Hacker News Reader

Comment by vxNsr | Hacker News Reader

I always have trouble with posts like these, the comments are full of people who ask why prisons exist, and seem to imply they would rather crime and criminal behavior not be punished at all.

They also chafe at the idea that prisons should be allowed to inhibit their inhabitants’ freedom in anyway. As if prison should actually be a really nice free hotel that we send people who commit murder and rape.

I totally get that someone can sound eloquent in written form, especially if a professional editor spends some time cleaning up the grammar, etc. but that doesn’t change the fact that this particular person ended someone else’s life in cold blood and is now whining about not being able to send his daughter poems in stanza form. The other guy can’t send anything to his daughter at all because he’s dead. Maybe you should recognize you deserve to be punished.

View on HN

> you deserve to be punished.

I don't like scumbags who commit those crimes any more than you do, but honestly, if we just want to be as f'd up as possible to them, then it starts to get pretty close to the "just do capital punishment" argument. If on the other hand we'd like them to reform themselves so we don't just have to keep them locked up forever or kill them, various forms of psychological torture run counter to those goals so we actually should care that they're not being subjected to cruelty.

If you look at prison as a whole, I don't think the needle is anywhere close to "so pleasant that people don't even want to stay out of it" so no, I don't think it's necessary to make every aspect of it worse just to spite them. It won't bring the victims back. And just having them locked up at all is sufficient to keep the rest of society safe.

The USA imprisons more people than any other country on the planet.

Don’t generalize that no one wants no prisons. Our prisons should not operate like Abu Ghraib. Why are drugs, weapons, sexual assault and violence occurring in what is supposedly secure facilities? Why are prisons allowing/encouraging tribalism along racial/ethnic lines? Why is rape and sexual slavery permitted?

Our tax dollars fund all of this.

Other industrialized nations have better training for law enforcement and much better prison systems, which don’t operate like hellholes.

They don’t promote a private prison industry which lobbies for longer sentences so that their firms get to bill the state and enrich their owners.

> they would rather crime and criminal behavior not be punished at all.

If it's possible to do so and sufficiently discourage crime up front, still reduce recidivism, and keep society from harm, then yes, absolutely.

Being the real world and lacking such a perfect solution doesn't mean that can't still be the direction we aim in.

The goal is maximizing net benefit to society.

There's absolutely some amount of benefit to the satisfaction the punitive approach can have for those harmed, there's definitely benefit to getting people to choose to not commit crimes due to consequences (but with diminishing returns), and there's absolutely benefit to keeping actively dangerous individuals separate from society. However, when we make prisons so bad that people come out as dangerous or more dangerous than they went in, has society actually benefitted on the balance?

Are we, collectively, better off because one murderer was made utterly miserable for 15 years who is just as likely to murder again than we are if that same murderer was made moderately inconvenienced for 10 years, but is less likely to murder again?

sufficiently discourage crime up front

the problem here is that many attempts to discourage crime upfront come with a reduction of personal freedom and privacy. eg. surveillance.

> ended someone else’s life in cold blood

As he's convicted of 2nd degree murder, this is precisely what he did not do.

That's not necessarily true in all jurisdictions, as the elements defining degrees of murder are not universal. But, interestingly, in the case of Michigan (which applies here), you may be correct, insofar as a "premediated killing" is construed as a killing performed "in cold blood".

Michigan's statutes indicate that first degree murder includes any willful, deliberate, and premeditated killing. [1] Whereas second degree murder includes all "other kinds" of murder which do not fall under the specifically enumerated conduct rising to the level of first degree murder. [2]

While the second degree murder statute does not expressly describe what circumstances would precipitate those "other kinds" of murder, the statute outlining the scoring system for crimes involving "intent to kill" suggests that second degree murder would be committed where the offender had unpremeditated intent to kill or created a very high risk of death knowing that death was the probable result. [3]

---

[1] http://www.legislature.mi.gov/(S(cdcjvuv1er3twxx1crhz3tb3))/...

[2] http://www.legislature.mi.gov/(S(cdcjvuv1er3twxx1crhz3tb3))/...

[3] http://www.legislature.mi.gov/(S(cdcjvuv1er3twxx1crhz3tb3))/...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com