Regarding the war on drugs (the massive spike in the graph on the previous page):
http://content.usato...gs-has-failed/1

[quote name='Hodgman' timestamp='1307022006' post='4818653']What if there are mitigating circumstances, such as when the shoplifter is the child of a addict and consequently have no food, so they steal to eat?

Without sounding like a complete and utter idealist - that's what a welfare system is for.[/quote]Apparently it doesn't work -- otherwise there wouldn't be such an above average crime rate, right? Either that, or crimes of necessity / crimes due to upbringing don't exist in a significant percentage?

If welfare indeed is the answer, maybe some spending on social justice needs to be redirected to spending on social welfare, which would indirectly also help with providing justice in the long run, no? Perhaps if inequality was addressed, then crimes would be prevented, meaning you no longer require as much investment in "correctional facilities"?

What's your explanation for the 1 in 4 statistic?

Who is really destroying the life though? In the end there is only one person at fault.

If that's true, then what is it about Americans that makes them so much more likely to be at fault in this way? What's the root cause? Shouldn't this cause be sought out and corrected so that the US can function like a regular western state?

The justice system itself though is not as harsh as it is painted by the numbers. It is kind of put in a situation where it has no choice but to look harsh because there are just more criminals.

How is a life sentence for getting caught shopfliting 3 times not harsh? How is the stuff I linked earlier in the article http://www.lewrockwe.../roberts43.html not harsh? How is arresting, detaining and convicting pre-teen children for writing on desks or misbehaving in schools not harsh?

The law is there, it's an absolute, and it's designed to protect those values of freedom and liberty.

Criminal behaviour is not an absolute, not a constant. It is someone's choice to commit a crime, and they should be punished accordingly. Being sent to prison to 25 years for being stupid enough to be caught shoplifting etc, three times would be a fantastic deterrent.

Unless the crime in question is something like drug possession charges, which is a non-trivial portion of the prison population. Laws about that seem designed to inhibit liberty even if there's no harm to others (or, arguably, to the user).

The law isn't absolute at all. The legislature, and to an extent the justice system itself define laws. Morphine used to be legal to buy over the counter, now it isn't. It used to be legal to own a person and beat them to death if they made eye contact. Now it isn't. Societies decide what behaviors they want to allow and criminalize those that they want to prohibit.

They use a variety of criteria to determine what falls into which category, but legality is always a matter of decision, not of inherence. For example, 60 years ago interracial marriages were illegal in much of the US. How did that protect freedom? What possible rationale could justify that?

Things that sound like good deterrents aren't necessarily so. The death penalty sounds like a great deterrent, but statistically it has been shown not to be much of one. I couldn't find the full treatment online (I know that there's one in Freakonomics), but this might be enough to show that I'm not just shooting my mouth off for now. There's been quite a bit of debate about whether or not simply making penalties harsher has much deterrent effect. I won't wade into it now, but there's enough contention that I think it logically hazardous to claim that stricter penalties will necessarily net a worthwhile reduction in crime.

Without sounding like a complete and utter idealist - that's what a welfare system is for.

Spoken by someone whom I can only assume hasn't had much interaction with the welfare system. There has been a steady trend criminalizing poverty itself for some time. And the welfare system is complicated, inefficient, highly variable by state, and often not able to alleviate circumstances of poverty on its own anyhow.

The justice system itself though is not as harsh as it is painted by the numbers. It is kind of put in a situation where it has no choice but to look harsh because there are just more criminals.

As I mentioned above, the justice system has a huge impact on what people are criminals (even though laws are made by the legislature, they are administered with quite a bit of discretion by courts, and can ultimately be reviewed by the Supreme Court). See above, where I touch on how arbitrarily people can be defined in and out of the "criminal" category. And that doesn't just apply to the raw number of crimes comitted. Sentencing is a huge part of things as well.

Remember just over a year ago, when someone selling crack cocaine would get the same sentence as someone selling 100 times as much poweder cocaine? That's an extremely harsh disparity, and one that is difficult to justify. The new standard is something like an 18:1 ratio for crack to powder. Whether or not that ratio is appropriate can be debated, but it's definitely going to be more definsible than 100:1.



There are a lot of competing factors in how a society will separate criminal from non-criminal acts. The better way is to look at practical matters-- what costs does a crime impart to society, what kinds of measures would be effective in reducing occurrence of those crimes, how much do they cost, etc. It's also easier (or at least possible) to review these to assess the efficacy of the law.

A worse way is to try and use moral standards. They can be difficult to agree on broadly, make assumptions about the benefits to society that are difficult to quantify, and tend to view cost as a secondary concern. Look at prohibition (1920's style). It was expensive, didn't really deliver any benefits to society, couldn't be effectively enforced, and spawned a series of highly undesirable consequences.

Assumptions about criminality or any kind of absolute faith in the justice system are extremely undesirable given these concerns. They make it incredibly difficult to assess the costs and benefits of criminalizing certain behaviors, make it very easy to enforceme moral concepts without being much bothered by data, invite rampant propoganda (whether to compensate for a lack of data or refute it), and make it hard to re-allocate resources when existing practices end up not being very effective. A dollar spent on enforcement or punishment which is not effective is a dollar which can't be spent on something that might be.

It amazes me how people focus on this isolated incident where a ship-lifter gets hit with three strikes. This is FAR from the norm. It requires three felony convictions to qualify for three strikes sentencing, not three of any crime. If someone had just shoplifted three times, there is no way they would be sentenced to life in prison. In the example that was used earlier in the thread, the person had previous felony convictions, and in the state of California if you are caught stealing and you have a prior record for stealing, it is up to the judge to decide whether it is a felony or misdemeanor. This was by no means someone who was just caught shoplifting three times, he had a long wrap sheet that covered things from burglary and transporting drugs to escaping a federal prison.

And it amazes me how emphatically someone can state something erroneous and without looking at the evidence.

Leandro Andrade was hit with the three strikes law precisely because he was a serial (though non-violent) thief. If he hadn't been caught stealing twice before he would have recieved the usual shoplifting sentence of a few years. Please see for yourself, http://www.cbsnews.c...ain527248.shtml .

And certainly not an isolated incident. Please also see the following cases.

Gregory Taylor
- Third strike: Attempted burglary for trying to break into a Los Angeles church to steal food in 1997.
- Previous strikes: Two robberies.

Jerry Dewayne Williams
- Third strike: Petty theft for stealing a slice of pepperoni pizza in Redondo Beach in July 1994.
- Previous strikes: Robbery and attempted robbery.
- EDIT: this particular case was later succesfully appealed and the sentence reduced. But nevertheless it happened and the harsh law allows for that possibility.

Displaying two additional instances where the system didn't work (which I suppose is arguable in these cases, though I would tend to agree with you on them) does not really counter tstrimple's argument that such situations are a minority of cases. Whether or not that is actually the case, I don't know.

No system will ever be perfect. There will be mistakes and exploitations, even outright corruptions. It is not reasonable to point to a handful of such situations and declare that the system is valueless. The question isn't whether or not a system or practice has ever failed, but rather how its overall efficacy weighs against its costs (in terms of dollars, opportunity costs, societal effects, and the cost of the inevitable failures). There is then a related question of whether or not the society in question can afford those costs, independant of the results of that system.

In the case of three strike policies, my opinion is that they would not pass this test even if there were no questionable applications, and so they would be candidates for repeal or at least very serious reform anyhow. This is much more relevant than trotting out a couple of arguable misapplications which, were the policy effective in its stated intent, might pale in comparison to the benefits it produced.

When you have analyses like this and this, the value of re-allocating the resources used to fund such a program is far more compelling than talking about convicted criminals, who were perhaps not criminal-y enough to be snared by a program that would still be a poor bargain, even if they were bad enough to be unequivically deserving of three strikes. Especially if you're California. Even if three strikes worked well, CA may not be able to afford it at present.

Displaying two additional instances where the system didn't work (which I suppose is arguable in these cases, though I would tend to agree with you on them) does not really counter tstrimple's argument that such situations are a minority of cases. Whether or not that is actually the case, I don't know.

I was countering his statement that it was an isolated incident.

But now you mention it I'll counter the argument that such situations are a minority of cases. Evidence has been presented in this thread that at least half of Americans in prison are in for non-violent crimes. By extension, and unless evidence is presented to the contrary (evidence I haven't been able to find), we can assume that about half of three-strikes are also due to non-violent crimes.