This is an important issue, but HN?
A living death: Sentenced to die behind bars for what?
51–60 of 513 posts
Re: A living death: Sentenced to die behind bars for what?
#52From the map it seems like all the cases are in the Southeast. Is the Southeastern United States sort or a 3rd Word Country within the U.S. ? It seems like every time I see something like this it is in the Southeast. It seems to me like the rift from the Civil War has never completely been resolved. Just an observation, does anyone else feel the same way?
The southeastern part of the United States has a larger African-American population.
Re: A living death: Sentenced to die behind bars for what?
#53My thoughts on the best and the worst: > Anthony Jackson has a sixth-grade education and worked as a cook. He was convicted of burglary for stealing a wallet from a Myrtle Beach hotel room when he was 44 years old. According to prosecutors, he woke two vacationing golfers as he entered the room and stole a wallet, then pretended to be a security guard and ran away. Police arrested him when he tried to use the stolen…
Uh, why would he decline to press charges? The guy stole his truck. No idea why the article calls it 'borrowing'.
Re: A living death: Sentenced to die behind bars for what?
#54[deleted]
Re: A living death: Sentenced to die behind bars for what?
#55I came across a web forum thread in which the escalation of criminal sentencing laws is compared to the Milgram experiment:
http://www.isthmus.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=58211
Of course no analogy is perfect, but this one gave me pause.
Re: A living death: Sentenced to die behind bars for what?
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, the decline in murder counts, for example.
http://i.imgur.com/S5QjFxC.png Does anyone know of any research showing that the decline in murder counts is primarily due to harsher penalties?
About this time someone always links to the lead and crime story. And because its a good article I'll link to it now. http://m.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link...
Re: A living death: Sentenced to die behind bars for what?
#57This is poorly focused. I'm absolutely against 3 strikes sentencing laws and mandatory sentencing escalations that can put petty criminals in prison for life. On the other hand, I'm perfectly OK with some criminals dying behind bars, such as the recently sentenced Whitey Bulger, and so are most other people. By making the headline about the undesirability of custodial life sentences in general, they'er losing a large…
> On the other hand, I'm perfectly OK with some criminals dying behind bars Lots of people from similar backward countries are perfectly OK with this. I mean, if I recall correctly you even still have the death penalty. Heck, it's only like 4 decades since you ended racial seggregation (in paper). Hopefully, in 3-4 decades you'll turn to more modern and humanistic views on justice, catcing up to most Western European…
I'm from Ireland, actually, although I live in the US.
Re: A living death: Sentenced to die behind bars for what?
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Crime in the 1970s got out of control. Stuff like this played a role in turning it around. Does anyone have any data to back this claim up?
Check the CDC website, it has the stats. Violent crime has been in decline in the US since the 1970s. (Down voted for pointing out where to get the stats - very funny - must be DOJ folks)
Down voted for pointing out where to get the stats
Probably best to just assume it was an accident. I've done it more than once on mobile.
Re: A living death: Sentenced to die behind bars for what?
#59It's a crying shame. Normally that's an empty phrase, but it describes this. I can't imagine reading this and not feeling tears well up. No sense of what I would call humanity. From what perspective does this make the world a better place? What am I missing about being human that this fits into that I don't understand?
Does anybody else constantly live in a state of guilt? So many lives lost and wars fought just to get us to where we are, and we reap the benefits. I feel so guilty for having a good paying job in the city. I'm not adding any value to the world, none at all. I tinker with a few codes every day and make silly amounts of money, when there's people struggling to put food on the table working 18 hour days. I need to do s…
Contact representatives in government bodies every so often. I'm not sure it makes a difference but I always figure that at a bare minimum it occupies some of their time (at least it does here in New Zealand, as the replies are not canned as far as I can tell, and they aren't from assistants either usually) which prevents other work getting done. I have a faint hope that it achieves more than this, but hope is about all.
Re: A living death: Sentenced to die behind bars for what?
#60Obama is pretty stingy on pardons:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacobsullum/2013/08/15/barack-th...