For my very own amusement, I’ve been trying to come up with some unambiguous statements of what policies I would enact, should my candidacy for whatever office come through.
1) The US will no longer sell weapons to any foreign power. If we support someone else’s war enough to send our own troops, great. If not, let them fight with rocks and twigs…or at least with French and Russian manufactured weapons. I’m sick of seeing US made weapons running over poor people.
2) No new prisons. We have *got* to break our addiction to incarceration. I don’t know the real solution to our social ills, but I’m absolutely certain that adding more prison beds and locking up more people is not part of the correct answer. Refurbish the ones we’ve got, increase guard levels, whatever. No increase in the number of prison beds. Hopefully, we can create enough back pressure to affect sentencing for nonviolent offenders, and eventually to push us into some truly interesting solutions (requiring educational goals, rather than temporal ones, for example).
3) All “hate crime” and other legislation that segregates punishment based on intent has to be scrapped. The government has no business prosecuting *why* I did or did not take some action, only in the fact that it happened. We cannot make a value distinction on beating people to death based on race, gender, sexual orientation, or any of that. I want just the same punishment for a moron who goes out looking for *anyone* to beat to death as for the moron who goes looking for a specific race to beat to death.
4) Sex offender registries need to be scrapped. Either a criminal can “do their time” and be released, or they cannot. If we can’t bring ourselves to consider the penalty paid (I think that some crimes can’t be forgiven), or can’t believe that they are safe (I believe that some people can’t be redeemed) we should either execute them or lock them up for life. If the penalty *can* be paid, and they *can* be released, it is completely bogus to force them to forever live on the fringes of society. That equals “never forgiven,” and we should admit it. At the very least, I should be able to inquire about a specific individual or a specific address. The current system, where I can get a list of sex offenders by zip code is terrifying in its potential for abuse.
that seem pretty clear to me.
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