Regarding Paris at the razorwire Hilton

[jhetley]

If some tattooed butch murders poor little rich girl in the slammer, what does society lose?  Nominate the corpse for a Darwin Award and truck on.

(Yeah, I'm fed up to here with the waste of print and pixels on the case.)

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The rich don't deserve more compassion than the rest of us, but neither do they deserve less. And a prison in which Paris Hilton could get murdered is also a prison in which Jane Random Prisoner could get murdered. That's not a society I want to sign up for, no matter how little I care whether Paris Hilton is in jail, at her house, or anywhere particular as long as it's nowhere near me or mine.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Personal opinion only, but I happen to think that drunk drivers represent a greater statistical threat to the public health and welfare than Al Qaeda.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Then lobby for the death penalty for drunk drivers -- legally. Using criminals to eliminate other criminals you consider dangerous may be expedient, but it's also cowardly of a society to choose that road.

I have enough qualms about advocating death for someone who has been convicted of a capital crime by a jury of their peers in a trial with at least some safeguards set up for fairness. I certainly couldn't advocate that it should be applied at the discretion of other criminals.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Maine doesn't have the death penalty. For anything. But why should I worry about protecting Ms. RichBitch from the logical consequences of her actions?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, what are you waiting for? Time to lobby for it for drunk drivers only! Or drunk drivers whose net assets are greater than a certain dollar amount, of course....

Why you should worry: because you, along with all the other citizens of Maine (or of the US, or whatever, depending on the prison in question) are the ones who construct the "logic" of the prison systems in the first place. The natural consequences of drunk driving are risk of damage to self, others, and property. But in our society as it stands, we -- rightly, I believe -- don't consider that the natural consequences either deter the action enough or penalize it enough, depending on which kind of justice system you want. So we, as a group, decide how it should be penalized, and we construct those penalties. We build prisons. We decide how they ought to be built, how they ought to be staffed. These are choices we make, not facts of nature.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Because of the consequences of ignoring the long term effects of ignoring or condoning prisoner-on-prisoner abuse (Or guard-on-prisoner abuse). You know, stuff like winning the hearts and minds of Joe Iraqi with Abu Ghraib.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

It's been suggested that a large part of the cause of Ms. Poor Little Rich¹ Bitch's weeping, screaming and general carrying on is that being in jail is forcing her to go cold turkey on whatever she uses to get high.



[1] But Not Very Bright

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Judging by what I hear of the uproar, way off here in the Wilds of Maine, Ms. Whatever thinks she _has_ been tossed in Abu Ghraib.

Part of the day job, I've been inside Maine county jails a few times. One of them probably gives the worst of L. A. County a run -- 1880s relic, with open sewers in the basement. Our society thinks that a stay in jail should rank low on the desirability scale. The ones I've seen qualify.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Driving drunk threatens everyone around with death. What percentage of annual traffic deaths are caused by alcohol? Figures I've seen put it at over 50%,
tens of thousands of deaths per year.

I would not weep if she joined them. Alone.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

If you can't see the moral difference between, "I would not be personally upset if this person happened to die," and, "Someone should murder this person," I don't know what more I can say to explain it to you.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Uh, ma'am...if you look back, I was asking what society would lose if somebody killed her, a not-impossible, but unlikely, outcome of her actually doing her time. Which remains a considerable distance from advocating the act or offering to pay for the hit.