Comment by chillingeffect | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chillingeffect | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Spoken like a truly out of touch academic.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innocence_Project

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.

You can't un-execute someone.

I do think there is an argument for offering someone who has a life/no parole sentence Euthanasia but that would be a massive can of worms to open.

> Not sure why you got downvoted

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_emotion

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.

> Spoken like a truly out of touch academic.

I agree.

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.

http://www.bostonherald.com/news/local_coverage/2016/03/ille...

Yes, that's the one. I actually had a nightmare about it happening to my friend and I two nights ago.

p.s. Thank you for making a whole new account just to post that ;)

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.

[edit]

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com