[ExI] What is Grace?

[Damien Broderick]

At 02:36 PM 3/12/2009 +0100, Stefano Vaj wrote:

>At least in western societies, criminal sentences serve somewhat
>unofficially an additional purpose, namely the more or less temporary
>elimination of people who are perceived as dangerous or asocial from
>society.
>
>This is of course hypocritical and distorsive, since it should be
>dealt with if anything not on the basis of crimes allegedly already
>perpetrated and their gravity, but on the basis of potential future
>damages.

And as Dagon stressed in his excellent post, the current system 
actually *increases* potential future damages, through brutalization 
and creating an environment that (very expensively) *teaches* humans 
how best to be criminals. And doing this to many tens or hundreds of 
thousands of people whose "crime" is to choose cannabis over more 
dangerous mood modifiers is truly, grotesquely absurd.

Damien Broderick