(October 3, 2022 at 2:23 am)Irreligious Atheist Wrote: Yes, perhaps it was a poor analogy as abstinence training is dumb, and you are suggesting good things that will benefit society that I agree with, and credit to you for having these stances, but the point still stands that those things, yes, are going to lessen the problem and we'll have less people in prison, but it doesn't eliminate the problem. There will always be innocent people in prison. There will be people brought up correctly by their parents, that can still fall into hanging around the wrong people, and then they can fall into crime. Like I said, shit just happens in life. Drugs are addictive. Even kids who were raised right experiment with drugs, and some of them just end up getting hooked and then their life is screwed. I actually don't mind so much that you don't want to give voting rights to people currently in prison, and I wouldn't consider someone a bad person for holding that position. The thing I'd be more interested in convincing you is my view that it's not ok to have innocent people in jail, even if doing so may prevent some violent crimes. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and many leaders in history thought they were doing the right thing by being tough on crime at the expense of human rights. You say you worry about crime and your family, and I can completely respect that, but you know what would make me feel even less safe? If I knew I didn't have the right to the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. If I knew that my family didn't have these rights.
It's a tricky issue. It sounds great to err on the side of liberty or innocence until proven guilty. But then sometimes you have to look in the eyes of a little girl's parents, after her mangled body is found in a ditch, killed by someone who's been under suspicion for a long time. So it's not a matter of whether there will be injustice-- it's which injustice you lean toward.
My view is that criminals might be innocent of the particular crime they were put away for-- but very few of them indeed were clean civilians who were just dragged up on fabricated charges. So I'd favor leaning more toward protecting the public than you, but certainly not without due process.
