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On top of the psychopaths you have extremely disagreeable people who do understand the pain of their victims, but just don’t care about them, maybe 3-5% of the population.
The only way to encourage these people to behave is to have an effective system that will punish them if they break the law. The expected return of crime needs to be negative to stop these extremely selfish people from engaging in it.
Most people who believe in rehabilitation/restorative justice refuse to believe that such people exist.
The existence of a rehabilitation system is not a deterrent and about 5% of the population would enthusiastically commit their “first crime” then enthusiastically enter the rehabilitation program. They would continue this cycle until they encounter a proper deterrent.
Not to mention that someone with his background and upbringing should be even more aware of the difference of what’s right or wrong than other criminals.
I’m against all crime but at least I can kind of understand how someone on the edge of society, with poor or no education, etc. would see crime as a viable option, but someone that literally doesn’t need the money? Let him go with a symbolic punishment? I think that’d be worse.
To attain affluence solely from crime you’d have to be part of the organized crime, so yes, I’d consider them on par with someone who did what Bankman-Fried did, since money laundering is one of the charges.
It definitely does not rehabilitate as rehabilitation is almost unheard of in most jails or prisons.
Prison is only scary for criminals the first time they enter. Once you've been through the system going to prison a second time is a walk in the park. When I got arrested and sent to prison last year for retweeting a government tweet I walked back in the jail like I ran the place. I knew all the staff, I had my friends there. Even one of the nurses at intake pulled me aside like I was a celebrity and congratulated me for my social justice work. I felt like a boss. Any deterrence factor had long since worn off. And I've only been locked up twice. The other guys around me had been inside dozens of times. One guy had been locked up 70 times.
And we talk about the cost of locking people up, let's say an average of $50K/year in prison costs. People also forget to factor in all the court costs, for the judges, prosecutors, staff etc, probably runs to another $100K+ for a trial. THEN, when someone is locked up they are not generating any income tax or paying any sales taxes. They are not buying any goods or services with their money. There is a huge negative loss there from their lost income and spending to the economy.
Then multiply it by the two or three million who are locked up or on house arrest.
Could you expand on that? What the complete story?
Just asking, because all three of those guys did several years of federal time.
I somewhat agree with what you say about prison, but I'm not sure we should start with the charismatic and media-savvy child of politically connected Stanford professors, who had plenty of opportunities to do well and live a full life without stealing anything or cheating anyone.
Though I was unjustly convicted under false pretenses by federal prosecutors willing to lie and misrepresent the law and my rights were deeply violated, having been to prison in the process I found it filled with quite a large number of people who absolutely should be there. One drug dealer, for example, laughed about forcing a desperate woman to fuck his dog for dope. There were also a pair of twins that tried to acquire a toddler for use as a sex slave.
There were also some people that shouldn't have been there, perhaps not put in prison on false charges like me, but taking years off their life was a basic injustice that did nothing to advance society and likely encouraged further criminality.
All nice and stable societies have long-term incarceration. Japan has notoriously hard prisons, even worse than most federal facilities in the United States. If I could, I would change how the prisons worked and treated their prisoners. I would definitely segregate off some of the categories of prisoners from others, and we surely have enough facilities to do so. But without the ability to denaturalize people and permanently expel them to a prison colony, you are going to need large numbers of people in longterm confinement. I'd say society would be much better off if half the prisoners I met never walked free, and a quarter were never incarcerated in the first place. The US justice system has 3 major problems: it convicts too many people, lets the wrong people avoid prison, and has too many people given kid glove sentences who really should go down for a lot longer. Even having been falsely convicted and tortured by the United States, I am not so foolish as to believe in prison abolition.
Be careful what you wish for, generally going around throwing your political enemies in prisons has frequently had longterm consequences for the safety of the people doing so and the people that support it.
If were going to make a radical policy change in sentencing then it has to be done for everyone all at once.
Note: I'm not convinced prison should be off the table.
There is more to Shkreli and his sociopathic capitalism.
Shkreli showing his real stripes:
A drug comes before the FDA for approval, and it is opened up for comment. Shkreli lodges an objection to approval of this drug.
Why? Because it's unsafe? No, trials thus far have shown it to be safer than existing drugs.
Why? Because it's less effective? No, it's also been shown to be more effective than existing drugs?
Perhaps it's more expensive? No, cost of R&D and production, and estimated retail costs are expected to be lower than existing drugs.
Huh, odd. So why did Shkreli oppose this drug getting to the market?
Because he and his company had just bought the patent to one of those 'existing drugs' recently, and this drug coming to market would torpedo demand for his drug, and torpedo the profitability of his investment in buying the patent.
Man of the people, fighting for healthcare rights, Martin Shkreli.
Like, send SBF to Antarctica to clean toilets for the next 10 years, or do the same at a military base, or allow them to work exclusively on oil platforms etc.
Disagreeing that this should be done is one thing, but to claim that it can't be accomplished due to logistical difficulties just shows a severe lack of imagination.
A US federal prisoner costs (according to some quick searching) ~$120/day, the minimum wage is ~$7.25. So to a first approximation you could get the guy a blue collar job paying taxes, and pay someone else to do nothing but watch him for 15 hours a day to certify that he's still doing manual labor, and still come out ahead.
[1] so he could buy a car and house but not skirt the rule by using loans against an asset portfolio to make more "income" for himself.
I’m not a fan of the current imprisonment establishment either, but this solution doesn’t seem viable.
Are they allowed to have kids? If yes, are the kids included in the punishment?
I feel bad that Sam is going to go away for life, and ideally we'd live in a society where we don't need prison to reform people, but Sam is a case where there is considerable deterrent effect and well as a public protection interest. When someone steals so much from so many and admits no fault, that's not a person who can go to a day program and reform their ways, they need severe consequences to get the to honestly reform.
There's also what the victims say should be done. Just thousands and thousands of people felt pain, and will get a say in the sentencing. If they all forgive, sure, it's okay to give him a light sentence, but the degree of suffering SBF caused is just so profound people will want justice to an un-repentant fraudster who stole their future.
Victims of crime deserve revenge in some part and the state is the mechanism to deliver that revenge. We should always remember the victims of crimes first.
The administration fees to monitor and enforce all that wouldn't be cheaper for the state.
> what's the point of putting him in prison.
To keep him from scamming more people, since zebras don't change their stripes. Especially desperate ones that would be prevented from working white-collar jobs and forced to pay restitution from what they make at other legitimate jobs. And as others have already said, a deterrent.
> Do we really, as a society, need revenge?
No, but his victims do.
> more humane for him
Oh, poor baby he is.
"Yes" in the sense it's a deterrent in place of revenge. It's on purpose and codified in the law for that reason.
The revenge part of justice isn't there because it benefits the convicted's rehabilitation. It's there because it increases the ambient peace of society to have the state take upon itself (and codify, and normalize) the very human desire to seek a balancing of the scales by bringing someone low who brought you low.
We punish criminals with discomfort, constraint, and loss of freedom so that their victims don't hunt them down and cave in their skulls with a two-by-four. We give them what's coming to them so they don't get what's coming to them directly from those they've wronged.
If there were justice in this world his mind would be put in a simulation and he'd be forced to do all of the things that the people who lost money did to get theirs in real time. Let him feel that loss before you then wake him up and make him spend the rest of his time in prison.
2. Prison makes SBF a spectacle-- commit fraud, go to jail and be miserable.
3. How the hell are you going to ban "white-collar" work?
4. How many tens of millions of $$ do you think SBF has hidden? How many favors are owed to him? He's never going to have to work another day in his life.
Yes - a lot of victims of crimes want some token of revenge. We should honor the victim's wishes within a reasonable way. Revenge brings comfort and closure to many people - it's an entirely natural emotion. People very likely ended their own lives and he ruined the lives of many people due to his rampant fraud. Think about those people first.
Secondly, punishment is a big part of why prison exists. It should, hopefully, dissuade a decent amount of people from committing crimes. It keeps "honest people honest" to some degree.
> Because that's what this is if he gets more than 10 years in prison.
I guess I sort of agree here but not entirely. We grant a lot of trust in elites that have access to these financial apparatus and it can be very difficult to detect fraudulent actions. For this reason, fraud and financial crime at this level should be punished harshly. The most effective way of doing this is to remove an individuals freedom.
I'd agree prisons could be more humane and modernized. Caging people all day isn't the best, especially if they will remain for many years. Some initial harsh punishment (hard labor, isolation for a couple years) followed up by easier rehab incarceration and eventual parole (15 years from now) would suit this particular case IMO.
I think putting him to work until he pays off every stolen dollar would suffice. Making minimum wage stamping license place, it should only take him ~540,906 years[1] of work to pay off his debt to society.
The guy's admitted no fault, no remorse, and kept trying to do the slick-conman-swindle in front of the judge and jury. He's learned no lessons, and we're all better off without having to worry about predators like him.
If you can get 2 years for stealing a car, this seems reasonable.
[1] With weekends, but no holidays.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/may/17/walmart-shop...
He is among the worst of the worst in society. It's really easy to do what he did. Everyone's got a story, or could come up with one if you let them.
We have punishments for the worst of the worst in society. I think we should be more lenient, and under my values he might not be going away for 10 years, but there should be something substatial here.
I find it quite shocking to find people on HN that think he should get NO prison, but perhaps this is a typo.