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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

This is American "justice" culture. We can do anything we want to "bad people" because they are intrinsically "bad". You can tell they're bad because they're in jail. If they were good people, like me, they wouldn't be in jail.

Anyone caught suggesting something is too much punishment is not "tough on crime". They want the bad people to win (so don't vote for them!). Reducing sentence length, improving prison conditions, trying to actually help those on prison, that's all just weakness, that's not being tough on crime.

Who cares that recividism is more expensive than rehabilitation- the point isn't to save money or reduce crime, it's to punish the bad people. I mean, if we stop thinking of them as bad people, how am I supposed to know that I'm a good person?

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>the point isn't to save money or reduce crime, it's to punish the bad people

Actually, one of the reasons is to spend money on private prisons. Private prisons, bigpharma, lawyers make a lot of money on defending AND putting people to prison for stupid things, things that were delegalized by sponsored bills. We've known for years that alcohol and tobacco are more dangerous than marijuana, yet, there are lobbies that benefit a lot from jailing people for having 5g of weed.

> lawyers make a lot of money on defending AND putting people to prison for stupid things

The idea that lawyers are part of a conspiracy to make _money_ by running more people through the criminal justice system is completely senseless.

To start, criminal justice is easily in the running for least highly remunerated category of law. The median pay for public prosecutors with with 11 - 15 years of experience is only $81,500. For public defenders (who handle roughly 80% of all felony cases [1]), the median pay for someone with 11 - 15 years of experience is only $62,550. Oh, these fat, fat cats in criminal justice! And if anyone here thinks the work life balance in SV companies leaves something to be desired, I encourage you to read about the bat-shit hours that the average criminal attorney puts in. 20 hours of overtime a week would not raise any eyebrows.

And basically those salaries are not affected by caseload. Whether 100 or 50 people go to prison makes no financial difference to lawyers on either side. Some prosecutors have bonuses contingent on conviction rate or volume, but such agreements are rare and when they do exist, the bonuses are never contingent on sentencing, so there would be no incentive to send people to prison. There is no equivalent for defense attorneys.

And all of the above just speaks to your claim's stunning lack of circumstantial evidence, to say nothing of the lack of actual evidence that lawyers are intentionally putting more people in prison to make money.

The US justice system is rife with problems. But the idea that a root cause of those problems is lawyers trying to make more money just doesn't make sense.

1. http://www.pbs.org/kqed/presumedguilty/3.2.0.html

> The idea that lawyers are part of a conspiracy to make _money_ by running more people through the criminal justice system is completely senseless.

That's strange of you to say. Haven't lawyers conspired to do just that before?

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

> To start, criminal justice is easily in the running for least highly remunerated category of law.

Is it not well understood that people who are less highly remunerated are more prone to seeking out illegal sources of additional funds? This is the justification for extremely high ministerial salaries in Singapore - to avoid such corruption.

It was certainly a disturbing case, but let's review the point we are discussing (as raised by the parent): whether the high incarceration rates in the US are in part the result of lawyers systematically profiting from the criminal justice system.

Are you really making the argument that lawyers all across the US are systematically making deals such as the ones that took place in Luzerne County, therby leading to high incaceration rates? Do we have evidence to lead us to believe that the kind of deals found in Luzerne County are widespread? Honestly, I find the suggestion preposterous.

The criminal justice system in the US is in dire need of reform and it's infuriating that discussions of said reform are often distracted by these kinds of baseless conspiracy theories.

If you ask me, the US's world leading incarceration rates probably have much more to do with the outsized sentence lengths, drastically underfunded public defense funds, mandatory sentencing requirements, lack of due prosecutorial discretion, overcharging and abuse of plea bargains, and insane drug legislation to name a few things.

Oh, but that's so complicated. It's probably just all those greedy criminal lawyers. /s

Private prisons account for 8% of the total state and federal prison population in the United States+. Are they really a major driver of criminal policy?

[+] https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-priso...

But it varies wildly by state, with some states having nearly half their prison population in pivate prisons. I imagine in those states, the lobby is pretty powerful at the state level. Lots of state-specific interests have a great deal of federal lobbying power.

Not just private prisons. The prison guards union has been one of the most potent political forces in California over the last 20-30 years.

https://www.nytimes.com/1995/11/07/us/political-gains-by-pri...

8% is still billions of dollars, I reckon.

The other 92% doesn't lobby for laws that result in more prisoners, but a billion dollar industry does.

So the 8% statistic is a red herring.

I'm also skeptical of the influence of private prisons on criminal policy (mostly just because voters unfortunately seem to love putting people in prison regardless, no special lobbying required), but I think there are some interesting correlations at the state level.

For example, the 6 states with the lowest incarceration rates (New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Minnesota, Maine) have no private prisons. And 9 out of the 10 states with the highest incarceration rates do have private prisons.

- Percent of privately incarcerations: https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-priso...

- Incarceration rates by state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_incarce...

Has the Netherlands, a country which has been closing prisons and even importing convicts from Belgium, faced any significant lobbying from the prison industrial complex and or any law enforcement organizations in favor of harsher sentencing? Or is this a uniquely American problem?

There is no prison industrial complex in The Netherlands, as all prisons and jails are owned by the government. There is no incentive to increase the inmate population. I wouldn't call it an American problem, but there is definitely a very large difference between the American and European approaches to imprisonment. If you're interested in learning more, check out Breaking the Cycle (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuLQ4gqB5XE): it compares a Norwegian high-security prison to an American one. Main takeaway: if you imprison people in order to make them better persons, threat them as actual human beings; punishment is not the primary incentive of imprisonment.

> There is no prison industrial complex in The Netherlands, as all prisons and jails are owned by the government. There is no incentive to increase the inmate population.

This is really off the mark.

Having prisons and jails owned by the government does not mean that there's no incentive to increase the inmate population - in fact, the US is proof positive of that, because, for all the press that private prisons get, the number of them is quite small, and most of the worst abuses occur in state-run prisons.

This isn't going to be a popular opinion here, but I should point out that, in general, people tend to underestimate the extent of the prison-industrial complex in Western/Central Europe, and particularly its effect on ethnic and religious minorities. It doesn't help that a lot of the countries that have problems with this also make it either difficult or illegal to access that data officially, so it's not discussed nearly enough.

So, one important part is the jails/prisons being owned and operated by the Government. But what about services, like the video calling in this story, or things like the commissary? Those services can be just as, if not more exploitative.

But prisons aren't a sort of "hospital" for bad behavior. The primary reason for prisons is punishment, and its secondary role is to inflict a pain that should discourage other criminals to commit similar crimes. It doesn't mean that it should be inhuman, overcrowded, underfunded, etc. But I don't believe in the idea is that crime is a disease and that prisons are there to "cure" criminals.

If punishment isn't supposed to be a cure, and if discouraging "other criminals" is only secondary ("future crimes" might be less loaded), then what exactly is the primary purpose of punishment?

Sure, there are certainly people who hold that justice can only be achieved if the perpetrator pays in pain, with any discouraging effects being incidental.

On the other hand, there are also plenty of people who want to reduce the amount of crime that happens, and then they are more concerned with if the justice system actually achieves this goal. Pain based justice plainly doesn't.

You forgot incapacitation. This is removal of the capability to commit crime, typically by keeping an offender separate from society. You can't rob a bank if you can't go to the bank.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incapacitation_(penology)

> There is no prison industrial complex in The Netherlands, as all prisons and jails are owned by the government.

How are food, clothes, supplies, etc. sourced? Who builds the prison? Is this all done by the government down to the farmer? Or is there a supply chain that makes profit by selling to prisons? If so, there is a prison industrial complex.

How about the staff? Are they paid? Do they have a union?

If there is a profit motive, there is a potential for political lobbying / corruption.

Right, and I guess because the tax office buys its furniture from private companies there is a tax-industrial complex too?

I'd say you are now pretty clearly arguing for diluting the meaning of the "military-industrial complex" context to nothingness.

I suppose you're right, but that wasn't the intent. I took the line off thinking off the logical cliff.

However, in the US it is common for major inter/national firms to service entire state prison systems. This is surely a representation of the prison industrial complex, and that's what I was getting at.

Simply having publicly run prisons does not preclude this type of situation, a major firm holding large contracts and thus having an incentive to grow the criminal population, unless it would be wholly socially and politically unacceptable to do so.

A farmer can also feed people who are not in jail, an industrial prison complex cannot make people who are not in jail perform free labor. To the farmer/clothing producer the prisoners are equal to free people, to the stake holder of an industrial prison complex, they are not.

For-profit prison industry is more than just running the prison itself. The other 92% of public (I guess?) prisons still need services.

Yeah, and all those inmates and families gotta stay in touch somehow - so charge for video calls.

Not just charge; charge out the ass. Just like everything else in the prison.

Reminder private prisons make up 8.4% of total inmates. Source (as the official government source is giving a HTTPS issue) https://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/sande...

The private prison issue is one of reddit's favorite topics to blow out of proportion. Can we not bring it here as well?

Private prisons may be under 10% of inmates, but they still constitute 100% of some companies' income streams. The influence those companies wield is a function of their investment in lobbying and other persuasion tools, which is not necessarily correlated to marketshare.

it still is 8.4% more than it should be.

>The private prison issue is one of reddit's favorite topics to blow out of proportion

I've never seen such thread on reddit.

There was a period maybe around the election in 2016 when it was a very frequent topic of conversation. That may have been spurred by the Obama administration's announcement that they'd stop using private prisons for detention of illegal immigrants at the border. Hillary I believe said she'd do the same if she became president. As a result there was a lot of talk about it.

You can see a similar simplification between good and bad in popular movies, like all the superhero movies. It's always the good versus the bad, and the bad can't be helped, they must be punished or -better yet - destroyed.

I would love a popular movie (maybe even one for kids) where at some point through the movie we get to see things from the "bad guy"'s point of view and discover that it actually makes sense, leaving the viewer undecided on whether they support the good or the bad guy.

It would be interesting to see children struggle with the moral dilemma, is there any movie like this already that I'm not realising?

I don't know why so many people here are suggesting "The Wire", unless they don't understand what the concept of a child is.

For incredible kids TV shows that emphasize empathy for "the bad guys", demonstrate the flaws and weaknesses of the "the good guys", and does so in a way that encourages personal growth, integrity, and compassion over moral nihilism as a response, then you can't do better than

* Steven universe

* Avatar: the last Airbender

> "I don't know why so many people here are suggesting "The Wire", unless they don't understand what the concept of a child is."

Your parent isn't making the "for kids" a requirement, which explains many of the suggestions here, including "The Wire".

> *"I would love a popular movie (maybe even one for kids)"

Kids is also relative: you need to take the kids themselves into account to know what may be appropriate for them.

The sequel to Avatar, the Legend of Korra also continues in the same vein, with more of a flawed hero and some villains whose motivations are very relatable.

> and does so in a way that encourages personal growth, integrity, and compassion over moral nihilism as a response

I appreciate you including that. When media does trend towards "reality is complicated" very often it feels like to me its ending with the lesson 'everybody hurts everyone so just get used to it and stop classifying anything as wrong or right.'

Both Captain America: Civil War and Infinity War are like that.

I remember hearing shouting matches as I left Civil War about who was right, who was on the side of good.

And Infinity War leaves a lot of people with a sense that maybe Thanos wasn't so bad.

Yeah. Thanos had a vision and executed on it. Depending on who tells the story one could easily see him as the hero.

Even if you agree with him that population control is needed, I don't see how you wouldn't criticize him harshly on his method both on the technical grounds of being ineffective and on various moral grounds. His comic-book motivation of trying to impress a certain lady is much more relateable for the particular action he took.

I saw a fan theory suggested on Reddit that it would make more sense if population control was also a means to an end for Thanos, and that Thanos's ultimate reason for doing what he does was to stave off the arrival of Galactus.

Still makes no sense -- universal replacement rate is probably > 2, almost certainly now with so many deaths + resources freed up, the overall population will be back to its pre-snap number in a few solar years tops (ed: ok maybe longer, on earth it took ~200 years for Europeans to recover from the plague, but that's just earth and just Europeans). Would have been better to target fertility rates, or kill more females than males and more asexually reproducing sentients than non.

Or you know....if we're arguing about potential solutions to unhappiness in the universe when the infinity gauntlet literally allows the wearer to do anything they desire, then why not just give everyone limitless resources, or just make everyone permanently happy, or eliminate greed or fear or violence.

I still like the idea of wiping half of life in the entire universe though, it works well from the narrative perspective.

I said he had a vision, not that the vision made sense

Especially within the discourse of black folks, there is a lively debate on the extent to which Killmonger is a villain in Black Panther. My biggest criticism of the movie is that they could have written it to make it even more ambiguous, by making Killmonger less openly ruthless.

Same goes for the much maligned Marvel's Inhumans, where it's not clear exactly why the Royal Family is deserving of any sympathy.

I felt like Batman vs Superman had at least a little bit of that.

>I would love a popular movie (maybe even one for kids) where at some point through the movie we get to see things from the "bad guy"'s point of view...

Has society gotten so corrupt that we can't see that almost all the "good guys" are total villains compared to the moral and ethical norms from even as recent as 30 years ago?

Apparently, because I don’t know what you’re talking about. 30 years ago we were celebrating a vigilante who threw a criminal off a building in revenge for the death of his parents. [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman_(1989_film)

Yes, there has been and always will be anti-heroes. The difference is that instead of that being the exception, it's now the rule.

I don’t agree that everyone is an anti hero now, but regardless the complexity is a sign of the medium maturing.

This sounds like rose-tinted glasses. Can you expand upon it with some examples of who you had in mind when you wrote the comment?

Being good is evidently boring...

I added a few examples in another comment. Even Rambo sacrificed his own safety and freedom to help rescue POWs.

Modern day heroes are all a bunch of whining self-centered children. Just go watch any super hero movie today for a good example of that.

It's almost a badge of honor to be morally ambiguous. Compare a list of protaganists, how many are anti-heros? Do we even have any real good guys in movies and tv these days? Even Superman has been turned into a murderer for this generation.

A few examples from popular TV:

Walking Dead: everyone is a murderer. Murder is justified consistently.

Billions: It's hard to know who to root for, they are all rotten. The righteous people are the "bad guys"

Scrubs: All the characters are morally bankrupt (compared to 30 years before it's time)

Ironman: A selfish rich asshole.

Batman: (ok, he was always an anti-hero from day 1)

Deadpool: Do I need to explain this one?

Wicked: A play about how the evil witch is misunderstood.

The Shield, The Wire, modern Star Trek vs old Star Trek, the list is too long...

There has always been corruptions, lack of morals. That's not my issue, it's that today, there simply isn't even close to a minority of actual real main protagonists that are selfless.

I think people find good people trying to do what is right just boring these days.

/rant

I think what you’re seeing is characters not being so one-dimensional. You harken back to simplistic characters who have no depth (A-Team, G I Joe, Rocky) and dismiss more complex characters (many of which are not actually new) for not portraying simplistic morality. But this isn’t moral bankruptcy. Real people are complex and portraying hero’s so idealistically makes them less relatable and frankly, yes, boring.

You call Iron Man a selfish, rich asshole. But this is the character who shut down his defense contracts worth billions because he found out that his weapons weren’t being used the way he thought. He also sided with the UN (or whatever equivalent) against his team, in deference to traditional hierarchical authority. If anything, his morals are simpler than many other modern characters. He’s just not as flat as the Superman written for Reeves.

Would you mind sharing an example?

A-Team, GI-Joe, Rocky, heck, even Terminator 2 (the machine) from the early 90s tried really hard not to kill people.

Go back further, and the good guy "sacrificed" himself or his own interests for the benefit of others.

Edit: Rocky isn't a great example, but leaving it in because at least it was inspiring to try and rise above his place in life honestly.

The modern Battlestar Galactica series was excellent in this regard. Although, target audience is not children.

Started with a black and white view of good vs bad, but started pulling that apart as by mid way through there was no appropriate label for any side. You began to question what was good and what was bad and why.

I dunno. I think the Cylons are clearly bad. Genocide, pursuit, enslavement. Sure they have a grievance. But the response was quite disproportionate.

If you restrict the scope to just human interaction on ships then you retrieve the good-bad spectrum. A caste system, a military dictatorship, black markets, etc.

Battlestar Gallactica had mostly clear good/evil lines. What they didn’t do is paint all humans as good and all Cylons as evil. There were good Cylons and evil humans throughout along with plenty on each side who were not clearly good or evil but some mix.

TV (albeit adult TV) is much better at this. Many of the most popular shows feature antiheroes/flawed characters. You know what they're doing is bad/wrong and yet you're rooting for them anyway.

Ironically I'm not sure it makes a difference. I think in a kind of perverse voyeuristic way people like to live through them, but stay safe in the knowledge that they "could never do that". Like the kind of excitement you got from being around the naughty kid at school, without actually risking getting in trouble.

The TV series “The Wire” does this in an extraordinary way.

If you have Youtube Red, there is a show they just did called Cobra Kai where they look at the Karate kids nemesis 30 years later. In one episode the guy is recounting some event to one of his students from the opposite perspective as we were fed in the original movie and it fills this idea you describe above really nicely. Check it out if you get a chance.

V for Vendetta springs to mind, depending on how young the kids are. Although it's too clear early on that it's the regime that's bad not our bad guy hero.

Grendel, Grendel, Grendel[0] Superb children's animation from the 80s. Though you might be very hard pressed to find it. A retelling of Beowulf from the monster's point of view whilst paying homage to Monty Python. He's big, bad, misunderstood and ultimately dies when our human hero Beowulf ambushes him. Never full of Disney shmaltz and cute, deep enough to give you plenty of talking points.

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082478/

Despicable Me & Megamind remind me of that.

You should watch The Wire, which is exactly what you describe. In fact, everyone should watch it, as it is one of the best shows ever made (despite the wonky final season).

Not a movie, and certainly not for kids, but that's part of the appeal of Game of Thrones.

> I would love a popular movie (maybe even one for kids) where at some point through the movie we get to see things from the "bad guy"'s point of view and discover that it actually makes sense

Lots of movies with bad guys and good guys do that, but mostly just without...

> leaving the viewer undecided on whether they support the good or the bad guy.

(Or, if they do that for a while, they resolve it, for most viewers, by the end.) In fact, any movie with a well defined “good guy” and “bad guy” does so specifically because it either doesn't do that or resolved it before the end. Otherwise you have at best a winner and a loser.

OTOH, lots of movies that aren't action movies are driven by character conflict where there isn't a well-defined bad guy and good guy, and where the protagonist is differentiated from other characters by focus and arc, not by superior virtue, and where it's quite possible to disagree on whether the protagonist or someone with which they had a conflict was more right, because “good guy defeats threat of bad guy” isn't the story model.

There's a quote that they use frequently in Marvel: Agents of Shield... everyone is a good guy in their own story. Even the people they are trying to stop, much of the time, are viewing the world in a way that makes their (sometimes horrific) actions seem the right thing to do.

Not movies but...

Avatar: The Last Airbender the cartoon tv show is a perfect example of this. For kids and adults alike.

Also Star Trek DS9 did an excellent job of getting into the villains heads, spending time with them and showing their perspectives and motives.

> Star Trek DS9

And even the "good guys" did some questionable stuff, e.g. in In the Pale Moonlight. But that's my favorite Trek episode ever out of all the shows, so I'm not complaining

I completely missed Avatar: TLA when I was younger (it was a bit after my time) but have been watching it now as an adult and love this about it. My kids also got really into the conflicted nature of the "bad guys". They did a great job delving into the moral conflicts on both sides.

"Watchmen"

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0409459/

Watchmen for children... hem, probably not.

"Star Butterfly vs. The Forces of Evil" has several episodes like this: the first half will be from one character's point of view and the second half from the opposing side.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_vs._the_Forces_of_Evil

The Watchmen did this well.

Spoliers

Spoilers

Ozymandias did unify the world, after all.

I always found the ending to that personally unsettling, because I actually agreed with him and he does end up accomplishing a greater good.

It's great because it divides the present heroes as well, with Rorschach the absolutist morality on one side, Dr Manhattan as the complete pragmatist on the other, and everyone else somewhere in between.

There's probably many movies like this, but I'm not a movie buff so I can't give an example right off the bat. I know of the video game Quantum Break, which included short live-action episodes between gameplay chapters from the villain's POV. They served to explain the villains' actions and humanize them.

Every once in a while there is a episode of Criminal Minds that does this. Well sort of. Like I don't think anybody could ever get behind what the "bad" guy is doing, but you can at last understand and then feel sorry for the "bad" guy.

This is also one of the few shows where they try not to kill the bad guy every time.

> This is also one of the few shows where they try not to kill the bad guy every time.

That's actually fairly common in TV shows. Police procedurals, for one example, where they try to kill the bad guy every time are kind of exceptional.

This is why I hope Marvel somehow gets the rights to DR. DOOM and adapts Triumph and Torment for the big screen.

Most comic book villains lack any redeeming quality (largely on purpose, to remove any chance for empathy and justify the heroes' wanton destruction), but DOOM is refreshingly multi-dimensional for a villain.

Magneto has always been that type of character for me. Considering his back story and how you happen to view the world yourself, you can very easily see him as being the good guy against the hateful and prejudiced humans (and Xavier as being too pacifist and unable to enact any "real" change).

Some of the greatest villains are built on this concept of deep sympathy with the character. At least I think so.

After reading through this thread; I think of Shrek

The big scary Ogre comes to the rescue instead of Prince Charming. Something about government plans for land and evil fairy God mothers.

--- And then there is Frozen,

A Girl is taught to conceal, not feel, and turns the whole place into an icicle and is in many ways considered the wicked person.

There are plenty of examples.

This is one of the reasons why I actually like the X-Men movies a lot (at least the 1st ones), while I hate most superhero movies. I find the character of Magneto, with his backstory and his relationship with Xavier really interesting.

In this vein, I can recommend this review of 7 Samurai:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZSRxp-dJ-Q

King of New York (1990) is a good one

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099939/

Not a movie, but there is an anime about that.

It's called Magica Madoca. It completely flips the roles by the end.

Any movie where the bad guy's motive is not "greed", probably.

No Country for Old Men, Death Proof, Cape Fear, Dead Calm...

Read an article on this recently: https://www.animefeminist.com/feature-how-princess-tutu-shat...

It sometimes goes well beyond that too, where the ‘bad guy’ isn’t human enough to deserve any kind of compassion and so becomes an object for any kind of abuse or revenge the ‘good guys’ care to throw at them, and not all of this is just in the realm of TV fantasy because it’s clearly catering to a certain audience mindset.

- torture is okay if someone is a suspect

- jokes about being raped in prison

- all of the shitty treatment suspects get in police procedurals and detective shows, at the hands of the ‘heroes’

Even if they turn out to be innocent, it’s still like they’re guilty of not being innocent enough which justifies the abuse, while the apparent good guys are celebrated for being utterly sociopathic.

Only that's not the case at all. Popular cinema and TV are bursting at the seams with antiheroes. From Clockwork Orange through Hannibal Lecter to Sopranos, Dexter, Breaking Bad...

For some people's tastes, it's not the same thing. Those are about making bad guys relatable and struggle against the good guys. OP more likely meant if neither side of the conflict were good or bad.

For millennia, traditional myths and stories have been going against the just-world fallacy [1]

Painting a good VS bad worldview has been heavily used for mass propaganda and it became very effective starting from WW2 due to television and movies.

[1] https://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/06/07/the-just-world-falla...

It didn't always seem to be this way though: https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-pop-culture-obsessed-with-batt...

And it's not necessarily just because of the shape of post-WW2 society either: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/03/beware-covert-war-mora...

I feel like more recent kid-targeted movies have had a lot more moral nuance than the classics and fairy tales do. There are often sympathetic antagonists, flawed heroes, etc.

I’d have to agree with this. The first charector that comes to mind for me is Magneto I think he reacts how a lot of people would even though that makes him an antagonist. I had a history teacher use him vs Professor X in Jr. High as a way to better convey the nuance of opposition styles.

There are some that show the villain background, musings and/or rehabilitation. There also are some that show a hero becoming a villain. In fact many movies show and emphasize the reality is far from black-and-white. Unfortunately many people still don't get it and keep judging the characters just as good or bad.

Expand this out further and it's clear that manufactured dialectics are a very useful tool in controlling large amount of the population.

Something happened over the years that caused, at least in my experience living in America, people to incredibly deeply associate legality with morality. I suspect this is universal to some degree in societies around the world and in history. But how prevalent it is in my lived experience feels deeply Orwellian. As long as Big Brother approves your in the right, right?

I’d say the 24 hour news channel. Crime has been dropping since it peaked in the mid 90s. You wouldn’t think so if your constantly bombarded with crime reports all around the country and world at all hours of the day.

This manifests itself in viewers electing politicians who are more tough on crime than the last election.

If the law is not at least an approximation of morality, then what is its purpose?

Or to put it another way, assuming that I share a common moral sense with my fellow citizens, I would much prefer a legal system that is strongly associated with morality than one that is not.

If your objection is that the law feels to retributive, then that is a separate issue.

> If the law is not at least an approximation of morality, then what is its purpose?

To maintain existing power structures

The more the law diverges from the morality (as commonly understood in a given society), the more oppressive power structures you need in order to maintain it.

>I would much prefer a legal system that is strongly associated with morality than one that is not.

The issue with morality based laws is that morals are subjective. I would prefer a legal system with absolutely no morality - instead being based off of reason and logical conclusions. Being explained well enough in layman terms that people can see why the law is the way it is. "Pay your taxes for schools and roads. Don't kill you neighbor because you wouldn't want to be killed. Don't steal because you wouldn't want to be stolen from."

Morality based laws is how you end up with "It's criminal to be a homosexual. Skirts must pass the knee. Cannabis and alcohol are only for bad people. You must be [religion] to be moral, because only immoral people aren't part of [religion]".

The reason cannabis is being legalized in several states is people's changing moral intuitions leading to public action to change the law. The law has not stopped being an approximation of morality in that regard.

Reason and logical conclusions are not contradictory to a citizenry's moral intuitions, but are orthogonal to them.

>The reason cannabis is being legalized in several states is people's changing moral intuitions leading to public action to change the law.

Existing laws in the US are largely based on protestant morals. That's kind of the point I was going for: morality based laws can change on a whim once the publicly held views of what is moral changes and that should be seen as a bad thing and it is unfortunate our current laws are so heavily rooted in morality instead of reason. Also, the two can overlap! I'm not saying they never can, I'm saying they sometimes don't. And the times in history where they don't overlap is where you'll see many of the largest crimes against humanity committed simply because it was "legal (and by extension: moral)" to do so.

> If the law is not at least an approximation of morality, then what is its purpose?

Perhaps it's meaningful the other way around, too. So many people I see don't want more rigid tax laws, because morals are enough. I argue that morals guiding tax laws only cause to harm those good enough to have morals following the tax laws.

It would seem morals should perhaps guide the desired end result of the law, like no killing your neighbor, but the laws to get to that end state might be counter intuitive. Something Americans suffer greatly from grasping.

I think the idea that "law and order" is an approximation of morality is giving to much credit to the law, it enforcement, and all of things that have grown up around it. For sure, some laws clearly have some basis in someone's idea of what moral behavior might be, for instance the prohibition of alcohol. But there's also a lot in there that's really just keeping society's machinery churning in a practical sense (parking tickets, speeding, small claims court), or in the case of finance there's bits in there to preserve clearly immoral behavior (tax "loopholes", etc.)

I'm aware of the same thing in the UK. I don't know whether something has happened over the years or if it's always been that way.

So many people seem content in their assumption that the state is essentially benevolent and wise and on their side.

Even with the recent spate of ridiculous arrests and prosecutions we've had over freedom-of-speech issues (which some of us find terrifying), you get this attitude of "well, it seems a bit harsh, but he did break the law!"

I like to remind people that you don't need to look very far back for examples of when the state got it very, very wrong (by modern standards of morality). The illegality of homosexuality, and the cruel punishment inflicted on people like Alan Turing, is the most obvious example of this.

As a German I am very very aware of the distinction, and our school system puts emphasis on this too. Just following the rules is no excuse.

Consider some action to be taken.

The action is under consideration because it causes some benefit, worth $A.

The action may cause some public-relations fallout, which in turn will cause some amount of lost business (or analogous malus). The total losses caused by public-relations effects are a continuous random variable; and a complicated one, because the causality chain between action and the final losses involves multiple random events.

But, it has some expected value, $B > $0. (Disregard outliers, so as to better approximate the median outcome rather than the mean outcome.)

Finally, the action will inevitably cost some resources to implement, worth a total of $C.

(Again, all three quantities $A, $B and $C are nonnegative.)

We can then evaluate whether the action may be taken. That question is equivalent to the following:

"Is it legal? And if so, then does it hold that $A > $B + $C?"

(In the larger context, then, if multiple actions may be taken, then choosing which single one should be taken is a matter of maximizing that same inequality rather than truth-testing it.)

* * * * *

Why should we use any decision-making process other than the above?

Equivalently: why should we take into account any further "morality", beyond merely legality plus long-term expected-value for oneself?

"A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."

That's why.

> Should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by ...

Did you pick that example because of the Ford Pinto case? In case you didn't know about it, that's exactly the cost/benefit analysis that Ford did when they discovered that the gas tank on the Pinto would rupture if the car was hit from behind at 31 mph or greater. Here's the infamous internal memo:

http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/tortsprof/files/FordMemo.pd...

Look at Table 3 on page 6. Paying $200,000 per death would cost $49.5 million. Strengthening the tank at $11 per car would cost $137 million. Clearly it was cheaper to pay settlements on the deaths.

> Clearly it was cheaper to pay settlements on the deaths.

That merely shows that tort settlements at that time didn't have an accurate price on human life. $200,000 is about $1.13 million in today's money, which is only about 7 years of senior-dev salary. An early death usually costs more than 7 years of healthy life.

If we assume that the median car-fire death actually had 20 years of healthy life ahead of them, instead of 7, then we can conclude that typical settlements should have cost about $500,000 (in the same 1973 money) instead of $200,000.

This would have raised the total tort cost estimate to $123 million, at which point the two figures are close enough that the entire discussion would have ceased to be worth the amount of C-level labor that must have gone into it.

(The above also assumes that one's own life is worth as much as one can earn prior to death-by-natural-causes. I have yet to find evidence to disprove this hypothesis with respect to my own life ... but some people feel that life is even more valuable. If those people were to perform the same process as I did above, then their conclusion would be even more powerful than mine.)

When you underprice something you have, don't be surprised to find yourself in a drastic shortage of it.

I believe that specific wording is also an exact line out of _Fight Club_

Yep, that's the one.

That doesn't hold as much water when victim is the same party that would be paying for the recall. With social issues like crime society is both the victim and paying for the settlements/recall. Resources are not infinite (eventually you run out of other people's money). I want society to spend the resources I have to give it as effectively as possible. If that means paying settlements then I'm all for paying settlements.

This quote always brings to my mind the Ford Windstar.

Now, they did do a recall for a problem with the cruise control cutoff switch possibly leaking brake fluid. But not included in that recall was any damage that leaked brake fluid might have done to the anti-lock brake control module, or any of the other electronic or electrical components located beneath the potential leak site.

Such parts can be corroded by leaked brake fluid, causing electrical shorts and burnt-out components. And the brake fluid is itself quite flammable. Your Ford Windstar can burst into flames while you are at speed on a highway. Or it could simply light itself on fire sitting unattended in your driveway and turn itself into a total loss. Most of the time, it just drains its own battery or kills all the instrument gauges in the dashboard.

No recall for this problem. And yet, the vehicle has already had several previous recalls, including one for the rear axle potentially breaking in half. This leads me to believe that there is another term, D, for the estimated dollar amount for a loss to brand value due to doing another recall.

But then again, "Found on Road, Dead" didn't come from nowhere, so I'm not sure how much value is left there.

Indeed, the need for that extra term is part of the sloppiness that I identified in another comment here.

I don't see how that answers my question.

That logic is exactly the rational thing to do, provided that settlements are the only consequence of that flaw.

If, on the other hand, this being the real world, there is some probability that customers will discover this flaw (e.g. reading a news article about such a crash-and-burn) and thereby demand fewer cars, causing fewer or cheaper sales ... then that also affects the calculation.

So, aside from this quote representing some degree of sloppiness, which can't be solved with "morality" ... I don't see the problem here.

Yes, ignoring all moral and ethical externalities – things that are important to human beings – does indeed make economics easier to fake on the internet. Letting people die in foreseeable fiery crashes, however, is not how an organized civil society deals with product defects that put lives at risk. It is immoral to do so: a concept which actually does exist, no matter how hard you sarcastiquote it.

Your proposed framework would make for a silly Ayn Rand book or two, but little more.

> things that are important to human beings

If they were important, then there would be economic value to them.

(And to some extent this is in fact the case: even once the de Havilland Comet's metal-fatigue issues were compensated-for and recalls completed, nobody wanted to fly on it, so it became a commercial flop, and now the air-transport leader is Boeing not de Havilland.)

>If they were important, then there would be economic value to them.

What justifies this statement? It seems nearly mind-bogglingly false to me so I would be interested to hear support for it.

The interaction between demand and prices is an important part of the intrinsic signaling mechanism that a free market provides.

If there are two alternate (competing) goods, and one is cheaper but the other is "Produced Ethically in Accordance with X Standards", then each person chooses whether that certification - and the qualitative difference it signifies - matters to them enough to pay the difference in price between that product and its cheaper competitor.

Or, to use another example elsewhere in this thread: if someone is in the market for a car, and one of the cars that meets their criteria is the Pinto, then it is up to them to decide whether the reduction-of-risk of fuel combustion justifies buying a more expensive vehicle that isn't a Pinto.

In either case, the macro-level effect will be that some portion of customers will buy the inferior product, and some will buy the superior product, and if there is sufficient disparity in the quantity-demanded, then the suppliers have greater incentive to produce the product with the higher quantity-demanded (but any quantitative mismatch between supply and demand will cause temporary fluctuations which will quickly self-correct, preserving the equilibrium in the long run). Ergo, if a good is superior in some way such that that superiority is "important", then that good will outsell any competition that lacks that quality.

Here comes the "everyone is always a fully-informed consumer" trope. Practically a religion at this point.

How do you think Ford communicated with pre-sale consumers re: their product's inadequately reinforced rear end, insufficient crumple zone, "essentially ornamental" rear bumper, and increased risk of death secondary to fire or combustion? Under your scheme, how do consumers who wish to avoid death by fire learn of these defects? What economic interest does Ford have to disclose the problem if the deaths are cheaper than fixing it?

"In the [Pinto] memo, Ford estimated the cost of fuel system modifications to reduce fire risks in rollover events to be $11 per car across 12.5 million cars and light trucks (all manufacturers), for a total of $137 million. The design changes were estimated to save 180 burn deaths and 180 serious injuries per year, a cost to society of $49.5 million."

> What economic interest does Ford have to disclose the problem if the deaths are cheaper than fixing it?

If people read the news, some nonzero amount equal to the amount of lost Pinto sales. If the competition has been crash-tested and the Pinto isn't, then Ford was already continually losing money by losing the "non-cheapskate" market segment.

> Under your scheme, how do consumers who wish to avoid death by fire learn of these defects?

Read the news, be mechanical engineers, prefer products that have been given favorable ratings by independent crash-test firms, or start an independent crash-test firm.

(No, I have no idea whether crash-testing was already a thing when the Pinto came out. Regardless, such things are, generally-speaking, how one solves these information problems.)

They didn't need a nonzero amount of loss to motivate correction of their product's problem, they needed more than $123 million. The market did not provide that.

I think we can end this here. The idea that average Americans should "be mechanical engineers" just to not die in a preventable fire is insane and really not worthy of further discussion.

So if there's no economic value attached to something, you consider it unimportant by definition? Wow.

Well, in these modern times, we call any mechanism which allocates scarce (ergo valuable) resources, an "economy".

Thus, the "economic" in "economic value" is actually redundant.

And if something has no value, to anyone ... what importance could it have?

(except perhaps in the history books, e.g. the now-bloodstained clothes that Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria wore when he was assassinated)

This seems rather elementary/tautological/Econ-101 to me.

> This seems rather elementary/tautological/Econ-101 to me

If it does, it's only because you're deliberately engaging in tautology.

Not all human value can be expressed in monetary terms. At a minimum, market forces cannot and will not raise the dead any time soon. In death there is no recourse that will make you whole. No amount of money will restore the value to you. That's why regulation and prevention exists – because the market can't cheat death.

Isn't this just true by definition? Don't break the law while doing the best thing for yourself.

It avoids the hard question grandparent asked. Legality only partitions behaviors into legal and illegal. Morality is more like a partial order which lets you compare behaviors.

Morality then is clearly more general and must inform legality not the other way around. Which is to say, just because you aren't breaking the law doesn't mean you are a good person. And further, how should we construct legal systems which are moral?

> Isn't this just true by definition? Don't break the law while doing the best thing for yourself.

Yes, it is. The comment I was responding to, appears to assert that there is something more to it; some kind of "morality". I question the purpose of following it, when it can only possibly cause one to make decisions with lesser expected-value (i.e. self-sabotage).

I don't think this is the last few years. I am but one data point, but morality and law have always been closely linked in the United States. I would further claim that for many Christians, morality and law are also closely linked with religion. Southern political ads[0] will surely back this up.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwiqcZVujRc

Quite the opposite. Anchoring the law in morality works like a safeguard against the dystopian scenarios. Laws can be changed overnight - but permanently altering societal views on morality takes considerably longer.

This process is still achievable (called 'perekovka' by the Soviets), but it can take whole generations, and a great deal of power.

Besides, when the law isn't anchored in commonly shared sense of morality, you'll basically have no other option but a politically oppressive system (to balance this factor out).

Through our (USofA) short history, at least half of the federal congress persons & presidents who've served have came from a prior held legal profession, most of those credentialed attorneys. I suspect this has been greatly impactful on the deep assosiation you describe.

I remember reading a research telling that the internet/smartphones caused a significant decrease in empathy.

Without empathy, and very little attention to the matter , could you expect any different result ?

The US has always been a land of paradox. We have a narrative/ethos of personal freedom, but the details are a little different.

Growing up in the USA I was taught in public school in the 1960s and 1970s that we lived in a better version of Ancient Athens. It took years to realize (e.g. reading Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, and Smedley Butler) that in several ways we instead live in a version of Ancient Sparta instead. Perhaps the Athenian ideal was indeed more true when those teachers themselves grew up (in the 1920s and 1930s).

But in any case, as Manuel De Landa says, all real systems are combinations of both meshwork (associative freedom) and hierarchy (imposed structure) -- that often transform into each other. http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm

- the point isn't to save money or reduce crime, it's to punish the bad people. I mean, if we stop thinking of them as bad people, how am I supposed to know that I'm a good person

You would think the recent examples of Meek Mill and Khalif Browder would open eyes to the fact there are a ton of people in jail because they either can't afford bail or for minor infractions.

There's a disturbing deeper reasoning, one that I like to acknowledge: double predestination Calvinism. In certain forms of Christianity, you are born as either "good" or "bad". You are just intrinsically this way. You can tell which you are based on whether God grants you a good or bad life. Get arrested unjustly, wrongly convicted, or too poor to bail yourself out? Well maybe that's just because you were one of the bad people. Rich and successful? Clearly proof that you belong in heaven.

Now, even most Christians see this as horse shit. But the deep seeds of this reasoning are everywhere in Western culture, hints here and there. Harry Potter is my favorite example- that sorting hat, man, it's never put a bad person into Griffindor, has it? (I haven't read the books in years, so go ahead and remind me about that one time it did...).

This is the kind of thing that leads to hidden biases, sort of like unconscious racial or gender biases. And like those other two examples, there are people who 100% believe that it's true, right, etc.

Edit: removing a clause that didn't make sense.

Peter Pettigrew was a Gryffindor.

The "prosperity gospel" people make me ill. It's almost the exact opposite of Christianity, in my opinion. The combination of black-white morality and a belief that some divine agency guides the fortunes of mortal humans results in a twisted view, wherein bad things happen to bad people, and good things happen to good people.

If a bad thing happens to a good person, well they must have done something sinful to deserve it. It's just sick. People like that always blame the victim.

Agreed; it's completely anti-biblical. This is explicitly addressed in John 9, that sometimes bad things happen to people and it's not because they're evil or because they deserve it. Arguably one of the most important central tennants of Christianity is "you are not a good person, you don't deserve grace any more than anybody else does, and God loves you in spite of that."

Yet somehow there are huge portions of Christianity that take the complete opposite lesson. It's like if there was a sect of the Open Source movement that went around telling people "the best thing about Open Source is that nobody can use your software unless you give them permission."

Christ was convicted of heresy and executed for his crime.

>It's like if there was a sect of the Open Source movement that went around telling people "the best thing about Open Source is that nobody can use your software unless you give them permission."

Richard Stallman's main gripe about Open Source software vs Free software is that it only grants you permission to view and modify the source, and doesn't necessarily grant you permission to use the software. Most open source licenses also grant you usage rights, but they don't technically have to.

I agree that it's the opposite of Christianity, at least in that in the RCC catechism good things happen to bad people and vice-versa, at least here on earth. The books get balanced in the hereafter. That's why the meek will inherit the earth and the rich enter heaven only by pushing camels through needles

Not only is this a perversion of Christianity, but it's also a perversion of Calvinism. (not arguing against your point, but of the people that hold these views)

This is the problem with all religion: the people who adhere to these views think that your views are perversions of Christianity (or Islam or whatever) and there is no way to resolve such disputes except to see who can shout the loudest, or who can obtain the most political power so that they can use the power of the state to suppress dissent. Ironically, Christianity itself is the product of this dynamic.

On the note of rehabilitation, do you (or anyone here) know of any good studies comparing various methods of rehabilitation?

My buddy firmly believes that the system is broken, just like myself. Yet, he believes it's broken by being too lax on criminals. He thinks we should be more like his home country, where "They leave their doors unlocked at night because if you steal, you lose a hand".

While I disagree with him, I'm not actually aware of facts on this. I know some countries have great success with rehabilitation methods, but what about more "harsh" countries? Is it compared often?

Your buddy has a rather simplistic view of crime. Much crime is done without thinking through the consequences. They are acts of impulse. Fear of punishment does not help in deterring such crimes. No matter what the punishment is crimes of impulse will be done. Other factors need to be addressed at a societal level to combat impulse crimes.

But lack of hand(s) helps to deter crime, isn't?

Jail is just modern version of that practice: hands are not cut, but whole body is jailed (temporary).

By definition no form of punishment deters crimes of impulse. When a person is enraged or otherwise blinded to rational thought the consequences of said action don’t come into play.

There are different degrees of impulse.

A spouse who kills after finds their partner in bed with someone else is what is traditionally called a 'crime of passion'. Maybe they would have committed that crime even if a policeman was looking over their shoulder.

A person who pockets a cell phone left unattended in a bar may be an equally spur-of-the-moment decision - but we wouldn't consider it a crime of passion. If a policeman was looking over their shoulder, they'd have resisted the impulse.

If people aren't being deterred from the second type of crime, we've got to ask whether the chance of being caught is too low, whether the punishment is too small, or whether the person isn't being rational about the expectation of punishment. Which probably varies from one crime to another.

Definitely there gray areas as you pointed out. My goal is to dissuade one from thinking that excessive punishment for crimes necessarily leads to less crime. It certainly dissuades some people but not everyone.

Oh, absolutely. People have been given 20+ year sentences for sub-$30 shoplifting [1,2,3] which is inexplicable if you think huge punishments will eliminate crime.

[1] http://articles.latimes.com/2001/jun/19/local/me-12244 [2] https://www.npr.org/2016/04/04/473004950/new-orleans-man-fac... [3] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/cruel-and-unusual...

If, for stealing, you need a hand, crime is deterred after two instances of punishment for each criminal.

Then you’ve decreased the recidivism rate but have you decreased the crime rate? Does living in a society that cruel lead to unintended consequences? Perhaps such a society leads to an increase in callousness and desperation thereby increasing the crime rate. North Korea famously has harsh punishments for crimes but its overall incarceration rate does not seem to be decreasing.

Practice shows that yes, punishment decreases crime rate. Without punishments, North Korea will collapse in hours.

Are these rules and punishments are good for people of North Korea? I don't think so. Will I obey law, when I will be in North Korea, even if I think that it is wrong? Of course.

Without punishment we get societal collapse. This is very different than saying increasing punishments, from their current form, would decrease crime. In other words, at the current level of punishment, what is the marginal effect of an increase in punishment on crime rates.

Actual federal and state-level data shows that increased penalties alone do little to reduce crime rates.

Maybe because free food & shelter alone is not a penalty for many but a vacation.

I’ve worked at a maximum security state prison. It is not a vacation there for any but a small number of people.

I just stumbled across a reference to a study about recidivism in Massachusetts last century while reading "Against Empathy" by Paul Bloom, perhaps it'll interest you.

I'm much too lazy to type out the entire quote, but the author references the case of Willie Horton, convicted murderer, who was let out on furlough, who went on to reoffend. This caused outrage and the book doesn't go into more detail on whether the furlough program was suspended, but the author does reference a study at the time affirming that:

> the program may have reduced the likelihood of such incidents. A report at the time found that the recidivism rate in Massachusetts had dropped in the fifteen years after the program was introduced and that convicts who were furloughed were less likely to go on to commit a crime than those who were not.

in Paul Bloom, Against Empathy (2016), chapter 1, pp. 34–35. See also: Massachusetts Department of Correction, "The Massachusetts Furlough Program", May 1987, https://static.prisonpolicy.org/scans/MADOC/Furloughposition...

This example is used in the context of a chapter where it is posited that rationally, we might best continue the net-positive furlough program, whereas our empathy with the victims might lead us to abolish it after a statistical outlier causes atrocities to happen. I'll avoid commenting further on the book as i haven't yet read it completely.

Other than that very specific reference off the top of my head, i'd recommend looking at anything published about the Norwegian justice system. I believe it is quite progressive and mainly focussed on rehabilitation instead of punishment.

>but what about more "harsh" countries? Is it compared often?

In my non-expert mostly Nth hand (where n>=2) observation countries where everyone steps in line out of fear are generally better at getting people to step in line when someone's looking but when nobody's looking or people think they can get away with it there's less rule following

Treat people like idiots and they will

I'd rather have to lock my doors at night and take other action to insulate myself from other's poor decisions and personal freedom to make my own decisions than live in an authoritarian society where nobody makes the "wrong" decisions because of the reliability and harshness of law enforcement.

"On Social Sadism" by China Mièville is a really good guide to the social processes that produce this.

http://salvage.zone/in-print/on-social-sadism/

> the point isn't to save money or reduce crime, it's to punish the bad people.

A huge part of justice system is exactly that, justice for the victims. They want the offender to be punished and pay for harm they caused. It would be unfair to the victims if govt was easy on the offenders.

Edit:

Depends on which end of spectrum you think humans are responsible for their own actions. Between,

1. People are merely the product of a zeitgeist.

2. People are 100% responsible for their own actions.

Most people think human nature is somewhere in between and our justice system reflects that thinking. Any rant saying only 1 is the right way to think about justice system has never been personally victimized or brutalized and would be singing a different tune if their loved one was a victim of some senseless/sadistic behaviour by another human being. People who live in crime free neighborhoods love to theorize about how we can be so kind of criminals and that will bring the best out of human beings.

To what end? Should we waterboard them every day? Should we implant them with pain devices that make their life hell?

What good does that do anyone? How does that make a net-improvement to the world? How does that "payment" work, exactly?

The victims' right to sadism should not trump society's right to reduced crime in the future. What we do to prisoners today increases recividism, increases crime.

RTFM[1]. Justice is not a vendetta.

[1]: http://justiceharvard.org/justicecourse/

Listen, listen, forget this entire topic for a moment and let me just say: thank you for linking me to those lectures. You just gave my brain the candy it's been craving lately in abundance that may even be too much.

"revenge: the action of hurting or harming someone in return for an injury or wrong suffered at their hands."

The idea that a victim would feel better by knowing that the perpetrator is suffering is exactly revenge by proxy.

> To what end? Should we waterboard them every day? Should we implant them with pain devices that make their life hell?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Bear_(Black_Mirror)

> To what end? Should we waterboard them every day? Should we implant them with pain devices that make their life hell?

Nothing like the good, old reductio ad absurdum. Two can play that game, but it prevents any meaningful discussion.

The problem is that a lot of what happens in American prisons really is absurd, Kafkaesque, sadism apparently for its own sake, and yet this hasn't actually led to the reductio. When we know that other approaches are better for society in that they lead to less recidivism, and are also less painful for the criminals, and yet continue to push in the opposite direction, it's reasonable to ask if there are any limits to our appetite for inflicting pain. If we can't even ask, then imo that is what prevents the meaningful discussion.

> reductio ad absurdium

Let me simplify it then, with no logical fallacy: If harming those who commit crimes is a good thing, why not do it more? Why not make it worse? And who gets to decide how much is enough?

> If harming those who commit crimes is a good thing, why not do it more?

Because proportion is a good thing, too - and is pivotal for the whole concept of justice.

> And who gets to decide how much is enough?

The same instance that decides what is and what is not a crime. Ultimately: society, in one way or another. "Implementation details" depend on the era and the civilization.

This is precisely the kind of medieval attitude that renders our prisons overcrowded, ineffective, and often at the mercy of racist policy makers, though.

It's absolutely the case that an effective justice system needs to make bad actions much more expensive than good actions. This is there it discourage people from taking a potentially easy-for-them-but-bad-for-victims-and-society approach.

But it's also the case that there are people who simply lack the facilities or resources to recognize this situation. Or people who's situations are so dire that these deterrents don't matter. For those people, rehabilitation is the only path forward.

The more rehabilitation we can offer, the less brutal our punishments need to be. And the more opportunities we can provide people to succeed within our modern social framework, the more compelling modest punishments will be.

> This is precisely the kind of medieval attitude that renders our prisons overcrowded

Do we really have the right to the victims that they have an attitude problem if they don't forgive their offenders. The comfort of our crime free existence is partly possible due precisely 'medieval attitude' .

> more rehabilitation we can offer, the less brutal our punishments need to be

Is there any proof to this. Would you personally accept possibility of higher crime in your neighborhood to carry out these experiments?

> the more opportunities we can provide people to succeed within our modern social framework

This is such a non solution. Yea we want to provide more opportunities for everyone, yea we want to live in crime free societies.

People who haven't been personally victimized by a brutal crime have no right to take moral high ground about the attitudes of victims. I cannot even begin to imagine the range of emotions victims go though.

People who have the moral ideals about this topic are ironically the people least affected by crime in general. Its a privilege to be on a moral high ground, who wouldn't want to be there, feels so good.

> Do we really have the right to the victims that they have an attitude problem if they don't forgive their offenders. The comfort of our crime free existence is partly possible due precisely 'medieval attitude' .

Pardon me, perhaps you're in a country with a "crime free existence." In my country, every week brings new atrocities and mass shootings. I'd expect such an effective strategy to perhaps have a lower total incarceration rate for victim-less crime and be better at prosecuting things like rape and murder.

> This is such a non solution. Yea we want to provide more opportunities for everyone, yea we want to live in crime free societies.

"Lock people up because it makes victims feel better" is equally unproductive, and we need only look at America's prison population vs our crime rate relative to our peers to see it.

> People who haven't been personally victimized by a brutal crime have no right to take moral high ground about the attitudes of victims. I cannot even begin to imagine the range of emotions victims go though.

> Its a privilege to be on a moral high ground, who wouldn't want to be there, feels so good.

Actually, it is an awful burden. But I don't think that pointing out "a failing, unfair system is not working" is a moral mountain to lecture down from. Your mileage may, of course, vary. But if you think you can browbeat me by suggesting that we must only listen to the most extreme opinions on violent crime by victims of said crime? It's both my right and duty within the context of my citizenship to disagree. I understand some people may passionately disagree, and I accept that conflict. I'm sorry if it's troubling, but I believe punitive justice is observably and obviously flawed and I will not support it simply because you say so.

> I believe punitive justice is observably and obviously flawed and I will not support it simply because you say so.

> more rehabilitation we can offer, the less brutal our punishments need to be

Do you have anything to back your main position on this matter. I am curious to learn and open to changing my position.

Except there is a lot of evidence that punishing the person who harmed them might not make the victims feel any better long term.

Curious to read more about this if you have anything.

Also wondering if ' there is a lot of evidence' proving that rehab works long term in reducing crime.

Some places are trying to save money and the result is further punishment, imagine not being able to read or receive books [1]. These people aren’t being thought as humans, just a source of exploitation. They aren’t being rehabilitated and preparation for returning to society is absent.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/federal-p...

Recidivism increases profits. Why lower it?

The rich hate the poor and this is yet another example of it. The Prison system in the U.S. is bursting with people who have been either forced out of the economy or never allowed into it.

The poor hate the poor too. The poor people are the ones who comprise most of the voter base for the politicians who push these laws and policies.

Maybe in some places. In San Francisco criminals can steal and Rob with pretty much impunity. So I don't really buy the American tough on crime narrative.

This is a [better worded] version of what I came to post. America will need to completely overhaul its system of fovernment before this begins to change.

I think this is a simplistic comment designed to elicit a thoughtless emotional reaction from people who already agree with you. It doesn't really address any of the issues the article bought up, nor does it suggest any ways forward.

I also don't think you're right about your blanket statement: five seconds on Wikipedia revealed a very broad, bipartisan prison reform initiative organized by the Koch and MacArthur Foundations and many other groups including the ACLU. So there is a lot of support for making the penal system better. And there is ample recent evidence of politicians advocating for reform: California and Massachusetts vacating low-level drug convictions; Governor Deal's reforms in Georgia; The First Step Act (just passed committee last week); even Trump hosted discussions in Jan. Sure, none of those are perfect but it's a mile away from your alleged harsh 'American "justice" culture.'

A moment's reflection opens up a the possibility of a slightly deeper analysis, which is that actually it might be a function of money and business inserting itself into the public sector: cash-strapped state budgets, privatized prisons, a pattern of contracting-out basic services, and a literally captive customer base create a perfect environment for this kind of predatory nastiness.

Let's be realistic here, these people committed crimes and were convicted (yes a very small percentage may be innocent).

With that said, I am completely against video calls. Having interaction with their friends and loved-ons is a important for moral and hopefully aids in rehabilitation.

> Reducing sentence length, improving prison conditions, trying to actually help those on prison, that's all just weakness, that's not being tough on crime.

Until somebody hurts your family and you start to think differently.

Or possibly reflect even more deeply upon how our medieval system of punishments has done approximately nothing to prevent that from happening in the first place.

That's true but it has done wonders preventing retalliations.

The culture is one part, but the other major part that shouldn't be ignored is that the current, largely privatized prison business is a huge modern day slave labor market, slash a huge money grab by private prison companies (and their suppliers), given how they can charge the government an x amount of money per inmate per day. That money is then used for lobbyists and propaganda so that the lawmakers make sure people serve long time for minor crimes, and the propaganda is to make sure the population at large (the 97.5% that aren't in jail) doesn't see the inmates as having rights, e.g. that they deserve it like you said.

Which of course is reminiscent of how other exploited people were dehumanised - people of color (slavery), jews (pre-WW2), Japanese (WW2, off to concentration camps after Pearl Harbor), "enemy combatants" (off to the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp and numerous unmentioned 'black sites', clear violations of any international convention but everyone turns a blind eye), etc.

The US as a whole is a dick.

Your first paragraph was on topic. Your last two, not so much.

I hope I can live long enough to see the rehabilitation method that prevents recidivism in statistically significant number of cases, especially for violent crimes like murder or rape. I think that rehabilitation is something we can try on those guilty of minor offenses, but for murderers, rapist, mobsters, the only effective way to prevent recidivism is death penalty.

> for murderers, rapist, mobsters, the only effective way to prevent recidivism is death penalty.

For all of them? What about the wrongly convicted? We know that a certain percentage of those found guilty of murder are later found to have been innocent. Victims of rape sometimes, years later, admit that they lied.

When your loved one, your child, is wrongly found guilty of such a crime, should we give them the death penalty immediately, or let them rot in a hellish prison for a few years first?

Nothing is a simple as you'd like it to be.

>Victims of rape sometimes, years later, admit that they lied.

Sometimes they lied, sometimes they identified the wrong person, sometimes they were coached into it by someone else. Ex-wives frequently accuse their ex-husbands of rape, and also evil parents sometimes coach children to allege the other parent of molestation.

Not every murder even requires rehabilitation. Given that I can't murder the same person twice, if the reason for murdering them isn't something I could apply to another, I'll never do it again. No jail time, rehab or death sentence necessary.

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