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

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.