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Comment by alpha_squared | Hacker News Reader

> Should the assaulted be happy with the fact that the inmate will get a job?

Um... what? This is borderline advocating for all sentences be for life.

If a sentence is given and served, the convicted deserve a chance at living. The US has a terrifying and awful fetish for punishing lower/middle-class folks who commit some of the pettiest of crimes, many of which struggle to re-integrate with society if/when they're released and therefore continue to serve a sentence long after they're no longer in prison. Compared with, for example, a vast majority of white-collar crime that often has victims an order of magnitude or two greater than most petty crime.

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I don't think I advocated that all sentences should be for life, and I don't get how you got to there from what I wrote.

You were complaining that inmates would deign to find work after being incarcerated.

> Should the assaulted be happy with the fact that the inmate will get a job?

YES, everyone should be happy if ex-felons are able to find work after leaving prison. Otherwise, they just go back their previous behaviors (eg ~80% recidivism). If they can't get work, that's effectively a "life sentence".

I was not complaining about anything. They aren't ex-felons, after they are released, they are felons.

I do not think you understood my original comment, since you keep quoting that sentence only. Where is the restitution to the aggrieved party? The assaulted, the robbed, the beaten, the raped? You pay for what you do, and if your enterprise is criminal, you pay in time behind bars. Personal responsibility. Why would anyone want to hire a wife-beater? There are millions of upstanding citizens out of work ...

You seem to have a very limited understanding of why people commit crimes, which makes for extremely uninformed opinions.

Punishing those who commit crime demonstrably does little to nothing to dissuade them from future crime. Given an understanding of the reasons why many people commit crimes makes this obvious: by taking angry people without hope, and giving them more reasons to be angry and even less hope, we end up with an incredibly high recidivism rate. Meanwhile, harshly punishing those who've committed crimes usually doesn't make the victims of those crimes feel better, either.

So if it's not benefitting victims, and making re-offense more likely, why do we do it? So third parties can feel a sense of self-righteousness that they call "justice?" That seems to be the primary reason!

Sometimes people in dire straits do bad things, and hurt others. Punishment is reasonable, but objectively, rehabilitation is also needed. Restitution to victims, and victim statements, also help. We can look around the world and see objectively that there are many ways to do this better than we're doing, by any measure. It's both more humane, and more effective.

Of course my opinions seem uninformed to you, when you intentionally misconstrue them as you have done.

If someone murdered a loved one of mine, I don't see how having the state execute them would make things any better for me. I'd be satisfied if they were simply imprisoned so they could not hurt others. Punishing them further wouldn't help me at all.

> Where is the restitution to the aggrieved party? The assaulted, the robbed, the beaten, the raped? You pay for what you do, and if your enterprise is criminal, you pay in time behind bars. Personal responsibility. Why would anyone want to hire a wife-beater?

Criminal law is about wrongs against the state. In regards to payment for restitution, how is the state being restored by somebody rotting in jail?

What sort of payment is this that the state may end up even poorer than before? In fact, if serving in prison is payment, then I'd say it's the state that's paying for the prison and all the harms which follow.

If the state should find itself awfully harmed from its own criminal justice policy, from where shall the state seek remedy?

Criminals commit very few crimes against the public while incarcerated.

Depending on whether you look at state or local prisons, anywhere from 1/3 to almost 1/2 of inmates are detained for non-violent offenses. With a reasonable rehabilitation program that focuses on getting people out of the situation that led them to petty theft, drug dealing, etc in the first place, we could probably take 30-40% of the population out of prisons and reintegrate them to society with no discernible impact on public safety.

This would be without even touching any “wife-beater,” rapist or murderer.

There are a lot of people unnecessarily locked up for absurd sentences compared to the crime who absolutely deserve another chance at society. We should actively want that. It’s a net good for society and it happens to be a lot less expensive, too.

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