You ask for a solution Haimona? Here's a cheapie. Empower the Courts to order killers who plead remorse at sentencing to visit their victim's grave once every year until their own death.
Excellent piece, prison is like education, you can’t have one on one punishment no more than you can have a tailored syllabus for each student. (Sadly)
I have some experience with persons that go to prison, and in my experience the vast majority belong there.
My issue with our legal system is that instead of short sharp punishment at the start of criminal careers we go for a softly softly approach and it allows individuals to amass numerous convections where we end up with the ridiculous situation where X murders Y and we find X has 56 convictions and never had a custodial sentence , where perhaps a short lag at offence two may have straightened him out
Emmy Rakete, a lecturer at Auckland Uni, is a man who says he's a woman, and takes photos of himself in women's toilets to gloat that he's there, it would seem. Why would we believe anything a man like this says, even if he did have something to say?
I know little about prisons but it strikes me that we need to put more people in prison than currently as we need the deterrent at this stage. - things are out of wack. That being said, we are not rehabilitating people and cant afford to pay to maintain sufficient, decent prisons.
I cant help thinking that prisoners below retirement age need to be required to work 40 hours a week. As happens in the US. I know some prisoners work here in NZ. Also that Progressives think 'forced labour' is unacceptable but it strikes me as the solution to a lot of the problem.
I'd look at the gamut of activities they could work at from manufacturing, farming, crafts, right through to public works and professional skills. Then I'd assign prisoners to different cohorts depending on ability and psychological and physical testing. The proviso's would have to be that the prisons are owned entirely by the government - there is zero incentive to inflate prison numbers, all money made flows 100% back into prisons and that core government funding is upped each year based on the prison population and cpi so that prisons returning profits don't see the money channelled into non prison related endeavours.
The revenue generated should go into educational programmes, rehab, skills training, basic and higher education and improved or new prison facilities and decent rooms. The whole thing can be incentivised in various ways with the aim being to teach the prisoners good life skills - routine, accountability and teamwork, serviceable vocational skills and the value of education and community.
In employment, we are told 'recent past behaviour is predictive of likely future behaviour'. So that acknowledges that people can and do change. What better change for an incarcerate to make than holding down a job for a number of years, learning to read or maybe getting NCEA Level 1 and coming out with a trade or skill under your belt or conversely, a degree or similar. For some it may just be getting free of a bad drug habit.
And of course, even with extra resources and incentives, this approach will only pay dividends with a % of prisoners.
If "throw away the key" is appropriate for some prisoners, why not the death penalty? A ordinary prisoner costs the taxpayer over $110,000 a year, while maximum security prisoners like Tarrant cost far more - with no hope of ever becoming a productive member of society.
A good exploration of the proposals and limits of the movement as it stands. I always got the impression that the Anti-prison people, anti-war people and more radical environmental groups were essentially the same group of people who were a mix of old school Marxist and younger radical leftists who are really against the state as it currently exists. It felt like the same groups and people were involved in the same protests and letters at least, I think an exploration of that would be interesting.
Just another wanking exercise for social-liberals who are disinclined to contemplate the actual greatest crime in history- the theft by violence or legislative capture of the earths productive resources from the commons into private ownership, and the consequent theft of the labour of those who are thereby dispossessed of the means to create their own living using those resources.
You ask for a solution Haimona? Here's a cheapie. Empower the Courts to order killers who plead remorse at sentencing to visit their victim's grave once every year until their own death.
Excellent piece, prison is like education, you can’t have one on one punishment no more than you can have a tailored syllabus for each student. (Sadly)
I have some experience with persons that go to prison, and in my experience the vast majority belong there.
My issue with our legal system is that instead of short sharp punishment at the start of criminal careers we go for a softly softly approach and it allows individuals to amass numerous convections where we end up with the ridiculous situation where X murders Y and we find X has 56 convictions and never had a custodial sentence , where perhaps a short lag at offence two may have straightened him out
Enjoying your writing
Emmy Rakete, a lecturer at Auckland Uni, is a man who says he's a woman, and takes photos of himself in women's toilets to gloat that he's there, it would seem. Why would we believe anything a man like this says, even if he did have something to say?
Thanks.
It is nice to read a sensible essay.
Marcusian intellectuals have much to answer for.
I know little about prisons but it strikes me that we need to put more people in prison than currently as we need the deterrent at this stage. - things are out of wack. That being said, we are not rehabilitating people and cant afford to pay to maintain sufficient, decent prisons.
I cant help thinking that prisoners below retirement age need to be required to work 40 hours a week. As happens in the US. I know some prisoners work here in NZ. Also that Progressives think 'forced labour' is unacceptable but it strikes me as the solution to a lot of the problem.
I'd look at the gamut of activities they could work at from manufacturing, farming, crafts, right through to public works and professional skills. Then I'd assign prisoners to different cohorts depending on ability and psychological and physical testing. The proviso's would have to be that the prisons are owned entirely by the government - there is zero incentive to inflate prison numbers, all money made flows 100% back into prisons and that core government funding is upped each year based on the prison population and cpi so that prisons returning profits don't see the money channelled into non prison related endeavours.
The revenue generated should go into educational programmes, rehab, skills training, basic and higher education and improved or new prison facilities and decent rooms. The whole thing can be incentivised in various ways with the aim being to teach the prisoners good life skills - routine, accountability and teamwork, serviceable vocational skills and the value of education and community.
In employment, we are told 'recent past behaviour is predictive of likely future behaviour'. So that acknowledges that people can and do change. What better change for an incarcerate to make than holding down a job for a number of years, learning to read or maybe getting NCEA Level 1 and coming out with a trade or skill under your belt or conversely, a degree or similar. For some it may just be getting free of a bad drug habit.
And of course, even with extra resources and incentives, this approach will only pay dividends with a % of prisoners.
If "throw away the key" is appropriate for some prisoners, why not the death penalty? A ordinary prisoner costs the taxpayer over $110,000 a year, while maximum security prisoners like Tarrant cost far more - with no hope of ever becoming a productive member of society.
A good exploration of the proposals and limits of the movement as it stands. I always got the impression that the Anti-prison people, anti-war people and more radical environmental groups were essentially the same group of people who were a mix of old school Marxist and younger radical leftists who are really against the state as it currently exists. It felt like the same groups and people were involved in the same protests and letters at least, I think an exploration of that would be interesting.
Just another wanking exercise for social-liberals who are disinclined to contemplate the actual greatest crime in history- the theft by violence or legislative capture of the earths productive resources from the commons into private ownership, and the consequent theft of the labour of those who are thereby dispossessed of the means to create their own living using those resources.
Yet, El Salvador...