<p>I feel so very sad for the victim and his parents/families. cringe everytime these things are reported, and unfortunately they are being reported much too often. I just want to cry in frustration. How do we stop this? We have to stop labeling. what has led people to have such disregard for each other, to do such awful things to each other ? .</p>
<p>I feel so sorry for the victim. It makes you wonder why these kids who did this have such sick minds. I’m not surprised why some parents can be overprotective to their children nowadays with people like these who are unpredictably dangerous. I hope the right amount of justice will be served in the end.</p>
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An increase in incarceration does not mean that more people are committing violent crimes.</p>
<p>Wow…Hadn’t checked in with CC in several weeks only to be met with this nasty little thread. Now I’m even more convinced of the sanity saving merits of having immersed myself into Korean language self-study, K-pop & K-Indie music, and Korean and Taiwanese dramas: It’s given me the most pleasant escape hatch from all the race hatred and smug racial self-superiority people routinely bath in in this country. I’ve even been letting days at a time pass without tuning into the news, so this horrific murder wasn’t even known to me before reading about it here. Sad that the comments of the usual suspects don’t surprise me in the least. Oh, the irony! that some people are pointing out that one of the suspects apparently tweeted something disparaging about white people, even as they themselves often seemed barely capable of containing their hostility for black people. </p>
<p>This murder makes me heartsick, and reading about it grips me with a fear that’s actually quite irrational in its scope. It has to do with the horror of understanding that this story deals with a class of human being that should be quite outside the scope of the definition of “human”. There have been documented cases of the unimaginably sick of all races engaging in these kinds of thrill killings, and to use this one as a platform for tit for tat race baiting is quite frankly reprehensible. I can’t imagine the raw pain the parents and girlfriend of this poor student must be feeling. I can’t even begin to imagine being the parent of someone so depraved that he’d commit such a crime. Just thinking about the poor young man who lost his valuable life so suddenly and senselessly makes me terribly sad. For me, the only parallels between this case and the Trayvon Martin case lay in the fact that I immediately imagined my own son being the victim of these shootings. One minute, your son is a vibrant young man, a vessel into whom you’ve poured your entire heart and life, and the next minute, he’s simply…gone. Irrevocably, completely and senselessly gone, and no amount of political grandstanding and shrill internet race vitriol can change that. It’s the stuff of nightmares. It’s hard for me to imagine the level of hatred, or perhaps even worse, cavalier indifference to human life it takes to murder someone just because you’re bored, or you’re curious as to how it feels to kill. Apparently, entirely apart from race, three teenagers of three different racial backgrounds decided to end a life just because they could, just for kicks and giggles. They did it as a group. It seems unlikely that they all hated white folks and used it as an excuse to kill one. But I suppose that, no matter how flimsy the rational, if you wish to use it as an opportunity to once again point out how bad “those people” are, you’ll do it with gusto.</p>
<p>Americans need to adopt a Chinese/Saudi approach to punishing criminals. Perhaps not their due process approach, but once guilt has been determined beyond any doubt, it is ok to go medieval on some of those lost cases! Just sayin’!</p>
<p>^But these punish for political reasons. We want to have political prisoners? OK, from what I see, the IRS is the way of the current gov. for political reasons. IRS has the same purpose as GULAK - intimidate and destroy, it is a great alternative to imprisonment. Way to go, USA!!
Going back to non-political crimes, there are merits in much stricter laws, there is no reason to keep alive a known/proven 100% murderer. I am not talking about accidental death, self-defense, etc. I am talking about murder.
Why do we feed them and support their beings for the rest of their lives? The murderer is NOT a human being any more, it is a sick beast that has to be hanged on a public square for everybody to watch. This will prevent very many crimes, many thousands of lives will be saved, both potential criminals as well as potential victims. Look at Singapore!</p>
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<p>Violent crime doesn’t account for this rather alarming increase. The fact is, a large percentage of those currently being sent to prison are non-violent drug offenders. Over the last couple of decades, an increasingly powerful private prison management lobby has risen up in Washington which has no small incentive to see America’s prison population increase in this fashion. I have not fact checked this myself, but I read just last week that fully 50% of the world’s prison population resides in US prisons. If that’s true, it’s rather staggering to think about. And when you factor in the tens of thousands of tax payer dollars that it annually it takes to keep even one non-violent drug offender in prison, it rather boggles the mind. That’s why the hew and cry dedicated to denigrating education funding, youth programs, and intervention and treatment programs as “wasteful” strikes me as patently disingenuous. We as a nation are perfectly happy to spend 40 grand to imprison someone for a year, and thereby insure he has almost no chance of socially or economically recovering from the globally negative impact a prison record confers upon his future. But, we readily dismiss as “wasteful” less than half that amount spent on intervention, mentoring, and educational measures. We should be ashamed.</p>
<p>But hey, it’s one way to vote disenfranchise for life persons representing certain political demographics. I suppose for some politicians, it seems worth it.</p>
<p>Miami, I was not referring to political prisoners. I do not wish to discuss politics here. I was talking about capital punishment for crimes such as premeditated murder, violent rape, selling dangerous narcotics to minors etc…I find the US way too lenient on such criminals.</p>
<p>Now how many proven guilty individuals have been set free by new DNA evidence? That includes death row inmates!</p>
<p>poetsheart, you are spot on about everything you have written. We have our priorities mixed up. Of course the difference between spending $40k a year on a prison inmate versus putting some of that money back into schools, jobs programs, etc. is obvious–who wins? We certainly can’t serve the public good over the interests of corporations, now can we?</p>
<p>The thing is–I think people are starting to wake up to what’s going on. Or at least I hope so.</p>
<p>Whenhen, it explains why there is LESS crime.</p>
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There is no shortage of money spent on public schools. Here in NYC, breakfast, lunch, sometimes dinner, immunizations, check-ups, birth control, and pretty much anything else that a kid could need is provided in the schools. There is still a huge problem of gang violence, which is what this seems to have been. With the failures of Chicago, Detroit, Newark, Cleveland, etc. one would have thought that this line of reasoning would be laid to rest once and for all. I read a heartfelt OpEd the other day (before the murder) about the devastation wrought by rap music in some communities. The author was a black man who had lived the whole experience firsthand and had a lot to say about the impact. We are not going to fix broken young men (and I do think it is a gender, rather than race, issue) unless their home lives are fixed. By the time the kid gets to school it’s too late. Unless we are willing to take custody, some kids will never be productive, safe members of society.</p>
<p>I don’t know about 1980, but violent crime has decreased from 1992 to 2011. The population in 1992 was 255,029,699 and violent crime 1,932,274. In 2011, it was 311,591,917 and 1,203,564.</p>
<p>[FBI</a> ? Table 1](<a href=“http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/table-1]FBI”>FBI — Table 1)</p>
<p>That is a good thing. Why this is happening could be for many reasons. The freakonimics guys say it is the result of more abortion. Other says it is the result of longer sentences prevent criminals from repeating. I think both are probably right. </p>
<p>I will let you in on a little secret. I can’t cite the statistics but the number of juvenile offenders has decreased dramatically over the past five years. This is a good thing and I hope it continued.</p>
<p>According to news reports today, this shooting was a gang initiation and the actual intended target may have been another young black man who knew he was targeted and made himself inaccessible.</p>
<p>I don’t know where I would be without the government’s free lunch and breakfast programs I took advantage of while my single parent mother worked 3 jobs. If the government didn’t subsidize my college education, medical school (about $75K per student per year) and residency (about $100K per resident per year) in the early 2000 it would be nearly impossible for most people to become physicians. Government plays a role for those individuals who are motivated to succeed. I personally feel that our prisons are overrun with petty drug abusers who don’t belong there. I would rather see that money spent elsewhere.</p>
<p>These suspects knew right from wrong and chose to kill an innocent person. I want to hear all of the facts and NONE of the politics on the matter. This is already an emotional event that doesn’t need stirring any more racial tensions.</p>
<p>Alexandre,
Apparently you did not read my post #166 in full. If you did, you would realize that we are on the same page.</p>
<p>…btw, we are discussing politics here, the case is made to be political by President’s comments to some previous cases. He could do whatever he wishes, however, every president say whatever with the expectations of certain outcome, and he was not an exception to this rule. So, from now on, all of the murder cases will have political consequences, you wishes it or not. It has happened because of behaviour of politicians, not much we can do, except to shut up and say nothing, but thread was opened, the choice was made not to discuss and you cannot leave politics out of a very political case. Race is a huge card in current politics, ones the box is open, cannot keep the lid down.</p>
<p>The president is free to say whatever he wants. That doesn’t always make it political. If he says the sky is blue we shouldn’t go off on him for saying so. People on the left were disappointed that he had not made a statement about the Trayvon/Zimmerman case. He made a statement and now people on the right use it as ammunition for future cases. Just because our politicians and news organization make statements doesn’t mean we have to fall for them, unless we truly want to.</p>
<p>But I think bringing politics into this is disrespectful to the parents who just lost their son. It is a side conversation that has little to do with the empathy they need. That’s what happened in the Trayvon case. We quickly overlooked the fact that one set of parents lost their son while the bickering quickly migrated to racism, gun control, and whether Trayvon was a bad kid months before his death. I don’t want to fall for it and so I continue my focus on the facts of this tragedy. Someone was killed by some bad kids. If this was my child, I would be infuriated by the tone of this thread.</p>
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It will be interesting to see how many people who are sure this was a racially-motivated hate crime will amend their views if this turns out to be the case.</p>
<p>That being said, I admit that I do want to know the racial identity of victims and accused in cases like this, because it’s obvious that in many cases, it does matter. It’s too bad, of course, that so many people (on both sides of the spectrum–but Allan West, yuck) will jump to conclusions without development of the facts. And I’ll point out that even if you think people rushed to judgment in the Trayvon Martin case, that doesn’t justify you rushing to judgment on the “other side” in this case. I learned that in kindergarten.</p>
<p>I’ve been on record that I don’t think either case was racially motivated and I have never seen anything in either case that would change my mind.</p>
<p>But, race aside, Mr. Obama is the president of every American and the leader of our nation. Since this was an incident that, horror aside, is deeply disturbing to our allies in Australia, I think it would be right and comforting for him to express condolences. I’m sure I will be attacked for being picky and demanding, but I would have said the same of a president of my own party.</p>