Prisons, Harper buried own findngs?

[guyser]

They could be just pollsters who are often wrong. 'Specially predicting federal elections.

Opinions of selected people. Then adjusted.

I suppose every survey , every poll , every stat ever compiled could be skewed but that would be a silly notion that only someone from some backword country might spout.

In this case , and I will refer to the link above, says.....

In 2009, the GSS collected information from 19,500 respondents aged 15 and older living in the 10 provinces

I have serious doubts that it is 'selected people' nor adjusted' .

[Saipan]

I suppose every survey , every poll , every stat ever compiled

...are three different things.

[guyser]

...are three different things.

Oh how nice.

This teacher is tired and off for the cottage now.

Go home and study . Today you got an F .

[Saipan]

Have a nice weekend.

[guyser]

Have a nice weekend.

Why thank you !

I hope you do too and also hope the black flies arent as bad up there as they are down this way.

[Saipan]

I hope you do too and also hope the black flies arent as bad up there as they are down this way.

No. They hate freezing weather.

One good thing about this "global warm up"

[Scotty]

Shall we assume she spent 4 yrs in gettting an undergrad degree,a yr writing/studying for LSAT , then find a place to study and pay thru the nose, then 4 yrs at law school , 1 yr articling, then write the bar exam and then get called to the bar and then find employment?

You are talking about the education required to be a LAWYER. Not a judge.

Oh yeah, then wait 10 F'ing years before she could apply to become a Judge?

And how many people fresh out of university ever get near high positions in the first few years?

Minor requirements my ass. You havent the vaguest notion of what you speak.

Well, if so, you've done nothing to contradict it. Basically, from what you've said, any lawyer can be a judge unless he's in trouble for something. Oh, right, you have to put in ten years first. Duh.

And we know just what a great sense of justice lawyers in general have...

Edited May 13, 2011 by Scotty

[Scotty]

The Victim's Survey is more accurately called the Self-Reported Victim's Survey. This does not capture crimes that are reported by witnesses. A body doesn't turn up and go unreported. A violent assault or rape that requires medical attention doesn't happen and go unreported. One's doesn't have thousands of dollars worth of property stolen out of their home and not report it. The things that aren't reported are spray-painted walls in alleys, smash & grab incidents with property in cars, and garden gnomes mysteriously wandering off.

Why are you talking like that when the survey itself flatly and unequivocally contradicts everything you've said? Oh, wait, you never read it. Of course. That'd be too much effort.

So here, I'll save you guys the trouble. Go straight to table 10 which lists the percentage of various crimes which were actually reported to police. You'll find that only 37% of physical assaults are reported to police, along with 46% of robberies, and 15% of rapes,

Victim reports to police

Your inference that crime is actually worse because victim reporting is down is disingenuous and actually ignores what Stats Canada themselves have written on the topic

.

But I've NEVER said crime is up. Go ahead. Find me anywhere I've said that. What I've said is that the rates aren't down in the victims surveys, just the rate of reporting is down, and so maybe that's accounting for all or at least a substantial amount of the so-called 'drop' in crime. In addition, I've pointed out that regardless of what the police-reported crime rate has down in the past ten or fifteen years, it is still, even using official statistics, several times higher than it was in the sixties.

And so I've asked, where do people get off thinking that our hug-a-thug system, which was, coincidentally, slowly introduced in the sixties and seventies, is so great compared to a tough-ass conservative approach?

[Scotty]

No its not proof positive of anything. You havent shown a causative link between softer sentencing and easy parole and violent crime rates. You think you see a correlation but thats about it. Theres a whole host of other factors that could be behind any increase in crime rates besides sentencing.

I'll grant you the point. This is not proof of a causative link. It's suggestive of one, though.

But I've never said this is proof of anything. In responding to others, who claim that the Tories and their get-tough-on-crime attitude is regressive, and who use crime stats to show how great we're doing because crime is dropping from it's 1990s high, I've merely pointed out that it's still far and away higher than it was before we got soft on sentencing and parole, and asked just why people think Harper getting harder on them will be such a disaster? After all, it's not like we have low crime compared to how it was in the sixties. We have far more crime, and far more violent crime than we had then. Certainly we have more than I'm content with.

Further, I've pointed out that the Justice Department estimates the cost of crime to us at $57 billion per year - that's exclusive of policing, court and prison costs. And that there is a 37% recidivism rate. So how is it people seem to think that keeping prisoners in prison longer is a bad thing?

The problem is though they dont just want to increase sentences for VIOLENT criminals. It sounds to me like the want to ratchet up the drug war as well and throw people in federal prisons for have a couple of pot plants.

You must have a hearing problem, because I've never said, or even inferred that I have a particular problem with whatever weeds people grow or smoke. My problem is with criminals who break into houses, steal cars, or who stick people up at ATMs or drag women into bushes. Maybe a burglar isn't violent, but the cost to society is immense, and given the number of times I've read about burglars convicted of multiple counts it sounds mightily like a career to me. That being the case, I'm all in favour of putting career criminals away for good. And no, that doesn't mean life in prison for swiping a chocolate bar. It means that if you have a guy with a rap sheet longer than he is you give serious consideration to just locking him up and throwing away the key. It'll be cheaper in the long run.

[Scotty]

Dont be a f'ing idiot, I posted links that blew his notions out of the water.

In your own delusional mind, perhaps.

And I doubt you even read the link to the victims survey.

[Scotty]

Anyhow , I will leave this right here and stop this silliness....(from the link) "Rates of victimization resulting from violent crimes, namely sexual assault, physical assault and robbery, remained stable between 2004 and 2009" Yes Stable , not up nor down.

Well, thank you, after all the insults, for flat out agreeing with what I said.

Because, though you seem to be confused about it, that IS what I said. I never claimed crime rates were up. I only said that while police-reported crime was down, vctim reports of crime were not down, only their reporting of it was.

So now you agree with me after all.

See it all the time. One only has to mention the name Homolka and listen to them blame the justice system and how she should have been locked away for ever, should be hung and our "justice system" is soft etc etc.

Well, this is going off topic, but you can blame the lawyers in this case as easily as the clods in blue who didn't find the tapes. Their deal with Homolka was rendered unnecessary after they found those tapes. And there were several points afterwards where it turned out Homolka had lied to them or neglected to mention things. This could have allowed them to tear up the agreement. For example, she neglected to mention the repeated drugging and rape of a teenage girl they knew. When police found it on the tape, they allowed her to amend her statement so that she got covered for that too. As I recall from my reading (vaguely) the crown at the time was an NDP appointee, and very much into the woman-as-victim-of-the-evil-man, so ready to exempt Homolka from most of the blame.

The standards are set from precedence and other factors. The public by and large dont know what is truly fair and dont bother with the details that may mitigate a case, so in some sense have no say, and thats a good thing.

Precedence has nothing to do with justice. And sometimes, there really isn't any mitigation. Canadians generally have a pretty good sense of justice, of what is right and what is wrong. And they clearly see to many injustices from the courts, otherwise they wouldn't be supportive of Harper's crime agenda.