I'm serious that I like the memorising thing.

Many more people will try to memorize the Koran given this incentive than will succeed at it. All those people trying to memorize the Koran will be easier to handle than if they had no such incentive. (There's nothing less dangerous than a guy who is busily reading and re-reading a book at all hours of the day!) That means you can afford to keep more prisoners in prison for any given budget on guards. The few prisoners who suceed are let out early, but you can afford to safely keep other prisoners longer or convict more prisoners per unit time as a result of this policy. So even if there were no corellation whatsoever between ability to memorize the Koran and socially desirable characteristics this pro-reading policy would still, on average, make society safer.

But there is a corellation, and it's not because reading the book transforms the criminal - although for some it will - so much as that it reveals previously opaque information. The good part of what it reveals is that it's an advanced literacy test combined with a sticktuitiveness test - only people who can read well and can stay focused on a task for a long time pass. Sure, I'll grant there are negative uses for intelligence and literacy - dumb criminals are easier to catch than smart ones - but overall my suspicion is that the smarter criminals are the most likely to have "learned their lesson" and to be able to restructure their lives into something socially positive.

As for the guy who got 4 years instead of life, that's contrary to the guidelines given, so he was probably a special case. Maybe it was a parking ticket. :-) The guidelines say memorizing the entire Quran only gets 20 years off, so there must have been something else going on there.

Lastly, this a criteria that sounds objective but has lots of wiggle room for useful subjectivity. One could easily be stricter or harsher in testing the alleged memorization depending on the severity of the crime and the nastiness of the criminal. If it's used that way, it's really a disguised liberal reform - a way to let off deserving inmates whose sentences were overly harsh in a way that's politically acceptable to the religious fundamentalists.

Of course, it would work better if you couldn't do the work in advance - having memorized the koran when you were 9 or 10 isn't as impressive as memorizing it in prison later. Even still, it's an interesting policy.

I think we should try it here, but use the complete works of William Shakespeare.

Posted by: Glen Raphael on February 20, 2006 05:00 PM

Good grief Micheal, do you get paid by the number of comments your posts generate? You are either trolling or you are brain dead.

As J.Goard reported, people, in Scandinavia and other places, now report rapes/child abuse in greater numbers.

There is no cause and affect with immigration. If that were the case, Cuba would be relatively rape free while Toronto (a city that has 50% of it's population born in an other country) would be the rape capital of the world!

Even if immigrants were more likely to rape (they aren't), how would you propose a country cherry pick the ones that are less likely?

Application question 47:
Have you ever raped someone?
Application question 48:
Do you intend to rape once you are accepted into our country?

Please, if you know the secret to predicting rapes, let us know!

Posted by: Erik on February 21, 2006 02:30 AM

Erik -- You did notice that the reference in the posting wasn't to immigration generally, but to *ill-managed* immigration?

Posted by: Michael Blowhard on February 21, 2006 03:29 AM

"There is no cause and affect with immigration."

Is Erik's post for real?

Posted by: jult52 on February 21, 2006 09:27 AM

Erik is probably getting paid by the LACK of comments his posts generate at his own place: the less comments/more PC/less successful - the more weighty canadian dollars he gets.

Sunds like a typical French-speaking business to me.

Posted by: Tatyana on February 21, 2006 12:16 PM

Crime is strongly related to immigration, especially with violent crime. There was a new Swedish study by the government department which deals with crime showing that persons born abroad and their children have FAR higher rates of crime. And the study even controlled for socioeconomic status. It is available to read at www.bra.se and then go to the section for publications and look for the publications about crime in swedish people and those born abroad. It's all there in plain English with official data to back it up. Immigrants cause crime.

Posted by: benjamin wallis on February 25, 2006 09:45 AM

being a Swede I have the advantage of being able to read up on the subject. Last year we changed the law concerning rape and lowered the bar so that more sexual assaults could be labeled rape.

Hence the 32% rise in our statistics. So there isn't so much a dramatic rise in rapes as in more cases being concidered rapes that before.

In recent years more of the domestic crimes such as rape and wife beatings is being reported to the police. this is a cultural change yet to happen in many of the other countries we have mentioned.

Regarding the immigrant/crime discussion I would say that crime is born out of desperation and alienation. Many of the immigrants have experienced things most of us "westerners" never even could begin to understand. It's in this gap of understanding that many conflicts grow I think.

Just my 2 cents

Posted by: Kim Carlquist on February 28, 2006 05:58 PM






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