151–160 of 202 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many of these service members are openly gay?
Gays in the military have nothing to do with Manning's case (unless he is openly gay, then I digress).
That, and more people who refuse to convict anyone for "resisting arrest", especially when that's the only charge and none of the cops are injured. Doubly so if only the suspect is injured.
I realize they charged them with "attempted lynching" here, but "resisting arrest" is by far the more common charge. Mind you, I'm not saying that one can't resist arrest or that it shouldn't be a crime, only that I wish more people were wise to the abuse of that charge and that they knew to look for warning signs that it's being used abusively. Specifically, I would consider it to be a warning sign if: no cops are injured, there's heavily injured suspect especially when they're disproportionately injured compared to the hypothetical threat they might pose to an officer (two large cops shouldn't be very threatened by a small, unarmed kid), no weapons are found or alleged to have been seen, officer say-so is the only evidence of the crime, suspect is charged with no crime except resisting, contradictory or non-existent testimony about what they were arresting for to begin with and any other contradictions in the evidence.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds like the difference between inefficient and an efficient police work - not something that is due to a greater incarceration rate. If that was the cause, there would be fewer crimes, but the resolution of them should be about the same. Of course, that evades the question of whether incarceration has any kind of positive effect on crime rates - Popular wisdom assumes that, but scientific evidence is lacking…
And the efficiency of police work doesn't always depend on location. I also live in Brazil (São Paulo) and had my car stolen last year; they found it the next morning. While living in Paris years ago, I had my car stolen and it was never found.
As for your car in Paris, the obvious conclusion is that the total prison population in France is a bit lower than it should be. ;-)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or a pretty serious opportunity, if you get to build/run prisons for a living. Given how corrupt US politics is, I'm sure the two are connected.
And a massive cash cow if you're selling the products of the cheap labour that goes on in US prisons. http://www.cio.com/article/595304/Prison_Labor_Outsourcing_s... http://newworkerfeatures.blogspot.com/2010/02/us-prison-labo... Paying someone who you have in complete physical bondage under $1 an hour is slave labour as far as I'm concerned, even if it is nominally voluntary. At best its unconscionably exploitative.…
Why replace children in a chinese sweatshopa earning 80c an hour with prisoners being paid $1 hour. Wouldn't it be more profitable to replace people being paid $1000/hour with prisoners at $1/hour?
Imprison the bankers, have them continue to work from prison for $1 - use profit to pay off national debt.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stupid war on drugs :(
That's merely a symptom, not a cause. The cause is that US prisons are for profit organisations, and that laws are written by lobbyists and passed by bribes. This shows how effective market forces are.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
However, anecdotal evidence can point to a line of inquiry that might uncover important statistical evidence. It presents categories: "Crimes not addressed" as a cause of low incarceration. Truly, to combat his assertion, you should find statistical evidence to show that his anecdotes are actually contrary to the trend. Anecdotal evidence _is_ evidence. It is just not strong statistical evidence.
>Truly, to combat his assertion, you should find statistical evidence to show that his anecdotes are actually contrary to the trend. It is never my responsibility to disprove any assertion, as that is fundamentally impossible. It is the responsibility of the person making the assertion to provide a sufficient quantity of relevant evidence.
The old adage that 'you can't disprove a negative' is more specific in scope than your allusion to it here.
Mostly, however, the nature of collaborative argument is such that yes, we are disproving and attempting to disprove each other all the time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is slave labor. The US constitution bans slavery except for prisoners. Here is the text of the Thirteenth Amendment, Section 1: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” – edit: To add a bit more substance, here is an article about the recent Georgi…
to me that means that labor has to be ordered by the judge as part of the punishment