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Comment by swman | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been stopped at knife point at dark by two people. It was traumatizing and I have no sympathy towards bad actors. What am I supposed to do? Just get stabbed and be thankful that the criminals were nice enough not to kill me?

I was going to night class and getting harassed by people my age. Lock them up and maybe they become rehabilitated but there’s something seriously wrong with people who are willing to go right up to killing someone over a few possessions. I personally will always vote strongly against crime. You can keep having sympathy for criminals I hope you’re never afraid of going outside after dark.

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I completely sympathize with you. I hate criminals, I'm tough on crime.

But... 68 years?

At that point, I almost think it's kinder and more honest to execute people.

I'm very sorry that happened to you. If you'd ever like to talk to someone, my Dad was a police officer and I bet he would open up his network to you. My email is in my profile and nobody ever even has to know your name.

Although I don't doubt the traumatic nature of your experience and I am genuinely sorry. Surely it would make more sense to diagnose why we have bad actors and seek to rehabilitate them as opposed to dehumanising them and tossing them into a dank cell.

I obviously agree, but can you do me a big favour?? Let's just love the hell out of swman and let them believe what they believe.

Won’t somebody please think of the humanity of those who rob others at knife-point?

At some point, people need to realize that some human beings are just born bad. Psychopathy and Sociopathy are real things that have a genetic component.

And, while we can try to rehabilitate those who score low on measures of psychopathy and sociopathy, we need to recognize that some people really do just need to be locked away from society at large to preserve the lives of innocent people.

Psychopathy and sociopathy are defined as antisocial personality disorder. There are treatments, unfortunately modern prisons are nowhere near conducive to the types of treatments that are effective. And the spiral continues...

You argument is very egocentric. It's proved that a light penalty system leads to much lower crime numbers. Too bad that so much people look at it from an individual perspective and not from a society one. The great danger of a individualistic society

I think being able to state - here is my trauma and here is how it’s part of my decision making - is pretty brave. It’s the opposite of egocentric. It clearly states a reasonable bias and makes it easier to communicate about sensitive topics.

Not saying that this is the right example, but usually when throwing in some emotional things to get attention is considered egocentric.

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