Tax money spent on the guilty but not victim?
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Topic: Tax money spent on the guilty but not victim?
Posted By: snowybeagle
Subject: Tax money spent on the guilty but not victim?
Date Posted: 09-Jul-2007 at 03:35
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Ponder over this scenario ...
A convicted murderer cost tens of thousands of dollars of taxpayers money annually, including free medical care, and even surgery or organ transplant.
The victim's family get nothing.
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Replies:
Posted By: Aelfgifu
Date Posted: 09-Jul-2007 at 05:16
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Well, Ideally, the victim gets care as well. The state here pays for therapy. And in some cases, the murderer has to pay a modern version of blood money.
And besides, that transplant (and most other medical care) is included in general health, and both perpetrator and victim and familiy would have gotten it anyhow, no matter where they were or what they did.
So what is the point? ------------- 
Women hold their councils of war in kitchens: the knives are there, and the cups of coffee, and the towels to dry the tears. |
Posted By: Dolphin
Date Posted: 09-Jul-2007 at 06:37
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What do you offer as an alternative? death penalty?
Aelfgifu is right, the victim should get care as well, so the treatment of the criminal is an aside to this. ------------- |
Posted By: Maharbbal
Date Posted: 09-Jul-2007 at 09:46
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The point is also that ideally the money spent on the criminal is more of an investment. I.e. the prison is not only a place where you punish but also a place where you learn. As such a good prison turns criminals into normal citizens that won't sin no more. As they don't commit any crime they don't cost society any money. Recently new figures came out in France comparing two groups of ex-cons one having had a reinsertion program and the second who did not. In the first group only 9% committed a new crime after in the second one 27%. That being said it is true that many progressist legal experts have criticize the prison system as it is now even for hard core criminals. The reason being that even in the best prison in the world (it would be the Northern European I guess) the criminal is merely paying its debt to society or enduring society's violence in return to his own violence, but the victim remains out of the equation. Three options have been proposed: (a) the victim or his relatives pick themselves a part of the punishment or has his say in the release of the criminal or something like that, (b) live interaction with the criminal can be proposed in jail with the criminal as a sort of double psychoanalysis or something and (c) the criminal works in jail and gives part of his revenue to the victim as well as later out of the prison. All these have positive and negative points and actually should certainly all be in use but not be mechanically applied. At the end of the day what people are interested in is not what happen to one given criminal but how to devise a program that would make us as safe as possible for the lowest price possible, and prison is neither. Prison should be reserved to a criminal elite having committed crimes particularly damageable to society (murder, rape, violent robberies, smuggling important quantities of products harmful to the public, corruption on a large scale, and that is it). In France an inmate is nearly 20 times more expensive than a university student and they just voted a law that automatically sends you to jail after the third offense (e.g. if you steal a third mobile phone you go 2 years to jail…). It is of course totally counterproductive. ------------- I am a free donkey! |
Posted By: malizai_
Date Posted: 09-Jul-2007 at 20:32
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On one level both need help. I believe there would be very few 'natural born killlers', with innate disposition that craved murder. In a lot of places convicts have to do forced labour, not as penance, but for prison economics. ------------- |