Do you think that trees should grow sideways?

I know; it’s an irrelevant question. So is yours. I wrote what I meant. Read it carefully again if you’re not sure what it means.

Well, that’s what the government-sponsored social engineers want you to think. ”

Well, no, Chim. That’s actually what I’ve learned after thirty years of working as a writer, a broadcaster and a trainer in a large number of cross cultural contexts, in Canada and abroad.

Maybe that’s what’s made me utilitarian. I don’t think of myself as a bleeding heart (who does?): but I do know that if I want to change someone’s behaviour (which is what training is, and also the end goal of a lot of the writing I do), I have to start with an understanding of the learner/reader. That’s the difference between a university prof and a trainer. The prof speaketh, and the learner learneth. A trainer, on the other hand – a good one, anyway – has a few dozen ways of transferring any given basket of skills and knowledge, and KNOWS that a number of factors impact on the most effective method transfer. And culture is a huge factor, impacting on motivation, learning style, response to authority, etc.

So the bottom line for me is, what works?

I would prefer that sentencing be tailored to fit each crime and criminal, within the bounds of automatic and fixed guidelines. Murder/manslaughter should carry an automatic minimum, and have time added for aggravating factors such as robbery, theft, impairment, choice of weapon (in this case, a motor vehicle), and previous record of criminal activity, including crimes committed while still a juvenile.

Race should not be a mitigating factor for lowering the minimum time.

“Culture impacts on the way people learn, or change, or respond to various forms of discipline or punishment.”

Well, that’s what the government-sponsored social engineers want you to think. That doesn’t necessarily make it so. I’m a little — no, a lot — surprised that you would fall for that pablum.

And in Canada, our “culture” has taught everyone that if you kill, you spend a little time behind bars where you can upgrade your education and job skills, then come out of prison and pretty much depend on the government’s bending over backward to get you a job…and paying your keep until you get one. But if you somehow manage to bring “race” into the equation as a disadvantage to your proper upbringing, and a mitigating factor in sentencing, you might not spend enough time behind bars to complete that education. Then the next time you commit a crime — and you probably will, because you have learned nothing except that the more excuses you make, the more lenient your sentence becomes — you can add “lack of proper education” as a mitigating factor.

What I think is that race is not a factor for mitigation during sentencing if we are to be equal before the law. Can you handle that single exception without assuming a bunch of others have to be lumped in with it?

Culture impacts on the way people learn, or change, or respond to various forms of discipline or punishment. Our system tries to take that into account. That’s all.

I hate social engineering that makes excuses for criminals based on charts and graphs. It gets us nowhere. Criminals commit crimes because they can. We let them out of prison because we’ve been conditioned to feel sorry for them, or to feel guilty about “persecuting” them because some idiot bureaucratic drone has all this neat audio-visual material that he put together in some make-work project done to justify his government salary.

SL: Ah, thanks for clearing that up. I read and re-read his post, though, and I didn’t think he was being all that bigotted. He was expressing his opinion about legalized bigotry in criminal law. You apparently disagree with his choice of words, but from my POV, he’s not wrong.

That remains my opinion regardless of the various pieces of spin, explanation, attempted redefinition of terms, and his, and others, attempts at redefining that point that I made, that have been attached to the discussion in justifying the choice he made.

Plenty of criminals came from privileged backgrounds. And plenty of people with vile childhoods turned out to be just fine. I see no corelation between upbringing and criminality.

I was under the impression that this was a point SL was trying to make strictly to do with racism…and Aaron’s “racism” as a blogger. I linked his comments directly back to the judge, is all. And from the judge, it goes back to the law, which specifically directs the judge to consider that the criminal is Indian when handing down a sentence, and to give him a lighter sentence because of his race.

Well, you attribute the decision of the Court of Appeals to consider the perp’s ancestry in sentencing to racism: I attribute it to their desire to assess his likelihood to reoffend, the probably impact of punishment, etc.

“And what do upbringing and childhood have to do with the potential for rehabilitation? If they don’t have anything to do with the propensity for criminal activity in the first place, where’s the connection in the second place?”

They have quite a bit to do with both, don’t you think?

And what do upbringing and childhood have to do with the potential for rehabilitation? If they don’t have anything to do with the propensity for criminal activity in the first place, where’s the connection in the second place?

Do you believe a person’s upbringing and childhood…
a) do, or
b) do not
…have an impact on their potential for rehabilition?

Grant’s family is never going to be happy with the sentence (and who can blame them?). After all, they’ll never see him again, and his killer is about to go free. They had gotten to the point of acceptance, though.

What I said about local anger goes to the entire community, both for people who were his friends and for people who had never met him. The reduction in Pratt’s sentence galvanized an entire town (actually, a whole lot more than an entire town) to reaction against the Canadian legal system (it’s NOT a justice system).

The legal system, and this sentence reduction, was race-based. Because Pratt is Indian, he qualifies for a lighter sentence than he would if he were white. The judge who wrote the opinion (and the one to whom I am referrring) made that point very clear.