Peterkin

Thanks, I'm familiar with Gibbon. Is this on topic?

You're a scamp, an imp, a loose starer pistol.

At the time, i meant, but you maybe shouldn't carry the subject into the realm of farce. But I've had second thoughts: You can find a clip in the Monty Python movies and skits to fit every situation, just as you can find a quote from Shakespeare. They're comprehensive of the human condition - and not in awe of it.

I love the Pythons, too... but...

I'm not particularly concerned with feelings: feelings are changeable, individual: they can't be legislated or instituted. Anyway, justice is not an emotional or personal matter: it's a social matter. It is applied by humans to one another, on several levels. Familial justice is dispensed by parents when there is a dispute or conflict among the children, or when the children break some rule set by the parents. (In patriarchies, rules are set, justice dispensed and punishment - typically harsh - administered by just one parent, the other cowering in abject fear, even as she pleads for leniency.) Communal justice, which applies to small, interdependent groups, is usually dispensed by an arbitrator or committee empowered by the group to serve its common interest. He, she or they administer justice according to a set of rules enshrined in a founding document, or revered as tradition, that is based in some particular principles shared by the group. It is understood by all mature members, since adherence to the principles is a prerequisite of membership. National justice is far more complicated, both in the formulation of its tenets and the administration of its justice. The rules still have to be based in a philosophical stance, or guiding principle (in truths we hold to be self-evident) but they have to cover a much wider range of activities, encounters and transactions among a wider variety of people, with a far greater diversity of interests. Nevertheless, the central purpose of all legal codes is the welfare of the country - and/or its power elite, which are not always the same. In considering justice, my concern is with how a system serves the polity at large: the least possible harm to the fewest possible citizens. To that end, I consider: - the philosophical foundation of the law - fairness of the law - the practicality of the law - the applicability of the law - the means and methods of enforcement - the effectiveness of enforcement - the cost-efficiency of legal procedures That's why I'm consulting statistical charts, rather than newspaper headlines.

And who supply the bulk of both the actual criminal and incidental prison populations.

What was the Roman reaction to their occupations? How do the Roman records of those invasions compare with those of the Visigoths, Germans and Huns?

Oh, wth! I have a sneezing fit that lasts from two to five minutes, almost every time I brush my teeth. The dental hygienist advised changing my brand of toothpaste, so I did, again and again. No luck. Thing is, they all contain fluoride. And the allergy - if that's what this is - started about two years after I started daily fluoride treatments. There don't seem to be any other ill effects, so I just live with it.

I'm not aware of any existing records. Of course, the oh-so-much-more-civilized Europeans took care to destroy as much knowledge and as much of the literatri of other cultures as possible, just as the Germans and Russians were to kill off the intelligencia of Poland and Estonia. Whatever records the conquered peoples might have made would have disappeared long before an impartial historian got hold of them. It's not by accident that history is written by the victors. While there must be diaries and letters from China, India and the Middle East from various periods of conquest, there certainly would be no trace of what the North American and Australian natives thought, since they didn't keep written records. In South America and Africa, the occupying Europeans had plenty of time to seize and destroy any subversive documents.

I know.

I'll accept lazy - particularly in linguistic effort. It's easier to be sloppy; nothing depends on your correct grammar. You might be surprised how lazy some authors are and how much of the slack editors have to take up. (gripe, gripe, gripe... I can't leave a badly-phrased sentence lying around in plain sight, which is why I keep coming back to edit.)

I think you would like it. It's a very good documentary.

I was referring to the movie. The people in it are not 'chasing' anything. Contented is good, too, but that wasn't the title. We all potentially always are. We don't know where they come from or who they are, until after they have done a very bad deed. Keeping repeat car thieves and burglars locked up makes no difference to our level of danger from the unsuspected crazies. And they will repeat, if the second and third chance you offer puts them back in the same, or worse, circumstances than what caused their first crime. Did you not see the charts? Serious crime is lower in countries with a relatively mild justice system (of which yours and mine are examples btw), and higher in some countries with a very harsh system. We were already on the way to do something right by not "throwing away the key". (Now, we're facing a whole new wave of madness, racism, paranoia and violence that our justice system is not equipped to handle. I fear they will react in the American way and escalate it. The Americans intended to build a good, fair system, but the situation got away from the good guys; that could happen to Australia and Canada, too). All I'm proposing is that we should prevent more crime than we punish. How's that unreasonable? Must go! Back later.

Preventing crime might improve things. Deliberately ruining the lives of thousands of people who made a stupid decision, and turning thousands of wayward boy into life-long criminals, in order to support a resource-gobbling edifice like the prison system, just to contain a tiny handful of monsters doesn't sound like a bargain. However, "my approach", whatever that is, won't prevail, so you're quite safe.

Aside from death, taxes and wildfires, what is? What percent security does the present justice system offer the average citizen? If we could raise the security level by 10%, would you consider change?

If we live in the same community, you do care what I do, and what happens to me; you count on me to care about you. In communities where a level of mutual trust, tolerance and interdependence has been achieved, you get very little or no crime. It's not just because these people are well off materially: it happens in very poor communities, too. Not because those people are all the same tradition, language and faith; it happens in mixed communities, too - though it's harder to achieve. It's because they understand that they have a common interest in safeguarding one another's welfare. Part of what makes that happen is local leadership -- yes, that alpha pair of wolves whom all the rest follow, not because they're tough or mean, but because they're smart and reliable. Every successful project has such leaders - an individual or core group who can envision a plan, organize and inspire others. If you watch the documentary movie Happy, you see what all good communities have in common. And guess what! Happy people don't hurt or steal from each other. If most of us were safe, reasonably well fed and surrounded by friends, the only justice we'd ever need to worry about is what to do with the 0.001% who can't manage social animalhood. But we'd have the leisure, manpower and other resources to deal with them case by case, thoughtfully.

I'll look at the other responses and maybe learn something or add something, after I toss in my spontaneous one. That seems to me typical of an inquisitive mind and active imagination. Thoughts are hard to discipline; even after you find the right method that works for you, it takes years of practice to apply consistently. It's also possible that your mode of ideation is not primarily verbal, so you have to keep translating into grammatical format, and when your mind gets bored with that, it just kind of slides off the words; they become difficult to grasp and put into place. (That's a bit fanciful, but if it applies, you'll recognize it.) In its extreme form, I suppose ADHD comes closest. But I don't think you have the other symptoms. Almost certainly. But I can't say which would work for you - I'd have to know you very much better even to recommend one. I sometimes find it useful to make lists and notes, before a fleeting notion gets away, or i forget a figure. My desk is littered with pages from a notebook with gibberish scribbled all over them: url's, words i dislike, blog ideas, names, poem fragments, slogans, passwords, calculations. They're useless after a week or so, but in the moment, I find them helpful to draw a series of thoughts into some coherence. BTW, are you synesthetic?

Okay. What percent of all crime do they commit? What societal, parental, environmental, chemical or genetic factors produce these incorrigible sociopaths? Have you looked into means and methods of stopping them before the heinous crimes are committed - prevention? And why are you wasting so many resources on them that could be better used rehabilitating the majority of lawbreakers? On this, I cannot concur. It is what we have done, and it hasn't worked.

That's a victim's POV. Of course you feel like extracting vengeance for your grief and restitution for your loss. Everyone who is wronged in some way by a fellow citizen feels that way. But what happens to the community around people who act on those feelings? Escalating personal violence, vendettas, family feuds and society breakdown. That's exactly why state instituted law is impersonal. In turn, that very impartiality can lead to a new set of problems: indiscriminate punishment of the wicked, the hapless, the stupid, the desperate, the insane and the wrongly convicted. The fact of institution itself is prone to problems: corruption, political bias, religious and ethnic prejudice, poor selection of personnel, increasing cost to the public, etc. So, a justice system is only an approximation (or travesty, or something in between) of a collective sense of personal justice. A fair and effective court of justice would consist of a council of elders, who personally know the individuals and circumstances in each instance of rule-breaking and figure out what course of action is least damaging to the community. We can't do that with millions of people - but I believe it should be the model we try to emulate. Did you check the crime statistic I cited above? A whopping 46% of incarcerations in the US are directly drug-related; this doesn't even account for crimes such as weapons possession and tax evasion incidental to the drug trade, and crimes committed indirectly due to drug use. One would almost suspect there was something unhealthy going on in that society.

I'm sure he does. To what? Possibly. But I can also see other possibilities. In any case, the thieves I sentenced to restitution instead of incarceration have not continued "re-offend, again and again and again". You just assume they're going to. No alternative to incarceration has been tried. The recidivism rate of incarcerated burglars, car thieves and cheque-kiters is fairly high (around 50% in Canada) - after prison sentences. For drug dealers and smugglers, it's even higher. (Obviously, if you killed them all, the same ones would never do it again, on which point MigL is absolutely correct.) Why? Is there more profit in burglary with assault than a quiet, efficient burglary, or just more risk? Is there any reason to escalate fraud to murder? Criminals are not necessarily stupid. That would be lovely! Any national one does, yes. And they all have crime. It would be logical to suppose that the ones with the least crime have the best law-enforcement. Or maybe that the ones with the most severe punishments have the least crime. If both were true, I'd take it as proof that a harsh criminal justice system is effective. But.... Is that condition met? High crime rates can coexist with harsh punishments, and low crime rates can coexist with progressive correction methods. So maybe crime isn't caused or prevented by prisons. Maybe justice is not that simple. Care to mark your country's record in each of those categories?

So? I just answered the questions. That is not what the prison system - at least in the US - is doing, however. It is not what most prisons do, or ever have done. I'm not sure what you mean by "see the need". The rate of recidivism is dependent on several factors. I should think sitting in a prison cell is easier than working off one's debt. Give them the opportunity and see what happens. See, yes; agree, no. We'll never know, because there is no such society. I thought I was participating in dimreepr's thread about the meaning of justice. I have no other agenda here.

Because both poverty and high birth-rate and high petty crime rate among the poor are historical facts - most prevalent in nations with harsh criminal justice systems. Of course, my example was about restitution: i.e., that in certain instances, it's not possible. Restitution wouldn't work there, either. An excellent example where restitution with interest, plus a hefty fine for the public coffers would work admirably. Some do, certainly. Not the burglars, embezzlers, shoplifters and fraudsters so much: they would be much better put to work, repaying their debts. Which would save a whole lot of tax-money and cage-space for the mass murderers. That's doesn't deter all those who believe that they won't be caught.

No, I don't forget them; I just have a different perspective from yours - bold print notwithstanding. In the instance you cited, I was talking about theft, which is a very common crime, and which can, in practical fact, be compensated. Do you assume that all or most citizens desire to commit crimes and refrain only out of fear of retribution? It's not an uncommon assumption, but it doesn't go very far toward explaining why most people support law and order in the first place. If you have proof of the deterrent value of severe sentences, as compared to rehabilitation, I would like to see statistics to support it.

Very informative!

Amazing! Did Arthur have a sword in that unification?