Posts by Joe Wylie
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Capture: Spring is Like a Perhaps Hand, in reply to Lilith __,
I thought the plastic beak looked incredibly fake and unconvincing until I saw a real takahe in the flesh and its beak looked equally fake. :-)
Ditto for platypus - almost too perfect :-)
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Hard News: Christchurch: Is "quite good"…, in reply to Hebe,
To be fair, it's a huge job
Being an army of occupation usually is.
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Hard News: Living with the psychopath, in reply to Russell Brown,
These trends have real impact on public perceptions of crime and punishment and these have political consequences.
Russell, I'm in broad agreement with you on this, but like some others who've posted here my views are coloured by the kind of personal experience that I'd rather hadn't happened.
When I had to deal with a neighbour from hell situation, where the police and my MP proved ineffective, I checked out the person concerned on Sensible Sentencing's online register. Should I have refrained from doing so on principle? In the circumstances that kind of consideration seemed a bit academic. That said, I probably have no more sympathy than you do for Garth McVicar's agenda, insofar as I'm able to understand it.
When I put it to my MP that we as a community have a social duty to carry a level of nuisance criminal behaviour in our midst, but the situation I found myself in was beyond any kind of reasonable endurance, he replied that usually these things happened in low income areas. An interesting observation from a progressive Labour MP.
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Hard News: Living with the psychopath, in reply to Russell Brown,
People thought crime was increasing (it was falling) and sentences were becoming steadily lighter (the opposite was true).
So if we're to congratulate ourselves on being above those kinds of delusions, we're likely to be more tolerant of real crime because, hey. it's declining, and each case is one less we have to worry about?
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Hard News: Living with the psychopath, in reply to Russell Brown,
I don't think anyone's saying that and I'm sorry if I gave that impression. But there were some very sweeping statements being made upthread.
Russell I'm sorry if I've implied that you did, but there are a couple of posts upthread that come across as needlessly condescending to what are probably genuine sentiments. I know from the fortunately rare but nonetheless very unpleasant experiences of people close to me that the kind of concerns that feed the likes of Sensible Sentencing are fueled by rather more immediate issues than the media and common prejudice.
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Hard News: Living with the psychopath, in reply to DexterX,
One benefit of Hall serving a prison sentence is that it enables those involved in the care of the child to get on with things whilst he is inside. Prison isn’t entirely punitive it is after all managed by the Dept of Corrections.
I'd assumed that the circumstances of Hall's home detention would be such that he'd have no contact with his victim, much as if he were incarcerated. As for the implied rehabilitative nature of a prison sentence, in the absence of any real evidence, aren't we expected to extend a similar level of faith to Corrections' expertise as those who scorn our right to comment on this case are applying to the wisdom of the trial judge?
That said, I'm far from comfortable with the argument that just because the media coverage of this case happens to be shallow and sensationalist nobody outside of the judiciary has a right to so much as express disquiet about the sentence.
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Hard News: Living with the psychopath, in reply to Gudrun Gisela,
. . . he prevented the infant’s mother from seeking treatment.
That's pretty grim. I can only hope the learned judge knows what he's doing.
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Hard News: Living with the psychopath, in reply to DexterX,
When is it that you see one stops being a shild and becomes an adult?
Depends entirely on the individual. Also I'm not offering "being a child" as some kind of mitigating circumstance. It's just the nature of the dysfunction, and that's hardly likely to be remedied by a spell in prison.
How will a prison sentence in contrast to home d compound a tragedy and compound it for whom - the infant, the mother or Hall?
As you're the one advocating a prison sentence for Hall, shouldn't you be spruiking the benefit? From my limited experience of such things I can't see how placing someone who's demonstrably immature and poorly educated into an academy for criminality is going to benefit anyone.
What do you see will make Hall a better person?
Perhaps you're privileged to know more about Hall than has been revealed in the media. I don't. I also don't know about the quality of supervision or the kind of rehabilitation that he'll be offered during his term of home detention. As long as there's a chance that he'll be made to face the consequences of his actions, and hopefully be equipped to make some kind of eventual restitution to those he's damaged, then I believe that it's a better option than a purely punitive prison term.
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Capture: Spring is Like a Perhaps Hand, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
The Toetoe also.... invasive.
Perhaps it's the Argentinian interloper?
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Hard News: Living with the psychopath, in reply to DexterX,
Sorry - I don't see 19 years of age as being a situation where a child is raising child.
No need to apologise - if you're going to take a narrowly legalistic view, maybe you're right. Without meaning to make some kind of blanket deference to the wisdom of the judiciary, I'm going to assume here that the judge took into account the likely consequences of a prison sentence on the particular individual. Apart from satisfying the public appetite for revenge, was it likely to make the offender a better person?
One connection I will concede with Wilson's case - unless we've led very sheltered lives, I think we've all encountered people who've displayed a certain learned tendency to manipulate that they've probably picked up in prison. Most are a bit too full of their own imagined ability to be convincing, but they'll try it on. I don't know if Wilson, like Charles Manson, refined his manipulative talents in the prison system, but it seems likely. Whatever, it doesn't surprise me that a reasonably socially aware judge would be reluctant to compound a tragedy by imposing a prison sentence.