My main problem with the three stikes law is that rather than addressing the problem, it's just locking it away. And do you have any idea how much it costs the community per year to keep one person in jail? And the people it tends to catch are usually those most visible - the homeless, the mentally ill, and the black.
We had a three-strikes law in the Northern Territory. A pretty harsh one too - you could get locked up for massive amounts of time for simple shoplifting. And the people who were jailed under it the most? Aboriginals, because they are targeted both by racial profiling ("everyone knows they're all drunks and crooks") and the fact that they are by large mostly homeless, and therefore _living_ in the public eye.
The other problem is that unless you have installed in your prisons a viable rehabilitation/re-education system, you _will_ get recidivism. Once a person has been to jail, that's permanently on their record. It affects their ability to get a job, get an education, get a place to live... So if you're a eighteen or nineteen year old kid, barely finished school, and you get into drugs and get arrested and jailed (because there's a War On Drugs, don't you know), and you spend nine months in jail... how do you think that's going to affect your life? You'll get out, apply for jobs... but you can't get anything more than the most menial work because you've got a record. You'll try and rent a place to live somewhere reasonable - and fail the personal history checks. You'll try to get a loan from the bank - and be turned down. So everywhere you go you're treated like scum because you made a mistake, and eventually you come to believe it. You fall back into drugs again (if you managed to get off them in the first place, since jails aren't known for their drug rehab successes), you wind up associating with other criminals, you start doing burglaries and robberies to support your habit, and hey, there you are back in jail again at the ripe old age of twenty-three, looking at a twenty-five year stretch. With no hope of things ever improving.
What a waste of human potential. What a waste of time, effort and _money_. It seems both our countries would prefer to throw people into the rubbish than actually do something about the reasons why they're committing crimes in the first place.
But yeah, that's the liberal looney leftie view. I knew there was a reason why I shouldn't be working for the Department of Justice.
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Re: They already do...
Date: 2003-04-10 05:16 pm (UTC)We had a three-strikes law in the Northern Territory. A pretty harsh one too - you could get locked up for massive amounts of time for simple shoplifting. And the people who were jailed under it the most? Aboriginals, because they are targeted both by racial profiling ("everyone knows they're all drunks and crooks") and the fact that they are by large mostly homeless, and therefore _living_ in the public eye.
The other problem is that unless you have installed in your prisons a viable rehabilitation/re-education system, you _will_ get recidivism. Once a person has been to jail, that's permanently on their record. It affects their ability to get a job, get an education, get a place to live... So if you're a eighteen or nineteen year old kid, barely finished school, and you get into drugs and get arrested and jailed (because there's a War On Drugs, don't you know), and you spend nine months in jail... how do you think that's going to affect your life? You'll get out, apply for jobs... but you can't get anything more than the most menial work because you've got a record. You'll try and rent a place to live somewhere reasonable - and fail the personal history checks. You'll try to get a loan from the bank - and be turned down. So everywhere you go you're treated like scum because you made a mistake, and eventually you come to believe it. You fall back into drugs again (if you managed to get off them in the first place, since jails aren't known for their drug rehab successes), you wind up associating with other criminals, you start doing burglaries and robberies to support your habit, and hey, there you are back in jail again at the ripe old age of twenty-three, looking at a twenty-five year stretch. With no hope of things ever improving.
What a waste of human potential. What a waste of time, effort and _money_. It seems both our countries would prefer to throw people into the rubbish than actually do something about the reasons why they're committing crimes in the first place.
But yeah, that's the liberal looney leftie view. I knew there was a reason why I shouldn't be working for the Department of Justice.