I find it worse that San Francisco would possibly give 0 years to someone dealing heroin.
I think the war on drugs is fundamentally flawed, and I don't think drug users should be convicted or sent to prison but I do think that dealing illegal drugs should definitely count orders of magnitude more heavily since the very activity of dealing enables the destruction of a large number of other people.
which would put them in prison for way longer. and for the right crime.
Prisons currently fail very badly at rehabilitation, and actually tend to make worse criminals. We should be spending less money on punitive unfair sentences and more on trying to make people productive members of society through good rehab and education programs. This would actually make society better. Fixing the root of the problem rather than ignoring it by just locking people away.
We should reserve prison for only those people from which we need to protect the general population, e.g. violent crimes. Though I do have a special place in my heart for locking away fraudsters and con artists.
Sometime people's sense of fairness is pitted against the idea of rehabilitation.
Fixing the root of problems mean dealing with the dredge of society, the people who deserved it the least.
Imaging rehabilitating a tinpot dictator who killed million so that he can feel remorse for what he did and find a productive living.
And yes, I think you go ahead and let the terrible dictator read books or whatever. That's much easier to accept than society occasionally getting together and executing an innocent.
Someone who makes money off of the victims of drug dependence is horrible scum, and if you're willing to lock up con artists you should be able to work up the give-a-crap to lock up a heroin dealer.
People are making a lot of money off of this, but not, for the most part, anyone who is at risk of getting arrested and charged with decades in prison.
Furthermore, arresting them has about as much effect on the drug trade as locking up all the clerks in a grocery store. The demand is still there, the distribution networks are still there, all they're missing is people willing to work for minimum wage or less. (And obviously there's no shortage there either.)
The poster you're replying to is using rehabilitation in the "correct this person's future behavior" sense.
> lock up a heroin dealer
The problem is that nearly 3/4 of all prisoners end up back in prison within 5 years [0]. Locking people up isn't changing their behavior. Locking up a heroin dealer isn't keeping them from dealing heroin once they get out.
So, either we need to lock people up indefinitely (which costs $$$ even if you're not swayed by the humanitarian arguments), or we need to figure out something more effective than trying to hammer our square peg (prison) through this round hole (reducing criminal behavior).
0: http://www.nij.gov/topics/corrections/recidivism/pages/welco...
And since the other post mentioned my comment on fraudsters and con artists, dealers are not lying to people, they're just providing the consumer with what they want.
The ones who should be locked up are the fraudsters, because they mix things like Fentanyl, which may directly lead to someone's death (not to say people don't OD without that, but it is less often).
Honestly, I dislike anyone who takes advantage of other people's ignorance or incompetence. They are the bottom of the barrel of society in my opinion.
Are all these people horrible scum?
I found this repugnant. Who more deserves prison than those two? But with reflection my views have softened. At least one of the two seems to have wanted to be good. He lived out his life in prison quietly, spending his time writing an ornithology book. I can no longer honestly say I believe that society as a whole was better served by jailing them. Perhaps they should have been given the chance to redeem themselves by becoming productive citizens, and the chance to earn back a measure of dignity. (Certainly repeat offenders should be deemed a menace and incarcerated for the public good.)
I feel the same confusion about Brock Turner, the Stanford swimmer who raped a woman behind a dumpster. There was a lot of outrage at his early release, but again I'm not sure the greater good is served by keeping him behind bars. I hope he will live in infamy for the rest of his days, as is just. But should he have stayed behind bars for longer, at the public expense? I can't give a really cogent reason why he should (I am not comparing his sentence to that of other rapists, or to that of other convicts by the way).