M.G. Stinnett responds to Thomas T. Thai regarding sending offenders to the miliarly:
Please, no. Once upon a time it was customary for a judge to offer a 'troubled" youth a choice: jail time or military service. And, it did work for a lot of young men--but times have changed and so has the nature of "troubled." I joined the Air Force just after the military had mostly purged the services of miscreants who joined for just such reasons (in the period just after Vietnam to about 1979). The members who are honorably serving don't want or need these people. We have a well-trained, well-disciplined force which is the envy of the world. They aren't, and shouldn't be, an expensive social retraining program. In any case, I suspect the military wouldn't have them. One of the ways they got rid of the bad ones was to raise enlistment standards, and I don't think our military leaders (who were low-ranking officers when it was bad) want to go back to the days when company commanders couldn't walk into some barracks without armed escort. Peter Schmitz responds: Going by several incidents that have occured over the past several years in South Korea, Japan and Germany, I would say that our new military breeds anti-social behaviors among its recruits and that Minneapolis judges would not be serving us well by sentencing local criminals to the military. It will only make them meaner, like prison. --------Peter Schmitz CARAG TEMPORARY REMINDER: 1. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. 2. If you don't like what's being discussed here, don't complain - change the subject (Mpls-specific, of course.) ________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Un-subscribe, etc. at: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
