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

[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.