Waste an hour watching my dangerous idea at the Sydney Opera House’s 2013 Festival of Dangerous Ideas:
There’s also me on a panel “Getting Soft on Crime”:
You can watch all the Dangerous Ideas here. What an amazing weekend and amazingly well run festival! Thanks to everybody at FODI.
Ok,
I'll watch your video, but I suggest you give the video contained here with Bill Bratton a looksee when you get a chance.
Since it's warm down under you aren't getting a hyperlink.
youtube.com/watch?v=b1eYSUko33c&feature=share&list=TLvYUFow2Q8myO-qRk8cDQy-B66MG5Bwac
By the way if you haven't encountered the Aussie slang word "seppo" you need to look it up.
The most suburbanized decent sized country on the planet and they think they're all kangaroo hunters or sumtin.
The word for the week when I was there was "bikie." As in "Queensland bikie gang." I couldn't say it with a straight face, thus I tried to sprinkle it into every talk I gave.
I tried to tell them they everything didn't have to have a two syllable diminutive, but the Aussies were too busy eating breakie and packing the eskie with bikkies and meat for the barbie while swatting away mossies to bad mouth this seppo.
Thanks for the Bratton link. Hadn't known of it and watching it now.
Here in the Netherlands the government, including the criminal justice system, has to cut spending severely. I think I will propose your idea of optional flogging to the Dutch government as way to cut spending on criminal justice.
Doe het! Maar denk ik niet dat het in de Nederland heel goed gann zullen zijn. (how's that for bad Dutch?!)
PCM, not quite bad. Only a few errors: it's "het Nederland" not "de Nederland", in fact in this context the articly is usually left out entirely. Further it would be either "goed zal gaan" or "goed zal zijn" instead of "goed gann zullen zijn".
Damn. I knew het Nederland and gann was a typo. But thanks for the rest!
Is this correct? Doe het! Maar denk ik niet dat het in Nederland heel goed zal gaan.
The second sentence is correct. Might I ask how do you know so much Dutch? It's not an easy language to learn.
My Dutch used to be better. Back in the late 1990s, I lived and worked and did police research in Amsterdam. My brother has been there for 20 years (he started Boom Chicago). So I go back and visit every now and then (but it's been awhile).
PCM, I was wondering about your opinion regarding community service as a punishment. As far as I have understood, there's research which shows that community service has a reasonable rehabilitating effect, despite it's often considered a "soft" punishment by the common public. Would community service not be a reasonable alternative to (short) prison sentences?
I'm for it. But it's hard to scale-up community service to the level needed to make a dent in the prison population. And it runs into problems if one inmate does something bad. And then if it's combined with incarceration, it becomes expensive. Also, unions oppose it.
But yes, I'm for it. I'm for anything other than incarceration.