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Comment by planarhobbit | Hacker News Reader

It’s perfectly well within the rights of this individual to resign, without Reddit/HN getting into a spat about whether the individual’s justification meets some loose standard.

I do think this particular tweet is very concerning. See if you can follow this train of thought:

> While I empathize with any ex-felon's right reintegration, I empathize more with past or potential victim's right to do their jobs amongst people who haven't fallen short of one of the lowest moral bars in society. Choosing one side must exclude the other.

How does this make you feel? Do you agree that “Choosing one side must exclude the other”? Is this an applicable statement to make in this context?

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I don't think it makes sense to say you support the right to reintegration and then argue that the idea of 'potential future victims' is enough to remove someone from a job. Anyone can be a potential future victim following that logic, so this person could never really be integrated at all.

I think sex offenders elicit emotional responses in these discussions and that the position isn't tenable at least for someone who purports to favor reintegration.

I'll pick a particularly thorny and controversial example but I think it's necessary. Imagine a member of a minority group with a background of severe violent crime spoke at a conference, he went to prison and served his sentence. Now someone attending says they don't feel save with him in the room and that the person should never hold an administrative job again. What would be the response to that?

The response would probably be that they can't fire him because he's a minority. But that doesn't make it right. It just means that minorities can get away with stuff that nobody should be able to get away with,

if someone was found guilty, went to prison and served their sentence, I have trouble to characterize this as 'getting away with it' given that they, in the most literal sense imaginable, did not. This doesn't just do away with rehabilitation but even with punitive justice, because the punishment served is justified on the basis that the punished has afterwards repaid their debt to society.

If not even prison is sufficient we're firmly in the realm of tribal outcasts and I don't think that's generally speaking a popular form of justice among liberally minded software developers at conferences.

Not every crime can sufficiently be paid in the scope of one lifetime and more importantly not every person can be rendered safe for the rest of society in any finite term. I don't think its incompatible with the notion of justice to suppose that someone can represent an inextinguishable risk to society despite serving their sentence.

Rather than questioning the entire concept of justice one can simply question whether the implementation of justice is in this instance sufficiently sound. To give an extreme example its probably best that the prolific serial killer Gary Ridgeway remain in prison until he's dead. If our justice system were dumb enough to release him one wouldn't be obliged to accept or reject the entire concept of justice as one piece. One could simply reject whether Gary was a safe fellow to be around.

This isn't even hypothetical there are actually serial killers who are free men post conviction.

https://www.ibtimes.com/brazils-most-notorious-serial-killer...

I used to agree with your general statement, until I worked with some people who were victims of violent crimes. Their trauma did not go away with a set unit of time served, but follows them forever.

The idea of neatly packaged-and-served justice doesn’t mesh with the reality of trauma inflicted by the crimes. Some stigma should remain with perpetrators, regardless of time served.

Completing a prison term (or being found "not guilty", for that matter) does not spare you from civil litigation; why would it spare you from ostracism?

I don't. We have a legal system that doles out punishments for crimes, and then you're free to go about your life.

If a person served their punishment, I generally feel they should be given a chance. This is minus things like joke sentences and repeat offenders, because some people seem beyond saving.

If you're going to treat criminals as forever outcasts, you may as well advocate for branding their face or sentencing them to death, IMO.

If you’re a registered sex offender, there is clearly a sense that society has decided your prison term ending is not enough and people need to be notified of a risk you still pose. Your debt, as it were, was not repaid.

I am perfectly fine with those convicted of sex crimes against children being permanent outcasts. (Level 2 implies that in my state, unsure whether it means the same in the local jurisdiction of the poster)

I don't disagree with your conclusion, but the method.

Simply put, if we're going to treat them as permanent weirdos, just make the sentence life. Personal view: people who sexually abuse children deserve it.

What's the point in letting them out but with asterisks...

From the purely legal academic standpoint there is the concept of proportionate sentencing. If abusing and killing children gets the same sentence as abusing them, criminals will be incentivised to kill as well since there is no downside.

Because child rapists are applying game theory to decide which crimes they are going to commit? Your logic only makes sense theoretically. In the real world people barely ever consider the punishments to decide which crimes to commit, especially with emotionally driven crimes such as rape.

This statement is demonstrably false. Yes, people intuitively apply game theory all the time. For example, it is well established that in states with a three strikes law police officers are killed or attempted to be killed by felons having just committed their third strike, because it makes sense from a game theoretical point of view: there is no downside to it (if you're caught, life inprisonment awaits you), but there's a chance to escape.

> This statement is demonstrably false. Yes, people intuitively apply game theory all the time.

People do intuitively apply game theory, but they do so in ways that aren't strictly rational.

Rationally, deterrence is a function of the penalty adjusted by the odds of being caught and convicted. which means that doubling the penalty should have the same additional deterring effect as doubling the odds of conviction. However, increasing penalties has a relatively small deterring effect, and increasing enforcement a relatively large one.

One way to explain this is to assume that getting caught and convicted has large fixed costs that are independent of the length of sentence.

This tends to cut against the dominant tough-on-crime narrative that focuses on increasing penalties, BTW, but for some reason hiring more judges, prosecutors, public defenders, detectives, CSIs and other people to solve cases and actually go to trial isn't as popular as just mandating longer sentences (and coercing defendants to agree to a plea deal).

It’s not a complicated thought. Criminals see the news and hear from others. They’ll know if they’re going to get life anyway. It’s wrong to underestimate criminals intelligence

So we lived three houses from a registered sex offender when we were raising our kids. We didn't burn his house down. We didn't try to get him fired. We did limit which direction our daughters were permitted to ride their bikes in.

It's not all or nothing. He can be out of prison, he can have a house, he can get a job. Other parents on the street can make informed decisions about the risks to their children in whatever fashion they deem appropriate.

Generally speaking people who want to exclude the rapist aren't in a position to change his sentence after the fact. So the logical solution is unavailable and thus we are left to deal with messy reality as it is. In context it is perfectly reasonable to deal with this by excluding the rapist.

Is life imprisonment a valid punishment? Is it a valid rehabilitation method? Is it, as some others have pointed out, a valid form of protection for society from the ill-behaviors of certain people?

I believe that life imprisonment is a valid punishment, but more commonly a valid "Protection for the rest of society". I also believe that other "For life" restrictions can be valid as "Protection for society", too. Felons of certain financial often have their sentences include restrictions on their ability to hold certain kinds of jobs, including serving on boards of public companies or to act as treasurer/accountant/executive. This is not unreasonable.

We have a system of rights, and some are absolute. Some are tied to the social contract, and their revocation upon felony is not only valid, but required for society to function.

Life imprisonment is just plain cruelty! There is no rehabilitation in the scope… just plain revenge. If someone is broken beyond repair (or sick) then it would be unjust and cruel to throw them in jail for the rest of their life! Sure they must be kept away from the rest of society but rotting in a small cell with daily abuse and basically no rights in my opinion makes society as guilty as the criminals it tries to punish!

Justly the loss of freedom is the punishment and we should not try to subject the offender to abusive treatment but this is ridiculous hyperbole. An example of someone who deserves life imprisonment is Gary Ridgeway aka the Green River Killer who was convicted of murdering 49 but probably killed 90+ innocent girls.

Rotting in a small cell is better than he deserves and keeping him there is the only way society and indeed he can be safe. He is segregated even in prison not because of extreme risk he presents although he would certainly be a high risk if ever released, but rather because the risk that someone perhaps a relation of one of the many people he murdered would in turn murder him.

Keeping society safe by giving Gary a crummy but safe life doesn't make us as guilty as someone who lured and strangled innocent girls.

Actually the serial killer example is perfect! He is sick… he doesn’t deserve to suffer because it’s not his fault if he is broken! Ofc he must be kept away from society but that’s it… no extra harshness should be imposed!

> makes society as guilty as the criminals it tries to punish!

I think no, because even if we equate the level of savagery (declare that locking up someone for life in a tiny cell is exactly as savage as whatever they had done), those involved in the locking up retain a moral upper hand, because they do not make random, innocent people the targets of their savagery.

Very often people committing hideous crimes are just sick! Their mind doesn’t work anymore as it was supposed to (or never did). It is immoral to punish the. Particularly harshly! Sure… we must keep them away from others but that should be it!

yup, As a society we have to decide if the "justice system" is about retribution, or protection. A society that leans heavily on retribution, as most do, is always going to be unhealthy. If a person is dangerous, they belong in some sort of restrained living condition. If a person has done bad things, giving them excessive punishment because "they really deserved it" is silly.

A society that has individuals whose behavior (in a retribution-based society) calls for retribution will also always be unhealthy. Avoiding retribution won't heal it.

> advocate for branding their face

A lot of the doofuses make a hobby of this, making the job of the police a tad easier.

Tbh, this "contradiction" in the moral side of the progressive movement was bound to happen at some point. My own feelings about it are it's hard to judge either party from the outside. There is an argument that people should have a right to not associate with whom they'd rather not, but on the other hand, denying someone the ability to rehabilitate themselves by (yes) denying them your company seems also wrong. For example, saying "you'd rather not hire black people" and saying that's just your right to associate with is generally considered immoral today, so it's difficult honestly for me to pass judgement on either side.

> denying someone the ability to rehabilitate themselves by (yes) denying them your company seems also wrong

No it isn't; screw them? And can't they rehabilitate themselves without me?

> you'd rather not hire black people

Black is not a choice, like assaulting someone, and not some stain on your character.

We've come to the conclusion that this kind of characteristic of a person falls into a protected class, and discriminating on its basis is illegal.

From that it doesn't follow that any attribute of a person whatsoever is the marker of a protected class.

> it's difficult honestly for me to pass judgement on either side.

Yet, that's exactly what some judge did, in the case of the one side.

> For example, saying "you'd rather not hire black people" and saying that's just your right to associate with is generally considered immoral...

Martin Luther King put this rather clearly -- one is judging on the content of a person's character, the other is judging on the color of a person's skin.

> How does this make you feel? Do you agree that “Choosing one side must exclude the other”? Is this an applicable statement to make in this context?

This seems straightforward to me.

We are talking about people who have been victimized by another person, and may have a great deal of trauma from that event.

We likely wouldn't question it even slightly if they said they could not work with their abuser. Working with someone who was convicted of performing the same (or similar) abuse on a different person wouldn't be too much different from that I don't think.

I have notice the uptake of extremism in tech, especially among those who frequently use Twitter or Social Media.

Although admittedly I have zero tolerance for pedophile. I hope we can all agree on that.

I think so, because the person just wanted to nominate a replacement for themselves so they could be recused and avoid this other person. The job would still get done and both people would still be connected to the community while avoiding each other personally.

As a society we have taken the position that once you are a felon you are permanently subject to heightened scrutiny, and people who have been victims of crimes you committed can reasonably ask to not have to interact with such felons.

That is what people did in this case, and they were told that if they did recuse themselves they would be censured for breaching the CoC.

What they board has done has said that a victim choosing making use of a public registry to know to avoid certain people is someone who should be actively punished.

This is despite allowing this kind of avoidance being a significant part of the reason these registries exist in the first place.

No one has stopped this pedo from being on the C++WG - otherwise we wouldn’t be here - what happened was a victim of abuse said that they wanted to be given the reasonable accommodation of not working directly with a sex offender. They were told that not only would they not receive such accommodation, but that they would be punished for requesting it.

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