8 Year Old Girl Murdered (3 Viewers)

[Captain Obvious 1]

So how do we solve that problem?

I don't know how we solve the problem, but letting them off sure isn't the way to do it.

 

[banco55]

So how do we solve that problem? Build more gaols? Seriously you should join the NSW Liberal Party (or maybe the NSW ALP) and start banging on about the need for ten thousand more police, heavier prison sentences and a few more very expensive prisons.

It seems that it is stuck in the minds of NSW folk is that the way to stop crime is to put more police on the beat, and lock more people up. More police and more custodial punishments are only good at curbing crime to an extent. But law and order is substantially more complex than that. There are already an inordinate number of people in NSW prisons. Surely it would be better to prevent crime and then simply glorify the imprisonment of individuals and never look at to why he or she committed the crime?

You have to look at the motivations of Lornorder reforms. As pointed out by Cowdry the DDP isn't funded well, presumably because funding the DPP to prosecute crimes isnt going to win votes as much as pointing to 10 000 new police to please un named news outlets who like to jump on the populist bandwagon, appeal to the lowest common denominator and fuel the flames.

Locking people up is preventing crime. A career criminal is going to have a hard time committing crimes (except against other prisoners and guards) from behind bars. Of course law and order is a complex business but of the various factors that effect crime levels about the only one that governments can do much to control is policing tactics/number of police/prisons. For example demographics are a part of the crime picture. Less 18-25 year old men as a proportion of population means lower crime rates but the government can't do anything to alter that either way really. The state of the economy has a marginal effect on crime rates but it's not like any government wants a bad economy. So as far as alternatives go the law and order option is the most effective.

 

[MoonlightSonata]

Locking people up is preventing crime. A career criminal is going to have a hard time committing crimes (except against other prisoners and guards) from behind bars. Of course law and order is a complex business but of the various factors that effect crime levels about the only one that governments can do much to control is policing tactics/number of police/prisons. For example demographics are a part of the crime picture. Less 18-25 year old men as a proportion of population means lower crime rates but the government can't do anything to alter that either way really. The state of the economy has a marginal effect on crime rates but it's not like any government wants a bad economy. So as far as alternatives go the law and order option is the most effective.

Actually it has been known for a while now that imprisonment does very little to combat crime at all. There are extremely poor correlations between greater imprisonment and decreasing crime rates.

(For example, studies like this in the USA have examined the factors operating on crime levels and have noted increases in crime concomitant with increases in imprisonment. You may not have access to the journal, depending on your university's subscription, but note the abstract, "While calculations of the costs of crime are inherently uncertain, it appears that the social benefits associated with crime reduction equal or exceed the social costs of incarceration for the marginal prisoner.")

 

[Captain Obvious 1]

Yes, they speak of prisons as being "universities of crime". So what are we to do then, live in a state of anarchy, with no prisons? I think not.

 

[banco55]

Yet we have the same Steven Levitt putting the decrease in US crime in the nineties down to four factors:

1)more police
2)bigger prison population
3)receding crack epidemic
4)legalisation of abortion

From the article:
Using an estimate of the elasticity of crime with respect to punishment of 2.30
for homicide and violent crime and 2.20 for property crime, the increase in
incarceration over the 1990s can account for a reduction in crime of approximately 12 percent for the Žfirst two categories and 8 percent for property crime, or about
one-third of the observed decline in crime.7

http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/LevittUnderstandingWhyCrime2004.pdf

 

[angelduck]

sorry to be ignorant, how can legalisation of abortion lead to a decrease in crime rates?

im confused

 

[gerhard]

less unwanted financially destitute black children who take drugs and commit crimes