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Comment by ralmidani | Hacker News Reader

In the US, criminal justice is almost exclusively about inflicting maximum pain and suffering, with apparently little to no desire for punishment to have a reformative and deterrent effect.

In the name of being "tough on crime", people convicted of non-violent felonies are often stripped of the Constitutional right to vote, and find it difficult to obtain gainful, legal employment for years after they have finished serving their sentences.

And then we wonder why recidivism is such a problem in the US...

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I don't disagree exactly, but you don't think "maximum pain" has a deterrent effect? I don't want to experience maximum pain myself...

If only people in jail know how bad it is and it makes them more likely to commit more crimes then it's got the opposite effect. What you're talking about is the reputation which has little to do with the reality. We could for example use propaganda like movies to make prison seem worse without actually making it suck that bad.

Apparently not enough of a deterrent to keep our prisons from over crowding. It is also inhumane in my opinion. I think that it would do everyone well to spend a weekend in solitary in jail. It is torture and should be seen as such.

Spend a weekend in bed, not talking to anyone? I do that from time to time now. I find it relaxing.

It is different when it is against your will, you have no means of entertainment / stimulation, and you don’t know how long you will be there. But don’t take my word for it. Commit a small but arrest worthy infraction on a Friday night and try it for yourself.

People here are so quick to say confinement = torture. But the keyword here is "indefinite". A weekend isn't torture in my opinion.

Five Things About Deterrence:

1. The certainty of being caught is a vastly more powerful deterrent than the punishment.

Research shows clearly that the chance of being caught is a vastly more effective deterrent than even draconian punishment.

2. Sending an individual convicted of a crime to prison isn’t a very effective way to deter crime.

Prisons are good for punishing criminals and keeping them off the street, but prison sentences (particularly long sentences) are unlikely to deter future crime. Prisons actually may have the opposite effect: Inmates learn more effective crime strategies from each other, and time spent in prison may desensitize many to the threat of future imprisonment.

3. Police deter crime by increasing the perception that criminals will be caught and punished.

The police deter crime when they do things that strengthen a criminal’s perception of the certainty of being caught. Strategies that use the police as “sentinels,” such as hot spots policing, are particularly effective. A criminal’s behavior is more likely to be influenced by seeing a police officer with handcuffs and a radio than by a new law increasing penalties.

4. Increasing the severity of punishment does little to deter crime.

Laws and policies designed to deter crime by focusing mainly on increasing the severity of punishment are ineffective partly because criminals know little about the sanctions for specific crimes.

More severe punishments do not “chasten” individuals convicted of crimes, and prisons may exacerbate recidivism.

See Understanding the Relationship Between Sentencing and Deterrence [1] for additional discussion on prison as an ineffective deterrent.

5. There is no proof that the death penalty deters criminals.

According to the National Academy of Sciences, "Research on the deterrent effect of capital punishment is uninformative about whether capital punishment increases, decreases, or has no effect on homicide rates."

[1] https://nij.gov/five-things/Pages/deterrence.aspx#addenda

6. Even worsers is, that draconion punishments equalize small time criminals with big time criminals. We are in this together said the mafia boss to the pot-smoker, and in a strange way they are before the law.

'It is said that Drakon himself, when asked why he had fixed the punishment of death for most offences, answered that he considered these lesser crimes to deserve it, and he had no greater punishment for more important ones'. [Plutarch, Live of Solon]

I feel like the whole "being locked in a building for a couple years" thing is already a huge deterrent.

Because of that alone, it's likely you'll lose your job, your house, almost all your possessions.

I feel like most stuff on top of that doesn't really change the calculus too much, because even being locked in the nicest prison in the world is not great for an average person.

(Rich people it's a bit different because they have the resources to handle this)

How does denying people the ability to work amount to a deterrent? If anything, it has the opposite effect; if you cannot work legally after being released from prison, how can you possibly live a normal life?

The evidence seems to indicate that harsher sentences have barely any effect on crime deterrence: https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2016/03/crimina...

I wonder how many of suicide bombers and domestic shootings were conducted by previous cons.

Seems like when you’ve got nothing to lose, one may go to an extreme.

It actually tends to be counterproductive. If you shit on people enough and there is no upside to cooperating, people just become increasingly subversive, often with tacit support from otherwise law abiding citizens.

The US has a track record of punishing people of color disproportionately. We have the term jury nullification to describe one means for ordinary people to engage in peaceful non cooperation. During Prohibition, lots of ordinary people looked the other way so the mafia could make alcohol available. It basically gave money and power to the mob to make alcohol illegal. In Asia, Martial Arts were born due to extremes of laws forbidding people from having weapons.

The more unreasonable the government becomes, the more creative the people get in quietly saying "Fuck you. No." Or they eventually outright rebel. The first thing that happens when a government is overthrown is they empty the prisons on the assumption that most prisoners are really political prisoners, regardless of what they were convicted of.

Unfortunately I don't have a source, but as I understand it, there are three important factors for effective punishment (as a deterrent and to prevent recurrence). Namely, that punishment should be certain, immediate, and proportionate. The criminal justice/carceral system of the United States achieves none of these.

It's much more effective to have small, immediate certain punishments than disproportionately large punishments in a small fraction of cases. One reason for this is that humans are not good at estimating expected values, and vastly underestimate low probabilities.

When I read comments like yours, I really wonder if you realize how much of an exaggeration you're making or if hyperbole has become so ingrained in how you express yourself that you genuinely believe such extreme statements as " In the US, criminal justice is almost exclusively about inflicting maximum pain and suffering..." Like, have you SEEN prisons in Mexico? Cuba? Russia?

Here, I'll finish the rest of this exchange for us:

You: "I can't BELIEVE you are comparing the U.S. to less prosperous countries and Russia, run by a criminal. This goes to show you how terrible America is! Don't you care about pain and suffering? Don't you want criminals to be able to reform?!"

Me: "Yeah that's not what I was talking about. My point is that you are exaggerating to an absurd degree about how bad US prisons are."

You: <continues to not respond to my point, accuse me of character flaws, shoehorns in more tangential political points>

There, saved us both the time.

Please don't do flamewars on Hacker News. It's just what we don't want here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

My comment was borderline at best, far from a "flamewar." I mean good lord, my comment would be top 1% nicest posts on /r/politics. But whatever, sure, noted.

Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and raise your standards by a few orders of magnitude.

"Few orders of magnitude" huh. See how hard it is to resist throwing in your own little jab at people online? Let's both read them and reflect on how we can be better netizens.

"Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

I didn't mean it as a jab at you, more as a wry nod to Reddit. The 'wry nod to Reddit' genre is an ancient HN tradition. But I see your point, and you're right that it's hard for me to follow the guidelines too. It's work that we all need to do.

Actually, there are very few torture chambers in US prisons. So, I'm not sure "maximum pain" is an accurate assessment, or even a sane one.

It's a tiresome strawman. Really.

You know what the real point of prison is--no matter the stated goal? It's not punishment or rehabilitation or karmic realignment or the state defusing vigilantism or profiteering or any of that. (Oh, they are elements to be sure...) But the real reason for prison is sequestration. That's it. Just taking the people most likely to be dangerous, based on their own actions, and minimizing future risk. It's not cruel or righteous, but strictly practical.

> Actually, there are very few torture chambers in US prisons

I suspect every prison in the US (or nearly so) imposes solitary confinement on inmates. In that regard, every prison has torture chambers, at least as considered by the Canadian judge whose ruling the article is about.

Perhaps one reason there is no officially-sanctioned, physical torture chamber in the US (as far as we know, at least) is because even the most conservative interpretation of "cruel and unusual punishment" would prohibit such a chamber.

> But the real reason for prison is sequestration. That's it. Just taking the people most likely to be dangerous, based on their own actions, and minimizing future risk.

This is completely at odds with the long sentences meted out for possession of small quantities of drugs in the United States. Whom, exactly, are pot users dangerous to? How is paying to keep them in prison for 10+ years in any way practical?

Regarding drugs, the purpose is to redistribute taxpayer money to police and prisons.

They are dangerous to politicians, because offenders belong mostly to minority groups (i.e. blacks, hispanics). Yes, I watched 13th on Netflix.

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