Why is the dino thinking of the entire Jackass Party?

The dino agrees.

My observation: without youthful hormones a lot of stupid or crazy - hold my beer; watch this - activity in life goes away.

...or an aspirin factory in Sudan, after US embassies were attacked in east Africa (or was it to divert the Monica Lewinsky story?).

Looking at our often screwed up legal system, I often wonder if we might be better off under the old Celtic system of Brehon law. In that system, all non-capital crimes were decided by a negotiation between the victim and the offender. Usually, in the case of property crimes, the offender was directed to compensate the victim, value for value. If the offender could not afford to repay the victim, then his relatives were held to account (enforcing family responsibility). If none could pay, then the offender was obligated to work for the victim for period of time determined to match the loss (kind of an indentured servant). Even in cases where the victim suffered injury or death, the victim and his family had the right to decide punishment, ranging from forgiveness for the crime to the death penalty. The certainty of punishment was an effective deterrent.

Even Ayn Rand found herself arguing both sides against the middle on issues like this (e.g. capital punishment). There is really no answer. I hate to support situational ethics, but it may be as good as we can do in a universe where effects bifurcate to infinity from a unique cause.

The $50 is largely irrelevant, it's the nature of the crime that's the issue. The perpetrator of a robbery at knifepoint doesn't know how much money the victim has, and the degree of emotional trauma suffered by the victim probably has more to do with the robbery itself than with the amount stolen from him. I don't think life in prison is necessarily the answer, but the punishment for such a crime should include some form of restitution to the victim, as far as that is possible.

I agree totally

Yes. I am upset I was robbed by out stupid system

Remember when Alabama made national news for cranking up chain gangs? This went on for a couple of years before some inmate filed a federal lawsuit that complained about discrimination because inmates at my state's Julia Tutwiler Prison For Women were not made to go out on chain gangs.
Asked if he would order that, the Alabama governor at that time said, "Not on my watch."
The end result? No more chain gangs.

Reminds me dino of reading criticism of the USA using a missile maybe worth $600,000 to blow up some dinky Al Qaeda gun emplacement while we were having all those recent Middle East desert wars.

Then the victims should put up most of the cost of his upkeep.
How does imprisonment teach him to love liberty and fear losing it? I have never seen that happen from taking away one's liberty.

He robbed $50 at knife point and the court robbed the tax payers some $600,000 for his keep. Seems like value for value, both robberies.

Thanks, I'm flattered. Won't let it go to my head.
I'll only claim expertise in what I was trained to know and gained experience at, acknowledging that some supervisors and coworkers were brighter than me way back when.
On the other hand, some of both in a variety of forms were for really real jerks if not just plain evil.
I can get along with anyone who has a good heart and basic common sense.

Allosaur. A lot of opinions here from most angles. Your opinion, being the expert here, would be quite salient. I eagerly await a sage interpretation from the Dino’s cache of wisdom.

I don’t like our taxpayer funded prison system at sll

I don’t need to “ know him@. He did what he did. Maybe we should let the victims determine what happens to him. They were the ones whose rights were violated

I am glad I am not a judge.

I don’t like life sentences that we pay for. I would much prefer some sort of deportstion

SO you are implying the life sentence was appropriate, and he should still be incarcerated for the $50 crime of 36 years ago. At what point would your judgement consider the penalty to be cruel or unusual? Was the life sentence (without parole) adequate? Or something more severe?

@term2; seriously? You don't know me at all and neither of us knows him. Yes, he was going down a bad path, but he was still a kid at the time and I'm sure he could have gotten help/redirection. The guy was no hardened criminal. Makes me wonder how prejudiced you are in other areas if you judge someone so harshly that you don't even know.

He was 18 at the time. He never gave me any trouble year after year after year. You come to appreciate that due to inmates who DO cause trouble.
A serial thief would have continued to rob other inmates. Recall chasing such a thief out of a cell block and across the east yard.
He had a bit of a head start, but a shouting officer on a tower pointed him out to a sergeant that the thief ran straight into as he rounded another cell block.
Then he cried with tears on his face. LOL!
Thirty days disciplinary segregation. Isolation with a cot but only two hots. Actually, that "cot" is a concrete slab with a thin mattress on it.

Why does someone steal just $50? Because that's what was there. If there were $5000, he would have stolen that.

In our local area a man tried to steal from an old lady for whom he done yard work. She trusted him because she knew him. But she didn't have any money at all that day, so he stabbed her, killing her. Robbery turned murder netted zero dollars.

Don't forget free medical treatment all paid for by the state. That includes runs to the hospital, operations, hospital stays, seeing specialists, the whole bowl of wax.
Early on during my career I was riding unarmed in an ambulance transporting an inmate, having given my .38 to another officer following in a van. Or sometimes I was the doubly armed guy following the ambulance in the van.
Years later on there were two officers who specialized in doing just that. Me dino was content to work at the prison, especially when I was on the back gate tower lowering those .38s in a bucket.
On the back gate tower I had six .38s to check in and out as needed. There were a lot more weapons in the prison armory that was located down a ladder below my feet.

I am upset that we housed and fed him all those years. THAT was stupid.