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You sound pretty violent yourself. Should we put a bullet in you? |
+1 Nothing to see here, it's all good!
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There are several separate questions and issues here.
1. Violent individuals: We need safe streets, we should be able to go about our business, ride trains without being attacked, walk at night without being mugged, not have our kids shot when they go to school. Violent people need to be removed from society, period. That's not about punishment, that's not about rehabilitation, that's about doing right by society. 2. How should they be punished? I don't have the answer to that. Is removing them from society enough of a punishment in and of itself? I do believe they should have to make restitution to their victims or the surviving family members. And if that's through prison labor I think that's fair. 3. Can they be rehabilitated? Should they get a second chance? That's yet another totally separate question. I believe in some cases, yes. In others, no. But that takes evaluation. Let's not commingle and conflate all of these and start with the first one, even if we don't have the answers for the other two. |
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Lawrence Reed “allegedly slapping a social worker so hard that she was knocked out during an Aug. 19 assault inside the psychiatric ward of the MacNeal Hospital“ . . .
. . . and then was released into the community. He knocked someone out, IN THE PSYCH WARD, and then was left to his own devices. I challenge you to find anyone on any side of the political spectrum who would argue that was a good idea. But somehow it happened. Probably the most memorable thing I’ve done all year was ride the Blue Line out to O’Hare at 5am. The 300lb transsexual seated beside me alternated alternated between extremely entertaining and extremely terrifying. I breathed a very deep sigh of relief when I got off that train. Next time I will take a Uber. I’ve heard a lot of explanations as to why it’s not possible to involuntarily commit mentally ill folk to treatment centers (or whatever other euphemism you want to use). Some of those explanations reference Supreme Court decisions, others Reagan’s gutting of the Mental Health Systems Act. We can argue about that all day, but what all of us should trying hard to understand is why it’s so damn hard to put together a political consensus to do that which everyone seems to be in agreement about. |
+1 That poster lacks empathy for others' pain and suffering. |
If someone is in prison, they are not a threat to the public. The number of people in prison is irrelevant. We have more prisoners because we have more criminals. We are past the point where people give a crap if somebody is mentally ill or had a rough childhood. If we have to double the number of people in prisons to make things safe for people simply traveling to work, so be it. |
| Thousands of researchers are doing endless studies & writing countless articles about crime & punishment. We need to start considering the concept that perhaps there ISN’T a nice clean cure for habitual criminality; no magic pill or curative therapy. Maybe the best we can do is isolate the criminals from the public. And at this point I don’t really care if that means we have a higher % of our citizens behind bars than f’ing Denmark has. |
Do you honestly believe Americans are more criminal than everywhere else is the developed world, or do we just maybe have the most poverty? And maybe turning prisons into a vehicle for profit making inevitably leads to more people being thrown in prison? |
No, I believe, and the stats back this, that it’s the usual suspects committing these crimes and other developed nations don’t have the same demographics as the U.S. Poverty isn’t causing people to be violent, culture is. |
| I read somewhere that 80% of the crimes are committed by 20% of the people , seems like we should put that 20% away |
+ 1 million I don't know how judges who make decisions like that one sleep at night. |
This person is insane. He needs to be committed to a mental health facility not a prison. There are in fact “magic pills” for treating mental illness. That someone has to have the ability to understand between right and wrong has been a bedrock of the criminal justice system for hundreds of years. |
He needs to be committed to a facility for the criminally insane. The mentally ill who are a serious danger to other people need to be kept away from the mentally ill who simply lack the ability to care for themselves but are otherwise harmless. But in no world should this guy have been allowed to walk the streets. Just like the guy in Charlotte who stabbed the Ukrainian woman. |