3 ms·
I mean take the extremes. If there was no penalty, would people be more inclined to steal? What if the penalty was the most extreme? If you look to Singapore, y
by throwaway73838 5y ago
I mean take the extremes. If there was no penalty, would people be more inclined to steal? What if the penalty was the most extreme? If you look to Singapore, you’ll find a country with very rough penalties by western standards. Yet that translates to almost no crime.
- tomlockwood 5y agoI can also think of plenty of countries that have even more severe punishments for criminals, that do have a lot of crime, though. Which just leads back to the idea that increased punishment isn't necessarily the solution here.
- throwaway73838 5y agoWell, harsh penalties mean nothing if you have a corrupt and/or underfunded police/criminal justice system. But if you combine a highly efficient and regulated justice system with proper funding and harsh penalties, you will soon have no crime. The problem of course, is people who will advocate for “criminal rights” instead of the rights of victims.
- tomlockwood 5y ago> Well, harsh penalties mean nothing if you have a corrupt and/or underfunded police/criminal justice system. Interesting... This sounds like America, to me. > The problem of course, is people who will advocate for “criminal rights” instead of the rights of victims. Unless the justice system is corrupt, right?
- throwaway73838 5y agoI don’t think that describes America at all. America would have among the safest and best police by world standards. I recently visited Bangladesh, and the police there were recently involved in a shooting - however, they weren’t able to respond, as the local police had sold all their bullets. In a country the size of America, it’s not hard to find examples of when it goes wrong, which the media then inflate in order to incite racial tensions to increase their ratings.
- tomlockwood 5y agoSounds like you've already decided, since reading BLM as a media ratings frenzy is amazing - but America has the largest prison population in the world, in a mostly for-profit system. From 2014 onwards asset forfeiture has taken more money from American citizens than burglary.
- throwaway73838 5y agoThe number of people killed by police annually in the USA is quite low, fewer than 1,000 per year. For a nation with over 300m people and as many guns, don’t you find it surprising that this number isn’t higher? Of course, 50% of this thousand killings per year are of white people, sometimes at the hands of black cops - but this doesn’t cause race riots, and people don’t automatically assume racism - yet if the ethnicities are reversed, it becomes a national issue, rioting etcetera.