There's a very interesting thought experiment devised by the human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smitg and outlined at the end of the excellent book "So You've Been Publicly Shamed" by Jon Ronson.
Quoting from the book;
“Let me ask you three questions,” he said. “And then you’ll see it my way. Question One: What’s the worst thing that you have ever done to someone? It’s okay. You don’t have to confess it out loud. Question Two: What’s the worst criminal act that has ever been committed against you? Question Three: Which of the two was the most damaging for the victim?”
The worst criminal act that has ever been committed against me was burglary. How damaging was it? Hardly damaging at all. I felt theoretically violated at the idea of a stranger wandering through my house. But I got the insurance money. I was mugged one time. I was eighteen. The man who mugged me was an alcoholic. He saw me coming out of a supermarket. “Give me your alcohol,” he yelled. He punched me in the face, grabbed my groceries, and ran away. There wasn’t any alcohol in my bag. I was upset for a few weeks, but it passed.
And what was the worst thing I had ever done to someone? It was a terrible thing. It was devastating for them. It wasn’t against the law.
Clive’s point was that the criminal justice system is supposed to repair harm, but most prisoners — young, black — have been incarcerated for acts far less emotionally damaging than the injuries we noncriminals perpetrate upon one another all the time — bad husbands, bad wives, ruthless bosses, bullies, bankers."
The point of it is that we punitively punish people for many crimes while doing things far worse at the same time. Should we really be putting someone in prison for burglary when there are people who rip millions of people off with legal price gouging or break up a family by cheating?
We should think and question the legal system, and what effect it has on people unfortunate enough to become embroiled in it. If the legal system is there to punish behaviour that isn't in the interest of society or to protect communities from those who'd harm them, are we actually punishing the right people?
It's a very deep question. Not something that HN will answer in a thread. I think it's worthwhile spending some time on though.
You should at least be comparing expected outcomes (if not worst possible outcomes) rather than actual outcomes. Especially because your thought experiment is subject to extreme (literal) survivorship bias; no murder victim will answer your hypothetical. Other crimes such as carjacking, which has a 50% death rate for the victim, should be punished very severely even if the victim survived.
In addition, in cases where people do things like cheating, they could blame the 'victim' for actually filing for divorce, and not being more forgiving. The divorce filing could be seen as much more damaging to children than the actual cheating, unless you try to instate some sort of negligence standard for 'immoral' activities. Another interesting case might be a child 'coming out' as homosexual when their parents are very religious and consider homosexuality a sin; is the child not inflicting harm here?
Is honesty (or lack thereof) more troubling to you than threatening a fellow human being with disability or death?
I think the point of the parent is not that we should punish more, it's that we should punish less: since we don't punish grave misbehaviors that have dire consequences but are technically not illegal, why punish shoplifting?
But not punishing shoplifting is a non-starter. So if inflicting emotional pain is worse than mere property loss, and we want to keep things equal/relative, that means we start punishing for inflicting emotional pain. This whole line of reasoning leads to either anarchy or more punishment for arguably moral issues.
I do not address the question of what (absolute level of) punishment (if any) would be appropriate for any level of harm; I am offering a set of criticisms of the standard (, how harm could be measured and compared).
One of the most damaging things Clive Stafford Smith has done is to give public support for Moazzem Begg, who was almost certainly a high-ranking member of al Qaeda (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moazzam_Begg). (Sure, Begg should have gotten a fair trial -- he would have gone to court had the charges not been dropped, probably because the intelligence services didn't want to reveal all the intel they had gathered on him and his associates).
In every human society in history, there have been people who choose to rob, rape and kill. There's no pleasant way to deal with such people, but it is the role of the state to deal with them, or you have anarchy. It isn't the role of the state to prevent "emotional damage", "bad wives" or "bankers".
Stafford Smith's position seems to be a twisted version of Christian morality where all problems are caused by meanness. Since the justice system is an institutionalised form of meanness, it must be wicked -- indeed, it's probably responsible for crime and terrorism.
> One of the most damaging things Clive Stafford Smith has done is to give public support for Moazzem Begg, who was almost certainly a high-ranking member of al Qaeda (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moazzam_Begg). (Sure, Begg should have gotten a fair trial -- he would have gone to court had the charges not been dropped, probably because the intelligence services didn't want to reveal all the intel they had gathered on him and his associates).
I don't know enough about this person to say one way or another whether he was a high ranking al qaeda member or not. But _even if he were_ I don't think insisting on a habeas corpus rights for detainees or decrying torture is a _damaging_ thing at all. It was up to the state; who originally imprisoned him and almost certainly tortured him to prove his guilt. They didn't even attempt to do this; and it likely had nothing to do with not wanting to reveal intel -- the 'court' he'd have been charged in had little to no due process, and the evidence was presented to a government tribunal, not to the defendant.
I think Smiths point there wasn't that there was some problem-meanness correlation, but that the justice system as it is structured doesn't even try to have a sensible metric by which to sentence by. I think framing it in terms of damage done to society is a reasonable one. Under such a metric, (unarmed) robbery should be treated with much less severity -- and daresay rehabilitative measures as opposed to just imprisonment -- than rape or murder. That seems reasonable, and not particularly evil as worldviews go.
In every human society in history, there have been people who choose to rob, rape and kill. There's no pleasant way to deal with such people, but it is the role of the state to deal with them, or you have anarchy. It isn't the role of the state to prevent "emotional damage", "bad wives" or "bankers".
The point of the question (which is an interesting question regardless of who asked it) is that we should challenge what the role of the state is. We definitely shouldn't blindly or unquestioningly accept that the state is there to do one thing or the other, to deal with robbers and not bankers, because "that's the way it's always been" or something. That is how states attain power over citizens and we end up with things like the scandalous overreaching surveillance revealed by Snowden et al.
States have justified their actions by many different codes of ethics. I know my answer to the legitimate role of the state: to protect individual rights.
Can't ignore in all that, the issue of public order. Going soft on bullies (which is what many smash-and-grab criminals may be) means it grows without limit. So establishing public order is not an optional thing.
I agree with this. You only need to see what happens when public order breaks down during riots and natural disasters. There are a hell of a lot of people out there who go wild when they don't anticipate punishment.
In places where there is no civil authority, they have what resembles post-apocalyptic landscapes. We've not descended into that. So yes, enforcing public order has an effect.
(And what about prison? Where did that come from?_
Of course, most people are socialised not to even consider breaking most laws, but that only happens because they live in a lawful society. When you see people around you breaking the rules, you feel much less obliged to keep them.
I have. Of course I have my own personal code, as most every man does, but that does not always align with the law, and so where they conflict, rational calculations are made. I like to think that my code is good enough that in a society of just Mes we could get on well enough in anarchy, but there will never be a society of just Mes, there are lots of differing codes out there and the law helps ease tensions between them, plus my code certainly has flaws even if I can't change or see them yet.
You make a good point, but I rather think the burden of evidence that prison is a deterrent rests on the people who recommend it, seeing as prison is a pretty significant interference with someone's human rights.
I should say that I have no problem of prison for repeat violent criminals. Some people say that prison stops those people committing crime while they're in prison, but it doesn't even do that. Look at the rates of violent crime happening in US prisons (which I accept are unusual) to see evidence of that. There's not much evidence that a stay in prison stops a person from re-offending; it seems that there's a bunch of "psycho-social" stuff (housing, debt management, employment, education, drug and alcohol treatment) that would be more effective at stopping re-offending. (Or preventing crime).
And do we really want to deprive someone of their liberty in prison for "petty crime"? I'm not sure what you mean about petty crime.
I don't think this kind of reductive thinking, if taken into more political and behavioral extreme areas works.
Lets try this mental exercise, what is the physical damage to me if I get raped? In extreme cases one could get infected with a potentially deadly STD, or if a woman, onr may become pregnant, but in many cases at the physical level, it's not all that different from regular sex between people. The main difference is granting permission to sex, or not granting permission to sex.
That makes all the difference, or most.
So, you see, it's easy to break things down into oblivion, the thing is, this is what, in part, makes is human, why we don't follow the same kind of courtship other animals accept as part of nature. Or why otherwise rationalized behavior is not normally accepted.
Restorative justice won't cut it here.
I of course understand my example is extreme, but I simply want to point out that there is a point where these ideas break down as a solution to unjust sentencing.
>what is the physical damage to you if you get raped?
I don't think the parent was suggesting only physical damage be considered. They discussed several examples of emotional damage.
EDIT: And I'm not really sure why you're calling their post reductive either, it seemed fairly nuanced, and ended with "It's a very deep question. Not something that HN will answer in a thread."
The OP kind of was when they brushed away the burglary they experienced as, not much monetary loss and the lost feeling of security was back went away after a few weeks. To feel secure in one's home is f*&(ing important. I'm not equating it to rape, but it's that intangible feeling of lost of trust you cannot quickly brush away.
Emotional damage is interesting. In many senses it's entirely one's own fault, if one feels emotionally damaged / offended / distraught. But it's an uncommon mental discipline to get yourself to feel differently. That intangible feeling of lost trust can be quickly brushed away, the OP is an example of that since they did it in weeks, similarly rape actually doesn't end up being a huge deal for some victims. But it's pretty weird to start drafting up policies (like "let's punish less 'cause come on, he just threatened you with a knife and took your wallet, he didn't actually hurt you and your material losses were only the cost to get a new wallet and the small time it took to cancel any credit cards") that would only work on a small portion of the population with a certain level of mental discipline. The fact that some have it to various degrees and some don't is enough to make any suggestion requiring it to be pointless unless that suggestion includes "and kill / severely culturally shame anyone who does not have the discipline".
The error in thinking here is your equivocation of the emotional trauma of having your groceries stolen with being raped. Your conclusion is extreme, but it is not a logical conclusion.
Our legal system doesn't push "harm" per se, but rather harm caused unjustly[1]. E.g. it harms me a company raises the price of a product that happens to be in demand ("price gouging") but that company has every right to do so as it owns the product.
One way we can reconcile the utilitarian notion of harm, with the property rights/natural rights approach is through economic theory. The so called "welfare theorems" of economics state that when every person maximizes their own utility (under the assumptions of a perfect market), then the result is pareto optimal. From this it follows that in a society with redistribution of wealth, no person has a right to complain that another person has "harmed" them by way how they behaved in the free market.
Outside of the economic realm, the argument for natural rights is even stronger. How can you compare cheating, which is a consensual act, with robbery? At most cheating could be considered a violation of a contract, e.g. a prenuptial agreement.
By completely ignoring the role of natural rights and property rights in the law and in moral reasoning, you are engaging in sophistry.
E.g. it harms me a company raises the price of a product that happens to be in demand ("price gouging") but that company has every right to do so as it owns the product.
Actually, 30+ US states have laws making "price gouging" illegal, though the definition isn't just that the product is in demand, but that there is also a state of emergency fueling that demand.
> Should we really be putting someone in prison for burglary when there are people who rip millions of people off with legal price gouging or break up a family by cheating?
I agree that cheating usually hurts more than burglary. However, it's not just a question of how harmful it is, but also how many people feel the urge to do it. We can mostly deal with burglary by criminalizing it, but criminalizing cheating would be a disaster akin to the war on drugs.
And again cheating is much greyer area than killing. The marriage, the wedding, being faithful are very artificial social constructs. I for once, would never, ever want somebody to be punished because she cheated on me. I may not like it, but I don't think the state has anything to do with it.
"The law called for sentences of up to two years in prison. Adultery cases were only heard when a spouse filed a complaint, and could be withdrawn at any time by that spouse."
It's only deep if you want it to be deep. In my opinion, it's as "deep" as any other meaningless question. As one in the title, by the way. Because the very assumption that legal system exists to help some commoner — you — seems absurd to me. It's not you who puts people in jail. It's not you who has the guns and manpower to maintain the existing regime and rules. It's not even you, who "feeds" those who have guns and manpower — regardless of what you think, you don't really chose to pay taxes, you just have to, because if you don't, then you are the "criminal" who must be punished.
These questions seem deep (which actually translates to "without an obvious answer") only if you assume that you are choosing who should be punished, what is a crime and what is a punishment. Then, unsurprisingly, it is quite hard to explain rationally the current state of things — so that "your" choices would seem "right" enough. Because that's just not the case.
But if you try to answer the question about "what is right" from the "Golem's" point of view — the legal system, the government, the "social norm" — it actually is pretty clear and simple. "Right" is what keeps it stable. Punishing somebody, who makes somebody else miserable doesn't really help it — it's ok for people to be miserable, it's not ok for them to turn on the Golem. It doesn't have to be rational or efficient, it doesn't have to help anybody or protect anybody. The moment it becomes something more than a mere human — and it long time is — it doesn't care for human needs or worries. Feeding murderers on behalf of other people, while keeping them in a closed institution doesn't really help anybody or is rational, it isn't about justice or whatever — it just works, it just keeps the system stable. On the other hand, people using psychedelic drugs and living in hippie communes doesn't hurt people, but hurts the system. That's why things are what they are.
- Government isn't about morality.
- Really? What is it about?
- Stability! Keeping things going. Preventing anarchy. Stopping society from
falling to bits. Still being here tomorrow.
- What for?
- I beg your pardon?
- What is the ultimate purpose of government, if it isn't for doing good?
- Minister, government isn't about good and evil it's only about order, or chaos.
This is a good question, but the direction he's going with it seems like it might be advocating throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It's true, we're not punishing the right people, and the people we punish are frequently being punished too much for comparatively minor crimes. The solution isn't to eliminate punishment, it's to fix the system so that the bigger criminals don't get away with their crimes because of their wealth and political connections. And for things that aren't against the law but are devastating, maybe we need to look at changing the law. However, even here, civil suits usually serve to deter such behavior: many things aren't technically "illegal", but they are actionable "torts", which you can sue people for. The McDonald's coffee case is a good example here, and shows why civil suits, though frequently derided, actually serve as a check on really bad behavior that doesn't have specific laws passed against it yet: McD's kept their coffee heated to dangerously-high temperatures, despite other people being injured by it in drive-thrus, and when it happened to this woman, she sued (wanting them to pay her medical bills, as she sustained serious burns) and won a very large punitive judgment as the jury felt that McD's was negligent. There's no law saying how hot coffee should be served (and that's likely to be micromanaging and not a good way to run society), but it is entirely possible to be sued for "negligence" when you do something that gets someone hurt, so there is a big incentive to not do that, and to make sure you don't seriously injure someone through your carelessness.
These examples (mugging, burglary) are serious crimes that have a lasting impact on most people. In addition, a place where mugging and burglary is happening without consequence has a really negative effect on the people there. Ask a black mother whose kids live in fear whether that guy who is mugging, robbing and breaking and entering belongs in jail.
The punitive nature of arrest and jail makes the cost/benefit less attractive of capture looks like a high risk. (Example: NYC)
We don't jail cheating spouses because society learned that moral turpitude as a crime creates other problems that society is struggling to move past.
We don't effectively police many categories of white collar crime because the risk of capture is infinitesimal.
Not sure I follow. Are you saying robbers, rapists, carjackers, thieves, murderers, drunk drivers causing vehicular manslaughter etc etc should NOT be punished because some other "bad" behavior is not punishable by law in today's society?
Machiavelli said, the man forgets the loss of a father sooner than the loss of property. Imagine you worked 5 years to buy something and it is robbed. Isn't it emotional damage? Human rights people tend to separate rights in boxes, while in fact most rights are indeed human rights.
It's very considerate of the burglar to only choose victims who have insurance! I'm sure the insurance company was happy to pay out. I hope you can still afford it when premiums go up with the increased crime rate that follows unpunished crimes.
I think it's not about what is the worst, but about what is necessary. Ultimately, the idea is that there are some basic rules without which the society can not perform. The exact rules vary by culture, but in a Western culture they usually include murdering people, violating property rights, causing substantial bodily and emotional harm, defrauding or defaming someone, etc.
Now, one has to admit our current legal system has gone way beyond that and subverted criminal justice system from "absolute necessities" to "things I love to force other people to do because I think they should be doing those things and too stupid to realize it" - and so we now prosecute people for setting wrong kind of plant on fire and inhaling the smoke, or for cutting other person's hair without consent of government employee, or for listening to a musical tune without paying to some corporation that is considering "owning" it, or for using the idea because somebody else thought about similar idea before and asked government employee to give them "ownership" of it. And so on.
This all looks like abuse, but there's still the original idea behind it - the idea that there are some necessities underlying working society, and these necessities must be enforced. Not because each violation causes grave harm - but because multiple violations would snowball into set of consequences that would make our society very hard to live in.
So if we go to the mugging example, let's assume we say "mugging is no problem, the police should not care about it, there's no harm done, especially compared to what Wall Street bankers are doing". Let's ignore even the facts that people are grievously hurt or murdered in muggings. But even beyond that - what happens if we declare free mugging season?
First of all, more muggings - especially from people that are physically strong, imposing and have no moral problems with it. Then, people that are not so strong would try to defend themselves - e.g. by arming themselves. Then, muggers would arm themselves too, because they found the source of cheap income and are not going to give it up. Then you have two outcomes possible - either the non-muggers succeed, individually or collectively, in raising the potential price per mugging to level so high it's not worth it (i.e. if you are going to end up dead in 1/3 of mugging attempts, your mugging career is not going to be long) or you have situation where you're living in a warzone. Which some people learned to survive in, but would you want to get into such situation?
In either case situation did not exactly improve - in the first case, you just create the police by other name, and probably more harsh to muggers than any current one (vigilantes have little use for Miranda rights and competitive trials) , in the second you get dramatic reduction in quality of life.
Before Napoleon there was such a thing as "restorative justice": "Restorative justice is an approach to justice that focuses on the needs of the victims and the offenders, as well as the involved community. This contrasts to more punitive approaches where the main aim is to punish the offender, or satisfy abstract legal principles.
Victims take an active role in the process. Meanwhile, offenders are encouraged to take responsibility for their actions, "to repair the harm they've done – by apologizing, returning stolen money, or community service".[1] In addition, the restorative justice approach aims to help the offender to avoid future offenses. The approach is based on a theory of justice that considers crime and wrongdoing to be an offence against an individual or community, rather than the State."
How about sociopaths? They can become serial offenders, learning all the while how to apologize more effectively each time they are apprehended. If a crime has little downside, then crime will grow.
Go re-read his post. Apologizing might be acceptable for some crimes and with some victims, but not all. Others may demand compensation or more punitive measures. There's nothing there about crime having little downside; if the community requires you to repay a victim for everything you stole from him, and wants you to do a bunch of hard labor (community service) in addition, that sounds like a pretty big downside to me. The main idea isn't going soft on crime, it's letting the victims decide on the punishment. It makes a lot of sense: if someone steals my TV, gets caught, and the punishment is for him to buy me a new TV and fix my door that he broke and another 100 hours of lawn care on top of that, that's a lot cheaper and better for society than sticking him a prison for several years. The system we have now is entirely punitive, doesn't give victims much say in the process, and doesn't restore the victims at all (they have to sue the criminal separately in civil court).
"if someone steals my TV, gets caught, and the punishment is for him to buy me a new TV and fix my door that he broke and another 100 hours of lawn care on top of that, that's a lot cheaper and better for society than sticking him a prison for several years."
If the the criminal is stealing your TV, do you actually think they will have the money to pay it back? There are plenty of cases where a judge forces a person to pay money back and the person just doesn't pay it back or doesn't have the money.
Even the guy from "The Wolf of Wallstreet" hasn't paid the millions he owes. I just don't think this will deter petty crime.
"The main idea isn't going soft on crime, it's letting the victims decide on the punishment"
What if, as a victim, I decided that the person that stole my TV needed to have his hands chopped off?
Your method seems to be more based on emotion and retribution than our current system.
It may be more expensive, but I don't see a problem with our current system in terms of deterring crime. I don't mind paying more for something that will help society.
Who would be stupid enough to allow a known burglar to return and repair the door? I would never put my family and other possessions at risk that way. Plus I would have hired an honest worker to fix the door long before the hypothetical burglar was caught and sentenced. These ideas only seem sensible in the context of an ivory tower philosophical debate.
...and they leave the courtroom and you never see them again. This is a guy who thought taking your TV was easier than working and buying his own. No way is he going to get me another one. Its preposterous.
How will this work in today's society? Judges give the harshest sentences in election years compared to other times because they want to look "tough on crime". Some of the most asinine laws stem from politicians who also want to look tough on crime. As a society, we treat people who've been to prison like crap and our movies make prison rape jokes, as if it is something to be joked about. It is just depressing.
We're always going to need some prisons. Because as much as many people are possible to rehabilitate, there's always going to be a (rather small) percentage that are simply dangerous to just about everyone and everything around them. See, some of the worst examples of serial killers. You don't really want to risk the possibility of letting them near anyone else, and house arrest (or a traditional psychiatric ward) might not be secure enough in a few cases...
But we should be sending a far lower percentage of criminals to prison, yes.
On another note, could virtual reality potentially be an interesting punishment here? There are a few articles online about the possibility of having someone experience what feels like 10,000 years in 8 hours, and the concept could potentially be used for literal imprisonment too (like say, in The Matrix). You could give someone who's simply impossible to rehabitate a virtual life that fits their own worldview...
That sounds more like we need insane asylums not prisons.
Politically we find it easier to deal with people that can't function in society as criminal than sick and historically Insane Asylums have been really nasty places. However, I don't see the advantage of keeping criminals in the same place as the insane.
I agree we should be sending less people to prison. But then the problem becomes how to punish people for doing these things?
Some people do not have the money to pay compensation. Some people will avoid community service. Some people will disobey home detention orders. What do we do with these people now?
I think author forget that prison ALSO means that we are isolating someone dangerous, someone that is dangerous for society, that's why we lock him up. There will be no other solution/place for murderers etc. Period.
I really would like that authors of that kind of articles go to areas where there is a lot of gang activities and live there for couple of months. I am sure they would change their mind.
Here's an incident that took place last week in a town near me:
A man with a beer and a condom approached a random couple on the sidewalk and declared his intention to have sex with the woman. When she declined, two of his brothers and a fourth man appeared from behind a bush, beat the man into submission and dragged the woman back to their apartment. They barricaded the door and raped her. The criminals had multiple previous charges including DUI and were illegal immigrants AND they had sneaked into the U.S. a 2nd time.
But I suppose letting them "live with and be closely supervised by a family" will straighten them out. /s
What the author doesn't acknowledge is that prison is the best thing we have come up with so far. We all want something better, but we don't have it. And his touchy-feely concepts are perhaps adequate for shoplifters and soft-drug offenders, but not a family of gang rapists.
The true problems with the prison system are the overwhelming numbers of non-violent offenders who are disproportionately ethnic minorities. It would also be a good idea to improve rehabilitation efforts.
Not sure why you got downvoted, I'm pretty left wing but people who pull the kind of shit in that story really do belong in prison, it doesn't have to be a harsh american-style prison but it has to be secure, some people just shouldn't be in society because of the threat they pose to the rights of others.
It's not just about punishment it's about protecting law-abiding members of society.
There are still crimes where the punishment should be a short rope and a tall tree. Forty years of a roof over your head, a bed to sleep in, and three squares a day is insane.
Death is irreversible. Imprisonment is not. Unfortunately, US criminal system routinely imprisons innocents (and in other countries I'm sure it is not much different). E.g. check out Innocence Project[1]. Criminal justice system is rife with errors, malfunctions and abuse. For imprisonment and fines, one can at least fix an error after the fact. One does not get back years spent in prison, but at least they can get free and maybe also compensated for it somehow. But if the person is dead, you can not fix it.
I was for a long time of the opinion that there are crimes deserving death penalty, and I still kind of think so. But - I am no longer sure the US government, and most of other governments, can be trusted with this power. They are too broken and dysfunctional to be able to wield it justly. As such, it is better to not have it at all.
Yes and No, I'd sooner my taxes pay to keep someone away from society who needs to be than pay to execute them even if it costs more, I'd sooner living that society even if it costs more.
Fortunately where I am the death penalty is a settled issue.
Honest question, why is putting someone in a box for the rest of their life more morally acceptable than killing them? I personally find life imprisonment to be far more horrifying than death.
I understand the concerns around the death penalty, namely the possibility of a wrongful conviction with the inability to appeal once the sentence is carried out. But just comparing the punishments, why is one morally better than the other?
My price-sensitive futurist perspective would rather we pay the one time $30k price for a basic cryonics suspension than outright kill them or keep them locked up for life. (Caveats that it would then be seen as cruel not to suspend terminally ill patients, old people, and so on, so the sudden increase in cryonics demand would surely improve the methods and decrease the cost...) But in the Current Year and Current World locking them up for life is strictly better than just killing them, because I think that sometime within the next 50 years we have at bare minimum a decent shot at finding out how to drastically expand lifetimes (perhaps de facto immortality) and additionally alter a person's self in subtle ways that still constitutes a continuation of identity, and then we can directly rehabilitate. (Somewhat like Demolition Man, except done right. ;)) I also think the major powers can squeeze by and last that long, specifically no entering of a new dark age even if say the US split up or even if the several social order crises currently underway made some big dents. Without the possibility of living forever with a non-dangerous mind, I actually don't see much reason to prefer life in prison over death, I see a big reason (cost) to prefer death, and if I was sentenced any time prior to the early 1900s I'd ask for the guillotine instead.
Not sure it counts as an appeal to emotion, he pretty accurately stated the facts from the article posted down thread, if reading it makes you emotional that's on the reader.
Deterrent factor is huge. Most if not almost all people fear having to spend time in prison. And there is no question that it guides their behavior. And the people who don't fear being in prison don't need less of a reason to be out there. Prison is punishment. No way to compare that type of loss of freedom with home detention.
For all the crime committed now, there is no question that crime would increase if the punishment weren't viewed as taking away a liberty in a consequential way.
I think this is missing a big point of the article - Currently there is a real perception problem that probation (etc) is not enough punishment, therefore a lot of people get sent to prison. This is actually the same as you're saying.
So his solution is to provide a harsher middle ground, that provides more punishment and more "benefits" of prison, without needing to send all offenders to prison.
In fact the solution keeps prisons around - partly for the violent offenders in your example, partly for those that don't get the message from the middle ground.
Agreed, I think the big problem here is that we have "soft-drug offenders", and not only that, but we have lots of them - more than rapists. This erodes the public image of what "criminal" is - if we look at random criminal and it's a pothead that just wanted to get a little high without harming anybody, then the natural question people ask is "do we really need to be that harsh on that?" And the answer is no. Because he's not a criminal, and only idiotic laws make him a criminal. But the harm is done because the idea of "criminal" is now confused - are we talking about rapists? Are we talking about murderers? Are we talking about potheads and public drinkers? Do we want to be hard on them or soft on them? The only way to untangle the mess is to get people that we don't really need to prosecute out of criminal system altogether.
Show me where in the article he suggests that violent felons not go to prison?
He merely points out that punishments less severe than prison (i.e. fines) are ineffective against the poor, while prison is poor at rehabilitation.
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Furthermore his suggestion of deferred sentences would work great to imprison someone with multiple minor charges, as you mention these perpetrators having.
We (the human species) have done better than (modern) prisons; prisons are a compromise that makes the system of building and maintaining orderly society less effective and more expensive than simply hanging the bastards but in theory that compromise has enough positive tradeoffs to be worth it in the end.
Sure. The US needs to prolong their racist and anti-communist policies, that's why they came with their current prison system afterall.
Nixon improved the system to ensure better voter turnout for his kind (20% less democrates votes and get blacks from the streets),
Clinton improved the system for more cheap slave labour (which worked great for centuries to make the US the greatest country of all) and helped private prison incentives. Mandatory sentencing, war on drugs, reducing accountability on law enforcement and justice.
Actually helping improving the crime rate is not the goal, the goal is entirely business and political.
The crime rate went down due to Roe v. Wade btw, getting poor people access to birth control. That's why the right-wing states are fighting that. It would diminish their advantages of the current imprisonment system.
I think only the individuals that pose a real and significant physical safety threat should be put behind bars (i.e those that are likely to physically attack others).
For everyone else (incl. white-collar criminals, non-violent drug offenders, etc.), we need to figure out a more cost-efficient, recidivism-minimizing corrections system.
White collar crime can be so much worse than violent crimes. If some desperate person punches you in the face that should be punished, but someone who destroys the lives of so many by engaging in fraud in the financial sector leading to billions in public money spent to bail out companies, lives destroyed has done far worse than punch a single person in the face.
Yes.
Prisons should be first to rehabilitate the offender if it's possible, if there is no punishment of being away from society people will be more willing to commit crimes.
The main problem with prisons is that they seem like a waste of tax payer funds.
Why should I sentence someone for pre-meditated murder for 20 years? Wouldn't it be better to just off him? Same with rapists. If the crime was done to intentionally harm another person that person is a danger to society.
The economics are also not in favor of keeping criminals like that.
For all other crimes the prison should help rehabilitate that person and if possible pay for his incarceration to offload the burden on the tax payer.
I'm not sure I believe punishment is even possible.
My personal view is that if someone needs to be separated from society for the good of society or for themselves, it should be done in the most humane and least restrictive way possible.
My question is why do we still punish people with computer or financial or corruption crimes in prison for long terms? Yes, I understand some price should be paid, but extremely long prison terms for non-violent crimes such as hacking computer systems seem strange.
In fact, some of these wrongdoers actually are very intelligent, and having them make amends with their intellect could be a just way to perform community service. Anyone able to chime in? I'm not well informed on the different views, so I'd like to gain some insight to this view.
You don't think someone like Madoff deserves the worst punishment we have available for current non-violent offenders? He destroyed thousands of lives, ruined their savings and their ability to retire. Many people will probably have a far worse quality end of life experience because of him. The opportunities for the children of his victims is much diminished. It was an incredibly damaging crime and he's in prison right now bragging about it still.
He's not ashamed of all the hurt he's caused.
You think someone like that shouldn't be in prison? Ok, well if you do I still disagree. That guy belongs where he is for the time he has to be there for.
>You don't think someone like Madoff deserves the worst punishment we have available for current non-violent offenders?
No, no--I am merely asking and want to know the purpose of these long terms. I don't believe I mentioned Madoff in particular but in general with respect to things like drug distribution, computer hacking, etc. As I said in the beginning, I believe there is some price to be paid. My confusion is why we sentence some people to 1 year or to 10 years in prison for a non-violent crime, and then some for 200 years. So my observation of the non-violent criminal justice is that punishment is not meted out in a deterministic fashion, even if it's intended to rehabilitate. While if you are convicted of killing somebody, it is almost guaranteed you will lose your freedom indefinitely.
I know of someone who was accused of hacking a computer network without actually producing much harm aside from snooping at info, yet he was asked to serve 2 years.
I'm not educated or well-informed in these aspects. You seem to be mistaking my asking of the question with advocating a position. I apologize if I have offended you.
At least here in the U.S., the odds of getting any punishment at all for "white collar" crime seems very low, and even if it happens, long prison terms are not likely. It seems the main thing holding people back is cultural, not fear of punishment.
That sort of system is very biased towards the upper classes though. Those who have access to the education and resources and connections to pull off this sort of crime end up punished lightly if at all, while those of similar character who are stuck robbing liquor stores are locked away for years, even though the overall damage they inflict may be minor in comparison.
If you remove the risk of prison for nonviolent offenders, you're creating a world where large businesses and their owners will no longer care whether they do something illegal, they will only care about the risks of getting caught versus the potential profit to be made. You turn the criminal justice system into a risk analysis that happens in some board room. There will be no real detriment to rich people for breaking the law - worse case scenario they lose some money, the equivalent of you ruining the financial security of thousands of people or causing billions in irreversible environmental damage and getting a speeding ticket for it.
I understand there has to be some price to be paid. My question is the length. Is the term deterministic or is it arbitrary? I have never really understood why some non-violent crimes are sentenced with 10 years in prison versus 200 years in prison. For example, a self-victim crime of consuming drugs is punished harshly in Singapore.
At some point the length was arbitrary. As precedence is created, it becomes more deterministic but only somewhat more so. Often times there are minimum sentencing laws, the length of which is mostly arbitrary.
All the talk about home incarceration type programs seems like it wouldn't work out all that well with a population that (I assume) mostly rents and (I assume) often has trouble keeping their finances in the black without any punitive measures.
Quoting from the book;
“Let me ask you three questions,” he said. “And then you’ll see it my way. Question One: What’s the worst thing that you have ever done to someone? It’s okay. You don’t have to confess it out loud. Question Two: What’s the worst criminal act that has ever been committed against you? Question Three: Which of the two was the most damaging for the victim?”
The worst criminal act that has ever been committed against me was burglary. How damaging was it? Hardly damaging at all. I felt theoretically violated at the idea of a stranger wandering through my house. But I got the insurance money. I was mugged one time. I was eighteen. The man who mugged me was an alcoholic. He saw me coming out of a supermarket. “Give me your alcohol,” he yelled. He punched me in the face, grabbed my groceries, and ran away. There wasn’t any alcohol in my bag. I was upset for a few weeks, but it passed.
And what was the worst thing I had ever done to someone? It was a terrible thing. It was devastating for them. It wasn’t against the law.
Clive’s point was that the criminal justice system is supposed to repair harm, but most prisoners — young, black — have been incarcerated for acts far less emotionally damaging than the injuries we noncriminals perpetrate upon one another all the time — bad husbands, bad wives, ruthless bosses, bullies, bankers."
The point of it is that we punitively punish people for many crimes while doing things far worse at the same time. Should we really be putting someone in prison for burglary when there are people who rip millions of people off with legal price gouging or break up a family by cheating?
We should think and question the legal system, and what effect it has on people unfortunate enough to become embroiled in it. If the legal system is there to punish behaviour that isn't in the interest of society or to protect communities from those who'd harm them, are we actually punishing the right people?
It's a very deep question. Not something that HN will answer in a thread. I think it's worthwhile spending some time on though.