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Old Enough to Die - (Page 117 of Arguably)

#100: Oct. - Nov. 2011 (Non-Fiction)
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giselle

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Re: Old Enough to Die - (Page 117 of Arguably)

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My point with respect to 'preventative measures' has been interpreted in a way I did not intend (which is understandable because I was not clear). I was not referring to 'preventative measures' in the home/family relating to children or character profiling or income levels or anything like that, nor did I allude to these things. I don't believe that family based interventions of this nature would work for many of the reasons that have been stated and the results could be catastrophic .. if we went down that road, we might as well carry on with genetic engineering and prevent the problem before 'it' is born and then we get into really scary territory.

I was thinking about preventative measures in the criminal justice system to deal with repeat offenders and those with escalating patterns of crime. And these might be positive measures, like rehab, but also measures to protect society, like responsible parole conditions. There are criminologists and psychologists and counsellors and others who specialize in these things ..
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Re: Old Enough to Die - (Page 117 of Arguably)

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I think that we don't want to admit that cost has to be a factor in everything, but it really does. Any society only has a finite amount of money and difficult choices have to be made about where to spend it. In the next 20 or 30 years as health care cost rise and we having an aging population, we're going to see how value of a life vs cost of that life are going to have to start weighing in the equation more and more. Prisoners who have a life sentence and are considered drain on society might be a good first choice on where to cut costs.
Yes, cost is a factor in everything, no question, but it does not follow that capital punishment is the solution to the cost problem. If prisoners with a life sentence are 'first choice' to cut costs, who's second in this cost saving drive? and third? How about people on life support, that costs a fortune. And who is going to sign off the order of death and say that the cost is too high so pull the plug? If the state has the right to kill its own citizens in a rising cost environment, there is no telling where this could lead. Talk about the state having too much power to interfere in people's lives. We have to deal with the upward spiral of costs in health care, justice and elsewhere, but I think there are places to trim costs that do not involve state sponsored death.
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Re: Old Enough to Die - (Page 117 of Arguably)

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I was not referring to 'preventative measures' in the home/family relating to children or character profiling or income levels or anything like that, nor did I allude to these things.
No, I realize that you did not, but I was just looking at it from that angle.
I was thinking about preventative measures in the criminal justice system to deal with repeat offenders and those with escalating patterns of crime. And these might be positive measures, like rehab, but also measures to protect society, like responsible parole conditions.
I know that this is a great idea, but I don't believe that it has very much success. I don't really know all the much about life in prison, mostly from TV and movies, but it seems to me that the way of life inside does not resemble what is in the rest of society. I would think it would be much better for success, if prisons were set up more to resemble real life: working hard and paying for your keep.
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Re: Old Enough to Die - (Page 117 of Arguably)

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I just read this remarkable essay by Sam Harris on how to escape from violent people, and thought I would post it in this thread, especially for this comment:
Sam Harris wrote:The only data I could find on prisoner release and recidivism in the United States are out of date, but they are nonetheless shocking. As of 1992, violent offenders in the U.S. served an average of 43 months in jail and prison before being returned to the streets. For murderers the average was 71 months; for rapists it was 65 months. Why genuine murderers and rapists are ever released is a mystery to me—and if we didn’t have to make room in our prisons for graduate students caught selling MDMA, perhaps we could keep true predators off our streets. To make matters worse, a Canadian study found that psychopaths are 2.5 times as likely as ordinary criminals to be released from prison—because they successfully con parole boards. And the re-arrest rate for violent offenders is over 60 percent within three years. This paints a rather terrifying picture of our collective masochism: We do not keep dangerous criminals off our streets; rather, we have turned our prisons into graduate schools for predatory violence, and we release their graduates back into society, knowing that most will continue harming innocent people.
America is too soft. Psychopaths should be executed whatever their age.
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Re: Old Enough to Die - (Page 117 of Arguably)

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What do you do in Australia? I wasn't aware that Australia goes against the grain of modern Western countries, as the U.S. is criticized for doing regarding cap. punishment. I didn't read Hitchens' essay, but I'm against executing kids who murder. Murderer doesn't equal psychopath, as hard as that may be to accept. The law has to preserve a distinction between the judgment and conduct expected of an adult vs. that expected of a child.
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Re: Old Enough to Die - (Page 117 of Arguably)

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Australia abolished capital punishment 45 years ago. I agree that not all murderers are psychopaths who deserve to die, but some are. A court ought to be able to assess if a person is a psychopath, and if so, we are all better off without them. Asserting that it is compassionate and civilized to keep psychopaths alive seems to me to be a very thin argument.

There are several murderers in jail in Australia who are generally seen as psychopaths - Martin Bryant, Ivan Milat, and the Cobby thugs. In the US they would have been executed but here they are kept alive at taxpayers' expense. If someone does these things, they should die. These cases are adult criminals, but if a child commits pathological murder, their continued life will only bring more harm.

Singapore is another place that executes criminals quite regularly, and considers it fully justified. This helps to send a lesson to others, and is much less costly than keeping them alive to fester and vegetate and establish criminal schools.

Some background is at http://crime.about.com/od/juvenile/i/juvenile_death.htm

The Cobby case is discussed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Anita_Cobby
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