http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/02/23/pennsy...dges/index.html

I've heard about this from other sources as well. Basically:

(1) Judges started getting kickbacks from the administrators of a couple private detention facilities.
(2) Those same judges certified the state-run detention facilities as too run-down to operate and closed them down. The private detention facilities which were bribing them were now the only option.
(3) Those same judges then started sentencing roughly 25% of the juveniles who came before them to serve time in those detention facilities. The state average was 10%.

One girl served time for posting a MySpace page making fun of an assistant principal when the website itself said it was a joke.
One boy served five months for shoplifting DVDs from Walmart.
A thirteen-year-old boy served time for trespassing in a vacant building.

It's about the worst case of judicial corruption I've ever heard of.

Sounds like that judge deserves to be tried on charges on child cruelty.

I'm just waiting for the posts that say he should be killed.

You mean tortured and killed?

A judicial system where sentences were dictated by DS threads would be an interesting place indeed.

lol... and the harshness of the penalty required is decided by who we choose to dictate it. For instance, if someone does something REALLY horrible, we let OHirtenfelder name the penalty.

Afrikaners do it best

seems like there's a lot of torture/bondage fans on here

i jerked off to hostel like 3 times

I jerked off to you jerking off to hostel, but only twice

Well duh everyone knows that these young people today are only trouble. Ends justify the means, right?

In certain cases, yes, actually. Not this one though.

That is what students of history call "the wrong answer"!

Theorize: New York is under an impending nuclear threat. One man in captivity knows where the bomb is, and the disarm code. Negotiation won't work. Your call, sir.

Excellent analogy! Now I see how we're supposed to run our society.

Afraid to answer?

It's totally unapplicable to any realistic situation...it may as well be in an episode of 24, for crissakes. Your tendency to paint things in such an extreme light once again comes through here, showing your lack of nuanced thinking.

And I'm sure you're one of those people who think everyone in Guantanamo Bay should just be set free, aren't you?

...no. Once again you demonstrate un-nuanced thinking, gitmo is not just a matter of "torture or set free". I believe anyone held by the United States needs to be treated humanely, which means following the terms of the Geneva Convention (which we've agreed to follow) and allowing them due process of law laid out under the military branches. AKA treat them like we would treat any other prisoner, which means treat them how we would hope OUR prisoners would be treated. We have every right to detain these people that we have reasonable cause to believe were involved in attacks on our country that caused deaths. We do not have the right to cause unreasonable bodily harm to them for our purposes or to withhold from them the right to a fair trial in a reasonable time frame.

As for waterboarding, I dunno where I stand on it. On one hand I acknowledge that it's widely regarded as excessively mentally damaging, but on the other hand in this psychiatrist-friendly era we live in, people can attribute massive mental damage to ridiculously mundane things. I'm not sure waterboarding meets the criteria for being cruel and unusual, but not so strongly as to say I'm for it.

Here's a non-hypothetical question on means and ends.

(1) According to modern theory of legitimate war versus terrorism, deliberately targeting civilians is completely unacceptable.

(2) In 1945, we dropped an atomic bomb in Hiroshima, Japan. The city was largely untouched by bombing up to that point because there was no even arguably military target within the city. Three days later, we dropped another bomb on Nagasaki, which admittedly had a port, but is still at least somewhat of a stretch to call a military target.

(3) Japan surrendered because of those two bombs.

(4) While hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed, significantly more would have been killed ("collateral damage") had we not dropped the bombs and instead launched a ground invasion of Japan. While preserving Japanese civilian life was certainly not the reason we dropped the two atomic bombs, it was the result.

So: does the end (ending WWII without killing a million Japanese civilians as "collateral damage" in a ground invasion) justify the means (deliberately killing 200,000 Japanese civilians)? Since I'm a firm believer in #1 above, this question has always given me trouble.



No, they should be (1) classified as criminal defendants and treated as such, (2) classified as POWs and treated as such, or (3) set free. But we have to do one of the three with each, because indefinitely holding people for years on end with no charges and no parameters to their treatment or the purpose of their detention is 100% bullshit. Never mind liberal versus conservative. Even Reagan said "trust but verify," and there's no verification going on in Guanatanimo under the "enemy combatant" system.

BTW, waterboarding IS torture. Once again, not a liberal versus conservative thing. That's straight from John McCain.

Break out the popcorn everyone!

Ah, a breath of logical fresh air. Thank you.

I will turn 35 in May of 2016, and would appreciate your vote that November. Thank you!

kill em all and let god sort em out

At least that's efficient.

Which god will sort em out?

The Norse ones.

It'll be funner that way.

THOR

sucks for those kids tho huh?

I'd be so pissed if I did time for making fun of a vice-principal on the internet.

Fixed.

LOL

Plaintiff: That man raped me!
Clarkma5: Pics or it didn't happen...
Porsche944: Bitch probably had it coming.
Mitlov: That's fucked up.
Diesel: OK, defendant is sentenced to holding up a sign saying he is a douche for the rest of his life [/case]
Dukenukem: lol owned!
Admin:

I dont do lol owned. Thats goota.

I have a sinking feeling that his sorting method would be putting everyone into one of two rooms: "total fucking pussies who I'd never want watching my back during Ragnarok and thus get no mead at Valhalla" and "other." And in room #2 is a lonely, lonely Audie Murphy.

Fun story: Back in 1945, my grandfather had just finished Marine basic and was given 2 weeks at home with his family and told it was probably the last time he would see them. He was then put on a Landing Craft and sailed out for Okinawa where the first invasion was to take place and he was to be on the initial invading force (human shield). Somewhere on the trip, Fat Man and Little Boy were dropped from a pair of B-29s. He got some great pictures and cancer from his following detail of patrolling the ruins of Nagasaki. When he got home, he had my dad. Thus, I'm here because of those two bombs. That question has never been a problem for me.

The American government had a hell of a problem - do they drop the bombs and face the consequences if all went according to plan or do they send what would be the bloodiest waterborne invasion of a country where, as they had already seen with the terrifyingly effective kamikaze attacks, people were willing to risk certain death to stop their enemy? The military at the time also speculated that the majority of the civilian population would take up arms against their invaders, ergo, the battle would have ended up with the delineation that the Israelis had in Lebanon that drew all that global flak: the lines between soldiers and civilians have been deliberately blurred making it impossible to tell who is who. I suppose this is grounds for another thread, but just my 2 psi.



John McCain is NOT a conservative. Waterboarding IS torture, just correcting some semantics.

fixed

Only in MidnightDoriftoLand, where 90% of Americans are communists, and the other 10% are even further left

Hate to brake it to you, but only reason Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren't touched before hand was because they were the targets picked out long ahead of time and they wanted to show it's true capability so Colonel/General LeMay of the AirForce wasn't allowed to firebomb the cities. LeMay had most of Japan in ruins, if they gave him enough napalm there would have been nothing left of Japan to surrender.
They had long been fire bombing civilian cities before fatman and little boy.

This thread made me lol many times regardless, though.

Consequentialism/Utilitarianism is a novel idea, it's like the scenario where someone in public view is murdered and the authorities have to arrest imprison/execute a random person for the "heads have to roll" mentality to keep public peace of mind. This sort of stuff that thrives in laboratories and poli sci books, yet rarely finds any use on a broad non person-person basis.

Clue: 99% of conspiracy theorists think the world operates this way.

Now THAT is a good story.

I know. I said that those two cities weren't military targets. I never said that everything else we bombed in WWII was a military target. It's my understanding that when the war ended, more Japanese civilians had been killed by our conventional (high explosive and incindiary) bombs than the two nukes.

^I don't have the will to check right now, but I think the fire bombing of Tokyo killed more people than the two nukes combined.

My personal opinion however is that a couple of demonstrations in unpopulated areas would have sufficed. I think there was a desire at the time to see what a nuke would do to a civilian population.

dresden

Before I go any further, might I reccomend this thread gets spun off into a different thread? Pennsylvanian detention facilities, while possibly similar to Japanese Internment Camps, don't really have much to do with this topic. Just a thought.


I think some perspective would help here - this wasn't the beginning of one of the bloodiest wars in recorded human history, this was the end. You're talking about millions upon millions dead (people who lived through WWII look at those protesting the Iraqi war with great puzzlement over this, at least according to my Grandmother - other side of the family - that lived out at Alamogardo during the war, there's another fun story there, but anyway). The cost of human life was a lot cheaper back then, and governments on all sides were desperate to end the bloodshed (we're only 20 years or so out of WWI when Germany invaded Poland in September of '39). Unlike WWI, which probably would've fizzled out without the involvement of the United States, the Japanese resolve (a fantastic study into their culture indeed) meant that they would fight tooth and nail unless drastic measures were taken.


The phrase "nationalization of banks" showed up on the front page of the WSJ last week, so I'm getting closer to being right. Besides, is MidnightDoriftoLand so bad?

In MDL, Monaco has declared war on Dubai for international tourism and has entered into a international amusement park race.
In MDL, rocket-powered chainsaws are not just a reality, but the main sport for the competitve lumberjack events.
In MDL, Lindsay Lohan would still be hot.
In MDL, people own up to their own decisions. Full. Stop.
In MDL, I'm totally getting a BJ while typing this.

Come to think of it, MDL fucking rules.

lohan also wouldnt be a lesbian in MDL

MDL is perfect.