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Comment by niyazpk | Hacker News Reader

> Sending fraudulent people to jail for a long, long time is fundamental to running a healthy society

Really?! Interesting...

I agree, a functioning society needs good law and order, and some way to prosecute and bring criminals to justice.

But I am personally not convinced that sending someone "to jail for a long, long time" is the solution. How is that productive? I think we need to come up with better ways to serve justice than physically restricting otherwise smart or productive individuals to a room for decades on end. As soon as we are done with abolishing the death penalty, I would want us to start looking at abolishing this "decades long locking up" of folks. I don't have a good solution as I said, but I am convinced that this is not it.

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There are many different philosophies of justice. Personally, I find "restorative justice" the most compelling, especially when tempered with the practicality of "preventive justice". But there is also "rehabilitative justice", along with "retributive justice" which is closest to revenge and thus will never lack for popular appeal.

> But I am personally not convinced that sending someone "to jail for a long, long time" is the solution. How is that productive?

At least for murder, one of the strongest predictors of whether a person will kill is if they've killed before. So prison is productive because it makes it more difficult (though not impossible) for a person to keep killing.

Trying to abolishing imperfect parts of society with no tested replacement solution is a dangerous game.

Some people are or became irredeemably antisocial and need to be kept away from society at large. Watch any liveleak video around the mexican cartel if you need a reminder of what evils people are truly capable of.

That being said, sure want to properly reintegrate everyone possible. But society understandably does not exactly welcome past offenders back with welcome arms. It is kind of hard to be productive again when few places will even consider hiring you. That isn't a stigma you can just wish away.

The point of sending them to jail for a long, long time is to protect society from them. Honest people don't deserve to live in a society filled with liars and cheats and conmen. Send them straight to hell

The length can be debated, but jail wastes the most priceless resource you have - time. That’s why it’s a punishment.

I think the question is whether punitive policies work in that way. I'm fairly comfortable saying this person getting locked up for a long time will probably not deter too many others from doing similar, at a personal level. I suppose it can be argued that it doesn't have to act as a deterrent to individuals at a high rate, but to groups? But... why aren't we then hearing about everyone else that enabled this? (That is, this just encourages more folks to make sure to have a scape goat.)

Or, do we really think it was down to just this one person's actions?

It's net productive because it removes the large negative productivity from fraud / other crimes from society.

It is the worst solution, aside from all of the others.

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