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Comment by bradleyjg | Hacker News Reader

Reading down below, it sounds like your crime didn’t really have individual victims. It cost all of us a little something in higher prices or fees or similar. In a case like that, I think it’s a lot easier to say that we as a society should forgive and forget.

There is another side of the coin. Having worked with some crime victims, there are a lot of crimes out there where it’s not just some diffuse, whole society damage. Everyone thinks of the big ones—homicides and rape—and yes, of course, those are the worst. But even “just” home burglary can leave people never feeling safe in their homes for the rest of their lives.

In cases where the victim never gets to move on with his or her life how much should we work towards making sure the victimizer can?

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Punishing felons is not going to directly make people feel safe. At best it serves as indirect deterrence for future crimes.

But much more effective ways of deterring crime are 1) pre-crime deterrence, like cctv, police patrol, etc; and 2) not letting crimes get away, and recidivism.

Yep. There's usually 3 goals of any criminal justice system:

- Punishment (criminals should be made to suffer)

- Deterrence (we want to discourage crime in society)

- Rehabilitation (Criminals are also citizens. Ideally they can become a contributing member of society, instead of wasting away in prison as a burden on everyone)

Any intervention should be assessed based on these criteria. For example, increasing prison sentences might be beneficial for punishment, have no impact on deterrence (most criminals assume they won't get caught) and in the US system, make rehabilitation harder.

And this is a theme. In general, the US on the whole seems to be strangely obsessed with punishment as the primary goal of its criminal justice system, compared to the systems in other countries. (Eg Norway - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNpehw-Yjvs ). The result is prison system which has one of the world's highest recidivism rates and more inmates per capita than any other country in the world. (With a corresponding financial cost to the taxpayer). Interventions which decrease the capacity for criminals to be rehabilitated make this obviously worse - For example, having news articles about the perpetrator online, forever.

Here in Australia the media isn't allowed to identify criminal defendants in most cases, which is as it should be. This also decreases crime - eg, the NZ shooter a few years ago was never named so he couldn't be painted as a hero, and to avoid copy-cat incidents.

Flogging sounds barbaric, but I bet lots of criminals would rather be flogged than suffer the dehumanizing system y'all have right now. (And if they wouldn't, you could flog them harder without also getting in the way of rehabilitation). Having a perminant cloud over your head when you look for housing or when you meet a new partner sounds simply inhumane.

There has to be some punishment for most crimes for a which is enough, after which the perpetrator deserves a truly fresh start. If you don't believe that, maybe the monster is you.

The order in which you name those three items is weird.

The main goal is rehabilitation, and, to a certain extent, deterrence.

Punishment was a goal a medieval ages, and, though it still it in some countries in modern times, it's still a medieval practice. You want to _educate_ those who do wrong so that they do better (e.g.: rehabilitation).

Punishment would only result in resentment.

Plenty of people want criminals to suffer. Eg, from earlier in this thread:

> In cases where the victim never gets to move on with his or her life how much should we work towards making sure the victimizer can?

Ie, “the perpetrator should suffer at least as much as the victim”. I’m sympathetic to the argument that this is medieval and not aligned with humanist ethics. But plenty of people, at least in the US obviously think this way.

I know I shouldn't read reddit comments, but I always find it alarming how many people want to throw people in jail immediately for any minor infraction.

The goal of punishment is to prevent extrajudicial retaliation. It's been as actual since before the medieval ages as it is now.

While NZ’s leadership choose not to name the shooter in their public statements, the name of the NZ shooter is well known. It is right there at the top of the Wikipedia article on the incident, and many non-NZ newspapers choose to name him.

Firstly: I don’t see punishment as separate from deterrence. If a different deterrence strategy works better, it should be used preferentially.

Secondly: This doesn’t capture the need to remove people incapable of integrating with society. Rehabilitation does not capture the reality of the situation. US jails contain many people that do not have the mental faculties to resist overt victimization of vulnerable people. There may also be thoughtful people mixed in, but these groups are nothing alike.

It should not be different, but it is. Strictness of punishment does not directly correlate to deterrence. However, laypeople don't know or care; they want their pound of flesh. The GP's list is very much laid out in priority order according to practical American policy, although it misses 0) profit for private prison operators.

> Strictness of punishment does not directly correlate to deterrence.

I used to believe in this, but SF proved it wrong. Simplify writing up or catch-and-release has caused the city's crime rate to go through the roof.

I think the point is that the deterrence effect has diminishing marginal gains. Works well for petty crimes with clear intention.

Yep. My understanding is that the strictness of penalties has almost no bearing on the murder rate. Most murders are either crimes of passion, or committed with the assumption the perp will never being caught. Murderers aren't thinking - "Hm, 20 years of prison I could handle but 25 years is too much. I suppose I won't murder my wife when I find her in bed with another man."

Increasing the penalties for murder is an extremely ineffective way to reduce the murder rate.

>Firstly: I don’t see punishment as separate from deterrence.

I think the simplest way to see the difference between punishment and deterrence is in nature.

We learn not to touch a hot stove by getting our hand burnt. It's usually not very painful, but because it happens immediately and every single time we quickly figure out that touching a hot anything is a bad idea. This creates deterrence without a heavy punishment.

Sometimes a heavy punishment can also cause deference by itself though. Eg messing around with mains electricity. You probably won't get shocked if you're careful, but if you do then the damage can be very severe.

Let's see what Norway does when Brevik gets out after his 21 year sentence, which... is only 10 years away, YAY! (sarcasm)

For those that don't remember he killed 77 people (mostly kids) and was sentenced to 21 years in jail.

Not quite. At that point a panel will review if he's a danger to society. If they decide he is he stays in prison for five years, then comes before them again. There is no limit on the number of five year extensions, so he will remain in prison for the rest of his life if the board thinks he remains a risk to society.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2012/08/24/159978667...

As a victim/survivor/whatever of several violent crimes, I would rather it never happened. Whatever broken system we had in place that created people so desperate that they had to harm people appears the problem.

If the people aren't causing problems for anyone else, more power to them. The only thing society owes me is that someone else should not have to deal with the shit I had to go through.

All murderers, for example, are “desperate” people that “had to” kill? Nothing is ever anyone’s fault, just broken systems all the way down?

Let me spin your question back at you: Do you not acknowledge that yes, many (not all) crimes are committed as a result of desperation, addiction, or otherwise poor community conditions that could be prevented by better social services?

Determinism has some thorny philosophical issues. Couldn’t we just as easily say that right wing voters that don’t want to provide better social services are that way because of their upbringing and societal conditions? Soon we have nothing left to talk about because everything is inevitable.

You didn't answer the question, and I don't think it's that thorny. I'll get back to your question after you provide a direct response to mine.

Edit, in case you got upset: Philosophy is important and well and good, but it is a game too often played by online trolls to ask questions, and never answer those posed to them. So when I ask a direct question and you throw back a counter, and then change the subject to the philosophy, I have to wonder if you really had any interest in debate in the first place.

I tend to think that in most cases, in the US, there’s a mix of poor character / ethics / whatever-you-want-to-call-it and circumstances that lead to people committing crimes. I think it’s rare that it’s entirely society’s fault (accepting that framing for the sake of the discussion).

> I'll get back to your question after you provide a direct response to mine.

Watching this show about the FBI profilers on Netflix qualifies me to respond here :-) In a sense even the serial killer can be seen/understood as a victim of the society. What made him into what he is is the unwanted part of the society. I still see the crime as his doing/fault though.

Maybe unpopular, but I don’t think the victim’s pain and suffering should be relevant in determination of guilt, sentencing, or reintegration, just as a victim’s resiliency is obviously not. The important thing is the demonstrated intent and willingness to do harm, or inability to control their harmful behavior, because that is what we can expect more of.

The actual pain should not be an influence, yes. The 'usual' influence, however, should be, as it's directly related to the willingness to cause harm (imo).

Sure, but there are many popular cases where the courtroom was used as a sympathy circus to establish both guilt and impact. It should be against jurisprudence to allow this.

Of course it's awful if a victim is scarred for life due to a crime. But how does society (or the victim) benefit from making sure the criminal is also scarred for life?

How does society benefit? Society benefits if those who haven't yet scarred victims for life decide not to do so because they themselves might suffer like their intended victims.

That is the "deterrence" wing of the list above. Shouldn't that primarily be the job of the criminal justice system? If someone is free after a punishment, and seems repentant, do you think it is the job of uninformed/half-informed citizens reading a local police blotter from 10 years ago to shame someone for their past?

I don’t say necessarily that we need to make sure the criminal is scarred for life, but what time, money, and attention is going into rehabilitating victims of crime?

Depends on the goal, are we trying to make sure their life is worse than the victims to it's own end or are we trying to optimize the outcome for society by preventing future damage and removing as much as we can? If the latter then the inability to negate the effects on the victim alone probably isn't the driving factor on how we create the optimal outcome for society. Especially for crimes where a permanent separation of the criminal from society (e.g. death or imprisonment for the rest of their life) is deemed excessive or too expensive and recidivism can result in more damage than the initial crime if the goal is to expressly ignore integrating them back into society.

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