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 don’t think without the threat of jail - which is society taking away your time - some violent people would avoid crime.
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.
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.
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.
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"?
I agree they're not terribly common. That's fine if people disagree.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Once you're out you still need to survive. And if the only way of survival is more crime that's what you choose.
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...
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.
Sounds like a perfect solution fallacy.
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)?
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
If you reach some reasonable total let's say 100 years just do death penalty then.
> 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.