Posted on 11/29/2013 11:24:37 PM PST by Olog-hai
“They treat him like a dangerous criminal.” Judith Minor has had to live with that reality for the last 13 years—ever since her son Ricky disappeared behind the bars of Yazoo City Jail in Mississippi because he had drugs worth a handful of dollars on him. He was sentenced to life without parole—something his 76-year-old mother just cannot fathom.
But his case is no exception in the US justice system. It could be a pair of socks, a slice of pizza—many petty thieves serve life sentences in the US. Ricky Minor’s offense was carrying one gram of methamphetamine. …
“These sentences are the direct result of laws that were passed over the last 40 years, as part of the war on drugs and tough-on-crime policies. Those policies led to the passage of mandatory minimum sentencing laws, three-strikes laws and other mandatory sentencing laws,” (Jennifer) Turner told DW. Those laws stipulate sometimes draconian punishment for petty crimes. In some states, like Louisiana and Florida, the three-strikes law puts anyone in jail for life who has been convicted three times. …
(Excerpt) Read more at dw.de ...
should have added this to my first post:
Years ago I worked for a medium sized machine shop. They had an attendance policy. If you worked 10 days straight you got a -1 point. -20 points you got a savings bond or something like that. If you called in sick, not using a vacation day or personal day you got a +2, if you were more than 7 minutes late you got +1. If you got +26 you got a week off with out pay and they dropped you to +20. If you got a second +26 in a year you got 2 weeks off with out pay and dropped to +20 again. If you got to +26 again in that year you were terminated.
We had a woman whose husband had been out fishing and his boat had problems and he was lost out on lake Erie. She had used all her vacation and personal time and was on +25 for the third time in 9 months. Her husband got back to shore the next day and she came into work./ The VP of manufacturing told her that she was suspended pending termination. She began to whine and complain how unfair it was. Her husband could have been killed etc....
The VP of manufacturing looked at her and said, Okay you had a good excuse this time but what about all the other times. In nine months she had used 10 days of vacation 5 days of personal time and had been out or late 18 additional days.
Both of them got exactly what they deserved.
Well, call me a creative thinking evangelist... I see how we can get the bible read very much in schools.
Make God cool. God is already cool. We just need to tell the listening world the story about how. For just one example: Let child centered bible memes out of the Christian family store ghetto.
Anyhow getting back to what you said. Having bibles in prisons is better than not having them in prisons. There could be entire prisoner-centered evangelistic curricula. The closer that penal science gets to the gospel, the better it will do at eliminating recidivism AND cruelty.
Your shop merit/demerit system, even as it was, was better thought out than this other one. There WILL be popular pushback. This is not about being fired from a job. It’s about being fired from life.
I agree with you. Mandatory sentencing is stupid.
As for cops planting evidence, I know a guy who used to be a cop. He told me he saw another cop plant drugs on a black guy. The cop said “He didn’t have drugs on him tonight. But I’m sure he had some on him last week.” The guy I know didn’t cross that thin blue line. (It’s getting thicker every day.)
Bibles are prohibited in schools thanks to the ACLU and activist judges who overstep their bounds.
Bibles are on their way to being banned in the US military (hateful towards homosexuality (if you don’t CHAMPION it these days, that in and of itself is “hate”), banned in certain Middle Eastern countries where our men and women serve...).
But a repeat offender can claim to have found God while in prison and (while some do) that is good enough to be offered early release.
Then you must blame the Bible for why there are so many criminals out there with rap sheets, a mile long. It is clear, if you’re a Bible believing Christian, that punishments must not be out of proportion to the offense and that we should be working to bring people back into society, who have served their sentence fully.
That does not mean I don’t believe in punishment. Punishment is part of the justice system, but it needs to be properly proportioned with the offense. So, in the event of a theft, the person convicted would have to return what he stole from the person or the amount that he stole, even if he had to spend the rest of his life working towards that objective.
Make no mistake, if an offense should mean the life of the convicted because the offense he caused is absolutely impossible to make up for, I will pull the switch myself. But that does not mean I believe in continually amping up the punishment for the same offense, until the perp “finally” learns to not offend. Punishment only justice systems rarely work out to eliminate crime in totality.
This is where a creative evangelism gets on the move. School administrators cannot present bibles. So do it grass roots. Some soldiers cannot get bibles. Write them letters containing gospel material, send them gospel songs.
“To the crooked, God shows Himself astute.”
Yup I’m bragging on God. His mind is what inspires faithful Christians.
You have to ask whether such “defective units” are right for prison. They cannot seem to function in society without offending against others, but they are not psychiatric cases.
So perhaps the best bet is that they be minimum security prison institutionalized. Likely on a mostly vegetarian diet, so they will have a place to live before they die, that harms no one else. The only real offenses in such a place are if they hurt someone else, or they try to escape, either of which will get them put back in a real prison.
Three Strikes Laws are like Zero Tolerance Policies.
They are a way of dodging the responsibility for making common-sense distinctions. They play well to people who think, who are admittedly a majority of the population.
If I had two strikes. . .
and didn’t have the self control to keep drugs off my person. . .
I’d need to be in prison.
I hate it when they act like someone has life for stealing a pizza. It’s not for stealing the pizza. It’s for a life of habitual criminality.
Caught and convicted three times? Man, you have committed a TON of crime.
He was convicted of strong arm robbery, and the deciding factor was his long history of violent felonies. That was the whole idea of 3 strikes.
Just to clarify, strong arm robbery assumes assault and theft. Just as armed robbery assumes assault with a deadly weapon. Assault doesn’t have to be actual violence, it can be the threat of violence. They don’t charge you with assault and theft separately. Yet the liberals never tell you it was a violent crime against a minor. A 10 year old kid, IIRC.
Good riddance.
I do agree in principle that the third strike should be serious, but in this case it was. And if career criminals don’t like the law, they can move to some other state.
^^^ THIS ^^^
Liberal judges and prosecutors keep letting criminals go so politicians get involved to make sure these habituals are punished. Unintended consequences are things like this.
For non-violent crimes, criminals should be sentenced to increasing periods of hard labor. For violent crimes, hard labor as well as three strikes rules, but only for crimes of violence, not drug possession or shoplifting.
>>decide if what he is being charged with is disproportionate to the crime.<<
That is what the jury should consider before anything else.
Exactly! It's an abdication of reason in favor of an entirely emotion based reaction. The easy way out.
So if they make being conservative or being Christian illegal, you will be all for jailing them, “because they knew the stakes?”
How many times to you vote for your imperial lord Obama?
Wow...that is so twisted I don’t know where to start.
Three strike laws were enacted by conservative legislatures because liberal judges were letting criminals walk time after time. Because these laws are based on three felonies, the liberal judges now allow plea bargains down to misdemeanors in cases where, in the past, the perp would have gone to jail.
I have a close friend who is a conservative judge. He, and other judges like him, look at the entire record of the perp and refuse to allow plea bargains with habitual offenders.
In short we have gone from a system where a habitual criminal would get multiple small sentences, to a system where, for the most part, they get no jail time until they run afoul of a conservative judge three times then, bang, they go away for a long time.
Both systems suck, but I prefer the one where the habitual criminal eventually gets put away for a long sentence.
BTW, my friend tells me that the long sentences are a joke as well. He sentenced a “really scary guy” who ran drug and prostitution rings to 30 years in 1999 right after Florida enacted their three strikes law and he says the guy will be getting out of jail in February after serving about 15 years.
Was he convicted of assaulting this minor?
If not, than regardless of it, it shouldn’t have been a factor in his sentencing.
Habitual criminals deserve to be in prison.
bump
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.