> There are a few genuinely 'bad people' out there
Do you want to count the number of violent rapes by year?
Violent premeditated murders?
Lets add violent robbery and assault by people have food and a place to stay, but are looking to level up and buy shiny things?
This is not a circumstance, and there are many 'bad people' out there.
The comment you’re responding to suggests that implementing certain societal changes would dramatically reduce crime. Your reply completely ignores their considerations and offers the status quo, I.e. a world completely lacking the changes they mention, as a supposed counter-argument.
I live in a country with next to no violent premeditated murders, next to no violent robbery. And a LOT of very poor people. But there is a public social safety net which you can't fall below. So no one is ever really desperate.
I understand if you're based in the US why you think this way, but it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Most of these are mental health issues. ESPECIALLY violent rape. Really every cop will tell you that vast majority of crime is not committed by some cold-blooded, well-planning, career criminals - but by mentally unstable or sick people and/or people suffering from addictions, that do ridiculous things being clearly out of sane mind. Sadly, psychiatry is really in its infancy and its success record at both diagnosis and treatment plain out sucks.
Basically, is there any "rational" reason to be a rapist AT ALL? Especially in today's world which is full of easy to get sex. I think every rapist is mentally not OK.
>Sure, but is it an illness which can be alleviated?
That's exactly my point. There isn't. So we criminalise it instead. It's inhumane and will be most certainly seen by our grandchildren in a way similar as we see chattel slavery today, but it's just simply that we have no other way today.
I agree, there is a problem with this. We've been there before: being gay was considered a sickness and/or a crime in most countries till recently, for example. But, medical science can adapt to changing social norms, it did before, and was hardly ever a blocker here - i can't recall if there was ever a point where medical science or healthcare industry insisted on labelling something a sickness when society or state claimed it wasn't.
My own feeling is that many of these people were not born evil, but their life circumstances as children (e.g. extreme poverty or abuse by family members) set them on a bad trajectory that's quite hard to correct for in adulthood.
I think giving every child a stable home life will go a long way in reducing crime. Of course some people will slip through the cracks. But I'm in agreement with OP that the number is quite small compared to the number of people currently incarcerated.
>Do you want to count the number of violent rapes by year? Violent premeditated murders?
People do keep count of this, and the (per-capita) rate of violent crime has been falling fairly monotonically since at least the end of WW2. Our genetics haven't changed in that time, but circumstances have.
I mean, it depends on what you mean by "violently inclined".
I'm not a sociologist, so I don't know specifically what works and what doesn't, but clearly whatever we've been doing for the last 50 years has led to a smaller percentage of children born with inherently aggressive/antisocial personalities going on to commit violent crimes as an adult.
If you're talking about adults with violent inclinations that have acted on them and committed horrific crimes, then the obvious answer is to segregate them from the rest of society as they're clearly dangerous.
It looks like we're speaking across purposes. I'm not trying to absolve rapists and murderers of blame, nor am I trying to downplay the danger they pose to the rest of us. At the same time, though we should acknowledge that violent crime seems to be a mostly-solvable problem on a population level and simply throwing up your arms and saying "bad people are bad" isn't going to push the stats down.
Some get better, some are disasters waiting to happen.
Source: Norwegians do this. It is not every day it seems but there absolutely are multiple cases each years of people with violent pasts who become violent again given the opportunity.
There are two types of prison sentences here: ordinary and "forvaring" (best translation I could come up with is "detainment") which practically means they get to serve a minimum sentence anyway but won't be released until the specialists consider them reasonably safe. Kind of close to life but with a chance of parole, only the parole is meant to be the rule, not the exception.
For now it seems to work well enough, but if the rate climbs I think they will have to make adjustments.
Do you want to count the number of violent rapes by year? Violent premeditated murders? Lets add violent robbery and assault by people have food and a place to stay, but are looking to level up and buy shiny things?
This is not a circumstance, and there are many 'bad people' out there.