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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Grainne who wrote (22502)	5/29/1998 7:11:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

> When you say that "each and every incident of gun use by children has a common theme: the kids were committing a felony" you presuppose in a way that we have become such savages that we now will abdicate the responsibility to be good role models for our children, bring them up in a society which at least attempts to be reasonably healthy and safe, or hold them to lesser standards of criminal responsibility because they children, and therefore assumed to be vulnerable, teachable, and salvageable.< Huh? I don't see how that follows. All I'm trying to say is that when someone does something bad, it's much more direct to address the bad behavior than try to figure out (first, or as a primary assault on the instance) how the bad behavior occurred. There's a cart-and-horse idea at work here. First you judge the act of bad behavior - in a fair and timely manner. Then you try to figure out how it came to be - in the interest of preventing a recurrence. Where is the savagery or abdication in that? >If it were truly normal, though, would journalists still be writing about it? < This question suggests to me that you consider our press impartial. I have no such confidence. I think that our press exercises an editorial bias on a number of issues. So to me the above question carries an answer of "it depends". >Upon what hinges does a healthy society hang, in your opinion?< My turn to risk being tedious. I think that a healthy society lives in the balance between being permissive and being strict. On the one hand, I like to see the freedom to explore a wide variety of modes of expression and lifestyle. On the other hand, I like to see a certain consensus within society about what is good. These two things are in tension. Ive said it before - I think a most effective way to get closer to the balance is to more consistently punish our felons. They represent a pretty universal extreme of behavior we all would say is bad. We've dropped the ball on that one. Here's where you remind me about the relatively large prison population in the USA. And I have to answer: It's not yet large enough! If we jailed all our convicts, I posit that we'll send a clearer message to the ones thinking about it that there's a price. I think we've incurred a social debt: our inefficient judicial and penal system carry a lot of the blame for our relatively large prison population. If we'd stayed on top od matters of crime and punishment - and in particular, if the Great Society architects hadn't fallen in love with the quixotic notion that people are inherently good, and that rehabilitation will be more effective than simple punishment - we'd have fewer folks in jail. And we'd have selected out the worst sorts into our jails, where they're separate from society. Now we have a de facto guild system in place - where new prisoners are cooped up with the hardcores, and are schooled into the way of the outlaw. Ceterum censeo once we've addressed the issue of crime&punishment, we as a society would ultimately reap a "peace dividend". Then we could go on to weightier matters like payroll taxes and Internet cartels.