I can’t take it anymore. I do a two year criminology course to find that I’m surrounded by idiots who’d be happy to have CCTV in their homes and jail anyone who so much as looks out of place.
I live in a country which complains non-stop and then, as they get the Olympics, whine because either it’s expensive, out of date, “a farce,” whatever reason they got out of the Daily Mail that day.
The government is stupid. If you’re British, you’ll know I could fill a page with the reasons why.
People are slating the working classes left-right and centre but are so fucking hypocritical that the problems are ignored. If someone’s committing crime, let’s dock their benefits. That’ll cure the problem for sure, making them more poor!
People screaming at the darkness because they’re too stupid to open their eyes. I can’t take this shit anymore.
I need to move out of this goddamned town. Who else is sick of the idiots?
I heard today on the radio that they are planning on introducing sex education to 5 yr olds. They (the government) are completely backwards, this is such a stupid completely waste of time thing to do, when it comes to sex ed. and drugs I say let’s do what the Dutch are doing, whatever they’re doing is generally progressive it seems, in fact fuck this place I’m outta here new year.
I hate some of modern criminology. Some is truly nonsense, infact a lot of it is. ignoring all sorts of modern research in behavorial genetics, genetics, plenty of neuroscience and modern psychology.
Place the blame where the blame lies, the general population. Even here in the US folks like to blame everyone else but if you take a hit and do nothing and keep letting them hit you, how can you then say they are soley guilty of harming you. You allow the hits you hold the responsibility of allowing the harm.
I’ve spent two years studying social policy and criminology for a diploma and have learned a hell of a lot about the different perspectives in crime and crime control.
So I go on a forum full of geordies. Bad idea. I try to have an intelligent debate (you can see where this is going) and find myself stonewalled with ingrained, simplistic “the law is very clear on this” and “if you break the law you go to jail” mantra which have zero insight or depth and the individuals chanting these mantra are just the same.
I wanted debate, I got ridicule. I tried to say that imprisoning someone for theft is causing much more damage than the crime did, that it leaves the problems caused by the crime unsolved and the problems which caused the crime ignored - and all I got is “it gets the scum away from law-abiding people.” Which would be fine if only they had allowed for some debate. “I see what you mean, but…” would have been nice once or twice.
Did you offer a better explanation or social policy for what could be done with thieves? or did you just say prison was too destructive and leave it at that? because if there was no legal repurcussion for stealing, we’d probably see what we do in blackout conditions. Massive stealing and property destruction.
My argument was that returning the stolen item was sufficient. Locking people up to be beaten and raped was not proprtionate nor useful in solving problems. It is in delivering sadistic punishment, but not in solving problems.
Perhaps you might turn on the light for them and show them where to look.
There is always hope.
Dare to reach out your hand into the darkness, to pull another hand into the light. ~Norman B. Rice
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything,
That’s how the light gets in.
~Leonard Cohen
:-" :-" :-"
Its all well and good to say an action is wrong, but before you do you should have an alternative. I happen to agree with you but, what is the alternative?
Can I just say, so far this thread is a trillion times more intelligent than the last time I had this conversation. You guys actually have brains and minds of your own. =D>
Prison served as a good method of raising revenue, that’s true. But the moral implications still remain - if someone commits a crime which can be fixed proportionately (such as breaking and entering; the criminal could be forced to simply fix the damage and assist in installing a security system, [although obviously not one he/she could work around by virtue of their involvement in it’s installment!], or a thief being made to return the stolen item), why bother overkilling the situation with a jail sentence just to exploit their free labour? If you include revenue as a primary aim of prison, then surely it would be for long-term prisoners or lifers who, by virtue of their serious crimes, warrent seperation from society and concequentially have removed their labour from the market? Instead of small-time criminals who pose little risk to the public and whose crimes can be easily repared with reparative or restorative justice techniques.
After all, people who “transgress the bounds of society” do so (usually) for a reason. The thief steals usually out of poverty and desperation - locking them up and stigmatizing them as a filthy criminal does zero good. The reasons behind each case of crime should be subjectivley examined to see if the situations of the criminals can be in some way managed or assisted to lessen the need to restort to crime. Of course, this does not apply to every criminal, for example thrill-seekers, psychopaths and violent criminals (who would qualify for my lifer’s labour scheme!), but it would for a great majority of criminals. Think about knife crime - the highly emotive moral panic in the UK at the moment centres on the knife-wielding yobs crowding street corners. In reality, most knife-carriers are simply attempting to protect themselves from other knife-carriers! If you moved the family of a known knife-carrier to a better estate, chances are you could then begin to work on removing the ingrained culture that have been associated with for so long and not only remove a “criminal” from the streets but made at least one life, and one family, better.
Its not an accurate response to the crime, locking up thiefs with murderers. However, you’re naive if you think ‘giving the stolen object back’ would work. I don’t believe in ‘detterence’ per se, but when the lights go out PEOPLE RIOT AND STEAL, in huge amounts.
If criminals getting caught only had to give their items back and even go through a forced ‘learning’ on why its wrong, it would create massive amounts of stealing throughout society.
Not only that but your idea is so insane as to be useless, i’m sorry that we don’t live in a conceptual world filled with conceptual people, but real life humans evolved and they have cheater detection mechanisms for punishing people who betray social alliances.
So… yeah… people will want justice, and no amount of intellectual tongue flapping is ever going to change that when it comes to punishing crimes in some note-worthy way
that doesn’t mean we can’t debate the death penalty or different sentencing, but to simply say “Well he should just give the item back”
guess what happens? The person whose object was stolen, will still want revenge. If you want less people stealing you’re going to have more violence/death when citizens start taking things into their own hands because they don’t trust the legal system to protect their hard earned cash.
the real world has real people, with brains which are *adapted. Realistic solutions should be suggested; or nothing.
It drives me insane when people live so deeply in conceptual space that they ignore thousands of real-world variables.
WTF makes you think that if someone steals from someone, that they’re going to be happy when the person is forced to give it back without repurcussion; have you ever studied societies that don’t have a ‘state-like’ legal systems? Do you know how they resolve stealing disputes?
How would one seek out the motives? If it is known that a desperate person can just get a slap on the wrist so to speak, what stops a real criminal from using the same defense? Trials take long enough as it is, To seek out such truth will take even longer in an already overly burdened system. I would say that it does have to be broken down much more than it is. But, how to do so with out releasing someone who is a criminal and keep it all cost efficient for society.
I know I would like to see drug users set up in a different system rather than the criminal, Also first time offenders. right now as it is the penal system creates hardened humans and then it releases these people back to society. Pretty damn dumb system.
Your both right - this kind of thinking is conceptual. In reality, people and situations are simply too, well, real!
My thinking is admittedly lifted from restorative justice rhetoric - which is based on the idea that conflicts between people can be resolved and the damage repaired, but with the added aim of shaming the offender (as opposed to stigmatizing or humiliating them) and reintegrating them into the community.
Yes, it sounds like hippy bullshit, and the theory is a fair bit removed from the practical applications of restorative justice - but the evidence is that restorative justice is highly successful.
I think the real problem is that people are too ingrained in a “compensation” and “retribution” mindset - it’s lead to the current obsession in society with locking people up and segregating/excluding “transgressors” to the point where more and more groups of people are becoming part of the paranoid Joe Public’s underclass - single mothers, benefit claimers, immigrants, I’ve seen people suggest all these should be locked up. It harks back to 19th Century ideas of “the unwashed masses” full of criminogenic anti-social elements. It demarcates “law-abiding citizens” from the rest of society - seen as utter scum.
Then there’s the concepts of moral panic and the deviancy amplification loop - society gets “outraged” about something because the media says so, or more rightly, the media gets outraged because it sells papers, and the authorities act on “the people’s rage” which turns into greater exclusion and stigmatization of the bad guys of the day (yobs in the street, for example), who in turn “reject their rejectors” and live up to their bad reps. And of course, as a result, the problem (which may not have existed to start with) is now much worse - meaning more moral panic until the next bad guy comes along.
You end up in a vicious circle where you can justify the exclusionary, “revenge” and “punishment” guided policies and practices by pointing at the finger at the problems in society caused by the retributive mindset in the first place!
This is all conceptual too - but the problem is, it seems this logic is ruling the roost socially. Again, it ignores real life and it ignores the harsh, complex nature of reality. Massive social change which could change this mindset is impossible thanks to the media pumping us with the same “lock 'em up” rubbish day in day out.
EDIT: I think I should make clear that restorative justice, which my philosophy is based, is not a total system, a universal one for all criminals. It wouldn’t work that way. It should be an alternative avenue for criminal justice when harsher penalties are not warrented or can be avoided.
Crime and maturity is a good question to study. Even though a person is of legal age or near to it what is their maturity level? Are we sending people that have the maturity of 14 or 17 yr olds into a system designed for mature adults? What specific effects would that cause? How many folks could be rehabilitated if they were handled differently and set in a situation that did not house hardened adults? I have always wondered why Guards are not also counselers. To me that would make sense.
](https://www.ilovephilosophy.com/uploads/default/original/2X/7/7c349bf1053f368a5729d053e1e91215f22ce66c.gif "Brick wall"){kind=small}
