The 5 Most Popular Safety Laws (That Don't Work)
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Really, is it ever possible to be too safe? Especially when it's our children at stake? Actually, yes. Especially when the rule or law intended to make us safe is so poorly thought-out that it either does nothing but suck up public money, or creates a ripple effect of unintended side effects. We're talking about things like... #5.
Speed Limits
The Idea: Speeding is a major cause behind many fatal accidents, so it must also be true that mandating lower speed limits will make us all safer, right? Like how after marijuana was made illegal, you could hardly find anybody smoking the stuff. It was back in 1974 that the federal government passed the National Maximum Speed Limit Law in the USA, slowing America down to a creeping 55 miles per hour. The main reason behind the law was to lower gas consumption, but President Nixon promised us it would make our streets safer as well.
Partially thanks to anti-speed limit activists like Sammy Hagar, in 1995 it was repealed. But not everyone was happy about that. Some states and many cities still have their highway speed limits set at or near the '74 lows, and a lot of people support bringing the '74 law back into effect before every man, woman and child in the country finds themselves living in the horrifying universe of 2 Fast 2 Furious.
But There's a Problem... After the National speed limit was repealed, the state of Montana removed all non-urban speed limits in their state. A few years later, engineers working with the state decided to venture out to see just what kind of post-apocalyptic Death Race wasteland their lawless state had produced. What they found was that, you guessed it, on the roads where they removed the speed limits, fatalities didn't go up at all. Proponents of the national law still argue that traffic fatalities nationwide did drop during the national speed limit's lifetime. Buzz-killing critics of the law point out that no, no they didn't. Why Doesn't it Work? Because, and this surprised the hell out of us, people aren't completely retarded. As it turns out, people tend to drive at speeds they feel comfortable driving. Yes, there are reckless madmen out there, but they're not going to obey a couple of digits on a sign anyway. It just becomes a make-work project for traffic cops.
By the way, even worse than speed limits are speed bumps, the irritating, jarring humps they put in parking lots and such, intended to physically force drivers to slow down and make their CD players skip. Not only do those things not prevent accidents, but they keep ambulances from getting to emergencies, which is exactly the sort of thing you don't want happening when years of bacon sundaes and cookie-dough sandwiches finally catch up with you. The above link references a study in Boulder, Colorado that found speed bumps kill as many as 85 people for every one life they save. Holy shit! We think landmines have a better ratio. #4.
Three Strikes Laws
The Idea: Psychologists have found that criminals who have committed three felonies are likely to continue committing felonies for the majority of their non-jailed lives. After wiping their feet with the whole "make the punishment fit the crime" thing, they decided to institute a new law, based on that theory and the rules of Baseball. These "Three Strike" laws mandate very long prison terms--up to life--for criminals who have commit their third felony, regardless of what that felony was. Surprisingly the law did not originate from the home of western-style, retard-executing justice (Texas). California instituted the first Three Strike law in 1994.
The law was very popular at first, and a number of states adopted it shortly thereafter. California's crime rate, which had peaked shortly before the law's implementation, dipped significantly in the years after. This was seen as proof of the law's success. But There's a Problem... First, correlation does not equal causation. We have a grand history of ignoring this fact when it is politically expedient to do so. So while California's crime rate did decline, so did the rest of the country's. In fact, violent crime dropped more in states without Three Strike laws (4.6 percent) than in the states that had them (1.7 percent). Why Doesn't it Work?
Three Strike laws punish petty criminals as often as the violent ones everybody has in mind when talking about "getting tough on crime." Men have been put away for life for shoplifting cookies, video tapes and golf clubs, essentially equating those crimes with violent assault or attempted murder. As a result, California's prisons and jails have been flooded with hundreds of thousands of new occupants. That, combined with many of their facilities being condemned as unfit to live in, has led to a prison overcrowding crisis.
Gosh, it's almost like we shouldn't rely on sports analogies to build a criminal justice system. That's too bad, because we have this little idea we like to call the Mixed Martial Arts Courtroom... #3.
The Amber Alert
The Idea: The Amber Alert, created in response to the highly-publicized abduction and murder of nine-year-old Amber Hagerman, is a system put in place to help find lost and abducted children by instantly flooding the highways, radio and television stations of the area with information about the missing kid. The Amber Alert is based upon the logical principle that, deep down, we all want to be like Batman. An alert is a chance for any regular Joe to be a masked vigilante, rescuing terrified youngsters from prancing, sex-starved pedophiles.
But There's a Problem... Like covering up a hole in the wall with a poster, the Amber Alert system made everyone feel better without actually costing the government a dime. From 2003 to 2006 independent researcher Timothy "The Griffon" Griffith conducted the first third-party investigation of the Amber Alert system. He found that, while state and local governments were claiming huge numbers of children "rescued," they were actually full of shit. Most of the children "saved" by the Amber alert hadn't been in any danger in the first place (in most cases they'd been taken by legal guardians arguing over custody rights). The few children who WERE abducted by psychopaths usually died before the Amber Alert could even go online. Why Doesn't it Work? Few things are more dangerously retarded than people in large groups. There's a reason Batman works alone. Griffith and others came to the realization that, while the Amber Alerts weren't really helpful in saving children, they were great at drowning the surrounding community in a tsunami of irrational fear and paranoia. The chance of a child being abducted by a stranger is far lower than of the child, say, dying from drinking the bottle of floor wax you have in the cabinet because it has pictures of lemons on it. The latter just doesn't become a media event.
The heightened level of fear might have something to do with the fact that more and more Amber Alerts are being called in with greater frequency every year, and with less cause. Fully half of the alerts in 2004 were issued on children who were in no danger whatsoever, and 48 of the 233 alerts that year were issued for children who hadn't been abducted at all. While Amber Alerts aren't expensive, they tie up virtually every law enforcement resource in the area. Policemen and 911 operators that could be out saving lives and arresting minorities for driving nice cars are instead diverted to fielding calls and chasing leads on children who often aren't in any danger. And while someone, probably in our very comment section, will cry that if even one child's life was saved by the system then it was all worth it. But in the case of every "feel good" solution that doesn't actually solve the problem, you have to ask if the time and energy devoted to it couldn't be spent on something that actually works. You know, like sex offender registries. Oh, wait... |
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The Amber Alert thing is f*****g stupid. The Connecticut Dept. of Children Services once claimed that if my wife and/or myself left the state with OUR child, they would issue an Amber Alert, as they felt that cleaning one's house was unsafe with a toddler kept in his room with one of those fences.
My wife had a friend that was obsessed over my son, and would show up at odd hours to "play" with my son, and when I told her that I did not want her showing up at 3 in the morning, she called the CT DCS on us, and that is when the CT DCS said that we had to find a sitter for spring cleaning.
f**k CONNECTICUT!
Ha yea I was just about to comment on that Megan's Law broken link.
Upon googling that exact phrase, I came across this [maybe this is the missing link]:
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2009/02/despite_new_report_on_megans_l.html
Hey, Cracked.com staff? Your link about Megan's Law simply points right back to this page. I'd really like to see the research you're referencing, could you please, respectfully, repair the link? Thanks.
At my high school, if you had a headache you had to go to the nurse and she had to CALL YOUR f*****g PARENTS to make sure you could have it. As if one Advil is gonna make me trip so many balls it'll be as if the entire school is one giant ball pit. Furthermore, she had to make sure you swallowed it. Damn her, I was planning on selling this soggy 200mg brainfuck to some Freshman for $1.50. Point is, ZT is bullshit.
im happy that i don't live in the USA
i live in Holland(everything is legal here)YAY
One of my sons was expelled from school in the second grade for pointing his finger at someone and saying "POW". The evening before, he had been taught how to play "Cops and Robbers" by his teen cousin who lived in a state where they do not have Zero tolerance. My son suggested the same game to his friends at school during recess. He was labeled a trouble maker and couldn't sneeze without a teacher sending him to the principal who looked up his "RECORD". He eventually landed on the Juvenile Sex Offender registry for some innocent horseplay that caused his hand to make contact with another boy's pants. He was sentenced to 2 years Probation and mandatory Sex Offender therapy. I think it is correct that we are teaching children that no one should touch certain areas of their bodies but also understand that boys wrestle around and make contact with each other. The teacher who reported the incident and the District Attorney who prosecuted my son (over the protests of the parents of the supposed "victim") are out of their minds. Fortunately the juvenile sex offender list is not published on the internet, otherwise people would be looking at my other son like HE is dangerous.
@ geekella: If your kid's hanging out with the children of a Lifetime Movie villian, stop reading articles on a comedy site about it and PAY MORE f*****g ATTENTION TO YOUR GODDAMN KIDS YOU LAZY b***h!
f**k USA!!
ALL of these things do NOTHING AT ALL!!
Government watchdogs= poverty/safety pimps. Stay out of peoples business and mind your own! Down with all those pussies calling for oversight of everything under the sun. Orwell must be ready to rise from the dead already.
it's worth noting that America holds 1/4 of the world's prison population. 1 in 100 adult Americans is in prison. the closest after America is Russia with 600 in 100,000 or so. USA! USA!! land of the free and home of the brave!! http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/us/23prison.html
Wow - thanks for saying all this! It should be shouted from the housetops! It is really quite genuinely shocking that such obviously dumb things could actually come into being! Aagagag - as many others have said - where are the brain cells? where ARE the brain cells?? It essentially invalidates the whole legal and school system really if things like this can even be considered, and yet people still seem to cheerfully follow them and give them credence. Why are people as a whole so happy to let other people do stupid things to individuals - presumably assuming that they themselves never will be those individuals. Of course - YOU will never end up on the sex offenders register for no reason or have your kid suspended for doing nothing at all. Of course! And while you are in this clever frame of mind, i have a bridge to sell you!
Some kid in my high school brought some vicodin, or something of that nature to school. He was passing them out to his friends, one of which happened to be my little brother. My brother apparently wasn't paying much attention, and didn't realize what he was being handed. He realized what it was, and immediately said he didn't want to have anything to do with it and threw the two pills in a nearby trash can.
Well, as kids who pass out pills to large groups of people are apt to do in a small town high school, the kid who brought the pills was quickly caught, and implicated everyone he had distributed them to. My brother was among the implicated.
He literally had the pills in his hands for less than 4 seconds, a fact he admits, was verified by several eye witnesses, and the fact that the pills were still in the trash can at the time and were recovered. But that 4 seconds was considered "Possession" and the schools Zero Tolerance Policy required that he be expelled. For the first and last time in his criminal life, my little brother did the right thing. As his now lengthy criminal record will account, he learned his lesson well. If you're gonna get in trouble for something, might as well do it.
Oh man..one middleschool I went to had a Zero Tolerance Policy..it lasted one year.
The ONLY times in my entire scholastic career where I got detention..and damn near got suspended.
They had it set up so the MOMENT the teacher said "class come to order" you had to shut your piehole..if you so much as sneezed after she said that..the crazy psycho b***h (which she was) would send you down to the principal.
And they didn't care what you did.
First "offense" was a warning, then a detention, then 2 detentions, then a suspension, and it continues from there.
I got up to 2 detentions before the crazy-psycho-b***h of a teacher quit because "God told me to" and we got someone who was twice her age but 4 times as cool..and I never got sent to the principal there again. :D
Every person she sent down was just trying to finish their sentance/statement/word. One guy said "water"..I was talking about a bus and made a bus honking noise..the last half of that noise JUST HAPPENED to be after she said that statement..and down I went.
She didn't have many students that liked her.
The sex registry list is the greatest. It tells you exactly where to order 10 pies of anchovy pizzas to, or where to play ring-and-run, or where to make prank calls making believe that you're a 6 year old boy looking for a good time.
Ah man I had one of those tiny guns on the keychain when I was little. They're actually badass capguns that can be used to nearly deafen older/younger brothers.
3 just reminds me of that episode of South Park called "Child Abduction is Not Funny".
some of them are useful....
booz helps me get down the stairs with style
http://www.epiclosers.com/load/8-1-0-309
Hmmmm maybe the next one I read will be better (yawn)
The Sex Offender Registry is particularly flawed because it's based on the completely wrong assumption that sex offenders are incurable. That simply is NOT the case. Only 15% of sex offenders go on to re-offend (lower than the re-offending rates of most other crimes like Break & Enter) and the vast majorit of serious sex crimes (such as raping a child) are committed by people with no criminal record at all. But the Sex Offender Registry makes us FEEL safer, right? Too bad it doesn't do a damn thing.
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they're goin waaaaayyyy too far with "zero tolerance" rules at school. if you're hiding like candy nerdz or something, they make it seem like you're hiding rainbow colored crack