The article was the usual indignant waffle about the soft criminal justice system and the comments were mainly about how community sentences are a joke and what scum these repeat offenders are. But one comment from "Craig" in Glasgow stopped me dead in my tracks:
These sentences create lots of work for lawyers through the legal aid system and that's the real reason we have these silly sentences. Lawyers know their cash cows will continue to re-offend if they're getting such soft sentences. If criminals got sentences that fitted their crimes, then lawyers would get a lot less work. You see stories in the local paper here of people with 40 odd previous convictions and they've only been in jail for a few months, it's utterly ridiculous.
When you apply Guido's test of cui bono to stuff like why our legal system is such a complete fuckup, it becomes obvious. It creates work for lawyers, and curiously enough, it's lawyers who create the legal system.
The complexity of the legal system also creates massive barriers to entry and allows for endless rent-seeking opportunities.
And it's not like I haven't moaned about lawyers before. I can't see how I missed this one.
14 comments:
Obo, Likewise I have mentioned many times that the real reason that drugs are not de-criminalised and treated like tobacco/alcohol is that the hundreds of thousands of jobs that rely on 'servicing' the needs of addicts would be lost, as would the law enforcement budgets and the hundreds of fake charities.
It's all about the money.
Indeed. Have you never noticed how many MPs used to be solicitors or barristers? The legal system is, by an large, a massive scam.
Plus, what Rab says.
You mean lawyers, who form most of the p[olitical parties... lawyers in practice... and Judges (ex lawyers) might somehow collude to feather their own nests?
There should be a bar on any person in the legal profession being a pollitican, full stop.
In Western Australia we have one of the most fucked up cases in the history of law going on precicely because a lawyer designed it to be fucked up.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/08/16/2007009.htm
Thats the initial reporting on the case, what has happenned since then is foul.
The ex murdered her, but guess what, he wrote the new police proceedures on investigating a serious crime.
Hes allready used the courts to sue the police for naming him as a suspect, and has mounted a succession of legal challenges regaurding any evidence.
The name of the game has shifted from who did what when, to was piece of evidenc #2 of 345 countersigned by superintendent x then submitted in triplicate?
If not its get out of gaol free.
The complexity of cases is to prevent convictions, nothing more, nothing less.
FYI - put a + at the end of the bitly link, and it takes you to a preview/stats page.
Now you need never grace the Daily Mail website with your presence again. ;)
It is beyond rent seeking. It has now become extortion and a massive protection racket.
We need the punishment to fit the crime followed by rehabilitation to ensure those leaving prison have far less pressure to re-offend.
I think you are being unfair. If because 99% of the lawyers give the rest a bad name, does it mean that we should tar them all with the same brush?
I would go one further than that I truly believe the English civil war was between Lawyers and the crown ,Cromwell himself being a Lawyer ,parliaments been full of them ever since.
Rule by Lawyer.
On a lighter note ,what is the difference between a dead Lawyer lying in road and a dead dog lying in the road.
Answer,
there are tyre tracks in front of the dead dog.
May I suggest this book by Frederick Bastiat?
www.fee.org/pdf/books/The_Law.pdf
plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose......
"The one great principle of the English law is to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings."
Charles Dickens, Bleak House 1852.
Goodness me, someone on the Daily Mail's website leaves a comment that's actually thought-provoking! I never thought I'd see the day.
I'd honestly never thought about this before. He's absolutely right. Come to think of it, it's nothing to do with judges being namby-pamby liberals who see criminals as victims - they're looking out for their own livelihoods. It's the missing piece of the jigsaw.
Brilliant.
Could not agree more! I used to work in the Legal System (conveyancing) and this certainly holds true to a lesser extent there. In the criminal system, I was attending court with a friend who had been slapped with a trumped up "harassment" charge and realised, looking around, that we were the only ones in an army of people swarming around who were not being paid a handsome sum to be there.
I'm surprised that this thought has suddenly struck you. I've always wondered why so many loopholes are 'discovered' and why there is endless argument over 'legal points' which seem obvious to us mere mortals. As Mr Wadsworth (and others) notes, Parliament has always been traditionally stuffed with the parasitic scum. They create 'the law', couch it in a language ordinary people can't follow, add a lopad of arcane ritual and mystery and they have created a monopoly money making mystery. If you ever see a poor solicitor, he (or she) will be utter shite or stupidly idealistic....but not for long. The last thing the law is about is the truth! It's always been about the money.
Precisely, Ranter. A taxpayer has to be pretty dumb not to suspect the scam from working on first principles alone.
That anyone can pass an open sewer without noticing anything unusual, beggars belief.
heh
The law is not complicated, like most things, people are lazy cunts who don't want to look it up and use it, it probably doesn't help that it involves thinking about what words actually mean rather than just using 'common sense' and 'txt spk'
and I'm not buying 'boo hoo hoo there are big bad lawyers in parliament making money for themselves' You make more money as lawyer than a wonk, the old adage of 'if you can't do it teach if you can't teach it pretend you used to do it, shove it on your cv anyway and become an mp'
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