@lupin_iii: I think he should pay the guy $200+ a month until his credit is returned to where it was to begin with. If he gets it fixed in a month (fat chance) so be it. It resolves the situation in the fastest way possible and the perpetrator is punished.
@ripfire: It's a lot harder than you think to evict "bad" tenants. What was the story on this $200 in back rent? Was it being withheld for some reason, or was the guy just a deadbeat?
I still stand by the fact prison was created to seperate violent, dangerous people from the rest of society. It isn't for people sending spam mails, or shoplifters, etc. With today's technology, there are far better ways to keep these people in line, without having taxpayers footing 35k a year to keep them locked up. Garnish their wages, use electronic monitoring, etc...but prison is meant for rapists/murderers, etc...not these white collar crimes.
True, they are meant to punish...back in the days when we had no other means. Between satellite tracking, microchips, garnishing wages...there are FAR better methods of punishment than spending 35,000 a year for 5 years (in this man's case) to punish someone. Look at it from an efficiency standpoint. We will spend 175,000 in taxpayer dollars to "punish" someone for messing up someone else's credit (which probably cost 5k to repair). Nevermind the fact our prisons are already overcrowded. Do we want to keep some sex offender on the street to make room for a guy sending spam applications in someone else's name?
@Saboth: I guess I'm going to have to be the crude one and give out a big ol' 'Fuck Them' to these white-collar scuzzbuckets. Be it through violence or not, this person reached out and attempted to ruin someone's life. If given the opportunity to sit in the same room with a person who ruined my credit and threatened my livelihood, and a snow shovel, no doubt someone will have a seriously acute case of Shovel-to-face syndrome.
Also to boot...by using monitoring software and allowing him to actually work and garnishing wages...(say like 33% of his wages)...the state could actually MAKE money off of him instead of spending 175k to keep him locked up. In economic times like these...those are solutions we should be looking at.
@Saboth: Saboth, as lefty-liberal as I proudly am, I am a firm believer in the punishment aspect of the justice system.
Moreover, I believe that someone who steals $100 million from a pension fund through fraud deserves as much prison time - if not more - than the thug who steals $100 from a bodega. Michael Millikin stole hundreds of millions of dollars and only paid a small portion of it in fines. The message that sends is "if you're going to steal, steal big".
A guy with a gun might kill a store clerk or even a police officer but a person who embezzles can ruin the lives of thousands.
Do shoplifters and spam emailers deserve prison time? Absolutely. Especially for repeat offenders.
Consider this - a shoplifter steals from a grocer. The grocer's profit margins are already pretty slim (there's only so much you can mark up a 50 cent can of peas). If the grocer wants to prevent shoplifting, s/he needs to hire security personnel. In addition to the salary increase, the grocer needs to take out additional insurance. This can be the difference between a successful business and an unsuccessful one.
In a down economy, the grocer might not be able to afford the extra costs. Moreover, in a bad neighborhood, the places for residents to buy food is already slim. If the grocer goes out of business, the residents are going to have to take even more time out of their free time to go shopping. On top of that, the loss of amenities in the neighborhood will lower property values. The effect ripples through the marketplace - all because of the effect of shoplifting.
NB - I am also a staunch opponent of mandatory sentencing and especially "Three Strikes" laws which, in my opinion, improperly usurp the power of the judiciary and vest it with the executive.
If we made prisons what they were supposed to be, it wouldn't cost 35k a year per inmate.
The problem is, people want to coddle prisoners because they have rights, too.
I say, if you violate someone elses rights, you give yours up for the length of your sentence.
Keep prison cells at a cool 50 degrees in the winter, and 80 degrees in summer. Cold? Put on a sweater. Hot? Take your shirt off.
Give them oatmeal for breakfast, baloney and cheese sammiches for lunch and stew for dinner. Don't like the food? Well, stay the hell out of jail!
Stop paying for educations for these creeps. Want to learn while you're in jail? Get a student loan, just like non-criminals have to.
Want a tv? A radio? Tough shit! YOU'RE IN FREAKING JAIL!
For exercise, put them on a chain gang to do public works jobs. Save money like that. What? It's embarrassing to be on a chain gang? DON'T BREAK THE LAW, MORON!
Until we jail a punishment, people will continue to break the law.
@ottermann: There are some problems with your position.
First of all, prison labor for public works jobs often undercuts jobs in the areas where contracts are being done. When your employees are only getting paid $1 an hour, you can underbid everyone. Prison labor isn't a one-size-fits-all solution.
TV does the same thing to prisoners that it does to small children - it opiates them. Corrections workers have to keep large numbers of violent criminals in line without firearms; they need all the help they can get.
Does this really surprise anyone after the kidnapping/diaper scandal? I know we want to hold the folks at NASA to a higher standing but they have the same problem any other organization faces. People.
Your always going to have at least 1 one scumbag in any group.
I knew Cubicle Computer 2140S was trouble the moment I flipped on it's surge protector. Something about the way its SATA ribbon-cables were daisy-chained just told me that this computer came from a bad plant.
It was a quiet computer; it wouldn't speak up much except for the internal speaker blips and beeps when it ran its BIOS check. But something about it....
You can just tell - the way that the cursor would blink, or the HDD access light's flicker, I knew it was up to no good.
@Git Em SteveDave loves this guy->★: I don't know why but I thought that it I could just gain access to Cubicle Computer 2140S' CPU, I could flip its setting from bad to good. Little did I know that the dipswitches were all set to bad.
Maybe Cubicle Computer 2140S had a bad manufacturer. Maybe something in Cubicle Computer 2140S' shipping corrupted its hard drive. Maybe Cubicle Computer's 2140S just had a rotten logic board. Whatever the problem was, it wasn't covered by warranty.
I should have seen the warning signs. I should have defragmented the drive more often and cleaned out redundant code. I should have backed my data up more. But Cubicle Computer 2140S was hooked up to an unstable network.
Cubicle Computer 2140S started hogging resources, wasting bandwidth, and giving out bad memory addresses. It was only a matter of time before Cubicle Computer 2140S had kernel panic and tried to kill init.
I remember talking to Norton. He sent me to Dr. Watson to get some anti-virus. But it went deeper than malware. The processor needed upgrading so I called in Dr. Sbaitso, who put in his 8 bits.
@OMG! Ponies!: 2140S you say? I've always wondered about that cubicle. Every time I would pass it, the hairs on the back of my neck would stand on end, as if something malicious were lurking behind me waiting, planning, scheming to launch two girls and a cup on me.
I should have known from the pinging of the coils as the resolution changed that something was very wrong. The slow flicker of the sub 60 hz refresh scan rate, and the ominous red glow from the obviously out of place laser mouse.
Lol, how Philip Marlowe of you! Tis needs a little Chris Botti in the background, played on a rainy, Sunday afternoon ...
"She was a charming middle-aged lady with a face like a bucket of mud. I gave her a drink. She was a gal who'd take a drink, if she had to knock you down to get the bottle..."
@Acemonster: I had just finished compiling when Cubicle Computer 2140S accused me of syntax error. I knew that the problems between us didn't just exist between the keyboard and the chair. Cubicle Computer 2140S was really pushing my buttons.
I tried to go Home. On the way, I met us with some friends from my Buddy List. Url told me that I needed to lay off - not let myself get overheated. Linux slipped me something he said would refresh me. I had no idea that they were part of the Token Ring.
We had another few packets, transferring data exchanges. It was the same old program. 10111 10011. REPEAT, IF X, GOTO 10. It wasn't too long before I felt W3C compliant.
I have a lot of data loss after that - like someone turned the Brightness down to 0. Before I knew it, I was Not Responding. It was like someone gave a hard boot to my head.
12/11/08
12/11/08
12/11/08
12/11/08
12/11/08
Also, welcome back!
12/11/08
12/11/08
12/11/08
12/11/08
12/11/08
12/11/08
12/11/08
12/11/08
12/11/08
12/11/08
12/11/08
Too often, people think of the utilitarian purpose behind prison and forget the punitive purpose. Both are legitimate and moral.
12/11/08
True, they are meant to punish...back in the days when we had no other means. Between satellite tracking, microchips, garnishing wages...there are FAR better methods of punishment than spending 35,000 a year for 5 years (in this man's case) to punish someone. Look at it from an efficiency standpoint. We will spend 175,000 in taxpayer dollars to "punish" someone for messing up someone else's credit (which probably cost 5k to repair). Nevermind the fact our prisons are already overcrowded. Do we want to keep some sex offender on the street to make room for a guy sending spam applications in someone else's name?
12/11/08
12/11/08
Also to boot...by using monitoring software and allowing him to actually work and garnishing wages...(say like 33% of his wages)...the state could actually MAKE money off of him instead of spending 175k to keep him locked up. In economic times like these...those are solutions we should be looking at.
12/11/08
Moreover, I believe that someone who steals $100 million from a pension fund through fraud deserves as much prison time - if not more - than the thug who steals $100 from a bodega. Michael Millikin stole hundreds of millions of dollars and only paid a small portion of it in fines. The message that sends is "if you're going to steal, steal big".
A guy with a gun might kill a store clerk or even a police officer but a person who embezzles can ruin the lives of thousands.
Do shoplifters and spam emailers deserve prison time? Absolutely. Especially for repeat offenders.
Consider this - a shoplifter steals from a grocer. The grocer's profit margins are already pretty slim (there's only so much you can mark up a 50 cent can of peas). If the grocer wants to prevent shoplifting, s/he needs to hire security personnel. In addition to the salary increase, the grocer needs to take out additional insurance. This can be the difference between a successful business and an unsuccessful one.
In a down economy, the grocer might not be able to afford the extra costs. Moreover, in a bad neighborhood, the places for residents to buy food is already slim. If the grocer goes out of business, the residents are going to have to take even more time out of their free time to go shopping. On top of that, the loss of amenities in the neighborhood will lower property values. The effect ripples through the marketplace - all because of the effect of shoplifting.
NB - I am also a staunch opponent of mandatory sentencing and especially "Three Strikes" laws which, in my opinion, improperly usurp the power of the judiciary and vest it with the executive.
12/11/08
If we made prisons what they were supposed to be, it wouldn't cost 35k a year per inmate.
The problem is, people want to coddle prisoners because they have rights, too.
I say, if you violate someone elses rights, you give yours up for the length of your sentence.
Keep prison cells at a cool 50 degrees in the winter, and 80 degrees in summer. Cold? Put on a sweater. Hot? Take your shirt off.
Give them oatmeal for breakfast, baloney and cheese sammiches for lunch and stew for dinner. Don't like the food? Well, stay the hell out of jail!
Stop paying for educations for these creeps. Want to learn while you're in jail? Get a student loan, just like non-criminals have to.
Want a tv? A radio? Tough shit! YOU'RE IN FREAKING JAIL!
For exercise, put them on a chain gang to do public works jobs. Save money like that. What? It's embarrassing to be on a chain gang? DON'T BREAK THE LAW, MORON!
Until we jail a punishment, people will continue to break the law.
12/11/08
First of all, prison labor for public works jobs often undercuts jobs in the areas where contracts are being done. When your employees are only getting paid $1 an hour, you can underbid everyone. Prison labor isn't a one-size-fits-all solution.
TV does the same thing to prisoners that it does to small children - it opiates them. Corrections workers have to keep large numbers of violent criminals in line without firearms; they need all the help they can get.
12/11/08
Your always going to have at least 1 one scumbag in any group.
12/11/08
12/11/08
12/11/08
12/11/08
12/11/08
It was a quiet computer; it wouldn't speak up much except for the internal speaker blips and beeps when it ran its BIOS check. But something about it....
You can just tell - the way that the cursor would blink, or the HDD access light's flicker, I knew it was up to no good.
Some computers are just wired for evil.
12/11/08
12/11/08
Maybe Cubicle Computer 2140S had a bad manufacturer. Maybe something in Cubicle Computer 2140S' shipping corrupted its hard drive. Maybe Cubicle Computer's 2140S just had a rotten logic board. Whatever the problem was, it wasn't covered by warranty.
I should have seen the warning signs. I should have defragmented the drive more often and cleaned out redundant code. I should have backed my data up more. But Cubicle Computer 2140S was hooked up to an unstable network.
Cubicle Computer 2140S started hogging resources, wasting bandwidth, and giving out bad memory addresses. It was only a matter of time before Cubicle Computer 2140S had kernel panic and tried to kill init.
I remember talking to Norton. He sent me to Dr. Watson to get some anti-virus. But it went deeper than malware. The processor needed upgrading so I called in Dr. Sbaitso, who put in his 8 bits.
12/11/08
12/11/08
12/11/08
12/11/08
HAHAHAHA. I just got in trouble for reading this on my Blackberry at work cuz i laughed so hard. amazing
12/11/08
12/11/08
I should have known from the pinging of the coils as the resolution changed that something was very wrong. The slow flicker of the sub 60 hz refresh scan rate, and the ominous red glow from the obviously out of place laser mouse.
12/11/08
12/11/08
Lol, how Philip Marlowe of you! Tis needs a little Chris Botti in the background, played on a rainy, Sunday afternoon ...
"She was a charming middle-aged lady with a face like a bucket of mud. I gave her a drink. She was a gal who'd take a drink, if she had to knock you down to get the bottle..."
12/11/08
I tried to go Home. On the way, I met us with some friends from my Buddy List. Url told me that I needed to lay off - not let myself get overheated. Linux slipped me something he said would refresh me. I had no idea that they were part of the Token Ring.
We had another few packets, transferring data exchanges. It was the same old program. 10111 10011. REPEAT, IF X, GOTO 10. It wasn't too long before I felt W3C compliant.
I have a lot of data loss after that - like someone turned the Brightness down to 0. Before I knew it, I was Not Responding. It was like someone gave a hard boot to my head.