I got a degree in criminology about 25 years ago and can confirm that there was no dispute in the science at that time that this was the way to reduce crime.

Everything else had been tried and tried again and proven not to work. It was around that time that my (then) field realized that the DARE program increased drug use.

It was almost 25 years after the St. Louis (maybe wrong city, it’s been a while) Crime and Control study proved that flooding the streets with more police officers only pushed crime into other neighborhoods.

When I studied, it was almost a joke to read new research coming out, because every serious study was just confirming what everyone knew. Guest lecturers would come in to talk about their latest theories in criminology. and, it was basically everyone just sitting around saying oh yeah that’s obvious. The field has peaked, and it was up to society then to catch up.

We looked at three strike’s laws, truth and sentencing laws, asset forfeiture laws, mandatory minimums, and every time we found that these policies increase violent crime. They further fracture communities and destroy families at the generational level.

It may not be intuitive to think that, but would a little thought, a little reflection, it is hard to say that this would not be the obvious result.

The methods to reducing and ending recidivism have been well known to science. People who talk about harsh law enforcement and punitive corrections are either ignorant, emotional blowhards, or not serious about reducing crime.

We have in America a well-established cat and mouse model of policing. And indeed it does Trace its history to slave patrols, a reactionary force of violence, dispatched into the community to capture offenders. The entire model does absolutely nothing to prevent future crimes from occurring.

Maybe they catch some guy who’s a serial offender, and get him off the streets. And they call that a win. But until the root causes of crime are addressed, all they’re doing is playing serial offender whack-a-mole; the next one is just going to pop right up. And maybe they’ll say, oh sure, that’s because we have a “catch and release” system.

Well, if we literally did nothing at all to stop crime, and totally abolished the concept of a police force, the science is absolutely clear that most people are going to age out of crime by the time they turn 25, and the rest, save for a few people who are likely mentally disabled, will age out by the time they hit 35. But instead, we’re kicking down doors and locking people out in cage for decades on end, making sure that their families are broken and locked in a cycle of poverty and trauma, and we end up sometimes with three generations of men sharing a prison together.

And while we’re on the subject of prison, the science is also absolutely clear that the way to reduce recidivism to almost nothing is to provide good health care, good mental health care, and to teach people marketable skills, all in a safe environment. When I got my degree, the field was shifting to a program evaluation approach, because we had figured out what programs we needed to have, and the only thing left to do was to fine-tune those programs to get the most out of them.

But then 4 years would go by, or 8 years would go by, and some new tough-on-crime politician would come and wonder why we’re spending so much money to hold people in a cage, and they’d start cutting the programs.

And despite that, and despite the emotional reactionaries who just want to see bad guys be treated badly to make themselves feel better about crime, virtually every type of crime is the lowest it’s ever been in my lifetime.

Nazi truck.

These cops will never testify in a case again without being asked about this.

I saw something maybe yesterday that was like, Samwise could carry frodo without being affected by the ring, so why didn’t they just tape the ring to a small animal and put it in a bag, and carry the bag to Mordor?

I’ll tell you that council didn’t think very hard before concluding “one of us must physically carry it all the way there.”

This is exactly right. They were just busy with important eagle business.

Nah, read the book. The dude that bred them has multiple books about what he did and when. You’re making shit up.

This is bullshit. In more than half of dog bites the breed is unknown. So that’s the end of your line of reasoning. You simply don’t know and cannot say their “nature.”

They were bred for hunting. Some people used some of them for fighting dogs years after they were first bred and used for decades as hunting dogs. Of the few that were used in fighting, dogs that bit humans were not allowed to fight and so were euthanized

Edit: abject know-nothings and science deniers downvoting me.

I made a post, as a lawyer, about some of the common law rules for self defense, five months ago, and I still get replies from people who don’t like the truth:

Deadly force is never authorized to protect property.

An intruder standing in your living room with no weapon or other outward sign of aggression is not a deadly threat and you will be charged with murder if you kill him.

People cannot handle this.

She’s referring to overly emotional men, who need extra attention; guys who can’t handle failure or rejection, who have a bad day at work and then can’t help around the house at all at night and who expect their partner to take care of them, regardless of how their partner’s day went. I know the type of dude she’s talking about and I wouldn’t want my daughter to bring one home. Dude needs a mother not a partner.

This was always legal. I’m an attorney, I do not represent any Trump supporters. If a client says something favorable about trump, they are no longer my client. They are just too stupid, judgement too poor, don’t understand difference between reality and fantasy. They make the absolute worst clients.