Crime and Punishment

Thinking of Changing Jobs

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Via Ace comes a totally bewildering news story from Great Britain. The official government policy concerning burglary has just been changed. Burglars are not to be jailed unless they cause harm to persons or property.

No matter how much they steal, no matter if it is irreplaceable family heirlooms, the criminal walks. They get “community punishment”, which I suppose is the same as “community service” is here in the United States.

And we know that the felons will show up to fulfill their obligation to society because they are such stand up guys. Hardly like criminals at all. Right?

My favorite part…

“The recommendations to let burglars walk free come as, for the first time in several years, burglaries are increasing.”

So refusing to lock the burglars up where they can’t ply their vile trade will cause the number of break-ins to decline?

I keep rereading the news report, and I just can’t believe it. It slides off of my comprehension like claws on glass.

Is this some sort of April Fools joke done early?

In the spirit of full disclosure, there was a similar problem in the United States dating from the late 1980’s through the 1990’s. Space in our prisons was at a premium, the crowding so severe that courts were ordering a certain percentage to be released early to thin out the press.

Eventually the money was found and more prisons were built. And, please note, the felons got at least some jail time.

(Cross posted in a similar form over at Hell in a Handbasket.)

How Can This Be An Issue?

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A measure put to the vote recently in Switzerland was to give abused animals their own lawyers. It was handily defeated.

I’m at a loss here. How did this get on the ballot? Isn’t there a global economic crises going on right now? So, of course, money has to be spent on expanding another bureaucracy. There are already laws on the Swiss books to protect animals, so why not hire lawyers to represent them in court?

Yeah, yeah, I know. I hate the helpless little furry children, and want to see them suffer. The reality is rather different.

Special interest groups will drain us all. Luckily the voters in Switzerland told them to get lost.

An Island Of Sick, Perverted Freaks

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Last year, I read about an incident in a water park in the United Kingdom.

A father took his kids to the park so they could frolic in the cool and refreshing waves. When the children said they wanted to hurl themselves down the water slide, the proud father decided that this would be a perfect opportunity for some action photos of the apples of his eye.

Kid Having Fun!

He positioned himself at the end of the slide, camera at the ready, only to face a muttering and hostile crowd that apparently wanted to lynch him then and there!

The justification for the violence was that he must be a pedophile. After all, what other reason would a grown man have of snapping shots of young children in swimwear? The explanation that he was only photographing his own progeny were rejected out of hand. What else would child molesters say to escape just punishment when the righteous crowd gets their blood up?

Lucky for all concerned, the police were notified by someone in the mob. A police officer arriving at the scene averted any ugly actions.

Unfortunately, I cannot now find the online article to prove to my readers in the United States that such a ridiculous incident actually occurred. It seems unbelievable, that such a climate of suspicion and paranoia can actually exist in Old Blighty. I wouldn’t blame you one bit if you thought that I was simply writing as fact a bad comedy I once viewed on cable TV, or some uncomfortable dream I once had where everyone around me turned into bizarre and violent zombies.

But such an environment of hatred and prejudice is all too prevalent in Great Britain, and simply scanning the online news article from that country proves it to be so with appalling regularity.

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The Rorschach Test for Evil

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[I did a post on this thread over at Reason and it went long so I decided to turn it into post here. I apologize for the sloppiness. I am pressed for time.]

We have a modern ritual in which we try to see which political ideology is reflected in the murderous actions of people like Amy Bishop and Joseph Andrew Stack. This is especially true in the case of Stack who left a suicide blog post.

The key to understanding this guy (and others like him) is to grasp the staggering depth of his narcissism and self-absorption.

People who carry out these types of crimes have an incredibly invariant profile. It’s always the same in every single one of these crimes.

(1) They have a seriously inflated sense of their own competence. They believe they are in the top 1% of their chosen field when they are usually merely average or sub par. Since they believe they deserve the top rewards but only get the average rewards, they constantly believe themselves cheated out of money, jobs and status.

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I Don’t Mind This Type of Spin

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More revelations concerning the university professor who allegedly slaughtered some of her colleagues. (Hat tip to Ace.)

Seems she killed her brother with a shotgun 24 years ago, fled the scene of the crime after the death, and tried to carjack a passing motorist. It is tough to say if this is a true account, since police reports of the incident have been missing since 1988.

I worked for some years as a fingerprint technician for the local police force. Standard procedure was to keep all arrest records on hand until the person taken into custody died, and the death was verified via fingerprints taken from the corpse. Some of the cards were from before the First World War, and were the very first set of prints taken by the police.

fbi sample fingerprint card

Of course, I live in Columbus, Ohio. I have no idea what guidelines the cops in Alabama use. Something tells me that it is not all that different, though.

I found the following passage from the news article I linked to above to be interesting…

“After she left the room, the police said, she dumped the gun — for which she did not have a permit — in a second-floor bathroom.”

I’ve seen that mentioned in several news stories now. She did not have a permit! (“No permit! No permit!“) It seems the reporters writing these articles want to make sure that their readers know this.

In Alabama you don’t need a permit to purchase a firearm, only to carry a concealed handgun.

One of two things are happening here.

It could be that the journalists working on this story want to include the fact that the crime was premeditated, as the suspect cannot claim that she just forgot to leave her gun in the car when she came onto the university campus that morning. Not only is it illegal for someone in Alabama to carry a firearm on to school grounds, CCW permit or not, but it was illegal for the suspect to even carry a concealed handgun at all. This strongly indicates that she was planning this attack in advance.

The second possibility is that the reporters writing these news items hail from places with such draconian gun laws, that they simply cannot conceive of anywhere you can purchase and own a firearm without government permission. The fact that the suspect owned a gun at all when she didn’t have a license is a crime in their eyes.

Considering how much anti-gun bias I’ve encountered in the news over the past two decades, I’d have to say that the latter explanation is more credible than the former.

But, whatever their motivations, it turns out that they are actually doing a favor for those who advocate armed self defense. The suspect wasn’t one of us!

(Cross posted at Hell in a Handbasket.)