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Comment by whatgoodisaroad | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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