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Irish Judge Orders 13-Year-Old To Surrender Xbox
An anonymous reader writes "In Belfast a High Court judge has ordered a 13 year old to surrender his Xbox to the authorities. The boy was charged with a series of robberies and in the bail application the judge asked the boy what he owned that meant a lot to him. The teenager said it was his Xbox games system. The judge told the youth that the surrender of the Xbox would show him what it was like to have something he really valued taken from him."
I wish people would get their heads out of their asses and realize that punishment and pain have basically no correlation. It's that mentality which leads to our poor recidivism rate. And a lack of appropriate rehabilitation while the convicts are still in prison.
Unless, you've got some actual evidence to back up your assertion that this is more likely to keep the lad from getting into more trouble than his parents paying the fine.
Uhmm if you READ, this was the boy's BAIL HEARING. So this was not at all simply 'siezing property', it was determining what of value the potential offender had that could be used to ensure he would make his trial.
Honestly this seems to me like a pretty well thought out decision on the judge's part. Most kids don't have a lot of financial assets that could be held for bail, but many have some posession that would be treated as such. Asking the KID what it was seems like it could backfire though...
Probably more to do with the fact that those 'resort' prison countries:
A) Also take care of their non imprisoned citizens -- they have functioning social safety nets.
B) Don't have America's shitty attitude towards ethnic minorities, or have very homogeneous culture.
I mean don't get me wrong, America's brutal prison complex is horribly immoral, but if you transplanted it to Scandinavia magically without fucking up their social safety nets, I don't think it would really RAISE crime at all.
While you do make a few good points here, I would add one point to this:
C) Drug use. For example, just in tenth graders, 41% of American students have tried pot, compared to 17% in Europe. Also included in this same study* is the fact that 23% of American students have used illicit drugs other than cannabis (not counting alcohol), while only 6% in Europe have.
I hate to be the one to bring up drugs, but from what I see on a daily basis, it does play a major role. I'm not saying every drug user is going to become a criminal, but it seems from recent data collected by SAMHSA, the balance of drug abuse is changing in the US. Marijuana and alcohol are decreasing, while other more serious, dangerous drugs are increasing in use. This varies from Europe, where Alcohol and Marijuana, in that order, are the most abused, with much, much lower percentages of the population using more dangerous, serious drugs.
I attribute this change in the US being due to the availability. Alcohol, as a teenager is actually much harder to come by than say marijuana, or surprisingly prescription pain killers, for example. Teens these days have broad access to marijuana, and seem to always have a friend who can get pain killers or tranquilizers (I do not have a source for this statement, it is based on personal observation.) This leads to them just avoiding the trouble of acquiring alcohol and instead, smoking marijuana, while not really a problem in my eyes, or taking prescription pain killers, which is a much bigger issue. Marijuana isn't truly a gateway drug, many users can go their whole life without moving to something "harder", but things like prescription pain killers, tranquilizers, etc are more likely to create the need to get higher and higher, and are rising in use at an alarming rate.
I've not known many marijuana users, or alcoholics for that matter who will harm someone to get money to acquire their drugs. Crack, Cocain, Meth, Pain Killers, Tranquilizer, etc users on the other hand, will go to great lengths to get their next high. I've seen many, many friends go down this path, and it's truly sad to see.
Study Cited: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/21/us/study-finds-teenage-drug-use-higher-in-us-than-in-europe.html
Older, but still accurate information with the same testing methodology used in both regions.