Prison is society's recourse for anti-social behavior. Does it have to be a violent and horrible place? No. The residents tend to make it that. In addition, I am against pampering in anyway, with my tax dollars, people whom I've had to remove from proper society...for anti-social behavior.
Prison is supposed to be a deterrent. My biggest gripe is that I have to pay for it at all. I support banishment or death.
Does this view not presuppose that the exhibitors of the anti-social behavior cannot be fixed or remade into useful members of society? If you believe that, fine, but if you think that some could be reformed, why is that not worth the money? "Reform", in my mind, has nothing to do with pampering. It could be even more torturous than now...For example A Clockwork Orange. Not that I'm advocating that.
Does this view also not presuppose that all prisoners have exhibited anti-social behavior? I think we can both say that this is not the case. Although, prisons tend to somewhat separate the two populations.
I suppose that good people can make a[singular and non-violent] mistake or error in judgement which can run them a foul of the law. These people don't require reform. They are typically leaniently sentenced, pay for their mistake and move on.
I also suppose that others are more habitually and fundamentally anti-social. These people are not worth the effort of trying to 'save'. The brains have literally been wired for this behavior[over the course of many years]. They must be removed from society.
There are also those somewhere in between natural-born killer and 'busted for pot'. These people are responsible for their own personal choices. If they keep making bad choices of their own volition I have no compassion for them. [I say this from first hand experience dealing with a close relative who is a lifelong fuck-up.]
You are making a lot of assumptions, which seem taylored to bolster a particular worldview, rather than be based in fact. In particular, you assume
1. People differ vastly in their innate ability to follow societal rules.
2. The justice system is able to distinguish between people who make simple mistakes, and people who are unable to follow society rules.
3. The above is a big factor in sentencing.
While there is evidence that some aspects of behavior are innate, there is also a huge literature linking the environment a person is raised in, and their tendency towards crime. Furthermore, sentencing is generally extremely inconsistent by any standards, so it is very unlikely that sentencing would fit your criteria for being lenient to the right people. Finally, it's hard to think of sentencing criteria that fit the criteria you propose, and are also objective.
I dont necessarily agree with your moral standpoints however the statement "They are typically leaniently sentenced, pay for their mistake and move on.", this is not typically the case... there are plenty of people who receive light sentences and plenty who get the book thrown at them for non violent first time offenses
If people can be changed then they will change given the right incentives, which can be achieve simply by making prison sufficiently harsh and long enough.
Your use of declarative and profound statements, with no evidence, gives me a high degree of distrust towards anything you say.
With that said, I have a few specific points.
> Prison is society's recourse for anti-social behavior
Lets speak objectively. Prison is a punishment that is forced upon some people who are found guilty of breaking some law. Many laws exist without thought for "social" behavior.
> Does it have to be a violent and horrible place? No. The residents tend to make it that.
Some residents make it that. Other residents have little to no "social" means of preventing or defending themselves against it.
> I am against pampering in anyway, with my tax dollars, people whom I've had to remove from proper society...for anti-social behavior.
Its funny that you use the word "pampering" when the alternative we are discussing is torture.
Nonetheless, this is the easiest point at which I can find common ground with you. Would you, rather than pay with your tax dollars for "pampering" prisoners, pay for educating prisoners so that our GDP grows? If there were ways to measure that GDP increased because we educated and enabled certain prisoners, would you gripe less?
> Prison is supposed to be a deterrent.
I've always heard that its supposed to be for rehabilitation. But, again, lets speak to the reality rather than the ideal: Prison is obviously not an effective deterrent.
> These people don't require reform. They are typically leaniently sentenced, pay for their mistake and move on.
What evidence do you have that people who don't need reform are typically leniently sentenced?
Oh for fuck's sake...is smoking a bowl on a weekend anti-social? What about trimming a quarter inch from a shotgun barrel? Or issuing well-formed GETs against a public API?
Banishment or death? Really? You do realize that pretty much any inventor or programmer of note in the US--the folks on whose shoulders all of us stand--are likely guilty of several "anti-social" actions?
Prisons, as implemented, are a bad answer to a stupid question.
Humans make mistakes. Here on HN, it's repeatedly announced that making mistakes is a good thing, as long as you are allowed to learn from them - it makes you a better person/founder/businessperson. Your mindset just doesn't match this - one mistake and you're literally dead. That you consider a few tax dollars so rapaciously important to yourself speaks rather badly of your priorities.
Racism doesn't necessarily entail singling a group out explicitly, especially today where we have a trained smell for racism.
If your intent is to single out black people, there are many ways you can target them without spelling out "black people". Specific job categories, specific neighborhoods, specific types of crime (which are hugely lopsided racially), etc etc.
The same can be applied to any race. You can effectively create a law that only targets Asian immigrants without once mentioning the words "Asian immigrant".
In the US race and crime are inexorably linked, and highly politicized. Through a combination of factors and people (acting both maliciously and otherwise), blacks are without a doubt targeted.
Here in NYC we have a rather odious policy of stop, question, and frisk, where the police are empowered to stop anyone they deem suspicious or threatening and search them. It turns out that Blacks and Latinos are search disproportionately often, well beyond their proportional contribution to crime rate. There's nothing in the regulation that spells out that dark-skinned people should be searched more, but everyone in charge knows this is the consequence, and everyone in charge intends this to be the consequence.
Racism is complicated. The fact that you don't have a hooded guy on your lawn burning a cross, screaming "lynch him!", doesn't mean it's not in front of you.
Anecdata on disproportionate searching: I'm a middle-class white guy who's 40. I haven't been pulled over for a "random stop, sir" since I was about 25, and before that I would have been pulled over about a dozen times. The times when I was pulled over, I was a young guy with long hair in a beaten-up car. My mother has never been pulled over. And judging from the general dialogue with friends, this is not an unusual experience. These "random stops" are (almost!) certainly using a different definition of 'random' than the ones we used in statistics class.
I do not agree with the hyperbole of the OP, but there are a disproportionate amount of black people in prison, black people get on average longer sentences for the same crimes, and drugs forms more commonly used by blacks carry longer sentences than the same drug in other forms (crack vs. cocaine). Are black people singled out to be tortured? No. Is the US prison system racist? The evidence points in that direction.
Sorry about the hyperbole. As you probably guessed, I was lightly trolling in order to provoke a response. Whilst we do better than the long-term historic average, our societies are still deeply flawed, whilst we, as individuals (myself included) sit idly by slinging insults from the sidelines.
Were every violation of the law punished with a prison sentence, you would not see disproportionate numbers of black people in prison. The problem is that the law is not uniformly enforced, but it is so broad that eventually any normal person will have broken it.
When the police presence is higher in black neighborhoods, you are going to see more arrests. When the law is so broad that anyone can be arrested, the effect will be magnified. Eventually you get to the situation we are in today, where in some black communities one in four black men has been to prison. This is not merely a measurement error or some kind of mistake; our approach to law and law enforcement right now is disproportionately affecting black people, especially black men.
It's not strange at all. If the AP's sources just disappeared, the word would be out to any future sources/marks that the AP gives up sources...but if the big bad government did this rare, but effective overreach...the spooks can still terminate the leak and the AP has plausible denial.
The CIA wants to maintain the AP's ability to lure in more leaks in the future.
This is something I've seen before, and expect more of.
Municipalities[taxpayers] paying to build out infrastructure, "mismanaging it"[then usually underfunding the administration because everyone wants 'small government', and then having the infrastructure scooped up for peanuts by a private company who makes a killing.
It's actually happening right now in slow motion in my hometown.
Given your derision for the term "small government", I'd guess you think this is a corrupt practice and that such infrastructure shouldn't be sold. But--at least to a small-government-er like myself--this seems like even better evidence that the municipality shouldn't be trusted with building these things in the first place.
Yea, I read that part. Unfortunately, great governments supported by a steady stream of good decisions is not an option on the table. We need to decide whether to begin government projects given that crappy and corrupt decisions will be made in the future.
Efficient implementation and operation of infrastructure does not happen by fiat, and is not improved by throwing more money & personnel at the problem - especially when individuals involved benefit from prolonging and expanding the problem, assuring job security and expanding their bureaucratic fiefdom by extracting ever more funds from taxpayers. It's not a consequence of "small government", it's that the project will fail (or, worse, just not die already) regardless of funding. Such projects are better run by those with an incentive to succeed at low cost, who can afford to find & hire people good at making such projects succeed, and who will soon suffer significant consequences if they don't.
Of course the infrastructure gets scooped up with peanuts. Insofar as it exists, those running it are unable to complete it or operate it, much less break even. Best to consider it "sunk costs" needed to jump-start private completion & operation thereof where the startup cost was prohibitive. Google had no incentive to put an awesome network in that particular town until the municipality basically gave Google $39M to make it happen.
This notion of "we don't know anything about the subject, but we can do it faster, better, and cheaper than somebody who gets paid very well to do it" must be eradicated from governmental thinking, both because it's stupid for obvious reasons, and subject to abuse by those who see great profit therein. Don't confuse legitimate opportunistic taking over a failing project with illegitimate opportunistic creation of the problem: I doubt Google was pulling strings behind the scenes in Provo Utah just so they could get $39M of infrastructure for a buck; far more likely the town discovered the hard way they didn't know squat about implementing and operating a broadband WAN at any price, and realized the best way to salvage their failing investment was to sell it to someone who does know for $1.
It's kinda like the old joke about home repair pricing of "$100/hr to do the job, $200/hr if you tried to do it yourself first".
Physical access is god access. Admin/root is god access.
Guard them both with your life.
I fail to see how handing over control of your boot to some 3rd party who clearly doesn't have the same interests that you do is anything but a horrible idea.
Just physically secure your boxes(or VDI them) and use permissions and ACLs to do what they were designed to do[control and delegate authority].
A good first step for Microsoft, if it cares so much about security, is to stop making its users automagically admin for fogging a mirror, during new PC setup.
> handing over control of your boot to some 3rd party...a horrible idea
It's actually a good idea if you're the party who's getting authority over the world's computers handed over to it.
> use permissions and ACL
I still have no idea how these work in the Windows world [1]. There's nowhere obvious in the UI or the "dir" command that shows you what the ownership and permission is [2], unlike Linux's ls -al.
My one experience with Windows permissions is, in the early '00s, I put an NTFS partition on an external drive because I wanted to put >4GB files on it. I copied them and got a bunch of permissions errors opening them on another computer. My impression of Windows access controls from this: They're invisible things the OS attaches to your files which will potentially make them unreadable later.
[1] I understand there's something called ACL's in Linux too, but I never use them.
[2] I don't have much experience with multi-user Windows systems, and Linux has been my main OS for 3-4 years so I don't have as much experience with post-XP OS's.
Prison is supposed to be a deterrent. My biggest gripe is that I have to pay for it at all. I support banishment or death.