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Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

>Upon entry of judgment after his sentencing, John Steele will be a convicted felon with a federal fraud conviction. His career as a lawyer — or, more generally, as a gainfully employed person — is over.

While I share everyone's hatred of the tactics these people have employed over the years, I also hate that felons in the US are given such a hard time after they have served their sentences. People make mistakes and should be allowed to move on from them. A couple of years in federal prison shouldn't carry with it a lifetime of financial despair.

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Whilst I agree with your criticism of the treatment of felons in the US in most jurisdictions a conviction for a crime of dishonesty, especially one in a professional context, will haunt you for life. In the context of this specific individual it would be a bold company that put him in a position to have any influence over money, management or clients.

For sure, that covers the "career as a lawyer" part. It's the "as a gainfully employed person" that is troubling.

It makes sense that it would. But should it also make it difficult for him to find housing, to benefit from aid programs like food stamps, or to flip burgers for minimum wage?

If John Steele can't get housing, can't get food, and can't get a job, but is also supposed to obey the law on penalty of more jail time or another felony on his record, what's he likely to do?

Suppose someone is a felon, can the average Joe run a background check to know what crime was committed?

I.e would happily hire someone who was caught in possession of marijuana or a bit of drugs, but not a pedophile, mobster or serial killer.

Point of clarification, a felony fraud conviction wouldn't prevent him from getting food stamps or any other aid. There are 6 states that have restrictions on drug felons getting food stamps, perhaps that's where you're claim comes from?

I recognise that what I'm going to say next will be very unpopular on HN. Harsh punishments work exceedingly well as a deterrent. Harsh punishments make other prospective law breakers think twice before harming innocent people. I can agree with the notion that petty criminals deserve second chances, but what this guy did isn't petty at all. If even one innocent person is spared the ordeal of victimization, then harsh punishments are well worth the costs.

Most criminals don't do calculated risks and inability to integrate back to society (e.g. find job) makes one more likely to commit crime again. USA does not have lower criminality rates then other western countries.

Not really, especially when they're not applied consistently. "Harsh punishments" are disproportionately applied to the poor, which in turn increases recidivism when they feel they have no other option.

The United States Department of Justice disagrees with you:

https://www.nij.gov/five-things/pages/deterrence.aspx

(NIJ is research arm of the DOJ)

Our overcrowded prisons and high prisoner-per-capita rate stands as one piece of evidence against that. We keep throwing people in jail for long periods of time, but people keep committing crimes and former criminals keep committing crimes again at a higher rate than other countries whose criminal justice programs focus on rehabilitation instead of punishment. In fact, the ability for ex-convicts to get jobs after they're released is associated with lower rates of recidivism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recidivism#Employment_and_reci...)

You say that your comment will be very unpopular with HN, but it seems to me that it's actually very unpopular with facts and statistics.

Evidence please? All the research I have seen suggests harsh punishments do little to deter crime. See e.g. this National Institute of Justice page as a jumping-off point: https://www.nij.gov/five-things/pages/deterrence.aspx

People who commit crimes rarely believe they will be caught, and as a result weight that conditional probability differently than an ideal reasoner might expect them to. If you believe your chance of being caught is 0% then the punishment is not a deterrent. Alternatively, if you are desperate, even if that chance is not 0% and you know it, it might still be worth it (say you're desperate because you have a previous felony conviction and now can't support yourself).

Now, one of the hard things to measure, is whether the sentences does deter everybody who doesn't commit crimes. I assume that there are crimes you and I have had the opportunity to commit, but weighed the odds of being caught and decided that the outcomes from committing the crimes were not worth it. It's difficult to measure that, but it's also not very useful, because it is hard to say whether the deterrent came from the punishment, or from the fact that it was lawbreaking in the first place, or that the label of "felon" is risky enough given the known outcomes.

In the place I'd argue we want the most deterrence - violent crime - our harshest punishment seems to have no real deterrent value. (I would be interested to see a review of this using more modern statistical / ML techniques to examine the data, though).

https://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance/teaching_aids/books_articl...

I'd almost be on board with harsher punishments except for the fact that almost everything is a felony these days. In the US anyway.

Do harsh punishments do anything other than slightly affect the expected value calculation for a sociopath? For the majority of people, the reason they don't commit arbitrary crimes is a feeling that it would be wrong. I don't kill people because I might get 25 to life. I don't kill people because killing is wrong.

When I look at crimes of passion or necessity, these cannot be stopped by harsh penalties. A fit of jealous rage doesn't consider the prison term. Hunger won't stop theft. The only place harsh punishments could stand to be effective are crimes which have no moral component. For such crimes ALL persons make an expected value calculation, like a sociopath makes for crimes than an ordinary person would consider immoral.

> Harsh punishments work exceedingly well as a deterrent.

That is an enormous claim and there are reams of research on this topic - your assertion is not supported. It doesn't even stand up to the most cursory scrutiny - if it were true, then societies and states with harsh punishment would have lower crime - and this is very, very, very obviously not the case.

https://www.nij.gov/five-things/pages/deterrence.aspx

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ethics-in-question/2015...

http://www.sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/...

https://undark.org/article/deterrence-punishments-dont-reduc...

tl;dr Social norms, accepted membership in 'legal' society and education are the best ways to deter crime, followed by certainty of punishment - not its severity. The reason people commit crimes is, in rough order, usually out of desperation, social norms that lead them to believe the prohibited act should be acceptable or ignorance of the knowledge that the prohibited act is illegal, for greed, and, lastly, then for the sheer thrill of it. Severity of punishment doesn't act as a good deterrent for any of those categories - certainty of punishment acts as a deterrent for the latter two, but for the first two, desperation and ignorance, are fairly well inoculated against rational counsel.

Before you start arguing the philosophy regarding merits of punishment v. deterrence, I am going to put it bluntly: the claim at issue - that severity of punishment is a deterrent for crime - is an evidentiary claim and it cannot be proven from first principle. It must be supported evidence, and as far as I can tell, the numbers are in, and they do not appear to be on your side. Unless you have studies that support your conclusion, the philosophy is totally irrelevant.

You've clearly spent some time looking up links to support your cause, so it's unfortunate that you've cherry picked only the ones that support your beliefs. Here are some others that say the opposite.

"Sentence Enhancements Reduce Crime"

http://www.nber.org/digest/oct98/w6484.html

"Longer prison sentences deter re-offending, study shows"

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/8504923...

Longer sentences deter crime up to a point

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2016/03/criminal...

"Longer prison terms really do cut crime, study shows"

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2012/jul/07/longer-prison-se...

"the average add-on gun law results in a roughly 5 percent decline in gun robberies within the first three years"

https://www.law.upenn.edu/cf/faculty/dabrams/workingpapers/D...

Note also that 2 of the 4 links you provided are comparing certainty-of-punishment vs harshness-of-punishment. This is a false dichotomy. There's no reason you can't have both. Having harsh punishment doesn't reduce the certainty of punishment in any way.

Is there a lot of contentious debate on this topic, and a lack of consensus on this topic? Of course. But given the lack of clear answers, I'd much rather err on the side of preventing victimization.

> But given the lack of clear answers, I'd much rather err on the side of preventing victimization.

In America, we have historically low crime rates and historically low violent crime rates. Simultaneously, we have an insane crisis of prison overpopulation that leads into multi-generational cycles of poverty.

I too would rather err on the side of preventing victimization.

Right now, from where I sit, over-criminalization is a bigger problem than violent crime.

   Harsh punishments work exceedingly well as a deterrent.

Assumes facts not in evidence.

There's too many qualified people and not enough jobs to go around. Under those conditions, which person without a felony would you like to volunteer to take his place and no longer be gainfully employed? There's already plenty in that situation, perhaps this felony conviction means a non-felon can now become gainfully employed, which is good news.

And how exactly is forcing felons who have served their time to become homeless due to a complete inability to become employed good news?

Its great news for those who have not served time but have become homeless due to a complete inability to become employed.

No matter how thin you slice the piece of cheese there's always going to be a top half and a bottom half and agonizing over the suffering result of intentional misbehavior, ignores the larger pool of suffering experienced by those who never did anything wrong, other than maybe not be born in the right place, or to the right parents, or the right skin color, or the right gender, etc.

I'm not going to wring my hands at the injustice committed against a felon because some law school grad who never committed a felony can now get a law job, solely because a felon can't.

I find it hilarious social commentary that the average HN commenter commiserates with felons but not with the lower 99% of the working population.

Before you laugh yourself silly at the hilarity, you may give some thought to the various paths to being labeled a felon. Put the Prenda sociopaths aside, and look at the treatment of members of that 99% on the school->prison pipeline, as just one example.

You might just find that the injustices you do recognize are linked to the ones you laugh at.

One injustice is infinite when held in isolation, but a collection of injustices is a social hierarchy.

In the vast pile of injustice that is our culture, where felons fall into the hierarchy is unfortunate in isolation, yet simultaneously is also an infinitesimal fraction of the sum of injustice.

You can minimize the importance of just about anything that way. But I'm glad we at least got to "unfortunate in isolation"; baby steps.

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