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Comment by bpodgursky | Hacker News Reader

Can we stop throwing around cries for imprisonment for things which are (1) not even obviously a legislated crime and (2) not intentional? This has become a super common meme recently.

There are perfectly viable ways to financially disincentivize companies (or individuals!) from bad acts like this without building a society where the default punishment for anything zeitgeist-bad is imprisonment?

Prison is a last resort when you _can't_ get people to follow laws using other means (ie, a serial rapist is not going to be deterred by financial penalties). But if a CEO or corporation is doing something clearly for profit, there is an obvious and easy way to prevent it without taking someone's life away. It's barbaric and unnecessary.

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It seems to be an American attitude where its just normal to relentlessly imprison people who fall out of line.

I'm American! Stop doing it! It's not even the traditional law-and-order conservatives calling for this; it's leftists who just want to redirect the industrial prison system at a new target!

The system is bad, no matter who you target!

Yes, it's bad.

Which is why the most appropriate solution for those who hold themselves above the system due to their wealth and influence is to stick them directly in the worst parts of it and force them to experience it for years.

You know, deep down, this makes you a bad person, right?

I don't believe that subjecting someone to the same punitive system they have an outsized influence over is a bad thing. I believe it's necessary, so that when they get out, that they work to change it lest they return one day. The funny thing about contrition is that you usually need to be forced into it.

"...redirect the industrial prison system at a new target!"

Absolutely. A target that deserves it.

Short prison sentences for white collar crime, rather than easy to pay fines, would change the landscape

Prison is the only thing that deters millionaires and billionaires from purposefully destroying priceless treasures to humanity to get at the commonplace resources that lay underneath.

Financial disincentives have NEVER worked because our system isn't designed to punish these things, by design.

If the reason they do these things is for money (which I think is fair to assume) then money is clearly an effective incentive. The fines just have to make it unprofitable.

Fines are tax-deductible. They're better at gaming the system than policymakers are at fixing it.

1. That's literally not true, you're just making stuff up: https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/102915/are-irs-pena...

2. Even if it was, do you understand what a deduction is? You still lose money; you'd be changing the base on your federal income payments, but since your income tax is at most 40% or so, you're still paying at minimum 60% of the penalty (even if it was deductible, which it is not).

1. That's a very specific type of penalty.

2. Business taxes aren't the same as individuals taxes.

I agree, punishment is revenge. It doesn’t work.

It has not been tried for crimes of this sort.

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