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by thorntonbf
3714 days ago
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It's really encouraging to see people in the system who really care about helping the people they serve, and this judge is clearly in that category. His comments in the video about "sometimes they lose their way" was filled with compassion. We need more people like that in the world. |
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The war on drugs, mandatory minimum sentencing, brutal probation regimes that throw ex-prisoners back into prison for minor offenses all play a part.
This is systematic problem, media-driven attacks on criminals are a reliable "dog-whistle" issue for politicians and so-forth.
It is encouraging to me when folks involved in this system put forward a critique and try to stop the overall downward trend here.
It is "nice" when someone engages in this sort of act of pure human kindness but this seem like exactly the sort of things that doesn't scale, that doesn't recognize larger problems and basically puts things down as a simple problem for veterans rather than a problem our whole society faces.
Anyone who's spent a bit of time watching courts knows that a given judges sees dozens of people per day who get essentially assembly line justice with 90% of them being sad people who made sad choices with the courts meting out one more level penalties likely to continue these people's downward spiral. It's nice when a judge does one semi-good thing - but I can only see nice, not encouraging, here.