Mandatory minimum sentencing

Watermark said:
If it means anything, I also think that giving him the death penalty would be too harsh. Of course, I don't believe in the death penalty. You were a little bit flippant in your response but I don't really see why Dano made such a big deal out of it.
Click to expand...

Because he's dishonest.
 
I mean, guys, look at this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_offenders#State_Specific_Recidivism_Studies

In 2007, the State Bureau of Investigation in North Carolina made significant changes to its sex offender registration system, including new search criteria that include an "offender status" search, enabling an explicit search for convicted sex offense recidivists in the sex offender database. Manual searches by county using the new criteria yield some of the lowest recidivist percentages ever disseminated by any law enforcement establishment. In the entire State of North Carolina, there are only 71 recidivists shown on the registry, if incarcerated offenders are included. Per-county results for "Registered" status offenders compared against "Recidivist" status offenders on the North Carolina registry yield actual convicted recidivist percentages ranging from zero to fractions of one percent.
 
Watermark said:
Please. Sex offenders have some of the lowest reoffence rates out of any criminals. With reform hardly any recommit. Why should we punish the 90% who don't recividate to get back at the 10% who might? Sure, it would incapacitate those 10%, but 90% of those going to jail for life would've been able to go back into normal society had we not just acted on a knee-jerk angry instinct. Wouldn't that be a crime in and of itself?

Barring that, I'm not really against second or third strike laws for sexual or violent offenders. But we really need to get reform in there, so that we don't have to send as many people back to prison. Our prisons currently are just crime re-training facilities.
Click to expand...
Child molesters have a huge recidivism rate. You are confusing all "sex offenders" with child molesters and are simply wrong.

If one is honest with themselves and considers the massive underreporting of Child molestation crimes a 67.5% re-arrest rate is massive.

Almost half are reconvicted on a second charge. This is HUGE when the reality is they usually victimize many victims before even one comes forward, and many are never reported at all.
 
Why not just give everyone the death penalty? Apparently anything less is "recommending tiny sentences" and isn't tough enough on crime.
 
Damocles said:
Child molesters have a huge recidivism rate. You are confusing all "sex offenders" with child molesters and are simply wrong.

If one is honest with themselves and considers the massive underreporting of Child molestation crimes a 67.5% re-arrest rate is massive.

Almost half are reconvicted on a second charge. This is HUGE when the reality is they usually victimize many victims before even one comes forward, and many are never reported at all.
Click to expand...

Oh, OK.

Honestly, I get widely varying reports on recividism whenever I look the subject up.
 
ib1yysguy said:
Why not just give everyone the death penalty? Apparently anything less is "recommending tiny sentences" and isn't tough enough on crime.
Click to expand...

If tough setences have a pragmatic use, then I'm all for them. But Dano and people like him don't think rationally. They just want vengeance. And I have problems with that. It's just been proven that America's ridiculously harsh sentencing laws haven't deterred crime that much.
 
If a child molester has a sole attraction to children, then the only really effective treatment is castration, either physical or chemical. Most who go through with the "treatment", after a few years, just express a feeling of relief at being able to participate in normal society again. But really, it presents ethical questions to give that out as a mandatory treatment. Then again, you know, whenever we're talking about locking them up for life? Wouldn't it be more sensible? *Sigh*
 
Damocles said:
It isn't to punish people that we should put child molesters in prison until the day that they die, it is because the recidivism rate and the causation for the child to later become a molester themselves creates the strongest reason to take these people out of society.
Click to expand...

Children who are sexual molested don't often become sexual molesters themselves. But most prostitutes or adult film stars, at some point, were victimes of sexual abuse.

1 in 4 or 5 children are sexually abused in this country. Which is staggering. And how are we supposed to stop it? It happens behind closed doors, and the victims are usually children who don't know what's going on and don't report it. It isn't something that's easy to enforce at all.
 
Watermark said:
If a child molester has a sole attraction to children, then the only really effective treatment is castration, either physical or chemical. Most who go through with the "treatment", after a few years, just express a feeling of relief at being able to participate in normal society again. But really, it presents ethical questions to give that out as a mandatory treatment. Then again, you know, whenever we're talking about locking them up for life? Wouldn't it be more sensible? *Sigh*
Click to expand...

Also, if it's a mandatory sentence it ignores special situations, like the story about that 17-year-old who was sent away to prison, tried as an adult, etc, for having sex with his 15-year-old girlfriend. He was guilty of rape of a minor. Is that the same as child rape/molestation? If it is, and he lived in Danoworld where there was a mandatory sentence, he'd have his wanger chopped off without consideration to the fact that he's not a fucking child molester prone to repeat offense in reality but only on paper.
 
ib1yysguy said:
Also, if it's a mandatory sentence it ignores special situations, like the story about that 17-year-old who was sent away to prison, tried as an adult, etc, for having sex with his 15-year-old girlfriend. He was guilty of rape of a minor. Is that the same as child rape/molestation? If it is, and he lived in Danoworld where there was a mandatory sentence, he'd have his wanger chopped off without consideration to the fact that he's not a fucking child molester prone to repeat offense in reality but only on paper.
Click to expand...

That wouldn't really be considered paedophilia. It's attraction to someone under the legal age, but paedophilia is attraction to pre-pubescents. It's a mental disorder. Like I've said before, most paedophilia is repressed. Most people who do have such feelings wouldn't know about it or would never admit it, which makes it difficult to identify and treat. It requires some sort of special immorality to actually go out and molest a child. Most of the people who are caught are the ones who are blatantly obvious in their child molestation. However, it's probably true that most child molestations happen from people who are passively paedophiliac and have had their inhibitions lowered from consuming alcohol or something. It would be impossible to collect recividism data from these people. 90% of the time it goes unreported.

A 17 year old having sex with a 15 year old is still immoral, but it's not to the level of having sex with an 11 year old. A LOT of those people are put on the sex offender registries and identified as child molesters or something like because of that, however, and they usually go to prison for 15 years or something. I don't think it should be considered as big of a crime as it is, and since the recividism rate is so ridiculously low it's trivial to put them on the sex offender registries at all.

And I wouldn't support mandatory sentencing for any first time offenders. Maybe even second time.
 
Last edited:
Yes, I know it's not pedophilia. That's the point I was making. I don't believe judges and juries adjudicate whether or not someone is a "pedophile" since that's a mental disorder and not the crime itself. The crime, as the law states, is sex/molestation with/of a child. A child has a very specific definition in law, and I believe it varies by state.

You just restated what I said with more detail than was necessary in your signature move, which I like to call "mental masturbation."
 
I'm hesitant to throw the book at them just for being repeat offenders because drug dealers/users have high recividism rates too. Granted one is a complete an utter abomination on mankind, and one is a good way to catch a buzz and pay for your habit, but our legal system is a fucked up broadsword that will probably punish both about equally.
 
There's some point at which you can just completely give up on reforming someone and just need to incapacitate them. Then again, with three strikes laws, you know, you may have this one guy who was just an angry young kid, did two bad things, cooled off, and then thirty years later he steals a candy bar or something and he's in prison for life, and his children will never be able to see him again.
 
We have to cut off their nads first, IB1. Hey, they brought it on themselves. Whenever the gave their friends some weed, they signed a contract that said "Cut off my nads, United States government".
 
How can you possibly disagree with this? You're such a sick, twisted person, IB1. Not believe in soley-retributional, why, it's a crime against man.
 
Beefy said:
Both parties are highly complicit in placing non violent drug offenders in prison, to the tune that we have more of our population in prison than any other country on the planet. And we put them in with violent offenders. The Republicans are a disgusting bunch, and the Democrats are about 95% as disgusting on this issue.

If the Republicans are Nazis, then the Democrats are Nazis too, but maybe they are about 5% less Nazi. I won't give their heartless, power hungry, whoring asses a fucking dimes worth of credit for it though. Both parties are diligently working very, very hard to continually serve these gross miscarriages of justice to the American people. We live in a goddamned police state.

Land of the Free? I guess that's all relative. The only two parties that have any say about it are trying to one-up eachother in the drug war. They can all burn in hell. Fuck em.
Click to expand...

Well said

We have 5% of the world's population and 25% of all its prisoners.

Land of the freely locked-up.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top