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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

I'm generally against punishment as a whole, as I don't think it works generally, but considering how little responsibility SBF has taken for stealing all this money I think there's a reasonable chance that he'll just turn around and do the same scam again if he's not thrown in jail, or at the very least having the SEC monitoring every single thing he does.

Granted, I'm a victim of the Gemini Earn unregistered security scam [1], and so maybe I cannot be an impartial judge here, but SBF is kind of the only non-violent offender that I can think of right now that I honestly feel should be locked up and throw away the key.

[1] Before you give me a lecture about how I should have known better and how you'd never fall for such a scam and how Gemini's claims of FDIC insurance would never fool anyone smart, just rest assured I've heard it from the denizens of HN and my peers. I know I was stupid to have done anything with cryptocurrency, and even more stupid to think that Gemini wasn't misleading people about their Gemini Earn program. Just to be clear though, it's not my accusation to called Gemini Earn an unregistered security, it's the SEC's (https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2023-7).

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"we shouldn't lock people up for non-violent crimes except for ones similar to the one I was a victim of" seems like kind of a..limited view?

I don't think there's anything particular about SBF that makes him more likely to re-offend (And even if he wanted to, one would hope he'd have a hard time convincing folks to hand over another 8 billion for him to embezzle a second time).

Which isn't to say that I don't think he should go to jail (he definitely should!), just that I don't think he's any more jail worthy then people who engage in other forms of non-violent theft and/or fraud.

Well, I mean, that's why I admitted my bias. I do think I'd have the same position even if I weren't a victim of a crypto scam, but I felt it important to disclose potential conflicts in what I'm saying.

SBF went on many podcasts and interviews, and instead of showing even the slightest hint of remorse, he instead denied everything, blamed everyone but himself, then pleaded ignorance, all while also claiming that he probably won't be charged with any crimes. I recommend looking at CoffeeZilla's coverage on this.

We can find plenty of examples of convicted conmen that manage to get funding again. Off the top of my head, the wolf of Wall Street himself, Jordan Belfort, was convicted of securities fraud, spent almost two years in jail, was banned from any kind of stock trading, but now promotes all kind of cryptocurrency and multilevel marketing scams.

“I don't think there's anything particular about SBF that makes him more likely to re-offend”

No? Not the alleged (and very convincing) parent involvement? The total lack of remorse and continued denial? The latter is typical for fraudsters, but the former is pretty particular to SBF, and definitely would incline someone to be a repeat offender imo.

I think I would more easily be convinced that Madoff deserved rehabilitation than SBF.

There are certain behaviors in fraudsters that make me think they are psychopathic fraudsters and really incapable of dealing with the world without deceit. That naturally overlaps other dark triad traits that make it hard but not impossible for someone to put aside deceit and allow some deflation of their ego, etc.

Can you say this with a straight face while seeing so many people over and over pay Donald Trumps legal fees by donating to the latest cause.

I'm not a fan of Donald Trump at all, but he's never actually been convicted of fraud has he?

I'm not disputing that he's committed fraud, but I think that a lot of his followers can do a lot of mental gymnastics and convince themselves that he never actually did anything illegal, in no small part because he's never directly been convicted.

> he's never actually been convicted of fraud has he?

His corporation was given the death penalty for wildly overstating the value of assets.

Isn't he banned from operating a nonprofit in New York now, and didn't Trump University get a civil judgement (I'm aware you might not call that a fraud conviction) that disbanded it? That's just from memory - if not technically a criminal, he's quite certifiably crooked, but people will still throw money at him, and I'll never understand people.

The other figure that comes to mind is Adam Nuemann (and I'm not alleging anything criminal against him), but apparently he just has a personality that draws VCs with dumptrucks full of money like moths to a flame.

Clearly people just have tons of money they don't need these days.

In regards to Trump University, I think it was technically settled [1]. I think in that particular case, people argue he had plausible deniability because it was just a bad branding deal, and that he wasn't directly involved in anything crooked. I don't remember the outcome the Donald J Trump foundation embezzlement scandal from a few years ago, but I'm sure his followers would just say NYC is a crooked liberal state and it was rigged against him anyway. In fact, because it's rigged against him, that's why he needs donations!

Just to be clear, I think he's a moron and a fraudster; even if you could prove that Trump University and the Donald J Trump Foundation and the hoarding of classified documents and the collusion with Russia was all hogwash, the fact that he didn't divest himself from his businesses after assuming power should be a bright red flag to people.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/federal-court-a...

Wasn't there a survey showing that his followers now trust him over their religious leaders? Which I guess says it all.

He used blatantly demagogical language throughout his entire campaign and presidency, and basically claimed that "he alone" knows how to fix every problem.

I tend to be pretty far-left (at least by American standards), but some of the "Bernie Or Bust" rhetoric has gone a bit crazy sometimes; I don't think Bernie Sanders is nearly as horrible as someone like Donald Trump (I voted for him in the primary in 2016), and I certainly don't think he's an outright fraudster, but I do feel like he (and his followers) kind of cozy up to demagogue-adjacent language as well.

I think people really really like the idea that one magical person can and will solve all their problems.

But that's about as far as I'll go towards partisan politics since I don't want to get hellbanned.

I suspect we're ideologically fairly close though I did not vote for Sanders in the primary, I believe I actually skipped 2016 then voted for Warren 2020, but I'd have been fine with Sanders though I agree he did have a fanatical contingent that was a bit off-putting. I don't think he actively encouraged that either.

I've long worked with and even dabbled a bit in sales (which would have shocked a young hotpotamus to learn - it's basically the opposite of my natural inclinations). I was quite bad at it myself - I would often try to explain nuances to people and how they need to invest in their own skill as well as buying a good product. Salespeople who promised them simple solutions that would solve all their problems were far more successful, which was a bitter early lesson for me.

What rankles though is that Trump is so transparently a buffoon - I can't believe it works for him.

> I would often try to explain nuances to people and how they need to invest in their own skill as well as buying a good product.

Yeah, this is (partly) why I was not a good professor/teacher. I don't think I was horrible at it, but I have a very strong compulsion to mention every bit of nuance in what I'm talking about. Sometimes that can be a good thing, but when a student is trying to learn introductory programming, getting into the weeds about how the textbook is "basically right but kind of simplistic because in this case..." really is not the right approach for teaching freshman students. I grew a new respect for teachers who learned to suppress those instincts and teach the simplified stuff.

I almost think that Trump being an idiot works to his advantage. He's so utterly stupid that I think he's completely unburdened by any kind of nuance, and as a result it's very easy for him to speak authoritatively about everything, no matter how wrong he is.

He's currently on trial for fraud. Among other things wildly overstating the value of his assets.

Consider adding corruption and large-scale fraud to your list.

Punishment has three purposes: deterrence, incapacitation and retribution. The first two are simple. The last seems irrational. Yet if you ignore it, you wind up with people executing a parallel system of justice (i.e. taking matters into their own hands) and generally losing trust in society.

Within the category of crimes that maximise the need for that last element, it’s wide-scale actions that harm a lot of people, visibly, done by a member of or someone perceived to be proximate to the elite.

aside: I see "retribution" on these lists a lot and usually these days it's disgarded. IMO it's discarded prematurely.

The sort of retribution that is like "X hurt me, so punish them" is the one everybody seems to no longer believe in, and that's fine. But there is another sense of retribution that I think is very valuable, which is "maintaining the status quo that people who commit crimes are punished for them". It's not personal retribution but more of a "belief that the system will handle retribution", and it is important because it helps us believe that there is a legitimate criminal justice system that takes care of justice for us and which we can delegate justice to.

You alluded to this in your comment when you said "losing trust in society". Mostly I just want to observe that to me it feels like it deserves a separate bullet-point instead of being lumped in with "retribution".

I would rather have a belief that the system will find the root causes of crime and take actions to fix them then believe the system will punish those who break the rules. Punishment causes damage to society beyond just the individual being punished. Criminals have jobs, families and relationships with people who haven't broken the law. Punishment should be used sparingly as the cost to all of society is high. I also believe we'd have lower crime if the massive budgets currently being used on police would be instead used to improve the health and welfare of high crime communities.

> would rather have a belief that the system will find the root causes of crime and take actions to fix them then believe the system will punish those who break the rules

I thought similarly. But these are baked into our psyches. Jailing the drunk driver won’t bring back the dead child, but if you don’t do it there will be backlash. This sense is profound enough that we generally celebrate people who take justice into their own hands when they’re denied retribution through lawful channels.

If I were to cite one common failure mode of the last decades’ criminal justice reform efforts (in America, but coast to coast) it’s in attempting to rationalise away our social need for retribution. The key is in recognising that every exercise of justice need not satisfy all three facets. A remorseful defendant need not be incapacitated. And a crime with no human victim need not seek retribution.

> I would rather have a belief that the system will find the root causes of crime and take actions to fix them then believe the system will punish those who break the rules. Punishment causes damage to society beyond just the individual being punished.

In your belief it seems you discount the cost of "finding the root causes of crimes and taking actions to fix them" with the idea seeming to be that a greater good is achieved that way than through punishment. However, you fail to realize that there are very real costs to society for enabling this root cause analysis, to the detriment of our civil liberties. Every time you take off your shoes at the airport, you are being punished for someone else's crimes.

> I would rather have a belief that the system will find the root causes of crime and take actions to fix them then believe the system will punish those who break the rules.

I prefer both

*discarded

IANAL but I'm curious if intent is the deciding factor. Maddoff got 150 years because he knowingly operated a criminal enterprise and admitted to the whole thing eventually. His sons even testified against him when they found out. Maddoff went to great extents to construct his criminal enterprise, operating a small boiler room out of the front office.

If prosecutors can show that actual malice and intent were part of his motive then logic would follow he'd get a Maddoff-like sentence. If he's just the worlds biggest bumbling idiot that people put too much faith and money in then it'd be lesser. I'm not quite caught up to when SBF knew he'd started a criminal enterprise versus when he was making reckless decisions.

Punishment, deterrence for others, and deterrence for the individual themselves, are three important parts of why the state has consequences for bad deeds.

The US is pretty punishment-heavy. As a non-US person it even looks sadistic. It's "now I got you, you son of a bitch" social game from "Games People Play".

Since you're against "punishment as a whole", I assume you by "punishment" mean "I want them to suffer for what they did"?

Giving more than (say) 20 years to most 20-year-old murderer is no different from 120, from either deterrence perspective. When they're 40 they'll be a different person. 120 years of terrible prison conditions does not make anyone better off, compared to 20. Except for the victim's "sense of justice". But man, 20 years? No year more than that will bring your loved one back.

Anyway, I agree that we need both types of deterrence for SBF. Otherwise what's to stop people counting on getting "only" 10 years. Steal a billion dollars, hide it in cryptocurrencies, and when you get out of prison you're older, sure, but you are super rich.

We need deterrence from him doing it again. And we need deterrence for everyone like him, and everyone who would be remotely involved him people like him. People need to know that if you help this kind of scam, there are dire consequences. Which is why his parents should face the full weight of the harm they caused, to show that it will all be taken away.

But I don't see that as "punishment". Not in the way I think you mean it.

> When they're 40 they'll be a different person.

Is there any evidence of that?

I say this with sympathy as I suspect some number of violent individuals have as-yet-undetected genetic abnormalities that would make them 'blameless' for their actions if we could track it down. However that wouldn't change their behavior. My son has a non-violent known genetic abnormality and in 20/40/60 years his behavior wouldn't change unless some effective treatment is found.

So I think there needs to be some realism injected into this discussion. There are people I would not want as next door neighbors even after they've served a long prison sentence.

There's a lot of evidence that most people mellow out with age, age-crime curves show this clearly with dramatic peaks in the late teens. Teenagers and young adults are more prone to acting impulsively, with less foresight for the future.

There may be some people who are irreparably 'genetically damaged' from birth and will never improve, but this isn't the general case.

I feel like most of us kind of intuitively know this at a somewhat visceral level. If a two year old does something obnoxious (e.g. throws food at you), I think most people won't be nearly as upset as if a 40 year old did. I know when my nieces or nephews do something annoying, it's substantially easier for me to roll my eyes and say something like "they're just kids, don't get angry with them" than it is when a full-on grownup annoys me.

I'm quite confident that 18 year old me was still basically a child. I never committed any violent crimes when I was 18, but I did a lot of other dumb irrational things that I don't think I'd do now.

In addition to the other reply you got from someone else:

I'm not saying they'll necessarily be great people. But people do change. Especially the understanding of consequences is not fully developed in your early 20s.

So even if they are basically the same people, they would be much less likely to act on it at 40 than at 20. And really, we're talking about deterrence of committing crimes, not deterrence of bad moral character.

> Since you're against "punishment as a whole", I assume you by "punishment" mean "I want them to suffer for what they did"?

Yeah, I clarified in a sibling comment, but that's basically what it comes down to.

I generally just don't think punishing people with the express purpose of making them suffer is a good thing. I think it's cruel, and I also don't think it actually works in regards to helping society long-term. The fact that it's sort of common knowledge that you'll be sexually assaulted in prison, and people seem bizarrely fine with that because "they deserve it" really disturbs me, for example.

In regards to SBF specifically, I'm not convinced he won't try and run a similar scam again; if not in the US, then in another country with less strict securities laws. He doesn't appear to have any remorse about what he's done, and blamed everyone but himself for everything.

I agree that we have no need for vengance against the criminal.

But the fact that SBF would do it again is not a case for vengance/punishment, but for deterrence. And, frankly, it's harder to launch your next scam while you're currently incarcerated.

I hear you saying "I don't want vengance, but…", but there's actually no contradiction there. You want deterrence and to prevent recidivism.

And merely taking all his money, and all his parents money, is not actually a deterrence. But that doesn't mean prison is vengence/punishment for punishment's sake.

> it's sort of common knowledge that you'll be sexually assaulted in prison

While a blasé attitude toward such abuse is certainly reprehensible, I don't think there's any support for the magnitude you describe.

Even the most dramatic statistics imply that prisoners are far more likely to not be assaulted.

Official numbers are like 2-5%, activist numbers are in the 20% range.

Anything greater than 0% is horrifying of course. Although FWIW I also checked official and activist numbers for non-incarcerated males and females in the US, and it's actually very similar.

(Never been in prison, never been a victim, never been a perpetrator, not in law enforcement, not an activist, don't know what I'm talking about, but wish the problem could be understood honestly and eliminated completely.)

I suppose that's what I get for relying on common knowledge.

If that 20% number is right, that's completely terrifying. A 1 in 5 shot being sexually assaulted is still very high, and when I have argued with people about prison reform, they seem wholly uninterested in fixing the problem.

> Giving more than (say) 20 years to most 20-year-old murderer is no different from 120, from either deterrence perspective. When they're 40 they'll be a different person

There was an interesting interview with Matt Cox (stole $55 million or so via mortgage fraud) where someone asked him what amount of prison time would have deterred him from re-offending (he got like 30 years originally).

He said anything above 5 actual years in prison (so like 8 sentenced years) and he was never breaking the law in a major way again. That losing such a length of time was not worth any amount of money to him, essentially.

Do you think punishment is an ineffective deterrent?

I do not think punishment is a good deterrent, no; I think the data more or less says that as well. If you look at Scandinavia, where they generally have a much higher emphasis on reform instead of "punishment for punishment's sake", and they also have a substantially lower recidivism rate compared to the US.

Now obviously, I'll fully acknowledge that it's not completely apples to apples; there almost certainly a million differences between the US and Scandinavia that contribute to differences in crime statistics, but I think it does demonstrate that reducing emphasis on punishment doesn't turn the world into this post apocalyptic dystopia.

> they also have a substantially lower recidivism rate compared to the US.

How sure are you of that? It's easy to get lost in the weeds, but looking at similar timelines and similar definitions of what constitutes recidivism, the US compares favorably to Sweden [0].

Worth noting is that the data is very noisy. You'd expect that recidivism would be monotonically increasing with years post-conviction, but it varies quite a bit year by year so this is not what the statistics show. This noise also makes it pretty easy to cherry pick numbers to suit your argument.

[0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/recidivis...

This is from today:

https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/nio-av-tio-gangkriminella...

90% recidivism rate. Scandinavia is not a success story anymore.

You better have another look a the Swedish gang murder rate, it's staggering (in Swedish terms). The world is changing.....

From [0]:

> More than 60 people died in shootings last year in Sweden, the highest figure on record.

This may be a lot of people for Sweden (~0.5 death per ~100K people); it's not a lot of people in the general sense. Per [1], 19,000 people died from gun homicides in the US in the same year (5 per 100K people). Not exactly a sign that Sweden's system is failing relative to the US.

[0] https://apnews.com/article/sweden-shooting-explosion-deadlie...

[1] https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2023/cdc-provisional-data-gun-s...

I can assure you that every single Swede agrees that it's failing. People are horrified at what's happening.

Anyway, bringing up Scandinavia as one unit doesn't work anymore when there's such a big difference between Sweden and for example Norway where restorative justice is still successful.

probably have to look at the first derivative or second derivative of murders wrt time to get a sense for how people perceive the change?

You are against the concept of punishment as a whole? Or just for financial crimes?

I don’t think without the threat of jail - which is society taking away your time - some violent people would avoid crime.

I'm generally against punishment for punishment's sake; obviously if a serial killer is running loose, they should be locked up as a matter of making sure they don't kill more people, and maybe that even applies to non-violent crimes as well.

What I don't like is the American take [1] of locking people up for years and years and then ruining their remaining lives with a felony conviction making them forever unemployable, all to stroke some kind of cosmic idea that we are "even" for whatever they did.

If you look at other countries that have a much higher emphasis on reformation, and less of an emphasis on "punishment", they have a measurably lower recidivism rate.

That's basically what I'm getting at; I don't really believe in "punishment" as some cosmic good, I believe in maximizing safety and reformation.

[1] Just a disclaimer, I'm American.

Here in New Zealand the current government came into power 6 years ago with a policy of reducing the prison population by 30 per cent. Not by increasing focus on prevention of crime, but by locking up fewer people. They achieved this target, and as a result crime - especially violent crime - has skyrocketed.

I think you live in a sheltered little bubble. In fact we know from your first post in this thread that when you're personally impacted by crime you quickly change your tune, much like hundreds of thousands of former NZ Labour voters.

> In fact we know from your first post in this thread that when you're personally impacted by crime you quickly change your tune,

That's actually not what I said. I was disclosing a potential bias but I never said that I "changed my tune".

I was mugged about two month ago and had my expensive iPhone stolen out of my hands. I filed a police report and reported the phone stolen to Apple, but I very explicitly said that I didn't want to press any kind of criminal charges on the off chance that the phone is recovered and the thief was caught.

> iPhone stolen out of my hands

People still steal iPhones?? I thought the non-reusability of parts had eliminated that problem.

Sorry to hear about your misadventures, I hope you were not injured.

> People still steal iPhones?? I thought the non-reusability of parts had eliminated that problem.

This guy did! Snatched it right out of my hand. I of course did the iPhone lock on "Find My", and since I reported the IMEI number to the police I don't think they'll be able to easily activate it, so I suspect that the phone is probably on the bottom of the Hudson now.

He did lightly shove me, but I wasn't really "injured" at all; not a scratch on me outside of my ego.

Also with felony conviction and with the records being there for however long they are it makes it nigh impossible to get a job once your prison sentence is over.

Once you're out you still need to survive. And if the only way of survival is more crime that's what you choose.

It's hard to say how effective it is but an aspect of that sort of punishment is general deterrence which became more common versus reformation approaches in the 80s and 90s, where the intent is to increase the perceived risk of the crime. I think generally more approach on reformative punishment in the US would be good, but there also still examples where deterrence is useful.

One more recent example is DUI enforcement and license revocation,[1] or tax evasion jail time. The goal isn't entirely to reform those who commit the crime, or keep them from being able to commit further crimes, but to increase the percentage of people not committing crimes by changing the perceived risk to reward ratio.

[1]https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/809950.pdf

> If you look at other countries that have a much higher emphasis on reformation, and less of an emphasis on "punishment", they have a measurably lower recidivism rate.

I have trouble finding good evidence for this. Easy enough to find cherry picked numbers when someone is trying to make a point, but what I see is that the data on recidivism is pretty noisy and subject to a number of parameters that can make it hard to compare across jurisdictions.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/recidivis...

You call it 'cosmic good', but there's nothing cosmic about it, the victims are often right there in court, and it isn't exactly justice if all they get for the suffering that was inflicted on them is to get to see their offender get some therapy and let out to live his life.

Eg, a rape victim is likely going to have at least mental scars for much of the rest of their life, there's nothing cosmic about the rapist having to suffer for at least a comparable length of time for inflicting that on the victim.

I don't believe that two wrongs make a right. I also don't believe the world is a video game where "suffering points" are counted. I of course feel bad for any victim of a violent crime like murder or rape, but I don't really see how it benefits the world to have the rapist "suffer at least for a comparable length of time as the victim".

A rapist should obviously be put in jail to prevent them from raping other people, so I'm not saying that they should be free from consequences, but no, I don't think the world is better place because we have a bureaucratic reenactment of "I Spit on Your Grave".

Maybe in some isolated case a violent offender will feel the punishment and pain they're getting and then empathize and feel like they brought it on themself, but I think in a vast majority of cases, the offender has already rationalized what they're doing and just gets increasingly mad at the system.

How exactly would you even measure a "comparable length of time of suffering"?

If it is true that retribution does not have deterrence value, and anything we do along that line will just make the criminal more sullen and likely to reoffend in the future, why not just toss the key and be done with it? Life sentences for everyone. Recidivism rate 0%.

I’m sure you realize how abnormal your opinion is. Most people and societies disagree with you. You shouldn’t speak as of your ideas are inherently correct.

I'm not sure why you are saying this. I never claimed my ideas are inherently correct, I didn't try and provide a syllogism or proof or anything, I just said what I believe.

I agree they're not terribly common. That's fine if people disagree.

The threat of punishment doesn't stop people from committing violent crime. Even if you totally eliminated the threat of prison, the actual threat of committing violent crime is that someone will retaliate/defend themselves against you. If you're willing to put your life on the line to rob someone, whether or not you might get put in jail isn't even going to register.

Non-violent and financial crime is a different story. SBF should go to prison for life and maybe that would dissuade others from trying to pull of scams of this scale. Every politician who accepted money from SBF should also go to prison if they don't return 100% of the money given to them.

The threat of punishment is broadly ineffective at preventing violent crimes that arise from inflamed tempers or insanity, mental spaces in which people do not respond rationally to incentives and punishments.

However, incarceration incapacitates convicts and prevents them from being able to re-victimize the public for the duration of their incarceration. Locking up serial killers is a good idea, not because it dissuades other would-be serial killers (it probably doesn't) but rather because a serial killer who's locked up in a cell is a serial killer everybody else doesn't have to worry about.

(Furthermore, the threat of punishment probably does dissuade the kind of murders that might be committed in 'cold blood' by rational people. For instance, it may be easier for a robber to shoot everybody in the jewelry store than to waste time with crowd control, but doing the robbery nonviolently is incentivized by the severe penalties for mass murder.)

I agree that this is a more legitimate reason to put people in prison, but I think it needs to be very selective to be effective. Serial killers need to be taken out of circulation but drug offenders do not imo. Often you turn people into an even deeper life of crime after removing them from society, putting them in psychologically damaging situations and exposing them to intensified organized crime that exists in prison. Not to mention any collateral damage such as the offender's family who may now also suffer and be drawn more towards conditions that would breed crime.

With nonviolent crimes, such as drug abuse and financial crimes, I think the utility of incarceration depends on the degree to which the criminal might still be hurting society in nonviolent ways which would be prevented by incarceration. Maybe drug abuse is itself a victimless crime (I think there's room to disagree fwiw), in which case incapacitation via incarceration wouldn't be useful.

But I think you can't make that claim about financial criminals like Bankman-Fried or Bernie Madoff; these were not victimless crimes. They victimized many people, therefore putting them in prison for the rest of their lives is a fairly straight forward way of making sure they'll never get the opportunity to do it again.

> Not to mention any collateral damage such as the offender's family who may now also suffer and be drawn more towards conditions that would breed crime.

Particularly in the case of these two men, the damage to the offenders family is completely irrelevant; their families are wealthy and are probably beneficiaries of the crimes anyway, so screw their feelings. And it's not like Bankman-Fried has a young son that will grow up to be a criminal because his daddy is in prison. Elizabeth Holmes has some kids but I'm confident they'll be fine with their mother in prison; their father's family has plenty of resources to raise them properly. And what of the children of the victims of white collar crime, who will grow up poorer because their parents were scammed? This 'family impact' angle of objection to imprisonment for white collar crimes isn't very persuasive.

I'm also starting to think that people underplay the devastation financial crimes cause relative to physical violence. People in a very real sense "eat money".

If you steal someone's life savings you've harmed them way worse than just giving them a beating. And investment fraudsters tend to also have a lot of victims.

That's never mind the physical harm that results from the stress of losing your life savings, including substance abuse and in extreme cases suicide.

I agree, if you see up thread I said SBF should go to prison for life.

Fundamentally if you're going to have laws, and for the laws to mean anything, there has to be a consequence for violating them. There are maybe three ways to do this: financial penalties (fines), community service or some other sort of forced labor/obligations, or incarceration.

If you're not willing to do these things, you should just do away with the law in question. Otherwise you reduce the respect and confidence people have for that law, and by extension all law.

That’s an awfully certain statement. I don’t know man, it seem likely that some people will be dissuaded from pursuing non passion driven violent crime by appropriate risk of punishment.

Sounds like a perfect solution fallacy.

It's not a perfect solution but it's also not believable that what's stopping people from committing violence is the law and not the violence itself. If you're willing to commit premeditated violence, you're already far beyond the influence of the law.

If someone carjacks a car they are willing to accept the risk that the person they're robbing may have a gun. They are literally willing to put their life at risk, something only someone with nothing to lose would do. Do think maybe getting caught by the police and spending 10 years in prison is as big of a threat to this person as being shot and killed (a risk they've already decided to take)?

have you considered that a person who is in a life situation where turning to crime becomes a viable option is perhaps underestimating the risk and negative impact of either situation?

In that case the threat of prison is also not a deterrent.

Or, both are deterrents but one or both can be weaker than the other depending on the perceived risk by the person committing the crime. Having multiple deterrents should be a greater deterrent as a whole across the average of potential criminals.

I think I more or less agree, except for this:

> Every politician who accepted money from SBF should also go to prison if they don't return 100% of the money given to them.

Even if they surrendered all the money given to them, and lets assume they even paid interest and another fine on top of that, I'm not sure they should be allowed to be politicians anymore.

Politicians are very specifically a "trust" job. The fact that they even took the money signals that they were receptive to bribes, and I think should signal to the courts that they cannot be trusted to represent the will of their voters. Just because bribes and lobbying are commonplace right now doesn't mean they should be.

> SBF should go to prison for life

I sincerely believe in the death penalty in cases where more than $1 million is stolen. Let's put the fear of god into the white collar business criminals and then maybe they'll rethink things.

I'm very very broadly against the death penalty even in the worst of cases, but even entertaining what you suggest, I certainly think that a million is pretty low to be executed for.

I'm not even sure how you'd fully quantify that; suppose I had a flash drive with a crypto wallet worth two million bucks in my backpack, and then when I get up to go to the bathroom someone steals my backpack.

Now, technically this person stole "more than a million dollars", but I don't think you'd suggest we dust off the gallows just for snatching a backpack would you?

I had hoped that it would be clear from context that I'm talking about someone who commits financial fraud, not just someone stealing a backpack, but if that was not clear then that is on me.

Disagree on $1 million being a low threshold. There are fraud operations out there that steal $10k from one pensioner and $50K from another that in aggregate hit $1 million. I think everyone involved in the fraud end of something like that deserves to forfeit their lives.

I mean, I was being deliberately obtuse on it to be fair!

While I could see myself getting onboard with locking these fraudsters up for the rest of their lives, I think our disagreement stems from the fact that I think actually executing people should be reserved for explicitly violent crimes, if at all. As stated, I'm broadly against the death penalty in any case, but I'm more amenable to it in regards as a direct means of public safety from violence.

Statutes as harsh as this have been tried but were repealed for unspecified reasons (Draco’s laws in Athens) or because juries wouldn’t convict in death penalty cases very often (England’s Bloody Code).

Yeah, I think I saw in a video or something where you used to be able to be hanged for forgery, which basically led to no one ever being convicted of forgery because people didn't feel like the punishment really fit the crime.

I believe in linear sentencing. Set some base level. Like minimum wage, multiply by 8. And for each such value add day to sentence.

If you reach some reasonable total let's say 100 years just do death penalty then.

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