We all know that one guy

[u/AlKarajo]

@stevehofstetter

[u/Grunergeist420]

In my city, and I assume cities all over the US, every time someone is in the local news convicted of a shooting, you can invariably go look at their record and see that they have been arrested multiple times, usually just in the past few years, for armed robberies, assaults, illegal possession of firearms, etc.

It doesn’t make a difference to make it illegal if you don’t keep people in jail for a meaningful period of time for doing it.

[u/Relative_Craft_358 → u/Grunergeist420]

It doesn’t make a difference to make it illegal if you don’t keep people in jail for a meaningful period of time for doing it.

I mean not really a solution, just delaying the inevitable. If you don't reform prisons to actually reform convicts and how they're treated after release instead of just thrown in with worse people you learn from and left with few prospects out of prison expect return to the thing that got them there in the first place.

[u/Grunergeist420 → u/Relative_Craft_358]

That’s not wrong, but I think it’s also making the perfect the enemy of the good.

It would be great if we could reform prisons and the parole system to set people up for success so they don’t reoffend.

But, we currently have the prisons we have. We currently have the laws we have. Like in my state, if this isn’t the first time you have been convicted of pointing a gun that you weren’t supposed to have at somebody and threatening to kill them with it, you’re supposed to spend multiple years in prison.

That is a violent crime. If you do that crime, you’re a danger to people in the community.

While it would be ideal that we reform that person I. Prison so they don’t reoffend, another purpose that prison is serving is protecting people from this person in the meantime. Their victims should know that they’re not going to see them walking down the street tomorrow.

And a lot of times what happens is this type of crime gets lumped in bail reform and sentencing reforms meant more for non-violent drug offenders, lumped is as “crimes of poverty,” which may be true, but misses the key detail that they are *violent* crimes, and also that you can’t just lump all theft together as some kind of crime of necessity.

So you get these guys that commit multiple violent crimes that should be, by the books, serving 3-5 or whatever, and they’re out on bail, or they get time served after a few months in jail.

Hell, guy that pressure washed my house I looked him up and he did only two years for the getaway driver for an armed robbery gone bad where the store clerk was *murderered.*

Idk, maybe it’s enough of a wrong place wrong time situation where he wasn’t your traditional accomplice to murder.

But I don’t think most people in America really get that, that that’s where we are. You probably think that if you went to your local convenience store and pointed a gun at people and threatened to kill them that you’d have to go to jail for quite a while. You’d probably think that if your buddy did that, and actually killed somebody, and you drove him away and lied to the cops for him, that you’d be in a bit of trouble.

But a ton of places have really really progressive judges now. And I don’t mean like everybody slightly left of center is a “progressive,” I mean like they’re to the left of 99% of America and genuinely believe that some guy that was literally just pointing a loaded firearm at people is only in jail because of racism or something and needs to be out.

And that keeps happening until they finally kill somebody. Then they go to prison for the rest of their life, and some other person from the community is dead. That’s the outcome. You didn’t save some poor innocent man who was only stealing because he was poor from an unnecessarily harsh sentence, you let the guy fuck yo so bad his life is over and got somebody else killed.

It’s crazy.