*controversy

Adding video to channels (Controversy) - requested by MrFisk.

Where is the sympathizing, all I'm seeing is reporting? It's not like anyone is saying that this judgement is undeserved, they are reporting on the consequences of these men ruining their victims life and in turn ruining their own. I feel like people suddenly expect CNN to be their with pitchforks and a noose.

No arekin, what you are watching is a standard hack journalism piece form an news org notorious for such tripe-"Poppy Harlow" here (pretentious and douchey female-reporter name), is attempting to infuse the story with some heart-wrenching emotionalism and grave tone..
It's a rape honey, cut to the sentencing segment as you spin the tale of these poor athletes with their lives ahead of them who double-teamed someone without her consent. Get a shot of the big, blubbering one there as his counsel consoles him!

Where's more Waldo in this unprofessional ballad of useless information about these douchebag rapists? They came from a troubled family...blah blah blah.."father a former alcoholic??"- Uhh, what the fuck does that even mean?!

Yet another time-filler offered-up from CNN, their standard fare, an over-dramatized example of developmental-disability in our distracted society. This is not journalism, is fucking Maury Povich and people throwing chairs at they baby-daddys.

Poppy, thank you for edifying us with that useless wind-session. Please get a job that assists in the evolution of the human condition...like on a crabbing boat in Nova Scotia!

Rape culture ? Did anyone say rape culture ?

http://publicshaming.tumblr.com/post/45608534736/the-news-out-of-steubenville-today-is-a-small
http://publicshaming.tumblr.com/day/2013/03/17

That sound you're hearing ? I'm pre-heating my rocket, i don't want to live on this planet anymore.

How many kids or young adults get shoved down the us criminal justice system every year for drug possesion and other minor offences.. how come this is even news?

Keep your editorializing out of news reports. Just report the facts please, make it bland and boring and informative.

Zero sympathy for the pricks. Only a disgustingly disturbed person does what they did and they deserve what's coming to them

This Onion.com vid from two years ago nails it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=zWLJZw9Ws-g

It is easy to call two 16 year old KIDS you don't know disgusting and depraved.

What they did is terribly wrong and they should be punished. The question is does the punishment fit the crime?

Personally I think we as a society would be better off if after their juvenile detention they were given an option at some sort of public service i.e. military or civil service that if performed adequately for a number of years would expunge their records and names from the registered sex offenders list. Give them some hope, make them learn a lesson, make them give back to the world/country.

When I was 16 I spent most nights playing Everquest and I never drank even when at a party... so these kinds of things didn't come up.

Jesus... I... fuck me, I don't even know where to start with that.

I'll be honest. I've been wary of the term "rape culture" as I've seen it applied to scenarios that didn't warrant it.

But that is just disgusting. It is unfathomable to me.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

Crappy situation all around. What they did was wrong, but they are sobbing because their life may be over for all intents and purposes. Very little hope for rehabilitation in a system that makes career criminals.

Everyone cheering their incarceration in this thread - what do you think is more important - justice and punishment - or rehabilitation? Because that's what it comes down to. One of the myriad problems with the US criminal justice system is that it's heavily weighted towards justice and a form of institutional vengeance, with very little going into rehabilitation.

What happens when these guys re-enter American society in a few years as convicted sex offenders after a few years in the clink? Any semblance of a good life is over for them from this point on.

I do think CNN steps over the line here, though it's not as egregious as the title suggests. No one in the report suggested that the young rapists are not fully responsible for destroying their own lives.

The problem is that CNN is trying so damn hard to make this a juicy emotional piece, and since it would be unethical to show the victim and put her through more trauma, they've almost settled on making the rapists the object of sympathy.

They are sorry because the got caught.

Otherwise they would be telling their "fun time" with the "coal miners daughter" at the next party and laughing about it.

Yeah, I'm not cheering these convictions, but if you want my sympathy, don't rape, photograph and urinate on a teenage girl.

CNN lost my respect long before this "report" but this shit is fucked up.

I really don't know. I've actually thought about this before.

Ignoring the awful "blame the victim" stuff that was happening earlier, rehabilitation for rapists gets to the heart of what we want in a justice system. And it puts us in an incredibly uncomfortable place.

My visceral, gut reaction is quite honestly
"fuck 'em, they deserve whatever they get"

But that's exactly the same thinking I criticise in others who call for harsher penalties for other crimes, and I find myself arguing for thieves and even murderers. So here I am in the position of trying to, if not sympathise, at least empathise with people who've committed the most heinous crime.

Intellectually, if they can pay their dues and show genuine remorse, then everyone deserves a second chance.

Emotionally, I want them to suffer.

It's a human condition and it might be something we can't rise above.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

I get the emotional response - I have that too. But that's what a government criminal justice system *should* do, is prevent that - and use cool logic for the right rehabilitative outcome. Instead, our courts are the thin wedge of the criminal vengeance system, channelling media churned victim and bystander rage.

Agreed. But the problem is that as much as we'd like it not to be, a governmental criminal justice system is ultimately political. And rehabilitation of rapists is never going to be politically popular.

Maybe we really do need to learn to "turn the other cheek".

Finally, a little perspective. I feel like CNN was really just trying to emphasize that this isn't some bullshit punishment. These kids got their asses handed to them. They're fucked. I think this was in direct response to the understandable concerns that they wouldn't be.

This brings up a bigger question, which is "why don't more of these cases end this way?" My argument would be because the legal consequence of sexually related crime is too severe. It often has the effect of making the judge or jury uncomfortable levying that punishment in light of the specific facts of the case, and thus acquit the rapists to avoid destroying their life completely. It even probably dissuades many victims from levying accusations in the first place. If there were more graded punishments as there are in many other developed nations, we might find charges and convictions more common.

The registered sex offender thing is just one example. I remember that one case of a girl getting charged with distributing child pornography for sexting her boyfriend. Now she has to tell her neighbors she's a sex offender. It's all about politics, not justice.

Alcohol + teenagers + sex hormones + party vibe + yearning to be accepted.

this shit happens almost every weekend. Maybe not rape. But shit goes down.

(funny how 1 guy sobbing brings on a different spin to a story. )

Shrug, we cant all watch fox news...

Thank you, everyone sees any angle that portays consequences on the criminals as sympathy. This is not often the case, and when you dont want to hound the victim out of respect, what story can you tell? I think several news outlets did a tasteful job of portraying what a night of drunken malicious stupidity did to these kids who in all reality did have a future as something other than a criminal.

You think rape is worse than murder..? I'm not condoning rape or anything but there are worse crimes out there (like murder).

Anyway, rehabilitation simply doesn't work for the vast majority of criminals. Most were born and raised in poor conditions with negligent and/or abusive parents. They've been hard-coded to do what they do. Trying to rehabilitate them is a waste of taxpayer money.

No, what we need is for potential criminals to truly fear the consequences of their actions, to the point where they won't even consider doing them. That's the whole point of the punishment: to act as a deterrent. We want to stop criminals before they become criminals, not wait until they commit crimes and then try to persuade them to change their ways.

Yeah, rape is worse than murder. Murder is sometimes, if not justifiable, at least understandable.

And I'd argue that rehabilitation works better than deterrence.
The ultimate deterrent is the death penalty and that has been shown time and again to be ineffective.

You can recover from being raped. You can't recover from being murdered. While rape is certainly traumatic and can cause physical harm, it's still nowhere close to being dead.

As for rehabilitation's efficacy, how many criminals are repeat offenders? If rehabilitation worked, there would be no such thing as a repeat offender.

You are correct, though, in regards to our current implementation of the death penalty being ineffective. For one, the death penalty is very rarely handed out. You stand a much better chance of getting a life sentence. Even if you do get the death penalty, you'll likely sit on death row for years before being executed. In fact, this is often a benefit to prisoners, as they are separated from the rest and don't have to worry about being raped or beaten. Free food, free room, no threats from other prisoners and you don't have to worry about anything because you already know you're going to die. And when you are finally executed, it is done in the most humane (and unnecessarily elaborate and expensive) way possible. If you're a sociopath who has accepted or even embraced your own death, this is hardly the worse way to go.

The death penalty isn't the ultimate penalty, either. There are some people who don't care about living and therefore don't care about dying. To them, death means nothing. However, being forced to live a life of pain and suffering isn't appealing to anyone, no matter how apathetic they may be. If the penalty for any crime was to have your arms, legs and eyes removed, be hooked up to the necessary IVs to survive and then forced to endure daily torture for the rest of your life, I guarantee crime rates would drop substantially. Fear is an incredibly effective tool at keeping people in check. It's when people stop being scared of punishment that rules start being broken.

Right, well thankfully we no longer live in the dark ages.

And you're actually wrong about fear. We live in the safest time in history (statistical fact) and we don't use torture as a deterrent, yet when state sanctioned torture was considered a deterrent (which was much of human history) violent crime rates were much higher.

I suggest you read "The better angels of our nature" by Stephen Pinker.

When was torture last sanctioned by the state? The dark ages? Of course violent crime was higher in the dark ages. It was pretty difficult to enforce the law back then due to the lack of cars, satellites, computers, security cameras, guns, etc, not to mention that laws varied greatly depending on which part of the land you lived in and what lords you served under. Does Pinker's book have any contemporary examples that support your position?

In any case, regardless of whether you favor punishment or rehabilitation, the real solution is to address the root of the problem: lousy upbringings. Anyone can have children, no matter how qualified they are. They can have a criminal record, a history of mental illness and be unemploymed and still have as many kids as they want. It's ridiculous and the reason why so many children grow up to be criminals. We need to have strictly enforced regulation of reproduction. Parents should have to go through a thorough testing process and meet certain requirements (like having enough money to actually support a family) before being allowed to have kids. If a woman walks into a hospital with an unlicensed pregnancy, both she and the father should be arrested and executed without trial. Legal births would be recorded in an international database, which employers and government workers would reference during any hiring, licensing or authorization process. Essentially, illegal children would have no chance of ever becoming a part of regular society, forcing them to the outskirts and slums. This would make it easier to focus raids and clear out the most prominent concentrations of criminals.

This may sound dystopian but it's really the only way to fix the root of the problem. You will never be able to make people better if you let them be raised under lousy conditions. Morality is learned, not innate. If we want everyone to follow the same rules, they need to be taught to respect them. If the parents don't, why would the children?

Are some of you really that blind? Rehabilitation don't work criminals are hard coded? Then why does it work on other countries then? Supporting death penalty? Who the hell gives you right to take a life, just like the murderer did to their victims?

Sentences are way too harsh in the USA, there are countless studies proving that longer and harsher penalties does nothing to curb crime. There are nations that hand out death penalties for petty crimes and still there are people who commit those crimes every year. If death penalty would work, there would be no murders. Countries with shorter sentences have fewer repeating offenders, how is that possible in your world where criminals are animals who can not change their ways.

I guess those who want death penalty and ridiculously long sentences have something sadistic in their personality. YOU MUST SUFFER SO I FEEL GOOD. Same goes for inequality supporters, same principle, other must suffer to make me feel good.

How many shootouts with cops could we avoid when there is still hope in the criminals mind that the mistake they made won't cost them their lives.

On the story, this is more and more common, specially in the States but happens all over the world. Victims are on secondary focus, they aren't as interesting as perpetrators: Why? Victims have their story told before the news, it happened already, they are weak = prey. The assailants, their story has just begun, they are strong = predator.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

Deterrence in the style of "let's make an example of a few of 'em" has a pretty poor track record. Look at the war on drugs - extremely harsh penalties for pot smokers - did not work - just filled up US prisions with people caught with a roach in their ashtray.

Cry me a f*cking river CNN, THis girl was carried around from party to party, was violated, photographed naked, URINATED ON, and then had the images spread around through social media.. Promising young men dont do that kind of sh*t. Promising young men see that happening and they shut it down and stick up for the poor girls honour. Alcohol is no excuse either.

Just throwing this in. Norway has one of the most liberal attitudes towards prisoners in the world:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/feb/25/norwegian-prison-inmates-treated-like-people?INTCMP=SRCH

Aside from having one of the lowest prison populations anywhere (as a percentage) it's re-offending rate is less than half that of the US.

Was this proven in court, or even commonly accepted as fact? My understanding is that they were jokingly talking about urinating on her. My suspicion is that a lot of what was said was really just typical bravado that wasn't actually acted out.

This discussion comparing punishments for murder and sex offense is interesting to hear. Yes, if they killed someone (or a few people) by driving drunk or whatever at 16yo they wouldn't have to register as convicted murderers for the rest of their life. And they would be out of jail by 21. Besides, I thought juvenile court and that system was supposed to protect ALL concerned in an incident. The juvenile system was supposed to be set up ESPECIALLY for 16 year old boys who do terrible things. Everybody loses the way this is now.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

yes yes yes!

are these the guys that made of video of them laughing about it in someone's basement ?

The book is filled with statistics that support the position (often to the point of information overload).

And you're right that we need to address the root of the problem but you have the wrong root. Lousy upbringings can indeed lead to criminal behaviour, but what leads to lousy upbringings?

Lack of education, unemployment, perceived social inequality all factor into it. And yes, some people are just messed up and shouldn't have kids, but I'd say they are a minority.

So instead of your frankly insane, dystopian, eugenics-based future, we could instead look at ways to make everyone better off. First step, give women control over their reproductive cycle. This has been shown time and again to be one of the keys points in raising a societies economic and social values.

To get back to the original point here, how do these young men, (who had every advantage in life, compared to 90% of the world anyway) fit into your future?

Duuuuude really, pee-pee?? it's a non-issue considering the bulk of their depraved soiree-

Oh and Jerryk???-No need for all the draconian measures in an attempt to adjust society to your idyllic model: The military has rigorous psyche-screens for the guys whose job it is to turn the keys, enter the codes, and push the big red button and folks with better ideas (not unlike yours) are usually MP's or infantry!

You mean the diddling or the nekid piktchurs?

I forget, what was it these esteemed gentlemen did anyhow?

We already give women (and men) control over their reproductive habits. It's pretty apparent that a large portion of these men and women don't deserve that control, since they reproduce without any thought or consideration to their impact on the rest of society. If everyone were mature and responsible, there would be no such thing as abusive or negligent parents. Parenthood should be a privilege, not a right. As an aside, in 2010 the divorce rate in the U.S. was over 50%. If 50% of married couples aren't even mature or responsible enough to sustain a marriage, how can these people be expected to raise mature and responsible children? Hell, how many of those couples had kids before they divorced? You ask me to have faith in people but the numbers really don't give me any reason to.

As for these young men, I'm guessing they had lousy parents who never taught them to respect other people or the law. That's probably why they raped a girl, peed on her unconscious body and took pictures of it all. If they hadn't been caught, do you really think they would have regretted their actions and turned themselves in? No, they would have just continued life as usual, grown up, had kids and raised them with the same twisted values. It's a vicious cycle that exists because we have no regulation over reproduction. Instead of wasting taxpayer money trying to rehabilitate them (and very likely fail; the vast majority of sexual predators can't break their habits), why not just end the cycle right then and there? Humanity is hardly on the verge on extinction, so getting rid of the trash and cleaning up the gene pool would only help make life better for future generations.

All that said, you're right that issues like poverty, lack of education, etc, are all relevant here. But would those still be issues if everyone were raised to be contributing members of society, as opposed to worthless parasites that exist solely for the sake of existing? There are a finite number of jobs and classrooms out there. There aren't enough to accommodate every living person. That's why we need population control. If you extend yourself beyond your own means by having kids you can't afford to feed or send to school, you're just making the problem worse.

Putting someone in prison isn't harsh enough. There should be a zero tolerance policy with automatic death penalty, which would need to be carried out efficiently. No more prisoners sitting on death row for years. No more ridiculously expensive lethal injections. If someone commits a crime and there's sufficient evidence of their guilt, they are killed quickly (broken neck, slit throat, cattle spike into the head, etc) and cremated. Boom, no more overpopulated prisons and no more wasted taxpayer money on feeding and sheltering criminals who will likely break the law again as soon as they are released.

Enforcing the law is always the trickiest part, since we don't have constant surveillance of every citizen. Therefore, in the absence of surveillance, we have to rely on fear. There's a reason why people don't think twice about speeding, jaywalking or littering. Not only are they very unlikely to get caught, the penalty when they do get caught is negligible. If you gave the death penalty for the above crimes, I guarantee people would think twice before committing them.

As for Norway, they certainly do have a comfortable prison system. If I were to go on a shooting rampage, I would definitely do it in Norway because their prisons don't seem that bad. In fact, their prisons are probably nicer than the living conditions of most criminals. The point of punishment is to deter people from breaking the law in the first place, not make them happier and less likely to do so after the fact.

You don't get it, do you? Your ideas have been tried, and they don't work.

Eugenics and brutality are discredited ideas. The entire history of human civilisation has been one of increasing liberalisation, decreasing barbarism, and because of that we now live in the safest period in history.

Cite one contemporary example where what I describe (all of it, not just parts) has been attempted.

There are plenty of examples of unjust and tyrannical brutality. I can't think of any where the brutality was fair, consistent and logical. That's what you don't seem to be grasping here. Genocide or religious/political persecution are not comparable to what I propose.

We live in the safest period of history not because of liberalization or decreasing barbarism but because technology has made it much easier to enforce the law and maintain order. If you try to rob a bank, you'll be caught on camera and the cops will have you surrounded in minutes thanks to silent alarms. If you try to rape someone in the street, bystanders can whip out their phones, capture your face on camera and then call the cops. If you steal a car and try to speed off, you'll never get away from the police cars at every corner and helicopter in the air. Never before has it been so easy to defend yourself, get help or capture proof of a crime. It's no coincidence that the vast majority of crime occurs in poor areas with minimal surveillance and police presence. It was thanks to technology that the two Steubenville rapists were caught and successfully persecuted.

Real clever.
Shrug, no, but you can apparently be just as predictable an asshole as someone who does, eh?

Uhhh, I think all news is complete shit and consider journalism as a profession akin to that of a banker or lawyer, so...Sorry to dash your fantasy about just who the fuck I am. Yo, Libby??.... Republicans are democrats and democrats republicans in this kid's paradigm-I don't play that game with people, it's fucking offensive.

That wasn't sarcasm either, arekin. Fuck that sophomoric bullshit.

Oh and hey, Jerykk? If I found myself in your ideal world I'd burn it to the ground. The inevitability of a serious police state follows that model of yours.

While you can accidentally murder someone (eg. beat them up TOO much), it's damn hard -if not literally impossible- to accidentally rape them.

There's also no emotional or psychological damage emparted to your murder victim. What with them being dead.

Thankfully, there are no contemporary examples where ALL of what you describe has been attempted. That would be because it was done away with centuries ago as a discredited idea.

The closest attempt to what you describe would be in certain european countries around 1939-1946 (I will not invoke godwin! ). Is that really the model you want to follow?

And your technology argument is patently false. If technology was the primary factor in creating a safe community, then there wouldn't be such a huge disparity between crime rates in different parts of the world. Even allowing that poorer areas have less technology doesn't account for the vast difference.

@ChaosEngine-Maybe ol' Reinhard Heydrich there got typing cramps over to the eugenics forum and he's waiting for the Ibupropen to kick -in....

Again, genocide and religious/political persecution are not comparable to the system I describe. Nobody in my system would be arrested or executed because of their ethnicity, political alignment or religious beliefs. They would only be arrested and executed if they broke rational and fair laws, such as requiring aspiring parents to be healthy, responsible, educated and financially secure.

And yes, there is a huge disparity in crime rates around the world. What is consistent is that areas with the most surveillance and law enforcement (which are generally the more prosperous and advanced areas) have the lowest crime rates. Washington D.C. currently has the highest violent crime and murder rates in the country. There are shootings on a daily basis (despite the stringent gun laws) in the poorer areas of the city. If the police decided to focus their efforts in these areas and lethally enforced a zero tolerance policy, crime would be significantly reduced. However, they don't because politicians don't care about the ghettos and slums. Instead of trying to either improve them or purge them, they simply let them sit and fester as lousy and irresponsible parents continue to breed future criminals.

Given your comments in general, you think (and I use that term loosely) most professions are shit and that there are no worthwhile people left in the world, other than yourself. I wont change your mind because its buried too far up your ass, so instead I'll be equally dismissive of your opinion and as condescending of your comments as you are to others.