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Comment by leftnode | Hacker News Reader

Everything about this is ridiculous, but this especially so:

"Johnson’s release date was originally scheduled for earlier, but he ended up serving an additional eight months at the age of 69 for a juvenile shoplifting charge he received when he was 17."

How in any reasonable society is this justifiable? I re-read the sentence probably five times because I simply couldn't believe it.

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I'm surprised the sentences stack, I would have expected that if you have 5 jail-terms assigned to you, you would serve until the longest one.

American law sure favours punishment.

Once you'd committed one crime, that would remove the primary deterrent against committing more (as long as they were no more serious than the first).

I'd still think the judge can and should be able to use discretion and allow concurrent sentences.

Maybe the judge decided in this case that the sentences should not be concurrent. We don't know what judge had in their mind.

I hate to go all PC (I swear I am not one of them) but I wonder whether mandatory sentencing isn't all bad. Perhaps mandatory sentencing is the most effective way to bring down sentencing rules and guidelines to make them more humane.

This is getting a little off-topic but I don't have much sympathy for violent offenders (I'll lower the bar to those who actually commit battery or robbery as opposed to a threat). As far as non-violent crimes, especially victim less*, crimes go there should really be no jail time at all.

I don't have all the answers but I think we really ought to limit our criminal justice system. Specifically (sorry for going off topic) copyright and such topics should not belong to the criminal justice system. Let those be civil lawsuits between two private entities.

No jail time for non violent crime? I presume you've never been defrauded, burgled, etc.

I've been defrauded and burgled for substantial amounts. I've also been mugged at gunpoint. Only for the latter violent crime would I suggest jail time.

Why do you draw a distinction between the two?

(To be clear, I'm not trying to defend victimless 'crimes' here; rather, I don't understand why you would distinguish between someone stealing from you at gunpoint vs. raiding your home while you're out).

Edited: With the obvious exception that the mugger is endangering your life by pointing a loaded weapon at you. Is that the only difference?

I think someone pointing a gun at you and threatening your life is a big difference. Don't you?

I think it makes it worse, because of the physical endangerment involved.

But in both cases the theft of property is morally equivalent to the thief enslaving me to produce the stolen items for him.

If it took me a day to work to earn the money to buy my phone, and you steal it, you've just stolen a day of my life.

Consider that if this hypothetical thief were to be put under house arrest instead of in prison, the state could save enough money to buy you a new phone.

Except that the taxpayers would then be forced to pay reparations for the criminal behaviour of another. A.k.a. moral hazard.

Why not do both? Put him under house arrest, and compel him to buy me a new phone.

How about we start with no jail time for victimless crimes? If you don't endanger anyone but yourself, we don't pursue criminal charges. I'm thinking drug users and people who drink unpasteurized milk.

I'm 100% in agreement with you there. The entire idea of a 'victimless crime' is without merit.

We can then extend the logic to ridiculous cases where the law is clearly "wrong".

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/11/thanks-to-the-mus...

What would you suggest then as a punishment?

Just a thought, but picking up trash along the highway is one option.

What about reparations for the victim of the theft?

What if the person can't pay the reparations?

That's actually an excellent question.

Bankrupt him? Poor odds for rehabilitation then.

Enslave him? Tempting, but as others have pointed out there's a world of corruption and market distortion awaiting you.

I'm really not sure what the answer is.

I used to believe that we should put people to useful work instead of warehousing them in jails to rot. Then people on HN explained to me how it was tried in the US and it created perverse incentives, giving jail wardens tremendous powers of blackmailing locals into doing their bidding at the threat of deploying free work force in their industry (e.g. cutting down trees) and driving the locals out of business.

This stuff is hard to get right.

Burglary is absolutely a violent crime. Busting into someone's home is a violation and crosses a serious line.

As I said in item?id=10595078, I am not happy about the situation but considering we already let go the largest of the criminals, I don't see why we should send people to jail for failing to be big/important enough.

I do think false representation, fraud, malpractice are serious crimes. If someone sells you a copy of Debian Linux or Microsoft Windows and they sell you a compromised copy, they deserve to have their pants sued off of them. To me that is the same level of crime as a pharmacist selling placebos as real medicine. I imagine there has to be a balance somewhere between discouraging fraud and abuse while not coming as too heavy handed.

I certainly won't claim to have the answers. Perhaps I am kicking my position further to the extreme than what I believe is a reasonable compromise. Sorry if I come off as silly or self-contradictory. Part of me writing is to discover and learn what my positions are.

Look at it from the other way around - if you were to enter someone else's property and steal, would you expect to be sent to prison for being caught? If yes, would that seem fair? I would say yes.

Would you expect to serve time for being caught riding a bicycle on a pavement? No. Otherwise would not seem fair, particularly if there were no warning signs...

The law is a system with predictable penalties if you a) don't live somewhere with utterly absurd laws and b) can put yourself in the shoes of the person doing such a crime and think about the expected outcome of getting caught.

For anything more than traffic tickets, predictable is not what I'd call it.

I've seen someone charged with kidnapping get it lowered to a misdemeanor (in that particular case it was appropriate).

It doesn't seem to be working that way as a deterrent, then, given that the US has an incarceration rate five times higher than it's developed-nation contemporaries (750/100k vs ~100-150/100k population).

It's working well as a deterrent, but the goal is not to deter people from committing crimes; it's to deter minorities from going to white neighborhoods for fear of getting arrested. America's cities are very well segregated as a result.

It's possible to serve multiple sentences simultaneously in the American system. The courts have discretion in deciding on how a sentence must be served.

It depends. The sentences can run consecutively (the case here) or concurrently. Typically, for unrelated crimes, they run concurrently. I believe this is true in most other countries too. You don't avoid serving your previous prison sentence because you subsequently committed an even greater crime.

Don't forget the possibility that the reporting might be inaccurate.

Did he shoot harmlessly in the air during a robbery, and then get 44 years for "attempted murder" because he's black? Or did he leave a police officer in a coma for life after torturing him for days? Or did he get 8 years for attempted murder and then commit additional crimes while in prison?

We don't have enough information to know.

Are you suggesting that in addition to the shoplifting and the attempted murder that you suspect there might be an additional crime that is bad enough to justify the courts sending him to prison for the shoplifting?

Or are you suggesting that the badness of the attempted murder might be such that the 44 years was inadequate and so the additional 8 months is acceptable as additional punishment for the attempted murder?

Your wording is somewhat ambiguous. I can tell there are some scenarios that you believe are possible and which justify the additional sentence, but I'm not sure what exactly those scenarios are.

Actually, I think we do have enough information to know. Read it again, paying attention to the dates and ages. The shop lifting offense occurred 8 years before the attempted murder. Tacking an extra 8 months onto a 44 year sentence, for a minor crime committed 8 years earlier is just vindictive.

Is it just not to punish one offender for a crime just because they committed additional crimes whilst nonetheless punishing another offender for that same crime?

I don't think it's vindictive to have a fixed sentence for a crime, shop-lifting say, and apply that to all shop-lifters who are convicted regardless of any other crimes they may also have committed and been convicted for.

Vindictive? Maybe not. Outrageously stupid and thoughtless? Definitely. What good is 8 months of prison for petty crime going to do after already serving 44 years? Prison is supposed to be more about rehabilitation than punishment. If he isn't rehabilitated in 44 years inside another 8 won't do much. In this case it's just a waste of tax payers money.

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