It would be less biased to show statistics for the kind of
people sentenced under the three strikes law, but that
wouldn't tug the heart strings as much.
Perhaps we could aspire to have a law that works right in outlier cases, not just on average?
One of the most basic principles of system design is that there will be edge cases. Every engineer knows that. In a country with 300 million people, enough will fall into these edge cases for the ACLU to put together a pamphlet with a few examples. That's inevitable.
That said, with three strikes laws, you don't need to resort to sob stories. The statistics are evidence enough: about half of three strikers in California are in for non-serious or non-violent offenses. That's much more persuasive, to a rational thinking person, than a few examples of people who fell into the edge cases of the system.
> That's much more persuasive, to a rational thinking person, than a few examples of people who fell into the edge cases of the system.
The problem is not convincing rational thinking people. Are there really some nontrivial group of informed rational people without an ownership stake in a private prison company who genuinely believe that three strikes laws are good policy?
The problem is not the rational thinking people at all. The problem is politics and rational ignorance. It's the swarms of busy people who don't have the time or the education to understand the statistics, who consequently go back and vote for the people who enacted these laws.
I get where you're coming from. The world would be a better place if all policy decisions were based on evidence and reasoning rather than emotion. But when you have the prison lobby heaping the corpses of teenage girls on their side of the scale, you need to put something visceral on the other side to shock complacent people into realizing that something is very wrong here.
Politics is a popularity contest. It's important that the side with the best argument wins, but how do you get that to happen when people have limited time and limited resources and the winner is decided by voting rather than correctness?
If the last 25 years or so have taught me anything, it's that politics is _never_ about rational, thinking people voting for their own best interest. It's pretty much just emotion and/or fear for the vast, vast majority (of the tiny minority of people who actually bother to vote).
Irrational emotion bred these laws, they will only go away via the same pathetic process. The ACLU is just playing the game with their appeal to emotion.
>One of the most basic principles of system design is that there will be edge cases. Every engineer knows that. In a country with 300 million people, enough will fall into these edge cases for the ACLU to put together a pamphlet with a few examples. That's inevitable.
What if you are the next edge case in this system? with nobody to remember that you even exist, if its fair..
Just one person beiyng this edge case is enough to put the whole system down.. as every engineer knows this is what we call a bug, and can make the whole system irrelevant, and work agains its own purpose..
And that is what happens to the justice system.. the worst thing is that its all about property.. its f#$% stupid.. its unproportional, and minimize that is pure lack of humanity.. and its the real reason why things are still working that way.. because if you are not one of those "edge cases" you really dont care
And thats so many human lifes wasted, not only the people behind bars, but also their families, how they kids will grow up.. how can they support their families..
No, one person being the edge case is definitely not enough to put the whole system down.
If we get, say, 1000 edge cases every year - then it's completely acceptable unless you can provide another system that will have much less edge cases. And if you're not sure, you don't switch until you are sure. If you simply "switch off" the system, then you get random 'mob justice' which whill have much more problems than the current situation.
The big difference here is, mandatory minimum sentencing is an aberration which is engineered from the start to create more injustice. There is a reason that in a normal case, sentencing takes the history of the individual and the circumstances of the crime into account, instead of following a rulebook saying "Theft: 5 years in prison, no early release".
Three-strike laws exist to quench the mob's appetite for blood (as public execution is sadly no longer acceptable, the mob has to settle for life sentences), and get politicians get elected on a fearmongering & repression platform. But on a humane level, it's not far removed from judicial amputations.
If only we could have a system where a real, live flesh and blood person could make decisions regarding punishment upon a guilty conviction... we could call these people, I know, judges.. they could judge on a case by case basis and make appropriate decisions.
I know, now the problem lies with these judges having poor decision making skills... if only there were a process to removing or overriding their decisions.. like an "appeals" process.. or a way of electing new judges and "voting" them in and out of office...
Neah, that's crazy talk.. we need absolute maximum/minimum sentencing guidelines like three strikes so we can keep those privatized prisons full, and making money.
The biggest problem with broad judicial discretion is that you get wildly varying outcomes with identical facts depending on which judge you get and even what kind of mood he's in.
If anything the system still has too much discretion (in the hands of police and prosecutors) that lead predictably to discriminatory outcomes.
The problem with restricting judicial discretion is that a judge always has a living breathing person in front of him or her, and a sentencing committee never does. This leads to inflated sentences across the board.
