The problem is the seriously bad crimes. Sure let a shoplifter get good behavior. But a murderer... no. You can get insurance for goods. You can even recover from assault. Ok it may still happen again, but at least the people will recover and the guy can be disallowed any more chances for good behaviour. But a wilful murder... how do you explain that "well he was behaving well in prison, we didn't know if we let him out that he'd go kill that kid..."

Yeah the justice system is fucked up and always will be, because its invented by us. That's the problem. The law itself has so many loopholes just in case an official gets into a problem that there might as well be no law.

Take for instance the post office that I used to work at. Seems to attract criminals for postmasters.
Case 1: Husband and Wife. Steal over £11,000, get a ballooning holiday to kenya, new house and new car out of it (flashy convertible thing). Get 6 months of community service, pay back £1,000 and keep the house and the car. Hooray!
Case 2: The temporary postmistress to replace the previous case. She makes it away with around £5,000. Not sure what happened to her, probably just another couple months community service.
Case 3: My boss. Gets away with over £21,000 in total (apparently because his second post office was getting near bankrupt, and he was gonna pay it back, honest!). No community service, no nothing, all he had to do was give up his job, turn over the other post office to his wife (he wasn't allowed it in his name anymore) and declare himself bankrupt
Case 4: Mum's colleague. She was committing benefit fraud with her own mothers benefit book. She lost her job.

Now don't you think that's worth it? Hell, I'm one of the most law abiding people around (not perfect, no one is ) and even i'd be tempted to do 6 months community service for £11,000. More than I earn in a year right now...

That's the thing. Yes, criminals need encouraging to turn their lives around. But they need discouraging too. As in Mole's example, where's the point of "Oooh I know, if I rape this baby/girl/woman/man/wahtever, I'll get 6 months jail and then... hmm if i behave I'll be out in 2... yeah lets do it! I might not even be caught!"

Life should be life. I'm not for killing murderers, that makes us no better than them (and leaves a lot of explaining to do if you find out you were wrong later) but 20 years less good behaviour is a pathetic punishment for someone who not only ended one or more peoples lives, but also severely fucked up the lives of all those who knew the victim.

Ummmm... back on topic, in theory i'm fine with being watched to keep the peace, in practise however i don't trust the police/government not to abuse it, or allow huge security holes for other members of the public to abuse it.

If you like having to pay for every meal, heating, cooling, electricity, legal fees, education, and what not for murders and rapist to sit in jail for life then I dont guess you mind taking up my part then? Cause I sure dont want to have to pay for them. My money could be better spent in a better education system.

Look what happened last time we tried it though 11b - Australia's population increased ten fold

We should export our prisoners to the moon. There they'll earn their keep by mining titanium and other rare minerals and sending them back to earth. We'll profit, they'll work off their debt to society, and if they don't work we kick them out of an airlock.

Then some super computer will go sentient, the moon will rebel, and we'll get pounded to dust by moon rocks. But still, for at least 50 years we'll be profiting.

I kinda like Satis' idea.

And let's not forget that jails aren't -typically- 4-star hotels. I think it costs close to nothing to feed/wash/warm your average prisoner for a day. But the US has so many ppl in prison that it might become a problem. I think the land of the free has one of the highest numbers of incarcerated citizens in the world.

EDIT: it's even the highest in the world



1 of every 138 U.S. resident is in jail atm, and the state of Texas currently has one percent of its population in jail and 5% under correctional supervision. Dang! You guys must either be doing a lot of bad things or they must lock you up for throwing a candy wrapper on the road or something.


http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0818/p02s01-usju.html

haha funny you should say that actually...

While I was working at the Grand last year, our temporary hotel manager had a brother who works for the police down south somewhere and he sent up a newspaper with an article for our manager to read. It was comparing the Grand to a jail.

I can't remember prices now, but basically it compared a typical english jail and the empress suite (best one) at the grand hotel. And they both were pretty much the same (sky, meals included, decent bed) and of course the guy in jail gets it all for free!

people suck.

Actually, our justice system sucks. And the idea of prisons sucks, because it doesn't work. Noone is ever 'rehabilitated'. I'd like to try some experiments with alternative forms of punishment.

Before you start getting imaginative just remember the Geneva convention Satis, otherwise I would be behind you all the way.

lol, actually I was thinking along the lines of something a bit more constructive then just locking people away for years on end. :p Pain doesn't seem to work so good.

They should tag criminils with rfids/whatever replaces them and give EVERYONE IN THE WORLD a detector that sounds when a known convict is within x amount of feet of you.

The real problem there isn't the costs/stupidness, it's the problem you'd get with noise polution, all those warnings sounding off at once.

I still think putting them in a caged hole and only feeding them when their family shows up is the most cost effective and morally effective thing to do.

I say we put them all in call centers and let the callers pwn em.

haha

"For your horrific murder I sentence you... to 10 years as an I.T. help centre technician"

Lol
ultimate crime prevention there.

The reality of the prison problems is, of course, that it's not all that easy to find a good solution while maintaining a bit of a 'safety hatch' for the innocent.

11B's suggestion (throw in a pit etc) for example disregards the fact that some people simply don't have a family or friends (or not enough of them to do proper 'shifts' etc) and would starve to death in no time. Being a criminal is one thing, being left to die because you suck in social relationships is another. Or if you killed -say- your sister and your family doesn't want to have anything to do with you anymore...does that justify you dying over someone else who killed 1541654 people but still has his family to take care for him?


I'm just saying, a lot of these solutions sound very simple and clear but when it comes down to it it usually isn't workable. And no, I don't like paying taxes to house criminals. But you shouldn't forget that they do work in there, at a very crappy wage. For a lot of criminals prison is the only place they can function: a bed, a meal, a job and ppl who tell him what to do and keep in line etc. Many of these people need to be told what to do. Look at it as a sort of social housing plan. That's just the mentally weak of course, but they make up a large part of the prison population.

Anyway: the solution isn't letting criminals to die by their own means or sending them to a barren rock to duke it out. We all know what happens next, cfr. Oz and Escape from LA. That's just fighting the symptoms. Like Satis said, what would fundamentally help is looking into other, more effective ways of punishment than being locked away for three times life. I wish i had prison and rehabilitation figures for every Western nation in the world..so we could see who does best and why that is so.

or to go even further, investigate how it is so that violent crime rates soar in one country and are realtively low in another? And work on a means to prevent that, create a change in attitude. If you manage to keep people out of jail in the first place we wouldn't have to be so concerned about them soaking up money, now would we.

It's all connected: social inequality, tolerance of violence, overcrowded prisons and lack of rehabilitation. You may not believe it, but a lot of people in jail aren't professional crooks or psychopats. A lot of them are people like you and I who took a wrong way somewhere down the road or had a moment of madness. If you can guide these people well while in jail and when they'releaving it, you can definitely prevent them from becoming recidivists. And from costing society money.

Anyone who did not commit a pre-meditated capital crime should be able to get out of jail early on good behavior. The others are usually so far gone (psychos) that they never get out of mental institutions anyhow. Pre-meditated murder is a very small percentage within crime, I think.