Hi Warmcome, you are indeed an interseting lady.
You have raised some very controversial points. This crime & punishment issue has so many layers that there is no 1 solution, it is multi-faceted.
I think it starts with parenting, opportunities available for education & careers, feelings of self-respect, self-worth & respect for others. This positive beginning in life comes from both home environment & state. Let's be honest, prisons in Ireland & most other western, 1st world countries are for 1 class of people only. We live in one of the most unequal societies in the world & the feelings of being dis-affected will only increase amongst the same people who never got a lick of the tiger. This is a social problem but also one the government didn't have any real appetite to solve even with all the budget suplusses.
So we end up with the dis-affected, ill-educated young man in our midst & he has no respect for himself, let alone anyone else. No one has ever said anything positive to him in his life & he is the product of our rampant capitalist, greed is good, look after no.1 society. He is doomed before he ever began.
He then becomes a scumbag & learns lots of new tricks as he is continually processed through Mountjoy for petty crimes, until he graduates to some proper stuff.
Is this accurate or am I a liberal, lefty apologist ?
I contend that as the bankers, politicians & any other person who has had every opportunity in life are caught comitting crime they should be punished even harder !
I also however want to differentiate between rapists & criminal scumbags. Rapists & paedos should be chemically castrated after the closest adult male relatives of the victims have 10mins in a cell with a baseball bat with them. Criminals who have never had opportunities should be given a chance to better themselves while in prison, it's a form of self-preservation for the state, better chance of them not re-offending.
The state & society divorces itself from any responsibility for the scumbag. We are all partially to blame for what our society produces & an unjust & widening divide between the wealthiest & poorest will only produce similar results as in the USA.
Will capital punishment work ? I don't think so, again look at the US.
Are prisons for punishment or for rehabilitation ? A functioning rehabilitation regime would surely bring crime rates down in time ? The current system only serves to institutionalise the criminal & it's purely an education system for young offenders to graduate to bigger crimes.
Then there's the victims, that's the one I don't have any real answer to. What is the best way to help the victim feel like justice is being done ? I have been a victim of a pretty serious crime, which left me in a bad state & one of my friends with a more colourful past took retribution & that helped me. That's taking things into your own hands though but I do feel there's a case to be made for the law of the jungle - inflict something similar on the criminal ?
I contend that our biggest problem in Ireland is a loss of social conscience, a me fein obcession, a pointless drug prohibition & rampant inequality. Crime, scumbags etc. are all a symptom of this.