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Comment by VictorPath | Hacker News Reader

America's incarceration rate is over nine times that of a country like Denmark's. You see the comments here from Americans - even more people need to be incarcerated, the DAs are too soft. People elect these DAs because they are tired of police brazenly murdering people on video and locking everyone up.

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If someone robbed a train in Denmark would they go to jail? No one is saying we shouldn’t find ways to prevent people from committing crimes in the first place, but this experiment in california with having no consequences isn’t working, that’s pretty obvious.

> If someone robbed a train in Denmark would they go to jail?

In Denmark, would the robbery happen in the first place?

It could. Maybe california should send their criminals over to Denmark to see what happens.

American is large. Some DA's are soft. Some are hard. LA's is definitely way too soft. It's dropping the standard of living for common working class people.

US also has, like, heck of a lot more crime than Denmark. We don’t arrest and jail people for the hell of it.

And based on comments here, it seems that many of you guys seriously think that a solution is... arresting and jailing more people? Somehow brings mind the quote about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

And from my European point of view, the three strikes thing is pretty much a definition of jailing people for the hell of it.

If someone committed the same crime in Europe you would put them in jail too, would you not?

Context was how to reduce crime, not whether a specific crime should yield jail time.

Yes, that’s how the European country I moved to US from deals with crime. US is insanely lenient toward petty criminals compared to Europe.

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