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Comment by w0z_ | Hacker News Reader

The US prison sentence lengths are insane.

Insanely low? Insanely high?

SBF hasn’t really accepted responsibility or apologized through the trial, and didn’t at sentencing either.

Judge Kaplan seems to have taken a balanced view — far from the statutory maximum, less than the U.S. wanted, more than the defense wanted.

There will of course be appeals — SBF has already indicated he will file one.

There’s good coverage of what took place at sentencing today here — https://twitter.com/innercitypress/status/177334004374401064...

Also of note is since this is a federal conviction there is no parole in that system, and so unless SBF is successful in his appeal, he will spend at least 255 months in prison, that’s a 15% reduction versus the total sentence in return for good behavior while serving his sentence.

High, generally. The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and US sentences are an outlier in terms of how long they are (they’re not the longest, but the whole picture is kind of shocking).

> The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world

It's actually the 6th:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/262962/countries-with-th...

I get your point, the claim was incorrect. But if you're only beaten by Salvador, Cuba, Rwanda, Turkmenistan, and American Samoa... Well, maybe the overall point stands: "Highest in the world" is hyperbole, that much is true, but the USA has an insanely high rate of incarceration, higher than most countries, and definitely higher than all "developed" countries. As a point of comparison, the next OECD member on that list is Turkey, which has about 34% fewer prisoners per 100k people than the USA.

Assuming the accuracy of that source on the numbers, its actually the 5th.

Yes, the United States is the sixth listed, but the 5th listed is part of the United States, not a separate country. (So are several others, but I don't think Guam or the US Virgin Islands are big enough that they move the US overall rating down far enough to matter.)

When you can't solve crimes you have to make the sentences really long as a deterrent.

A difference in philosophy on prison sentence length. The higher incarceration rate is almost 100% explained by sentences that are on average roughly twice what the UK imposes (as one example).

Three suicides related to the theft.

People also commit suicide if the bank repossesses their home, their spouse has an affair, their surgeon makes an error, etc.

I’m not saying that SBF has no culpability, but I don’t think you should get prison time for causing someone’s suicide, or at least society doesn’t act as if it’s in any way equivalent to murder.

The scale of SBF's fraud was so enormous that the money could have been used to save hundreds of lives that have now perished. So if we use a little bit of EA napkin math, we can conclude SBF's crimes were on par to hundreds of murders.

You think so? 25 years seems quite reasonable to me. He stole billions of dollars.

Not to undermine what he did. The US prison system just seems very unproductive, put him in a factory for 20 of those years.

And then we will have people complaining about slavery...they already say that prison jobs pay below minimum wage so they are slavery.

I don't like the incentives that creates. Private prisons and the existing prison labor system are bad enough.

forced work for who breaks the law? you risk to fall in the "slavery with extra steps" situation

Slavery as a punishment for crime is explicitly authorized in the United States Constitution.

To piggy-back on this, not only is it explicitly authorized it's often expected.

Failure to voluntarily participate in a work-program is grounds for solitary confinement (which entails more penalties than just being by yourself).

federal prisons already require prisoners to work. We DO have slavery with extra steps

no, private prisons are productive?

Private prisons account for 8% of the total prison population.

The victims are going to get paid back (in 2022 crypto prices) due to the appreciation of FTX’s assets (crypto and Anthropic shares). So if someone lost a bitcoin when FTX collapsed (BTC was at $18k at the time) they will get more than $18k but not $70k which is today’s price.

If I had 1 Bitcoin in an FTX wallet, I'd like to have 1 Bitcoin back. Not whatever the value of Bitcoins is in Dollars.

If you wanted those kinds of banking protections, then you should have used a currency system that has those protections. Bitcoin is "easy" because it is unregulated, but the flip side of that is that you the consumer get no protection, and you shouldn't expect any.

This is pretty twisted. FTX can claim it made customers whole by benefiting from exactly the speculative gains that it prevented its customers from getting.

It’s certainly immoral but it’s the risk you take investing in an unregulated market. There are regulations to prevent exactly this when you invest in stocks or put your US dollars into a bank account.

That has zero to do with SBF's intention and should not be in any way a defense against the wrong perpetrated against them.

It could easily have crashed.

That it went in a direction that helps make his victims more whole is entirely happenstance and SBF should get ZERO credit or recognition for this aspect of restitution.

They've never made any sense to me, but neither do my country's sentence lengths. Ours seem too light, whereas the US's seem extreme.

I guess I'm really not sure what value there is to locking up someone like this for 25 years when in a sane system/society there should be far better options.

How so. Do you think it's too long, too short, too ...?

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