Crispin's parting words

“There has never been a terrorist attack on Australian soil (unless you count the bombing of a certain hotel last century)”

Thats like saying the twin towers never fell down unless you cound 9/11

Woody, there’s a few jihadists facing court now because the anti-terror legislation stopped them.

Openyourmind,

I would counter the claim that increasing prison populations is indicative that we as a society are not softer on crime by saying that statistic is irrelevant. A more accurate stat would compare it with number of criminal charges per 100,000 over the last 30 years. If the graphs plot the same then you could say that there’s been no change in how tough we are on crime.

and the welfare state.

I was amazed by the stats on the rates of incarceration too.

I think one reason we seem to see more crime around now, despite having more people locked up is that there are less police around, and that there are no secure facilities for mental health. and a general lack of support for mental health issues.

Woody in a lather again, reduced to spitting bile.

Typical though.

Where can I get the job as ACT hang-man?

I was really impressed by the comments made by Ken Crispin. An excerpt from CT: “Much of the rhetoric about crime was misleading. It was not out of control, the streets were not full of criminals who had escaped conviction ‘on silly technicalities’ and sentences were not ever more lenient. In 30 years the prison population had grown from 62 to 163 per 100,000. In fact crime is driven substantially by drug dependency and mental illness. Neither of these problems are amenable to correction by simplistic slogans….”

Seems fair to me. America has a ridiculously high incarceration rate and it doesn’t seemed to have helped their crime problem.

I don’t profess to be an expert in this area, but I’d certainly put more trust in the judgement of this well spoken man than I would in the armchair legal/social experts here who probably have a lot less exposure to the true situation and the true statistics on criminology than Ken Crispin does.

If you’re prepared to give up a right out of fear, then you didn’t deserve that right in the first place. Surrendering fundamental freedoms sends a clear message to the towel-head fundamentalist Allah-fucker$ who oppose us that their use of terrorism against us gets results. We just end up looking weak and stupid.

Sometimes rights we enjoy that are exploited by terrorists

By “sometimes” I assume you mean “never”. There has never been a terrorist attack on Australian soil (unless you count the bombing of a certain hotel last century). Of the terrorist attacks on US soil in recent years, two-thirds of them were committed by white Americans. Of the terrorist attacks committed in the UK in the last few decades, most were committed by Catholics. We’re a few thousand times more likely to be killed by our fellow WASPs than by jihadists.

We already had laws against blowing people up, and they seem to have worked fine til now. You poncey-arsed nancy-boys are the ones with tits, shivering under your beds, wetting your pants about OMFG TRRRSTS FTW.