White knight

You can't believe in GOOD without EVIL thoughtout the world there is always a conflict between the two.There be some that will make an intelligent choice to chose EVIL and commit to terrible acts.

John Carter

Because nobody's got the guts to stop them from being so?

If you go beyond this answer, you get INTO phpbb_all sorts of leftie-style sympathy thinking which leads to the current problem situation.

B.A.Ware

Why would it be leftie-style sympathy to try and find out what the real cause of crime our. To have any chance of preventing people from becoming criminals we must understand why they became criminals in the first place

John Carter

I've just told you why they become criminals - because nobody stops them from doing so.

With very few exceptions (i.e. mentally unbalanced cannibals), the only reason most "hard men" (and women) are the way they are is because nobody's slapped them back hard enough while they were growing INTO phpbb_their role. The whole of law and order is based on fear - fear of getting caught and punished. If there's no fear, there's no deterrent.

Let's put it this way - nobody's going to burgle Tony Martin again.

Do we think that the constant news stories about the prisons being full are helping the crime rate? The criminals watch the news too and probably sit there thinking "it's OK, if I get caught they won't send me to pokey 'coz there's no space".

The solution is simple:
Build more prisons, preferably cheap ones without a 32" widescreen and Playstation in every cell.
Introduce a new layer of justice for crimes which disrupt people (i.e. anything which makes a 70-year old woman fearful of going for a stroll alone at 2am) and the crim is guilty "beyond any doubt" (keep the current system for "beyond reasonable doubt").
Impose serious tariffs for such crimes - if a crim thinks he's going to get 40 years minimum for stealing your car, car crime will simply stop after the first two guilty fall-guys start their terms.
Oh, and if a crim is proven guilty beyond any doubt and the judge lets him off lightly because he's "going to reform and write poetry", slap the judge in prison for aiding and abetting.

Being harder than the criminals is the only way to stop crime.

40 years minimum for stealing a car? Am I being too harsh? Nope. Our society is based on property ownership. It's why we work - so we can own things. Remove the right of ownership and we remove the incentive to work - what's the point in working hard if someone's going to steal the proceeds? Everything suffers as a result, including national productivity.
Trying to "understand" someone who's just deprived me of property which I worked hard for is missing this fact. Perhaps it's acceptable in a non-ownership based society such as a communistic one (observe how the former marxist Bliar has introduced the "right to roam" and altered both trespassing and shoplifting laws in favour of non-ownership), but certainly not in ours.

UKIP MAN

clamp down on them,

you should be able to put a mobile phone bomb in your car so if someone steals it, just ring the number and it blows up. ( :? oops wrong number) but you get the idea.

you see these signs on the back of vans saying "no tools are left in this van overnight"

my sign would say "Ive worked to pay for these tools in this van they are mine so go and work to buy your own"

or "The justice system in this country may give you one or two years in prison, but for messing about with my stuff, the sentence is death!"


UKIP MAN for prisons minister :wink:

social observer

Here is something for the Good v Evil / Good v Bad citizen debate.

What defines a good citizen?

Is it someone who works and provides for their family, tries to get on with everybody else and generally just slots in nicely with society? I would suggest yes.

But wouldn't you also count a good citizen as someone who doesn't work (either through choice or lack of aspiration). But uses their time to improve themselves, or regularly donates blood or bone marrow?

Good citizenship depends a great deal on the society of the day.

Go back 300 years and a good citizen would have been regularly beating their kids, attending bear baiting matches and opposing Parliament.

Go back further and a good citizen would have been declaring war on the neighbouring fiefdom and sending hundreds of serfs to their deaths as arrow fodder because they wanted more land or supported one branch of Christianity over another.

The romans regarded compassion for the less fortunate as a weakness to be despised.

None of these qualities apply nowadays (thank god). But it demonstrates that simplistic arguments can easily be defeated by simple (if somewhat flawed) logic.

We need to have a whole 'toolbox' full of measures to deal with these issues. Prison works for some, not for others, financial penalties have a place too, but its no good fining some drug addict who never has two pennies to rub together. Community work (necessarily hard) can have a place. But again it has to be judged to be of merit - no merit to it, then don't keep imposing it at court just because the magistrate wants an easy option.

I still support other measures 9touched on in another thread) such as restorative justice, public apolgy forums, the defendent having to explain themselves in court rather than the solicitor on their behalf, even corporal punishment under strict control.

__________________
If you don\'t like what I think, attack the opinion with Logic and reason, don\'t attack the opinion holder!

social observer

Here is another, what is a criminal?

8 weeks or so ago, someone taking part in a fox hunt would not have been a criminal, now they would be.

Does that mean they were always criminals?

A few years ago, before the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 96 (I think thats the year) someone actively targetting the home addresses of employees of animal testing companies would not have committed specific offences and therefore would not have been 'criminal'. Now they would be.

Does that mean they weren't criminals before this law came in?


3 years ago, simply failing to stop for a police officer in a car (i.e. trying to escape from them) was not in itself an offence. they had to be dealt with for other offences that came to light (if indeed any did). Now it is an offence on its own and they can be sentenced for it.

Does that mean that it was okay for them to try and evade police before but it isn't now? what has changed?

Many 'criminals' don't fall INTO phpbb_the classic shifty, sticky fingered foul mouthed yob or borderline sociapathic killer catagory. Therefore to deal with them all in the same way simply won't work.

I agree with MKD on this, lets make a court sentence actually have a positive effect on the accused and give a positive message to the victim and to society in general. Rather than the "he'll be back next week" revolving door system we have now.

__________________
If you don\'t like what I think, attack the opinion with Logic and reason, don\'t attack the opinion holder!

John Carter

What's a positive message to give to the victim who's just had their lives messed with by someone who didn't give a damn that they were screwing up other people's lives?

Why is there this unreasonable lefty-biased "positive message", "help" or "recompense" for the victim attitude everywhere? Surely we should be aiming to create a society in which there aren't any victims to give that positive message to?

In the elderly, fear of crime is almost as worrying as crime itself. Is this the society we want to create? Do we always want to bolt the stable door after the horse has gone?

You may think my 40 years for stealing a car is extreme. But think about it. What if the car belonged to an on-standby doctor and his car not being available when he needed it caused the death of one of his patients 'coz he couldn't get to them in time? A few years back around here, defibrillators were being stolen out of the back of ambulances - what kind of "positive message" are we going to send to the family of the dead heart-attack victim who could have been saved if the equipment hadn't have been nicked?

I don't want the court system to have a positive effect on the accused. They didn't care about me when they committed the crime, why should I care about them? I want the court system to discourage crime in the first place and, failing that, keep the criminals away from me.

B.A.Ware

John Carter wrote
This precisely why I asked the question, You seem to think that if you have a disease in your foot chop it of before it spreads, don’t you think we should try and prevent the disease from happening in the first place. I do believe we should be tough with criminals but its not that simple.
We have created a must have society, now what happens when a child is bought up by ignorant parents, parents that don’t give a toss. Has that child then got an equal chance in the must have society we have created, I don’t think so. He goes and steals a Mars bar we lock him up for 40 years at a cost to the tax payer, he comes out bitter and twisted and kills an old lady is that justice. People are not born evil they can become evil but why? this is the question that needs answering. My personnel take on this is parental responsibility.

mkpdavies

BA, why do you not think that an element of society could not be born bad?

I agree that in most cases that is not the case, but I definitely think some have their brains wired for bad.

I remember when my cat had kittens when I was a kid. 5 of them, all different colours and all different behaviour traits. One of them was brave and inquistive, one was soppy and shy, another was a vicious little git.

No conditioning, yet totally different behaviours. I reckon the same goes for humans. Obviously, with the extra inteligence humans have most should be able to control their basic animal instincts. I still think there are some incapable of curbing that behaviour though.

You are right that we should tackle the causes though, balanced with protecting society, providing a deterent and helping reform people.

__________________
http://brits4ronpaul.blogspot.com/
http://wokinglibertarians.blogspot.com/
http://lpuk.org

My ignore list

Labour, Blue Labour, Lib Dems