Sin City was a dark film, I never found it a model for cultural structure.
I assume there are also a lot of people in prison that aren't rapists or murderers but still cause a lot of troubles if left to their own device. What should be done with these ones? I agree prison is cruel and inhuman and I'm all for better detention conditions, but I don't think it's realistic to suggest we should leave these people walk freely (or to suggest that they don't exist). What are the alternatives?
Marijuana at least in the US, is an example of where society is actually changing to accommodate people:
http://www.governing.com/gov-data/state-marijuana-laws-map-m...
Also the Opioid epidemic is finally getting the attention it deserves at the federal level in the US. I think we will see an end to the cruel policies that are in place:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trumps-opioid-commissio...
A classic example is Al Capone caught for tax evasion. A more recent one is OJ Simpson jailed for some break-and-entering bullshit because everyone wants to punish him for those famous murders.
I'm sorry "breaking and entering bullshit"?
The crime was armed robbery and kidnapping. And it was OJ Simpson who said that nobody could leave the room which brought up the kidnapping charge. All of this actually happened. Nobody disputes these claims. Nothing to do with breaking and entering but much more serious crimes.[1]
If a family member of yours was robbed in their hotel room at gun point would it still be "bullshit"?
Do I have to type that sentence again?
... well, it's not good. But is it kidnapping? My common sense tells me by then the system was biased against him. Mob justice, therefore, even if not from a wild, tar-and-feather variety.
HINT = 15% of the prison population in California are sex offenders.
> HINT = 15% of the prison population in California are sex offenders.
Rapists and child molesters would both fall under the sex offender category, meaning 85% of prisoners are not convicted of those crimes (according to your post, which lacks citation).
Are you indicating that more than one in three California prisoners are convicted of murder? It sounds like you’re making a case for more than 35% of prisoners as murderes (15 + 35 = 50%). I’m not comfortable with that assumption without links to data.
[0] http://www.cdcr.ca.gov/Reports_Research/Offender_Information...
EDIT: homicide != murder
I was myself confused by the comment I was replying to. I don't like when people say "hint, most people x".
I wanted to get better information about what the actual statistics were, because I didn't know what percent of the prison population were sex offenders, which was 15%.
This is my source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/16/sex-offender...
I'm not sure what my position on this issue is. But it appears that a decent percentage of people in prison in California are serious criminals, and although some are definitely marijuana offenders that should probably be released, I don't think its fair to call that the majority of the people in the prison system.
The communists did this in the Gulag system, by putting the rapists and murders -- who had obviously been victimized by the previous system -- in charge.
It was deliberate and ideologically driven. The people who were imprisoned by the previous repressive system must have been innocent victims of that system.
The raison d'être of the society (and the state) is not to "accommodate" anything, especially not some particular aspects of human nature, but rather to suppress them, limit the "natural" freedoms -- in order to create a semblance of order and harmony among humans, which, in particular, makes it easier to control (and protect) them.
Some of these other views don't credit 'society' as something with a will or a reason, simply as an emergent property. That's not to say 'society' doesn't cause things to happen, but it does imply disagreement with the parent comment.
I absolutely agree that states are primarily instruments of suppression and coercion. I just think that equating state and society is not only incorrect, but also heads down a potentially dangerous path. Societies emerge from being social animals in proximity, states emerge from negotiations, coercion, or some combination thereof.
We are hierarchical creatures, even in a small group of friends hierarchy appears on its own. If you have a hierarchy the rest is just organizational details.
Also I think that our current system lets white collar criminals off too easily; they should be punished more severely.
This type of evolution is especially dangerous in a modern context because technology and globalization have taken the humanity out of our daily interactions and have therefore reduced the importance of altruism.
But it's not. Prison is also a punishment for the person who committed the crime, and, if our prison system wasn't so messed up, could be a place for reform.
Merely keeping someone in a cell is a rather gentle treatment compared to how other cultures or other times treat/treated criminals.
Now we can discuss sentence lengths, prison sentencing for certain non violent crimes, etc. But I am sure I am not alone to have no sympathy for the idea that putting criminals in jail is violating their human rights.
I can buy that living without fear of murder or rape or even theft is a human right (we have a right to life, liberty, and property). I can even buy that locking con men away is desirable from the point of view of improving society as a whole. But raising that to the level of a human right seems much.
Nothing in that Wikipedia article says anything about being conned or deceived out of your property, and my question is whether a right to not be conned can be derived from that right. Do I have a fundamental human right to hold onto my property even if I am making a decision to give it up that other people think is unsound? Does that right prevent me from giving up my property? (There are, in general, rights that prevent you from doing things - for instance, I'd say that the right to liberty prevents you from consenting indefinitely to authoritarian government. Is this one of them?) Or do I have a fundamental human right to do with my property as I wish, and a right to not have my decisions second-guessed by the government?
For example, several jurisdictions believe that I cannot give up all copyright claims to some software I write, and that whatever I do, I maintain a "moral right" or "author's right" to the software, and even if I want to promise someone that they can literally do whatever with the software, the laws prevent me from doing that. I think this is a violation of my liberty, but clearly the people writing the laws think that I am being conned.
Obviously this brings up questions of the "dangerous to society" variety, but a minuscule percentage of prisoners are dangerous psycho killers.
[1] Most people think Marv is crazy, but I don't believe that. I'm no shrink and I'm not saying I've got Marv all figured out or anything, but "crazy" just doesn't explain him. Not to me. Sometimes I think he's retarded, a big, brutal kid who never learned the ground rules about how people are supposed to act around each other.
But that doesn't have the right ring to it either. No, it's more like there's nothing wrong with Marv, nothing at all--except that he had the rotten luck of being born at the wrong time in history. He'd have been okay if he'd been born a couple of thousand years ago. He'd be right at home on some ancient battlefield, swinging an ax into somebody's face. Or in a roman arena, taking a sword to other gladiators like him. They'd have tossed him girls like Nancy, back then.