Personally, I'd love to see all non violent offenders skip jail.
That doesn't necessarily mean skip judgement but home arrest and community service should be the modes to serve penance where due.
This way people still pay their own way and the system is less bogged down and even low level criminals may find opportunity to become better through education etc...
Agreed, but you know who will push back? The police. The private companies running the prisons. Because it means less leverage, less power, and ultimately, less money.
Private prisons don't exist in many states and represent a very small fraction of people in prison. We lock up so many people because for many years that has been a popular thing to do, and people have affirmatively voted for it. I think those people are wrong, but let's not mislead ourselves about how this happened.
Even public prisons are primarily run and populates through the formiddable lobbying power of police and prison guard unions. Their influence is far more insidiuous than that of the comparably small for-profit prison industry.
Also an opportunity to question your union stance.
For people that don't see prison as punishment, indeed, Maddoff should not a done jail. He should have been bankrupt and forbidden to ever work with financial services.
Remove all his assets, maybe even his citizenship. I mean when crime exceeds billions of dollars, that's a bit more than just petty theft or something too...
The punishment should fit the crime, but prisons should be ONLY to protect people from dangerous criminals (Serial killers, rapists, etc) and not a form of 'punishment'.
For madoff just tax him at 90% of his income for life, assuming he/kin have zero assets. Ensuring he has to work at walmart as a greeter just to get by. I'm sure that's probably just as bad as prison for many white-collar criminals.
Why ask a rhetorical question? It’s pompous as all hell and makes your point impossible to truly parse.
No, I don’t think the above poster this Bernie Madoff shouldn’t have gone to jail.....now what’s your point again? Where are we? Oh right, something like Bernie didn’t cause harm, therefore he would also be released in your little plan, hmmm?
Like what’s the point of such smartassery. Financial harm isn’t some new concept. “He hurt my money”.
Is there another argument you want fenangled out of some smartass comment next? At least make a claim like, “nonviolence is hard to prove” or _anything_
Stopping prosecution of non violent crime is one part of the equation. We can't overlook the UBI aspect of the stimulus checks, which could have had an impact on lower property crime.
The murder rate dropped Baltimore's all time high murder rate of 348 to 335 and 2021's murder rate is increasing. Compared to calls for non-violent crime and coming directly from the article: "The number of 911 calls for violent crimes did not drop significantly in the same period."
Baltimore's homicide rate at around 58 per 100k people makes it the 11th most violent city on earth, second only to St Louis in the USA and over 10x the national average rate (which itself is 5-10x the homicide rate in most other OECD countries): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate
Doesn't necessarily argue against ending prosecutions for minor non-violent offenses, but I find this story's framing and blanket rejection of "tough on crime" odd. You could get the impression Baltimore is a major success story in depolicing resulting in a calming peace, rather than it having a (perhaps stochastic) 1 year decline from historic and globally record levels of violence, when the murder rate has been bumping up and down by similar amounts while hovering around an absolutely ghastly level of death.
They're talking about announcing a shift in tactic. Until recently, "broken windows policing" had been very popular: prosecute the small crimes and you will remove the criminals from the system, before they escalate to bigger crimes.
Even before that, there was a tactic of prosecutors competing with each other to be "tough on crime", prosecuting every minor offense so that people would feel safe. It's popular with voters, but it doesn't seem to work. Most notably, people don't feel safe, even as crime falls and prisons fill up.
Baltimore has problems of its own, and it's clear that whatever they've been doing hasn't worked. So they're announcing a change of tactic. We won't know if it works for at least five years.
20 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 53.3 ms ] threadThat doesn't necessarily mean skip judgement but home arrest and community service should be the modes to serve penance where due.
This way people still pay their own way and the system is less bogged down and even low level criminals may find opportunity to become better through education etc...
Also an opportunity to question your union stance.
It's about drug and sex crimes, not financial crimes.
Remove all his assets, maybe even his citizenship. I mean when crime exceeds billions of dollars, that's a bit more than just petty theft or something too...
The punishment should fit the crime, but prisons should be ONLY to protect people from dangerous criminals (Serial killers, rapists, etc) and not a form of 'punishment'.
For madoff just tax him at 90% of his income for life, assuming he/kin have zero assets. Ensuring he has to work at walmart as a greeter just to get by. I'm sure that's probably just as bad as prison for many white-collar criminals.
No, I don’t think the above poster this Bernie Madoff shouldn’t have gone to jail.....now what’s your point again? Where are we? Oh right, something like Bernie didn’t cause harm, therefore he would also be released in your little plan, hmmm?
Like what’s the point of such smartassery. Financial harm isn’t some new concept. “He hurt my money”.
Is there another argument you want fenangled out of some smartass comment next? At least make a claim like, “nonviolence is hard to prove” or _anything_
Not a bad move in any case. Throwing drug users and sex workers in jail doesn't make one shred of sense.
The title of the post is a lie.
I didn't see an updated graph for 2020, but in 2019 Baltimore set a record for homicides. A graph of the past 30 years is illuminating: https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/20190803_USC48...
Baltimore's homicide rate at around 58 per 100k people makes it the 11th most violent city on earth, second only to St Louis in the USA and over 10x the national average rate (which itself is 5-10x the homicide rate in most other OECD countries): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate
Doesn't necessarily argue against ending prosecutions for minor non-violent offenses, but I find this story's framing and blanket rejection of "tough on crime" odd. You could get the impression Baltimore is a major success story in depolicing resulting in a calming peace, rather than it having a (perhaps stochastic) 1 year decline from historic and globally record levels of violence, when the murder rate has been bumping up and down by similar amounts while hovering around an absolutely ghastly level of death.
Even before that, there was a tactic of prosecutors competing with each other to be "tough on crime", prosecuting every minor offense so that people would feel safe. It's popular with voters, but it doesn't seem to work. Most notably, people don't feel safe, even as crime falls and prisons fill up.
Baltimore has problems of its own, and it's clear that whatever they've been doing hasn't worked. So they're announcing a change of tactic. We won't know if it works for at least five years.