me wonder if there's some middle position
I do think it's important to consider what you mean when you say 'drugs'. Alcohol is not the same thing as weed, which is not the same thing as heroin. Putting all 'drugs' together in one category muddles up the conversation, and this is worsened by separating them into legal and illegal in ways that don't really make sense.
While I'm not necessarily all in favor of weed, for example, I'm convinced that legalizing it, simply because of its properties, will not lead to even a fraction of the deaths that legalized alcohol use does.
It's difficult to discuss any kind of position when we use a term as vague as 'drugs'.
Trying to foresee all future consequences is pointless when you have no control over them anyway. Besides, how many lives have been destroyed by the War on Drugs? That requires second and third order reasoning, not simply a body count.
There are many science studies that once you become a prisoner, instead of actually improving yourself, you degrade to the point that you become better criminal.
The world goes to reducing punishments and this is the way to go. Usually there is a "healthy" amount of criminals in every nation, but you will never solve the problem by increasing the sentences, this actually makes it worse.
This is also an area that can be studied. In addition to the other points it's worth looking at recidivism rates, which are much lower in places like Norway than in the US.
The major reasons for success of Scandinavian countries in crime and punishment are larger than a single metric, IMHO. They have a (more) comprehensive philosophy that touches on many areas, all of which work together.
If the US adopted the prison conditions and lighter sentencing of Norway without other measures, it would be a complete disaster. For the US to get similar benefits we would need to (ideally) first shift our attitude toward thinking of criminals as people, and thinking most of what benefits society rather than how to punish for punishment's sake.
He is being a political opportunist coming out with this proposal and others during an election cycle. If he had truly given a damn he had seven years to fix the plight of those imprisoned in this country. He had seven years to fix a lot of things but didn't. Since Republicans are portrayed as tough on crime this is being tossed out to put them in a lose lose situation. Don't even for once take any actions by any political figure in the US as anything less than political opportunism. Seven years, two of which they had near complete control of the government. Yet what did they do to improve the plight of those incarcerated, end the war on drugs, civil forfeiture, or countless other oppression of the people by the law enforcement industry? Hell he has waited till recently to finally close Gitmo. Applaud, more than shame him for wasting seven years
No, that's now how the system works in the US. He has nothing left to run for; he's term limited and leaving the highest office in the country.
The election cycle does have something to do with it: in the last year of his presidency, he has nothing to lose legislatively by putting all his proposals on the table. In previous years, he had to weigh each of them against the cost of losing whatever he was trying to accomplish with Congress.
That's not Obama's fault; it's the nature of the system. The President can't do whatever they want; their hands are tied by the other two branches of government. Blame John Adams.
> No, that's now how the system works in the US. He has nothing left to run for; he's term limited and leaving the highest office in the country.
Outgoing Presidents still work towards the future electability of other members of their party over the alternatives - in Obama's case, Clinton or Sanders over the Republicans. That's part of the opportunism, along with, yes, saving the more controversial unilateral actions for when they no longer need to worry about their own re-election or cooperation from Congress.
It's an incoherent argument to suggest that Obama is both saving his most controversial actions for a time when he doesn't need to worry about his own re-election and working for the election of the next Democratic President.
It's not at all that simple. The next candidate is then, during the election, free to position themselves however they want on the issue, whereas the President who chose to circumvent Congress and unilaterally implement a policy would be a much riper opportunity for attack in the next election cycle.
Liberal Democrats can then feel better (via recency bias) about a party that continued the Patriot Act, Gitmo, whistleblower prosecution, etc ad nauseam, while the next candidate can appeal to the moderate right that "hey, that was the last guy."
My point though was that it would be a misconception that an outgoing second term President doesn't have to weigh the impact of their decisions on future elections, even if they themselves will never run in one again. They aren't truly free to just drop whatever policies they want with no consideration for how it will impact future elections.
This one is getting done precisely because it can work with that agenda, unlike other possible policies that I'd bet, deep down inside, he has to know would also be good for the country - e.g. rescheduling marijuana or ending the war on drugs - but that would have a larger negative impact on future Democratic candidates.
How is it political opportunism?
He can't run for another term. That makes no sense.
And I don't know where you have been, but the Republicans have repeatedly tried to destroy anything Obama proposed. I say this as a fiscally conservative person (i.e. i am with the republicans on the financial side but with the democrats on the values)
I am going to try to ask this in the least inflammatory way--
Why are you with the Republicans on financial matters?
I am a partisan Democrats and enjoy scoring points on the internet as much as the next fellow, but I'm also genuinely curious. From my perspective, the Republicans are extraordinarily financially irresponsible, all reputation and no substance. (It's like the old saying -- you get a reputation as an early riser and you can sleep in til noon.) They want to cut taxes, yes, but their proposals to do so all involve drastically unbalancing the Federal budget to do so. At their most serious, they include unspecified $XYZ billion spending cuts and then never specify what they would actually cut to close the gap.
Obama's deficit, meanwhile, has largely been the result of automatic spending increases from pre-existing legislation in response to the Great Recession; his stimulus bill from the first year of his Presidency was a small fraction of the increased spending on Medicaid and Welfare and SNAP as millions of people lost their jobs, on Social Security as people retired early, and Medicare as people deferred medical treatment until they qualified.
The ACA was funded, is costing less than projected, and is in fact controlling medical costs, which makes long term financial projections much rosier than they were ten years ago. There is no plan to replace it, and repealing it, as Republicans keep trying to do, would be bad for our short term and long term financial health.
Obama has significantly reduced the size of the Federal workforce (I am actually unhappy about that, since it probably slowed down the recovery).
So why do you consider the Republicans fiscally conservative?
"In a hundred years from now people are going to look back at things like the war on drugs as one of the most barbaric, absurd and useless pieces of legislation ever to have been implemented."
How do you explain the rampant crack cocaine drug wars in New York and Miami in the 1980s that killed far more Americans than they do today? You're probably too young to realize how bad New York and Miami were before the war on drugs. How do you explain how Asia has even more "draconian" drug laws than the USA and yet crime is a fraction of ours?
Only nominally. Funding for the actual execution of the drug war didn't ramp up until the 1980's, and imprisonment for drug offenses was flat until the early 1980's.[1] Conversely, the surge in crime started in the late 1960's, and was already much higher than before by the time the drug war got rolling.
The crack epidemic had its origins in the 1970s and became widespread in the 1980s[1]. Crack was finally targeted in 1986 with laws that heavily punished crack dealers. This happened after crack became widespread throughout major American cities.[2]
"The murders and general lawlessness that you reference from the 80s are a direct result of the War on Drugs."
Where were the "murders and general lawlessness" in other countries that had even more expansive Wars on Drugs, like Singapore or Taiwan? America's War on Drugs is relatively mild compared to these countries that sentence drug traffickers to death.
Those countries didn't have their own government propping up the drug trade in order to generate illicit funding for illegal wars and to criminalize and imprison poor black people. USA did.
> these countries that sentence drug traffickers to death.
USA put small-time addicted drug users, in long jail terms. But only if they use crack, the "poor/black people" variant of cocaine, not the (expensive) white-powder variant of cocaine that rich/white people used.
> How do you explain how Asia has even more "draconian"
> drug laws than the USA and yet crime is a fraction of
> ours?
Comments like this are why people should travel.
In most of asia (by population or by state), low crime rates can be easily attributed to being able to settle the matter privately with the policeman for a small amount of money.
That's not true in Japan, where organized crime registers with the police, or Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan which are hugely wealthy microstates.
Edit: Spoiler: the inhabitable area is about the size of Puerto Rico, a country it has 8x the population of, and something someone who had been there would know...
Sure, Taiwan is funny that way. But I'm trying to figure out what it is that Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan have in common that causes you to label all 3 of them "microstates", but that causes you to exclude, say, Belgium or Denmark. I'll await your reply as I watch the sun set over Taipei.
Edit: HN won't let me reply to your reply below, which I'll take as a hint that I should stop arguing. As your first post was limited to Asian microstates, I agree that I shouldn't have thrown European countries into the mix. I still question the "micro-ness" of Taiwan, which is more populous than Hong Kong or Singapore by a factor of 3 or 4 (and not quite as wealthy), but sure, whatever.
> what it is that Singapore,
> Hong Kong, and Taiwan have
> in common ... exclude, say,
> Belgium or Denmark
To clarify, you're seriously asking why I left Belgium and Denmark out of a list of small and rich Asian countries?
Update: but ya know, even if it wasn't about continent(!) the main difference is that Belgium and Denmark sit in the middle of large areas with border-free travel, largely homogenous policing, largely homogenous drug laws and share the same Supreme Court with their neighbours. Seeing them as micro-states, rather than constituent states of the EU for this purpose surely misses the point.
The crack epidemic was a supply and demand issue. During the 1980s, the CIA enabled the flow of cocaine to help fund the Contras and other right-wing revolutionary groups in Central America. The new routes led to new manufacturing practices, and supply skyrocketed. This in turn dropped the price drastically, making cocaine suddenly available and affordable for a lot of people who couldn't get it before. Crack was another technical/marketing innovation, taking the old practice of freebasing and industrializing it. A quick, intense high got down into the $10-20 range, something even the desperately poor could afford. And since mainstream society doesn't usually care much about the troubles of the desperately poor, the cocaine industry had a relatively untroubled new market.
The end of this era wasn't so much due to draconian laws as to the end of the cheap supply.
Crack wasn't even targeted in the War on Drug policies until the 80s. The drug was relatively unknown to the general public compared to the other drugs that were targeted. Even Newsweek reported in 1977 that cocaine was safer than cigarettes and liquor "when used discriminately"[1].
Yes, and the New York and Miami drug wars of the 1980s were consequences of the escalation of the law enforcement War on Drugs in the 1980s, including the targeting of cocaine in that war in the 1980s.
Jail is the constitutional exception to slavery, so American law enforcement has had a built-in incentive since reconstruction to incarcerate as many people as possible to make up the work gangs that had previously been filled with slaves.
Private prisons are largely a red herring. They account for some 8.4% of the prison population. [1] Many of the horror stories coming from them are simply from the fact that state corrections agencies willfully loosen their standards when contracting with private prison operators.
Private prisons are more a symptom then a cause of high incarceration rates. States began using them in response to prison over-population - and the percentage of inmates in private prisons is relatively low (single digits IIRC).
edit: to be clear I am against privatization of prisons because I think the incentives are woefully misaligned, but wanted to point out it's inaccurate to suggest they're the cause of our high incarceration rate
"always seemed very draconian and counter productive"
How so?
U.S. laws are actually quite lax compared to other countries.
Lets say your society had a rampant theft problem, and a law was passed saying that anyone caught stealing would have one of their hands chopped. Would this not reduce the amount of theft?
No, it wouldn't, when people are stealing out of desperation, and chopping off someone's hand destroys their ability to generate a livelihood through honest labor, pushing them into more theft.
If I had to characterize Mr. Obama's administration, I'd say he all too often says exactly the right things (and maybe even believes them) but the implementations (if any) leave an endless amount to be desired.
But this, like everything the last 8 years, will come out to little more than an eloquent WashPos article. Thanks Obama.
Edit: TIL the president cannot pardon state level crimes. oops
The President doesn't have the authority to pardon someone for a State crime. I suppose he could threaten to pardon federal inmates who were residents of non-compliant states before their incarceration.
Article II, Section 2.
The President…shall have the power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.
Without the abbreviation:
The President shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States; he may require the opinion, in writing, of the principal officer in each of the executive departments, upon any subject relating to the duties of their respective offices, and he shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.
After multiple comments, I looked it up and yeah, its true. President can't pardon state level crimes. Although in my original reading of the constitution (the exact section you posted), I don't see why that is true.
>he shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.
Is there some case law that has determined "offenses against the United States" == Federal crime only?
Seems from the very beginning; an act establishing several federal crimes in 1790 [1] - only one year after the Constitution came into force - was titled "An Act for the Punishment of Certain Crimes Against the United States".
EDIT: And the root of this phrase seems to be in the distinction between civil and criminal offenses - an crime is an "offense against the State" [2], where the government has standing to bring the case to court rather than the individuals (if any) specifically harmed. In this context, the usage "offense against the United States" pretty clearly indicates crimes where the United States rather than an individual states has jurisdiction.
> Is there some case law that has determined "offenses against the United States" == Federal crime only?
At least going by the spiritual intent of the Constitution, the United States wasn't so much of a country on its own as a coalition of multiple tiny countries (made it easier for trade, war, debts), much as the member states of the European Union are still treated as independent countries today. The European Union hasn't yet had a 'civil' war to change the public opinion and perception of its governance, though.
The President can only pardon those convicted of federal criminal crimes committed against the United States. This new policy will only affect those in federal prisons (in which the President has purview) and why this measure is more limited in scope.
I disagree agree with many of Obama's policies, but I think this response is overly cynical (especially the intimation that he might be disingenuous). Even absent any authority at all to act on a particular issue, it can still be productive for the President to draw attention to it by using his "bully pulpit." In this case, I had no idea that solitary confinement was overused in this way, and the principles he outlined seemed very sensible to me. Now, it is at least more likely that fellow politicians will follow his lead on this issue.
I'm not arguing that some of Obama's policy implementations are lacking. But it seems like people are expecting too much out of him.
I think that solitary confinement is definitely unethical. But I also think the idea of mass pardons for prisoners if states don't reform solitary confinement would be political suicide. Republicans would be running ads saying that Obama wants violent criminals to be released because prison isn't comfortable enough. Democrats wouldn't support it. And I think it might sink the democratic party's chances in the presidential election. Sure there are more things that Obama could have done to solve specific problems. But I don't think some complaints would have been fixed under any president.
If we followed your policy proposal, we'd still be figuring this out in 40 years or so when the Democrats finally win the White House again. I can't imagine a more damaging policy for future PR than pardoning definitely violent criminals who have suffered terribly due to solitary confinement, without any time or consideration given to rehabilitation.
If only one of those pardoned were to commit murder, wave goodbye to any hope at criminal justice reform.
I still remember the debate about Guantanamo Bay detention camp and how he wanted to completely close it, but nothing actually happened. [1] I don't know which one is worse : Holding prisoners without a charge for decades or holding criminals in solitary confinement.
Nothing happened because it's not the President's decision alone. He tried, met with huge opposition from Congress, and couldn't make it happen.
Part of the problem is that people don't understand the President's powers and expect more from him than he can deliver.
The other part of the problem is that the President himself seems to like promising more than he can actually deliver. He doesn't say "I'll try to close Guantanamo, but Congress really wants to keep it open and it's ultimately up to them." He just says, "I'll close it" and then, oops, can't.
Come on Mr. President - you had the past 8 years to visit jails and prisons, to make sweeping changes to the Federal Prison System, and to push for legislation to seriously curtail solitary confinement, for children and adults alike, throughout the state systems.
This may serve as a bit of notoriety on your legacy, for the position you take here will surely only gain traction and be looked upon as utterly obvious, but it does little to help those poor souls suffering needlessly and alone tonight.
Just as every person has a finite amount of money in the bank, there is also such a thing as "political capital" and a politician must choose carefully how it is spent, because you cannot spend it well on many things. Obama used most of his political capital to overhaul healthcare, that was his top issue and it took years and years to do it. Now that it is more or less set in stone, he's finally had the opportunity in the last couple years to look at other important items to him, namely climate change (for which he also did some important policy-making work), guns, immigration, and the prison system. It is not easy to make sweeping changes to any major policy, and even getting one big thing done in 8 years is hard to do in the current political climate.
Exactly right. No single administration in recent history has seen so much vitriol and tooth-and-nail resistance from the opposing party in Congress as Obama. The GOP went so far as to shut down the government to try to make sure Obama didn't get his way.
Don't get me wrong: Obama is definitely not without flaws. But I think history will remember him very kindly. The man has extraordinary patience and has proven time and again that he can remain mature and civil in the face of untold amounts of immature tantrums from the opposition.
Funny how the administration got the drone program through and sheltered the NSA without any problems though.
At least you have the ACA, where the administration had to fight tooth and nail against a hostile right to get what they wanted. Oh wait, no, they compromised on almost everything and still passed it without a single Republican vote.
Weird how that narrative doesn't actually hold up when you examine the issues.
You only read half the statement. I said "push for legislation to seriously curtail solitary confinement, for children and adults alike, throughout the state systems."
1) As my parent notes, He's still president. Time has not yet run out.
2) Publishing his opinion in the Washington Post is part of pushing for legislation, especially when we are talking about state systems over which he has no authority.
* An executive order, on day one of the presidency, prohibiting solitary confinement of children. This is a no-brainer.
* The commission of a study, on day one of the presidency, to study solitary confinement across the country. This is a no-brainer.
* An executive order, within the first year, walking solitary back to the limitations it had in decades past.
* A conference of US attorneys, headed by the attorney general, to come to a policy regarding sentencing guidelines.
* In the first year of the presidency, introduction and advocacy of legislation to eliminate mandatory minimum sentences for all or nearly all nonviolent offenses.
None of these are controversial - every single one of these steps has vocal support from at least one member of both parties in both houses of congress.
There are many more steps that might actually take a small amount of political capital, and they too are worth doing.
But a single directive in year 8 of the presidency? There are children who have been languishing in solitary for years while this guy waited to release this statement.
Bush Sr. used this to defeat Michael Dukakis in 1988, after an inmate committed a crime while on a furlough program Dukakis said could help rehabilitation.
Republicans eagerly picked up the Horton issue after Dukakis clinched the nomination. In June 1988, Republican candidate George H.W. Bush seized on the Horton case, bringing it up repeatedly in campaign speeches. Bush's campaign manager, Lee Atwater, said "By the time we're finished, they're going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis' running mate."
Dukakis also suffered a major character blow in the eyes of the public during one of the televised debates when he said he would not support death penality even if his wife had been murdered (or something along those lines). It was an awful question to ask, but his reply was seen as unemotional to the audience when he reiterated that he still would not support the death penalty. I often wonder what the U.S. would have been like had he been elected. In any case, the American public apparently had a similar notion, since they kicked out Bush Sr to elect a Democrat anyway, just 4 years later. But that moment in the debate is often held as the defining moment that crashed his chances to win. A little silly, I think, but that's politics.
Honestly, this read more like a PR piece. "Look at how much I care about these people!" "Man, I'd love to fix this broken system if only they would let me!" It's just a puff-piece, nothing more.
Disregard me. I didn't realize that he actually put it in place. I take back everything I said. Obama actually comes out looking good, and I'm an asshat
If you believe a man should be judged by his actions, not his words, that pendulum swings both ways.
Dismiss this piece for being only talk, no walk: sure. But don't dismiss it because "it's for the wrong reasons." Who cares? If he does it, he does it! Win for society.
And if he comes out looking better in the process? Win for everyone.
I'm not saying you're wrong; I just don't think it's a bad thing.
(Maybe I read too much into your comment and neither did you… That joke would be entirely on me, then :) )
I see some good points and bad points in this article. I applaud the president for looking into an issue that is traditionally ignored by leaders in the US- the effects of our prison system on the population. I wish he hadnt stopped at solitary confinement. Our entire prison system and matrix of crime->sentencing needs to have a complete overhaul to remove the drug bias on sentences. Repeat violent offenders need to be kept off the streets. Drug users need help, not incarceration.
I also wish he hadn't taken credit for reducing crime. I think that this has almost nothing to do with the president. Its very easy to cherry pick the statistics you like and claim responsibility. Would he also like to take responsibility for the continuing/increase in violence against citizens by the police? The violations of civil liberties? Anyway, I hope that this starts building momentum that we need to change our prison system. I think some of the policing issues will start to work themselves out as different socio economic groups see that cops aren't there to harass and arrest, and that drug users may be able to get help.
> I applaud the president for looking into an issue that is traditionally ignored by leaders in the US- the effects of our prison system on the population. I wish he hadnt stopped at solitary confinement.
I agree. Criminal justice reform is a primary plank of Clinton's platform, and Sanders strongly supports the discussion as well. I don't think we've seen this kind of focus in recent memory. I think this is going to be a growing issue in coming years, as access to information about our justice system becomes more democratized due to things like cell phones and Internet literacy giving more avenues for spreading experiences and information to people who previously didn't have them.
> As president, my most important job is to keep the American people safe
The author, er, the President is incorrect. His most important job is to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. He says this constantly, and, politics aside, it is important for every American to remember what the actual duty of the President is, as affirmed when sworn into office.
While I appreciate the point you're trying to make, I don't think it's accurate. You're quoting the Presidential Oath, which reads:
> I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
Note the order: first responsibility is to execute the office, the second is to protect the Constitution. The responsibilities of the Office of the President are laid out in Article II of the Constitution, starting with Section 2. The very first one is: "The President shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States[.]"
It's not unreasonable for him to say his most important job is to keep America safe. Indeed, the historical evidence shows that one reason the Constitution created a strong executive (where the Articles of Confederation had no executive), is because the failure of the government under the Articles to quell certain internal rebellions.
The founding fathers had a lot to say about a strong executive who is primarily interested in providing security as opposed to liberty and its inevitable corruption:
>In time of actual war, great discretionary powers are constantly given to the Executive Magistrate. Constant apprehension of War, has the same tendency to render the head too large for the body. A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.
-James Madison, Speech at Constitutional Convention, 1787
>A politic minister will study to lull us into security, by granting us the full extent of our petitions. The warm sunshine of influence would melt down the virtue, which the violence of the storm rendered more firm and unyielding. In a state of tranquillity, wealth and luxury, our descendants would forget the arts of war, and the noble activity and zeal which made their ancestors invincible. Every art of corruption would be employed to loosen the bond of union which renders our assistance formidable. When the spirit of liberty which now animates our hearts and gives success to our arms is extinct, our numbers will accelerate our ruin, and render us easier victims to tyranny. Ye abandoned minions of an infatuated ministry, if peradventure any should yet remain among us!—remember that a Warren and Montgomery are numbered among the dead. Contemplate the mangled bodies of our countrymen, and then say, What should be the reward of such sacrifices ? Bid us and our posterity bow the knee, supplicate the friendship, and plough, and sow, and reap, to glut the avarice of the men who have let loose on us the dogs of war to riot in our blood, and hunt us from the face of the earth? If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquillity of servitude, than the animating contest of freedom—go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.
Just as relevant is the vesting clause that begins Article II:
The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America
This executive power is the vehicle by which various acts of legislation which "provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States" (I.8) take effect.
》 On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. (Emphasis mine)
If it's on the front page, enough people have found it interesting and within the guidelines.
More concretely, The US Prison System is clearly broken and doing great harm. It's an obvious opportunity for making things better, which can lead to entrepreneurial opportunities.
I don't know about that. Thus far, those "entrepreneurial opportunities" have lead toward more incarceration, not less. For-profit prisons have contracts that guarantee a certain level of incarceration, resulting in occupancy of the prisons they run. This is definitely one of those things that I'd much rather not be in the hands of entrepreneurial entities.
They're focused on making it easier and cheaper to communicate with inmates, who often suffer from ridiculous price gouging for things like phone calls.
It's pretty small potatoes compared to private prisons, but it's something.
A school bus driver's job is to get kids from their homes to school and back. If she says her most important job is to keep the kids safe, it doesn't mean that she's not going to do her job! Instead, it means that she'll do her job in such a way that it keeps her safe, and in no way implies a conflict of interest between her job description and safety.
If that's so - and it may well be - then it is different in kind from this matter, where "safety" and liberty are, and have been, in conflict. The job of the POTUS has little do with safety, but much to do with liberty.
The POTUS is using this "my job is to keep Americans safe" line to make a very tenuous tie to a position he wants to take on solitary confinement.
Using your analogy, imagine the bus driver said "It's my job to keep the kids safe, therefore I'm going to start requiring all the kids to give me their cell phone numbers in case there's an emergency."
Could that be construed as "keeping the kids safe"? Sure, but that wouldn't necessarily make you any more comfortable with the bus driver gaining more intimate access to your children.
I know analogies are never perfect, but another nitpick with this one is that the POTUS holds a position of power and authority that you wouldn't typically have to worry about in your average bus driver, so additional scrutiny into "Just what did he mean by that?" is occasionally warranted.
Justifying the move as a step to keep America safe is the right move in this political context. America is generally fearful right now, so Obama's political adversaries will attack this move as eroding the safety the prison system attempts to maintain.
"My job is to keep Americans safe" is an acceptable justification for limiting solitary confinement. It would not be an acceptable justification for extrajudicial killings.
The U.S. Constitution is structured in traditional contract form. It starts with stating its purpose (preamble) and continues with rules to support methods of execution of purpose.
It is not unreasonable that a U.S. President may consider these recent statements as fitting to "...promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity..."
Perhaps its a limitation of our form of democracy, but if voters think the presidents job 'is to keep the American people safe' and they vote in said direction--well, that's the de-facto job. If the president is comfortable outright saying that his effective job is not the one legally defined, that's kind-of a HN topic in itself.
If you're going to downvote me for repeating the opinion of his own legal representation and several other legal experts commenting on the case, you could at least explain why.
Heh... Anyone else getting tired of the backhanded racism against whites?
"Privileged" white male checking in here. I've been harassed by the cops at least 3 times. Two included spending the night in jail. One included a healthy threat of violence. I might not have it as bad as others, but I've had my run-ins buddy.
You do realize that anecdote doesn't make data, right? Because the data is clear: wealthy white males are far, far less likely to get harassed by the police as any other ethnicity/income/gender combo. So the parent's comment, while politically incorrect, is factually on point.
This is incorrect. The single major demographic trait most likely to lead to arrest, higher conviction rates and stricter sentencing for the same crime is to be male. Being black (or to a lesser extent, Latino) is also a huge factor, as is being young.
The demographic of elderly Asian women, for example, is not more likely to get harassed by police, face arrest if they are or to be sentenced harshly in the event of a conviction.
Last time I looked at the stats, 18-30 male is the demographic most often arrested. Black 18-30 male get arrested slightly more often than white 18-30 male (although not as much as you'd expect). If you looked at the numbers and nothing else, the truly "privileged" demographic is actually Asian females. And for the record, yes I'm in the 18-30 male demo and yes I've had a police run in which didn't end in "sorry officer".
Yeah, one privileged guy had problems and everyone remembers it forever... Isn't really comparable to the thousands of underpribileged who's lives are just as tragically ruined...
Nobody is discounting the problem of police brutality for the thousands of underprivileged. Acknowledging that problem should not mean that we should simply ignore other forms judicial overreach, such as the abuse of the CFAA in Aaron Swartz's case. Both are major problems that need to be discussed.
Keep in mind that another major reason people remember Aaron Swartz because of everything he has contributed to the world of technology [1].
I agree that is why he should be remembered. I disagree that is why he is. Of course impossible to seperate the reasons now. But certainly his notoriety is far more widespread after his death, than before.
Yup, cops don't ever abuse their power unless it's against a minority. Cops aren't power hungry or brutal, they just have an unending unexplainable hatred for minorities.
And even if they do abuse or brutalize a white person who cares right? That white person probably had such a good life before then that they deserved it.
It's one thing to focus the conversation on race when we're talking about race, and fight off intentional malicious distractions like "all lives matter". It's entirely another to pretend no issues exist unless they only affect minorities.
Police have terrifying power, and fail to de-escalate situations much of the time. However, as a middle-aged and middle-class white dude, I have been able to avoid violence and jail on several occasions.
I'd like to say I read that line in disbelief that the POTUS could so completely misunderstand his own role in our government, but at this point, I'm afraid I'm used to it.
(For those not from the U.S.: The way it's supposed to work is that Congress makes the law, the President executes the law, the Court upholds the law)
From The American System and Misleading Labels[1]:
> Brad Templeton, chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, was present; and he said: "The legal status of AIs is ultimately a legislative question, and in the American system of democracy, legislative questions are decided by the Supreme Court."
> Much laughter followed. We all knew it was true. (And Brad has taken a case or two to the Supreme Court, so he was speaking from experience.)
The whole post is worth reading. It's a little dated and a lot oversimplified, but it drives home a useful point: just because something is named X, that doesn't mean it has anything to do with X.
There is a guy that is in solitary confinement since 1983 [1]. I was shocked when I read about him. It's a fascinating story, nevertheless so shameful for the society.
23 hours a day in a room for more than 30 years. :(
Thanks for the Thomas Silverstein fact. TIL. The "other side" does explain their rationale, valid or not:
> "When an inmate kills a guard, he must be punished," a Bureau of Prisons official told author Pete Earley. "We can’t execute Silverstein, so we have no choice but to make his life a living hell. Otherwise other inmates will kill guards too. There has to be some supreme punishment. Every convict knows what Silverstein is going through. We want them to realize that if they cross the same line that he did, they will pay a heavy price."
The solitary confinement practice needs a spotlight on it. A long-term "no human contact" order seems like torture. I'm glad Obama recognizes the risk of this in juveniles at least.
Clearly the problem is that the executions are too humane. We should create a gradual system of corporeal punishments instead. Like chopping thieves' hands off or cutting liars' tongues out. That would obviously work far better.
Jimmy Carter 2.0: after decades in power, now he wants to rethink policy. Maybe tomorrow he will condemn extrajudicial executions? Or Guantanamo? And sky's the limit once he's out of office.
It's one thing that politicians try this but why do people, even smart people, buy it?
It is so hard for me to imagine that socializing with hardened criminals (and being subject to violence at their hands) could be better for me psychologically than being alone. In some ways, that makes solitary even more scary to know that this is true.
Both your statement and your parent's are probably true. Extended forced isolation is incredibly psychologically damaging. Likely more so than being forced to interact only with "hardened criminals".
I'm confused. "It's not true" -- you seem to be saying that solitary confinement is better/safer than normal prison life. But then you say that people in prison are not so bad.
I don't think that people in prison are "inhuman", but I do think that they are "hard" in a way that would be extremely difficult for me as a very sensitive person. I think they'd have to be to get by in an environment like that. For example I can't watch Orange is the New Black -- it stresses me out.
Solitary confinement is not 'not having a cellmate'. Solitary confinement is being locked in a tiny concrete cell, with no bars, no windows, and no chance to speak with another human being. Indefinitely.
Yeah, I've thought the exact same thing before. Depending on the length of the sentence I'd probably do everything I could to get solitary vs. risk injury/rape/death with a general population.
I'm pretty good at being alone with myself for extended periods, so that seems the safer bet.
I'd agree with you. I'm on the introvert side of the spectrum where dealing personally with people is tiring and nothing is more refreshing than some quiet alone time. Given insane levels of prison over crowding, I could see myself being "that guy" who gets all stressed out by the noise and crowding and intentionally gets caught stealing food in the cafeteria just to get a vacation in solitary so I can relax, chill, and get my head on straight.
I'm not familiar with this particular case, but there are people who get completely lost in the Rikers island prison system.
This actually almost happened to me, though not at Rikers island: I was arrested under a false accusation of a crime I didn't commit, and while I was supposed to have been released after an hour, there was some mess up where they thought I'd already been released and so kept me in there for around an extra 12 hours. It only even got fixed that fast because my lawyer made a huge deal out of it.
Now imagine the same thing happening, but without a good advocate on your side, in a much larger prison, and ongoing for years or decades instead of just half a day.
16-year-old named Kalief Browder from the Bronx was accused of stealing a backpack
"stealing a backpack" doesn't sound so bad, but in the newyorker[0] ha is out on parole and "charged with robbery, grand larceny, and assault".
Robbery and assault by someone out on parole are a fare way from stealing a backpack.
I totally agree that the use of solitary confinement is probably to widely used and the story of Kalief Browder is sad, but after reading a bit more about it I feel a little bit tricked by this story. I wish the journalist cold better lay out the whole premises at the start, so I can easier make up my own opinion.
I'm with the president on this. Sure wish he'd actually do something, though.
As an example of what he could do, there are a few folks from both parties who share agreement that the prison system needs reform. It wouldn't have been too difficult to have co-wrote this piece with them. Heck, then at the end we could have read about the actual legislation sponsored, instead of him just hoping somebody, somewhere will send some to him.
Perhaps this president has a different idea of his job than I do. He seems very interested in pretending to be outside the system, dispassionately analyzing it, announcing where we've all failed and where we might do better.
This is a great skill for a candidate, and it'll probably serve him well after he leaves the job, but right now? Might be better to do less preaching and a little more compromising. Perhaps I'm being too tough on him. Don't know. Apologies if that's the case. I do note that observers from both parties have described him as being distant and disengaged.
This reminds me of the question researchers asked many years ago. Doctor A comes in and takes his time with you, he's polite and interested. Doctor B is gruff and rushed, doing only as little as he thinks necessary to get the work done. Which is the better doctor?
The answer is, of course, you don't know. Without seeing results, all you can really comment on is style. Ideally you'd want a doctor that had both technical and interpersonal competence. But without taking a hard look at what kinds of results occur, all a layman can do is comment on the stylistic nature of what they've observed.
So it is here. This is a very-well written piece. My intent here is not to criticize the president or play politics, simply to point out that the tech community has a lot of issues we care about, no matter what our party is. And there are a ton of folks who can make a good case for one thing or another. It's important that we sort out folks who can make a great speech but get little done from those who might not be able to put seven words together -- and could actually implement the changes we have to have.
After nearly 8 years of drone strikes and escalation of many of Bush's worst human rights abuses, we get this kind of insulting and silly propaganda, intended to help create the impression that Obama was a humanitarian.
Not only is the criminal justice system abusive (a problem itself) it plain isn't working.
The thing is... there are some extremely bad people in the system who know the ins and outs and consider prison just another place to abuse others while being taken care of.
We have too many laws. We spend to much time worrying about little stuff and not enough about big stuff. My personal opinion (I realize this is not likely to be a popular one) is that we need to stop locking people up for little things and return to public hanging for big things. Smoking crack might be stupid but is it really a crime?
On the other hand someone brutally killing a child for fun doesn't deserve to even breathe our air. Something like this is beyond rehabilitation. It is broken. Put an end to it without delay and return the raw material to the earth. But don't monkey around with solitary confinement. It is inhumane and in my opinion probably more so than hanging.
I don't agree with capital punishment at all, for a number of reasons that I won't get into here, but I can at least see a reasonable case being made for it. But public hanging? In what way could that possibly be good for society? If regular capital punishment doesn't work as a deterrent, I can't imagine that making it public would do much better.
Although after seeing public hangings the will for capital punishment in general would probably drop sharply, so maybe that would be a benefit. Seriously though, the idea of public hangings is barbaric.
I don't disagree with you as far as not locking people up for things like drug use though.
And how is what we are doing now not barbaric? Which is actually more barbaric? It turns out people sometimes see the barbarism in others while missing their own.
There is a reason public executions happened for so long (and still happen in vast swaths of the world). Partially to serve as warning and as a deterrent and maybe partially so society feels they are participating in punishment (or revenge if you prefer). Is it effective? I would assume to some extent.
Maybe we need to revisit some of the concepts of public shame (ok..maybe old school hanging is a bit extreme.. but jut to throw ideas around) rather than hiding offenders behind bars at the hands of sadistic guards and fellow inmates in some grey bureaucracy. Which is my estimation not only doesn't really work but is even more barbaric.
What we really need to rethink is imprisonment in general. The elimination of corporal punishment has led to this state of affairs. Nothing is more cruel and unusual than stealing a person's time. Whip wounds heal. And oftentimes, the violence experienced inside is worse than a whipping.
Physical harm has lasting consequences on vulnerable people. Some people have anxiety lasting a lifetime because they were subjected to corporal punishment as a child!
Will he be able to actually do something or will they all block each other so nothing changes? Won't the Tea Party find out that less solitary confinement will utterly destroy the U.S. and make it totally Un-American?
For most people — just the mere notion of being in conflict with the law — is enough to send chills down their back. How sad that something that could have been used to actually function as a mild punishment ends up completely destroying a life and the potential of being part of society.
In a hundred years from now people are going to look back at things like the war on drugs as one of the most barbaric, absurd and useless pieces of legislation ever to have been implemented. A war which ended up destroying more lifes than it saved.
I for one applaud Obama for finally taking a stanse against this unnecessarily strict legislation and hoping that normal otherwise law abiding citizens wont get their lifes completely destroyed for things anyone could have done. I love the US but the legislation I could certainly do without.