- Moderator
- #126
They're.
I'm a lawyer. I do know what I'm talking about. More than you do I'd hazard a guess.
The Law The Many Problems With Our Legal System
- Thread starter Rod Stroker
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They're.
I'm a lawyer. I do know what I'm talking about. More than you do I'd hazard a guess.
- May 13, 2014
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Shoplifters don't sprint from stores any more, they just load up their trolley and walk out, they don't care and staff are instructed not to confront them.
People don't shoplift a mars bar and a packet of chewy anymore, they will load up a trolley with a few thousand dollars worth of high end meat and cosmetics or simply do their weekly shop and walk out with it
I'm an ex-prison officer.
Where are people getting locked up for a relatively minor offence on their first offence? They will be given so many chances before the judiciary finally loses patience with them and locks them up. By the time they're locked up for a relatively minor offence, as you put it, they could have a huge criminal record. The could have already served a term or multiple terms of incarceration if they're getting locked up for relatively minor offences.
Rehabilitation is only good if the crook is willing to participate in it. If they're happy to serve their full term, except for a very narrow band of offences (terrorism, paedophilia for example), they will be released without having to do any rehab. You can't force them to take part in rehabilitation.
Probably the biggest obstacle for crooks to go on the straight and narrow when they're released is lack of housing and employment. It must be horrendous for the poor old housing officers trying to find them somewhere to live, if they've got nowhere to go in this current climate.
From a Victorian perspective.
A crook will get convicted and sentenced, they will be at the MAP (Melbourne Assessment Prison) where they will be interviewed and rehabilitation will be discussed, rehab courses will be discussed and other possible courses discussed for life after prison. They will also be assessed for what type of prisoner they can be housed with, in the prison they're going to.
The prisoner will arrive and be receipted into the prison and then escorted to their unit. Within the unit, each permanent staff member will have a prisoner case load, in my case it was 6 crooks. Once they're settled you would get them in for an interview, you would look at their file, see what was compulsory for them to complete to be eligible for parole as early as possible and have a look at anything else the MAP had recommended for them. In most of the interviews I did, all they wanted to know was precisely what courses were required for them to be eligible for parole, not one of them was interested in anything else and quite a few weren't even interested in the course required for parole. If they weren't interested, we weren't interested.
- May 1, 2016
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- Moderator
- #128
... none of which constitutes evidence that petty theft has gone up.
- Moderator
- #129
I didnt say they were locked up for a 'minor offence on their first offence'. * mate. Stop for a second and read.
I said the reason Magistrates are reluctant to impose terms of imprisonment, is because prison often contributes to recidivism instead of contributing towards rehabilitation.
You send someone in a car thief, they come out an armed robber.
Nearly half of all prisoners in WA return to prison within 2 years of being released:
https://www.parliament.wa.gov.au/pu...b28230ed9c541e48257d730008d551/$file/2295.pdf
- Moderator
- #130
TheEscapeClub
Read the following paper:
http://madgic.library.carleton.ca/deposit/govt/ca_fed/publicsafety_prisonsentences_1999.pdf
It's from 1999, but its points are still valid. Prison can (and does) in many cases institutionalize prisoners and contributes to crime.
If you're locked in in a boarding school full of hardened crims, those crims become your peers. You look up to and learn from them. You become institutionalized, and prison no longer holds any fears for you. Instead of a deterrent, it becomes a school of crime.
There are thousands of academic papers on this phenomenon.
The reason petty criminals don't go to prison until their 10th+ appearance before a Magistrate, is because the Courts know full well that when that petty criminal is released, he's as good a chance of now being a hardened player as he is to have actually seen the light and reformed.
Read the following paper:
http://madgic.library.carleton.ca/deposit/govt/ca_fed/publicsafety_prisonsentences_1999.pdf
It's from 1999, but its points are still valid. Prison can (and does) in many cases institutionalize prisoners and contributes to crime.
If you're locked in in a boarding school full of hardened crims, those crims become your peers. You look up to and learn from them. You become institutionalized, and prison no longer holds any fears for you. Instead of a deterrent, it becomes a school of crime.
There are thousands of academic papers on this phenomenon.
The reason petty criminals don't go to prison until their 10th+ appearance before a Magistrate, is because the Courts know full well that when that petty criminal is released, he's as good a chance of now being a hardened player as he is to have actually seen the light and reformed.
Good argument for just never letting them out.
- Moderator
- #132
No, its not.
Its a good argument that our prisons need a stronger focus on rehabilitation and less of a focus on punishment.
Then you'd actually see more sentences imposed, but also better outcomes from those incarcerated.
But if they never get let out, there’s no need to rehabilitate!
The victim gets justice. The community is safer for no longer having the individual in it. The perpetrator loses big time.
It’s win/win/win.
- Moderator
- #134
Tell that to the High Court. It's not going to happen.
That's not a win for the community. We as a society (and hopefully you as an individual) don't measure ourselves by how much of a campaigner we are to people, even bad people.
We as a society do the exact opposite.
- May 13, 2014
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So it's 10+ appearances before they go to prison, so at that point in their life they're already a recidivist, they haven't needed prison to get to that stage. If you're a petty criminal that has so many arrests / court appearances that they finally send you to prison, I'd say you're pretty much already institutionalised and it's happened in your home environment either taught by you scumbag parent / s, siblings or mates. Home is the primary / secondary school, prison is the finishing school or university with mostly intellectually challenged students.
The reasons prison holds no fear for them is because it's easier than living on the outside with it's routines. There's no pressure to find work to pay your bills or put food on the table, there's no pressure to try and secure accommodation.
The thing with crooks is that they're locked in their cells for 16 to 23 hours a day, they crave the personal interaction, they will do and say whatever they need to for that interaction.
The only academic papers I would even take in interest in reading on this is ones written in Australia based purely on Australian prisons.
- May 13, 2014
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Crooks aren't interested in rehabilitation.
The incarceration is the punishment, there are no further punishments meted out in the prison, only added restrictions for breaking the rules. They don't break rocks, they aren't put in stocks or hung from walls, they just go about their day separated from the rest of society for a set period of time.
Agree that it’s not going to happen.
Letting criminals off the hook is being as much of a campaigner as possible to the victims of those crimes. Removing penalties or minimising penalties out of existence for crimes is to some extent allowing more campaigner activities to take place in the society. I really think as we move towards softer punishments (or no punishment at all) we have got the whole balance out of whack.
- Moderator
- #138
10+ appearances for minor crimes. Car theft, property crimes, stealing, driving offences etc.
Send them to prison and they come out a major criminal. Armed robs, agg-burgs, rapes, murder. Those sorts of things.
Sentencing them to prison is (in many cases) simply sending them to 'Hard campaigner' school for a few years, where they learn how to be hardened crims.
I get you say that, but you're wrong. There are literally thousands of papers that show clearly how wrong you are.
You said you were a screw. You must have seen people come into prison and come out harder and nastier crims.
Are you honestly telling me you cant see how being thrust into mandatory confinement with hundreds of hardened criminals as your only peers might lead to you yourself becoming a hardened criminal?
If I put 20 atheists into a mandatory confinement in a cult with 500 religious fanatics, how many come out the other side now also religious fanatics?
A significant number right?
Which is stupid. Obviously Australian papers are important, but totally discounting Criminology papers from the UK, USA, Canada, New Zealand (and other parts of the world) makes zero sense. They've all made similar observations and drawn similar conclusions. It adds weight to the Australian experience.
What really bothers me here, is that you seem totally oblivious to what I'm saying here, despite being actively involved in the Prison system.
Which if anything, only further increases my feeling that Prisons (and Prison employees) need some serious reform.
- Moderator
- #139
They dont get let off the hook.
'Not going to prison for ever and never being released' which is literally what you were arguing, is not 'getting off the hook'.
I agree with whole of life sentences for serious crimes for what its worth. Multiple murders, or even for a willful murder done to cover up another crime (such as a rape). The starting point for those offences in sentencing should be a whole of life term.
We have them here in WA but only for the truly beyond the pale type of offences (only one has been handed out so far, and that campaigner deserved it and more).
Is a suspended sentence being let off the hook? We have those all the time in Adelaide for serious crimes such as child abuse, assault, breaking and entering, etc.
- Moderator
- #141
A suspended sentence is the last step before going away for real time. The offender walks out of court knowing that 'I * up, and I go inside'.
Some people only require the first court appearance to snap them back into line. Think back to that DUI that you (and pretty much everyone else) likely has. You're shitting yourself in court, get your spent conviction order and pay your fine, stay off the roads for 7 months, and never drink drive again.
Some people will * up again and need something like a suspended sentence to snap them back into line.
Courts really try not to send people to prison, because there is a good chance, you're only going to come out of prison a much harder career criminal instead of actually reforming inside.
If prisons had a better strike rate of reform (and were better set up to encourage reform), Magistrates wouldn't be as gun shy when it came to sentencing people to jail terms.
Haha I don’t have a bloody DUI.
Yeah, courts try to avoid sending people to prison. Granted this is out of some higher purpose, but you have to admit that on a per-case basis this amounts to deliberately stacking the odds against the victim.
- Moderator
- #143
Spoken like a true screw.
No-one wants to be in prison.
If I offered those 'crooks' ten million dollars, a mansion in France somewhere, plus 100 grand a month in wages, but they had to not commit any crimes or it all gets taken off them, do you think they'd still not be interested in rehabilitation?
Which life would they prefer? Crim s**t and prison, or the mansion and the money?
You see, you've only seen hardened crims, in prison. Of course, they're going to be hardened crims, because what other options do they have? They have to be tough guys, because if they're not, they're ****ed.
Hahahahahahahahahahaha!
What utter bullshit.
The bloke down the road has a list of offences the length of the Nullarbor yet somehow manages to avoid getting any time. Assault, burgary, vandalism.. go to to court every couple of months for their slap on the wrist, rinse and repeat.
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I discount them because our society and mindset is different to all of them as is ours to theirs. I've worked with prison officers from the UK and NZ who have emigrated to Australia and listened to their stories, about the only things similar to the 3 is that there's people locked up in big buildings.
I'm not oblivious to what you're saying, I don't agree with you. You won't even acknowledge that fact that I have now posted twice that in my first hand experience most of the crooks aren't interested in rehab and they can't be forced into it.
If the mindset of our Australian crooks can't be changed along with that of society then everything you're posting is just waffle.
- Moderator
- #147
I don't care about your first-hand experience. It's the same sort of 'first-hand experience' that leads to Police targeting black communities in the USA, or repeatedly stopping and searching Aboriginal people here.
You're expressing confirmation bias. 'Prison is full of hardened crims that dont care if they're crims and dont want rehabilitation'.
I'm saying the reason a lot of them are like that is because of Prison. If you want to survive in prison, you have to be a hard campaigner. The system itself encourages you to be a hard campaigner and encourages you to hang out with hard campaigners. These people are now your peers (whether you like it or not) and grouping people together (in any group) tends to make people conform to the socially expected norm of that group.
What happens to people inside that dont conform to the social expectations of other inmates in Prison? Im sure you know the answer.
If I had 100 people and forced them together on an island, and 60 of those people were a particular religion, or followed a particular sporting team, or lived a Vegan lifestyle or whatever, I bet you after a few years' time that a significant number of the other 40 people would also be doing the exact same thing as the majority.
People conform to peers. It's part of human nature. Sadly, you're too blind to see it.
I dare say most of those 'hardened crims' you saw in prison - even the ones that tell you they love being hardened crims - don't actually want to be hardened crims.
The day I listen to a screw for advice on reforming the Penal system, as opposed to listening to thousands of Criminologists who literally study the field, with hundreds of thousands of peer reviewed academic papers, is the day I start to listen to waffle.
You're talking out of your ass. Most people dont want to be in prison. If given the opportunity most of them would actually reform. Sadly our system places a higher emphasis on punishment over reform, and that's why you see the phenomena you do.
- May 1, 2016
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- #148
I look forward to the tax burden of having to permanently house prisoners of the state in perpetuity for having shoplifted when sixteen.
I don’t think the odd shoplifting should get people put away. I mean more the type of crime that is now getting people suspended sentences in SA such as breaking into peoples homes, violence against children, sexual assaults, etc. F**k em. Find it hard to believe that they would be net contributors to our economy whether they’re in prison or not.
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- #150
If you place them permanently in prison, you ensure they definitely aren't. You take people who can and will at different times of their lives pay taxes - perhaps not all that much, perhaps they become business owners via doing a trade - and turn them into a perpetual and permanent drain on the state and the rest of citizenry.
Then, you've governmental inefficiencies and general corruption to look at. Tell me, how and where are fixed speed cameras placed in SA (provided that's where you are). Are they in the wealthy neighbourhoods or the poor ones? What about ticket inspectors at train stations, are you more likely to see them in the more socioeconomically challenged areas?
To what extent are you willing to extend the government's control over law and imprisonment over the society it adminster's poorest members?
If you can, give this a go. I get it's long; I originally started a thread with this vid, hoping to start a conversation.
It essentially discusses how policing and imprisonment in America is used by the state to control poor populations and to provide an outlet for capitalist excess; basically, if capitalism cannot employ people at an appropriate rate, the state to an extent will find a reason to imprison those people by depriving them of alternatives.
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