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Comment by cortesoft | Hacker News Reader

This is why I never understand people who get mad at ‘lenient’ sentences for crimes. There are no crimes I would commit where, say, 1 year in prison wouldn’t be a deterrent but 5 years would be.

If the point of prison is to deter crime, then adding longer sentences isn’t going to change anything.

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> There are no crimes I would commit where, say, 1 year in prison wouldn’t be a deterrent but 5 years would be.

Part of the way punishments are set up are to deter vigilante justice.

If someone murdered someone I love and I knew they'd only get 1 year for it, I'd be tempted to return the favor and take the year myself.

It is interesting to see the raw visceral reaction to the DC council attempting to reduce prison sentences for crimes committed in the city. Congress even got involved to make sure it didn't happen, which has not happened in decades. Apparently a 14 year sentence for carjacking is not enough deterrent, it must be 20 years according to Congress, the President, and even the mayor of DC.

That’s all politicking. There are lots of states with lesser penalties for the same crime including plenty of red states. Republicans just see this as another facet in the culture wars they can use to scare their constituents.

That's more than the 6 years a US soldier got for torturing an Afghan man to death in 2003.

The length of sentences seem rather arbitrary to me. Knowing that how you're treated in prison is a game of luck does not help.

This is what happens when a major metro area has no representation in Congress.

Consider that the secondary point is to separate society from perpetrator.

Deterrence is an aspect. So is justice. Justice means punishment for the wrong-doer. It needs an independent arbitrator as whenever someone is punished, they feel it too harsh and whenever someone is wronged, they feel the punishment too lenient.

Not suggesting the punishment in this case was fair or just. I’m an ex-hacker who got very lucky to not end up with criminal charges when I was 18. I have great empathy for what Shane has gone through.

If I am a thief and I know I'm just risking one year in prison I may as well keep stealing. If I'm stealing I'm already a lowlife - Worst case scenario

If punishment for stealing was cutting my hand, I'd definitely not risk it.

Note: I'm not justifying harsher punishments for copyright infringement and I think an appropriate punishment for theft would be forced labor where the profits go to repay what was stolen and some more.

In a just world copyright infringement would not be theft: the only thing we should charge is whoever breached their contract with the source and redistributed the content.

It shouldn't be easy to persecute copyright infringement, it's a "natural tax" of the market: if your content is so popular you can't track who is redistributing you obviously made a boatload of money.

You're right.

https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/five-things-about-deterr...

For some people, a 5 year sentence means society is free from their crimes for 5 years.

People do things because they get something out of it and most will weight the risk of penalties vs the benefit. A long sentence would probably be harder to justify in the minds of would be offenders.

Because deterrence and rehabilitation aren't the only purpose of prison time. Protecting society is another. You don't ever want a Ted Bundy back on the street, because rehabilitation is probably impossible, whatever is messed up in his brain to make him like that is there for life. These violent sociopaths must be locked up forever. Admittedly, these people are a small proportion of all people in prison.

> You don't ever want a Ted Bundy back on the street, because rehabilitation is probably impossible, whatever is messed up in his brain to make him like that is there for life

And yet they put people in prison for life over basically nothing https://reason.com/2021/05/13/this-38-year-old-man-will-spen...

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