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Is our notion of "crime" socialistic?
Posted by Agit8r • 8 days ago • Subscribe to this Discussion [RSS] • Report This Topic
Topics: crime, debt to society, justice?
I'm not saying that nothing ought to be illegal, but rather the notion that a criminal owes a "debt to society" rather than simply restitution to the crime's victim seems rather a collectivist concept to me.
your thoughts?
User Comments
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Some crimes are against society. The drunk driver who weaves in and out of traffic. The teenagers who challenge each other to see who can knock over the most mailboxes. The night rambler who defecates at random on the park benches at city park. The...make one's own list.
Yeah, such are collective crimes and yes, punishment is proper.-
so in cases of public menace, or when public property is damaged?
I suppose that any sort of offense that is considered a "capital" offense (in such jurisdictions that allow such) could not be handled through restitution, and the criminally compulsive would require some sort of confinement/treatment in order to prevent public danger.
that all being said, most criminal activity doesn't fall into these categories -
Any crime that frightens the public at large is a crime against society. Coeds afraid to go out at night because of a serial rapist. People in Washington D.C. afraid to even drive, mow the lawn, stop for gas, send their kids to school because of the D.C. snipers. These aren't just crimes against specific victims, society as a whole is held at bay. Yes, a debt is owed collectively.
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right, I believe that all of those would fall under the exceptions i have mentioned above, even being potentially capital offenses. I think it goes without saying that most crime that occurs is not of this sort. Most are petty thefts, property damage, fraud, etc. i am wondering if compensating the victim might be a more worthy focus than the collective debt that is exacted--at taxpayer expense.
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My take is that even petty thefts, property damage, fraud, etc affect the public at large, not just the specific victims. If a couple of houses are robbed in my neighborhood, I may be prompted into buying extra locks, higher fence, install an alarm system even though I may ill afford it. People may insist city police patrol the neighborhood more vigilantly (which may require taxes to go up to pay for more patrol hours). A hold-up at the local grocery may cause convenient night hours to be tightened. Fraud or identiy theft may cause my own bank/insurance rates to go up. And so forth. When a crime occurs - even "minor" crimes - we all have a vested interest.
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If compensation to the victim is all that's required with regard to, say, a crime of theft, there is no deterrent regarding future crimes. In fact, we've seen this play out clearly in the corporate arena as punitive enforcement of regulation has declined and state caps have either eliminated punitive damages or rendered them useless; the risk of having to compensate a victim is simply a cost of doing business. The thief who gets caught one time out of ten, or even three, and has to make some kind of restitution may well still come out far ahead by continuing in that "field of employment", just as the drug company that opts to kill a certain number of people in the interests of profit now comes out ahead. A system that encourages that continued behavior creates a risk to society as a whole in that each individual member becomes a more likely victim.
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I agree with Rivy here. Crimes, even petty crimes, are rarely isolated incidents. Once a person offends, he/she will most likely offend again. So there's always more than one victim. Compensating a victim/s financially would still be out of the taxpayer's pocket.
And as Rivy mentioned regarding fraud = bank rates going up. It's the same thing when people steal 'minor items' from stores for instance which then add ups to millions of dollars in losses every year. This results in price hikes on certain items to compensate for such losses. Crime affects us all in some way or the other. -
How can you owe a debt to society? Who is society, anyway? You? Me? The people in power, who own property, who make the laws?
"A criminal-meaning someone who does something other people have forbidden him to do?"-Herman Hesse-
Hey, NP. Get to differ (grin) Who is society, anyway???
Well, my quick Webster's says: "living associated with others". So all the groups you name would qualify. Just as thousands of others would .
Homeless society. Underclass society. Gay society. Artists society. Bloggers society, etc. Depends on how broad an association we want to make. When we say "society" in general as here, we're basically talking about all others we are connected to - by culture, law, language, and so forth.
And yes, an offense to one offends - depending on degree of connection of course - offends all.
Who makes the laws? We all do. By our actions. Legally buying the uncensored version of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" was a no-no until 1959. Thankfully, because we can change laws, we can watch hardcore porn tonight on the Web.
Herman Hesse is right. People decide. Some isolated groups have historically seen nothing wrong with family incest. A natural thing to do. Today such a person, in our society, would - rightly so from my perspective - be punished. Put to the rack. So it goes. -
"Who makes the laws? We all do. By our actions." Rivy-that's a statement I find pretty hard to swallow.
"Prisons are built by stones of Law, brothels by bricks of religion." Blake
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This Society Is Run By Millions Of Paper-Tigers, Paper-Tigers Who Have Lost Their, Once, Hypersensitive Nose!
P.S: In India, Losing One's Nose Strictly Means Losing One's Dignity.
AH! Sometimes, It's Such A Relief To Be A Poet...-
"AH! Sometimes, it's such a relief to be a poet..."
Now there's a statement I can agree with.
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It is enough to render a criminal harmless, but to inflect pain upon him is only revenge and it is not justified.-
I disagree. To inflict pain on to him is to discourage him from doing it again. In Singapore where, for major offenses, they beat you within an inch of your life, crime is nearly non-existent, law actually means something. -
I meant that it is okay to punish in order to keep peace and safety not for revenge, because sometimes it takes that form and people judge out of anger.
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Sure. Absolutely. Any punishment administered should be for the sake of public safety and altering behavior. That's one reason I like corperal punishment actually, it resolves things fast and the person, brutalized, can get largely back to their life afterwards.
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Corporal punishment of white adult males (and of women by civil government) was fazed out about the time of male sufferage in this country. for women by husbands (in the lower classes of society) around the early 20th century (though of course not completely). Of blacks, when they were fully recognized as free (so in the more feudal parts of this country still not yet).
It is a practice generally unacceptable to those who are considered to legally own their own bodies. Of course in Singapore that is not truly the case:
www.yawningbread.org/arch_2007/yax-780.htm -
@Agit8r: "It is a practice generally unacceptable to those who are considered to legally own their own bodies"
We fine people for speeding, and you own your money. -
How is what you said in any way a response. Fines are not corporal punishment.
Are rules of the road in any way antithetical to self ownership? I is confused. . . o_0 -
Agit8r, I saw the same hole in your argument that Jeremy pointed out--we may be generally believed to "own" our own bodies, but we own our cars and our bank accounts, too, and they can be seized as a criminal penalty. And the fact that we "own" our own bodies doesn't stop the state from locking them in a cell block for years on end, throwing them into solitary confinement, etc. Ownership seems a strange thing to hang an objection to corporal punishment on, given that it applies equally to nearly all of the punitive actions the state does routinely take.
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The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Article 5
•No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment -
Thanx AH
@MX; perhaps i worded that poorly. What I meant was that it is not accepted for those whose bodies are not considered ANOTHER'S property. -
@Agit8r: Not everyone accepts the UN as a moral authority. Considering their conduct, it's easy to see why.
"Judge a tree by its' fruits..." -
I didn't cite the UN
I can cite some founding fathers if you'd like though -
"merit may perhaps be due for the discontinuance of the corporal punishment" -- James Madison
"That seeing, as we daily do, the goodness of God to all men, it is an example calling upon all men to practise the same toward each other; and, consequently, that everything of persecution and revenge between man and man, and everything of cruelty to animals, is a violation of moral duty." -- Thomas Paine -
Singapore has been more successful in reducing crime rates then the founding fathers have, and I don't really see how it's anything but a prejudice of their era.
Beyond that, it only becomes persecution and revenge if used for such a purpose. -
so would you say that America should be more like Singapore? o_0
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@Agit8r: Not in general, but THIS is a fundamentally good idea and one that doesn't really go against the American spirit in any real way.
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I understand it is popular among the Taliban as well
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So is taxation...
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"But he who keeps the entire law and stumbles on just one point is guilty of all of it." (St. James)
Why? Because if you break any part of a behavioral contract regarding theft, murder, et cetera, the rest of it can no longer be trusted in your hands. If someone commits just one crime, the laws are no longer a guarantee, that is the debt to society, the fear of you. Sadly, we are so far removed from law and order in this nation that not one of us will get through this life without being very exposed to EXACTLY that kind of behavior. Even worse, the government has made law so pervasive that not one of us will escape stumbling over and over again with our speeding tickets, et cetera, thus making us hypocrites even to seek it. The result: no one trusts the law. This note went bankrupt... -
In some countries adultery is punishable by death. So who is wrong and who is right? I guess it's all relative.
But when it comes to serious crimes like murder or pedophilia, where do we draw the line? Since such serious crimes rarely only affect the victim alone, but also the victim's entire family, a crime that can destroy many lives for years to come, what do you do? Do you allow a person to continue with their behavior because it's his/her human right to do so? Do we have the right to take a person's life? Do we have the right to 'punish' someone for doing so? I don't believe in an eye for an eye, but it does seem like certain measures need to be taken.
Furthermore, serial killers are in the minority for instance, and therefore they are outnumbered by the so-called 'law abiders'. -
Laws and penalties are in place to condition us to act a certain way, if one doesn’t act that certain way anyways because other conditions have determined them not to, then they are determined to face the penalties. Them having to face the penalties is designed to reinforce and strengthen the stimuli to increase the conditioning effectiveness of these laws for others. When a person is found guilty, they are guilty of breaking a law in which they had no choice but to break (no free-will). The real failure is on the deterrence systems part as the conditions set in place didn’t work. However, even the systems failure was determined, so it can’t be blamed either. However, the result is that when the law punishes someone, the person being punished is just collateral damage in a cause that has a greater agenda then just the individual.
Take one who has murdered another. In a deterministic environment, the murderer didn’t choose to think those thoughts nor choose to act on them. The thoughts were determined by the conditions of his environment, and the determined thoughts determined his actions. “He” is just the product of his biology’s reaction to his accumulated experiences with his environment. We can’t blame him for being determined to that course. What we are in effect doing with laws and consequences is conditioning people to behave in a way we have deemed appropriate. If they act against the conditions we’ve set forth anyways, we know that there were conditions greater then the ones we’ve put in place that caused that individual to behave the way they did. By making them faces the consequences we strengthen the effect of the conditions we’ve put in place as it serves as a model for others and that individual for future incidents. But was he really to blame, probably not.
This is how laws function from a determinist point of view. However, as you can see in court, People are held responsible for their actions as though they had free-will, as if they had a choice. Some people are thought to be bad people, while others are thought to be good or ordinary people who simply carried out “bad” actions. Carry out too many “bad” or “very bad” actions (”bad” as determined by society) and you may be considered a entirely “bad person.” Because, you are thought to of had control, had free will to choose to be good or bad.
Where from a deterministic point of view, there are no good or bad people or good or bad actions, just actions and reactions, no value. Just as your being came to exist as determined by the conditions of the environment, your action are determined by the conditions of the environment. Everything moved by cause and effect. Not by some mysterious, uninfluenced, uncaused, personally controlled free-will.-
Why not have free-will? There are some wacky nondeterministic mathematical systems out there, especially among differential and partial differential equations, which occur everywhere (I'm thinking especially of strange attractors.) Those could result in an unguided will.
mathworld.wolfram.com/StrangeAttractor.html
There! Biology and free-will. -
Actually, strange attractors such as the well known Lorenz attractor are deterministic. While these chaotic systems initially give the impression of a system that is behaving randomly, they are in fact deterministic systems in that their future dynamics are fully determined by their initial conditions with no random elements involved.
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Yes but add quantum effects to it, and it's fragile enough to "break."
(I did look at the equations, and you're right but change that "a" value even a tiny bit and you're in for a whole heap of fun, especially if the coordinates are determined continuously.) -
wow, you are really grasping at straws here.
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Look at the equations again.
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I think you need to look at them again because they don't equal "free-will."
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No but they do equal chaotic behavior, massive derivatives, and even slight alterations in the "a" value can cause major changes.
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Which still doesn't amount to free-will.
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No but it does amount to the possibility of free-will.
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Put that on the shelf with god than and all other possibilities like the possibility of invisible fairies that exist to hold your shoelaces together when you run. You can't disprove they exist, so it is possible right? And possibility actually means something right? It holds value enough for you to use it in this argument as though it proves something.
Possible? Perhaps. Probable. No. -
"like the possibility of invisible fairies that exist to hold your shoelaces together when you run." That made me laugh.
Still, there are some powerful dissenters:
"All theory is against freedom of will; all experience for it." Samuel Johnson
"He who feels his will is not free is insane; he who denies it is foolish."-Nietzsche
'As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are uncertain; and as far as they are certain they do not refer to reality." Einstein
"Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." Einstein -
"Probable. No."
Why do you say it is improbable?
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They go to the hoosegaw because it tends to be a decent deterrent to the same crimes being committed right and left. Sure, there are plenty of badass slimeballs out there who don't care about deterrence or where they will end up, but the thought of being thrown in the pen does have the effect of keeping many people in line. If you deny that, then you are a fool.-
What about those who thrive on "prison culture"? is imprisonment a deterrent for them?
What about our tax dollars subsidizing gangmember training in prison? Is our present prison system a solution for such, or THE problem? -
Good question, agi.
It has been shown time and time again that capital punishment does not deter offenders from committing serious crimes. Despite laws in place, there are people who still offend, and will continue to offend. Most prisoners, once out of prison, will simply go onto the streets to reoffend again. Our prisons are full and are getting fuller and we, the taxpayers are paying for that. So in a sense, the so-called debt that offenders owe to society, is also becoming society's debt. Something is seriously wrong with this picture.
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For sure we handle crimes as socialists. What are those red-light camera enforcement cameras and parking tickets all about? To raise revenue for the state. And most people are in prison in an attempt at behavior modification…drug offenses. That is another part of socialism…utopianism. The state will force people to behave. So we waste billions on locking up drug offenders while giving fines for “right turn on red” photo violations. -
If a criminal commits a crime...maybe we as a society should force them to work in a 'chain gang'. Some states do that. Locking them up in jail/prison does nothing to change them. They just come out worse. Black Americans are against forced labor because they think it's a form of slavery. But what can we do to reform criminals? It cost more to incarcerate a prisoner than to send them to college!-
i think chain gangs smack of barbarism, but i am sure that convicts could be put to something productive. I do not however condone your broad generalization of the sentiments of any particular "race"
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The criminal does owe a debt to society. I can't imagine a criminal giving restitution to its victims. They probably wouldn't be a criminal if they had that type of money...LOL-
restitution could be exacted by means of labor. Wouldn't we love to have Bernie Madoff scrubbing bathrooms for the rest of his life to payback those charities.
I know I would
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The criminal owes a debt to society because he has infringed upon the rule of law, which protects the individual from unchecked aggression, whether it be from the state or from another individual.
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