Willie Horton: were the conservatives right?

[madmusic]

Old article but even more relevant today:

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=passions_of_crime">Passions of Crime

Getting tough on crime has always been popular. Now there's also big money in it. Crime policy today is a study in irrational passions and rational interests.


What do you think?

[Orsino]

1. Crime is complicated.

Politicians who promise to "get tough" on it are really promising us that we won't have to think about it, and that no criminals will ever threaten us, our loved ones, or our property. We happily let their system make millions of us invisible, and in return they make sure a large segment of the poor never gets to vote again.

It's win-win. :mad:

Meanwhile, their system is bursting at the seams, threatening to unleash on us a deluge of people we have ignored. We might find that these people aren't any more pleased with us than they are with those who imprisoned them.

[madmusic]

3. Apparently, the lack of response indicates

The conservatives won that one. There is some swing back of the pendulum, but overall they won it.

[Orsino]

4. No one goes broke overestimating modern Americans' laziness and fear.

Too many of us are quite eager to bow to the Daddy state, and most of the rest of us are willing to look the other way.

[pretzel4gore]

2. Jesus said 'Let anyone lead one of these kids into sin....'

Willie Horton was a doomed man no matter how successful he was in his own worldview, from the day of his birth, and Willie knew it. Same with millions of others; only some of whom become hardcore criminals. The trick is to give tiny people the idea they can work their way out of problems, w/out lying or cheating or breaking laws when they're still tiny, and impressionable. Even at the time of the Willie Horton affair, 1988, I noticed even the most reactionary pundits were almost horrified by using a doomed inner city underclass person like horton to exemplify crime, justice or indeed anything: though it worked out very well for them. Have their cake, eat it too....
What is lovely about modern society is the fake religious underpinings used to promote morality- which undermines all trust in the religious hocus pocus (which, like the economy, is based upon trust and faith) -actually destroys any concept of morality! Thus, morality is whatever you can get away with, and that's that The cop thus is the biggest crook, the bizman the worst cheat, the reverend the serial killa and the president a junyer bush (though he looks like Barack Obama, he's still junyer :))

[Solly Mack]

5. K&R