chocolate pickles said:
Amakusa said:
chocolate pickles said:
Kristian Fischer said:
Because harsher sentencing work as a deterrent.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOT.
The only thing harsher sentencing accomplishes is filling up prisons faster.
Not trying to sound like a dick, but i don't think that's true. If i was desperate, then i would be more likely to consider stealing something if the penalty was a fine + short prison stint rather than amputation of one of my hands.
For you yes, but that doesn't mean ever single other person that commits a crime factors in the length of how long the sentence is or whether there is capital punishment. It's more complicated than that. Going by your logic, every jurisdiction should have low crime rates if the death sentence was implemented on every major crime conceivable. Heck countries with death sentence for drug smuggling should have very little drug smuggling crime problems.
I'm not saying that harsher punishments are the absolute answer to halting crime, as in some countries where poverty is rampant and there is a lack of care for the poor, people will commit crime simply because they don't have much choice other than to starve. I do think, however, that harsher punishments can make a difference in more wealthy countries: For example, There are areas in Britain which are classified as poor. However, for the most part there are measures in place to make sure people in need in these areas have something to eat and somewhere to sleep. These people do not need to commit crime to survive like people living in poverty in other areas of the world,
so isn't it possible that harsh sentences combined with a lack of need to commit crime in these types of area could act as a very strong deterrent against crimes of want? (E.g, I dont need this to survive, and the punishment is worth the risk)
Hmmm so we are not talking about purely crimes of violence and instead about crime that has some element of property I take it? Since i think a crime of want would be a property type crime, like break and entering, robbery, fraud? And i have to assume you are talking about decent welfare combined with high punishment and the target population is the poor?
In short not necessarily. For example with motor theft, it wasn't high sentencing that reduced that crime rate down but by technological advances that makes it easier to track and lock down stolen vehicles with the newer models. Another example could be cyber crime, harsh sentencing hasn't stopped people from downloading pirated stuff of the net. And even financial ruin by the threat of the record company bankrupting you through the civil courts hasn't stopped it either concerning music and film downloading.
The problem with welfare is that people that are on it are harshly stigmatised, especially in Australia. They are easy targets for the media and can't really defend themselves from the attacks. Heck, A Current Affair loves to run programs that involves welfare bashing giving the example that if one person is committing welfare fraud, all of them are fraudsters and they have a history of misquoting figures from Centrelink. (they also run xenophobic immigration stories about asian invasion but that isn't relevant here).
Your theoretical reasoning seems to the rational offender model where people will be weigh up the risk and think that it's okay. However that doesn't apply to everyone, juveniles don't go through a prism of harsh sentencing when they commit crime. Young people take risky behaviour and those that have offended most grow out by 25. Heck that flag stealing would be a crime of want mentioned above. There was also an example given in one of the books about cultural criminology where a teenager girl broke into her neighbours house and rearranged the furniture. Nothing was stolen but she did this as few times. Break and entering is a crime though and it wasn't harsh sentencing that factored into her decision making process to do it. It was risk and excitement. The Criminal justice system in Australia recognises this and thus when young people enter the system they try to make sure they don't became institutionalised by diversionary programs.
Then there is the theory of stigmatisation, where in short if you treat the offenders like trash, they are going to re-offend later.
I'll give you another example, shopping centres. A kid put shampoo in the fountain of the shopping centre. That kid was given a a 10 year ban. (Remember shopping centres are private property so they can kick anyone out if they want). Essentially that kid months later, was charged with trespassing for entering the shopping centre and sent to criminal court. So what started as a harmless prank escalated into a criminal charges.
Why is this important? In areas where the shopping centre is the only place where essential services are held in a country town, and the next place is 5 hours away in another town. If you get banned from a shopping centre for that has only centrelink, postal service and other essential areas in that area. And your poor and you can't afford to travel to another place to access essential services, your screwed. You have to go to that shopping centre to report to Centrelink (welfare services) or lose all your benefits. So that person ends up getting busted for criminal trespassing. So what started as a bannable offence (shopping centres have their own standards as to what that is and it essentially can be anything) now has grown to criminal charges. Harsh sentencing did not factor here.
As to why older poor people would commit crime would be different. There could be other issues going on in the mind of the offender. They can be things have that spiralled out of control. It's complicated. The point is that the motivation of why someone would commit crime it different, and it your case why poor people would commit crime wouldn't necessarily be explained by the rational offender model and sentencing wouldn't necessarily be a factoring decision. There are different competing theories and models that explain crime. There is no one universal and unifying theory as to why someone commits crime. And for most of those theories harsh sentencing isn't used as a deterrent to reduce crime.
When harsh sentencing is involved, it usually done by politicians and it's a rushed job to satisfy a moral outrage by the public or by politicians wanting to get votes on the "tough of crime." Irrespective of any evidence out there. If you want to look at a similar analogy look at the gun debate and video games. Look at how the actors play out, there is no evidence that video games cause gun death and yet you get politicians trying to regulate video games and blaming it for gun deaths. The dynamics that play out in that field and the field on harsher sentencing and tough on crime are similar.
I would argue that better ways to deal with reducing crime than harsher penalties. Better designed suburbs, community programs, work opportunity that give people value in their lives.
Edited(and now i need some sleep)
