bkp_duke
Well-Known Member
At the very least, it keeps them from perpetrating further crimes. So, I 100% disagree with you.
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At the very least, it keeps them from perpetrating further crimes. So, I 100% disagree with you.
Buckminster
Well-Known Member
It is difficult for Europeans to comment on US issues sometimes. Guns etc. change the paradigm.
bkp_duke
Well-Known Member
They also exported a large majority of their crime-committing population 200-400 years ago to North America. I would be very surprised if there were not substantial differences in the gene pools in regards to mental predispositions, etc.
JRP3
Hyperactive Member
So you have no prisons? While we certainly over incarcerate for minor "crimes" like drug possession even the most liberal people in the US understand that violent offenders can't simply be allowed to roam free.
JRP3
Hyperactive Member
Genetic criminals? I'd assume nurture vs nature as a more likely cause, though certainly some brain chemistry abnormalities could possibly be inherited. I'd need to see studies.
bkp_duke
Well-Known Member
That's a VAST oversimplification. There are STRONG genetic factors for psychopaths, that is well-documented in the scientific literature. Beyond that evidence, I'm certain we are just touching on the beginning of how certain genetic polymorphisms (i.e. inherited traits) affect behavior.
Sure, you take someone (i.e. an N = 1) with psychopathic tendencies and raise him/her in a loving environment, you will more than likely raise someone that is "well behaved". But we are not talking about N = 1 here, we are talking population genetics.
Twin studies are fantastic for analyses like these (this is just one example):
Psychopathic personality traits: heritability and genetic overlap with internalizing and externalizing psychopathology
JRP3
Hyperactive Member
Interesting, but comparative crime rates don't seem to reflect the "convict country" theory. For example the US has the same crime index as France, and Australia, another "convict country", has a lower index than both. Crime Rate By Country 2020
adiggs
Well-Known Member
HG Wells
Martian Embassy
Don't worry about crime my personal AI tells me.
Very soon we will have enough data on personal expenses, tweets, and browsing history to predict criminal behavior before it happens.
A slight nudge can redirect a possible crime days or even weeks before it happens.
And if a crime does occur, the criminal will be identified instantly by facial recognition and tracked by the location of his phone.
My personal AI was very patient with me while explaining it. No shocks or threats of locking my bank accounts.
I truly am my AI's best friend.
Very soon we will have enough data on personal expenses, tweets, and browsing history to predict criminal behavior before it happens.
A slight nudge can redirect a possible crime days or even weeks before it happens.
And if a crime does occur, the criminal will be identified instantly by facial recognition and tracked by the location of his phone.
My personal AI was very patient with me while explaining it. No shocks or threats of locking my bank accounts.
I truly am my AI's best friend.
Buckminster
Well-Known Member
Without rules or laws, humans behave like apes. Laws are harder to enforce in a big country like the USA. I mentioned guns but the other is drugs - much more prevalent in the US. Drugs is a crime increasing vicious circle. Places like the Netherlands have stronger family and community culture which stops kids going off the rails - before and after prison.
DragonWatch
Small FootPrint
FYI ~ my chaplain (I was his assistant) back in late 1969 went to the Bindloch, FRG prison to visit a US Lieutenant that was imprisoned for life in Germany after cutting up his girlfriend and tossing parts along the autobahn. They did not have a death penalty. All German courts and prision.
That was an interesting learning event for me.
That was an interesting learning event for me.
I recently heard an interview on the radio with an American prison reform advocate who went to an experimental prison in Norway that focused more on rehabilitation than punishment. Before opening the prison, their prisons had a recidivism rate of 80%, but those who have been through this prison have a recidivism rate of 20%. There are features of the prison that would freak out most Americans, like each prisoner has their own room with a lock on the inside and every prisoner makes their own food in a communal kitchen that is fully equipped.
The US prison system has devolved into a system geared towards keeping people behind bars rather than toward anything else. There are many fines and fees assessed to people going into jail, prison, and on parole. A lot of people are languishing in jails awaiting trial because they don't have the money for bail. In many cases the bail is quite modest, but they are too poor to afford it.
My SO has dealt with a lot of people on parole and most parole officers look for the tiniest excuse to send people back to jail. Most are sent back for "status offenses" or inability to pay fees. One ended up back in jail due a surprise visit by his parole officer. One of the conditions of his parole was he wasn't allowed to have any alcohol in the house (even though he had no history of problems with alcohol). The PO found an old bottle of wine (with dust on it) in the back of a cupboard that his wife had opened a while back and forgot about. They didn't even know it was there.
He ended up back in jail and caught COVID while there. He survived, but he was very sick for weeks.
The fact that there is some kind of penalty for breaking the law does deter some people, but the people it will deter will be deterred equally for a modest sentence vs a draconian one. Many repeat offenders have impulse control problems and studies on prisoners as well as investigating their pasts has turned up that head injuries can lead to impulse control problems. Many small injuries like getting slapped in the head by a parent can do it.
With special training, many people with these kinds of control problems can learn to override the damage with conscious thought, but they need a therapy regime to achieve it. Some people have too much damage and can't be cured.
My SO is both a lawyer and a counselor for domestic violence perpetrators. She's also been doing neuro-feedback for about a year for her own brain injuries. She's always been interested in everything medical and done a deep dive into brain research. Any severe trauma, even emotional, can look to the brain like a traumatic brain injury like the vets from Iraq or football players. Bad reactions to drugs can do it too.
She's finding that a lot of her DV clients have patterns of hyper-reactivity from past abuse or something that caused PTSD (she has a number of veterans who have seen combat as clients). Most of those who have abuse related trauma were beaten by their mothers and grew up in single parent households (ie the narrative than men learn to beat their mates and family from their fathers as a sort of male privilege thing is not true today except in some sub-cultures that stress that sort of thing). She's going to start a pilot study to see what doing neuro-feedback with DV clients does to their outcomes.
I read something written a year or so back from a defense lawyer who had been doing it fr 40 years and he said there were two groups of people guilty of crimes. There was a fairly small group of people who were wired to be criminals. They broke the law because they liked breaking the rules. (He opined Donald Trump was in this group.) But he said that the majority of people did not want to be criminals and did not want to break the rules. They either did out of necessity, or from poor impulse control.
He thought most of the latter group should be diverted into some sort of rehabilitation program and/or program to tech them new skills and with the right help, most would not re offend. But the people who were wired to be criminals were beyond hope. T
This is dangerously close to some 19th century notions about why the rich were rich and the poor were poor.
Brain study research has shown some people are born with psychopathy. A study at UCLA found patterns in the brains of known hard core criminals. When the study was done on the general population and the researchers themselves, they found a lot more people who had never been in trouble with the law who had the same patterns. One of them turned out the be the doctor running the study. in the case of the doctor he had been raised in a happy family and was not outwardly showing any signs of psychopathy, but when they talked to his family and staff, they did find a pattern that he was fine most of the time, but when pushed he could turn into quite a jerk.
A lot of serious mental illnesses have a combination of nature and nurture. There is a book called Evil Genes which is about the author's search to figure out why her sister had a Borderline Personality Disorder. She found that BPD is a mix of a misswiring of the emotion centers of the brain combined with trauma in early childhood. People with the misswiring but no significant trauma tend to be capable of flying off the handle emotionally sometimes, but don't have the other traits of full blown BPD.
I wish humans could live with anarchy, but we can't. CHAZ in Seattle was supposed to be a peaceful anarchist's paradise, but it devolved when a few people figured out they could game the system without consequences.
I am wary of economic libertarianism, but I am a proponent of social libertarianism. Basically social libertarianism believes that whatever you are doing, as long as you aren't harming others or putting others are risk, it should be allowed. The US has tried to do the opposite with recreational drugs, cracking down on them and imposing longer and harsher sentences for drug related crimes. Something like 70 or 80% of US prisons are full of people who committed drug offenses and almost all of those are non-violent.
There are some recreational drugs that are very dangerous and some that are fairly benign. But making them illegal creates a black market, which feeds more crime, and denies the government of tax revenue. If they are legal and regulated, the government makes money off of it, the black market withers and dies, and people who do OD or have bad side effects can get medical treatment without fear.
I read many years ago that if something is illegal, but you don't get at least 99.3% buy in, people will do it anyway and it will be impossible to stop with the criminal justice system. If there is a way to make money from it, a black market will emerge which will create more evils. Dealing with things that even a majority of society doesn't approve of is a necessary evil. It's much safer for everyone to make it legal and regulate it than try to ban it. This goes beyond just drugs to anything in which there is a demand if made illegal.
TheTalkingMule
Distributed Energy Enthusiast
Came here to post this before I got distracted by hate speech.
There are going to be riots over this.....
Outcry in New York after police force protester into unmarked van
There are going to be riots over this.....
Outcry in New York after police force protester into unmarked van
9 movies and shows that explain how America’s justice system got this way
I watched the Netflix doc, and it provides a lot of insight.
I watched the Netflix doc, and it provides a lot of insight.
Off Shore
Off Topic Member
Nice to see you over here in this little semi-private chat room, Francis. Be sure to add "and the apocalyptic destruction of the US will depress demand" to keep us on topic. The little button works here too, though the dynamics of the thread are a bit different due to the small sampling size.
Cheers!
Did you read what I posted? The person breaking windows in Minneapolis turned out to be a known white supremacist and @bkp_duke was advocating locking that guy in prison for 50 years. The police said the rioting in Richmond over the weekend was started by white supremacists.
Humans are herd animals and the white supremacists know it. If they start breaking some windows, there is a good chance some of the legitimate protesters who are all keyed up will join in. Though the BLM organizers have been trying to train their people to have self control.
Turns out the woman arrested was actually wanted by police and the cops who grabbed her were plain clothes NYPD. She was arrested, charged with damaging or destroying police cameras and released pending trial. Considering what happened in Portland, it was a very bad look, but the backstory was very different.
HG Wells
Martian Embassy
Do you think delaying the elections would help or hurt Tesla ?
Trump floats delaying the 2020 election ‘until people can properly, securely and safely vote’
Trump floats delaying the 2020 election ‘until people can properly, securely and safely vote’
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