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Comment by slibhb | Hacker News Reader

You're making so many assumptions. First, that crime rate is linked to policy. Further, it's bizarre to me that you think comparing San Francisco to Scandinavia makes sense but comparing past San Francisco to present San Francisco doesn't. Neither experiment is particularly good but the latter is better.

Leaving that aside for a moment, if there was "evidence" that not punishing murderers was the "best thing for society" (in terms of rehabilitation, crime rate, etc) would you support that policy?

For most people, a society that doesn't punish criminals is simply uncivilized. I tend to agree.

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> For most people, a society that doesn't punish criminals is simply uncivilized. I tend to agree.

Punishment is one thing, and it certainly is good for a feeling of justice. But the real problem San Francisco is experiencing is lack of deterrent. That's related, but not quite the same.

If there is a way to keep up the deterrent, but sacrifice some punishment to get more rehabilitation then that's worth discussing. That's what Scandinavia is trying to do (in addition to other policies that affect crime rate). A prison turns out to be a good deterrent even if you don't get raped there.

In comparison, just not prosecuting theft at all is removing not just the punishment, it's also removing the deterrent, and I don't see how it's going to rehabilitate anyone. Obviously punishing the theft as a misdemeanor was supposed to be the deterrent, but without enforcement all that's left is a total failure.

No amount of deterrent is going to remove the motivation of petty thieves. Give them better means to live a dignified existence without resorting to crime and the problem disappears. Such solutions implicitly demand rethinking housing policy, social welfare and jobs programs. A couple other equally effective, on paper, solutions would be imprisonment and slavery of petty thieves, or murdering them (capital punishment, near genocide, crime against humanity). It's important to consider the privilege, assets, and what people stand to gain or lose when considering solutions. I've got no dog in the fight over problems in California. What's clear is that these problems are systemic and demand a federal solution. The people responsible to enact a federal solution are beholden to the people who stand to lose the most if these systemic issues of housing, healthcare, income, and the like are solved. Tech workers have more in common with the homeless people they step over to get to work than the f500 CEOs telling paying Congress to stall and distract. Bridging this class divide and building solidarity with people we've been taught to think ourselves better than is a foundational step in building the grassroots needed to force change.

Wow that's a lot of buzzwords in one post!

Is a federal solution more likely to be effective for thefts under $950 or is a tailored localized solution?

Federal courts generally aren’t overloaded the way state courts are, and federal prisons generally aren’t overcrowded the way state prisons are. But if theft of less than $1000 in property became a federal crime that would certainly increase the number of federal cases and federal prisoners.

There’s also a question of how to shoehorn smaller theft into a federal crime. It can be done — any bank robbery is a federal crime regardless of how much money is stolen — but it isn’t straightforward.

Where I am in California there’s signs up everywhere begging for employees. The wage restaurants need to pay to have a dishwasher in some part of Los Angeles is $21/hr as of a couple weeks ago.

We don’t need deterrent to stop petty thieves. We can just escalate prison sentences exponentially so that we get O(log n) crime instead of O(n).

> if there was "evidence" that not punishing murderers was the "best thing for society" (in terms of rehabilitation, crime rate, etc) would you support that policy? For most people, a society that doesn't punish criminals is simply uncivilized. I tend to agree.

This is a pretty interesting and concise way to frame this, because I definitely would support such a policy.

Punishments carried out by justice systems are a means to an end. It's sad that even today it's considered the most effective tool for general safety and protection of society.

It strikes me as really strange to consider punishments for crimes as a sort of state-sponsored revenge.

It's the fundamental question here. Is justice a "means to an end" or "an end in itself"? You're with the former, I'm with the latter.

I would also attack the notion of "evidence" here. The previous poster is not making an empirical argument at all, he's only pretending to. If Scandinavia had more crime than SF, he would pick another example (notice how he dismisses Singapore for...reasons). He's defending an a priori belief, as am I. Empiricism fails us here, we're arguing over values.

> It strikes me as really strange to consider punishments for crimes as a sort of state-sponsored revenge.

Justice is carried out by a disinterested third party (the state), revenge is not.

>notice how he dismisses Singapore for...reasons

My point wasn't that punishment doesn't deter crime (it clearly does), but that crime rates are far more dependent on social and economic factors.

Singapore and Scandinavia are quite similar in this regard (socially harmonious and prosperous, with a well educated lower class), even though they differ completely on attitudes towards crime and punishment. Both nations have low crime.

America and Brazil (for example) both have a poorly educated, struggling-to-survive underclass whose needs are broadly ignored by the rest of society. Both have high crime rates.

Give me a country with a despised underclass and low crime and I'll gladly concede.

> Give me a country with a despised underclass and low crime and I'll gladly concede.

China?

Fair cop.

China has a low rate of violent crime and shoplifting. But corruption is off the charts.

And China also executes more people than any other and has the harshest penalties for crime.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2017/04/china-must-co...

Westerner: "Did you see that drug bust in Shanghai China yesterday? Two pounds of marijuana!".

Chinese National: "Yes. I hear they received 2 days."

Westerner: "2 days! That isn't that bad. You can do a lot more time in the states -- well at least in Texas. It's legal now on the entire west coast."

Chinese National: "No. No. 2 days to live."

I’m not sure China fit the bill “despised under class”. It would seem to me that China’s (Han Chinese) underclass, at least in urban cities, have a lot more access to welfare, like the GP was saying about Singapore

In China, the underclass are literally second class citizens who risk being exiled from major cities should they get into trouble. Social services are not available to them.

>Give me a country with a despised underclass and low crime and I'll gladly concede.

Literally Singapore has a massive underclass of migrant workers from South Asia, who are given limited visas that don't allow them the rights of even a normal work visa. In 2020 hundreds of thousands of them were locked in tiny dormitories for over six months straight while covid spread like wildfire through them (the vast majority of Singapore's 60k covid cases were in migrant worker dormitories). Their salaries are less than $500/month.

Nope, they weren’t “locked in”. They were in fact moved out by the government into a large number of alternate accommodations ( hotels, schools, apartments, under construction sites, barges) to space people apart. Everyone was tested for free, hospitalised and treated for free. Neither workers nor employers were charged any fee. The workers have free wifi at their dorms now and a mobile app via which their report issues directly to the Ministry of Manpower. I’m commenting only on “locked in” and not about their salaries, or other matters.

(Edit: replaced “work“ with “wifi”)

Most of them weren't allowed to roam freely in the community until around December/January, that's what I meant by locked in.

Roaming around has been highly discouraged in any case. Social distracting, limited table booking at restaurants, limited admissions to public places, group sizes at five, limits of how many can attend the office in person - all these were restrictions in place until a few months ago. The restrictions were replaced slightly a few weeks ago. With a recent upsurge, restrictions have been reintroduced.

There aren’t that many places for dorm workers to roam. The most popular place is Little India, where they can procure goods that they are familiar with. I do see dorm workers regularly buying provisions at the same neighbourhood stores that I go to.

"justice ... Empiricism fails us here, we're arguing over values."

Values can depend on descriptive background assumptions and in such cases value arguments can improve by making progress on factual topics. In the case of the justness of punishment: the topic of determinism. The recent discussion by Daniel Dennett and Greg Caruso in their book "Just Deserts - Debating Free Will" is a useful read.

Even with different values, there’s room for common ground.

For instance, you could both support programs to prevent people turning to crime (proactively), without changing the strictness of enforcement. Assuming they were effective, that would make progress on both the safety and social justice angles.

This is how you create effective change at scale - not focusing on the points where your values guarantee conflict, but finding approaches that can have broad support.

If you learned that punishment produced no useful benefit to society, and you want to punish anyway, then what you’re seeking is revenge, not justice.

I would think the state is a very interested party

Crime rate is strongly related to poverty. Stronger punishments don't change that and in fact have the opposite affect. If we work on that we can make some progress.

The US has the largest prison population in the world by a large margin and we still have a relatively high crime rate overall, especially when it comes to violent crime. Putting more people in prison is not a solution to our problems as we can clearly see.

It really helps to look at the numbers to wrap your head around it, but here is a lot of good data to start understanding the issue. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html

There is a lot of data and research out there regarding these issues, that's the good news. The bad news is that few people want to take the time to read it.

One more: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-prisons-make-u...

The two approaches are not mutually exclusive

No one wants to put more people in jail.

I think poster is saying instead, policy should not encourage more criminals.

If you have X pool of existing law breakers, policy goal is to keep a % subset of X out of the prison system.

However, policy is increasing the size of X, to X+1.

I don’t think there’s any evidence that most people agree with your perspective. Unless there is evidence, please don’t try to bolster your argument this way.

My question, then, is this: if punishing people for crimes was shown to be ineffective for society, you would continue to support punishment?

I think I must be misunderstanding. It sounds like you are saying that you’d prefer to cut off your nose to spite your face. (Punish criminals despite punishment being a net negative.)

This isn’t to boost any particular flavor of justice. I am just curious about your perspective.

> My question, then, is this: if punishing people for crimes was shown to be ineffective for society, you would continue to support punishment?

> I think I must be misunderstanding. It sounds like you are saying that you’d prefer to cut off your nose to spite your face. (Punish criminals despite punishment being a net negative.)

No, you're not misunderstanding. To me your question makes no sense. By definition, a society that does not punish criminals is no society I want to live in. It is uncivilized.

If you mean, "if punishing people for crimes increases the number of crimes, would you still support it?" then my answer is yes, of course (though I don't accept the premise). Reciprocity is part of human nature. If you do something bad, you deserve to be punished in porportion.

To the extent that we adopt your perspective, the value of human beings will be lost. When you punish a criminal, you are treating him with respect. You respect that he made a choice, you are showing that he didn't have to make that choice and that he could refrain from making it in the future, and that by accepting his punishment he can pay his debt. I believe that this perspective will result in less crime but even if it doesn't, I'm still in favor of it because justice is an end in itself.

To be clear, I didn't put forth my perspective, which is that crime and punishment and society is a very complex issue, and one that I'm not particularly well versed in. From what I do know, there are different theories of justice - utilitarian, retributive, justice, karmic, etc.

Drug laws might be an interesting litmus test. Their enforcement is pretty clearly bad for society, and causes all kinds of problems. Yet, because this health issue is mistakenly categorized as a moral failing, we all suffer the effects.

I'm curious to hear what you think about drug laws, especially in America.

> To be clear, I didn't put forth my perspective, which is that crime and punishment and society is a very complex issue, and one that I'm not particularly well versed in. From what I do know, there are different theories of justice - utilitarian, retributive, justice, karmic, etc.

You did put forth your perspective.

> I think I must be misunderstanding. It sounds like you are saying that you’d prefer to cut off your nose to spite your face. (Punish criminals despite punishment being a net negative.)

This is utilitarian thinking, period.

"It sounds like you are saying" is a very different statement than "here is what I believe". For some reason, you want to project my beliefs on me - perhaps for the sake of an argument? Regardless, I don't think this is a fruitful thread for either of us.

> If you mean, "if punishing people for crimes increases the number of crimes, would you still support it?" then my answer is yes

As a thought experiment how many more murders per year would you accept as a cost of keeping "punishment-respect" around? 10? 1000? 100K? Limitless?

To me respect for others is primarily about caring, promoting health and reducing harm. To prevent someone from getting murdered is very respectful of them and their life. We can also show respect for all the choices a person will make in the future by adopting the policy that prevents them getting murdered today.

> if there was "evidence" that not punishing murderers was the "best thing for society" (in terms of rehabilitation, crime rate, etc) would you support that policy?

Yes, if the "best thing .. in terms of .. crime rate" includes fewer murders. I prefer the package (fewer murders + higher percentage of murderers unpunished) over the package (more murders + lower percentage of murderers unpunished). Where unpunished does not mean "no reaction" but rather treatment, medication and rehabilitation.

Of course, this is a ration position to hold until yourself or someone you care about is the victim.

But you or someone you care about could become a murder victim in both packages. Indeed the likelihood for that unwanted outcome is higher in the second package. I prefer the policy alternative that lowers the risk of people being murdered.

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