I’m sure there are those who don’t commit any further violence or crime. Unfortunately, during my LE career I dealt with numerous people who followed the aforementioned cycle over and over and over. I’m sure their victims wished they were still institutionalized.
Replied to the wrong person lol.
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I was responding to this statement:
If someone has committed a crime on his own volition, he should stand trial and be found either guilty or insane, in which he would face one of 2 forms of incarceration. You don’t get held until you can stand trial. From what the article you posted says, there was a legal loophole that was taken advantage of. I do not know what that specific law is and whether there was indeed some kind of loophole or just misinterpreted.
However, if someone were to, say, use an innocent agent like the mentally handicapped to commit a crime, then the other person would be the one charged.
That’s simply not a priority for many jurisdictions. Can’t you get it through your dumb cop head how bad those kind of optics can be for elected officials?
I’m not sure if you ever read Second City Cop when it was still up, but it isn’t up anymore for some reason. Chicago is the capital of my childhood and it seems like every day there’s another tragic murder committed by someone who could have been locked up, but wasn’t.
But hey, that’s progress for you. Something about equity, I’m told.
This is because people have twisted themselves into utter fantasies about incarceration not being useful.
Incarceration isn’t a deterrent, but you can drop crime precipitously by incarcerating the most recidivist criminals. From what I’ve seen of the data, crime operates in line with Pareto distribution. 80% of crime is committed by 20% of the criminals, and 80% of that 80% is committed by 20% of those criminals and so on.
Run those maths and it’s 60+% of crime committed by 4% of criminals. Long custodial sentences drop crime by merit of who is incarcerated, not by who is deterred.
Edit: re: deterrence, the data also indicates that it’s the certainty of punishment that is most likely to deter, not the severity per se. So make of that what you will.
For my money, if you could improve your detection and prevention of crime, and then incarcerate the worst offenders, you end up with a very different picture, even in places like Chicago. The problem is that this is extraordinarily difficult, and even places that used to do it extremely well (London) have given up on doing it because it is that difficult.
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A candidate for the Darwin award:
Mom tells daughter she's been shot as April Fools' Day joke - ABC News
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I believe that was how Ed Kemper was released after he murdered his grandparents.
The problem in the US is that over half the violent crime is committed by a racial demographic that makes up 13% of the population. If you break it down further by sex and age, most violent crime is committed by young males of that demographic, then it’s what? 5% percent or so of the US population committing over half the violent crime. Therefore, that group will be disproportionately represented in prison (as it is now).
Yes, as someone who lived in a community where that group is like a virus or cancer on that community, it’s good to have them off the streets however, it does end up looking like a criminal justice policy that is racist. I’m not saying don’t lock them up and throw away the key, but that can’t be the long term solution unless someone is profiting off incarceration.
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A tiny fraction of that 5%* and a tiny fraction of that tiny fraction will be responsible for an outsized proportion of that crime.
This is the seriously complicated part of even beginning to tackle the problem, isn’t it? Even diagnosing the problem accurately is a minefield, and then actually dealing with it, a further minefield.
This is the tragic part. Solving the crime problem is the necessary first step to lifting these areas out of of their squalor, but tackling it means you’ll be incarcerating a minority that have serious legitimate grievances, current and historical with US government policy.
There’s no good answer to that conundrum that I can see, but leaving these areas to tumble into hell is a dreadful response to this, as I see it.
It’s definitely not the long term solution to anything other than the crime problem. If we could solve inter-generational poverty, broken homes, and lack of development, this problem would lessen by orders of magnitude, but that is a Herculean task by any measure.
As to your second point, for profit prisons are a blight, and I don’t care if it’s not particularly conservative to say so (though I think there are perfectly conservative reasons to oppose such things with extreme prejudice)
Ed Kemper is also incredibly intelligent. IIRC, the facility he was held at had him doing psych evals on incoming juvenile prisoners. He figured out how to beat the eval. From what I hear he is a nice guy in person. Some crazy shit goes down in that head though.
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I personally don’t get life in prison for mad dogs.
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A genius level IQ, or close enough to it, as I understand it.
So I hear, but who knows what to make of that other than he’s a polite monster?
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Nor I. The death penalty was ended in the U.K. because the politicians didn’t like their responsibilities with regard to it (for understandable reasons), had it been a public vote, we’d still be hanging people.
I read his Wiki a while ago. He isn’t very nice to criminals who he views as dumb. I guess he has taken at least one and manipulated him into being a pet. I guess when it come time to eat, he sits down, and another prisoner goes and gets him food.
He is also a very large man. I think 6’9" and over 300 lbs. I find the guy pretty interesting as he is not the typical serial killer. He has a Hannibal Lecter thing going with the genius IQ.
I guess he actually turned himself in after killing his mother. He didn’t think he would ever be caught if he didn’t admit fault and turn up. He says he doesn’t feel bad for his crimes, but understood that they were wrong. I guess many of his crimes were practice so that he didn’t screw up killing his mother who he really really hated.
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We’d be doing a lot of unseemly things if that were the case.
I personally don’t like giving the government the power to kill its citizens especially when the people most likely to be affected are from a different socioeconomic class as those in power.
Undoubtedly.
Strictly speaking, it was a properly instructed jury, but I take your point. It’s a power that should be used sparingly, but one I think that should be used when necessary.
It’s not a power I can fault anyone for opposing, though. There are perfectly sensible reasons to oppose it, especially in the US.
In the US they say you will have a jury of your peers. I have always managed to get out of jury duty so my jury would not be made up of my peers, as my peers would be smart enough to avoid jury duty.
Look at Derek Chauvin: should his jury be made up of “average” people or people who are experts or experienced in law enforcement? Or some jurists with medical backgrounds with regard to how drugs can affect someone behaviorally and the effects they can have physiologically?
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I am against it because our judicial system makes mistakes. We have executed people and later new evidence comes out that suggests it was likely they were innocent.
In the US, it also costs a lot more money to execute vs keep for life. Most of the cost is in the prosecution during the trial. On average the state pays a lot more money when they go for a death penalty sentence. That extra money is more than the money to keep someone in prison until they die (on average of course).
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Well, it should be the former, as the system is not meant to be a technocracy. But the exemptions for service, and the current pool it is drawn from do make a reasonable jury a dicier proposition.
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Certainly, but there are also clear cut cases where no doubt exists. Charles Ng, or Charlie Manson, or the Boston bomber, to name a few. I think the state should have the capacity to end such lives, but I can certainly appreciate you not agreeing with such a calculus.
It’s an enormous cost in the US, isn’t it? I sincerely don’t know how they rack up such bills. But my pro-death penalty stance isn’t based on cost per prisoner as a primary consideration.
The work of the innocence project is one I very much support, and I do wonder if there’s a way to safeguard trials from prosecutorial misconduct and faulty evidence in a quicker fashion.
I wonder if it would be better if you had a panel drawn of experts after the fact to assess all evidence as a second check against the death penalty if that would alleviate some of the most glaring injustices.
Just thinking out loud at the moment though.
Your quote also made me aware of the error in my sentence and caused me deep shame 
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