In that same perfect world we’d have the balls enough to execute those who so richly deserve it and lock those down forever who have shown time after time, in and out of custody settings, they will never become productive and always act out in a manner that injures society.

One thing I would think you’d agree on is the need for programs that track parolees back into society with more oversight and incentives in terms of education and employment. Personally, I wouldn’t put parolees directly back on the street but would make some sort of half-way house, training and successful work experience mandatory (at least in the case of guys with serious records.) That seems to me to be a better approach to the problem of recidivism than relying solely on longer incarceration. My guess is that after a long incarceration many of these guys aren’t fit for much of anything other than going back to prison if left to their own devices.

With the recidivism rate as high as it is what would change my mind about parolees in general? It’s not like there wasn’t tons of these guys taking part in new crimes to go around or you’d read about day after day in the paper.

How do we integrate career criminals, and I rarely see that term here but it’s what were talking about, into this type of job market? We;ve pretty much turned into a bunch of cowards when it comes to doing the right thing in all types of areas. Now many feel it’s better to do the thing that makes people feel good about how they treated someone else, even if that someone has an established track record that says I can’t be trusted.

It’s a recipe for more problems down the road.

Well…duh!!! Which is why I’m wondering whether your experience is the most rational basis for generalizing. As I said above, I’m not comfortable with the notion of dumping prisoners on the street because we can’t afford incarceration. I’d like public policy re: parole to be generated based on a full range of experts, experiences and some sort of strategy from integration. Without a strategy for integration and employment, we might as well keep these guys chained in a pit.

The idea is that he shouldn’t be hanging out where his gang claims its neighborhood, which certainly has a logic to it. And to succeed, frankly, a former gang member needs to move away from the ‘hood. But to make never going there at all a condition of parole, rarely turns out to be practical.

These are the cases I’m talking about.

And WTF, that’s just dumb.

*******************

Celeste forgot to mention the gangsters visting their sick grandmothers, we all know gangsters often visit their sick grandmothers.

I’m not blind to the fact that there are exceptions to the rule but my experience with parolees has rarely been because they’ve been behaving. I don’t know how people could get violated for being in the wrong neighborhood unless that neighborhood wasn’t friendly to him. No way could i get someone violated for that even in 2002, not with P.O.’s I ever ran into.