[Spoon Poetic]

I already said I think the penal system does a lot of things wrong. And yes too much money goes into it, yes it is often quite racist, and yes we should be looking into the source of crime to head it off before it starts.

But I don't believe any of that is what your statements from the first couple of posts mentioning prison and what-not indicated ANY of that stuff up there.

If you're going to argue a point, actually say what you mean instead of hoping everyone can magically read your mind.


Anyway, other than the drug thing (which I don't want to get into much past I definitely wish certain drugs didn't exist, for the same reasons drunk driving is illegal, but I can definitely acquiesce that as a point for your argument) I sure can't think of anything legitimate that people serve prison time for that they shouldn't. Cuz, uh, Civ, ain't nobody going to prison for consensual sodomy these days. (Except for in Zimbabwe and Iran etc.) In some states the laws still exist, just like some laws like "it's illegal to put a giraffe in your bathtub" or "you may beat your wife on the courthouse steps only on Sundays" or whatever exist. They aren't upheld.
Well just so that you won't slap me with an example of when they have been, I will head you off by saying that while there are a couple examples, that occurs even less than just plain ol' innocent people getting stuck in prison for no reason at all, on what novels and crime drama tv shows refer to as "trumped up charges." It's a FAR cry from being this rolling epidemic of gays being stuck in prison just for being gay. I mean really, in a looot of years, there's only been a very very tiny handful of that happening.

I'm not saying it's not an issue and we shouldn't get a handle on it, I'm just saying it's definitely not something you can cite as an example of how the U.S. constantly criminalizes things that shouldn't be criminalized or whatever. (Besides that, it's a state thing, so you should criticize individual states for this, and not the whole country.)

So yeah. Jm. Decriminalizing certain drugs to reduce prison populations, I can see that. Plus I already said I think the penal system needs this or that change. But that's not how the topic first got started. Your "...puritanical obsession with punishing the wicked" post sounds like the wicked should go unpunished, not that some people that are labeled wicked should not be. And your "don't know what other countries do with their criminals..." post - by referring to imprisoned people as criminals as well as providing no examples to show what you meant sounds like just whatever the crime, prison isn't the answer, and other countries must know that answer but the U.S. sure doesn't.

This post has been edited by Spoon Poetic: 05 September 2009 - 05:36 PM

[BigStupidDogFacedArse]

Decriminalizing drugs will eventually come to pass, virtually every public intellectual agrees on this subject. Most who hold any form of public office will denounce it of course, and I have a feeling they do so on the grounds that they feel the majority would want to here the denouncement. I'd care to find out how many incarcerated people are serving time on trafficking charges, exclusively (murdering, kidnapping withstanding). With all the evidence on this matter, prohibition being the largest historical precedent, nobody can give a good reason to continue the war on drugs.


And maybe the wicked should be punished.

[civilian_number_two]

Thing is, BSDFA, the criminalization of the sale of the drugs necessarily leads to the violence. So the guys in jail for traficking-only charges, and yes there are lots of guys in that predicament, aren't the only guys unjustly pushed into jail by a system that criminalized a popular hobby/addiction/whatever you want to call it. How do the laws cause the violence? Well, without the huge gains to be made from sale of illegal drugs, these dudes would have nothing to fight about.

"Hey that's my street corner!"

"What do you mean? What do you want it for?"

"I don't know. You're dead, motherfucker!"

I don't imagine this happening much.

The US took the time to perform a social experiment back in the 20s. They made booze illegal. Murders resulted. Making the booze illegal was supposed to curtail domestic violence, but the resultant murder sprees eventually convinced congress to repeal the ammendment, domestic violence be damned. The murder sprees disappeared. Spousal abuse didn't change much, and police continued to blame wives when it happened and generally doubt it anyway.

Later they legalized gambling pretty much everywhere and all kinds of other murders went away. The FBI's big mafia crackdown was for shit, and building specialty prisons like Alcatraz were just publicity stunts. The murders went away when they made the businesses leagal and applied appropriate government oversight to them. Now they just do that with drug sales, and we'll be getting closer, I believe, to an appropriate number of criminlas in the system. Then all we need to do is clean up the system itself so the guards are trafficking stolen goods and drugs and abusing the prisoners and encouraging gang activity and physical abuse among the prison population.



Spoon, I know, I know. I was only kidding about consensual sodomy as a contemporary problem; while cleaning up a snetence, I carelessly edited a reference to its cover-article status in a recent issue of The Economist. But yes, it was a real problem only recently, and homosexuality was certainly a crime in my lifetime. You could really go to jail for it; even after it was decriminalized, police could routinely beat you up and/or rape you for being gay, and you had noone to complain to. Why noone? Not because the system is simply corrupt, but because the system is corrupted by Puritans. Absolutely. And since most of the current penalties are "simply" registering one's self as a sex offender and paying a fine, courts don't have too much trouble prosecuting over it. Watch out guys if you matty a gal who's inot it and later you divorce. Have a hole dug is all I'm saying.

The business of it being a State problem rather than one of Congress is just cowardice. That's like allowing individual States to decide whether Slavery was OK. The US Supreme Court eventually stepped in and invalidated the sodomy laws, or so I understood; I didn't read the Economist article, but my main point still stands: just like that whole Prop 8 business in California, taking a Human Rights issue and first of all making it a State decision and then the State turning it over to a popular vote is simply political cowardice.

I say that the sodomy-hostile states should secede, since they're more almost the same states that seceded before. Or vice-versa, I don't care. A civil war over buttfucking would be awesome.


But I digress. Back to the main point, it is yes, way too easy to end up with a long jail term over bullshit in the United States, especially if you are poor.


BDSFA: "Public Intellectuals" are referred to as "Elitists" and characterised as effeminate and Liberal by the Red-state mentality. I doubt that the findings of some "Harvard Elitist," promoting the "Hollywood Mentality," will result in any change to legislation. For laws on the use of currently illegal substances to change, Congress, the Supreme Court, and maybe the President of the United States need to grow a pair. Meanwhile, a persistent fear holding back legalising most drugs in Canada is that the US would tighten up its border and kill our economy. Canada is stuck in game of chicken: the cops won't trouble you over possession of marijuanna, often even if you smoke it openly, but the courts can't make it legal. Guaranteed if the US legalised any of the currently controlled substances, Canadian legislators would breathe a sigh of relief and follow suit within days.

[J m HofMarN]

Quote

I always try to expose the Hofmarn that lives with in them; especially those who refute being called a sado-masochist and left wing nut ball.

Yes! Give in to your anger! Turn to the Hofmarn side! Search your feelings, you know it to be true!

Civ, I figured ending the war on drugs was pretty much the elephant in the room, but the real causative issue behind it is, as we agree, that kind of puritanical mentality that has survived since the founding of the US. Social deviants must be safely locked away where they will not tempt others to follow them down the path to THE FIRES OF HELL RIFE WITH BRIMSTONE AND SULFUR AND ASS POKING WITH PITCHFORKS. And yes, this is the heart of the problem, Spoon. That same puritan view point (root word: pure) is responsible for the rampant racism in the justice system. Italians, blacks, Irishmen, and hispanics, have all been portrayed as criminals. They are different, have different customs and, hey, would you look at that, three of those groups are catholics (HISS SPIT RAWR) while one of them goes to separate protestant churches for the most part. Religion is at the heart of the US system of morality, and therefore we have an easy time considering people of different religions (different christian sects included) or people whose lifestyles contravene Christian religious dogma.

And when they do, it is absolutely necessary to imprison them lest they infect other good christians. That is what I mean by the need to punish the wicked, and I think its pretty obvious that I don't equate criminality ( a sociological action that contravenes expressed social rules) to be the same as evil, which is a personally determined moral judgement. I said we should take the approach that other first world countries do, which, quite transparently, could not possibly be letting criminals run free without consequence. The other major change would be the, and I hate to harp on socialism but, hey, I'm a socialist... The other solution would be kicking out all private contractors in the prison industry. Private prisons merely provide incentive to hand out longer sentences, the most egregious case of this being a judge in Pennsylvania who was actually paid off for each juvenile he sentenced to time in a private detention facility.

Even for things like shoplifting, etc, our sentences are generally higher. You can even be sent to juvenile for truancy from school, as I found out. So yes, simply keeping criminals locked up and away from the rest of society does not work, and at the present time that is the primary focus of the US system.

And yes, homosexuality is no longer criminalized in the US, but a lot of people don't realize just how recently it was. Within the lifetimes of maybe half the current US population, blacks could scarcely vote, gays could be arrested, and women were still largely expected to do little besides looking after children and baking pies. It's absurd to think that stuff like that would go away within a half a century.

[civilian_number_two]

Hoff, that's awesome, but the real problem with drug legislation is that guys who make laws are profiting by the trafficking of illeagl substances. So great is our need to believe that out system is good and pure that whenever it turns out that the drugs are getting over the border with military or police help, and that street-level trafficking profits the police and the courts, we say we've cought a corrupt person or group. We never publicly say that we have rooted out a corrupt system.