Georgia couple behind bars after making racist threats at a child's birthday party

Good. Who does that at a children's birthday party? Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Everybody is always sorry for their actions AFTER they get caught.

Sounds to me like they got what was coming to them.

A lot of this comes down to your feelings on if very harsh penalties serve as a societal deterrent. That's what it appears they did here. The state rightly identified that racism is bad and they want to stop it. To make that happen they put some very harsh penalties on the books, similar what they did with the war on drugs. Now they hope they can tamp racial crime down by making examples of a few people.

Outside the obvious fact that these two are not the best of people the real question in my mind is, do these sorts of harsh punishments really lead to deterrence? I fear, similar to the harsh punishments with the war on drugs, the answer is no. But we are going to pay to lock them up for a very long time and we will continue to pay for them when they get out because we've made it likely they won't be able to get any real jobs ever again. Their lives are over, just like the lives of countless drug users and low level sellers that are locked up for very long periods of time for similar reasons.