Copernicus
Industrial Grade Linguist
That is why we keep polies out of the process of individual cases. But the broad policy outlines need some legislative input and since the pollies represent us and are part of society they do need some input.Oh we discuss rehabilitation an awful lot.We discuss this a great deal.The situation is also non-remedial where a guilty party is released and then commits again. We rarely discuss that though.
Efforts to improve prison conditions to help rehabilitation and reduce recidivism get dismissed as "coddling criminals".
Tom
What we don't discuss is why are those who are not rehabilitatied released? And if they re-offend what do we do with them then? That is rarely discussed. And the existence of a another set of victim(s) and their family/friends is not discussed at all.
Even less discussed is what people who complain about recidivism think would remedy the problem. We already have legislatures that try to second guess judges who hand out sentences.
Judges already use established sentencing guidelines to try to fit the punishment to the crime. For a legislature to try to establish such guidelines on the basis of how their legislation looks to voters, that is taking the judgment out of the hands of those appointed to do the judging and making the whole process subject to political whims. It is taking a sledgehammer to the legal system, since there are plenty of cases where judges and juries know a lot more about the circumstances of the case than those legislators and voters who try to second guess them from afar.
For some crimes that is a possibility - murder, child abuse, rape spring to mind. It is a great risk to release those who should not be. Safer fro the community for that risk to be eliminated if possible. I wonder how many of these rehabilitation programs actually work? Attending X numbers of classes over N weeks/years is not a guaranteed way to ensure rehabilitation. It will ensure a box is ticked but that may be all.Is it your opinion that we abolish parole altogether?
Incarceration without parole is already an established process within the judicial system. You simply can't have a system of parole without some risk, since nobody can predict the future. Nobody opposes reforming the system to try to make it less likely for people released to re-offend. I don't know what "rehabilitation programs" you are thinking about, but the US does have some of the highest recidivism rates in the world. I suspect that that has something to do with how tough we make it for those released to integrate back into society. As usual, we could probably learn more by studying what other countries do to achieve lower rates, but that would be admitting that other countries sometimes have better solutions than we do.
The process itself can be tortuous i agree.What reforms do you think necessary? Of course, we could just try to kill everyone convicted of murder, but the process of actually meting out a death sentence tends to be extremely time-consuming and expensive, given all of the appeals processes and special provisions for death row inmates.
Concerning murder, rape etc. - if there is a free, unforced confession. physical evidence etc. then it makes it easier to justify an execution.
That, in a nutshell, is why the death penalty so rarely leads to execution and is far more expensive than simply incarceration without parole. If unforced confessions are grounds for not killing the person at the end of a trial, then only the suicidal murderers will end up being killed during incarceration--probably just a small number of those caught and sent to trial.
If you make the process such that it is impossible to execute someone then it is no surprise that no-one is executed.Actual executions tend to be very rare, take a long time, and often get botched in a way that brings extreme suffering to the victim. But I suppose that suffering is part of the solution that advocates for the death penalty think would help to deter more people from committing capital offenses.
From my perspective, that would be ideal. I oppose the death penalty for the same reason that people abolished outright torture. I believe that it sends out a signal that murder is justifiable, if done properly. A great many murderers seem to feel that their actions were justified--at least at the time they committed the murder.