What should we do with criminals?

IMHO, most serious crime occurs for one of two reasons; financial insecurity or mental illness. In addition to finding criminals innocent or guilty, the courts should also be responsible for determining which root cause is at play.

For crimes motivated by legitimate financial insecurity, sentences should involve both rehabilitation in the form of formal education or skills training, and restitution. For crimes motivated by financial insecurity that's actually just greed (Martha Stewart), more restitution.

For crimes motivated by mental illness, sentences should involve incarceration with a focus on rehabilitation. None of this "you're an unrepentant rapist/murderer/arsonist, stay locked in this room for a set number of days until we let you out to rape/murder/arson some more until you wind up back here" bullshit. You commit a mental illness crime, you're held until you're not longer a danger to society. Did you commit those crimes because you have fetal alcohol syndrome, or you were abused as a kid, or you were too high on meth to understand what you were doing? Okay, you're still being held until you're no longer a danger to society. Maybe there's a minimum length of incarceration for certain crimes, but there's no maximum. Is there something wrong with you that means you'll never not be a danger to the public? Then you're never getting out. I read about special fake villages in Europe for dementia patients,that let them go through the motions of living normally when they're actually locked in for their own safety. You can live in a modified version of one of those for the rest of your life. You're welcome.

Absolutely none of this should be on a for-profit basis. At no point should more criminals be a good thing for anyone.

Thoughts?

So how would we be sentenced?

Run Ronald Reagan over with a temporal DeLorean when he was still an actor so the state-run mental institutions poof back into being.
Have fundamentalist religion classified as a mental illness.
Run the guy who invented red-lining over with the same DeLorean.
Legalize drugs.
There's 80% of crime gone right there.

Reagan messed up public schools, but we did the state hospitals in. Antipsychotic drugs and a liberal bent against keeping people locked up against their will did in most psychiatric hospitals.

Medicade finished them off.

No consideration to why you did what you did when your offense crosses a certain threshold. Violence outside self-defense is a one and done offense. You are permanently confined to the facility best suited to your malfunction. Likewise employing deadly weapons to commit a crime, as well as rape and child abuse/molestation. Some acts can never be redeemed, and nothing gained from the attempt at "rehabilitating" such people outweighs the fact that you are also offering them the opportunity to repeat their crimes. Where mental illness is the primary factor, involuntary civil commitment requiring neither the consent of the offender nor their family, would be the favored option.

Yes, legalize drugs. And prostitution. But without lowering the standards of personal conduct with regard to your fellow citizens. You will support yourself with your own labor. You will respect the boundaries of person and property. Or you will fail to do so and...permanently confined to the facility best suited to your malfunction. Drive drunk and hurt somebody? Gone. Rob a liquor store for heroin money? Gone. Rob a "John" for coke money? Gone.

That doesn't mean the facilities cannot be comfortable and humane. Only that you are never in a position to endanger others again. And that includes your fellow inmates/patients/residents. That necessitates the end of private, for-profit prisons. Also the end of civil asset forfeiture and anything that amounts to a profit motive in arresting, prosecuting and incarcerating people.

And unions.
And the publishing business.
And the AIDS pandemic.
And Nicaragua.
And Iraq.
And the drug war.
And created the Taliban and Al-Queda.
And got the dominos tipping towards Trump.
So...let's run him over anyway, okay?

Fixating on blame is not constructive. "Accountability" has become a way of papering over the unwillingness to confront what is actually necessary to solve this or that problem, because it might mean compromise or inconvenience for the complainer. "I have no solution, and I refuse to change anything about my own life, but I will sure as hell bitch about who is to blame."

Root causes are overrated. But when the same one is responsible for so many ills, you better take note.

Translation- stop crying, darkies, and pull your bootstraps harder!

Yes, oldfella2: Electric Boogaloo.

False.

Anybody else?

Root causes do not automatically negate the fact that you had a choice and you chose poorly.

I read about a guy in my city, hardworking asian immigrant that worked in a scrapyard dealing with all sorts of toxic metals. They gave him a mask, but in the summer it was too hot to wear, so he didn't. Then one day he came home, tried to melt some pieces of lead in a frying pan on the stove, then murdered his wife because she was obviously a snake demon trying to kill him first. When the cops found him he begged for their help because the demons were still after him. They take him to the hospital and do something about the heavy metal contamination, and once he's lucid again he asks if his wife knows he's in the hospital.

That dude doesn't deserve to spend the rest of his life in prison.

Likewise the guy that finds out the neighbour molested his kid and resolves the matter with a shotgun five minutes later.

Those criminals would likely fall under the "Is there something wrong with you that means you'll never not be a danger to the public? Then you're never getting out. I read about special fake villages in Europe for dementia patients,that let them go through the motions of living normally when they're actually locked in for their own safety. You can live in a modified version of one of those for the rest of your life" provision.

Addictive drugs should be available by prescription for addicts, so people can get the minimum fix they need to function and get on with their normal lives. If you want to try getting clean, help should be available. If you don't, that prescription should at least help you live normally.

YES

It's absurd to me that someone can get shitfaced drunk and murder an entire family with their car and barely get a slap on the wrist. Drunk driving should be treated like attempted assault. Killing or injuring someone should be treated as first degree murder or attempted murder.

Yup.

That's exactly what the people that are to blame will tell you.

Also people who have no interest in a solution that might inconvenience them, cost them money or compromise their lifestyle in any way. People who don't think they are part of the problem and insist that the solution is always someone else's burden.

One of the huge problems here is not that rehabilitative education and job training is not available. There are occupational training and even opportunity for academic and certification degrees available. The problem arises when you get out the background check is going to eliminate you from consideration, and any experience you get working the job is going to also show you were incarcerated when you got the experience. If I wanted to say I worked a couple of years for the DOT, in a kitchen, or as a janitor and potentially give any references because experience is a requirement for a lot of positions, that experience would out me as a convict even if my record were cleared so an employer could not see I was a convict in a background check. Experience does make a difference when the alternative is years of not working. Even if the employer does not ask why, that gap puts you below any applicants that have experience and no employment gap.

With the present system of limited employment opportunities you are going to run into a problem of people who want to work not being able to find a job because there are no jobs available. This is going top hit anyone with a record much worse, and it gets compiled by having gaps in employment that become a detrimental mark on your record. If we had a system where wanting or needing a job was the requirement for work, then people who wanted to pull themselves up by their bootstraps could. This does not just effect convicted felons, but all members of society who find work shortages destroying their lives when they want desperately to have a job and contribute to society. This whole problem is on the verge of exploding in a year or so as COVID layoffs will be making people look like losers because there is a huge gap in their resume.

One of the reasons why I support government employment is that the government can employ people based on non-prifitable needs much more than the demand of capitalism which is a huge failure. If you could show up looking for work and be employed by the government at a living wage or above then people could rescue themselves from poverty by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps as the liars on the right claim is a possibility. It is a bald faced lie promoted by the @Uncle Albert of society that people who are unemployed are lazy. That lie is necessary for the right wing to maintain their egos so they can piss on the unemployed. If you could just get a fucking job for want of employment and survival people like UA would fall in social status because they would have to compete with a world of far more reliable, intelligent, and worthwhile people, rather than just being presently lucky to be employed way above their pay grade.

Living around a lot of dementia and alzheimers people and seeing how they work, it is not just a matter of providing them assisted living in a safe environment. There is a level of assistance that helps an elderly person live with the troubles of getting old. There is a number of ways Assisted living can provide a huge realm of independence by doing some tasks which are hard or tiresom as you get older. Dementia and alzheimers come with a massive distortion of reality and ability to stay focussed on tasks. Lots of people suffering from this Do strange things. Like many patients my grandfather will actually have an episode if he cannot wear his dirty underwear and clothing or bathe himself. He will still make his bead religiously like in the military, but if the sheets are not dirty he has a fit. He will eat rotten food in his refrigerator over fresh food or going down to the cafeteria to get fresh food. He will pass off his fresh food to everyone else despite them having a plate full of their own and get angry if you do not take it. None of this was really his way when he was younger. From what I understand this is alzheimers.

My grandmother has more dementia, and she has adopted some OCD to combat her anxieties and memory problems. She could use some assisted living, but her vanity and personality means she does not reust anyone or like anyone. She won't go into assisted living because she has her ways and she does not want anyone in her financials or around her stuff. She thinks everyone is stealing and wants her stuff. She has always thought that way, but now it is so much worse. The backflips my father had to go through to get POA were amazing, but yet she will give her SS and bank information over the phone to anyone who has casual conversation with her. She still cleans her house very well, she cooks for herself, and she walks all over the place. These are things that keep her physically active and are the only things she wants to do for herself. Assisted living either wants to do them for her, or it is too crowded for her to be comfortable doing them herself.

My father sees all this happen in a number of different ways in 55+ communities because those are the transition area from actual independence to a need for people to do things. For some people it is great, and for others their personalities get more and more strained. Those people who have personalities that go a certain way just get more conflicted with care and assistance as they get older. We are getting better with options, but the options for some people are getting harder and harder as they age. If you are having breakdowns over wanting to wear dirty clothes, bathe, or eat rotting food over fresh food, what are people to do? If you do not want to make friends or trust anyone, no one can help you when you really need someone watching your back.

This is a joke where UA is making self aware descriptions of himself so he can demonstrate what projection is?

/thread.

I don't like agreeing with Tererun as a general rule, but you really do sound like you're talking about yourself.

Sarlacc pit.

Criminals should be forced to watch Jenee peg Uncle Albert. That will set them straight, and also give them helpful lovemaking lessons. It's a win-win.

Agony Booth.

Is it weird that I have a sudden urge to commit a crime right now?

In the criminal justice system, sexually based offenses are considered especially heinous. The dedicated detectives who investigate these vicious felonies are members of an elite squad known as the Special Wordforge Unit. These are their stories.

Bitch, I didn't even vote for Reagan. I didn't fucking exist at the time.

And yet I've got to live with the shit he fucked up

How young are you? I could not vote for reagan, but I was old enough to get the jokes about him. I was old enough to vote for Bush sr. the second time around. I was still under the spell that Bill was too much of a goofball, and I had not learned how libertarian beliefs lead to exploitation because capitalism needs regulation and does not cover everything well. It is funny how school left out the jump from the exploitation of child, immigrant, brown, and poor workers and things like unions, OSHA, and other workplace regulations as leftist ideas. They left out the reality our police started as private owned gangs to combat the other gangs so businesses, not the people, were safer. When you look at all those law and order heroes of the wild west they didn't give a fuck until there was a paycheck and federal forces protecting commerce behind it. Even as cities grew the police and fire departments were more business funded rather than public funded.

This lie that law and order came from morality and the people, and businesses do what is best for society lacks any insight. Even the realm of so called socialism and communism were corrupted to exploitation so the could work with the world in capitalistic power.

Really? He was given PPE and made a deliberate decision not to wear it and that choice directly resulted in the murder of his wife. By any definition, that meets the requirement of acting recklessly. Of course, I also blame the employer for not making sure he wore his PPE in such a hazardous environment. While their liability is civil, his is most certainly criminal.

I agree private prisons are an abomination and need to go.

I'm not opposed to forcing inmates to work, indeed there should be work training programs in prison to give them a better chance once they've come out. It just should never be for a private entity, and there needs to be strict safeguards in place so it's not abusive.

I don't agree all crimes are either for greed or mental illness. Some are for necessity, as disheartening as that is. Many are to support addictions. And I don't categorize all people that are violent, for example, as mental illness - nor does the APA.

It's a complex subject with a lot of innate biases, a lot of subjective calls, and a tremendous ability to negatively impact others if we get it wrong.

So I certainly don't claim to have all the answers.

What I am sure of however is we need to decriminalize many, many offenses, and if we have a fine system it needs to be proportional to wealth. We need to make 'white collar' crime sentences far more punitive than they are now.

And we need a far broader and deeper social safety net to help people before they get to the point where crime seems an attractive, or only, option.

When I am demonstrably part of the problem, as in NOT the default presumption of guilt, I'll acknowledge it.

If I further deem it is an actual problem worth solving, I will take whatever actions I find appropriate within my practical ability to have an effect.

Yes. Proportionate to the devastation they cause to the general economy, up to and including life sentences without the possibility of parole.

I need to correct the opening premise.

Most crimes are emphatically not committed because of mental illness or financial instability.

Both are objectively disproved myths.