Good Idea. Send me your address and we'll send them to your neighborhood so that you can set an example for them.
This sort of thinking will get you killed.
“This sort of thinking will get you killed.”
I don’t think so.
First, 70% of all “first time offenders” do not become repeat offenders.
The problem is the other 30%, because the largest segment of crime is committed by repeat offenders, which means they were once part of that 30% of first time offenders.
Most “first time offender” programs run by the states, if they have an emphasis and focus on improving the skills of “first time offenders” and with providing “first time offenders” with post-incarceration occupational placement assistance do have a lower rate of repeat offenses among those “first time offenders” that participated in those programs than do the states that do not have them. And there is a multiplier affect on how much you reduce the crime rate, over time, because such a high % of the crime is committed by repeat offenders. Every “first time offender” you help in a path to not being a repeat offender will add some reduction to the crime statistics over many years ahead, for every year that your initial efforts immediately after their first offense meant that you helped them not become a repeat offender.
The best first-time offender programs either include chaplains to try to assist first-time offenders in gaining a religious perspective, or are run directly by Churches.
One of the problems is that simply sending some of the “first time offenders” back to the community they came from defeats the possibilities for occupational placement assistance, because the jobs just are not there.
I believe there is too much emphasis placed on “saving the community” that the first-time offender came from by emphasizing attempts to reintegrate them back into “their community”, and too little emphasis on helping to save the first offender from becoming a repeat offender.
If you think these ideas are simply “liberal” and secular, read on:
http://www.religionandsocialpolicy.org/news/article.cfm?id=5774