It's a crime

[undyingking]

I'm a bit puzzled by one aspect of this foreign criminals business that's been in the news lately. Clearly it's pretty incompetent to not know what on earth is going on with them, and to not be able to deport those whom the judge has said should be deported. But the press has been dwelling not on that but instead on the horror of VIOLENT FOREIGN THUGS STALK THE STREETS -- and not just the tabloids. What I don't understand is, given that there are thousands of criminals wandering around having served their sentence and been let out -- that being the nature of sentences -- why is it so much worse that some of them are foreign? Why should they be deported after release, if the judge thought that the sentence handed down was sufficient punishment for their crime? If only 5 out of 1000+ have reoffended, that sounds like their recidivism rate is actually less than the native population. Or is the subtext that really people aren't happy about anyone who's committed an offence ever being let out of jail?

Comments

[thecesspit.livejournal.com]

If only 5 out of 1000+ have reoffended, that sounds like their recidivism rate is actually less than the native population.

I suspect a proportion of the rest haven't been caught, and the recidivism rate is probably on the same sort of level.

But it's a good point tnat I hadn't appreciated...

[fractalgeek.livejournal.com]

The issue should be entirely - is the risk of the offense that they might commit worse than that they have been not rehabilitated. Surely the work should be going into better evaluation of this?

A case in point - a guy who has a good job is caught in the London bombings. He has a good job in an advertising agency, and becomes a spokesperson for the victims. When it comes out that many years previously, he was a member of a rape gang, was convicted and served his time and rebuilt his life afterwards, there are calls for his compensation to be stripped, and that it's "disgusting" he should get any, and that the official compensation then for his victim is so much less than the official compensation now. He loses his job and is now disabled, identified and vilified for something he served the stipulated sentence for. Regardless of any statements about the relative merits of how evil each act was, his treatment worries me....

Another statement: Paedophiles who are kept in a treatment program and engaged with the authorities are much less likely to reoffend. Vigilantes want them named and shamed, which drives them underground. By all means use supervision and eg list 99 to keep them out of close contact with strangers, but the very act of those "concerned citizens" raises the risk for other children....

Prison (and anything short of summary execution) are expensive systems, largely as forms of retribution. That much money spent elsewhere, would have positive benefits for the whole community, including helping preventing offending causes in the first place. Continuing to inprison those who are no longer a risk has little benefit, except to scare those who are unlikely to offend.

Who says this is a moral country?

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Dispassionate risk assessment isn't something that fits in very well to our "democracy of outcry" -- I guess the only time that governments were able to take senisble decisions on this basis without fear of what "the people" might think was during the war and for a short period afterwards.

It's natural to blame the media for inflaming things like the story you mention, but really I think media, politicians and the public are in a mutual spiral of degradation of judegement.

[wimble.livejournal.com]

I strongly suspect that nobody wants a known criminal in their vicinity. I must admit I've been puzzled by the concept of persecuting "time-served" paedophiles as well: surely, if they've been let out of prison, the authorities believe they're safe to be in the environment. The authorities could be wrong, of course...

What's really amazed me is that nobody's tied this in to ID cards: if everybody had ID cards, it'd be really easy to locate the VFTs. In that light, there's almost the thought that this might have been engineered to garner popular support...

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

These guys wouldn't have ID cards, though, because they're foreigners -- only Brits are going to get them. Unless they got issued a special 'convict' ID card whil they were inside.

[wimble.livejournal.com]

That's the other half of the argument: ID cards won't achieve what the government says they're going to do, because they're really useful when they're required at every possible opportunity (in which case, these guys will show up because they don't have them). Of course, that's a level of inconvenience that the government wouldn't want to publicise... as well as affecting all other foreign visitors.

[thecesspit.livejournal.com]

You could issue the cards on the way in and hand them in on the way out... just like visitor passes when you go into secure buildings.

Perhaps we could have photo id on lanyards all the time!

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Or implant them in the neck like pet microchips, and have a RFID reader on every street corner.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Or is the subtext that really people aren't happy about anyone who's committed an offence ever being let out of jail?

This is indeed the case, I'm sure. Except that each individual makes exceptions in the case of any friends or family who may have done time for whatever reason.

Add to this the fact that there are plenty of people who'd like to deport all foreigners and this simply provides a more acceptable excuse...

each individual makes exceptions

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

There seems to be a really quite fundamental human limitation in generalizing from particulars in this way -- same sort of thing seen when people rave about how wonderful their local hospital is, yet insist that the NHS as a whole is performing terribly.

[jvvw.livejournal.com]

I guess if a guest to your house is rude, you'd just not invite them back, whereas if your children were, you'd deal with it in a completely different way. I don't see that it's much different.

There's also the problem is that we don't and never will have a definite way of telling whether someone would reoffend. If we did we could just keep everyone in prison until we know definitely that they won't or had reached a sufficiently low probability of reoffending depending on the severity of the type of offence they might commit.

So if we value freedom as a human right and believe that people can change, we have to accept a probability of reoffence, even though we'd rather not have to given the choice. And I suppose with foreign nationals we do have that choice. In the end I think it probably all comes down to who we should let live in this country. There are plenty of British nationals we'd rather didn't live here, but we can't really get rid of them!

who we should let live in this country

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Mm, I guess that's it really. Maybe in the future we'll be able to take away their ID cards and turn them into uncitizens...

I suppose the thing is that as a society we're currently going through a very risk-averse phase, so the cutoffs are lower.

Re: who we should let live in this country

[jvvw.livejournal.com]

I suppose that most of us have some sort of preference for sharing the place we live with people whom we share a language and culture with, which probably extends to prefering such people to benefit from the taxes we pay and reap any other economic benefits of the work we do. If relationships between different cultures are difficult for whatever reason, then it's going to accentuate that.

It does sometimes seem so random what nationality people end up. I still find it weird that drcosmos and the_sybil's daughter is American because she was born there, and that my second cousin and her husband has to decide the nationalities of their first child (they were allowed a choice of two out of English, Dutch and French) when she was born.

Re: who we should let live in this country

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Mm, legal nationality may not always be that reliable an indicator of the "share a language and culture" measure. Particularly in countries which have seemingly quite arbitrary methods of determining it.