Justice System

[SacredWarrior]

This is something that's been plaguing me for a while now so to get it all out, I gotta rant!

The justice system is complete and total horseshit. There are so many things wrong with it that it makes pedophilia look right. Ok that was a bad comparison but you know what I mean!

The justice system is very sexist towards men. I know it may seem impossible to the ignoramuses that are overpopulating the planet but MEN CAN BE RAPED! When a man rapes a woman, he gets 20 years in jail but when a woman rapes a man, she gets 1 year. That's some bullshit.

And there's the custody battle. Women shouldn't automatically get custody of their children just because they pushed them out of their vagina. News flash: that doesn't automatically make them mothers. If men have to put with visitation bullshit, women should as well. Children have literally been killed by their mothers because the courts automatically decided to place them in their care instead of placing them with the father where they would be safe and well cared for. I know some states give children a choice of what parent they want to live with when they get a certain age but it should be all states.

Last thing I wanna point out is the dumb crime ratio. Why is it that drug addicts spend more time in prison than child molesters and murderers? Drug addicts can reform and become productive members of society. Child molesters and murderers can't and honestly I feel they should get the death penalty. Especially child molesters.

That's pretty much all I gotta say about this fucked up world. Deuces you sexy people! What are your thoughts?

 

[Jorick]

Oh my, this thread has great potential to turn into a debate. Let's hope people can exercise self control.

I agree with all of those things, and I have more to add.

Not only is the system slanted against men, but it's so bad that it legitimately could be the central focal point of the current movement against the overreach of the justice system. It's certainly biased disproportionately against black people and hispanic people and so on, but the sad fact of the matter is that the disparity of the frequency of charges being dropped, frequency of convictions in similar cases, and severity of sentences in similar cases is larger between men and women of the same race than it is between black men and white men. I'm totally down with the system getting fixed in regards to racial discrimination, but holy shit the gender discrimination needs attention too.

Another specific area that's brokenly biased against men is domestic violence cases. Despite numerous peer reviewed studies finding that women are roughly equally likely to be the primary aggressor in reciprocal domestic violence, and significantly more likely to be the primary aggressor in non-reciprocal violence, men are disproportionately arrested for domestic violence cases far more than women. Many places have training policies on domestic violence that tell police officers if it's a domestic violence call for an incident between a man and a woman they should assume the man was the primary aggressor unless there is compelling proof that he was not. It's pretty awful.

On the note of custody, in those cases where men do get custody of the kids they end up having far less of a support system than women granted custody. Where men are expected to pay child support, even if the mother makes plenty enough money to support herself and the child(ren), women are frequently not made to do so. When they are made to do so, it's enforced far less frequently than for men. One examination of the incarceration rates for failure to pay child support in Massachusetts found that while women made up 12% of those ordered to make child support payments, they only made up 1.5 to 5% of those incarcerated for failure to pay; that's less than half what it should be if the system was truly fair. This disproportionate arrest and conviction rate is not due to women being less likely to fail to pay, it's simply a higher likelihood that men will be arrested and convicted for it than women are.

And totally agreed on the crazy difference in sentencing. There was a dude (Christopher Chaney) sentenced to 10 years in prison for hacking into the personal accounts of some celebrities and co-workers, finding and posting some nude photos, and also sending some nude photos of his co-workers to their family members. Shitty thing to do, absolutely, but he got a harsher sentence than some murderers get. Not even manslaughter type murders, actual willful and intentional murders. :|

Shit's broken and needs to be fixed.

 

[Saito Hajime]

Where I come from, we have a native monarchy (as in a historical monarchy that belongs to a native group, but with no real authority or legitimacy). One of the candidates for succession of that monarchy committed a crime. The courts decided to quash the convictions entirely on the basis that the punishment would interfere with his ability to succeed the monarchy.

If your reaction was "No shit it would prevent his succession, that's a consequence of committing crimes!", then you feel my pain. The idea that people should be let off of crimes simply because the punishment would harm them in more ways than one is insane.