Conservatives - liberals that were mugged?

[question everything]

Where do we stand on crime and punishment?

Where do we stand on the death penalty?

Where do we stand on punishment and rehabilitation?

Earlier today I posted a short note that I was conflicted in the way we handle sex offenders http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x3320901 and many responded.

What surprised, really shocked me, was how many just want to keep them in jail for life, want to execute them with as much hatred as we hear from the Bible thumping crowd.

Many are parents who obviously are worried about the safety of the children.

I don't know if today we have more attacks on children or whether such cases are more publicized. I am of a certain age where I remember playing outside with friends, walking alone to a friend's house, riding my bike to school.. Where our front door would be locked for the night. And, I suppose, I have been lucky to live in neighborhoods where kids still behave that way.

But can we, as liberals and democrats, debate the merits of how we treat sex offenders, or even murderers and just "plain" rapists?

We know that the jail population continues to increase. We know that many released convicts - of all forms and colors - go right back to crime. We also know that states that kill their inmates with relish have not seen a decrease in violent crime.

Thus can we, should we, as Democrats and as liberals tackle this issue? We know that the goals of the penal code is to both punish and to protect society, but should we include also rehabilitation? Isn't this a worthy goal to invest in rehabilitation? Isn't society measured by the way it treats the lowliest people?

I have opined several times on these pages that I consider the strong division of our society to have started with Reagan and to have magnified with Bush II. Why? Because we moved from debating the merits of policies to quoting the Bible. Rather, once someone says that s/he follows god's directives in enacting laws and rules - what else can one say?

I think that the areas of how we treat criminals can be one that can be highlighted as us vs. them. And, no, we do not have to be "bleeding heart liberals" who are willing to lessen one's crimes because the teacher flunked him in second grade. No, I think that criminals should be punished, and hardened criminals punished severely. But we should not follow the "one size fits all" and mandatory sentences fall into this category. We need to study the different kind of criminals and criminal behavior and decide who can be rehabilitated and how - and then invest in such programs.

For example - I think that releasing all hard criminals, including sex offenders, into some type of communes where they live and work together and, by definition are under watchful eyes - of varying degrees - could prevent them from committing another crime.

But the question, again, is - for those who want to "fry" sex offenders - what is the difference between you and a run of the mil freeper?

Should the area of crime and punishment be one where we should take a stand, where we can point to a difference between us and the Republicans? Should there be a difference?

[bossfish]

1. Curtailing the war on drugs is a good start...

and bring the prison population to a reasonable number where real criminals can be treated properly.

[Az]

2. To heck with drugs, laws against consentual acts of adults are absurd

In a free society. Pursuit of happiness did not come with a list of approved forms of happiness.

[Warpy]

3. All laws that tell consenting adults what they can do with their own

bodies are contrary to every tenet of a free society. Government has a role in making sure that goods and services adults consent to use are regulated for safety, but that is the limit of government's role.

Government in a democratic republic should always act in an adversarial position on the behalf of the people and against rich and powerful institutions that overstep their bounds. Government has no place in curtailing anything consenting adults do with themselves or with each other.

Before the flames start, the operative word here is "consenting." Murder victims do not consent to be murdered, robbery victims do not consent to be robbed, children to not consent to molestation, and sheep to not consent to be sexually abused by horny farmers.

[blondeatlast]

21. I couldn't have put my feelings any better than were done in the above

three posts.

If we could concentrate our efforts on those who truly are a threat to our safety and well-being, we'd be a lot better off.

I'm the mother of an 8 year old, btw.

[SemiCharmedQuark]

4. There was a story awhile back about a kid who shot to death

after hitting a police car on a high speed chase. His car was stopped and as he got out, the police shot him to death. I couldn't believe how many people were saying things like "Good, one less criminal". The kid was fifteen years old. You think a scared fifteen year old kid knows how to act rationally when being chased by a bunch of cops?

Another story was about some teens who robbed a man. The man says as the kids left, they threatened to come back and hurt his daughters. So he got in his car and chased them down, ramming their car. One of the kids got out and the man ran him over with his car. Again, many many people were cheering him on, saying that that is what SUVs were for.

[jdj]

5. I don't think you understand the nature of these criminals.

they are either chemically deranged, or they are acting out unresolved issues.

a "commune" is not going to appease that. peace and love won't appease that.

society needs to be protected.

edit: if you think the "strong division of our society" started with Reagan, I suggest reading up on the civil war.

[question everything]

13. Perhaps. But I would like us to at least discuss the way

we dispense punishment. Not just for sex offenders but to all criminals. I would like to believe that we at least stop and debate the types of crimes and criminals and not just shoot from the hip "fry him."

By "commune" I was not thinking of 60s-style peace and love and sharing but more of Boys Town for adults. A place where released convicts - of all stripes - are kept busy and, hopefully productive.

We do not have any real rehabilitation programs. We just open the gates and tell the prisoner: here, you are free to go. And they are on their own, except when they have to report to their parole officers or, in case of sex offenders, have to register. But they may end up living alone, no one would hire them and under these conditions it is easier, I think, to fall back on old ways.

I am not a criminologist nor a social worker but I know that there has to be a better way that, of course, will cost money.

I would like us, liberals and Democrats to have a real discussion about this subject instead of the Republicans way of more and more prisons and more and more jail time and more and more executions.

[jdj]

19. me too, I want to discuss it more only for the benefit of

children being abused now and have people see that it sets in motion a cycle where in a certain amount of these kids will become offenders themselves.

I want to get away from the concept of "evil" as an explanation and help people see that these crimes when done to children before the age or capacity to articulate them get shelved inside with horrendous results later, which is why so many criminals used to be "such a nice guy" or whatever. My focus is on breaking the cycle by changing perception.

We currently don't have the ability to rehab these people, and the risk is too great to put them in society. However, if they do have an abuse history, they won't be happy with happiness and peace and productivity, they just won't, no matter their enviroment. They will continue their animal-brain repetition compulsion behaviors in a futile attempt to articulate something that they can't even admit or absorb having happened to them. And because they can't admit it, indeed many probably can't even REMEMBER it, there isn't much hope for rehab.

It's hopeless in many cases.

[iverglas]

22. and getting away from the "war on drugs" tangent

... what you're really saying is: how do we respond to the issue of "bad people" -- how do we come to the question of what to do with the bad guys, the ones who aren't driven to crime by social disenfranchisement and disadvantage and exclusion and exploitation?

It's a question with a long and frequently inglorious history in the United States in particular. I often cite the book The Wayward Puritans that I studied in a sociology of deviance class about 25 years ago, for those interested in the peculiarly (in the modern world) USAmerican sentiments of vengeance and vindictiveness that you're talking about, and the origins of the battle between the vengeful and more humanitarian/rational approach to crime and punishment in the US. (Vengeful won out right at the beginning.)

It's very true that many people who commit crimes are not "curable". Some psychopaths really may just be born that way, and there may be no way of persuading them to act in socially acceptable ways. Some people are so abused or even just so badly parented at very young ages that their personalities never developed to provide them with impulse controls and empathy -- but there will be degrees of damage, and not all will be beyond hope.

Unless a society really is going to lock 'em up and throw away the key, it is so incredibly counter-productive to treat people convicted of crimes the way they are treated in the US, in particular, that my mind constantly boggles when I see what you're talking about. Not just that "liberals" can be so vicious, which is certainly boggling enough, but that they can be so stupid.

What on earth do we expect an individual who is shut away for years on a diet of baloney sandwiches, under constant threat of injury, disease and death, in the company only of people as dysfunctional and "bad" as him/herself, and with no control over the conditions of his/her existence and no exposure to alternative ways of being, let alone access to services that might enable him/her to be more likely to succeed, in socially acceptable ways, once released, to do when released from that context??

I see it attributed to Einstein: The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Keep locking more people up, for longer and longer times, under less and less humane conditions -- and yup, things will get better.

I don't have any solutions to the problem of bad guys to offer; I think it's too obvious that the more people there are who are disenfranchised and disadvantaged and excluded and exploited, the more bad guys there will be -- and that one is obviously not going to bring about relative social peace as long as the levels of social injustice just continue to rise. And that's exactly what the situation in the US has been for some time.

But for pity's sake, what purpose does the viciousness serve? It makes the ones expressing it feel warm and fuzzy, I guess. We're good ... and we're not at all to blame for any of this bad stuff. That's the right wing's answer, of course. The left wing is supposed to recognize that we are to blame for at least some of it, and use its brain to try to figure out what might be done about it.

[question everything]

25. Indeed. Vengeance has won because it is so easy to follow this route

It falls into the black and white society that the Republicans are so good in exploiting.

This is why many of us (most, on these pages, I hope) are against the death penalty: that it does not bring the victims back to life; that it does not deter crime and that all it provides is a sense of revenge and this is not the purpose of the penal code.

More.. because it takes many years to execute a convicted killer, the family of the victims do not try to rebuild their lives and to try to move on. They continue to nurture the feeling of revenge and when the execution finally does take place they are left with a big void in their lives.

I think that something similar is happening with the parents of Terri Schiavo. Her parents have built their lives around keeping her alive instead of accepting the inevitable and try to move on.

It would be nice if a candidate will come who will speak honestly about these issues, bring specific examples. I suspect that at the Red States there are many for whom the need to rehabilitate can strike close to home.

[killbotfactory]

6. According to a human psychology book I've been reading

There are certain treatments that sex offenders can go through where the response is largely successful. Unfortunately, that would probably cost a lot of money and force us to treat them like human beings. It's much easier for us to dismiss them as inhuman monsters.

[question everything]

14. Thank you. This is what I am trying to communicate

that we, as thinking people who know that the world is composed of many shades of gray, should think outside the box, in different terms than just throw them in jail, castrate them, "fry them." Yes, it costs money and these people are not fat cats donors in whose behalf it "pays" to invest.

But, I hope, this is one aspect that separates us from the "black and white" Republicans.

[meow2u3]

7. Liberals: Conservatives who've been scammed

That's a little bit closer to the truth.

[Extend a Hand]

8. There are different kinds of sex offenders...

There are some crimes that are so heinous that nothing less than life imprisonment should be acceptable in a civilized society. IMO, the sexual abuse of a prepubescent child by an adult is one of these crimes.

People that commit heinous crimes against children have something terribly, terribly wrong with them. Keeping children safe from those that have committed these types of crimes *must* be the top priority.

Mandatory sentencing" as it is implemented today or "three-strikes out" laws seem to create problems rather than solve them. Lets return to sentencing guidelines and implement procedures for explaining deviations.

I would think that the primary difference between the democrats and republicans for the above example would be that republicans are for the death penalty and democrats are for life imprisonment.

It seems to me, that there is an opportunity to make a much bigger distinction between dems and repubs in our approach to non-violent crime. How about these distinctions...

• For property crimes, instead of prison time, the restriction of freedoms by monitoring and in all cases civil penalties including complete restitution plus jury awarded penalties and damages.
  
  
• Lets eliminate all laws that regulate consensual behavior. We can start by ending the futile "war on drugs". Let's tax all drugs and then lets use the money to provide a reasonable health care system and improve education.
  
  
• Lets eliminate the idea of a corporation and hold company directors and shareholders personally liable for criminal actions.
  

[question everything]

15. I like that. As we recognize that the world is composed of shades of gray

we also recognize that there are many strata of crime and criminals and and establish a fair society.

[Lexingtonian]

9. Liberals- conservatives who've been falsely arrested....

(that's the second half to the syllogism of conservatives being liberals who've been mugged.)

Attitudes- and that's what they are at bottom- about chosen and inflicted punishment for crimes are situational. It has everything to do with the life experiences of people and who they blame or don't blame, and the level of civilization or barbarity they consider the norm or at least the standard of retribution.

The norms of the Right are to favor the prosecution in criminal cases and favor defendants in civil ones. That protects the rulers and the powerful. It's the bias in American society, whose past and social order is colonialist.

A great deal of crime derives from structural poverty, from need and the violence in its wake. Another portion derives from enforcement of nominal social privileges- men beating their wives and/or children, rapes, defrauding others, perjury, 'passion' (jealousy). Some more of it comes from underdiagnosis and undertreatment of mental conditions- e.g. sociopathy and mild mental retardations, and other, closeted, mental conditions. A variety comes from immaturity- a need to prove one's physical maturation- and ignorance. All of these have solutions, and prisons or executions after the fact is the oldest and least adequate way.

Some crime does derive from sheer malice, vanity, envy. That is harder to find bearable or rationalize.

I like to think that what defines liberals, if not Democrats, is that protecting the system of rule is not the priority and attaining civilization is. The logical implication is to side in court proceedings in the way opposite to the Right- to help accused criminals and help the plaintiffs in civil injustices in order to achieve something closer to justice than the Right, in its need to prop its power on injustices to these parties, willingly permits.

Civilization says that the attainment of justice does not proceed by committing more crimes to 'balance' matters or attain particular ends. That is the argument against the infliction of death or torture. Justice is when the offender admits his/her offense against the social contract, atones and restitutes for it, does not repeat the offense- but most truly it is justice when the offender dedicates himself to serve the authentic and serious collective purposes more fully and fulfills that dedication.

Barbarism is when crimes are judged according to no criterion other than the interests of the rulers. In such systems the murder of certain kinds of people means medals and commendations, murders of other people means execution of the offender and, in some cases, extended to all his relatives.

[question everything]

16. Beautifully stated.

I do hope that this is how liberals view the system of crime and punishment.

But can we add this to the platform of the Democratic Party. Can we, in addition to other issues, proudly proclaim that this is our goal and "risk" losing the red states votes?

Though I would think that there are more miscarriage of justice in the red states but have no factual knowledge of this.

[free_spirit82]

10. Get Rid of Statutory Rape

I personally believe that the should have a national age of consent set at 14. I say 14 because EVERY girl and boy I knew growing up, that was not mental handicap, knew what sex was and the consequences of sex by the time they were 14 years old. Anyone who has sexual intercourse with a child under 14 should be convicted of child molestation. That would cut a big chunk out of the sex offender registry. JMO.

[Lexingtonian]

20. That's not the point of statutory rape provisions

It's not about the information portion of consent. It's the maturity to the consent.

The problem the SR provision is about is not 17 year olds. It's about deliberate predation, about 25 and 35 and 45 year old men going after 15 year old girls with no real sense of the pitfalls and treacheries in the adult world. Who are, to be blunt, on the whole very impressionable and extraordinarily gullible when dealing with older men, especially when the man has money and power. On one extreme. The other extreme is that women talk each other into developing paranoia and interminable and unallayable suspicion from the horrible experiences that such behavior generates.

[sandnsea]

11. child molestation is particularly hideous

The damage to children and the long term sickness it injects into society puts it in a different category. I'm definitely in the two strikes and life category, one strike for violent offenses or kidnappings or something like that. Treatment is not that effective and the risks are just too high.

BTW, what do you think of the priest pedophile scandal? Because you know, alot of that had to do with priests getting treatment and being moved to other parishes. Particularly in the 70's and 80's.

[question everything]

17. The priests scandals is the other extreme... way way extreme

of handling a crime. Because there the crimes were ignored instead of acknowledged. Had they been accused, like any other pedophile, and prosecuted and punished, perhaps it would not have spread so widely.

For some reason we tend to ignore sex crimes committed by leaders associated with the church in their communities.. not just priests but deacons and other leaders who have affairs, father children by their mistresses...

Come to think of it, until 30 years ago, husbands were allowed to rape their wives. So I think that in our male dominated society, sex crimes were winked upon for many many generations.

Maybe this is the reason why so many people are so hot when dealing with sex offenders. The pendulum is swinging in the other direction.

[sandnsea]

23. More or less

Back in the 50's & 60's, priest cases were ignored but back then, most child molestation was ignored. In the 70's & 80's, priests were given treatment and moved. The Church did try to do the right thing, they just weren't open about what was going on and that was the mistake. That fact is rarely mentioned in the priest stories.

We've had women and children victimized by sex offenders for hundreds of years and ignored. We've had sex offender treatment that failed. So yes, people are trying to put more accountability into the sentences because rape and child molestation just causes too much harm.

The problem is, we aren't really separating true offenders from two kids having sex or domestic disputes and the rest.

[Autobot77]

12. Most Dems have parroted the GOPs stance on crime

For fear of being labeled "too liberal". Problem is the Republican ideas on crime don't work. Their solution seems to be "build more prisons" and "kill 'em".

I believe ther should be more job training programs so people won't have to resort to crime.
(Which would lesson poverty; one of the causes of criminal behavior)
Also training in prison to combat recidivism.
Repeal drug laws or sentence non-violent drug-users to drug treatment.

If the Dem leadership had spines then they would have done a better job of showing how the GOP is wrong instead of letting the repukes frame the issue and add thier spin to it.

[question everything]

18. Indeed. But do we have honest and courageous leaders who can take

this approach and run with it?

I lived in Florida during the 1992 primaries and voted for Tsongas and one reason why I detested Clinton was that he paused his New Hampshire campaign to run back home to Arkansas to send a mentally deficient prisoner to death.

[XemaSab]

24. There's no excuse for violent rape

or sex with a prepubescent child.

If you do these things, there's something very wrong with you and you should not be allowed back into society. The risk of recidivism is too great.

How many of the most notorious child murderers had a history of prior crimes?

Richard Allen Davis, the killer of Polly Klaas, had a LONG history of violent crimes against at least five women that the police knew about before he abducted and killed Polly Klaas.

The man who assaulted and killed Megan Kenka had molested two girls, one 5 and the other 7 before he moved in across the street from Megan.

They had a history of prior HORRIBLE crimes, but they were allowed to go free with tragic results.

I'm sympathetic to the idea of rehabilitation of other kids of criminals, but child molesters and violent rapists just aren't worth rehabilitating. They've already shown themselves to be unsafe and dangerous to the public.

Lock 'em up and throw away the key.



On edit: these are also crimes where the "I had a horrible childhood" defense just doesn't earn my sympathy. If your childhood was so horrible that you have to rape little girls, then we should lock you up to break the cycle of violence. Like, thanks buddy, you've just given 50 other kids a horrible childhood too. I believe in rehabilitation for drug offenders, robbers, drunk drivers, and even murderers under some circumstances, but not people who are so twisted in their sexuality that they think it's OK to rape little girls. The research is clear that people who are molested go on to be molesters, which is too bad, but you're a sicko and in this case the rights of the criminal are VASTLY outweighed by the needs of society.

[question everything]

26. No, no excuse

and I, too, do not buy the "bad childhood excuse." However, we, as a society need to find these kids who have horrible childhood and try to save them before the become adults to continue the vicious cycles.

And the examples that you gave - I am not familiar with the history but wonder whether any attempts at rehabilitation was done. Were they just thrown into jail and then just let out through the open gates?

We cannot just release sex offenders to the streets as if nothing happen, and I am not sure that we can do these withe other violent criminals.

This is my point. We need to look at how we punish different criminals for different crimes. We need to incorporate the aspects of punishment, of protecting society and at least look at rehabilitation.

And we need to find the abused kids and take them away from the environment - even if it is the biological parent - before the continue the cycle of abuse. But we need commitment to it and money - to be used smartly and efficiently and right now the mood of the country is at an opposition.