Quote:
Originally Posted by manchambo
Maybe I'm getting soft in old age, but these days I look at a guy like Ruggs as a kid. And I just keep thinking: how is the world going to become a better place if this kid goes to jail? Isn't it likely that going to jail will just make him worse, potentially dangerous, more likely to do bad things in the future?
Obviously there need to be consequences for actions like this, but I just can't help thinking jail only tends to make things worse for a person who doesn't need to be separate from society for safety reasons.
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I mean - this is the debate over prisons as a whole, and the responses are myriad.
But ultimately it boils down to 3 main factors:
1) Specific deterrence: Drunk drivers have high rates of recidivism. By getting this particular drunk driver off the street, you lessen the risk to society as a whole of being injured by him the NEXT time he drives drunk.
2) General deterrence: By throwing his ass in jail, you show the rest of society that things are far different than they were back in the day when the sheriff escorted your granddad home when he'd had a few too many that night and got pulled over.
3) The retributive element: Henry Ruggs engaged in behavior that killed someone. As a society we owe it to the family of that person to ensure that Ruggs is punished for it. That he suffers just as you will now have to suffer for the loss of your loved one.
I mean ultimately think of the logical extremes to your argument here and apply it to murder. Murderers have extremely low rates of recidivism. By and large, they've already killed the person they wanted dead (very few killers are random, high volume killers). The odds of them killing anyone else are pretty low. In many ways they could go back to be model citizens now that they've murdered their ex-wife. But methinks
maybe we shouldn't condone that sort of behavior.