Looting and destruction of Aldi shop in Dublin.

[osarusan]

It's actually another poster who has been suggesting that the offenders were so stupid and lacking in the capacity for mature or adult thought that you'd have to wonder how he could see them as being fully responsible for their actions.

That's the third time now, that you've attributed something to me, that I didn't even come close to saying.

And you've done it in the same post as you criticise somebody else for misrepresenting you.

[Charlie Darwin]

I'm going to leave this point after this as it's obviously cutting close to the bone on both sides. You're free to disagree with my view, but as I've been there, done that, not been able to afford the t-shirt, I don't think your counter-argument can consist solely of painting a utopian graduate world where jobs grow on trees and we all have silver spoons in our mouths. It's particularly ironic that you complain that I don't appreciate others' circumstances while you resolutely ignore my own similar enough experience.

I'm not being funny here but I expressed exactly none of those sentiments. All I said was you're still not getting my point, and instead of trying to grasp it you're just saying "I had problems too."

[pineapple stu]

We clearly have very different outlooks on life and people generally. That is fine, although what can be a bit annoying is that you have a real habit of being haughtily dismissive of the (substantiated) opinions of others (not just my own) - despite completely misunderstanding/misrepresenting them - whilst assuming that your own possess some sort of special self-evident or infallible status.

Sorry Danny - I'm at least going to have to bring out the pot and kettle argument here. Your dismissal of Fizzer's post about their work experience based on the tone of their post bordered on the arrogant - the rest of the post was back to your own arguments, without any real reference to Fizzer's experience - and then there's your dismissal of views as "paternalistic ignorance" and similar on other threads. On this thread, you've three times ignored a poster saying you're misinterpreting their comments. Maybe you just can't see this; I don't know. But it's there, and makes your complaint above more than ironic.

And on the subject of misrepresenting posts, I think this deserves comment -

You thanked a post by BTTW where he appeared to be advocating a "zero tolerance" approach.

This has to be the flimsiest argument seen here in a long while. BTTW, for the record, said that "you still can't tolerate people brazenly knocking down supermarkets". Agreeing with this is not to show support for some sort of US "three strikes and you're out" system, which is what I would think of as proper zero tolerance, and which I absolutely acknowledge appears to ultimately be counter-productive because of the disproportionate penalties it can dish out. But knocking down a supermarket should be treated as someone knocking down a supermarket. Anything extra you read into that is your own issue.

I also think that people who commit murder should go to jail; would you criticise this as a "zero tolerance approach"?

It makes it hard to maintain a debate on a subject when what is actually being said is being so wilfully twisted (or mis-read, to give the benefit of the doubt)

Why is prison the "obvious solution"?

Because it's the primary social punishment in a wide range of places across the world, and has been for a long long time. That clearly makes it the obvious solution to consider.

It's certainly to be considered ahead of reinventing the wheel, as you appear to be trying to do. Now that's not to say the wheel can't be improved, but the "obvious solution" is rarely to go for a radical system redesign. Prison mayn't be perfect, but I think it's better than the alternative. I think the cases of people appearing in front of the courts with an absurdly high number of prior convictions to their name puts prison, at worst, better than the alternative you're suggesting, with its wishy-washy, ill-defined stuff about imposing "legal, communal and societal obligations" (this sounds akin to community service, which we already have for lesser crimes, of which this simply was not an example).

You mention reoffending stats - but you make no reference to the fact that keeping people out of prison also has high recidivism - much higher, in fact. Here's an admittedly extreme example from January - up in court after 326 prior convictions. A quick google will throw up plenty of other examples. Your idea may be nice in theory, but in practice, at best the support networks are clearly not there to have any sort of impact. You've not made any sort of allowance for this in simply deeming your idea to be better.

By the way, you never clarified what you meant by the term "thugs".

I don't need to. You brought it into the thread, not me (and here I'll have to acknowledge that I missed you putting words in my mouth), so as such, the definition should come from you.

But let's overlook that. Yes, they're thugs. What does that term mean? It means they're thugs. The great thing about language is that words have meanings, and we don't need to define every bloody word we use, because they already have reasonably clear definitions. This micro-analysis is a habit of yours, and to be frank, it's tedious and distracts from the main points in the debate.

It's genuinely commendable that you want to work with these people and improve their social surrounds (or at least, have someone do that), but ultimately, they knocked down a ****ing supermarket here. They potentially put people's lives at risk - knocking down a building with bystanders close by is seriously dangerous. They've caused a significant amount of commercial damage. They've presumably caused significant social unease in the area. You talk about acknowledging some manner of personal responsibility, but nothing in your posts suggest you actually want to take that into account. There's only so far that just cuddling these guys and saying they're the victims and that there's someone here for them will go.m

[peadar1987]

There are *******s in every socio-economic group. The difference is that those from wealthier groups can channel it into, say, being dirty on the rugby field, or being the middle manager from hell at Daddy's company.

The vast majority of disadvantaged people will never mug anyone, stab anyone, or rip apart a supermarket with a digger, but that doesn't mean that the environment isn't to a large degree responsible. And there's no reason why rich *******s should have any more right to have their *******liness channeled into something less destructive than poor *******s do.