Three Strikes Law

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I hope you arent serious. That would be just sad. Oh that person committed 3 serious crimes like armed burglary. Because of that we just take them out back and murder them. Also for the 3 strikes rule to work we have to have never put away an innocent person. If we just send them to prison after 3 strikes it seems to me they wont then have a right to appeal their conviction. And many innocent people have been allowed out of prison on appeal or finding evidence to support the idea that they are innocent. I just wonder how many people the law has killed that we innocent.

Yeah keeping crooks outta the streets for longer keeps the crime rates down since the vast majority of serious violent crimes are committed by a small minority even among crooks. Orwell sure as hell isn't disingenuous though, I consider him pretty honest and I think it's a simple misunderstanding. I think you should've used the word "reactive" rather than "preventative" since deterrence is basically preventing something from happening through disincentive.

Well the thing is, being shot by a homeowner is much more certain and immediate than being caught later and then sentenced to death. It isn't necessarily the severity of the consequences that deter crooks, it is the certainty and immediacy of the consequences.

If you don't wanna get killed by the system or the victim then don't commit armed burglaries. I personally don't give a s**t about a recidivist who habitually disregards the lives and rights of others and knows damn well what he's doing, but regardless I am against the death penalty cuz of my lack of faith in the justice system and the fact that even f*****g jurors are influenced by CSI. Of course innocent people have been locked up and put to death, but views on the death penalty are a matter of weighing both pros and cons not just assessing the cons. You can't have your cake and eat it too, so believing in the death penalty doesn't make you some savage who doesn't care about innocents being put to death. It just makes you someone who believes the sacrifice is worth making.

That's what I meant.......

Oh ok I didn't keep the "worst case scenario" part in mind since I was mostly focused on the deterrence and death penalty part.

You are entirely incorrect, and I have not quoted you unfairly, nor did I "snip" anything relevant out of your quote or distort your opinion in any way whatsoever. You claimed that throwing people in jail for life counts as "prevention" because it prevents them from committing crimes in the future. By the same standard, summary execution is also prevention. Dead men do not commit crimes.


You are flat wrong on that claim. There is no such correlation, and even if there were it would be a logical fallacy to assume causation in the way you are- especially since a much more straightforward answer for such a correlation would be that increased crime rates result in higher prison population, not the other way around.

No believing in the death penalty makes you someone who believes in revenge killing. That is what is happening. Also when did armed burglary become something to murder a person over.

I have seen nothing to suggest (let alone demonstrate) that "tough-on-crime" legislation does anything to reduce the level of crime in the jurisdiction where it is enacted.

Quite the contrary, in fact. Greater penal sanctions inevitably lead to larger populations of inmates, which introduces greater fiscal pressure on the level of government that is responsible for these increased populations. Inevitably, the mandator costs of food, shelter, clothing and the like will erode the discretionary programs for those inmates who will eventually be released, such as education, job training, substance abuse programs, psychiatric and psychological services, and the like.

So instead of releasing an inmate with a GED and some job skills, we release an inmate with no better education and no job skills, and expect him magically to eschew his previous life of crime and become a productive member of society. We build a system that could be more effectively designed to fail if we tried with both hands.

If government was genuinely interested in bringing down the crime rate, then government would involve itself in crime prevention. Programs to keep kids in school. Programs to get kids involved in recreation and sport, rather than in gangs. Programs to facilitate people returning to the classroom, or getting support while training for the labour market. Programs that do not financially punish people on unemployment or welfare when they pursue education or training.

Thewrll wrote:

Yes. Dox47 has also mentioned that, and there is where I see a big problem with "three strikes" laws taking far too much money out of society's pockets to permanently remove a relatively-petty criminal from among us.

Overall, however, and while I would not advocate for prisons being intentionally ugly and terribly nasty places to ever be, I do think "creature comforts" inside prisons make laughable the idea of incarceration being any kind of deterrent. In days past, I knew of mere window-breaking people who would then curse a judge in open court if their sentences were not of a sufficient length to get them all the way through at least the coldest parts of winter.

Last edited by leejosepho on 24 May 2011, 5:45 pm, edited 2 times in total.

it seems prisons hvae become more of a social tool for criminals than a deterrent

More like a university of criminal activity.

Both and each.