I checked again. I thought there was a series of court cases that limited the seizures to what was in the possession at the time of arrest (driving with a pound of pot in the car) and to what can be reasonably demonstrated that the proceeds of the illegal activity paid for. There had to be a hearing on the validity of the claim where the owner could dispute it, and a hardship out for family members who share the vehicle (home/whatever) if it wasn't purchased with drug money or the proceeds of illegal activity.
The one case that made it to the supreme court was tossed out because the owner stopped disputing the state's claim over the property making the case moot. All the other cases I found seem to be state cases which only apply to those states.
Either way, seizing something can be part of the evidence process in which it is argued that because his job pays 16k a year salary, the only way he could afford this 95k Porsche was with the proceeds of selling drugs reinforcing the idea that the 20 plants growing in his closets and the bail pot under the floorboards were not for personal use. But i still don't think the property can be converted to public use until after the conviction.
That's only if they can show the car or asset was purchased using proceeds from drug trafficking. And quite frankly, I'm not sure what other use there might be for a vehicle purchased by the proceeds of a Meth operation. It certainly shouldn't stay with the convict as it will show that crime does pay. It would be like robbing a bank, buying a house with the cash, and then keeping it after getting busted.
I hope you know that the value of bonus's paid in stock and the value of stock in excess of the option price is counted as and taxable at regular income when given to just the CEOs. It's called a non statutory stock option and in some cases, the CEO can be charged with a percentage of the value of the options if the total amount of options are worth a certain amount in order to put them into the Alternative Tax Method making them responsible for taxes on income they didn't technically receive.
Less taxes might end up being paid, but it isn't like it is being played out here on slashdot. It certainly isn't the way you seem to think it is.
It's not a dodge. The option counts as taxable income in several different ways. There are two basic types of stock options, a statutory option and non statutory stock option.
A CEO or any executive taking options as part of a pay package falls under a non statutory option and they will have to pay a portion of the option value if the stock value is known whether they exercise the option or not. They will have to pay income tax on the difference between the option value and the stock price minus the already taxed value at the time of exercise. Also the option value, even if the value of the stock is unknown and it was not exercised during the year, can put a tax payer into a rate that forces them to pay the alternative minimum tax.
What taking a $1 salary does is tie the majority of the pay to the outcome of the job performance and allows the executive to actually make more money then what might have been financially prudent at the time of the contract. Of course that is dependent on the executive's ability to improve the financial situation of the company and therfore the value of the stock. But the premise is that a company near bankruptcy cannot be paying millions to a new CEO, but they can under value stock- give them an option to buy, and when the CEO does his job and purchases the stock, he instantly makes a profit of the difference in value. This might look like $2.00 per stock option because of the current state of the company verses $15.00 per stock value at exercise or end of year which is $13 per stock profit over the number of options which might be 3 or 6% or more of the total stock available or so. Sometimes it's spread over a certain amount of years. GM for instance has 1.6 billion stocks issued and outstanding as of February 2012.
What the fuck do you think I can see that weather is not climate means? Are you daft or just pissed that I strayed slightly from your dogma?
And why would there need to be a magic replacement for oil? For god's sake open you eyes and think for your self. Technology can be anything including improvements in usage efficiencies, recycling, alternative fuels and so on. Hell, even improvements on pumping the oil out of the ground can move peak oil down the road.
Step outside the church and see what the real world it like every once in a while for fuks sake.
As I said, it is disingenuous to claim anything about a policy that was never passed into law. You aren't even picking which so called policy that was rejected, you are talking about. Nixon submitted 2 health care plans that got rejected for Kennedy's HMO act.
I'm also not sure where your working policies outside the US are supposed to be. Most all Government health care in other countries comes from an attempt at health care reform from the implementation of article 25 of the UN declaration on human rights passed in 1948. The US did not sign that provision.
But 20 years is hardly enough time to gauge if something is working/successful or not. There certainly are horror stories about them today indicating that if they ever were working, it isn't now or at least at what we would consider an acceptable level. The medical tourism rate in some of these countries is double and even triple that of the US. In Canada, they even sell wait insurance on the private market in case the gods of the government make you wait too long for your treatment- they will fly you to a country with private medical and pay for the treatment there. In England, they have used that as an excuse to deny treatment for any specific illness altogether. If you obtain treatment for any illness they are treating you for outside of their approval, they stop paying for any treatment for that illness altogether.
Now do not get me wrong, I'm not saying our system doesn't need work. It just doesn't need to be mangled into the crap people are not happy with in other countries. We could fix 90% of what is wrong with our system without ever having a mandate or getting rid of insurance or the government telling us what we can and cannot eat.
I doubt the insurance companies would have put much more into it then what is being done by the republicans and other groups.
I also think it is a little disingenuous to bring up failed attempts at the same thing and say it's better then what was already rejected a generation or more ago as if it is somehow validates what some don't like about it today. What we got during the Nixon years was the HMO act creating most of the insurance companies as we see it today which was largely the brainchild of Ted Kennedy who led the charge about how HMO's are evil and he knew how to fix them.
My guess to why would be either medieval perverts stashing away their conquests to brag when the boys from the next castle over came to visit (sex outside of marriage happened but was frowned on) or more likely rodents of some sort took them to create a nesting area which would explain 2700 fragments outside of getting old and falling apart.
Of course the carpenter who built that room could have been getting old and the cracks between the floorboards were larger then in other rooms. In this case, they could have just slipped through the cracks like that one dam sock that keeps coming up missing.
I've noticed recently that somehow a 10 to 15 degree F above normal swing in temperature in a localized geographical error is supposed to be proof of a 1-2 degree F increase in global temps. Any questioning of that seems to be blaspheme and whoever doesn't tow the line is supposed to be stupid.
Me, I can put aside my biases and evaluate the situation independent of preconceived notions. I can see that weather is not climate and that weather has 100 and 500 year patterns that are influences by other natural forces like variations in decadal oscillations in the oceans and this has been known for so long that entire cities are developed around a 100 year and 500 year flood map. I can see that peak anything is limited to the current technology for employing that anything and new technology can move the peak down the road considerably.
I'm calling bullshit on this. Obama care was pushed through without many republicans voting for it at all. They manipulated the bill through obscure rules and could have just as easily scammed a single payer provision in it. The fact that you don't see that is probably because the democrats as a whole did not support a single player plan and while some might have, making the idiots think they wanted one thing while doing another which is a common political tactic, ensured their reelection from the voter base.
He was being facetious about the raw data disappearing in some of the earlier studies leaving only normalized data with no way of validating the processes of changes to the values when certain people considered skeptics requested it for review.
In all honesty, if the kid is touching hot things after being told not to because it is hot, he probably isn't that old so not knowing what a dentist is or why an appointment is necessary is probably within the same realm.
Teaching kids to learn means them actually thinking is a more apt presentation of what needs to happen. The problem is that the frontal lobe does not fully mature until age 25 or so. More specifically, the prefrontal cortex of the brain doesn't create significant amounts of myelin (the white matter in the brain) in the frontal lobe until the late teens and there are large differences in the amount between children and teens and adults over 25. This is significant because this is where the reasoning happens and very few children - especially below the age of 13, can make significant reasoning decision as a matter of cognitive function. Most who appear to be capable are recalling memories of similar situations and basically reenacting them.
Of course one of the biggest problems with this entire line of discussion is that not all people are biologically equal so some children will develop faster or slower or to higher and lesser degrees then others. But the age they should be working on their cognitive reasoning is really later in life around the age they start driving or a few years before (the motor functions are largely in place so at this age) and this should continue well into their adult life. There really is a reason why someone is legally considered an adult at an age near 20 instead of near 10 year old.
There are a lot of situations where a child simply needs to listen and do as they are told. Instead of teaching them to ask why, we need to teach them how to solve problems and retain information so they can figure "why" out when the brain matter really does appear and connections start being made. They need the knowledge so when the situation presents itself, the connections are made.
The federal government shouldn't be evaluating teachers at all. Schools and education are a state issue that the federal government can assist with but in no case should they be over it.
Each state and municipality within the state should decide the best way to evaluate the teachers serving their communities. In my idea world, their evaluations would pertain to the amount of knowledge retained by their students pursuant to the state guidelines and grade levels and so on.
As for a teacher teaching kids weird and strange things, that is something else that needs to be caught at a state and local level. The reality is that is exactly where they will get discovered should it ever happen.
Legal immigrants not yet citizens, and alien residents can and do often get drivers licenses without becoming a citizen. Alien residents often have no desire to become citizens.
What the statement is saying is you have to prove a legal basis for being in the country to get a drivers license and it will mark on the license who the citizens are.
I can see it at your house now, Riceballsan: Get your shoes on junior, we are going away Junior: Why? Riceballsan: because I have an appointment Junior: why? Riceballsan: Because I need a check up at the dentist Junior, why Riceballsan: because you are supposed to get one every year, hurry up you are making me late Junior: why Riceballsan: because.... hey, get away from that, it is hot. Junior: why (cue screaming of a little child) Riceballsan:Oh that looks like a third degree burn. Oh well, I guess it is a trip to the ER instead of the dentist, was late anyways.
Later that night, Riceballsan discusses how special (not in a short bus kind of way ) the kid is with the other half. This reaffirms to Riceballsan how great of a parent he is raising a kid that doesn't listen, questions everything and almost kills himself without quite making the darwin awards. Yes, everyone should raise kids like that..
I'm not advocating killing people for armed robbery. I'm just showing it is only a matter of math because there are repeat offenders who offend after being released.
The race issue might very well reflect a problem with enforcement of laws and sentencing bias, but it really isn't an issue in this hypothetical situation. The disproportionate amount of blacks or minorities populating the prisons does not necessarily reflect the conviction rates of non blacks who might get off with lesser sentences. Remember. the op stipulated execution for all armed robbers. A black man getting 25 years while a white man got 3 would not make a difference if we catch, convict, then execute.
Also, I'm not sure that the number of blacks in prisons reflect the armed robbery convictions as a lot of inmates are convicted of crimes other then armed robbery. I know that a while back (late 70's early 80's), there was a mindset instilled with the black communities by the more aggressive civil rights groups like the black panthers encouraging crimes and crimes against the white man and whites man's laws.
I agree with everything except the bullying confessions and convicting everyone.
First the bullying. If someone commits a crime, they are looking at the max sentence regardless of the judge being tough on crime. The do not make sentence guidelines up on the spot and they are available to being known well in advance of the crime. I find complaint about getting the max sentence for a crime someone is convicted of to be a non sequitur. It is like complaining that you purchased a 12 pack of beers and there was only 12 beers in it.
Now the convict everyone who comes before you. This simply does not happen unless there is enough evidence to get a conviction in which case it is already proper. No matter how tough on crime a judge wants to appear to be, if his judgement is constantly getting overturned on appeal, or there are thousands of complaints or wrong doing, he will look like an imbecile. If he looks like an imbecile long enough, the state bar or other jurisdictional body will seek punishment or sanctions including removing the right of the court he serves on to hear cases and in some cases publicly recommend his impeachment to the governing legislation body. It all depends on the extreme nature and how much of a solid case they have. If a pattern of gross misconduct is present (convicting everyone whether they are guilty or not), his immunity from civil liability can be removed too.
Well, if we are limiting the conversations explicitly to the recidivism rates, it appears to be about 60% in the US and 50% in the UK. Let's assume it is 50%.on average for the whole. Wikipedia lists the recidivism rates for burglary to be about 70% which would include armed robbery and 74% for larcenist which would include con men but lets drop the number for argument's sake.
From that, we can assume that about 50 out of every 100 people imprisoned for armed robbery and or larceny, regardless of being black or not, will be arrested for offending again. From disastercenter.org, it appears that the robbery rate was about 368,000 in 2010. Let's assume that just half of them were committed by the same people, and another 25% were committed by New offenders. We would be looking at rehabilitated offenders released from the penal system comprising of at least 25% of the Armed robberies if we did not consider their role in multiple offenses.
So on the face alone, executing people convicted of armed robbery would reduce armed robbery crime rates about 25% without regard to race that you injected. Life sentences or imprisonment until they become old and crippled could have the same effect too.
Actually, the cut off is imprisonment of 6 months or more or a fine of $1000 or more (both in consideration with outside penalties like loss of a license and requirements to seek treatments like drug and alcohol counseling and so on) which makes misdemeanors fall within that scope.
This right to jury trial changes from state to state also in which some state Constitutions or laws lower the threshold in which someone is guaranteed a right to jury trial Vermont and Virginia, if memory serves me correct, even allow jury trials for parking tickets if the accused is willing to pay for the jury costs. Virginia I think actually allows a redo in a court just above the magistrate level if you lose an initial trial without a jury on a petty or minor offense.
As for being tough on crime, you do realize that whoever violated the law knew there were penalties before they violated it and somewhat agreed to be punished according to the strictest penalty when deciding to do so. I don't think the tough on crime stick adds anything as none of the penalties are created after the fact unless it is a matter of someone unjustly being convicted which can hurt the elected Judge and Prosecutor just the same.
The problem isn't sharing or lack thereof. That's usually a symptom. The problem is taking - sharing is what hopefully happens after someone has already taken more than what's fair. But it's just a remedy, not a cure, and it's not even true sharing. It's unclean hands.
Well, we are still right there with it not being an inherent trait. A child has to be instructed on not taking things too. It is not something he instinctively understands and often might take repeated attempts to cure him of it. The same goes with the sharing, People do not generally develop altruism within themselves until later in life when it is instilled by some experience or learning. Of course empathy does show signs earlier in life if the child is able to relate to someone but that only shows an instinctual disposition for family.
In some ways, unfortunately, this seems to be the case. I see more cases of people feeling entitled to anything they can get than, say, 20 years ago. When a BBS closed or became subscription only, people would sigh and move on. If a web site closes or becomes subscription only, people will send hate mail because they're deprived of something they felt entitled to. Yes, I would call this greed.
It is likely just an outlet allowing you to see the qualities in people as apposed to a cause of them. Greed is essential for evolutionary survival, It is the instinct we worked from to secure ample food and whatever else is needed. In cave man times, you could probably imagine someone thinking "ugg.. he got big club. Big club good for hunting. Me come over from behind and hit him with little club, take big club". The only thing different from then and now might be the need to take things by force but it seems that this trait survived quite well in a lot of people.
I'm game as long as you are sharing more then I have to.
Greed is inherent in behavior without capitalism which is why we have to tell children to share when they are young then tell them again not to share when they get older and start using the intertubes.
Wait, its the internet that makes people greedy.. hmm.
Slashdot Mirror
I checked again. I thought there was a series of court cases that limited the seizures to what was in the possession at the time of arrest (driving with a pound of pot in the car) and to what can be reasonably demonstrated that the proceeds of the illegal activity paid for. There had to be a hearing on the validity of the claim where the owner could dispute it, and a hardship out for family members who share the vehicle (home/whatever) if it wasn't purchased with drug money or the proceeds of illegal activity.
The one case that made it to the supreme court was tossed out because the owner stopped disputing the state's claim over the property making the case moot. All the other cases I found seem to be state cases which only apply to those states.
Either way, seizing something can be part of the evidence process in which it is argued that because his job pays 16k a year salary, the only way he could afford this 95k Porsche was with the proceeds of selling drugs reinforcing the idea that the 20 plants growing in his closets and the bail pot under the floorboards were not for personal use. But i still don't think the property can be converted to public use until after the conviction.
That's only if they can show the car or asset was purchased using proceeds from drug trafficking. And quite frankly, I'm not sure what other use there might be for a vehicle purchased by the proceeds of a Meth operation. It certainly shouldn't stay with the convict as it will show that crime does pay. It would be like robbing a bank, buying a house with the cash, and then keeping it after getting busted.
I hope you know that the value of bonus's paid in stock and the value of stock in excess of the option price is counted as and taxable at regular income when given to just the CEOs. It's called a non statutory stock option and in some cases, the CEO can be charged with a percentage of the value of the options if the total amount of options are worth a certain amount in order to put them into the Alternative Tax Method making them responsible for taxes on income they didn't technically receive.
Less taxes might end up being paid, but it isn't like it is being played out here on slashdot. It certainly isn't the way you seem to think it is.
It's not a dodge. The option counts as taxable income in several different ways. There are two basic types of stock options, a statutory option and non statutory stock option.
A CEO or any executive taking options as part of a pay package falls under a non statutory option and they will have to pay a portion of the option value if the stock value is known whether they exercise the option or not. They will have to pay income tax on the difference between the option value and the stock price minus the already taxed value at the time of exercise. Also the option value, even if the value of the stock is unknown and it was not exercised during the year, can put a tax payer into a rate that forces them to pay the alternative minimum tax.
What taking a $1 salary does is tie the majority of the pay to the outcome of the job performance and allows the executive to actually make more money then what might have been financially prudent at the time of the contract. Of course that is dependent on the executive's ability to improve the financial situation of the company and therfore the value of the stock. But the premise is that a company near bankruptcy cannot be paying millions to a new CEO, but they can under value stock- give them an option to buy, and when the CEO does his job and purchases the stock, he instantly makes a profit of the difference in value. This might look like $2.00 per stock option because of the current state of the company verses $15.00 per stock value at exercise or end of year which is $13 per stock profit over the number of options which might be 3 or 6% or more of the total stock available or so. Sometimes it's spread over a certain amount of years. GM for instance has 1.6 billion stocks issued and outstanding as of February 2012.
Nice,
I was just wandering what you was finding around girls asses. ;)
What the fuck do you think I can see that weather is not climate means? Are you daft or just pissed that I strayed slightly from your dogma?
And why would there need to be a magic replacement for oil? For god's sake open you eyes and think for your self. Technology can be anything including improvements in usage efficiencies, recycling, alternative fuels and so on. Hell, even improvements on pumping the oil out of the ground can move peak oil down the road.
Step outside the church and see what the real world it like every once in a while for fuks sake.
As I said, it is disingenuous to claim anything about a policy that was never passed into law. You aren't even picking which so called policy that was rejected, you are talking about. Nixon submitted 2 health care plans that got rejected for Kennedy's HMO act.
I'm also not sure where your working policies outside the US are supposed to be. Most all Government health care in other countries comes from an attempt at health care reform from the implementation of article 25 of the UN declaration on human rights passed in 1948. The US did not sign that provision.
But 20 years is hardly enough time to gauge if something is working/successful or not. There certainly are horror stories about them today indicating that if they ever were working, it isn't now or at least at what we would consider an acceptable level. The medical tourism rate in some of these countries is double and even triple that of the US. In Canada, they even sell wait insurance on the private market in case the gods of the government make you wait too long for your treatment- they will fly you to a country with private medical and pay for the treatment there. In England, they have used that as an excuse to deny treatment for any specific illness altogether. If you obtain treatment for any illness they are treating you for outside of their approval, they stop paying for any treatment for that illness altogether.
Now do not get me wrong, I'm not saying our system doesn't need work. It just doesn't need to be mangled into the crap people are not happy with in other countries. We could fix 90% of what is wrong with our system without ever having a mandate or getting rid of insurance or the government telling us what we can and cannot eat.
I doubt the insurance companies would have put much more into it then what is being done by the republicans and other groups.
I also think it is a little disingenuous to bring up failed attempts at the same thing and say it's better then what was already rejected a generation or more ago as if it is somehow validates what some don't like about it today. What we got during the Nixon years was the HMO act creating most of the insurance companies as we see it today which was largely the brainchild of Ted Kennedy who led the charge about how HMO's are evil and he knew how to fix them.
My guess to why would be either medieval perverts stashing away their conquests to brag when the boys from the next castle over came to visit (sex outside of marriage happened but was frowned on) or more likely rodents of some sort took them to create a nesting area which would explain 2700 fragments outside of getting old and falling apart.
Of course the carpenter who built that room could have been getting old and the cracks between the floorboards were larger then in other rooms. In this case, they could have just slipped through the cracks like that one dam sock that keeps coming up missing.
Every ./er has seen a bra successfully removed from a woman. The basement is where the washer and dryer is and mom does laundry ever couple days.
Maybe you meant never seen a bra that has been successfully removed from a woman not related to them?
What the hell kind of bugs were you hunting in high school?
I've noticed recently that somehow a 10 to 15 degree F above normal swing in temperature in a localized geographical error is supposed to be proof of a 1-2 degree F increase in global temps. Any questioning of that seems to be blaspheme and whoever doesn't tow the line is supposed to be stupid.
Me, I can put aside my biases and evaluate the situation independent of preconceived notions. I can see that weather is not climate and that weather has 100 and 500 year patterns that are influences by other natural forces like variations in decadal oscillations in the oceans and this has been known for so long that entire cities are developed around a 100 year and 500 year flood map. I can see that peak anything is limited to the current technology for employing that anything and new technology can move the peak down the road considerably.
I'm calling bullshit on this. Obama care was pushed through without many republicans voting for it at all. They manipulated the bill through obscure rules and could have just as easily scammed a single payer provision in it. The fact that you don't see that is probably because the democrats as a whole did not support a single player plan and while some might have, making the idiots think they wanted one thing while doing another which is a common political tactic, ensured their reelection from the voter base.
He was being facetious about the raw data disappearing in some of the earlier studies leaving only normalized data with no way of validating the processes of changes to the values when certain people considered skeptics requested it for review.
In all honesty, if the kid is touching hot things after being told not to because it is hot, he probably isn't that old so not knowing what a dentist is or why an appointment is necessary is probably within the same realm.
Teaching kids to learn means them actually thinking is a more apt presentation of what needs to happen. The problem is that the frontal lobe does not fully mature until age 25 or so. More specifically, the prefrontal cortex of the brain doesn't create significant amounts of myelin (the white matter in the brain) in the frontal lobe until the late teens and there are large differences in the amount between children and teens and adults over 25. This is significant because this is where the reasoning happens and very few children - especially below the age of 13, can make significant reasoning decision as a matter of cognitive function. Most who appear to be capable are recalling memories of similar situations and basically reenacting them.
Of course one of the biggest problems with this entire line of discussion is that not all people are biologically equal so some children will develop faster or slower or to higher and lesser degrees then others. But the age they should be working on their cognitive reasoning is really later in life around the age they start driving or a few years before (the motor functions are largely in place so at this age) and this should continue well into their adult life. There really is a reason why someone is legally considered an adult at an age near 20 instead of near 10 year old.
There are a lot of situations where a child simply needs to listen and do as they are told. Instead of teaching them to ask why, we need to teach them how to solve problems and retain information so they can figure "why" out when the brain matter really does appear and connections start being made. They need the knowledge so when the situation presents itself, the connections are made.
The federal government shouldn't be evaluating teachers at all. Schools and education are a state issue that the federal government can assist with but in no case should they be over it.
Each state and municipality within the state should decide the best way to evaluate the teachers serving their communities. In my idea world, their evaluations would pertain to the amount of knowledge retained by their students pursuant to the state guidelines and grade levels and so on.
As for a teacher teaching kids weird and strange things, that is something else that needs to be caught at a state and local level. The reality is that is exactly where they will get discovered should it ever happen.
Legal immigrants not yet citizens, and alien residents can and do often get drivers licenses without becoming a citizen. Alien residents often have no desire to become citizens.
What the statement is saying is you have to prove a legal basis for being in the country to get a drivers license and it will mark on the license who the citizens are.
Well, I reject your assertion on the grounds that I'm using critical thinking skills so there is no way you can refute that.
I can see it at your house now,
Riceballsan: Get your shoes on junior, we are going away
Junior: Why?
Riceballsan: because I have an appointment
Junior: why?
Riceballsan: Because I need a check up at the dentist
Junior, why
Riceballsan: because you are supposed to get one every year, hurry up you are making me late
Junior: why
Riceballsan: because.... hey, get away from that, it is hot.
Junior: why
(cue screaming of a little child)
Riceballsan:Oh that looks like a third degree burn. Oh well, I guess it is a trip to the ER instead of the dentist, was late anyways.
Later that night, Riceballsan discusses how special (not in a short bus kind of way ) the kid is with the other half. This reaffirms to Riceballsan how great of a parent he is raising a kid that doesn't listen, questions everything and almost kills himself without quite making the darwin awards. Yes, everyone should raise kids like that..
I'm not advocating killing people for armed robbery. I'm just showing it is only a matter of math because there are repeat offenders who offend after being released.
The race issue might very well reflect a problem with enforcement of laws and sentencing bias, but it really isn't an issue in this hypothetical situation. The disproportionate amount of blacks or minorities populating the prisons does not necessarily reflect the conviction rates of non blacks who might get off with lesser sentences. Remember. the op stipulated execution for all armed robbers. A black man getting 25 years while a white man got 3 would not make a difference if we catch, convict, then execute.
Also, I'm not sure that the number of blacks in prisons reflect the armed robbery convictions as a lot of inmates are convicted of crimes other then armed robbery. I know that a while back (late 70's early 80's), there was a mindset instilled with the black communities by the more aggressive civil rights groups like the black panthers encouraging crimes and crimes against the white man and whites man's laws.
I agree with everything except the bullying confessions and convicting everyone.
First the bullying. If someone commits a crime, they are looking at the max sentence regardless of the judge being tough on crime. The do not make sentence guidelines up on the spot and they are available to being known well in advance of the crime. I find complaint about getting the max sentence for a crime someone is convicted of to be a non sequitur. It is like complaining that you purchased a 12 pack of beers and there was only 12 beers in it.
Now the convict everyone who comes before you. This simply does not happen unless there is enough evidence to get a conviction in which case it is already proper. No matter how tough on crime a judge wants to appear to be, if his judgement is constantly getting overturned on appeal, or there are thousands of complaints or wrong doing, he will look like an imbecile. If he looks like an imbecile long enough, the state bar or other jurisdictional body will seek punishment or sanctions including removing the right of the court he serves on to hear cases and in some cases publicly recommend his impeachment to the governing legislation body. It all depends on the extreme nature and how much of a solid case they have. If a pattern of gross misconduct is present (convicting everyone whether they are guilty or not), his immunity from civil liability can be removed too.
Those possibilities are all reasons why they won't do that- or do it for very long. This is a story of a juvenile judge in PA who was tough on crime doing exactly this with the exception of getting kickbacks from the private jails and detention centers. http://abcnews.go.com/US/mark-ciavarella-pa-juvenile-court-judge-convicted-alleged/story?id=12965182
Believe it or not, there are watchers watching the watchers.
Well, if we are limiting the conversations explicitly to the recidivism rates, it appears to be about 60% in the US and 50% in the UK. Let's assume it is 50%.on average for the whole. Wikipedia lists the recidivism rates for burglary to be about 70% which would include armed robbery and 74% for larcenist which would include con men but lets drop the number for argument's sake.
From that, we can assume that about 50 out of every 100 people imprisoned for armed robbery and or larceny, regardless of being black or not, will be arrested for offending again. From disastercenter.org, it appears that the robbery rate was about 368,000 in 2010. Let's assume that just half of them were committed by the same people, and another 25% were committed by New offenders. We would be looking at rehabilitated offenders released from the penal system comprising of at least 25% of the Armed robberies if we did not consider their role in multiple offenses.
So on the face alone, executing people convicted of armed robbery would reduce armed robbery crime rates about 25% without regard to race that you injected. Life sentences or imprisonment until they become old and crippled could have the same effect too.
Actually, the cut off is imprisonment of 6 months or more or a fine of $1000 or more (both in consideration with outside penalties like loss of a license and requirements to seek treatments like drug and alcohol counseling and so on) which makes misdemeanors fall within that scope.
This right to jury trial changes from state to state also in which some state Constitutions or laws lower the threshold in which someone is guaranteed a right to jury trial Vermont and Virginia, if memory serves me correct, even allow jury trials for parking tickets if the accused is willing to pay for the jury costs. Virginia I think actually allows a redo in a court just above the magistrate level if you lose an initial trial without a jury on a petty or minor offense.
As for being tough on crime, you do realize that whoever violated the law knew there were penalties before they violated it and somewhat agreed to be punished according to the strictest penalty when deciding to do so. I don't think the tough on crime stick adds anything as none of the penalties are created after the fact unless it is a matter of someone unjustly being convicted which can hurt the elected Judge and Prosecutor just the same.
Well, we are still right there with it not being an inherent trait. A child has to be instructed on not taking things too. It is not something he instinctively understands and often might take repeated attempts to cure him of it. The same goes with the sharing, People do not generally develop altruism within themselves until later in life when it is instilled by some experience or learning. Of course empathy does show signs earlier in life if the child is able to relate to someone but that only shows an instinctual disposition for family.
It is likely just an outlet allowing you to see the qualities in people as apposed to a cause of them. Greed is essential for evolutionary survival, It is the instinct we worked from to secure ample food and whatever else is needed. In cave man times, you could probably imagine someone thinking "ugg.. he got big club. Big club good for hunting. Me come over from behind and hit him with little club, take big club". The only thing different from then and now might be the need to take things by force but it seems that this trait survived quite well in a lot of people.
I'm game as long as you are sharing more then I have to.
Greed is inherent in behavior without capitalism which is why we have to tell children to share when they are young then tell them again not to share when they get older and start using the intertubes.
Wait, its the internet that makes people greedy.. hmm.