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Sweden closes four prisons as number of inmates plummets

theguardian.com

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Re: Sweden closes four prisons as number of inmates plummets

#111

Post by csmuk »

madaxe wrote: post #109
csmuk wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is inevitable. Every society has descended into this so far, until there is a revolution. Us people in the UK realise what is happening. At some point, the moment will occur when the state oversteps the mark on something and the shit will get flipped country-wide.

Yup, just said the same as you. Hobbes and Hayek both anticipated this. Revolution is the only way out.

Thanks for posting this. Just the motivation I need to read The Road To Serfdom which has been sitting on my bookshelf for a couple of years.

Re: Sweden closes four prisons as number of inmates plummets

#112

Post by Ygg2 »

rimantas wrote: post #89
Ygg2 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, crime is present in highly dense, poor areas, color me surprised. /sarc Crime is increasing because the society can't integrate them fast enough. It's literally same deal before abortions were an option. More people, less resource on a local level, leads to crime growing. This has nothing to do with the minorities, but how they are being handled.

How many shrinks does it take to change a light bulb? One, but the lamp bulmb must want to be changed. How do you integrate someone unwilling to do so?

Not sure what the shrink comment is about :/

How do you know they are unwilling? Have you tried? What are your proof they are unwilling?

Any system can say well we tried but they are unwilling or repent-less. What applies in this example applies to US. Their system tries its best but gosh darn it, those repent-less Hispanic and Blacks are unwilling to repent in face of prison. It's very easy for people to delude themselves of their greatness.

Re: Sweden closes four prisons as number of inmates plummets

#113

Post by mjn »

mnsc wrote: post #99
mjn wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they're a bit different from Dansk Folkeparti (DF), mostly in having considerably more questionable roots, which I would guess doesn't help their acceptance in the party mainstream. They have made an effort to clean up their image in the past few years, expelling a number of the extreme-right elements, but the party's roots in the far-right scene makes them a bit anathema to respectable society. The origins o…

Ok, I did not know this, thanks for a good explanation. But do you agree that they seem to point the blame stick in the same direction? That immigrants are the threat to the "true original culture"? Or are DF more truly critical towards subcultures that maybe are ethnically "right" but immoral on a traditional conservative value scale, eg. bikers/punks?

Oh I agree, there's no doubt they're both mainly riding a populist backlash against immigration, especially Muslim immigration. I think the parties themselves differ considerably more than the broader wave they're riding, which has more common origins.

DF really do seem to be critical towards "ethnic Danish" subcultures they view as deviant as well, especially in the past year. There's currently a bit of hand-wringing over biker clubhouses (residents don't like having one nearby), and they've been getting out in front of that populist backlash too, which plays well among their base for different but related reasons. It's sort of Public Enemy #2 in things that are ruining Denmark, from their perspective.

Here's a recent story (via Google Translate, note that "rocker castle" means "biker clubhouse"): http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&pre...

Re: Sweden closes four prisons as number of inmates plummets

#114

Post by touzen »

berrypicker wrote: post #80
touzen wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you think it's perfectly fine to refuse to hire somebody just because of their ethnicity? Wow. Also, just because you can find one right wing economist supporting your view doesn't mean you're right. There's an overwhelming amount of evidence supporting the fact that inequality leads to higher crime rates. I'm sort of starting to think that you're really just trolling, seeing how Ted Kaczynski is a convicted seria…

Yes, I think employers should be able to refuse somebody based on ethnicity, whether I agree with the act itself or not is irrelevant, I believe in the freedom to do so. My personal opinions regarding employment do not affect my belief that you can't force equality. One economist supporting my view doesn't make me right, okay, but you haven't really added anything, you just labelled him right-wing and left it there,…

Your economist being right wing is relevant because most libertarians refuse to acknowledge the positive effects of equality. Noting that a source is biased is a valid point.

I agree that pointing out that Kaczynski is an insane serial killer who forced a bunch of papers to publish his anarcho-primitivist manifesto by threatening to keep bombing people (WTF?) doesn't prove he's a poor mathematician. However, we're not talking about his maths skills. Being a brilliant mathematician doesn't really make you an expert on social issues.

"Economic inequality is positively and significantly related to rates of homicide despite an extensive list of conceptually relevant controls. The fact that this relationship is found with the most recent data and using a different measure of economic inequality from previous research, suggests that the finding is very robust." - Wikipedia

While not everything on Wikipedia is true, it's certainly a less biased source than the ones you refer to.

Re: Sweden closes four prisons as number of inmates plummets

#115

Post by mrow84 »

madaxe wrote: post #36
csmuk wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like Nottingham in the UK's bullshit crime statistics. "Arrests fallen! Crime rates lower than ever!" Actually people just do it vigilante style or don't bother reporting it because the police are fucking useless. I mean I caught a person breaking into my car, had photos of the person doing it, the car was covered in finger prints, they arrived in another stolen car with plates that were photographed, left the…

The police are there to: - Do you for speeding. - Protect the establishment. - Threaten violence. - Prop up the prison-industrial complex for the benefit of private corporations. They are categorically not there to help you. They never have been. This is a misapprehension that has been around since the days of Peel. A police force is the state's visible threat of violence against its populace, in order to exact contr…

Could you please add a bit of explanation as to why you are so confident that this interpretation of the role of the police should be regarded as categorical fact?

Particularly in the case of UK, if your knowledge allows, given that we operate, at least in principle, an explicitly Peelian system of policing, in contrast to, for example, our European neighbours.

Re: Sweden closes four prisons as number of inmates plummets

#116

Post by marvin »

madaxe wrote: post #108
marvin wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not how a democratic nation is supposed to work. So please don't hold up this characterization of the police as something which is inevitable. The democratic ideal is that the police have a national monopoly on the legal use of violence, and the use of this violence is dictated by the laws and the courts. This is how well-working democratic nations work, and it is indeed how the police force in my home countr…

No, it isn't, but it appears to be the endgame of representative democracy. I'd suggest reading Hobbes' Leviathan, or perhaps Hayek's Road to Serfdom, if you haven't already, as both anticipated this exact malaise. The US and the UK are in the terminal stages of decline. The representative democratic ideal is ultimately revealed to be a fiction, and the rule of law is a falsehood - for without a universally applied r…

This doesn't make sense to me. Why hasn't my native Norway ended up in this spot? Claiming "it is inevitable" isn't a valid argument, projecting to unlikely-seeming future scenarios can be used to prove anything. Just because two big nations have ended up with a screwed-up political system doesn't prove that it is an inevitability.

Re: Sweden closes four prisons as number of inmates plummets

#117

Post by kzrdude »

Xylakant wrote: post #43
draugadrotten wrote: post #3

Beware of the political spin! Note that while the number of inmates plummets, the number of crimes committed is higher than ever. This is a failure of the police and the justice system and not a success story. Nearly 95 percent of violent crimes and robberies committed in Sweden go unsolved , and an individual police officer solves an average of three crimes per year. http://www.thelocal.se/20081103/15412

Beware of the political spin! The article cited is from 2008 and so nearly five years outdated. The rise has stalled and the trend has been reversing with a slight decline of 1% in 2012 [1]. The biggest problem I see is that the the article glosses over the reasons for such a change. There are multiple reasons why crime statistics change, some merely methodological, but chief among them are two factors: * Changes in…

> Hello Marihuana legalization

is it legal in Sweden?

Re: Sweden closes four prisons as number of inmates plummets

#118

Post by marvin »

hobbe80 wrote: post #105
marvin wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The statistics on this are fairly clear, but not very well published. It would certainly be possible to dig them up, but a comprehensive review would require a bit of work. You could find this in the official statistics, but newspaper folks are reluctant to compile them and put them on the front page. In Norway, the per-capita rate of violent robberies, burglaries and violent rape is overwhelmingly larger in immigran…

And yet, when you control for other biases (like income level, employment status, adult figures in household), this difference between immigrants and non-immigrants seem to disappear... almost like the defining factor is not where you (or your parents) were born, but more like your relative position in the society. Strange, huh?

Can you prove this? It's the first time I have heard someone make this claim, although it seems like something which is reasonable to test for.

Re: Sweden closes four prisons as number of inmates plummets

#120

Post by Xylakant »

kzrdude wrote: post #117
Xylakant wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beware of the political spin! The article cited is from 2008 and so nearly five years outdated. The rise has stalled and the trend has been reversing with a slight decline of 1% in 2012 [1]. The biggest problem I see is that the the article glosses over the reasons for such a change. There are multiple reasons why crime statistics change, some merely methodological, but chief among them are two factors: * Changes in…

> Hello Marihuana legalization is it legal in Sweden?

Don't thinks so, but I wanted to cite a real-world example of decriminalization that is actually happening in at least some jurisdictions on that planet. That was the first one that came to my mind. Others include

* decriminalization of same-sex intercourse (gay, lesbian).

* general decriminalization of drugs (think portugal)

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