5 ms·

I think at the root of this is a very prevalent attitude among a many people in America toward "not letting people get away with things" I don't think you can

by jmadsen 13y ago

I think at the root of this is a very prevalent attitude among a many people in America toward "not letting people get away with things" I don't think you can look at this in a vacuum - you need to see these punishments as simply another manifestation of this attitude. This is not a "this group vs. that group" thing; you may find this among "fire and brimstone" Democrats just as often as your "Limburgh Republicans". I've often said the difference between these groups is: given 100 people asking for a free meal, the liberal will take satisfaction in feeding 99 hungry ones; this type of conservative will fret over the one person who "got away with" getting a free lunch he could have afforded himself. (Side rant: these people tend to be among the loudest Bible-thumpers, and think "the Good Lord helps those.." is an actual biblical passage.) Rehabilitation as a way of dealing with miscreants doesn't work in the US for the main part because there is too large a segment of the American populace who feel that these various programs equate to giving them a reward for bad behavior. Why should they (the convicted) get a free hand with job placement when no one else is "being coddled"? (The wonderful quote "born on third base and thinks he hit a triple" always comes to mind here.) So you see, Americans understand perfectly well all the logical and economic aspects of this issue. The fact is, it is built into our culture to punish people. We get satisfaction from it. We're not after what's best for the country, we're after revenge. It's ugly, but I've been around for many years & I stand by that statement.

bsandbox 13y ago
I think people's sense of personal safety is a bigger driver than revenge. In general, people want a hard line on anything that impacts their sense of personal safety. In order to feel safe, people want punishment to prevent others from committing the same crime. (Of course the flaw in this thinking is that punishment does not always prevent criminals from committing a crime).
- rlanday 13y ago
  If you lock up a repeat offender, you can at least prevent that person from committing more crimes.
  - summerdown2 13y ago
    Unless it turns out that the statistics work out otherwise?* I tend to think the answer is evidence-based reform. Check out what works and do more of that. As far as I can tell, the best results are had by rehabilitation type systems. * What I mean by this is it might be a tautology that someone locked up in prison forever can commit no more crimes, but I'm not sure it's as simple as that. If you lock someone up: a) You deprive their community of that person. Maybe their children will now become criminals. b) You deprive their community of their spending power and work. Maybe it will become poorer. c) They have the chance inside prison to share experiences with novice criminals and teach them how to become old hands, increasing crime when their cell-mates get out. Now if that person is a negative on all the above values, maybe there is a point in not letting them out. Maybe they have broken homes, never work, and teach others about crime anyway. But that's not the person I'm comparing them to. I'm saying the criminal in their community has a negative effect on society. Putting them in jail makes it zero. Actually rehabilitating them makes it positive. If we could get rehabilitation to work, everything gets better. Personally, I think evidence from round the world suggests this is possible.
- summerdown2 13y ago
  I think the flaw in this thinking is that it's emotional. An alternative would be to do things that actually reduce crime statistics as proved by evidence, rather than things that people instinctively think might work.
rayiner 13y ago
There is this attitude, but there is also the other thing: economic and racial social conflict. It cannot be ignored that in California, which has only 6.5% black people, almost 45% of offenders sentenced under three strikes laws are black. Americans not only hate letting people get away with things, but they have particularly little sympathy for policies that disproportionately affect racial minorities. This is the legacy of segregation and suburbanization: it's hard to care about what happens to people in other racial and economic demographics when you're living in a racially and economically homogenous suburb and never actually encounter these people except to hear in the news about crimes in their communities. That said, I don't think these attitudes arise because Americans are bad people. America genuinely has a crime problem. London's murder rate is about 1.2 per 100,000. Chicago's is 15.9 per 100,000, while places like New Orleans and Detroit are around 50-60 per 100k. It's not particularly surprising Americans are less sympathetic than Europeans when it comes to punishment.
- sologoub 13y ago
  Americans are fascinated with race. It's used as an explanation for practically every kind of social injustice. To me, economic situation is much more important here. After all, outside of a serious mental illness, a wealthy person will not go and try to break into someone else's house. There are cultural aspects that have developed to support certain behaviors within an economic setting, there is plain ignorance, but all these can be addressed with proper economic support for the impoverished populations. In California, LA stands as the biggest source of the 3-strikers[1], order of magnitude larger than other urban centers. Part of this is the sheer size of the population, part of it is the size of the economic strata occupied by the majority of 3-strikers. Of the 6.5% (is this even accurate?) "black people" you reference, what % live in utter poverty? Of the 55% of non-black 3-strikers occupy the same strata? I don't have a source of these statistics, but to me it seems very intuitive that you will find that the vast majority come from the same economic situation, and race plays less of a difference than you might think. As for the suburbs, I fail to see the reasoning - are you proposing that we limit the free choice of people of where they want to live? Most people I know who chose to live in suburbs and endure horrific LA traffic did so not because they do not want to be next to other races, they did it because they want their children to have a yard to play in and breath fresh air. Schools with a smaller classroom size are an issue too, but that goes back to the economic situation - large lots/more expensive houses result in greater tax income and therefore better schools. Race is simply the most identifiable trait. Everything else, you have to actually work at finding root causes, this is why people gravitate to issues like that - it's easy, it's horrific and everyone immediately knows the solution. Unfortunately, that is also why we have made very little progress on the issues, despite making the subject socially-radioactive. Instead of feel-good/feel-bad rhetoric, it would be nice to see a tangible plan for improving the economic conditions in the blighted parts of LA for a change... If that happens, I'm willing to wager that crime will drop with poverty, and such horrific stories will become non-existent. [1] http://www.lao.ca.gov/2005/3_strikes/3_strikes_102005.htm http://www.lao.ca.gov/2005/3_strikes/3_strikes_102005.htm (2005 analysis, so a bit out-dated)
jmadsen 13y ago
The problem remains that we have a prison system that serves to punish, not rehabilitate. If you take a defective part & try to fix its deficiencies, it has a better chance of fitting back into the machine it was intended for. If you toss it into a box full of other rusty parts and let it sit neglected for several years, it is more likely to come out rusty & more defective rather than useful. If we were discussing machine parts, no one would ever argue otherwise. If your entire policy is based around putting that part back in the box over and over, then blaming the part for being bad & eventually throwing it away, then you're not being honest about trying to fix the part. A country that is as full of smart people as the US is, that has accomplished as many things as that country has done, and that cannot come up with a system better than what it has, cannot be honestly trying to "fix its parts". I say it is that way because people are not interested in fixing the parts; that they simply want to throw them away. They want punishment, not improvement.

by jmadsen 13y ago

bsandbox 13y ago

I think people's sense of personal safety is a bigger driver than revenge. In general, people want a hard line on anything that impacts their sense of personal safety. In order to feel safe, people want punishment to prevent others from committing the same crime. (Of course the flaw in this thinking is that punishment does not always prevent criminals from committing a crime).

rlanday 13y ago
If you lock up a repeat offender, you can at least prevent that person from committing more crimes.
- summerdown2 13y ago
  Unless it turns out that the statistics work out otherwise?* I tend to think the answer is evidence-based reform. Check out what works and do more of that. As far as I can tell, the best results are had by rehabilitation type systems. * What I mean by this is it might be a tautology that someone locked up in prison forever can commit no more crimes, but I'm not sure it's as simple as that. If you lock someone up: a) You deprive their community of that person. Maybe their children will now become criminals. b) You deprive their community of their spending power and work. Maybe it will become poorer. c) They have the chance inside prison to share experiences with novice criminals and teach them how to become old hands, increasing crime when their cell-mates get out. Now if that person is a negative on all the above values, maybe there is a point in not letting them out. Maybe they have broken homes, never work, and teach others about crime anyway. But that's not the person I'm comparing them to. I'm saying the criminal in their community has a negative effect on society. Putting them in jail makes it zero. Actually rehabilitating them makes it positive. If we could get rehabilitation to work, everything gets better. Personally, I think evidence from round the world suggests this is possible.
summerdown2 13y ago
I think the flaw in this thinking is that it's emotional. An alternative would be to do things that actually reduce crime statistics as proved by evidence, rather than things that people instinctively think might work.

rayiner 13y ago

There is this attitude, but there is also the other thing: economic and racial social conflict. It cannot be ignored that in California, which has only 6.5% black people, almost 45% of offenders sentenced under three strikes laws are black. Americans not only hate letting people get away with things, but they have particularly little sympathy for policies that disproportionately affect racial minorities. This is the legacy of segregation and suburbanization: it's hard to care about what happens to people in other racial and economic demographics when you're living in a racially and economically homogenous suburb and never actually encounter these people except to hear in the news about crimes in their communities. That said, I don't think these attitudes arise because Americans are bad people. America genuinely has a crime problem. London's murder rate is about 1.2 per 100,000. Chicago's is 15.9 per 100,000, while places like New Orleans and Detroit are around 50-60 per 100k. It's not particularly surprising Americans are less sympathetic than Europeans when it comes to punishment.

sologoub 13y ago
Americans are fascinated with race. It's used as an explanation for practically every kind of social injustice. To me, economic situation is much more important here. After all, outside of a serious mental illness, a wealthy person will not go and try to break into someone else's house. There are cultural aspects that have developed to support certain behaviors within an economic setting, there is plain ignorance, but all these can be addressed with proper economic support for the impoverished populations. In California, LA stands as the biggest source of the 3-strikers[1], order of magnitude larger than other urban centers. Part of this is the sheer size of the population, part of it is the size of the economic strata occupied by the majority of 3-strikers. Of the 6.5% (is this even accurate?) "black people" you reference, what % live in utter poverty? Of the 55% of non-black 3-strikers occupy the same strata? I don't have a source of these statistics, but to me it seems very intuitive that you will find that the vast majority come from the same economic situation, and race plays less of a difference than you might think. As for the suburbs, I fail to see the reasoning - are you proposing that we limit the free choice of people of where they want to live? Most people I know who chose to live in suburbs and endure horrific LA traffic did so not because they do not want to be next to other races, they did it because they want their children to have a yard to play in and breath fresh air. Schools with a smaller classroom size are an issue too, but that goes back to the economic situation - large lots/more expensive houses result in greater tax income and therefore better schools. Race is simply the most identifiable trait. Everything else, you have to actually work at finding root causes, this is why people gravitate to issues like that - it's easy, it's horrific and everyone immediately knows the solution. Unfortunately, that is also why we have made very little progress on the issues, despite making the subject socially-radioactive. Instead of feel-good/feel-bad rhetoric, it would be nice to see a tangible plan for improving the economic conditions in the blighted parts of LA for a change... If that happens, I'm willing to wager that crime will drop with poverty, and such horrific stories will become non-existent. [1] http://www.lao.ca.gov/2005/3_strikes/3_strikes_102005.htm http://www.lao.ca.gov/2005/3_strikes/3_strikes_102005.htm (2005 analysis, so a bit out-dated)

jmadsen 13y ago

The problem remains that we have a prison system that serves to punish, not rehabilitate. If you take a defective part & try to fix its deficiencies, it has a better chance of fitting back into the machine it was intended for. If you toss it into a box full of other rusty parts and let it sit neglected for several years, it is more likely to come out rusty & more defective rather than useful. If we were discussing machine parts, no one would ever argue otherwise. If your entire policy is based around putting that part back in the box over and over, then blaming the part for being bad & eventually throwing it away, then you're not being honest about trying to fix the part. A country that is as full of smart people as the US is, that has accomplished as many things as that country has done, and that cannot come up with a system better than what it has, cannot be honestly trying to "fix its parts". I say it is that way because people are not interested in fixing the parts; that they simply want to throw them away. They want punishment, not improvement.