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If ministers need to be paid the amounts that they are in Singapore to prevent corruption, which is a criminal act, why can't we pay people like Letchmi enough to sustain her livelihood and health so that she doesn't resort to stealing?
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If ministers need to be paid the amounts that they are in Singapore to prevent corruption, which is a criminal act, why can't we pay people like Letchmi enough to sustain her livelihood and health so that she doesn't resort to stealing?
As with healthcare and other valuable services, police work costs money; but as the cost is not borne by the user, the true cost is hidden and abuse occurs. Does this study by the SPF signal a desire on the part of the government to shift the cost of security from the public to the direct consumers? I certainly hope so. Now there will be people who will tell you that you cannot put a price on security (and health) - the truth is, you can: they just don't want to pay for it.
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The study aims to calculate the costs incurred as a consequence of crime, which includes "monetary loss in traditional terms" and "monetising the loss of life and trauma suffered by victims".
Costs of crime prevention and enforcement will also be tallied. The study seeks to find out costs borne by private entities - such as security expenditure and insurance - as well as costs borne by public bodies such as proactive police patrols in anticipation of crime.The police also intend to calculate the costs incurred in response to crime - investigating cases, apprehending suspects as well as the costs expended by the State in prosecuting, convicting and incarcerating suspects. -
While costs of crime prevention - such as installing alarm systems - and the State's response to crime could be measured, sociologist Paulin Straughan felt it might be "impossible" to measure the social costs of a spate of violence on a community. Social isolation and mistrust from these crimes would impact social capital on a community which would be difficult to estimate, she argued.
However, the former Nominated Member of Parliament felt calculating the cost of crime would serve as "a reality check" for any society. - 1 more annotation(s)...
All of these genetic links to common issues are fundamentally the same in how they work — they involve many genes that don’t determine our fate but rather impact how we react to our environment. The potential benefits to understanding this relationship are immense, and much progress is being made. As scientists learn more about how these intricate relationships work, they will hopefully be able to develop personalized treatments for people struggling from a variety of ailments. Until then, genetic sequencing for the public will have to wait — the relatively little information we have so far would likely only lead to faulty conclusions, made in an attempt to form that simple, big picture we always expect from science.
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A recent article in The New York Times reported that over 100 studies show a relationship between genes and criminality but that the environment plays a key role in the effects of this relationship:
“Kevin Beaver, an associate professor at Florida State University’s College of Criminology and Criminal Justice, said genetics may account for, say, half of a person’s aggressive behavior, but that 50 percent comprises hundreds or thousands of genes that express themselves differently depending on the environment.
He has tried to measure which circumstances — having delinquent friends, living in a disadvantaged neighborhood — influence whether a predisposition to violence surfaces. After studying twins and siblings, he came up with an astonishing result: In boys not exposed to the risk factors, genetics played no role in any of their violent behavior. The positive environment had prevented the genetic switches — to use Mr. Pinker’s word — that affect aggression from being turned on. In boys with eight or more risk factors, however, genes explained 80 percent of their violence. Their switches had been flipped.”
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In fact, environment plays the same crucial role for criminality as it does for obesity and depression.
In an interview I did for a story in The Michigan Daily on depression research, Dr. Margit Burmeister, a professor of human genetics and a researcher in the Molecular and Biological Neuroscience Institute at the University of Michigan, explained the dangers the public oversimplifying the link between genetics and depression:
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It was not perhaps the most obvious way of getting a bad back, arthritis and a dodgy foot seen to. But if you're unemployed in North Carolina with no health insurance, there is no obvious way.
So on 9 June James Verone left his Gastonia home, took a ride to a bank and carried out a robbery. Well, sort of.
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Before his peculiarly modest robbery, Verone, 59, sent a letter to the Gaston Gazette. "When you receive this a bank robbery will have been committed by me for one dollar. I am of sound mind but not so much sound body."
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He invited the paper to send a reporter to interview him in Gaston county jail, where he is now in custody facing charges of stealing from a person (for just $1 the prosecutors didn't think they could hold up a bank robbery charge).
James Verone calmly walked into an RBC bank in North Carolina and committed his first crime in his 59 years on this planet. Verone handed the teller a note that read "This is a bank robbery. Please only give me one dollar," took the dollar from the terrified clerk, and sat down on a couch in the bank's lobby.
"'I'll be sitting right over there in the chair waiting for the police," Verone told the bank teller. And wait he did. Police arrived moments later and apprehended him, hauling him off to the jail cell he so desperately wanted to enter.
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James Verone walked into that bank and committed a felony because going to jail was the only way he could receive the health care he needed to survive.
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He was laid off from his 17-year job and, with unemployment hardly a survivable wage, took the first job that came his way. He developed a growth on his chest - the sort of medical condition that could be life-threatening - and earned two ruptured disks in his back, along with problems with his left foot.
After depleting his life savings and realizing he had, literally, nowhere else to turn, Verone committed the crime, hoping he could get the medical care that he so desperately needs.
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Here, I will briefly outline some basics for understanding and using criminal statistics. I hope to provide a few nuggets for critical evaluation of claims that use, or are dependent on crime data. I won’t be addressing any specific claims, just outlining the characteristics and limitations of the most commonly referred to criminal statistics. Treat a criminal statistic as if you were carefully peeling an onion, one layer at a time. Take some time to think about why this is necessary: Any given criminal statistic likely doesn’t tell you what at first glance it tells you.
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Whole Numbers versus Rates
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Occurrences of crime are properly expressed as the number of incidences per 100,000 people. Total numbers are not informative on their own and it is very easy to manipulate an argument by cherry picking between a total number and a rate. Beware of claims about crime that use raw incidence numbers. When a change in whole incidence numbers is observed, this might not have any bearing on crime levels at all, because levels of crime are dependent on population.
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When is a criminal act permissible on political grounds?
This is the question posed yesterday by David Allen Green in the post here.
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Before she can feel justified in breaking it, law has not merely to be one that the democratic citizen dissents from; it must involve an injustice she judges to be so great that it violates a principle which is, for her, of greater moral weight than her commitment to democracy itself, to abiding by democratic outcomes. To put it another way, it must involve an injustice she judges to be so great that it violates a principle of greater moral weight than that of equality of political rights within the polity, the very principle of democracy itself. This sets a pretty high bar, I would think, for anyone who is indeed of serious democratic outlook.
Do we need a special category to understand certain sorts of crime based on relationships of power? Catharine MacKinnon believes that the concept of gender crime brings into focus the special nature of a range of crimes.
Listen to Catharine MacKinnon on Gender Crime (NB includes descriptions of sexual violence)
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If someone does you wrong, should you have a say in their punishment?
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Should victims have a say in sentencing criminals? That partly depends upon what you mean by "have a say".
A weak form of involvement would have a judge listen to a statement from victims, but ensure the judge alone does the sentencing.
A slightly stronger form would be when the impact on victims is considered as part of assessing the moral seriousness of the crime. The strongest form would be when victims have a direct say in the type of sentence.
So which is the more just?
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Shortly after Jared Lee Loughner had been identified as the alleged shooter of Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, online sleuths turned up pages of rambling text and videos he had created. A wave of amateur diagnoses soon followed, most of which concluded that Loughner was not so much a political extremist as a man suffering from "paranoid schizophrenia."
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For many, the investigation will stop there. No need to explore personal motives, out-of-control grievances or distorted political anger. The mere mention of mental illness is explanation enough. This presumed link between psychiatric disorders and violence has become so entrenched in the public consciousness that the entire weight of the medical evidence is unable to shift it. Severe mental illness, on its own, is not an explanation for violence, but don't expect to hear that from the media in the coming weeks.
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Minister-in-Charge of Muslim Affairs, Dr Yaacob Ibrahim, said he was very disappointed that Mas Selamat Kastari was helped by his immediate family members after his escape from the Whitley Road Detention Centre.
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Yet, in helping Mas Selamat, his family was merely practising Asian Values:
If one is in doubt about this, it suffices to consult the teachings of the Master:
叶公语孔子曰："吾党有直躬者，其父攘羊，而子证之。"孔子曰："吾党之直者异于是，父为子隐，子为父隐，直在其中矣。"
(论语: 子路第十三)
In a comprehensible fashion, this translates to:
The Duke of Sheh informed Confucius, saying, "Among us here there are those who may be styled upright in their conduct. If their father have stolen a sheep, they will bear witness to the fact."
Confucius said, "Among us, in our part of the country, those who are upright are different from this. The father conceals the misconduct of the son, and the son conceals the misconduct of the father. Uprightness is to be found in this."
(Analects, 13:18) - 2 more annotation(s)...
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14 U.S states exempt spouses, parents, grandparents, children, grandchildren, and siblings from prosecution for providing assistance to an offender after the commission of a crime “with the intent that the offender avoids or escapes detection, arrest, trial, or punishment.”
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an additional four states reduce liability for an immediate family member but do not exempt them from prosecution entirely.
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