Quote:
Originally Posted by Mutt
Do you not think the nature of criminal mind hasn't been debated for centuries? If you're going to label everybody who murders another person as 'mentally ill' then do it for lesser crimes as well because the same liberal interpretation of 'mentally ill' applies - I think somebody who scams an old person out of their life savings is a sick twisted fuck. Everybody who does anything criminal has an excuse, as we create more 'mental illness' categories everybody eventually will have a diagnosis of being mentally ill in some way.
For criminal acts we define 'criminally insane' the way it should be defined, only when the mental illness is so severe that the criminal can't understand the nature of his crime or control his impulses.
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That's true, every criminal is in some sense "sick", that's why we put them in jail, partly to get "justice", but also partly to cure them... criminal has a chance to ponder his actions, and hopefully come out cured or at least less "sick" than they came in... whether that's the best approach or how effective it is a completely different question... but don't you agree that the objective is to let person out in a less "sick" state than they came in? or is the objective to just store them away for X years in a cage to make sure they are unable to harm anyone else and to get "justice"?
a scam artist is only slightly deranged so we can safely let him out after 5 years...
a cold murderer is badly fucked up, with little to no chance of getting better so we might as well kill him?
(by "sick" I mean it in the broadest sense, not necessarilly mental illness, but perhaps a character flaw, inability to control impulses, poor decision making skills, etc... just any flaw that would cause a person to commit a crime...)