Once you've served your sentence you should recover all your rights. Lifelong punishment is a violation of human rights - those rights that you cannot "forfeit" or lose.
I believe there exist some set of crimes for which lifelong punishment is appropriate. Which crimes are in that set is a fine topic for debate and some may argue that the null set is correct. For me, the set is not-null.
(Simple drug possession, of any drug, in any amount, is not among that set for me.)
As if the opinion of a random person on the internet had the same value as the policy of an organization established by the general assembly of the UN.
A police officer once told me officers liked having something concrete and easy to catch someone with. His mode of thinking was "if someone is willing to risk jail for something as simple as weed, imagine what else they'd do for a greater reward"
Maybe. He was pretty convincing. The above goes along with his statement on "non violent drug offenders". He thinks it's a false concept, because again most people risking jail time transporting 5lbs of weed also do other bad things, but you just can't catch them doing it or prove it. If a drug dealer doesn't get paid by someone, they usually ARE violent with that person. If someone snitches to the police, they are violent with that person. If you insult a drug dealer casually on the street, they are violent with that person. They do carry weapons with them often. But catching them being violent or using their weapons is pretty hard. Catching them with the 5 lbs is easier. And then they get labeled non violent.
> If a drug dealer doesn't get paid by someone, they usually ARE violent with that person. If someone snitches to the police, they are violent with that person. If you insult a drug dealer casually on the street, they are violent with that person.
All of this is caused by the drugs being illegal, which prevents them from seeking justice in the usual way if someone steals from them or rips them off etc.
If you were to legalize drugs and release them, they would no longer have any incentive to resort to violence.
And the same logic applies to people in other situations. If you regularly get shaken down by two bit thugs and the police do nothing no matter how many times you report it, you're likely to eventually take matters into your own hands, even though that isn't exactly legal. So should the police use any excuse they can to arrest you, for the situation they caused, because people in that situation are disposed to commit a violent crime the state can't even prove?
About as often as you hear about it for anyone else.
It's called bargaining in the shadow of the law. If you have the ability to take someone to court, they know that too, and know you'd win, so they're willing to settle up with you peacefully rather than both of you incurring the costs of going to court.
When a small time drug dealer's car needs service covered under warranty, they don't go in and threaten the dealership with violence, they drop off the car and expect the dealership to honor the contract. Which the dealership does in the same way as they do for anyone else, because the dealership doesn't know anything about their extracurricular criminal activity and can't use it to renege on their obligations by threatening to turn them in to the police.
You must not have met many weed dealers before have you? Specifically the examples where a "drug dealer" would be violent are so divorced from my own lived experience that it really makes me wonder if this is how some of society really thinks weed dealers act like.
Is it possible your weed dealer acts differently with you then he does in the other parts of his life? He's clearly ok with jail time. Are you? If not, seems like you guys are slightly different people and you may not know him well.
Well, having lived with and generally hung out with these "drug dealers" for most of my youth the idea of them secretly having a set of circumstances where they would act violently that they keep secret from their family and friends is certainly possible I suppose.
Its also a really funny idea.
I get it you think to be a weed dealer you need to be some kind of hardened criminal who commits all sorts of various crimes or whatever, but im here to break it to you that the hollywood criminal drug dealers youre imagining dont really exist. Many people do all sorts of illegal things because we live in a country with many overly restrictive and draconian laws. Very few of those people are the dangerous criminals you are imagining. Most of them are regular people who dont have the religious reverence for arbitrary laws that some other memebers of our society have.
Having actually been at the grow and like I said, lived with and loved these people: Sure they own guns who doesn't? They also had gasp magic mushrooms!!!! That proves it, they must be violent criminal people who are "ok with jail time" right?
This was decades ago so I suppose its possible that in the intervening time everyone involved in the weed trade has reverted to the violent Hollywood drug dealers of yore, though I find that unlikely.
There really is this perception among more sheltered circles that if you break some given law you must be some kind of stoic gangster type. Its really not true.
Maybe in the 70s when weed came in bricks shipped in by the cartel. During that time the people moving pounds were probably actually dangerous people. During my time as a delinquent though, weed was grown in the mountains by families who were more likely to be caught donating to the local homeless shelter/passing out food and blankets to the homeless than they were "using violence on people on the street"
I promise you, you dont need to live in fear of weed dealers. They are really not that dangerous.
> He thinks it's a false concept, because again most people risking jail time transporting 5lbs of weed also do other bad things
That isn't the case IME, most people in the black market dealing with weed are pretty non-violent up until you are talking millions of dollars, which 5lbs will never be. They tend to only deal in weed or weed derivatives at those levels as well. It just doesn't make economic sense to do otherwise. What little bloods and crips style stuff of favela fame is a lot less common now too from what I can tell.
My point was people commiting crimes are overall bad people. Trafficking and selling weed isn't like speeding. You have a massive mental issue if you're doing things that can send you to real prison. Most people don't do these things.
Regular ol' white market stores getting robbed is like any other smash and grab robbery, but you're not associating weed with violence rn any more than you are jewelry stores with violence.
In my first year of law school, my criminal-law professor often mentioned that a fundamental value of the US justice system is to "punish bad acts, not bad people." I took my professor's statement on faith, but 30+ years later I wish I'd asked for a citation. It seems like your cop friend would have twisted the value to "use bad acts as an excuse to punish bad people." I'm sure it's easy to find plenty of Americans who think that's an excellent mission for their neighborhood police force. Which makes me sad, because it means that one's "badness" isn't defined by one's actual choices.
I agree that bad people do exist. And I'm sure that prosecuted crimes are committed disproportionately by those we'd define as "bad people." But I don't think that bad acts committed by good people are any better than those committed by bad people. And I don't think that a bad person who resists committing bad acts should be treated worse than a good person who also resists committing them.
Not sure why you have such a strong opinion on this. There are countless examples of people suffering immense harm for trivial things that are considered unlawful in some jurisdictions. And no, "so change the law" is not the full answer, that's just blaming the victim.
Not sure why you think I have such a strong opinion.
You are not a victim if you break the law, and it's not victim blaming to say that you should follow the law and work to change it if you disagree with it. Plenty of people never smoked pot when it was illegal then started using it recreationally when it was legal recreationally. If you want to break the law I could care less for something victimless like low level recreational drug use but don't be surprised when some regressive jurisdiction nails you for it and punishes you. That doesn't make you a victim, it makes you someone who got caught breaking the law.
So your thesis is that just because some arbitrary thing is against some law then nobody should use the word victim to describe people having their lives ruined by the enforcement of said law? Because laws are somehow divine and perfect by virtue of them just existing or something? Nobody has ever been the victim of any repressive system of government or "justice" because it was "the law?"
Many people are victims of unjust laws from laws against pot to laws against homosexuality. Thousands of people across the US and across the world are routinely victimized by unjust laws and corrupt police.
Pick pretty much any disadvantaged group and there will be or have been a law that keeps them in their place. I guess they should just follow the rules and complain via the methods the oppressors specify?
Not only that, you might be able to make that case in a hypothetical system where most people are law abiding, e.g. because there are few laws and only against well known and unambiguously legitimate offenses like murder and theft. Never in one where laws are numerous and broad and commonly violated but selectively enforced.
"You lose your rights if you break the law" in the legal system of Three Felonies A Day is equivalent to no one having any rights.
The thing is that there is a huge amount of indoctrination from schools to popular media that encourages people to just accept "Law" as somehow of divine providence. Many many people go their entire lives without considering the possibility that the primary function of many laws and "justice" systems would be to oppress and victimize people.
This is a great addition to the conversation! I didn't know about the Peelian principles and had only a passing familiarity with the entire concept of 'policing by consent.' Living in the US, it is not surprising that this concept seems foreign to me.
Personally, I still take issue with the idea of locking other human beings in cages. I think a police force that strictly follows the ideals laid out by Sir Robert Peel is about as close to ethical as it can get while still having people whose full-time job it is to enforce society's collective will on others. I believe there will always be better conflict resolution techniques than violence. That being said, the Peelian principles do lay out a seemingly ideal compromise in a society haunted by trauma and violence. Maybe even a path to a society where we don't lock anyone in cages anymore.
I’m in New Zealand which fully subscribes to it (based on my limited understanding!), and had a long talk with a policeman who was walking his dog. He had worked in NZ, the UK and Australia. He put Australia down the other end of the scale and the UK somewhere in the middle. It was a very interesting conversation.
They are comparable in that they can both get you thrown in prison in various places at various times by people who have a religious mentality when it comes to the nature of the "justice" system.
I hope I can assume that you retract your earlier statement about the term "victim" as it relates to people having their lives destroyed by unjust laws.
From the miscegenation laws mentioned earlier to anti-weed laws to anti-gay laws to any number of other laws, much of our current system of creating and enforcing laws is based around victimizing various people.
Miscegenation and homosexuality aren't choices, getting high is. If you're punished for being with someone you love you're a victim, if you're punished for getting high you're not.
By your logic it makes perfect sense to say "Its a choice to be with someone of a different race. You could perfectly well just choose not be with someone of a different race. Since its a choice you are not a victim."
It seems the line is arbitrarily drawn at "getting high". Is this because you dont personally like the idea of other people getting high or is there some other logical basis for your determination?
Say holding some religious belief is illegal. By all accounts what religion you believe in is a choice. Is the person who is punished for their religious belief a victim? They could have just chosen not to hold that belief but they "went against the law". So theyre not a victim?
I am going to disengage from this conversation as I suspect this stance has less to do with any logical reasoning and more with personal conviction. Which is fine, no shade on anyone for their personal convictions. As long as they dont go around trying to force that on other people. ;)
Literally in the comment you're replying to I said it's not a choice but okay. You can "disengage" for whatever made up reason you want, but you're wrong about my stance as clearly you're not even reading the comments to which you're replying.
The GP didn't specify which rights they were referring to. The parent probably assumed they mean natural rights. I think that's an understandable assumption.
It should never have been a crime in the first place. Punishment for breaking an unjust law is an injustice. The state owes restitution to the person you replied to. You should be ashamed for dismissing their suffering so carelessly.
If you can just pick and choose which laws are just and unjust then society breaks down.
As another commenter said, it's far better to focus your efforts on changing the laws. If they are truly unjust, then changing them will have wide support. We can already see this with the relaxation of Marijuana laws.
Even if you personally disagree with something and think it should be changed, you still have to "read the room" and see if society agrees with you. If not, then bide your time and wait for society to catch up.
Doesn't some states have really arbitrary rules for what constitutes "enough" to be called a sex offender? Things like visiting a prostitute, urinating in public, consensual sex between two teenagers and more requires you to register as a "sex offender" in some states. Should that suddenly mean you shouldn't be able to start anew online?
Because in order to pee you have to expose your genitalia. I suppose the laws were made so that anyone exposing genitalia could be charged for it.
That being said, it is completely stupid that people are actually made to register as sex offenders when they really were just peeing. Doubly so when they did so without anyone other than themselves seeing their private parts.
I know a guy that happened to. He was drunk and urinating by the side of the road in plain view and wound up registered as a sex offender. West Texas.
This is his story that I've not independently verified, but I don't think he was an actual sex offender from what I knew of him. He was certainly a drunk though.
Yes. If you don’t think some offenses should be punished with sex offender registration, we can discuss changing those particular statutes, but that’s no reason to allow violent rapists and child molesters to evade registration.
Eliminating registration requirements so we don't have to institute a tracking system and prevent anyone else from starting over when >99% of the public is not a sex offender is not "evading registration", it's eliminating it.
If someone is still a danger to the public then maybe don't release them from prison.
I think it's a cost/benefit thing. People react strongly to sex crimes, and many people don't agree with the state the 20 years in prison or whatever was enough, so this allows the state to spend $0 on incarcerating someone and still placate those voters.
I don't know why we don't do this for all crimes, though. Why no murderer registration list or bad-check-writer registration list? I guess those we outsource to the private sector.
People want rapists and pedophiles to burn in hell. They don't feel the same about bad check writers, and first degree murder already carries the death penalty in the relevant jurisdictions, but sex crimes generally aren't punishable by death.
It's probably because sex crimes are extremely hard to prove. If there is a murder, somebody is dead and somebody killed them. It's not that ambiguous. Consent can be extremely ambiguous. It drives people mad because you want every rapist to be six feet underground and every falsely accused innocent person to be free but there are all too may cases, plausibly the majority of cases, where there is no way for the system to conclusively distinguish them.
And then we hesitate to kill rapists because we're uncomfortable about that when it's so easy to get it wrong, but if we don't, people feel the guilty ones are being insufficiently punished. This is kind of a recipe for ending up with bad laws.
Sex offender registries are not limited to rapists and pedophiles. Jurisdictions without death penalties have sex offender registries. And some other crimes receive longer prison sentences.
Sex offender registries are for rapists and pedophiles. Putting people on them who were arrested for urinating in public is the sort of negligence that rarely gets addressed because it doesn't affect a powerful lobby. But that kind of intractable bureaucratic scope creep is another argument for not having them.
The sentence isn't the longest of any crime for the same reason it isn't death (or, for the jurisdictions without the death penalty, the same as their penalty for murder).
Sex offender is not a natural category. Registration statutes specify relevant crimes. People who urinated in public were compelled to register because statutes specified genital exposure. Buyers and sellers of consensual sex between adults were compelled to register because statutes specified consensual sex between adults.
The difficulty of proving rape is why rape conviction rates are low. Imprisonment for rape is shorter than imprisonment for murder because most people consider murder worse than rape.
People who urinated in public were compelled to register because statutes specified genital exposure in order to cover flashers but were overly broad and non-discretionary, causing an absurd result. Statutes covered flashers and prostitution because of scope creep; once you create a machine people want to use it for things. It's fairly obvious that there would be no registry to begin with if there were no rapists or pedophiles.
> The difficulty of proving rape is why rape conviction rates are low.
Even despite the low conviction rate, rape convictions are reversed at a higher rate than other crimes, because it's so difficult in those cases to know the truth.
> Imprisonment for rape is shorter than imprisonment for murder because most people consider murder worse than rape.
Many countries historically imposed the death penalty for rape and a few still do. Typically the ones less concerned about proof beyond a reasonable doubt in general.
People viscerally hate rapists and, even more, pedophiles. Murder is nominally worse but not by much. The penalty for rape and second degree murder are typically about the same. In multiple US states the penalty for rape is higher.
That’s what criminal background checks are for. Lots of criminal convictions have lifelong consequences, many of which are meant to prevent recidivism. People who are convicted of violent felonies are barred from owning firearms, people who are convicted of securities fraud are barred from working in positions where they are capable of committing securities fraud, and people who are convicted of sexual offenses are kept away from children. All of these restrictions seem reasonable to me.
I mean if you killed someone specific for specific reasons the likelihood of you murdered a random person for no reason is somewhat low. Not so if you’re a child molester. How do you even ensure that they can never get jobs related to children let alone be near them without a registry..
I would gladly support life sentences or even the death penalty for rapists and child molesters, but unfortunately a lot of people like to complain about “mass incarceration” so most states don’t have the ability to fund the necessary prison facilities. If we’re going to let them out of prison, the least we can do is to try and keep these people away from children.
"Mass incarceration" is from the war on drugs and general over-criminalization of society. Let out the non-violent drug offenders and there will be plenty of cells for the rapists and pedophiles.
62.5% of sentenced prisoners committed violent crimes, which includes 15% for murder and 15.5% rape and sexual assault. All drug offenses put together make up only 12.6%.
Sounds like your stats support the argument that if we let out the drug offenders there will be plenty of space, since it effectively doubles the amount of room currently taken by those convicted of rape and sexual assault.
Also, you haven't considered length of terms.
If 62.5% are serving for violent crimes, they are most likely serving longer sentences than those convicted only of drug offenses. This means over the time of one violent criminal's stay in prison, you have maybe 1.5 or 2 or even 3 or more drug offenders being taken in and released. This doesn't affect the amount of people in prison at one time, but it affects the amount of people who end up going to prison.
By the same token, life sentences for rape are going to take up a lot more prison capacity than you’re accounting for. If you change a rape sentence from ten years to life (and a ten year sentence might mean you get out in six), you could end up 5xing or 10xing the number of prisoner-years the system needs to handle from the same population of offenders.
Also by the same token, you’ve essentially made my case that “mass incarceration” is more a consequence of harsher sentences for serious violent crimes than it is a consequence of drug prohibition. If you favor even harsher sentences for serious violent crimes (I do too) then you need to accept that this will require significantly more prison capacity. Either that or we need to start talking about expanding the death penalty, and expediting the appeals process in capital cases so it can be applied at scale.
I think your case is overly simplistic. My response was pointing out that quoting basic statistics is not going to explain anything, and diving beyond the surface will reveal complications. Move on to 'violent crime caused by drug prohibition' to see yet another aspect of this. I am not making any argument beyond this.
It doesn’t really add anything to the discussion to wave your hands around, say “it’s more complicated than that” if you’re not prepared to seriously explore the consequences of the complications you’re bringing up. For instance, you raised the complication that prison term length will have certain effects on the amount of prison capacity required for a class of crime. Fair enough, but once we actually explore that complication in depth, the conclusion is that lengthening prison terms for rape will consume significantly more prison capacity than you can free up by completely eliminating prison terms that are already relatively short. Likewise, unless you have some sort of data-backed argument as to how and why eliminating drug prohibition will change the conclusion that we will need more prison capacity to incarcerate all sex offenders for life, you’re not actually making any useful point.
There is no way to have a real discussion about this without actually being informed. Pointing out that your feelings about how rapists should be sentenced should not depend on whether or not drug prohibition is just because of 'room in the prisons' is perfectly valid. Statistics that mean nothing without broader context and analysis are pointless and misleading.
> There is no way to have a real discussion about this without actually being informed.
I don’t know about you but I don’t have this problem.
> Pointing out that your feelings about how rapists should be sentenced should not depend on whether or not drug prohibition is just because of 'room in the prisons' is perfectly valid.
It’s completely beside the point here. I’m making the argument that if we want to incarcerate rapists for life, we will need the prison capacity to do so. Which means, keeping everything else equal, building more prison capacity and increasing the degree of “mass incarceration” in the country. Something that is a very controversial suggestion to say the least.
AnthonyMouse responded with the claim, “Let out the non-violent drug offenders and there will be plenty of cells for the rapists and pedophiles.” I could have backtracked and tried to make the argument that one has nothing to do with the other. But there was no need because I could, and did, simply refute AnthonyMouse’s claim directly.
> Statistics that mean nothing without broader context and analysis are pointless and misleading.
You’re clearly implying this is a mistake that I’ve made. I don’t think that it is. While you’ve pointed out a specific complication that I didn’t explicitly mention (the relationship between length of prison term and share of prison population), this complication doesn’t undermine my point but rather strengthens it. You made a further suggestion that maybe we should consider the violent crime that’s caused by drug prohibition. That would be a fine counterargument for you to make! Bring your own data and analysis and maybe we can both learn something.
The problem is that it’s a lot easier for you to sit there and criticize me for not bringing enough “context and analysis” when you’re not bringing any of your own. If you have a point to make, make it. Don’t complain that my arguments are “simplistic” when you’re just going to make lazy sniping comments and expect me to do the work of making your counterarguments for you.
My point is that you have a solution which, correct me if I am wrong, is 'let them out because we can't jail them forever because we don't have room, so then we have to put them on a registry'. You act as if this claim is practical (or even sensical), and then defend it by using statistics. I shouldn't have bothered pointing out your statistics are pointless and should have pointed out that your claim is based on a false premise.
Sex offender recidivism is a complicated topic that is very difficult to study, and 'sex offenses' are not something that are standardized between societies or systems, and acting like your solution is a decent one means that you think that a simple solution can solve a complex problem.
Thus any conversation you are going to have on the topic is going to be fruitless unless you are trying to push an agenda with no regard for a real path forward.
> I don’t know about you but I don’t have this problem.
One can be intelligent and intuitive but without the proper background and without the awareness to know when out of depth then a lot of damage can be done.
> My point is that you have a solution which, correct me if I am wrong, is 'let them out because we can't jail them forever because we don't have room, so then we have to put them on a registry'.
You’re wrong, so let me correct you. As per my previous comments, I’d be perfectly happy executing the lot of them. I don’t think that’s politically feasible, so as a compromise, I would be satisfied building as many prisons as are necessary to incarcerate them for life. But even that is politically infeasible, largely due to widespread misconceptions about the bogeyman of “mass incarceration”—including the misperception that mass incarceration is primarily a consequence of drug prohibition. So now that we’re backed into the corner where rapists and child molesters are eventually released from prison anyway, I much prefer them to be registered as sex offenders than for them not to be registered as sex offenders.
Since Anthony has some sort of problem with sex offender registration and was the one to suggest life imprisonment in the first case, I pointed out that the natural consequence of such a policy would be the expansion of “mass incarceration”. I wanted to see if Anthony was serious enough about life imprisonment to accept the necessary tradeoffs of such a policy. He replied by claiming that mass incarceration is the consequence of drug prohibition and that the required prison capacity could be freed up by releasing nonviolent drug offenders. This claim is false and I refuted it.
> I shouldn't have bothered pointing out your statistics are pointless
No, you shouldn’t have, because they aren’t. The point was to refute Anthony’s claims that mass incarceration is the consequence of drug prohibition and that the required prison capacity could be freed up by releasing nonviolent drug offenders. If you would like to refute my refutation, please feel welcome to introduce whatever data and analysis you have toward that end. I only ask that you put forth the effort yourself instead of gesturing vaguely in the direction of a refutation and then scolding me for not doing the work of presenting your side of the argument.
> Sex offender recidivism is a complicated topic that is very difficult to study, and 'sex offenses' are not something that are standardized between societies or systems, and acting like your solution is a decent one means that you think that a simple solution can solve a complex problem.
The rate of recidivism among dead men is zero, and while lifelong prisoners do engage in recidivism against other prisoners, at least they aren’t committing crimes against the rest of society. So there actually are relatively simple solutions available to us. If we are all in agreement that we are willing to bite the bullet and increase the scale of either the death penalty of mass incarceration, I would be satisfied.
When people object to sex offender registration by asking “why are we releasing them from prison in the first place?”, I am not actually convinced that they are serious about lifelong incarceration. I worry that they are using this point as a rhetorical cudgel and have no intention of actually accepting a policy of lifetime incarceration for sex offenders, especially when such a policy would likely conflict with what I reasonably presume to be their attitudes about “mass incarceration”. Now, maybe my presumption was wrong and Anthony is actually totally fine with mass incarceration, but if that were the case he would have said so. Instead, he introduced the canard that mass incarceration was the consequence of drug prohibition. He provided zero data to back up this claim and the data I provided refutes it. Anthony had no response and your responses have been little more than pointless bromides about how these issues are “complicated” with next to no data or analysis on your part about what these complications might be or why they would change our conclusions.
> Thus any conversation you are going to have on the topic is going to be fruitless unless you are trying to push an agenda with no regard for a real path forward.
Between the two of us, you’re the one who is struggling to contribute anything that could make this conversation fruitful. I hope I’ve clarified my position well enough for you to add something of substance. For one, I’m not actually clear on what specific position you’re taking here, other than “against Phil”. Perhaps this is another presumption on my part, but I assume that when people argue with me, it’s because there’s some point they disagree with me on. So what is it?
It's kind of weird that sex offences are treated specially. I'd like to know if I live around someone who gave in to plain violence as well or if someone stolen something significant enough.
Either we are giving people second chance without stigma or we are tracking everyone forever. I'm fine with both.
"Sex offender" at least in the US is a ridiculous classification that includes people who peed in a fountain while drunk. I don't think they should be punished for the rest of their life and be on a public list with serial rapists.
There is a ton of posts from lawyers confirming the fact that in many states you can get convicted for public urination and put on the sex offender list. For example, here is a post from a Texas-based lawyer: https://www.craiggreeninglaw.com/can-you-really-become-a-sex...
The reason it's so hard to estimate the real number of these cases is that the crime is listed as indecent exposure or lewdness.
I believe that sex offender registration laws are problematic. But so is that Men’s Health article.
Yes, the article contains actual names. Thing is, none of those people are registered sex offenders:
1. Juan Matamoros is not a registered sex offender.
2. Julie Amero was a crazy case involving false testimony by a police officer. Her conviction was vacated on appeal, and she is not a registered sex offender. (That all happened long before the article was written.)
3. Wendy Whitaker is no longer a registered sex offender.
4. Janet Allison is no longer a registered sex offender.
5. Eric Williamson was acquitted. He was never a registered sex offender.
Men’s Health is not a reliable source for investigative reporting.
