Wait a second! Didn't quite say that - I think a Minority Report-style system to store our criminals (in suspended animation) would be good, but I wouldn't agree with a Precrime-style system on moral grounds.

Police planting evidence to catch criminals is as old as cops themselves. What it really comes down to is: who's supposed to give the verdict, the police or the courts? What if the police who plant said evidence are mistaken?

The world is rife with the simplistic thinking that crime can be solved by increasing punishments. We're halfway between the primitive notion of crime as sin and the rational notion of crime as sickness, but you can't stop a nation of primitives from demanding communal vengeance on criminals/sinners in order to feel like some magical balance has been restored. It's like those people who think that any actual attempt to remove terrorism from the world would be a war of attrition.

http://www.newsgaming.com/games/index12.htm

"Prison is an expensive way of making bad men worse."
- David Waddington.

Deal with poverty and you've dealt with crime.

Dude, P is so clichéd these days.
The day that TV 3 Reporter (Mike McRoberts I think) said on a self-promoting ads that P was the "greatest danger to society today" was the day that I stopped believing P existed.

Another thing that is clichéd is saying that the Goverment is hiding crime statistics, because apparently crime statistics aren't being counted. According to this same criteria, we ought to stop believing government population statistics ("Fucking Labour are hiding the immigrants by not reporting it in statistics, my mate's uncle's friend told me that his mate knew a foreigner who ripped off the system!"), government economic statistics ("Fucking Labour are stealing our hard-earned tax money by not reporting it, my friend's dog's mate from down the road knew a guy whose uncle's dad worked as a government economist...!") etc.

Lessons like this should be learnt from flash games.

I agree with you but for one thing- you can reduce recidivism with longer sentences, due simply to the fact that someone can't commit crimes if they're already in prison.

Hence my idea: everytime you're jailed, the length of time you're jailed for is x + yz, where x is the length appointed by the judge, y is some fraction, and z is the total time you've already spent in prison for previous crimes.

Are you under the impression that dealing with poverty is simple? If you have no points that address my actual argument, I'm not too concerned.

If time spend in jail increases the chances of reoffence, which it currently seems to, all we'd be doing is increasingly isolating people who are increasingly likely to commit crimes. Makes sense when you look at it that way, but it's something like dealing with a malaria epidemic by forcing people to live in a mosquito-infested swamp.

What I mean is, I think that it would prevent those citizens from committing crimes purely by their isolation, not by their fear of further imprisonment.

Plus the tax dollars it costs the community to keep people in prison. If rehabilitation was a more widely used resource the previous offenders could help put into the community as opposed to sucking the resources out of it

Isolation is not insane, though. If someone has proven themselves to be a danger to the community, there is a strong argument for quarantining them. I just think it should be thought of in those terms, though - quarantine. The person is unwell in a manner that can hurt others.

But when we quarantine people who are contagiously sick, we try to treat them in a manner that stops them being contagiously sick. We don't stick them in quarantine for an arbitrary fixed term - say two years - and release them at the end regardless of their condition.

The communal-vengeance thing, where we say "this guy has caused this much suffering, and must suffer proportionately... two years!" is missing the mark on two fronts. Firstly, it's harking back to primitive Christian notions of free will and sin and punishment ("People who choose to be evil deserve to suffer.") Secondly, emphasis on punishment proportionally takes emphasis from treatment, and we end up releasing dangerous people back into the community before they're rehabilitated - often having become more dangerous - simply because they've "done their time".

So you stand for no defined sentancing? Just until the courts deem them to be safe enough to be let out? This is a novel idea but I dont think it would work too well. Im not saying i disagree or that the current system is better but we must be realistic in the way the prison system works. We have to take supplies upto the metal work shops up at the high security prison out Hellensville through work. My boss wont let me go up because its too dangerous, there are guys in there who are in for life, triad assassins, gang members + professional killers. When riots break out they pick up the closest steel rod and go for anyone they can. These kind of people cannot be helped. But what is the answer for their fate? We can isolate them, lock them up forever, some might go as far to say the death penalty (which i believe is a bad thing). The system is set up and I cant think of any postive way to change it.
The idea of no set time limit of isolation is a good idea for non-major offenses such as theft. Another question lies with people who commit such crimes as fraud, how long and how can you tell before they "get better" as such.

Frankly, I find my own expressions on the matter mildly disturbing. I talk about crime as sickness, but that makes legality health, and legislation is not perhaps the best way to model a healthy person or a healthy community.

I think, for example, that tax resistance is a good form of protest when the government does something thoroughly unconscionable in your name - though what's unconscionable to you might not be unconscionable to me. Refusing to pay taxes is a crime, the protestor is a criminal, is unwell, and must be rehabilitated back into health: paying taxes and sticking to forms of protest that pose far less threat, if at all.

So when I talk about crime as sickness, I'm primarily talking about violent crime, which I do consider to be a direct result of poverty and the complex systems that both perpetuate poverty while being perpetuated by it.

I don't believe that "those kinds of people can't be helped". I don't believe that they can be helped by prison as it stands today.

It's like this. There are four justifications for prison: quarantine, deterrent, punishment and rehabilitation. The purpose of quarantine is to protect the community from the dangerous person. The purpose of deterrent is to introduce the threat of unpleasantness if one acts in unsociable ways. The purpose of punishment is to even things up according to some supernatural balance of justice points. The purpose of rehabilitation is to change the criminal into a person who does not commit crimes.

We have a mix of the four as reasons for putting violent criminals in prison at the moment. But when it comes to reasons for releasing them, we go straight back to just one: punishment. If they've been punished enough, prison has fulfilled its purpose and their continued imprisonment is no longer justifiable in terms of punishment.

Now, I find punishment to be a thoroughly retarded reason to put people in prison in the first place, so it would be wacky if I agreed with that criterion as the sole justification for releasing someone. If I am to go with rehabilitation and quarantine as the only sensible reasons to isolate someone - prison or otherwise - then my criteria for justified release of violent criminals must also be in those terms: Are they changed? Are they no longer a danger? Okay, release them. If not, why release them?

If we only released people from the current justice system on these grounds, few people would ever be released, because prison makes them more dangerous, not less. But if the prison system was about rehabilitation, if that was its focus, rather than punishment, then resources being put into rehabilitation would make it possible for a violent offender to be rehabilitated and released on those terms perhaps sooner, perhaps later, than they would be under the essentially Christian system we've inherited.

Prison does make people more dangerous, so you're saying that instead of say sending someone to prison for minor crimes that we try to rehabilitate them instead, thus avoiding the "toughening" that prison is? With violet offences people do deserve to goto prison and yes it should be a bad experience for them as they have done a bad thing to get there. The thing with the people that I have seen (the ones i said "that cannot be helped") they enjoy killing, they enjoy whatever they do, and they like the life style they can make from being a profesional killer, what can we do about them?

I'd prefer if "deserve" wasn't even in the vocabulary.

We have to look at the conditions that give rise both to people who enjoy killing and the lifestyle of being a professional killer. People who enjoy killing are about as unambiguously unacceptably unwell as we can get - study them, treat them, keep them quarantined indefinitely until progress is made.

As for the lifestyle of being a professional killer, well, we have to look at the economic and social factors that make such a thing profitable and attractive.

True true, but how would we quarantine them?

Well, that's the question.

Imprisonment itself has an effect on a person's mind. Just the knowledge that their freedom is restricted.

We're talking here about violent offenders whose causes can't be traced directly to poverty - ie., assuming a world in which wealth distribution and education and changes in property laws have rendered most of our crime - property crime, drugs, etc., - negligible. We're left with the violent offenders, the sex offenders, etc.

Perhaps separated communities, where people work and earn within that community, but keeping them from leaving a certain perimeter around the community? I dunno, I'm sure we can come up with something.

But Zoot, that isolation would have very similar pyschological affects, if not even worse ones, on the people who are moved there. We all know what happens when you put a lot of dangerous criminals together in a specially created criminal society (particularly an island).

Is there any radically different way to deal with people who will predictably cause harm to others, other than quarantine?

Its a damned if you do and damned if you dont situation.

You really can't do better than prison unless you're willing to throw a whole heap of money at the problem, which society isn't willing to do, because people don't give a fuck about rapists and thieves.

Sad, but true.

No, I was just pointing out that the argument that "dealing with" poverty would thus "deal with" crime is itself simplistic thinking. As with anything in the real world it is much more complicated than that.

Thats true Simon. Its just unfortunate that its in human nature.