Mature

[Current]

I'm not sure where I stand on this. Sexual crimes towards children is a heinous offense, but castration seems extreme, and what of female offenders? You can't castrate a woman. Incarceration and psychological help seems most appropriate, possibly for life.

Notice this is chemical castration, not surgical castration. That is to say, administering a drug that reduces sex drive, not physical removal of testes. Chemical castration of women is more unusual and, I think, trickier than for men, but it's possible.
That being said, I have yet to find evidence this program is or will be used against female child molesters. Chemical castration programs are noticeably biased towards men, as is the general conception of rapists and child molesters.

[Master Crayak]

I'm not sure where I stand on this. Sexual crimes towards children is a heinous offense, but castration seems extreme, and what of female offenders? You can't castrate a woman. Incarceration and psychological help seems most appropriate, possibly for life.

I just don't know. My opinions will likely become more or less extreme on a weekly basis, this is a sensitive issue, and if there was a way to prevent all child abuse in a humane fasion I would pick that option.

"Sexual crimes towards children is a heinous offense, and if there was a way to prevent all child abuse in a humane fasion I would pick that option."

"If there was a way" that implies that there is not such a way.
I'm sure that we can all stand by the statement that "Sexual crimes towards children is a heinous offense" the trick then is finding a punishment that does not seem "extreme".

Lets look at some of our choises:
1) Life in jail-this costs the tax payers countless thousands of dollers (or whatever) and the "bad guys" get to live in a nice place without having to pay rent or morgage.
2) Put them to death-this one is the quickest and easyest to pull off, it costs the least and we never have to worry about that one person commiting that crime ever again, yet this is seen as "inhumane" where people on the other side will say that what is inhumane is to let these monsters live.
3) Castration-See "Put them to death", only with more pain.
4) Incarceration and psychological help-see #1, plus as much as I hate to say it, psychological help does not always work. I haven't looked at any numbers on this, but I'm guessing it hardly ever works.
5) Just let them run free, they have every right to express themselves that everyone else does. They believe that it is alright for them to do these things, and I believe that the world was created in a big bang or by some kind of god. Isn't it all really just a diffrence of beliefs? Can't was all just get along? - Yeah. There is a reason that I saved this one for last.

Anyone who votes for number 5 prob doesn't have any kids.

[Current]

Lets look at some of our choises:
1) Life in jail-this costs the tax payers countless thousands of dollers (or whatever) and the "bad guys" get to live in a nice place without having to pay rent or morgage.

Um, nice? How?

2) Put them to death-this one is the quickest and easyest to pull off, it costs the least

Wrong. The death penalty is more expensive than life in prison, due to the rather lengthy appeals process involved. And getting rid of the appeals process is basically killing innocent people.

and we never have to worry about that one person commiting that crime ever again,

But we do have to worry about other people doing it, as capital punishment is a very poor deterrent. (yes, those stats are for murder rather than child molestation, but since the latter isn't a capital offence as far as I know, it's not terribly likely to get info on it)
Most of this information is from the US, since it's the easiest place to get the relevant statistics from.

3) Castration-See "Put them to death", only with more pain.

As I explained earlier, the measure being discussed is chemical, not surgical castration. It's not particularly painful, as far as I know. And it's most definitely does not guarantee they won't commit the crime again. Even if it was actual castration it wouldn't. I don't think this is the right place for going into details, I'll just say that child molestation can happen in multiple ways.

4) Incarceration and psychological help-see #1, plus as much as I hate to say it, psychological help does not always work. I haven't looked at any numbers on this, but I'm guessing it hardly ever works.

Psych help works better than the alternative (short of murder, I suppose, but then you have to deal with killing innocent people). It can be combined with chemical castration, too.

[Spencer]

I should clarify what I said earlier. When I said if there was a way, I meant if there was a perfect deterrent. We've never found a perfect deterrent for any crime, because those crimes still happen.

I was also under the mistaken impression we were talking physical castration. Chemical seems less extreme, but still isn't a very good deterrent. I'd prefer to prevent crime. choosing deterrents that will make people not want to risk committing the crime in the first place is best. Unfortunately, the best deterrents would probably fall under cruel and unusual punishment, which is also bad.

It's too bad we haven't figured out how to imprint memories. If we did, the ideal punishment would be to live through your victim's memories of an event every 24 hours during your incarceration. The punishment would scale up the worse the crime is. If you thought you'd have live through the memory of being killed, you would probably hesitate to kill someone. Same for rape or other molestation. Might not work at all for vandalism or burglary, but physical assaults would probably go way down. And just because I stole the idea from an episode of Star Trek: Voyager doesn't mean its a bad idea. And if we could imprint memories, we could read them too, we could automatically check your memories to see if you did the crime you're accused of. They'd need a warrant and reasonable cause to do a memory search, and could only search the times when the crime was committed... wow... I'm such a nerd...

[Current]

I was also under the mistaken impression we were talking physical castration. Chemical seems less extreme, but still isn't a very good deterrent. I'd prefer to prevent crime. choosing deterrents that will make people not want to risk committing the crime in the first place is best. Unfortunately, the best deterrents would probably fall under cruel and unusual punishment, which is also bad.

You're thinking of deterrence through fear. While it's natural to think that way, it's not actually that great of a deterrent. I posted a few statistics about the death penalty in my last post, you'll notice that it doesn't work terribly well, and it's certainly not because people aren't afraid of death.

After a certain level of harshness, making a punishment worse does not directly translate into less people doing it. Murderers don't usually think "Hey, I'll kill this guy if the worst punishment is X amount of years, but not if it's Y amount of years." Torture and murder and such can add a certain dimension of fear, I'm not denying that, but expecting a reduction in crime proportional to the sentence assumes a level of rationality and cost-benefit analysis that people in general don't usually engage in, let alone in regard to potential criminal acts.

Your memory imprinting method is... a bit brutal, to be honest. You're basically saying it was wrong of the criminal to force the victim to experience something, but it's OK for the State to force the criminal to go through that exact same experience. While it is possible some people will be scared away from crime by that, certainly not everyone or even the majority. Crime that is not premeditated, for one, is unaffected. Criminals who believe they won't get caught, the same. To somewhat restate an earlier point, after a certain level of harshness in punishment, criminals who do the rational, premeditated cost-benefit analysis and factor in getting caught are a much lesser portion of the population of criminals.

Deterrence through fear only goes so far. Education and reformation, while much more complicated than torture in implementation, are also far more useful.

[Luna May]

Must post, someone please remind me.

[Current]

Does this count as a reminder?

[Visser 5]

"I'd prefer to prevent crime. choosing deterrents that will make people not want to risk committing the crime in the first place is best. Unfortunately, the best deterrents would probably fall under cruel and unusual punishment, which is also bad."

Yeah, I think we all feel this way.
Not just you.

[daysofgreen]

Just remember guys, if you give the same sentence for molesting a little girl as for molesting and killing a little girl, it seems an incentive to go ahead and kill her.

[Tobias_Marco]

<Chemical castration does seem to be less extreme than physical castration, however I have heard of cases where someone was chemically castrated yet they still did things that were 'not allowed' by polite society.>

<Not too long ago I read an artical about rape in the military.>
<There are women who have superior officers and those superior officers were taking advantage of them. These woman then file a complaint and nothing gets done. In fact in most cases the woman was called a w***e and was often kicked out of the military with DISHONORABLE discharges. To me THAT sounds like cruel and unusual punishment for being a woman in the military.>

<People say that the punishment should fit the crime. It seems to me that any form of sex crime being punished by castration would fit the 'punishment fitting the crime' thing.>

@ Spencer: <As soon as I started reading your 're-live the memory idea' I thought of that episode.

Current:
After a certain level of harshness, making a punishment worse does not directly translate into less people doing it. Murderers don't usually think "Hey, I'll kill this guy if the worst punishment is X amount of years, but not if it's Y amount of years." Torture and murder and such can add a certain dimension of fear, I'm not denying that, but expecting a reduction in crime proportional to the sentence assumes a level of rationality and cost-benefit analysis that people in general don't usually engage in, let alone in regard to potential criminal acts.

<Yeah, that is a real shame, I wish people thought that way more often.>

Current:
Your memory imprinting method is... a bit brutal, to be honest. You're basically saying it was wrong of the criminal to force the victim to experience something, but it's OK for the State to force the criminal to go through that exact same experience.

<Well when we put a murderer to death it is basically the same thing.>

Deterrence through fear only goes so far. Education and reformation, while much more complicated than torture in implementation, are also far more useful.

<That may be true, however there are many people who do the same crime many times, such as serial killers and people who rape multiple times. If such a person is put to death than they can't do it any more. How many people could we save per year if we just put all the multiple victim murderers to death?>