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Comment by benevol | Hacker News Reader

A slow-motion replay is just 1 way of "looking closer".

The thing is, in order to not be hypocritical, we'd need to look as closely as possible.

Once we do that, we'll be looking at the molecular structure of not only the brain of the perpetrator but also the whole body (as there is of course infinite interaction). We'll be asking for the causes that led to the body being as it was at the moment of the thing will currently call "crime".

We'll end up understanding that there is no free will, which will force us to rethink what we call "punishment".

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The judiciary process is not just focused on punishment, but protection of society from violent individuals, rehabilitation, and creating disincentives for other perpetrators.

Intentions aside, the 67% recidivism rate in the US shows that it is more focused on recurring punishment than rehabilitation.

If you believe both statements, that simply implies the US judiciary system is broken. [which I think is true...]

The rate of people who go back to prison is far less than 67%. The odds that someone goes back is 67% when looking at people who have already gone back and counting them once for each trip.

AKA (A, B, C, A, D, A, E) = 1 person out of 4 went back (25%). But, A went back 3 times so out of 7 stays 3 of them repeated (43%).

Yet another way of counting is to look at people at one point in time (C, A, D, A,). But, someone in prison regularly is much more likely to be in prison while your studying. This is mitigated by very long studies, but 10 or even 20 years is not enough.

PS: When you consider some homeless people use prison as a way to get free medical care it's easy for someone to be in and out a lot for minor reasons. Another group that's likely to come back are people who go to prison for failure to pay fines because prison tends to make you even more poor.

Incidentally, the same problematic interpretation of numbers shows up when looking at divorce rates. If you just look at the number of marriages which end in divorce (which is the commonly quoted statistic) then you'll assign too much weight to people who get married and divorced many times.

Is there any way for your statement (which has many bold assertions) to lead anywhere but "We're all just victims of our genes"?

Your materialistic assumptions are a wonderful way to do science, but a terrible way to be human or govern.

It goes further. His statement (which I agree with) implies that we have no individual responsibility because our actions are entirely beyond our control.

In that case the perpetrator is just as much victim, which alters the entire balance of justice, and creates all kinds of ugly rabbit holes to deal with with respect to societal effects and morality.

Providing a strong disincentive to the perpetrator (and in the mean time, locking them up) improves society, whereas doing so to the victim does not. That makes all the necessary difference.

1. The perpetrator of at least some crimes lays costs on society far outweighing the costs to the perpetrator of the actions.

2. Morality is irrelevant. We don't have free will either.

>Is there any way for your statement (which has many bold assertions) to lead anywhere but "We're all just victims of our genes"?

Maybe that we are influenced far more by uncontrollable environmental factors than by our "freely* willed" decisions.

>Free will: the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate;

When you are hungry, you need to eat. But if you don't have any money and take an apple from the market you will be punished. So technically in this situation, the person acted out of necessity and therefore did not act out of free will.

The "crime by necessity" argument is well known and well accepted in moral philosophy (even if not always in jurisprudence). The real question is unnecessary crimes: You choose to steal cars and ride around. Can we convince you not to do that (and other, worse, things), or are you simply broken?

Victims or not, people need incentives to not harm other people, and when these incentives fail society needs to be protected from the offenders. Once retribution is out of the picture (as it should be), free will doesn't matter with respect to justice.

Hear, hear!

Although I don't think people here are interested in hearing arguments that don't click in desired ways with their economic interests.

Rather sadistic, the graying-out option, when used on posts like this.

Rethink punishment in what way?

On the one hand, if the perpetrator is not "responsible", then it seems inhumane to punish them.

On the other, if the perpetrator has demonstrated that they cannot or will not abide by society's rules and we have no way of reprogramming them to do so, then the only rational response is to remove them from society. Permanently. And as early as possible in their career.

And fortunately, questions of "inhumanity" do not arise---we don't have any free will to worry about, either.

That's suppose the world is perfectly causal. However, there are areas where are are not sure about this:

- chaos; - quantum phenomenum; - creative thoughts;

Not saying it's not causal, but since we can't prove it is, yet, we can't state for sure there is no free will. Which would bother the hell out of many people :)

Careful with that train of thought, teaching unconditional love and forgiveness is what has led many mystics to be punished to the max: i.e. crucified, burned at the stake, etc.

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