91–100 of 112 posts
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This one is a big deal in states like Montana, where you can no longer hunt for food as a felon. And Archery is now in a gray area too, where they aren't letting felons hunt with bows either.
Are some people reliant on hunting for food?
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Sure there are sentences that include supervision up front and supervision that is given after sentencing as an alternative to completing the full sentence. But from the parents post that isn't in addition to "has served their said time", its part of the said time. Are you suggesting that you got supervised release after completing your full sentence as outlined after your conviction?
For example, my sentence was 70 months prison (1 month under the maximum allowed), then 3 years supervised release (the maximum allowed for my crime). During that 3 years, if I violated any condition of supervised release (including accessing the Internet, or working as a programmer), I could have been sent back for 3 more years of prison. This is different from parole, where you are conditionally released before you…
I'm not arguing that this is fair, or right, or the best we can do. I'm arguing that its not a case where these specific items are tacked on "after" your time is served. The other things he mentions (loss of voter rights, loss of housing rights, etc) truly are permanent punishments.
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OMG, another terrible "think of the children" law. Did you know that 1/4 of all sex offenders offended as juveniles and are not particularly likely to reoffend as adults? Did you know that well under 5% of "convicted" people actually were convicted? The rest plea bargained out of a combination of not being able to afford trial, and facing much worse potential penalties if they tried to fight it. Before heaping more p…
the criminal justice systems is always going to have flaws. sure we should try to address them. but it would also help a lot if we remembered that criminals are people. members of society who screwed up, felt they didn't have a choice, or have psychological problems. punish them, treat them, restrict them, but they aren't unhuman.
Somebody kidnaps and rapes a six year old? Yeah no, they are inhuman and just need to be taken out behind the chemical shed and shot.
There will never be any meaningful criminal reform in the US before the right recognize the existence of the first type of offender and the left the second type.
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> (Although Hacker News does not) I think it does - we have profiles with info like our personal website URL, twitter handle, a brief description on them. Here's mine, for instance: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ivraatiems
But we don't have photos in the profiles
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the criminal justice systems is always going to have flaws. sure we should try to address them. but it would also help a lot if we remembered that criminals are people. members of society who screwed up, felt they didn't have a choice, or have psychological problems. punish them, treat them, restrict them, but they aren't unhuman.
Agreed. (Related wall of text follows) I've always thought a major issue with the criminal justice system is serving competing masters: You want to punish people so OTHERS decide it would be a bad idea and don't try it You want to punish people so THEY decide it was a bad idea, not worth doing again. You want to redeem criminals, put them on a better path You want to ensure the criminals do not post a further threat…
People are commenting here without reading or understanding the ruling [edit: I should say that headlines like the one techdirt gave their article are also misleading; they are playing up the "banned from the internet" angle]. What happened is that North Carolina passed a law making it a crime for someone previously convicted of a sex crime to access social media sites (unless the site completely prohibits access exc…
The problem is that so many sites have social networking aspects to them, like the Supreme Court ruling pointed out. The North Carolina law is this: http://www.ncleg.net/gascripts/statutes/statutelookup.pl?sta... This law does not prohibit the offender from _making a profile_ on these sites, but from accessing them altogether. So any site that allows users (news commenters, product reviewers, whatever) to have a "use…
The more normal reading of “such ad” makes the scope of the law even broader than you describe (and would seem likely to include HN, which you view as excluded because it doesn't include every enumerated kind of information, specifically missing pictures, in it's profile pages.)
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Agreed. (Related wall of text follows) I've always thought a major issue with the criminal justice system is serving competing masters: You want to punish people so OTHERS decide it would be a bad idea and don't try it You want to punish people so THEY decide it was a bad idea, not worth doing again. You want to redeem criminals, put them on a better path You want to ensure the criminals do not post a further threat…
I don't think we should discount the extent to which the purpose of our criminal justice system is vengeance for its own sake. I don't think most people think of it this way, but it's hard to say this isn't the case.
I think you're totally right, and until we acknowledge this point as a society, it will be really hard to improve things very much.
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the criminal justice systems is always going to have flaws. sure we should try to address them. but it would also help a lot if we remembered that criminals are people. members of society who screwed up, felt they didn't have a choice, or have psychological problems. punish them, treat them, restrict them, but they aren't unhuman.
Somebody who could not feed their children and so ended up stealing food from the local store? Alright, I can see that they might not see any other choice. Somebody kidnaps and rapes a six year old? Yeah no, they are inhuman and just need to be taken out behind the chemical shed and shot. There will never be any meaningful criminal reform in the US before the right recognize the existence of the first type of offende…
But, making rules for everyone on the basis of the worst of the worst makes things worse for everyone: There are people who know they have a problem, but are too afraid to seek help because they are certain that everyone else will want to kill them if their secret ever comes out. Those people might stay hidden for life, or they might get drunk, do something regrettable, and be so frightened of the consequences that they kill their victim.
Dark Triad types don't think of getting caught, or so I am told. Question is, how many want to do things they recognise as immoral but are afraid to seek help to overcome? How many more seek mental stability by staying in denial, either refusing to recognise they have a problem or by refusing to believe society's condemnation? How many people could be saved by stopping people before they act, by treating humans as deeply flawed and letting the challenge be self improvement rather than simple binary good-or-evil?
I don't claim to know. Could be the hypothetical groups are tiny. It's not like it's possible to measure the size of a group which by definition is hiding to the best of its ability.
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But we don't have photos in the profiles
I take a different reading of clause 3. The main criteria is "Allows users to create Web pages or personal profiles that contain information". The restrictions following that are prefaced by "such as"... which is a very weird word choice for legal stuff. Usually you see stuff like "including but not limited to the following" or "including all of the following". So a bit of a wild card, but the common usage of such as…
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Edit: Misread parent.
I think you may have read that wrong. I think he's saying that full 25% (the ones who offended as juveniles) are unlikely to be repeat offenders. The remaining 75%, convicted as adults, are presumably a much bigger concern.
It appears that pedophile is as much a sexual orientation as homosexual, and is as hard to change. But where gay people do no particular harm except to the sensibilities of conservatives, pedophiles do a lot of damage.
However a 12 year old who sends a naked picture of themselves to a friend is treated by the law in the same way as a pedophile. Ditto an 18 year old whose 17 year old girlfriend's mother gets unhappy. As a father whose children are hitting puberty now, this fact is very scary.
I warn my children, but one mistake could destroy their lives, and there is no shortage of people who it has happened to.