It'll depend on your hierarchy of values, I suppose. Some people place individual liberty high and prefer to restrict government power to things which have actually happened, others prefer to sanctify abstract numbers and want to government to act on anything it can statistically predict. It comes down to whether you are still a person if you are convicted of a crime or whether that changes you from a human being to a set of numbers.Originally Posted by Loki
Last night as I lay in bed, looking up at the stars, I thought, “Where the hell is my ceiling?"
I'd argue that it hinges on whether you think the victims of crime are people or just statistics.
Hope is the denial of reality
I'm sure you'll be jumping up and down to denounce this non-murderer's sentence to spend his whole life in prison as unconstitutional: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-23534845
Afterall our relevant Convention passage is basically word for word the same as the relevant passage in your Constitution so this sentence must be so far beyond the pale for you.
Those words are fungible however and the two jurisdictions have very obvious differences in how they interpret them. See the death penalty. As it happens, I don't personally think much of the idea that an indefinite sentence is a violation of human rights, as I said earlier in the thread. I just think that A) focusing on punishment in general is counterproductive and B) that long-term detention on the scale discussed here ceases to have any meaning to the felon as a punishment by the time discussed in the case. It might have retributive meaning but that is derived by a different party altogether. Bear in mind, Rand, Loki is referring to the protection of society, which is a completely different penological interest than the two you've been obsessed with throughout the entire thread.
The victims of crimes? Or the people you think might get victimized in the future? Because the first is real, even though I don't think they should carry all that much weight in sentencing. The latter are imaginary and they seem to be who you're actually talking about when you discuss the possibility of letting someone convicted of a crime back into society at a later point.
Last night as I lay in bed, looking up at the stars, I thought, “Where the hell is my ceiling?"
No, I mean the victims of crime. The purpose of government is to enforce the social contract. In exchange for people giving up their right to everyone else's life and property, the state promises to protect those people's own life and property. If an individual is harmed by another individual, it is the state's responsibility to right the wrong. "Righting the wrong" here means punishing the criminal so that the victim, their relatives, and society at large doesn't have to do so themselves. Doing anything else is a flagrant violation of the social contract. It is up to each society to determine what the appropriate punishment should be for each time of crime (in the abstract; the state doesn't need to listen to society's demands for specific crimes due to temporary passions, etc.), and it is the state's role to enforce that policy. This means that it's absolutely illegitimate for the state to suddenly turn around and decide that it can enact punishments that are wildly inconsistent with the public will. Any government that does this risks discrediting not only itself but the entire social structure.
Given the above, I'd like to see a single poll that shows that the public in the US or UK supports letting out serial killers under any condition.
Hope is the denial of reality
Wonderful, halfway your argument you switch from the state being the party having to decide the punishment detached from passion to the state being entirely bound to let that very same passion while setting the sentence.
I can tell you that states that let themselves be ruled by passion in quite the way you want are the same states that don't respect any of the human rights of large swathes of their society. You don't have to be a serial killer in those states to end up in prison for life, or dead.
Huge numbers of Pakistani's think it should be a crime punishable by death if a Christian uses the word 'Allah' refering to 'God' in a non-Islamic context. Hordes of Brits don't know the difference between a paedophile and a paediatrician and would gladly see both castrated and sent to prison for what they do to children. Not so passionate people might not find that all that legitimate.
Congratulations America
Except I explicitly said that crime should be punished by abstract popular beliefs about what a proper punishment should be, not beliefs about punishments against specific people.Unless your point is that people's beliefs are formed entirely on the basis of passions in both the short and long term, in which case I'm not quite sure how you could justify having a democracy at all...
As for the Pakistan example, if the people really do believe strongly (over an extended period of time) that blasphemy should be punished by death, the government would risk discrediting itself by refusing to listen. Human rights don't mean very much when the state has no legitimacy, in which case everyone ends up losing their rights.
Hope is the denial of reality
Seems hard to get the bolsjevik out once you've sniffed it; the legitimacy of a state is just as dependent on its treatment of minorities, no matter how obnoxious their ideas may be to the (vast) majority.Except I explicitly said that crime should be punished by abstract popular beliefs about what a proper punishment should be, not beliefs about punishments against specific people.
As for the Pakistan example, if the people really do believe strongly (over an extended period of time) that blasphemy should be punished by death, the government would risk discrediting itself by refusing to listen. Human rights don't mean very much when the state has no legitimacy, in which case everyone ends up losing their rights.
Congratulations America
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