Mass Murderer Demands Better Video Games in Prison

[spugnor]

There are two things you can be certain of when you are about destroy a human life in the name of justice:
1. Someone is already dead because the death penalty did not act as a deterrant
2. Someone is about to die because the death penalty did not act as a deterrant

The one thing you can never be certain of though, is whether they are truly guilty.

The question is, are they really human? I would posit that somebody who can, in cold blood, murder 77 people, is not a human being. Murder of one person who has wronged you, or murder in the heat of passion is very human. But mass murder is not.

So, if someone is accused of mass murder, and there is a preponderance of proof, then that person is no longer a human being, and should be put down the same way you put down a rabid animal.

 

[Deleted member 222586]

Well, that's Norway for you. The guy murdered 77 people and got a 21 year sentence. He's already gaming on a PS2.... how sad.

Big sentence != good justice. The US has veeery long and severe sentences and justice doesn't work at all.

 

[c3141hf]

yeah, just think if the US wasn't so poor maybe we could do something about our crime problem :roll eyes:

after all, we "only" spend half Norways *entire* GDP on prisons per year. Perhaps if we doubled that to their entire GDP (500 billion) we could actually make a dent in our chronic violent crime problem.

Or, better yet, we could take our entire prisoner, jail, and youth incarcerated population and just *create* a Little Norway (both are roughly similar in population size)!

The U$ for-profit prison system is designed to incarcerate as many people as possible for as cheaply as possible. Modern US prisons are essentially equivalent to Nazi concentration camps or Soviet gulags (especially that little dictator Arpaio's prisons). We now have a system in which judges and government officials are getting kickbacks for every person they put in prison and where we now have kids getting thrown into the big house for things that would have gotten them detention in the past.

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/2009-05-13-income-crime-united_N.htm?csp=34

I still don't understand how people fail to realize that US prisons are not full of triple digit income college graduates from a long line of well-to-do families. Is this really some kind of newsflash? Is it really confusing that the same logic applies everywhere?

Look at the violent crime rate in Mexico... is it because their prisons are too harsh, or is it because they have such large masses of uneducated young males from poor family backgrounds committing a lot of violent crime? This is so common-sense and intuitive that its painful watching people make such ridiculous connections between cause and effect when its staring them right in the face.

The violent crime rate in Mexico is a direct result of the US-led war on drugs.

I understand completely what you are saying, and frankly think its a load of bull with no evidence to support it. Criminals that are in jail are off the street and aren't committing crimes, and its intuitive that punishments act as a deterrent to crime and are weighed in on the risk/reward ratio of any decision a rational person would make. An irrational violent person wouldn't be affected, but those people belong behind bars away from the population anyway. The worst of those criminals should shot to eliminate them from the population, and to stop them from reproducing.

If American concentration-camp prisons deter crimes, then why is our crime rate so high? The American private for-profit prison system is designed to encourage repeat offenses to maximize profit by making it impossible for someone to get back on their feet after a criminal conviction. By ensuring that a convict is ostracized for life and unable to get a job, you ensure that people who make a stupid mistake never have a chance to reintegrate into society and are instead forced to become career criminals.

Criminality is like a fungus, and it only takes one moldy strawberry in your basket to quickly spread and ruin those around it.

If you really want to lower the violent crime rate, you would use common sense and recognize the link between education and income levels and do what you can to increase these among your population and violent crime will drop accordingly. One of the easiest things you can do is to stop importing poverty and low-education into your country, by eliminating the problem with illegal aliens.

If the illegal aliens were white Norwegians, would you have as much of a problem with them? The vast majority of the crime in this country comes from the people who run it (e.g. the CIA, the NSA, the imperial president who thinks he has the right to murder anyone he sees it), not the immigrants.

Further if you incarcerate and eliminate the worst offenders to keep them away from society, and encourage policies to lower the teen pregnancy and general reproduction rate among the least educated and poorest areas while simultaneously concentrating law enforcement and education funds in these areas you can fight a long term battle on the rest (and welfare programs that encourage breeding aren't helping either... if you can't afford to put hot dogs and poptarts on your own plate, you can't afford to have four kids with three different men).

Now we are treading dangerously close to eugenics.

It's not all because of the immigrants, but illegal aliens have NO RIGHT to live here. Get here the right way like I did, going through the process and paying the expenses and pay your taxes. I don't give a fuck if you had 20 babies here, you still need to fuck off into your own country and come back when you can get here legally. It just promotes popping out babies way too much. After getting rid of all the illegals you can focus on education and poverty.

I would point out that Brevik attacked and did what he did because he was a xenophobic hate mongering bigot who hated the fact that non-whites were immigrating to Norway. I find it ironic that you would therefore try to then use this as an opportunity to go on a diatribe against the very same kinds of people that Brevik hated.

The question is, are they really human? I would posit that somebody who can, in cold blood, murder 77 people, is not a human being. Murder of one person who has wronged you, or murder in the heat of passion is very human. But mass murder is not.

So, if someone is accused of mass murder, and there is a preponderance of proof, then that person is no longer a human being, and should be put down the same way you put down a rabid animal.

You do not have the right to determine who is and isn't human. We've been down that path before with countless brutal tyrants and dictators and it is a dangerous precedent.

 

[Aluisious]

Stop pretending "we can't know if he's truly guilty" when he killed dozens of people, everyone saw him, he admits it continually and there's physical evidence. That only proves that you're irrational.

 

[Deleted whining member 223597]

US prison system like concentration camps or gulags. AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH. This is pure gold.

 

[Ducman69]

If American concentration-camp prisons deter crimes, then why is our crime rate so high?

Why do you use a question mark at the end of a statement? I have explained ad-nauseum why I believe that our crime rate is so high, so why would you direct that "question" at me as if you were actually curious? The cliffs notes is that there is a reasonably large segment of our population raised with poor cultural values and role models, often by a single parent, that has below average education levels, living in poverty that are prone to violence and gang behavior.

The idea that if we just let all the prisoners run free or adopted $500 a night luxury-hotel prisons even for mass murderers like this guy, that our crime rate would suddenly drop is nonsense. Detroit isn't Oslo.

Lets look at Singapore for example regarding your POSITIVE assertion about cause and effect, as it has a per capita GDP that is actually on par with the United States (virtually identical), and it has one of the most unforgiving judicial systems on the face of the planet, with even hefty fines (or jail if you can't afford it) for chewing bubble gum or spitting on the street. They also happen to be well known as one of the cleanest and lowest crime rate cities in the world. So if harsh prisons are a problem, then why isn't it a problem in Singapore? They certainly have a war on drugs, and its successful too, with drug use almost unheard of. If there is suspicion of drug use, police do not need a warrant, and you are automatically guilty by association if you are aware of someone using drugs and not reporting it or have drugs found in your dwelling that you have the keys to as part of their zero tolerance policy.

And guess what happens if you are found to have enough marijuana to be a dealer (500 grams, not that much)? Mandatory Death penalty, and they carry it out swiftly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Singapore

 

[Ducman69]

If the illegal aliens were white Norwegians, would you have as much of a problem with them?

Not likely, as they are probably rich and well educated and would raise property values. Last I checked, Norweigians aren't violating US law by sneaking into our country and having babies. Why not just come out and pull the race card instead of beating around the bush! I can assure you if we had a problem with a whole bunch of impoverished violent white Irishmen or Polish people, I would react just the same, but thanks for your concern.

 

[Ducman69]

BTW more reading if you care:

Capital punishment is legal in Singapore. The city-state had the second highest per-capita execution rate in the world between 1994 and 1999, estimated by the United Nations to be 1.383 executions annually per hundred thousand of population during that period. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Singapore

Per the UN, Singapore has the second lowest murder rate in the world. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-24428567

Singapore has one of the lowest violent crime rates in the world. http://furrybrowndog.wordpress.com/2012/05/10/what-explains-singapores-persistently-low-crime-rate/

So there you have it, a police state with far higher police per capita, an extreme policy against drug use with mandatory death penalty for even moderate amounts of drugs for small-time dealers, with very harsh prisons, and there is no big problem with recidivism, very low violent crime rate, and no problems with drug use or single-parent households, etc. It may be a complicated dynamic, but it certainly proves that harsh legal systems don't breed crime.

 

[c3141hf]

Why do you use a question mark at the end of a statement? I have explained ad-nauseum why I believe that our crime rate is so high, so why would you direct that "question" at me as if you were actually curious? The cliffs notes is that there is a reasonably large segment of our population raised with poor cultural values and role models, often by a single parent, that has below average education levels, living in poverty that are prone to violence and gang behavior.

The idea that if we just let all the prisoners run free or adopted $500 a night luxury-hotel prisons even for mass murderers like this guy, that our crime rate would suddenly drop is nonsense. Detroit isn't Oslo.

Lets look at Singapore for example regarding your POSITIVE assertion about cause and effect, as it has a per capita GDP that is actually on par with the United States (virtually identical), and it has one of the most unforgiving judicial systems on the face of the planet, with even hefty fines (or jail if you can't afford it) for chewing bubble gum or spitting on the street. They also happen to be well known as one of the cleanest and lowest crime rate cities in the world. So if harsh prisons are a problem, then why isn't it a problem in Singapore? They certainly have a war on drugs, and its successful too, with drug use almost unheard of. If there is suspicion of drug use, police do not need a warrant, and you are automatically guilty by association if you are aware of someone using drugs and not reporting it or have drugs found in your dwelling that you have the keys to as part of their zero tolerance policy.

And guess what happens if you are found to have enough marijuana to be a dealer (500 grams, not that much)? Mandatory Death penalty, and they carry it out swiftly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Singapore

Just because Wikipedia says something doesn't make it true. The fact that Singapore murders so many of its subjects in cold blood over trivial things belies the notion that it has a low crime rate (I don't exclude government crimes). Singapore has one of the lowest press-freedom indexes of the entire developed world and, while I'm sure the ministry of propaganda over there (the government there, does, after all, control all the media) would love you to believe that the crime rate is the lowest in the world, that does not make it true anymore than the nonsense that comes out of North Korea or other tin-pot dictatorships.

 

[mope54]

For the last time, and then back on ignore you go, I stated that poverty and violence breed crime and prisons tend to make things worse. Prisons make the situation worse for everyone because nearly everyone who is sentenced to a prison sentence comes back home (well over 90%). When they come back home they are worse off than before they went in, have learned even worse values than before they went in, and have to deal with a whole range of things that make it worse to rent places to live and find legitimate places to work.

Now, if you want to use Singapore as a model then you might be able to build a case that putting a lot of people to death for fairly innocuous things is one way to go about reducing crime. But that's a slightly bizarre argument to make in the context of what to do with American corrections. We don't have a police state, we have a range of civil and human rights, and we don't as a general rule think that drug addicts or even dealers are deserving of death.

Now, if you're arguing for us to become a police state to control our chronic crime problems then you're going to have a difficult time convincing anyone who seriously thinks about these issues that's a viable solution.

But comparing Singapore to the US and then drawing conclusions you did in the way that you did is silly...from a scientific perspective. It makes about as much sense as me saying well Oregon has a similar population rate so why is its crime higher than Singapore? Or why is Oregon's crime rate lower than Los Angeles crime rate...must be because they have more people in L.A. than Oregon and then of course, to be true to your style of "discussion," they also have more black kids than Oregon.

So far your "proposals" for reducing violent crime in the US are transition into a police state, put a lot of people to death for various offenses, and blame it all on certain ethnic minorities you have a lot of strange misconceptions about. So no, ducman, we are just going to have to continue to disagree on this subject that your suggestions approach anything remotely resembling viable solutions.

What we (and by we, I mean people like myself who actually study the data with scientific methodology and not haphazardly throwing darts at maps and comparing widely divergent societies for the fun of it) know is that when we compare penal policies, controlling for things like population sizes and racial composition and income levels, that punishment has little to no bearing on reducing crime. We've never been "soft" on crime in the US but some states have less punitive policies than others so we can compare them to one another and some states with harsh penalties have higher crime and some have lower crime, some states with relatively less punitive sentencing structures have higher crime and some have lower crime. The bottom line is that prisons don't stop crime. They don't cause crime. They don't do much of anything in terms of crime directly one way or another that we can definitively say.

What we can say, however, is that we spend a *lot* of money on our prisons and we don't get much back for that investment. The things that happen to people inside of prison make their lives worse. The policies that impact them when they come out make things worse. People who don't commit crimes are impacted by prisons, too. They have to pay for the prisons and they have to deal with the people who come out of them in worse conditions.

The money we spend on prisons could be better invested elsewhere. Somewhere in your strange ramblings you stumbled across the fact that better educated and wealthier people don't commit as much crime as uneducated, impoverished people. Then you wondered aloud why no one could understand that reality. Everyone understands it. It's not a great mystery. You don't need a doctorate or someone with a doctorate telling you that to understand it.

The mystery is, even having that basic understanding, when an expert on the topic points out to you that one possible solution is to divert some of the 200 billion dollars per year we spend on the back end (where by definition we can't prevent crime...because in order for prison to happen the person has to have already committed a crime) we can spend it on the front end with education and preventing child abuse and family violence, how your next response can be that won't work because if you don't put people in prison then children will grow up in violent homes.

It's confusing because you either didn't read my response, didn't understand my response, or simply don't care about it because you're on a soapbox and the facts and responses from someone else don't matter to you. You exhibit that kind of behavior in pretty much every discussion you get in on this board and that's why I have to leave you on ignore. Every once in a while I unhide your responses and try to engage in a conversation because it's a discussion board and I think it's odd to have to place people on ignore and also because I'm a professor I get weird sometimes and actually think people in general enjoy to learn the facts about something and possibly change their views if the facts are there to do so. It's a naive belief but one I have to deal with on my own. I used to become frustrated and respond differently and sometime get warnings and then I finally, reluctantly started placing people on ignore here. You were one of the first. I guess you can take some pride in that if you'd like but it's sad to me.

I hope you don't act like this in public. I don't think you do although I've met people who say crazy things like you do from time to time. I've not often heard someone package them all up into one incoherent spiel like you do so regularly, however. Well anyway, like I said, I was wrongly incarcerated and then I got out and earned my doctorate and as far as I know I'm one of about a couple hundred people who have done that sort of thing in all of human history. From my perspective you missed a fairly unique opportunity. I don't often put my whole business out like that but I'm teaching on this very subject this quarter and I'm open about my past to my students and it always impacts someone who really needed to hear it because of something going drastically wrong in their life. So it wasn't necessarily for you because you're particularly stuck in a fairly vicious worldview that you can't seem to shake...at least from my past dealings with you.

So anyway, with that said, I may be wrong but I did something about it. I went and earned my credentials and I work in policy reform and try to do what I think is best for the people around me. I can say this much about prisons: they're new. The way we do them is really very new in human history. We've only used them like we do for around two hundred years. The data isn't all the way in on how they impact prisoners but so far it doesn't look good. And we are just now learning how prisoners impact communities and that doesn't look good. True, a couple hundred years ago we didn't have to deal with people coming back from prison because we executed or banished our convicts. But the world has moved on. We are lagging and we're not with good company. The countries who share our punitive policies, especially the death penalty, are the countries we are either at war with or think of as our polar opposites. Meanwhile, the entire western democratic societies have ended the practice of killing their common criminals and they're doing quite well in terms of levels of violence. They didn't succumb to waves of mass murders...Norway is rightly shocked by what happened.

But while they were suffering with this one tragedy we suffered a handful (talking about spree murders here, not common street crime) in the same timeframe. So whatever else happened in this thread the reality, the bottom line, is that we can't stop this kind of thing from happening by being more punitive. The facts just simply do not support that conclusion. I prefer to live in the US despite the persistent rates of violence we suffer. But if I had to choose between Norway and Singapore I would choose Norway. Both equally safe yet one with much more liberty and respect for human dignity and life. Liberty and respect for human dignity and life are things that matter to me.

 

[Ducman69]

Just because Wikipedia says something doesn't make it true. The fact that Singapore murders so many of its subjects in cold blood over trivial things belies the notion that it has a low crime rate (I don't exclude government crimes). Singapore has one of the lowest press-freedom indexes of the entire developed world and, while I'm sure the ministry of propaganda over there (the government there, does, after all, control all the media) would love you to believe that the crime rate is the lowest in the world, that does not make it true anymore than the nonsense that comes out of North Korea or other tin-pot dictatorships.

I lived there for a few years, as well as all over Europe including Germany, Spain, France, and all over the South in the US and visited many others, and I can assure you it is the cleanest and safest city I have ever been to yet alone lived in.

Call BS all you want, but anyone that has ever been to Singapore can testify that its at least one of if not the safest and cleanest major city in the world. Just look on google maps streetview and see for yourself, or read the countless articles online about how freakishly clean/safe it is. We used to rollerblade through the inner city in the middle of the night, no concerns at all, as there was no bad part of town... even the HBD is great. http://qz.com/30159/what-the-world-...and-squeaky-clean-high-rise-housing-projects/

So extreme example of harsh prisons, harsh war on drugs with death penalty for even moderate amounts, and extremely low levels of criminality despite the ultra-high population density.

 

[Ducman69]

It's confusing because you either didn't read my response, didn't understand my response, or simply don't care about it because you're on a soapbox and the facts and responses from someone else don't matter to you.

Your argument is very simple and consistent, and I've explained I don't accept the "be quiet, I'm an EXPERT and study this stuff so my opinion is beyond question" reasoning. Beyond that, I've also explained why your example of Norway's luxury hotel prisons as an example would apply to the US, and find it commical that you are then so offended when using Singapore as another extreme example considering their crime rate is far lower than Norways despite having half the per capita GDP (we both agree poverty breeds criminality all else equal). I have stated that its a complicated issue, and there are several factors, which include the makeup of the people of a nation and the culture and values they are raised with, which if anything you have reinforced with your examples, even though I can sense it offends your sensibilities.

And thank you, you're an expert, we get that. I'm sure there are many experts that think you're full of crap and disagree with you completely, just as there are "expert" politicians on polar opposite extremes of the political spectrum.

 

[Ducman69]

BTW, you can't be so obtuse as to believe that I was recommending the United States adopt Singapore's political or judicial system, and I've stated in other threads in fact that I strongly believe that marijuana should be legalized. It was YOU that made this rediculous assertion that what works in Norway with their peaceful, well educated, and rich population would have to work in the United States, which of course is nonsense as that would only work if the United States were filled with a bunch of college educated Norweigans.... its not. So I brought up Singapore as a polar opposite, due to the claim that harsh prisons CREATE crimality and recidivism (well someone did, my response quoted the person) demonstrating this is also patently false, because it only takes one big example to show the rule is wrong. By no means do I think that either the Norweigan or Singaporean system are what we should adopt, nor have I ever implied that.

What I believe, since your straw man argument is quite BS, is that statistics are painfully clear that culture, family values, income, and education level are the primary factors that determine someone's predisposition to violent crime, that all rational people will be affected by a risk/reward ratio in any decision process (there is a reason criminals often attack old people rather than police stations), and that irrational criminals can't be reasoned with an have to be removed from the population regardless, because criminality breeds criminality as a negative influence on everyone's lives they interact with. And lastly I believe that prisons are for rehabilitation of criminals, where they serve their time and learn their lesson from it, and because its unpleasant don't wish to repeat the process. For those that cannot be rehabilitated, or whose crimes don't give them the right to be rehabilitated (such as killing 70+ people), you give 2-years for a reasonable time for appeals, and in the cases where there is no doubt because the evidence is overwhelming (like in this case, confession etc there is no reasonable doubt), they should be put to death. No torture, nothing fancy, just IMO goulitine as I think its better than lethal injection but whatever floats your boat as long as its quick and painless.

 

[nakedhand]

You want to REALLY deter murderers?
Give 'em the Darby treatment from Law Abiding Citizen, put it on TV every time, make it a public execution. Screw this life in prison BS.
Make people aware there is a consequence for their actions and its so damn grim is scares the living shit out of them.

This is basically how it once was, disregard TV, and it didn't deter murderers back then either.

Murderers like him don't give a flying f"#" about common norms, convention, law, ethics, morals etc. People kill for all sorts of messed up reasons and sometimes without - in chaotic acts of temporary insanity. Severe punishment never deterred anyone but the person who are already unlikely to commit murder in the first place. Stop thinking these predators think like the rest of us, they do not respond to reason and logic.

 

[c3141hf]

I lived there for a few years, as well as all over Europe including Germany, Spain, France, and all over the South in the US and visited many others, and I can assure you it is the cleanest and safest city I have ever been to yet alone lived in.

Call BS all you want, but anyone that has ever been to Singapore can testify that its at least one of if not the safest and cleanest major city in the world. Just look on google maps streetview and see for yourself, or read the countless articles online about how freakishly clean/safe it is. We used to rollerblade through the inner city in the middle of the night, no concerns at all, as there was no bad part of town... even the HBD is great. http://qz.com/30159/what-the-world-...and-squeaky-clean-high-rise-housing-projects/

So extreme example of harsh prisons, harsh war on drugs with death penalty for even moderate amounts, and extremely low levels of criminality despite the ultra-high population density.

I would hardly call Singapore safe. There are any number of peaceful activities that can get you tortured or murdered by the government there. Again, I do not exclude crimes committed by the government from crime statistics. Singapore has one of the highest government-sanctioned murder rates per capita. When you factor in all of the people the government has brutally tortured or murdered, you get an alarmingly high crime rate.

 

[Bone_Enterprise]

"Brevik is threatening to go a hunger strike"

Problem solved.

 

[Ducman69]

Singapore has one of the highest government-sanctioned murder rates per capita. When you factor in all of the people the government has brutally tortured or murdered, you get an alarmingly high crime rate.

It does!? Oh yeah, I was the one that posted that statistic.

The police don't grab you off the street for no reason, and they have trials just like everywhere else. So no, other people, including the world health organization, do not include capital punishment in the violent crime statistic, and you and your children can certainly feel safe anywhere in the city even in the middle of the night in skimpy clothes in the "projects" housing.... as long as you aren't accidentally cooking meth at the same time for distribution. Pretty easy rule to follow, and there are no surprises that its against the law (tons of signs out).

 

[Methadras]

Luckily for Norwegians they have significantly lower rates of homeless, violence, and people robbing anything to make do than we do despite their so-called luxurious correctional institutions.

Yeah, but remember, Norway is only about 5 million people in a pretty big land space, so...

 

[Admiral Equinox]

That and Quest 64. Without a memory card.

Yo really?
I fucking loved Quest 64 - but I think I'm the only one who did.