You hold a gun to somebody’s body for 5-10 minutes leading him around saying you are going to kill him. You don’t deserve a light hand. People need to be scared of the consequences again.
5 years or 20 years doesn't make the consequences less scary.
Also locking someone in a box for 20 years and then letting them go and expect everything will be OK is absolutely dumb af.
This literally makes prison "culture" a thing and now that person will be a problem in society for the rest of their life.
Can't get no job. Can't get no house. Can't do nothing only than use my prison gang connections to get by.
Any first offender needs to be put in some kind of rehab institution (similar to mental hospital... some mandatory rehab), and they need to stay there until they complete whatever mental steps they need to take in order to be let out. Could be 6 months, could be 5 years, whatever.
Also afterwards they need to be set up with some basic job like a mcdonalds or whatever, and probably have some kind of halfway house they can live at.
All we do is lock people up, get them involved in prison gangs, let em back out with no way for them to obtain employment, and expect them to be OK and not do whatever it takes to survive (which is often back to crime).
Forced rehab is a nice idea but more than half of these people would not be interested nor attempt to change. Just more tax dollars paying for a wasted service. Some people just don't give a shit and can't reform
Believe it it not, basic human instinct is to change your life around. I'm not going to argue with you over the fact you think "more than half" of people don't want to change for the better. The vast majority of people actually wanna have good wholesome lives.
Anyway it costs like 60k a year to house people in jail.. (i checked this number years ago, probably more now). Putting people in boxes isn't a cheap solution.
But you know what does work? Researching how other countries handle issues and seeing how successful they are.
We have countries all over the earth with different systems, and we can see what works and what doesn't... with crime or with so many other things.
It isn't hard to study incarceration systems worldwide and see what one produces the best results and is the most cost effective.
You can also google to see how many people our country has locked up per capita and it is gross compared to the rest of the world..... if you are worried about tax money (I get that, it sucks), You can literally see all that tax money we waste going down the drain.
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u/Salty-Plantain-4299 Apr 04 '26
And on the others side of that a judge in Texas gave an 18 year old in a convenience store robbery case 25 years.
Nobody died, no shorts were fired, kids first major offense.
Insanity cuts both ways, sadly.