Let’s look on the bright side. The people voted this way (quite significantly) so they must be seeing something positive there. I already know all the downsides so let’s discuss the upsides.
Let’s look on the bright side. The people voted this way (quite significantly) so they must be seeing something positive there. I already know all the downsides so let’s discuss the upsides.
Children take things at face value. Adults can use data to show that imprisoning more people doesn’t lead to lower crime rates except in the short term.
You’ve also changed the goal posts. Most crime is not violent crime.
I’m sorry, but you are assuming bad faith. Not everyone who breaks the law is a bad person. They only need to be a better role model out of prison than they would be in prison, and with that we get generational change. It takes time, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing.
It’s also important to note that women’s brains don’t finish developing until around their early 20s, and men their late 20s. Young people are dumb, and it’s not their fault. Someone who was an idiot at 20 can be a positive role model at 25, but not if they are in prison.
More than National and Act are willing to give them. They tried sending youths to boot camps last time they were power. The only thing it did was buy them votes, it did nothing for crime so it got shut down. Now they tested to see if the same thing works twice, apparently it does, so now we have to run a boot camp for another couple of years until we see it’s still not working.
We are operating a US style prison system, and until Labour took over we had an imprisonment rate almost as high, one of the highest in the developed world. I would much prefer a Scandinavian style system, where we accept people make mistakes and we try to give them the support to reintegrate in society. They do this for violent criminals including murderers, but I’d be happy if we at least started somewhere, and keeping non-violent criminals out of prison would be a great start.
And don’t even get me started on victims rights. Most criminals, and especially most violent criminals, are themselves victims, and no one seems interested in their rights.
Reducing crime requires small improvements over generations, not throwing more people in prison.
You’re vastly underestimating how much insight most children have to how the world works, in my view.
For example, I knew my father was often full of shit in my early teens.
It’s really interesting. I somewhat recently read a book about raising children, where a researcher talked about studies they did with kids. Kids understand a lot, at a young age (I think they did the studies on kids around ages 3-5). Kids will humour you, instinctively pretending they believe you, because it’s still helping them learn about the world. I know that kids are often smarter than adults 🙂
But it’s really obvious that putting people in prison for crimes will reduce the crime rate. It’s so obvious, it’s almost impossible to believe it’s not true. Neither kids nor adults are good at spotting counterintuitive things like that. The only reason we know it’s true is because of the vast data collection done these days (Probably best not to get me started on the involuntary data collection/data sovereignty).
Not only does throwing more people in prison for longer not reduce crime, it doesn’t even reduce violent crime. It literally does nothing more than cost the tax payer money, and satisfy a medieval sense of vengeance.
Is this why violent crime was down under Labour?
There is no data that shows violent crime increased because of lower incarceration rates. That’s the whole point.
There are a whole host of other factors that cause increases in crime, and even if harsher punishments lowered crime slightly, the most effective measures is addressing the underlying causes of crime in the first place. Mental health, poverty and inequality all have by far the biggest impact in crime rates. Locking up more people won’t change that.
Which Labour failed miserably at, by the way.
They certainly should have done more, I absolutely agree, but I do not think it’s fair to lay the blame for increased crime squarely at their feet.