4 ms·

I largely agree but this whole issue needs to be looked at through eyes of compassion first and foremost. Jesus stood by a woman who was about to be stoned for

by toss1941 9y ago

I largely agree but this whole issue needs to be looked at through eyes of compassion first and foremost. Jesus stood by a woman who was about to be stoned for adultery and told her would-be killers that he who was without sin should cast the first stone. Then he began to write in the sand, it doesn't say what he wrote, but it was probably some of the sins of the would be stoners and they fled quickly, realizing they were no better than she was. I think most americans who would applaud a 90 day sentence for a small quantity of drugs for personal use would feel guilty reading that story in the Bible in that context. People forget that those who turn to hard drugs don't tend to do so because they're simply rebels spoiling for a fight with the justice system. They do so because they're people and people have problems, every single one of us. There needs to be a return to compassion but as long as drug users are vilified in every possible way on every possible television show, that won't change. Hollywood could lead the return to compassion if it wanted to by raising awareness of what is actually happening in people's lives, how drugs are seen as a (usually bad) solution or an escape and give concrete workable examples of how that can change. In the end, it's a problem of ignorance, i.e. people believe and act one way when they would be best off doing something entirely different were they armed with more information about their problems. Rather than 90 days in jail, it could be 9 weeks of counseling for one or two hours while the person remains a productive member of society. So I just don't think attacking this as a problem with long sentences is going to do anything to help anyone. You might get sentences greatly reduced, but have you actually helped the root problem?

vidoc 9y ago
> So I just don't think attacking this as a problem with long sentences is going to do anything to help anyone. You might get sentences greatly reduced, but have you actually helped the root problem? The justice system isn't supposed to deal with root problems, but it is supposed to punish crime with a sentence that is both guaranteed, proportional, and rapidly executed. In this case, the very fact this guy goes to jail for drug possession is just completely insane.
- tripzilch 9y ago
  a good (compassionate) justice system is supposed to deal with: - safety, for society (removing direct threats) - deterrence, for other would-be criminals in society - rehabilitation, providing the opportunity to "be better" for the convicted - providing a minimal "lightning rod" to address and quell the (human/societal) instinctual/primal urge for vengeance Note that the latter is no more than a smokescreen to distract ourselves when we're not being aware of what this lust for vengeance basically is. On the animal level (present in all primates and certain mammals), there is a very fundamental desire for "fairness". It's a very rudimentary "moral" system, evolved to deal with a fundamentally amoral universe. It kind of works but it's not very optimal. Humans are smarter than that now, and we can observe this desire and figure out better systems. It's called "ethics", we've been puzzling over it for thousands of years, it's not solved but we have figured out a thing or two. Vengeance is the opposite of forgiveness. If you know about forgiveness, if you ever had to forgive something that was somewhat hard to forgive, and did the necessary introspection to succeed, you've learned this: You do the forgiving for yourself, not for the other person. It's a change in your perception of their guilt, you're not clearing a "guilt flag" in them, they still did what they did, you don't need to forget, you don't need to offer them anything, you don't even need to let them know you've forgiven them. Forgiveness is the decision to let go of this primal lust for vengeance. And that can be a hard decision if the thing the other did is very bad. And that's good because it should not be a light decision. Enacting the vengeance can temper this lust, but if you've already found better ways that deal with the first three points above, that is its only function left. So we can find better, more compassionate ways to deal with that, too. Which is why some form of punishment must be part of a justice system; It doesn't feel fair otherwise and you can't expect the whole of society to just get over that. Because we're still monkeys and in large numbers, on average, even more so. But just like we've subverted so many of our other primal urges in ways that are more useful in a modern society, we can really make this punishment as symbolic as our primal instincts allow for. If we've taken care of those first three points, that's really all there's left to do. And you don't need a lot, at all. It needs to be cemented in culture, but it can be done. Proof is, assuming that US humans are sufficiently similar to humans everywhere (which I like to believe, don't you? :) ), all those societies on this earth that have way less harsh punishments, shorter sentences and less awful prisons (US prisons are a bit on the... ehm.. medieval side of the spectrum). They don't get up in arms or feel that justice isn't "fair" enough any more than that nameless, shifting part of society that will always complain punishment isn't harsh enough. Which doesn't actually get any less than it is in the US with harsher punishments. Neither are these societies being overrun by criminals.
eternalban 9y ago
> writing on the sand My take on it is somewhat similar with the difference being that since the scene involved invoking a Mosaic law we should look that up and there we find that the 'justification' for capital punishment is that 'lest' the rest of the (presumably holy) community gets infected as in "one bad apple" process. That would make writing on the sand an analog for the /futility/ of keeping /records/ of judgment for an un-Holy people who are (spiritually) as sands in a dune subject to careless winds of material existence.

vidoc 9y ago

> So I just don't think attacking this as a problem with long sentences is going to do anything to help anyone. You might get sentences greatly reduced, but have you actually helped the root problem? The justice system isn't supposed to deal with root problems, but it is supposed to punish crime with a sentence that is both guaranteed, proportional, and rapidly executed. In this case, the very fact this guy goes to jail for drug possession is just completely insane.

tripzilch 9y ago
a good (compassionate) justice system is supposed to deal with: - safety, for society (removing direct threats) - deterrence, for other would-be criminals in society - rehabilitation, providing the opportunity to "be better" for the convicted - providing a minimal "lightning rod" to address and quell the (human/societal) instinctual/primal urge for vengeance Note that the latter is no more than a smokescreen to distract ourselves when we're not being aware of what this lust for vengeance basically is. On the animal level (present in all primates and certain mammals), there is a very fundamental desire for "fairness". It's a very rudimentary "moral" system, evolved to deal with a fundamentally amoral universe. It kind of works but it's not very optimal. Humans are smarter than that now, and we can observe this desire and figure out better systems. It's called "ethics", we've been puzzling over it for thousands of years, it's not solved but we have figured out a thing or two. Vengeance is the opposite of forgiveness. If you know about forgiveness, if you ever had to forgive something that was somewhat hard to forgive, and did the necessary introspection to succeed, you've learned this: You do the forgiving for yourself, not for the other person. It's a change in your perception of their guilt, you're not clearing a "guilt flag" in them, they still did what they did, you don't need to forget, you don't need to offer them anything, you don't even need to let them know you've forgiven them. Forgiveness is the decision to let go of this primal lust for vengeance. And that can be a hard decision if the thing the other did is very bad. And that's good because it should not be a light decision. Enacting the vengeance can temper this lust, but if you've already found better ways that deal with the first three points above, that is its only function left. So we can find better, more compassionate ways to deal with that, too. Which is why some form of punishment must be part of a justice system; It doesn't feel fair otherwise and you can't expect the whole of society to just get over that. Because we're still monkeys and in large numbers, on average, even more so. But just like we've subverted so many of our other primal urges in ways that are more useful in a modern society, we can really make this punishment as symbolic as our primal instincts allow for. If we've taken care of those first three points, that's really all there's left to do. And you don't need a lot, at all. It needs to be cemented in culture, but it can be done. Proof is, assuming that US humans are sufficiently similar to humans everywhere (which I like to believe, don't you? :) ), all those societies on this earth that have way less harsh punishments, shorter sentences and less awful prisons (US prisons are a bit on the... ehm.. medieval side of the spectrum). They don't get up in arms or feel that justice isn't "fair" enough any more than that nameless, shifting part of society that will always complain punishment isn't harsh enough. Which doesn't actually get any less than it is in the US with harsher punishments. Neither are these societies being overrun by criminals.

eternalban 9y ago

> writing on the sand My take on it is somewhat similar with the difference being that since the scene involved invoking a Mosaic law we should look that up and there we find that the 'justification' for capital punishment is that 'lest' the rest of the (presumably holy) community gets infected as in "one bad apple" process. That would make writing on the sand an analog for the /futility/ of keeping /records/ of judgment for an un-Holy people who are (spiritually) as sands in a dune subject to careless winds of material existence.