There was a young man from the North
Who threw glasses and wound up in court.
He wept, and got off.
I'm glad that his quaff
Was a pint glass, and not a quart!
That judge is totally Leonard Maltin. When did he move to England and pass the bar?!?
Perhaps a clone, TUM.
Well, it's not like he can't get drunk and screw up again. It's a suspended sentence, innit?
Speaking as a member of the most punitive society in the modern era, or perhaps in all of recorded history, I say kudos to you, Judge Maltin. Give the little bastard one more foot of rope, eh? Or, the benefit of the doubt. Whichever.
"Hardman" eh? "Big-wet-wimpy-boy-man" more like.
I like jail time for people who hurt other people physically. Leave the suspended sentences for nonviolent crimes.
Google's personalized home page gizmo gave me this link yesterday as my "wiki-how How To of the Day". It really creeped me out.
Speaking as a member of the most punitive society in the modern era, or perhaps in all of recorded history...
Is that the one that cuts off the hands of theives, the one that jails critics of the government, or the one that stones women for alleged promiscuity?
NOOO, I think that the would be the one that has a larger percentage of its population behind bazrs then any other country in the world.
The one with the most people in jail and the harshest sentences in terms of time.
(It's not the Evil Empire, either.)
Not that there aren't some woah-nellie examples to compare it with, obviously. Like killing retarded people and stuff.
Dammit Berek!
I was trying to be subtle, Pete! Now you're going to have the lawgivers on our ass!
No suspended sentence for you to jailbirds!!
In these Yew Knighted Statez, we save our suspended sentence for the lyin' politicians and thievin' CEOs.
Berek and petebest, criminologists have taken to calling it the penal-industrial complex.
(Hehe, you said penal, hehe. Shut up, Beavis!)
Are you thrreatening me?!
heh heh hm heh - poop! heh hm hhm hm heh
D'oh! I thought the penal industrial complex referred to the vibrator industry!
It's the same in America. Time and again, juries impose harsh sentences because the perpetrator didn't "show remorse;" in other words, he didn't cry for them.
Juries are tough- they demand a good floor show.
Speaking as a member of the most punitive society in the modern era
Seriously, this sort of selective rhetorical point-making is not especially helpful. And what is "the modern era"? Since, say, 1900? Hello Russia! Hello China!
Well, the US certainly seems to be the most punitive industrialized nation currently. See page three of this pdf. I'm not sure a comparison to something like Stalin's Soviet Union really makes the figures look any better.
Actually, I was able to find some data on Soviet incarceration rates. No idea how trustworthy the source is, and of course it must be extremely difficult to obtain data about this era in Russian history: linky.
I think the point is that we need to rethink our policies when we lock up people for nonviolent drug crimes. I have yet to hear a coherent argument as to why drugs are illegal. A lot of has to do with the fact that we have a large for profit prison industry in this country that spends hefty sums on lobbyists.
Sheesh!
I just wanted to laugh at the glass-throwing, witness-intimidating cry-baby, not have a heated debate on penal (pfft!) policy.
You guys are no fun.
*pulls koko's pigtails*
You should have known, kit, that your lighthearted fpp on wacky defendants would spiral into a "whose country is more oppressive" debate.
Miss Cleo would be ashamed.
Surely Berek, (at the risk of a further derail) on drugs the argument is simply that they make people ill and unhappy and we'd be better off without them.
There's a whole range of counter-arguments, of course: cannabis not really bad for you; what about all the other things that make you ill and unhappy at times (eg alcohol); people ought to be allowed to hurt themselves so long as they don't hurt other people; etc. But the basic point seems coherent enough to me.
And if you don't agree, I'll cry...
the modern era
Kind of a post-atomic-bomb since-the-50s kinda thing.
Do I have to explain everything??
*cries*
Maybe you could explain the Cultural Revolution or the Khmer Rouge. These fall pretty easily into that timeframe.
Via my amazing all-knowing brain Wikipedia:
The Cultural Revolution in the People's Republic of China was a struggle for power within the Communist Party of China, which grew to include large sections of Chinese society and eventually brought the People's Republic of China to the brink of civil war. It was launched by Communist Party of China Chairman Mao Zedong on May 16, 1966 to regain control of the party after the disasters of the Great Leap Forward had led to a significant loss of his power to rivals such as Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. Though Mao himself officially declared the Cultural Revolution to have ended in 1969, the term is today widely used to also include the period between 1969 and the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976.
The Khmer Rouge regime is remembered mainly for the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million people (from an estimated 1972 population of 7.1 million), through execution, starvation and forced labor. Although directly responsible for the death of about 750,000, the policies of the Khmer Rouge led to, mainly through starvation and displacement, the death of over 1 million people. In terms of the number of people killed as a proportion of the population of the country it ruled, it was one of the most lethal regimes of the 20th century.
But it should be recognized that both of those bloody revolutions / regimes paid the public defenders much less than the prosecution got.
Surely Berek, (at the risk of a further derail) on drugs the argument is simply that they make people ill and unhappy and we'd be better off without them.
UM, auctully that argument doesn't work. Drugs only make people ill and unhappy if they're abused, something that is also true of the legal drugs like alcohol and caffine. The DEA has several times over the years sheepishly, and quietly, admitted that the vast majority of drug users in this country are people who are happy, well-adjusted, normal members of society who like to smoke a joint at night instead of having a beer.
Drugs only make people ill and unhappy if they're abused
No denying that - I'd say that's probably the definition of abuse? You may think the conclusion is false, but (and I'm really making a dry logical. and perhaps tiresome point here) that doesn't mean the argument is not coherent.
But if your argument is coherent that means pretty much any substance with a potential for abuse should be banned. Do we really want to return to the days of prohibition? Do monkeys want to have to go to backalley speakeasies to get their caffeine fix? The problem is even if we grant the your point, and I don't, it doesn't really give us a useful point to debate from. Would we not be better served by making the illegal drugs legal and strickly controlling their ingredients and manufacture so as to remove the most harmful sideeffects from them?
We also need to take into account the consequences of criminalizing something whether it be drugs or jaywalking. We can use a utilitarian analysis which is further complicated by the fact that prisons really don't work. As well, calling something (and someone) criminal is not a morally neutral thing to do.
The fact that crimanalizing something isn't morally neutral is the point for those who believe drugs should be illegal. They believe that prohibition of certain substances is the moral thing to do. Of course, what makes their position hard to defend is the arbitrary way they decide that some substances should be illegal and others not.
But if your argument is coherent that means pretty much any substance with a potential for abuse should be banned.
Some people think this, yes. And you may think it a bad idea -- I do -- but that doesn't make it an incoherent argument. The very fact that you're offering counter arguments means it's coherent. If it were otherwise, you'd dismiss it as bizarre rambling, like Timecube.
What I'm trying to suggest is that the act of calling someone a criminal is in itself a moral wrong.
prisons really don't work
Of course they do. They effectively remove the offender from society.
Rehabilitation is not the real intention of prison.
More concern with rehabilitation, however, might cut down on the "returning guests" list at Ryker's Island.
There was a time when prisons in the US were into rehabilitation, but now it's become only punishment, IMHO. My correctional officer brother used to work in one where skills were tought. The state closed it. He became the overseer of two prisons, where the current theory is to put a bunch of felons together with gang tendencies and no diversions, except some time in the yard, so they lift weights and get tattoos, and get even more scary. He retired early with a sour taste in his mouth.
Putting people in prison does work, it just doesn't work very well. Any legal system has to match punishment with rehabilitation for it to be effective. Too much punishment, like we have in our system now, and you end up with angry people who only know how to be criminals.
At least in Canada sentences are supposed to meet the following sentencing goals: specific deterrence, general deterrence, rehabilitation, incapacitation, and denunciation. (Denunciation is usually seen as equivalent to the retributive or punishment aspect of a sentence.) So I guess I agree, prisons do have multiple and often conflicting goals and they may well be succeeding at one or another of those while largely failing at rehabilitation (and deterrence for the most part).
Yet it does seem to me that rehabilitation serves as an important moral justification for our willingness to imprison people. Imagine you've got the job of sentencing someone for small-scale trafficking. He's an addict himself, of course, so deterrence isn't really an issue since you can't deter addicts. Suppose you're told in advance that he'll be in an institution where he will have a good rehab program available. Does that change your willingness to sentence him to prison time as opposed to some sort of community sentence? I think the answer is that it does: the notion of rehabilitation make us more willing to accept incarceration as an appropriate punishment. Of course, I'm not talking about child molesters and murders here, but then then they don't represent very much of the prison population so they're bad examples to use when talking about prison and sentencing.
I teach a little in this area, so I apologize for rambling on a bit (and the couple of beers I've had don't help). I don't think I seriously disagreeing with anyone here, but I just want to suggest that while we tend to focus on the moral failures of offenders we tend to avoid thinking about our own when we decide to lock them up.
Okay so I checked with a real-live LAWYER type about my initial comment Re: punative nations etc. and although I got the green light, I was forced to concede that "modern-era nations" should be amended to include "western-democratic" in there somewhere.
The BBC would like to apologise to those whom may have been wrong as a result of the comment.
Rehabilitation is not the real intention of prison.
True, but it should be, else isn't it just winding up the animal before turning them loose?
my amazing all-knowing brainWikipedia: The Cultural Revolution in the People's Republic of China was a struggle for power within the Communist Party of China, which grew to include large sections of Chinese society and eventually brought the People's Republic of China to the brink of civil war. It was launched by Communist Party of China Chairman Mao Zedong on May 16, 1966 to regain control of the party after the disasters of the Great Leap Forward had led to a significant loss of his power to rivals such as Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. Though Mao himself officially declared the Cultural Revolution to have ended in 1969, the term is today widely used to also include the period between 1969 and the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976. The Khmer Rouge regime is remembered mainly for the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million people (from an estimated 1972 population of 7.1 million), through execution, starvation and forced labor. Although directly responsible for the death of about 750,000, the policies of the Khmer Rouge led to, mainly through starvation and displacement, the death of over 1 million people. In terms of the number of people killed as a proportion of the population of the country it ruled, it was one of the most lethal regimes of the 20th century. But it should be recognized that both of those bloody revolutions / regimes paid the public defenders much less than the prosecution got.