Hey dude, no one cares. I for one am surprised why these crap threads are not locked for being WAAAAAAAAY off topic.

Look at which forum category it's in.

WWW Link

Oh look, Philadelphia is getting soft on crime, they want to let prisoners out of the jail and put them back on the streets.

Notice that in the artical what is said about the prison make up.

Only one-fifth of the 9,300 inmates in city jails are there for violent offenses, a recent study found. About 37 percent of them already have been sentenced, prisons spokesman Robert Eskind said. <--- ONLY ONE IN FIVE IS IN FOR VIOLENT BEHAVIOR!!!

that means only 1,860 would be in jail if we were to make NON VIOLENT offfenders do alternatives to incarceration (like community service) do we really want or prisos filled up with so many non violent people?

Speaking on my own, I have been most interested in this thread and would be delighted to continue reading different thoughts.I'm not informed enough to add and am happy to passively read. Spacepony and Psychoak, please don't stop.

Don't think he read it.

I'm on the fence about drug legalization/decriminalization. Regardless of how you put it, making them go through treatment instead of being punished makes them basically the same thing from a penal view point.

On the one hand, there are drugs like weed, harmless, completely. There is not a single recorded case of a rational, non-violent individual smoking weed and going on a killing spree because of it. If anything, it would be a good thing to give those violent assholes out there. They can't screw with anyone else if all they do is sit around with the munchies. Of course, the brain debilitating side effects can be somewhat nasty. Someone driving stoned is severely impaired. But then booze are legal, and far more dangerous in that respect. The answer, not that it's reasonably enforced, is to hammer on someone that drives drunk. Our pathetic legal system aside, I find it to be a logical method of dealing with the drawbacks of consuming a substance the government has no place outlawing. I see no reason the potentially self destructive, but only self destructive drugs should be illegal for less severe drawbacks than legal mind altering substances.

On the other hand, I don't particularly fancy running into a psycho-pharmacological waste basket who's discovered that aliens have landed and everyone he runs into is trying to turn him into a pod person either. Certain chemical combinations are flat dangerous, psychotics I can't see any reason to have legalized. Stuff that just turns an asshole that likes beating the shit out of people into an asshole that thinks he can get away with it is fairly dangerous as well. However, booze does the same thing and is legal, so even the logic behind things like pcp is flawed.

As far as jail overcrowding goes, it's not so much that non-violent offenders are in jail. It's that you get 10 years for raping a child, and 10 years for having too much pot on you. We're in severe need of reasonable sentencing rules, and we need to strip the judges of their discretion entirely. Plea deals also need to disappear, a true loser pay system would do much better for lowering costs. Someone that's guilty and knows it can either skip the trial, and not spend the rest of his life paying for it even after he gets out of jail, or fight the state and bury himself in court costs. Someone like yourself that gets sent to prison for doing a good deed would never get charged, you could hire a first rate lawyer that knows how to pick a jury, and they'd never be able to convict you and get to pay your costs if they took you to trial anyway. With plea deals gone and proper sentencing rules, people would actually pay for their crimes the first time, instead of getting a felony assault dropped to a misdemeanor, or getting six months probation(this is punishment how?) for purse snatching. Getting away with something is the best way to encourage repetition.

Well, I do appreciate the comments of support about me bashing in the skull of that punk but I think it would do good to explain the reason that it landed me in jail.
A soon as he slapped the cell phone from my mother’s hand and shoved her I grabbed him by the throat and held him up off the ground (his back against the wall). I used my other hand to take out my cell phone, called my lawyer and asked him if he was going to be available in about 3 hours. He replied, I said thank you, hung up and then beat the living tar out of the punk.

The end result was I did not act under the legal exception of “coming to the aid of another” it was viewed as premeditated due to the fact that I paused in my assault to phone my lawyer. That meant I had him subdued at that point and my subsequent actions constituted aggravated assault, what made it even worse was the fact that after beating him I dragged him out of the house by his testacies. Yes, I really did do that, which raised the charge to indecent sexual assault.

I could have ended up doing ten years as a result, I did however end up doing only two in total. It was classified as a misdemeanor rather than a felony but because I drug him out by his testacies it landed me a Megens law charge.

Yup, I have to spend ten years listed next to child rapist because I dragged that punk out the door by his balls! I also found out that there are 890 other people on the list that were never even convicted of a crime.

So the next time you see someone being hurt do not try to save them... You could end up unemployable for the rest of your life just because you decided to give them a lesson they would not forget.


He got eighty-nine days in jail and a simple assault. I got two years and lost close to $500,000.00 as a result. That was even with the police testifying on my behalf! The only thing the jury was supposed to consider was if my actions were premeditated.

So, the next time you want to tell someone they should take the law into their own hands just remember that when it come to that, judges will hammer them often worse then the criminal who they beat up!

you lost your job?! WTF!

This the best discussion on any forum, ever

Thanks  . But SpacePoney and the others are the ones that are making this intresting. I just asked a question and they answerd.

Lost all my professional licenses I used to own a real estate company, a property & casualty insurance agency and I was a licensed private detective. (Employee surveillance not anything like on TV).

It is called a moral turpitude clause.

Without those licensees I could no longer operate in those fields.

What can you do?

Ah, but your question was very thought provoking, and posed succinctly. In these days of internet articulation abandonment, it's great to see a serious subject brought forth in a serious manner.

Armed revolt is about it at this point. Liberal fucktard judges constitute the majority of our appellate court system, the state courts aren't much better. The US Supreme Court is considered very conservative for a federal court, yet holds three raving lunatics that repeatedly disregard the Constitution in nearly all of their opinions(the only true thing left at this point is the label they've given themselves), one that only disregards it most of the time, two that disregard it anytime a previous judge has disregarded it on the same issue, two that usually follow it, and only one that always does. Until they stop making up the laws as they go, we're pretty much fucked. The unconstitutional instructions the judge gave his jury for instance. The jury is there to decide guilt or innocence, justice and law are not the same thing.

The odds of getting congress to enact legislation to fix the problem are about as good as the odds of a rational tax code. We can't even get them to fix immigration, and even the Hispanic population is in favor of kicking the illegals out.

Um excuse me but my difficulte are from the wonderful conservative judges rules not the liberals. also armed revolt? the threat of armed revolt is what has created this mess.

In my case it was judged on the law, not on justice.. that would be the strict conservative construction.

Well, I'm not entirely sure about what he means with this question. Are you asking if there is anything we can actually do with the prison system . . . ? Or are you asking spacepony what he can actually do now? I seem to think it's the former and if you are asking it, then you are the problem. I hate using that cliche (or any cliche for that matter), but what it comes down to is if you think you have no power, then you don't. This country is supposed to be ours. We are supposed to direct change. But we are constantly told that we don't and that people no longer gather and make change, so we become more complacent, which in turn ends up creating a self fulfilling prophecy. If you believe that things won't change for the better and that you have no power, then that is exactly what is going to happen.

And no, I don't believe positive thoughts and beliefs alone will change things, but actions without some forethought don't usually turn out for the best.

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I actually wanted to respond to the article about the GPS tracking and inmates.

"That capability has some critics questioning whether the technology is too Orwellian."

I for one am pretty paranoid about most things, but I don't see how using GPS tracking on inmates is Orwellian. Is having some technology attached to your leg any different than cameras and a whole slew of guards?

The proposed idea of the GPS attached to your ankle while not in jail seems a bit more Orwellian, but I think I would take that option over jail/prison time. The whole thing about the speaker telling you that you are in a "bad area" is preposterous, but as a tracking device for people who would normally have been in prison seems like a decent alternative. So you know when they leave the state or that they've been visiting a purported drug safehouse seems more viable than just letting convicted people walk.

Who this would apply to and the rule surrounding it seem like a more important question that whether or not Big Brother is an issue. Not all technology equates to Big Brother.

Now when we all are tracked, then I will raise hell.

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