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Comment by hypeit | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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