Really, is it ever possible to be too safe? Especially when it's our children at stake? [via cracked]
Actually, yes. Especially when the rule or law intended to make us safe is so poorly thought-out that it either does nothing but suck up public money, or creates a ripple effect of unintended side effects. We're talking about things like...
The Idea:
Speeding is a major cause behind many fatal accidents, so it must also be true that mandating lower speed limits will make us all safer, right? Like how after marijuana was made illegal, you could hardly find anybody smoking the stuff.
It was back in 1974 that the federal government passed the National Maximum Speed Limit Law in the USA, slowing America down to a creeping 55 miles per hour. The main reason behind the law was to lower gas consumption, but President Nixon promised us it would make our streets safer as well.
A joke about Richard Nixon being untrustworthy? Cracked breaks new ground in comedy once more!
Partially thanks to anti-speed limit activists like Sammy Hagar, in 1995 it was repealed. But not everyone was happy about that. Some states and many cities still have their highway speed limits set at or near the '74 lows, and a lot of people support bringing the '74 law back into effect before every man, woman and child in the country finds themselves living in the horrifying universe of 2 Fast 2 Furious.
The future.
But There's a Problem...
After the National speed limit was repealed, the state of Montana removed all non-urban speed limits in their state. A few years later, engineers working with the state decided to venture out to see just what kind of post-apocalyptic Death Race wasteland their lawless state had produced. What they found was that, you guessed it, on the roads where they removed the speed limits, fatalities didn't go up at all.
Proponents of the national law still argue that traffic fatalities nationwide did drop during the national speed limit's lifetime. Buzz-killing critics of the law point out that no, no they didn't.
Why Doesn't it Work?
Because, and this surprised the hell out of us, people aren't completely retarded. As it turns out, people tend to drive at speeds they feel comfortable driving. Yes, there are reckless madmen out there, but they're not going to obey a couple of digits on a sign anyway. It just becomes a make-work project for traffic cops.
By the way, even worse than speed limits are speed bumps, the irritating, jarring humps they put in parking lots and such, intended to physically force drivers to slow down and make their CD players skip. Not only do those things not prevent accidents, but they keep ambulances from getting to emergencies, which is exactly the sort of thing you don't want happening when years of bacon sundaes and cookie-dough sandwiches finally catch up with you.
The above link references a study in Boulder, Colorado that found speed bumps kill as many as 85 people for every one life they save. Holy shit! We think landmines have a better ratio.
The Idea:
Psychologists have found that criminals who have committed three felonies are likely to continue committing felonies for the majority of their non-jailed lives. After wiping their feet with the whole "make the punishment fit the crime" thing, they decided to institute a new law, based on that theory and the rules of Baseball.
These "Three Strike" laws mandate very long prison terms--up to life--for criminals who have commit their third felony, regardless of what that felony was. Surprisingly the law did not originate from the home of western-style, retard-executing justice (Texas). California instituted the first Three Strike law in 1994.
Pictured above: Legal Precedence.
The law was very popular at first, and a number of states adopted it shortly thereafter. California's crime rate, which had peaked shortly before the law's implementation, dipped significantly in the years after. This was seen as proof of the law's success.
But There's a Problem...
First, correlation does not equal causation. We have a grand history of ignoring this fact when it is politically expedient to do so. So while California's crime rate did decline, so did the rest of the country's. In fact, violent crime dropped more in states without Three Strike laws (4.6 percent) than in the states that had them (1.7 percent).
Why Doesn't it Work?
Why would they let him keep his ski mask?
Three Strike laws punish petty criminals as often as the violent ones everybody has in mind when talking about "getting tough on crime." Men have been put away for life for shoplifting cookies, video tapes and golf clubs, essentially equating those crimes with violent assault or attempted murder.
As a result, California's prisons and jails have been flooded with hundreds of thousands of new occupants. That, combined with many of their facilities being condemned as unfit to live in, has led to a prison overcrowding crisis.
Gosh, it's almost like we shouldn't rely on sports analogies to build a criminal justice system. That's too bad, because we have this little idea we like to call the Mixed Martial Arts Courtroom...
The Idea:
The Amber Alert, created in response to the highly-publicized abduction and murder of nine-year-old Amber Hagerman, is a system put in place to help find lost and abducted children by instantly flooding the highways, radio and television stations of the area with information about the missing kid.
The Amber Alert is based upon the logical principle that, deep down, we all want to be like Batman. An alert is a chance for any regular Joe to be a masked vigilante, rescuing terrified youngsters from prancing, sex-starved pedophiles.
Gotcha!
But There's a Problem...
Like covering up a hole in the wall with a poster, the Amber Alert system made everyone feel better without actually costing the government a dime.
From 2003 to 2006 independent researcher Timothy "The Griffon" Griffith conducted the first third-party investigation of the Amber Alert system. He found that, while state and local governments were claiming huge numbers of children "rescued," they were actually full of shit.
Most of the children "saved" by the Amber alert hadn't been in any danger in the first place (in most cases they'd been taken by legal guardians arguing over custody rights). The few children who WERE abducted by psychopaths usually died before the Amber Alert could even go online.
Why Doesn't it Work?
Few things are more dangerously retarded than people in large groups. There's a reason Batman works alone. Griffith and others came to the realization that, while the Amber Alerts weren't really helpful in saving children, they were great at drowning the surrounding community in a tsunami of irrational fear and paranoia. The chance of a child being abducted by a stranger is far lower than of the child, say, dying from drinking the bottle of floor wax you have in the cabinet because it has pictures of lemons on it. The latter just doesn't become a media event.
The heightened level of fear might have something to do with the fact that more and more Amber Alerts are being called in with greater frequency every year, and with less cause. Fully half of the alerts in 2004 were issued on children who were in no danger whatsoever, and 48 of the 233 alerts that year were issued for children who hadn't been abducted at all.
While Amber Alerts aren't expensive, they tie up virtually every law enforcement resource in the area. Policemen and 911 operators that could be out saving lives and arresting minorities for driving nice cars are instead diverted to fielding calls and chasing leads on children who often aren't in any danger.
And while someone, probably in our very comment section, will cry that if even one child's life was saved by the system then it was all worth it. But in the case of every "feel good" solution that doesn't actually solve the problem, you have to ask if the time and energy devoted to it couldn't be spent on something that actually works.
You know, like sex offender registries. Oh, wait...
The Idea:
In theory, these registries are comprehensive lists of every sex offender in your state, updated regularly with the offender's home location and other pertinent facts to help parents and employers avoid exposing their children to kiddie diddlers.
Megan's Law requires sex offenders to register and update law enforcement every time they change location. The law's namesake was murdered by a pedophile in 1994.
But There's a Problem...
Man, this dude was just some Photos.com model, and we went and made him a pedophile.
Nobody wants to be the one to stand up for sex offenders, but you've got to have pretty damned good cause to make a person face what is basically a life-long punishment, served even after their jail term is over. Which sounds fine if we're talking about a serial rapist murderer, but not when something like public urination can land you on the registry right alongside him.
That would be just one reason studies show Megan's Law hasn't done a damned thing to stop child molesters.
Why Doesn't it Work?
So you take a guy who's committed a crime. Now you put him on a registry that may keep him from getting a job, or making friends, generally just totally isolating him for the rest of his life and giving him lots of free time. Do you think that makes him less likely to commit another crime?
And how does knowing there's a sex offender in your neighborhood help? Unless he's wearing some kind of clanging Sex Offender bell around his neck to let you and your child know he's approaching, it doesn't protect you from a guy looking to do it again. And then you've got the fact that 95 percent of sexual assault victims are victimized by somebody they already know anyway.
So what's the point? Deterrence? As it turns out, someone who is willing to abduct, rape and murder a child often isn't stopped by the fact that he'll get put on a "registry" if he's caught.
The Idea:
When talking about crime, you may hear some refer to the "Broken Windows" theory. This goes back to an article in the Atlantic Monthly that made the case that petty crime, if not dealt with, would soon metastasize into serious ones:
"Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it's unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside.
Or consider a sidewalk. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of trash from take-out restaurants there or breaking into cars."
There you have it, folks. One moment you throw your empty Snicker's wrapper on the pavement and the next, some crackhead is breaking windows and stealing cars.
Above: a logical procession of events.
In an effort to save our children, which by the way seems to be the motivation for half of the stupid things society does, in the 1980s they decided to introduce "Zero Tolerance" policies in schools. When it came to drugs or weapons, they would come down on any little offense like it was an act of terrorism. And, if that means strip-searching a 13-year-old girl because she was caught with a couple of Advils, well, it's worth it to avoid that slippery slope toward chaos.
But There's a Problem...
As you can see, and as they should have seen five seconds after it was suggested, "Zero Tolerance" removes basically all elements of judgment or proportionate punishment from the process, making it a somehow even more retarded version of Three Strikes. Which leads to things like a child getting suspended for bringing in a keychain the size of an eraser shaped like a toy gun.
Also, it doesn't do anything about the problem it was created to solve.
Why Doesn't it Work?
The study linked above is from the American Psychological Association, who found the policies didn't distinguish between the kids behaving badly and the ones who were simply confused or showing poor judgment. You even got bizarre cases where a kid has been kicked out of school for possession of "... Midol, Tylenol, Alka Seltzer, cough drops and Scope mouthwash."
Obviously deterrents don't work if there is no attempt to understand the behaviors they're punishing. Oh, and also this supposed plan to clamp down on ALL offenses equally still somehow delivers more serious punishments to minorities. The potential for abuse is huge, because if there's a kid you want gone, hell, most people reading this article probably didn't go three days in high school without violating some interpretation of Zero Tolerance. His damned shoelaces could be called deadly weapons.
Is this any way to prepare our children for the adult world? By making them believe that authority figures often rely on unfair and arbitrary rules not based on any kind of logic or...
Wait, that actually may be a pretty good way to prepare them for the adult world.
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