I could be wrong, but I once heard a complaint against 3-strike that (in CA) a lot of crimes that are misdemeanors can become felony charges if you've been convicted of a felony in the past, so people with a previous felony were getting life for tagging buildings and other relatively minor crimes..
I've heard that the three strikes law in Arizona is supposed to apply only to more "serious" and "violent" felonies with only certain felonies counting as "strikes". Does marijuana possession falls under this category? http://www.kvoa.com/global/story.asp?S=4808026 [It'd be crazy if it did?]
You are correct. The Arizona three strikes law only applies to aggravated or violent felonies, not all felonies. The law lists 24 kinds of felony that are considered aggravated or violent (they are things like murder, assault resulting in injury, sexual assault, kidnapping, terrorism, arson). Drug crimes are not among them.
Ouch... do they have a three strikes law there? By the way I just went to Phoenix and I really don't like the speeding cameras. I am curious though, do they work to make the traffic overall smoother? When I was there I didn't see any traffic.
They certainly do not. The traffic jams that result from people slamming on their brakes in front of the cameras (I forgot the technical name for them. I just call them latency-jams...) have lengthened my commute considerably.
As someone who navigates roads without a steel cage around myself, I wish red light cameras were replaced with Red Alert-style Tesla coils. Running red lights is dumb. Cameras make the roads safer.
I cycle, but red light cameras have recently been part of a scandal where they slowly reduce the amount of warning time before the light changes.
This simultaneously increases revenue and endangers everyone on the road.
Speed cameras seem to go through a similar process, but are now (at least where I live) referred to as "saftey cameras" and brightly decorated so that you're slowing down at accident blackspots not getting caught out by sneaky placement.
I was actually only talking about speeding cameras. The red light cams are ok with me as long as they don't change the yellow length to make more money. If speeding cameras were used to improve overall flow of traffic I would be ok with them too.
I can see them positively affecting traffic because I have seen how backed up traffic can get when a cop pulls someone over for a speeding ticket.
Oops, I misread. Speed limits are set arbitrarily low in some places compared with the design of the road, so I usually disagree with speed limits anyway. If you want people to drive more slowly, change the road to make them want to drive more slowly.
As somebody who drives without a steel cage around them, you should support initiatives to have red light cameras removed.
They increase the frequency of traffic accidents at intersections (both because people are concentrating more on "making the light" than they are "not hitting something" and because people slam on their brakes to prevent running a yellow) and do nothing to make them safer.
With long enough yellows, red light cameras shouldn't be a problem. The places that shorten yellows to raise revenue are criminally stupid.
Anyway, this problem will hopefully be moot in ten years or so. If cars aren't driving themselves yet, just send a message to individual cars telling them to stop before the intersection. When the ones allowed to continue have cleared the intersection, give another direction a green light. No need to speed to make a yellow or slam on brakes.
To make the roads safer, the speed limit needs to be lowered to 25 on city roads. Licenses need to be suspended for running red lights and for speeding.
Instead, the cities just want to make a quick buck off of offenders. (Even this has backfired, as it turns out that cars can't speed, only drivers can, and the Constitution requires that the driver be offered a trial. Oops.)
