Comment by vidoc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vidoc | Hacker News Reader

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> Prisons not only make the convicts inside them worse, but from my experience and POV, it makes the people observing and interacting with them worse as well.

I'm afraid you are spot on. The fact prison most of the time makes people worse (truth be said it does act positively for some people sometimes, albeit rarely) is almost irrelevant here. I think the real problem is how the society at large clusters ex-convicts in a certain moral bucket, ad vitam eternal, when they are out. The idea that they have paid their debt to the society is ... just an idea in reality, and sadly, when they are released, the real punishment begins and makes them pay in all kinds of senses.

Firstly, I know it's not an easy subject with no perfect solution, and perhaps I'm a bit radical, but I think the very concept of rehabilitation will always just be a total joke as long as there is a culture of 'public records'. Especially in this google age. Nowadays, discriminations is getting less and less popular in this country, except towards ex-convicts, that's an open bar right there.

Secondly, disproportionate punishments. I mean, your case is such a perfect illustration. Ninety days in jail for possession of small quantities of drugs for personal use. And as you said with quotes, it was a "deal". Honestly, being an immigrant to this country myself, I'm probably not very well placed to criticize or comment that kind of realities of the justice system but to be honest, I often wonder whether or not people actually realize it's totally out of this world insane, and that very few others places on this planet would have justice systems inflicting such crazy punishments. I kind of suspect most people are in favor of those punishments actually, sometimes just culturally with a moral compass still a bit reminiscent of puritanism, and sometimes based on the belief that harsh sanctions can provide deterrence. One candidate in the last presidential election attempted to pitch the fact that 1.5% of Americans are behind bars as one issue to talk about, but it didn't seem to tackle much interest.

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I largely agree but this whole issue needs to be looked at through eyes of compassion first and foremost. Jesus stood by a woman who was about to be stoned for adultery and told her would-be killers that he who was without sin should cast the first stone. Then he began to write in the sand, it doesn't say what he wrote, but it was probably some of the sins of the would be stoners and they fled quickly, realizing they were no better than she was. I think most americans who would applaud a 90 day sentence for a small quantity of drugs for personal use would feel guilty reading that story in the Bible in that context.

People forget that those who turn to hard drugs don't tend to do so because they're simply rebels spoiling for a fight with the justice system. They do so because they're people and people have problems, every single one of us. There needs to be a return to compassion but as long as drug users are vilified in every possible way on every possible television show, that won't change. Hollywood could lead the return to compassion if it wanted to by raising awareness of what is actually happening in people's lives, how drugs are seen as a (usually bad) solution or an escape and give concrete workable examples of how that can change. In the end, it's a problem of ignorance, i.e. people believe and act one way when they would be best off doing something entirely different were they armed with more information about their problems. Rather than 90 days in jail, it could be 9 weeks of counseling for one or two hours while the person remains a productive member of society.

So I just don't think attacking this as a problem with long sentences is going to do anything to help anyone. You might get sentences greatly reduced, but have you actually helped the root problem?

> writing on the sand

My take on it is somewhat similar with the difference being that since the scene involved invoking a Mosaic law we should look that up and there we find that the 'justification' for capital punishment is that 'lest' the rest of the (presumably holy) community gets infected as in "one bad apple" process. That would make writing on the sand an analog for the /futility/ of keeping /records/ of judgment for an un-Holy people who are (spiritually) as sands in a dune subject to careless winds of material existence.

> So I just don't think attacking this as a problem with long sentences is going to do anything to help anyone. You might get sentences greatly reduced, but have you actually helped the root problem?

The justice system isn't supposed to deal with root problems, but it is supposed to punish crime with a sentence that is both guaranteed, proportional, and rapidly executed. In this case, the very fact this guy goes to jail for drug possession is just completely insane.

a good (compassionate) justice system is supposed to deal with:

- safety, for society (removing direct threats)

- deterrence, for other would-be criminals in society

- rehabilitation, providing the opportunity to "be better" for the convicted

- providing a minimal "lightning rod" to address and quell the (human/societal) instinctual/primal urge for vengeance

Note that the latter is no more than a smokescreen to distract ourselves when we're not being aware of what this lust for vengeance basically is. On the animal level (present in all primates and certain mammals), there is a very fundamental desire for "fairness". It's a very rudimentary "moral" system, evolved to deal with a fundamentally amoral universe. It kind of works but it's not very optimal. Humans are smarter than that now, and we can observe this desire and figure out better systems. It's called "ethics", we've been puzzling over it for thousands of years, it's not solved but we have figured out a thing or two.

Vengeance is the opposite of forgiveness. If you know about forgiveness, if you ever had to forgive something that was somewhat hard to forgive, and did the necessary introspection to succeed, you've learned this: You do the forgiving for yourself, not for the other person. It's a change in your perception of their guilt, you're not clearing a "guilt flag" in them, they still did what they did, you don't need to forget, you don't need to offer them anything, you don't even need to let them know you've forgiven them. Forgiveness is the decision to let go of this primal lust for vengeance. And that can be a hard decision if the thing the other did is very bad. And that's good because it should not be a light decision. Enacting the vengeance can temper this lust, but if you've already found better ways that deal with the first three points above, that is its only function left.

So we can find better, more compassionate ways to deal with that, too. Which is why some form of punishment must be part of a justice system; It doesn't feel fair otherwise and you can't expect the whole of society to just get over that. Because we're still monkeys and in large numbers, on average, even more so. But just like we've subverted so many of our other primal urges in ways that are more useful in a modern society, we can really make this punishment as symbolic as our primal instincts allow for. If we've taken care of those first three points, that's really all there's left to do.

And you don't need a lot, at all. It needs to be cemented in culture, but it can be done. Proof is, assuming that US humans are sufficiently similar to humans everywhere (which I like to believe, don't you? :) ), all those societies on this earth that have way less harsh punishments, shorter sentences and less awful prisons (US prisons are a bit on the... ehm.. medieval side of the spectrum). They don't get up in arms or feel that justice isn't "fair" enough any more than that nameless, shifting part of society that will always complain punishment isn't harsh enough. Which doesn't actually get any less than it is in the US with harsher punishments. Neither are these societies being overrun by criminals.

I think I agree with you, though vengeance is related to crimes against someone. Drug usage or possession is not of that kind. It's often seen as harm done to yourself, maybe.

> - deterrence, for other would-be criminals in society

In fact, the whole concept of criminal deterrence could be seen as an equation with several variables: the outcome of the crime, the probability of being caught, and how harsh the punishment will be. The idea that sentencing a micro-sample of (very unlucky) people with extreme punishment will detere others from transgressing the law is arguable, I personally believe it's incorrect, now even if I'm wrong it'd be deterrence based on fear of unfair punishment, instead of fear of punishment. A model with certainty of fair punishment seams more performant to achieve deterrence (it also probably costs way more money!). It also has the benefit of not ruining the lives of the unlucky members of the micro-sample :P

> And you don't need a lot, at all. It needs to be cemented in culture, but it can be done. Proof is, assuming that US humans are sufficiently similar to humans everywhere (which I like to believe, don't you? :) ), all those societies on this earth that have way less harsh punishments, shorter sentences and less awful prisons (US prisons are a bit on the... ehm.. medieval side of the spectrum). They don't get up in arms or feel that justice isn't "fair" enough any more than that nameless, shifting part of society that will always complain punishment isn't harsh enough. Which doesn't actually get any less than it is in the US with harsher punishments. Neither are these societies being overrun by criminals.

Of course they are! Humans are the same everywhere! And by the way, the very concept of 'penitentiary' was invented in this country at the end of the 19th century. Europeans were somehow curious about this new word, all they new about was a 'prison', a place where criminals were put for punishment, period. And at this time, on the other side of the Atlantic, this new nation was experiment with a new approach: the 'penitentiary' would be a prison, where convicts are given a chance to repel, improve themselves (learn new skills, study, etc). Delegations of diplomates were sent to study the American penitentiary system and ended up as a model for improvements. My apologies if I awkwardly made it look like I believe the current insanity of the system is just a cultural outcome, I obviously don't. Historical incarceration stats seem to show it's a rather recent trend:

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

> Which doesn't actually get any less than it is in the US with harsher punishments. Neither are these societies being overrun by criminals.

They aren't overrun by criminals for sure. Now, truth be said, there's considerably less crime (especially petty) in the US than in western Europe. Harsher sentences are probably a factor to some extent, probably not as important as efficacy of law enforcement, or certain cultural traits (e.g: Americans aren't kidding with private property). I'd personally trade a bit more crime in exchange of fair sentences :)

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