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Comment by KMag | Hacker News Reader

Some people feel that extreme sentences are deterrents, but studies show that people don't rationally calculate the expected value of their punishment. Almost nobody committing crimes thinks they'll get caught, so doubling jail time doesn't have much of a deterrent effect.

Almost everyone who commits crimes while expecting to get caught is in desperate circumstances (near starvation, jail preferable to available housing, loved one in big trouble, etc.), where the time isn't a big deterrent, either.

It's much more effective to increase (at least the perception) of the probability crimes will be caught and prosecuted. Excessive jail sentences presumably result in greater costs, meaning less money available on the investigation and prosecution side. (Yes, this makes faulty assumptions about how government budgeting works in practice.)

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> so doubling jail time doesn't have much of a deterrent effect.

Doubling jail time probably doesn't move the needle much, but I would be very surprised if there wasn't a significant behavioral difference between "go to jail" and "don't go to jail at all".

It's important to consider the impact of excessive jail sentences not only on the offenders, but also on society as a whole. Incarceration can have significant social and economic costs, including strained relationships between the incarcerated individual and their family and community, as well as reduced employment opportunities and income potential upon release. These factors can contribute to recidivism and create a cycle of crime and punishment.

At the same time, it's important to consider that there is an important emotional component to jail sentences. They aren't meant to be strictly utilitarian. Crimes of a large enough scale deserve severe punishment in part because it is important for the victims and society to feel that justice was served.

People are vocalizing their lack of trust in the government to serve justice in part because cases where people whom they feel deserved more punishment didn't receive it and similarly with people whom they feel didn't deserve as much punishment as they got.

I'm not a psychologist, but my feeling is that US culture's over-emphasis on punishment as a means for victims to find closure is a disservice to crime victims and their families. Particularly for major crimes that result in long trials, it seems like many victims or their families are strung along with the hope that the outcome of the trial will finally make them emotionally whole, only to discover at the end that no amount of punishment will make them feel whole. Their time, effort, and anxiety put into following the trial would have been much better spent trying to quickly move on to integration and acceptance. Waiting for the trial to end delays the healing process by years.

I think the importance of punishment as a factor isn't just a US thing. I think every justice system gives some importance to it. Plus, the idea (IMO) isn't that it'll make them whole, I think they're usually pretty cognizant of the fact that it won't. It's somewhat like the idea of karma.

An example that comes to mind is that for all the layoffs happening lately in the tech industry, a common sentiment here on HN seems to be that CEOs are talking about taking responsibility but usually don't really face proportional negative consequences to demonstrate how they're doing that. Similarly with criminals, of course you can and should rehabilitate them to prevent re-offending, but if that's all you focus on, you kind of miss out on making them take responsibility for their actions.

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