It's less about sympathy than about how you structure a justice system if you don't want more crime in the future. A lot of things about our justice system work very much counter to how you'd do things if your main goal was to have less crime. See also: banning certain kinds of government college aid for people with drug-related convictions. If you care about recidivism and cycles of poverty & crime why would you make it harder for people who've done their time and gotten out to contribute positively to society?
From a sheer fairness and what is justice actually POV, it's bullshit that this is yet another thing a rich family can shrug off, while a poor family is screwed. I don't have a solution for it, but the role money plays in our justice system may well be the biggest problem with it, which is saying something.
> Hopefully the son learns from that and he should be working to help repay that debt.
Very unlikely, with a record. A decade later and he's doing OK, for values of OK that include "can mostly pay own not-large bills, and only because he's living with his parents, and is steadily and consistently progressing in a low-paying field". Last I checked he's still "in the system" to some extent, as far as ongoing fees and check-ins and such.
(for the record, just to set some parameters here, he didn't physically hurt anyone, but it was still quite serious and definitely not something a society would want to go un-punished, that's absolutely true)
One imagines the long-term lasting harm to all of: victims, families of victims, perpetrators, and families of perpetrators; happening over and over in high-crime neighborhoods and it's no wonder it's so damn hard to improve those areas. That, on top of everything else that's often wrong with them. Reducing, not increasing, the "blast radius" of crime seems like something you'd focus on if you want to reduce crime rates, when stress and poverty are causal for crime and stress and poverty are part of the effect of same "blast radius".
> A lot of things about our justice system work very much counter to how you'd do things if your main goal was to have less crime.
If you think about it, keeping families uneducated and perpetually in debt means more bargaining power for those who have the money to lobby and change the system. What incentive do they have to do that?
Was your relative a multiple-time offender? If so, maybe stronger punishment earlier would have put him on the right path sooner.
Look, some people will always be fuck ups. That’s the sad reality of the life. Some people, no matter how their are guided, will always eventually fuck up and ruin all the hard work people put into them. They are wired to always make poor decisions no matter what. My best friend is like this. After 40 years of trying to help him, I accept him as he is now with no expectations he will ever get better despite decades of trying to help him. I have a close relative like that too. If they are protected from
consequences too early in life, they tend to make larger, irrevocable mistakes later in life and then they are fucked for a long time.
In SF crime is running rampant now because of a DA that refuses to prosecute smaller crimes. It has emboldened criminals. Prop 47 has made it so that gangs of thugs enter a store, fill their bags with merchandise and run out with no repercussions. I witnessed this with my own eyes and the manager said they don’t even call the cops anymore because they won’t come. Instead, 15 Walgreens have closed their stores in SF in the last few years because of it. Criminals are arrested 20+ times in the span of a year and they keep getting let go and they are free to continue committing crimes and it’s getting worse and worse.
So punishing criminals matter. Putting them on the right path matters but it can’t be consequence-free.
I don't think I've been advancing the idea that this should have been consequence-free. I just think some people (who, fortunately, haven't had much insight into "the system") may not be aware how the burden, financial and otherwise, for punishment can be in excess of the explicit punishment for a crime, and fall on far more people than just the offender, in ways that result in punishment being de facto much worse for the poor than the rich, even when prison time is in some way involved, and cause significant harm to families and communities in ways that don't seem particularly useful to the pursuit of justice. I find some of the ways these things are applied to be poverty-reinforcing, which is a really bad idea if you want less crime to happen, rather than more.
> In SF crime is running rampant now because of a DA that refuses to prosecute smaller crimes.
Just so you know, the DA came into office in Jan of 2020. That’s well after Prop 47 and nothing to do with him. If you look at clearance rates published by SFPD to compare 2020 to 2019, you’ll find that they are the same year over year at a surprisingly low 9% overall.
I see a lot of FUD spread about our DA where people don’t seem to actually look into what the DA’s office has done in cases or how often arrests are even made. In these convenience store robberies, it sounds like arrests aren’t even being made. No arrest and the DA’s office can’t bring charges. Just because it’s not a felony doesn’t mean they shouldn’t arrest and charge. Even if the person is released, the charges make repeat crimes more severe.
This sounds like cooking the metrics to me. If the police aren't making the arrests at all, sounds like someone up there is trying exceedingly hard to prevent this.
Just because the facts don't match your preconceptions doesn't mean you can just dismiss them. Proof that they are cooked, otherwise you don't have an argument.
I’ve always wondered, if someone is an irredeemable fuck up, what’s the point of punishing them? They’re not going to get better and it’s probably not even their fault.
I agree. If they're an imminent danger to others, lock them up strictly for segregation and not gratuitous vengeance (that is, be as nice to them as practical given that you're locking them up), if they're manageable, leave them be.
From a sheer fairness and what is justice actually POV, it's bullshit that this is yet another thing a rich family can shrug off, while a poor family is screwed. I don't have a solution for it, but the role money plays in our justice system may well be the biggest problem with it, which is saying something.
> Hopefully the son learns from that and he should be working to help repay that debt.
Very unlikely, with a record. A decade later and he's doing OK, for values of OK that include "can mostly pay own not-large bills, and only because he's living with his parents, and is steadily and consistently progressing in a low-paying field". Last I checked he's still "in the system" to some extent, as far as ongoing fees and check-ins and such.
(for the record, just to set some parameters here, he didn't physically hurt anyone, but it was still quite serious and definitely not something a society would want to go un-punished, that's absolutely true)
One imagines the long-term lasting harm to all of: victims, families of victims, perpetrators, and families of perpetrators; happening over and over in high-crime neighborhoods and it's no wonder it's so damn hard to improve those areas. That, on top of everything else that's often wrong with them. Reducing, not increasing, the "blast radius" of crime seems like something you'd focus on if you want to reduce crime rates, when stress and poverty are causal for crime and stress and poverty are part of the effect of same "blast radius".