some crimes are easier to stomach than others. some sentences are not meant to help the person going to prison, but protecting the population from that very person.
the lax practices in western europe have led to numerous cases where prisoners where able to rape/kill people while they were on "prison vacations", in german called "freigang". very often an expert psychatrist had deemed the prisoner to be stable and reformed.
a guy in austria has just killed 3 policemen plus 1 ambulance driver. if he doesn't kill himself (standoff is still ongoing) - what exactly is there to reform? 4 people are dead, the lives of their families are forever impacted by this. why should the assailant have any right to return to society? he decided to deny this right to 4 direct victims.
should marc dutroux ever go free? breivik? why do they need to be reformed? should the gangrapers in India go free?
the victims and their families should come first. you rape, kill, maim? consciously? ok, face the consequences. this reformation BS is ignoring the plight of the victims and their families.
I recently kayaked around Bastoy (prison), it's a great place; nice beaches; great view on all sides; rapists and axe murderers shuttling to or from places on their bikes.
Does sound like I'm making a joke doesn't it? It's not, it's how it is and I like it and am proud of it.
For cases like Breivik we have forced psychiatric admission, which can be a life-sentence. In fact this was the key point of the Breivik case: Whether he was in a psychotic state of mind, and even more importantly, whether his extreme (religious) views could be deemed delusional.
Revenge is barbaric, and granted some degree of barbarism simply exists within all of us, some more than others.
The court system shouldn't be based around barbarism, and the american use of "justice" really is just a synonym for revenge. Pure and simple.
I don't want this. I don't want to live in a country where our flaws doom us, where mistakes are never forgiven.
Norwegians live in a country where all the money in the world cannot have a man (legally) killed or sentenced to life.
Norwegians live in a country where men and women who take wrong turns in their life are given the opportunity to redeem themselves (and they do, almost always.)
I live here, I love it here, and I love it for reasons US citizens see in movies, but not in society.
"Norwegians live in a country where men and women who take wrong turns in their life are given the opportunity to redeem themselves (and they do, almost always.)"
Redemption? Or lack of recidivism? The former is hard to quantify, the latter claim is lacking attribution.
Because they are human beings, and we don't want to show the same callous disregard for human life that they did.
When you drag out murder, you should also keep in mind that murder has one of the lowest reoffending rates of most crimes. I don't know what the current reoffending rates for murder is in Norway or Austria, but in the UK it stands at around 3%, and 1% commit a second murder (the rest carry out some other crime).
Murder is most often a crime of affect where it clear from the outset that the offender is highly unlikely to be in the same situation again.
So these "numerous" cases you refer to are still a tiny proportion. Yes, it sucks. But conversely, it'd suck for the 97% that won't commit another crime to be punished more because the remaining 3% will commit another crime, or because 1% will kill again.
If we accept that it's ok to keep people locked up because they might commit another crime, where is the threshold where we pre-emptively lock people up because they may commit a crime sometime in the future? It's easy to find population subsets where the likelihood that someone some day will end up in prison is vastly higher than 3%. Why not lock them up the day they are old enough to be criminally culpable? How would that be any different than keeping people locked up because they might reoffend.
> the victims and their families should come first. you rape, kill, maim? consciously? ok, face the consequences. this reformation BS is ignoring the plight of the victims and their families.
How does locking someone up forever help the victims? It does not repair the damage.
it is not about repairing damages. it is about the feeling that his/her actions had tangible, long lasting consequences.
i feel the big differentiator is if you yourself have ever been victim of a crime. once you have experienced the feeling of utter helplesness your perspective changes. same is true if you get children - practically all young parents i know turned around their stance on punishment once they thought about someone maiming/hurting their kids.
it's all easy as long as you are the casual, non-involved observer. the moral high horse is a great viewpoint.
and to be clear, i am talking about violent crime, not shoplifting. right now you can get higher sentences for hacking a computer than raping your neighbor. which is perverse.
> it is not about repairing damages. it is about the feeling that his/her actions had tangible, long lasting consequences.
How would that help me? Is there any evidence at all that this actually helps victims?
> i feel the big differentiator is if you yourself have ever been victim of a crime. once you have experienced the feeling of utter helplesness your perspective changes.
This is too easy a dismissal. Even if it does change your perspective, that does not determine whether or not harsher punishment of the criminal will help you - people often wish things that has different effect than they believe it will have. There is also to my knowledge little indication that e.g. most Norwegian victims of crime cry out for drastically harsher punishments, despite sentences that in the US would often be slammed as slaps on the wrist, so it is by no means given that victims of crime will feel an urge for harsh punishment; that seems to be more culturally specific.
> practically all young parents i know turned around their stance on punishment once they thought about someone maiming/hurting their kids.
I have a four year old son, and though the thought of anyone harming him is one of the worst things I could imagine, it has not changed my stance on punishment at all. I am sure I would feel an urge to kill someone who harmed him; at the same time I am very much aware how little my urges reflect my long term emotions, and how often they will temporarily be out of step with what I consider moral once I have had a chance to calm down.
There is a reason why we do not let the victims judge or sentence.
a guy in austria has just killed 3 policemen plus 1 ambulance driver
This is the wrong way to look at it. Using single events for emotive arguments is wildly misleading.
Austria has a homicide rate of 0.6/100k. The US has a homicide rate of 4.8/100k - eight times as much. You will always be able to point at an event somewhere and discuss how evil it is, but overall the Austrian system is working incredibly well to keep the homicide rate so low. It's one of the lowest in the world.
this reformation BS is ignoring the plight of the victims and their families.
'lock 'em up and throw away the key' is performing poorly in the US at the moment, so except for particularly severe crimes, you have to let people out at some point. And if they're not rehabilitated, then you've stacked the cards against them not reoffending.
some crimes are easier to stomach than others. some sentences are not meant to help the person going to prison, but protecting the population from that very person.
the lax practices in western europe have led to numerous cases where prisoners where able to rape/kill people while they were on "prison vacations", in german called "freigang". very often an expert psychatrist had deemed the prisoner to be stable and reformed.
a guy in austria has just killed 3 policemen plus 1 ambulance driver. if he doesn't kill himself (standoff is still ongoing) - what exactly is there to reform? 4 people are dead, the lives of their families are forever impacted by this. why should the assailant have any right to return to society? he decided to deny this right to 4 direct victims.
should marc dutroux ever go free? breivik? why do they need to be reformed? should the gangrapers in India go free?
the victims and their families should come first. you rape, kill, maim? consciously? ok, face the consequences. this reformation BS is ignoring the plight of the victims and their families.