Reply to Non-Profit bails out domestic abuser, he promptly beats wife to death

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Bleeding hearts only care about their feel good moment . Fiddling criminals won’t turn out well but liberals have made criminals into a darling group [/quote]

I have a co-worker who has told me that she doesn't believe in incarceration, only in rehabilitation.  She is active in a non-profit regarding this.  I REALLY wanted to tell her that my kidnapper/rapist recently applied for parole and I'm terrified of him coming after me when he gets out.  I really wanted to ask her if she would feel that way if she was in my position.  I did not though, I kept quite and just listened to her talk about mass incarceration and using inmates as slave labor, etc. [/quote]

I'm far left but I don't believe in prison abolition precisely because I have a friend who survived a similar crime. I'm sorry that happened to you, pp. Obviously you have no obligation to share your story with your coworker, but I think stories like yours can push people to have a more nuanced view of the issue. I definitely think there are too many people in prison in the US but I also don't think we should have to live in communities with convicted rapists and murders. I find that people who grew up in violent communities tend to agree with that point, and people who have lived lives sheltered from violence are cool with letting everyone out.[/quote]

Ok, but wait: "I don't think we should have to live . . . with convicted rapists and murderers". Which means you are calling for life without parole in all such cases, since they have to live somewhere. What is the underlying purpose here? Is it because such persons are so despicable they should not be allowed contact with anyone on the other side of prison bars ever again?Or is it because of concerns about future dangerousness? And is this the case regardless of the circumstances of the crime? And 18 year old is present with other people engaged in a robbery, nobody has a gun--except the store clerk who shoots one of the other robbers, who also happens to have a concealed knife. Now you have an 18 year old facing first degree murder charges because of a homicide committed in the act of an intentional felony. Life in prison? really? What about people who are unquestionably rehabilitated? What is exactly the purpose in lifetime incarceration, which is what you are talking about?

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Right? Those are all huge and complicated questions. And when the Supreme Court had a case about whether life in prison for juveniles it was all young people who were like that 18 year old, all cases where maybe the kid didn't have good representation or got scared into a bad plea, and hadn't made good choices but also likely wasn't a terribly violent individual. Sure, I can believe that that that kid could do some time, or even not do time, and out and lead a decent life. What I need to hear from abolitionists is what you do with people like the 15 year old who attacked my friend. He had been violently attacking girls and women in his family and neighborhood for years with repeated slaps on the wrist, when he attacked my friend it was a big case. And, it is very likely that many terrible things happened in his young life that led him to his actions. Do I think that after 30 years in prison, getting released at age 45, I would want him in my community? Absolutely not. [/quote]

Understood, but even then it is hard to support any argument that outside of miscarriages of justice (which maybe cannot be separated from the criminal justice system as a whole) that our system is a rational response to bad or even horrific acts by people. According to Ruth Wilson (an abolitionist I never heard of until today) California started expanding its prison system in the 70s, at a time when government had acquired a pretty bad rap (Vietnam and Nixon) and, she argues, had surplus land, power, and other resources it needed to use at a time when crime rates were falling. It just dawned on me that small government conservatives and libertarians can always get behind military and criminal justice functions of the state because they see these as really the essential functions of government.

But still -- according to Pew as of 2018, incarceration rate (includes all people in custody) was lowest in 2 decades yet STILL the highest in the world. Yet our violent crime rate remains high (rapes per million we are at 14th out of 117 countries, I couldn't pull out the specific ranking of assaults but is also up there). [/quote]

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