Hope y’all are put in prison

If all you people think that the media reports everything without some sort of swing to the left or right you are pretty fucking stupid. It’s a well known fact that certain networks in Canada and the US are platforms for political parties. I don’t believe the media omits ground breaking news because of some conspiracy theory or another, I would say that the striving for the “big headline” by competitive reporters would counter that claim.

If you look at the political agenda of president Harper, a police state may not be far off. I’m not talking about police with machine guns on every corner and tanks brought in to disperse crowds, but on a fundamental level in 20 years we won’t be far off. What I mean is when the rights of police outweigh the rights of the individual I believe it is a police state. With some of the hard line one dimensional trash outlined in the omnibus crime bill, mandatory minimums and a focus on harsher sentences with no emphasis on rehabilitation, taking the power of sentencing out of the hands of judges etc, I think we can all agree that this is the opposite way we should be going. Since he has taken office police are allowed to monitor anyones email/text messages without a warrant, the police are soon going to have the right to randomly pull you over and check your sobriety (not a bad thing in principle, but it opens a door for police to abuse this for many reasons other than it’s intended purpose). Harper stood by complacently and let Mark Emmery be extradited to the US to serve federal time for operating a legal business inside this country (even if he was guilty of a crime committed on Canadian soil, he should serve his time in Canada, not in US federal pen).

The little prick is dismanteling the government piece by piece, and I for one don’t know wether I want to see the end result.

This tough on crime, punish with harsh sentences, three strikes you’re out crap is proven not to work. Larger police forces, larger prisons, and not attacking the root cause of the problem just increases the tax burden on tax payers (you know, the non criminals out working and paying taxes), and increases the crime rate. The US tried this for decades and all they’re left with is a soon to be trillion dollar a year bill. China has 4 times the population and slightly more than half the amount of prisoners. Hoo Rahhh America, fuck yeah!!! Lookin real good for your lockem up and throw away the key theory, but it sure is good for the cop business.

There are fundamental rights and freedoms given to us under the constitution that are apparently just a huge pain in the ass when it comes to fighting crime. Solution take them away slowly so noone notices under the guise of a rising crime rate, which all stats point to falling crime rates across the board. If we loose our rights and freedoms, no matter how incremental, society is regressing when we should be progressing. I guess history really is doomed to repeat itself with much dire consequences for future generations. I’m not some granola munching hippy that wants to cure violent criminals with rainbow ray guns that shoot beams of love, happiness and forgiveness. Prisons and the justice system play an important role in society, but the path the US has taken is a proven failure and why Canada would want to follow them down that road is beyond me.

Oh FFS, gun registry, really? That’s your big hate on for the left? You can have your hunting rifles without having to *gasp* register them now. This is not America, the right to bear arms is not in our constitution, and hopefully never will be. Why do we need hand guns and automatic weapons? Have deer and moose somehow evolved into armour plated bunker digging warriors? I’ve never needed the protection of a weapon, of course I’m not a criminal and don’t associate myself with the criminal element, so I doubt I’ll ever need one. I also don’t believe that anything I own is worth a gun fight, if someone wants my sneakers or wallet that badly that they pistol whip me, they can have it. Why don’t you bunker down GV in your “survival encampment” and hate on some shit?

Hand guns have had to be registered since the 1930s and we have never had the right to carry loaded weapons around in the back of our pants for the purpose of protection, so how do you equate that with left squashing your rights? You’d fit in well out west, you can snort as much crank as you want off the dashboard of your monster truck, and shoot as many beer cans as you want from your kitchen window.

Bro tim, I’m not saying we should model our system after china either, I was only using the numbers as an example. But you can’t argue with the fact that America is housing around 25% of the worlds criminals, and basic human rights are at an all time low in the name of the “war on terror”, a fictitious fight with no possible outcome. Canadian crime rates have been on a downward turn for the last 5 years and projected to be lower again this year, so why replace a system that’s working with a more expensive less effective system that has been proven not to work? That’s my question.

Shut up MM, there is all kinds of evidence, why don’t you get off your fat lazy ass and look for it, in fact why don’t you prove me wrong, wait for it MM, waaaiiiiiiitttt for it, with actual evidence. Instead of just making accusations, why don’t you support some of your rhetoric with some actual proof that either of us are wrong.

Here’s one article I found in about 20secs using, wait for it MM, come closer, closer, closer….GOOGLE!!!!!
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The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.

Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.

The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College London.

China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention, most of them in China’s extrajudicial system of re-education through labor, which often singles out political activists who have not committed crimes.)

San Marino, with a population of about 30,000, is at the end of the long list of 218 countries compiled by the center. It has a single prisoner.

The United States comes in first, too, on a more meaningful list from the prison studies center, the one ranked in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.)

The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have much lower rates. England’s rate is 151; Germany’s is 88; and Japan’s is 63.

The median among all nations is about 125, roughly a sixth of the American rate.

There is little question that the high incarceration rate here has helped drive down crime, though there is debate about how much.

Criminologists and legal experts here and abroad point to a tangle of factors to explain America’s extraordinary incarceration rate: higher levels of violent crime, harsher sentencing laws, a legacy of racial turmoil, a special fervor in combating illegal drugs, the American temperament, and the lack of a social safety net. Even democracy plays a role, as judges — many of whom are elected, another American anomaly — yield to populist demands for tough justice.

Whatever the reason, the gap between American justice and that of the rest of the world is enormous and growing.

It used to be that Europeans came to the United States to study its prison systems. They came away impressed.

“In no country is criminal justice administered with more mildness than in the United States,” Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured American penitentiaries in 1831, wrote in “Democracy in America.”

No more.

“Far from serving as a model for the world, contemporary America is viewed with horror,” James Q. Whitman, a specialist in comparative law at Yale, wrote last year in Social Research. “Certainly there are no European governments sending delegations to learn from us about how to manage prisons.”

Prison sentences here have become “vastly harsher than in any other country to which the United States would ordinarily be compared,” Michael H. Tonry, a leading authority on crime policy, wrote in “The Handbook of Crime and Punishment.”

Indeed, said Vivien Stern, a research fellow at the prison studies center in London, the American incarceration rate has made the United States “a rogue state, a country that has made a decision not to follow what is a normal Western approach.”

The spike in American incarceration rates is quite recent. From 1925 to 1975, the rate remained stable, around 110 people in prison per 100,000 people. It shot up with the movement to get tough on crime in the late 1970s. (These numbers exclude people held in jails, as comprehensive information on prisoners held in state and local jails was not collected until relatively recently.)

The nation’s relatively high violent crime rate, partly driven by the much easier availability of guns here, helps explain the number of people in American prisons.

“The assault rate in New York and London is not that much different,” said Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group. “But if you look at the murder rate, particularly with firearms, it’s much higher.”

Despite the recent decline in the murder rate in the United States, it is still about four times that of many nations in Western Europe.

But that is only a partial explanation. The United States, in fact, has relatively low rates of nonviolent crime. It has lower burglary and robbery rates than Australia, Canada and England.

People who commit nonviolent crimes in the rest of the world are less likely to receive prison time and certainly less likely to receive long sentences. The United States is, for instance, the only advanced country that incarcerates people for minor property crimes like passing bad checks, Mr. Whitman wrote.

Efforts to combat illegal drugs play a major role in explaining long prison sentences in the United States as well. In 1980, there were about 40,000 people in American jails and prisons for drug crimes. These days, there are almost 500,000.

Those figures have drawn contempt from European critics. “The U.S. pursues the war on drugs with an ignorant fanaticism,” said Ms. Stern of King’s College.

Many American prosecutors, on the other hand, say that locking up people involved in the drug trade is imperative, as it helps thwart demand for illegal drugs and drives down other kinds of crime. Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey, for instance, has fought hard to prevent the early release of people in federal prison on crack cocaine offenses, saying that many of them “are among the most serious and violent offenders.”

Still, it is the length of sentences that truly distinguishes American prison policy. Indeed, the mere number of sentences imposed here would not place the United States at the top of the incarceration lists. If lists were compiled based on annual admissions to prison per capita, several European countries would outpace the United States. But American prison stays are much longer, so the total incarceration rate is higher.

Burglars in the United States serve an average of 16 months in prison, according to Mr. Mauer, compared with 5 months in Canada and 7 months in England.

Many specialists dismissed race as an important distinguishing factor in the American prison rate. It is true that blacks are much more likely to be imprisoned than other groups in the United States, but that is not a particularly distinctive phenomenon. Minorities in Canada, Britain and Australia are also disproportionately represented in those nation’s prisons, and the ratios are similar to or larger than those in the United States.

Some scholars have found that English-speaking nations have higher prison rates.

“Although it is not at all clear what it is about Anglo-Saxon culture that makes predominantly English-speaking countries especially punitive, they are,” Mr. Tonry wrote last year in “Crime, Punishment and Politics in Comparative Perspective.”

“It could be related to economies that are more capitalistic and political cultures that are less social democratic than those of most European countries,” Mr. Tonry wrote. “Or it could have something to do with the Protestant religions with strong Calvinist overtones that were long influential.”

The American character — self-reliant, independent, judgmental — also plays a role.

“America is a comparatively tough place, which puts a strong emphasis on individual responsibility,” Mr. Whitman of Yale wrote. “That attitude has shown up in the American criminal justice of the last 30 years.”

French-speaking countries, by contrast, have “comparatively mild penal policies,” Mr. Tonry wrote.

Of course, sentencing policies within the United States are not monolithic, and national comparisons can be misleading.

“Minnesota looks more like Sweden than like Texas,” said Mr. Mauer of the Sentencing Project. (Sweden imprisons about 80 people per 100,000 of population; Minnesota, about 300; and Texas, almost 1,000. Maine has the lowest incarceration rate in the United States, at 273; and Louisiana the highest, at 1,138.)

Whatever the reasons, there is little dispute that America’s exceptional incarceration rate has had an impact on crime.

“As one might expect, a good case can be made that fewer Americans are now being victimized” thanks to the tougher crime policies, Paul G. Cassell, an authority on sentencing and a former federal judge, wrote in The Stanford Law Review.

From 1981 to 1996, according to Justice Department statistics, the risk of punishment rose in the United States and fell in England. The crime rates predictably moved in the opposite directions, falling in the United States and rising in England.

“These figures,” Mr. Cassell wrote, “should give one pause before too quickly concluding that European sentences are appropriate.”

Other commentators were more definitive. “The simple truth is that imprisonment works,” wrote Kent Scheidegger and Michael Rushford of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in The Stanford Law and Policy Review. “Locking up criminals for longer periods reduces the level of crime. The benefits of doing so far offset the costs.”

There is a counterexample, however, to the north. “Rises and falls in Canada’s crime rate have closely paralleled America’s for 40 years,” Mr. Tonry wrote last year. “But its imprisonment rate has remained stable.”

Several specialists here and abroad pointed to a surprising explanation for the high incarceration rate in the United States: democracy.

Most state court judges and prosecutors in the United States are elected and are therefore sensitive to a public that is, according to opinion polls, generally in favor of tough crime policies. In the rest of the world, criminal justice professionals tend to be civil servants who are insulated from popular demands for tough sentencing.

Mr. Whitman, who has studied Tocqueville’s work on American penitentiaries, was asked what accounted for America’s booming prison population.

“Unfortunately, a lot of the answer is democracy — just what Tocqueville was talking about,” he said. “We have a highly politicized criminal justice system”.
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This article may or may not prove every point I’ve made, but I have taken the liberty to assume that with canadas small population base in comparison to the US, coupled with the growing national and provincial debts, this type of justice would financially cripple our country. You can agree to disagree, but you’re still an ass. If you have a problem with the numbers I suggest you contact the editor of the New York Times.

Thanks MM, I must be more intelligent than I thought. I just picked those numbers out of thin air, and voilà, after googling it, what do you know? I was right!!! You know what, sometimes I can guess what time it is without even looking at my watch, well within 15 mins anyway. I would please ask from now on you refer to me as “The Amazing Harper”. Although it will take some time to perfect my next trick, I hope you won’t bite your nails to short with anticipation.

Why would you wish me “Godspeed”, MM? Do you know how fast the speed of god is? If you do, how did you make it a universal unit of measurement like MPH or PSI? First I’m going to have to ask you for evidence that god actually exists, as a skeptic you can imagine my confusion at the “Godspeed” you refer to. Why would you wish me luck along with godspeed, leading me to believe the two are interconnected somehow? Will luck effect Godspeed in a negative or positive way, or will the Godspeed effect the luck? Maybe I’m incorrect and am approaching this all wrong, is it that Godspeed is exponential in value, like luck to the power of Godspeed, or vise versa. This is conundrum I surely won’t be able to solve without your valuable evidence, be sure to include a graph that shows the corresponding values and effects.

Cheerio

A pleasure as always

RSVPs

SUNDY MORNING EPIC FAIL

Montrealman (Sunday 10:11am)

“Stephen reveals his literalist/materialistic understanding of a term which is neither. As a matter of fact it is an archaic expression dating from the 17th. century and most commonly associated with the Puritans sect of fundamental Protestantism.
I used it in a jocular sense because, well, I have a rather off-beat sense of humour. In any case Stephen, I think your reflections on its meaning reveal in stark clarity the farce which results from the application of inapplicable categories of comprehension. Thanks for the illustration.”

My problem with your argument is, although you present a rational sentiment, this is not proof of anything. With your affinity for the persuit of truth and evidence I am truely dissappointed. You neglected to include at least a general sense of the sentiment with which you wished to convey, like I said as a non believer I am stumped as to what “Godspeed” is. As you have concluded I was wrong about the standard unit of measurement, but as to the relationship with luck. I am still a little skeptical as to why luck needs “Godspeed”. Conceptually, I have always been under the impression that luck is a stand alone entity, with either good or bad connotations. I originally thought that “Godspeed” might have been to hasten the luck (bring it to the forefront more quickly), but as you have explained, with no measurement properties this cannot be the case. In this case I can only come to one conclusion, that this “Godspeed” you refer to is a wish of “good luck”, which would either make the wish of both redundant, or I am correct in my assertion that “Godspeed” is in fact an exponential power (such as “good luck squared” or good luck to power of Godspeed).

Please write back soon with your hypothesis.

A pleasure as always

Cheerio