What to do with gangsters.

It's not a top-down solution.

Government needs to take a holistic approach to the issue by inhibiting the very culture of criminal gang participation which must include schools and educational incentives, social workers, social welfare benefits, the gardai, youth action groups, and of course a hardline approach to crime on behalf of the judiciary and the prison services.

If you don't destroy the very root of the problem you just get new and fresher trouble sprouting at the top.

Clytus wrote: »

Watching the news this evening, I was struck by the story of the criminal gang who had a shipment of guns and drugs intercepted by aq joint operation between the PSNI and the Gardai.

The story went on to mention the fact that the operation was alledgedly run from prison by the same man serving life for the murder of Veronica Guerin.

Im find myself now more and more perplexed by the notion of hardened criminals running their drug and murder businesses from a place intended to protect the public from these types.

Maybe its time for us as a society to consider an even more stingent method to protect us from these criminals.

Should we consider a type of incarceration similar to the Supermax prisons in the U.S? Where prisoners are locked up for 23 hours a day...no visitors...electronic equipment to jam phone signals..daily cell searches.

Have them chemically castrated. It would make them more docile and, best of all, would reduce the hardcore scobe population in the country.:D

Wicknight wrote: »

Well people could stop buying drugs such as cocaine for a start. I get so annoyed with the people I know who buy hash and cocaine but go on about how "their dealer" is a nice bloke not involved in the criminal side of things, as if he flies the coke in from Columbia on Ryanair himself.

Metals, oil, food, electronics, clothes, etc. are all produced by industries that exploit workers; for example, much of the cocoa that makes your chocolate was picked by slaves in western Africa. Should we, then, refuse all these products also?

Rev Hellfire wrote: »

Absolutely not, since they're doing us no direct harm.
Drugs are different in that regards.

Interesting that as a consumer, you don't mind who is harmed as long as it's not you.

Criminals don't always kill each other to control illegal businesses, for example, mafia extortion rackets and whatever.

The causality argument is a valid point. As a member of a so-called developed country, a lot of the luxuries you enjoy are as a result of the misery of others. As consumers, I guess very little of us can say that we live completely non-compromised lives.

Of course, in the case of cocaine, the illegality of the drugs themselves is the point. That's why they should be legal.

We can solve both problems by increasing our domestic production!

Keep the money in the country, I say!

Cut the haemorrhage of funds to criminal or unsavory groups!

Hemp for victory!

While there is an underground market for drugs, there will always be people ('gangsters') selling them, and people buying them.

The only long-term solution for this, is to legalize and strictly regulate drugs; which has obvious public-health drawbacks.

The only long-term solution for this, is to legalize and strictly regulate drugs; which has obvious public-health drawbacks.

Yes, drawbacks such as less dangerous impurities from quality control; less induced demand from 'pushing' economics, regulation of situations of use, less organised violence due to taking away a principal driving cash flow, and so on. Truly, a nightmare scenario! We'd have to fund junkies retirements in comfortable surroundings from the massive tax revenues rather than keep them in prisons, and we'd need to find new hate figures (I suggest paedophiles, that always works)

It's ironic that we are one the one hand so into the free-market as a social ideology, yet criminalise recreational chemicals...Aceepting the basic premise of supply and demand, yet criminalising commonly used substances, we can hardly be surprised or appalled that the vacuum is filled by illegal supply. Criminalization as a policy is complicit, and bears a fair measure of responsibility for every gang-related death.

low detection rate means that its a good gamble. The risk vs reward is stacked in favour of the reward. Crime pays in this country. We know this from the drug dealer on the street to the highest level of goverment. Yet there are so little repercssions.

2 solutions : local people get p*ssed off, form vigilante gangs and deal with their local dealers.

Or alternatively wait until when we need to get a government in based on reducing crime like the uk did a while back with tony and co.

However I can honestly see the first happing quicker and being more effective than the latter.