I have to ask: does 20 years provide more social benefit than 10? 5? Surely there's diminishing returns on imprisonment.
As a deterrent and as a punitive, I get it, but even life sentences don't seem to deter crimes that can yield those punishments.
As a deterrent and as a punitive, I get it, but even life sentences don't seem to deter crimes that can yield those punishments.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_imprisonment_in_Norway
Perhaps the more important distinction: if we're going to let people out of prison eventually, we should make sure that prison is a place that is set up in the best way to make that eventual return to society successful. Right now, it feels like we do the opposite.
Ouch! I hadn't heard of this before, and I gotta say I'm not a fan.
I agree with it only in principle; it seems ripe for injustice in all practical details.
If you maintain your innocence, is that a lack of remorse? Can you be any kind of 'model citizen' in prison - engaging in charity or volunteer work? Who brings the +5 year charge or provides evidence for it? The prison staff who don't find your personable, or the shrink who doesn't think you're taking the sessions seriously (if shrink visits in prison exist)?
Yep, instead of "you definitely get out of prison after X years have passed" you instead get "you get out of prison in 21 years! (or never, depending on how we feel)".
People make mistakes, to err is human, and forgiveness should be provided to those with the capacity to change (ie harm less). Compassion is important. But if you don't believe you've done anything wrong, can we not project future potential outcomes? Prison duration is a risk assessment of harm reduction.
EDIT: Prison should still be about rehabilitation and treating humans humanely, to be clear.
Ostensibly the same thing as after a 22 year sentence, just later.
Naturally, by this logic I have to ask: why not 32 years? 52? 102? Aren't we doing society a disservice by ever allowing criminals to leave prison?
> Ostensibly
I chose this word carefully, because I think a lot of our preconceived notions on criminal behavior have not been validated by the real world, including the deterrent effects of long-term imprisonments.
Because the sentencing judge applied the guidelines provided by law as written by legislature, considered case-law, the specifics of this case and applied their professional judgement to come up with a 25-year sentence as an appropriate one for the crimes committed. If the defendant disagrees, they can appeal the sentence to get a second opinion.
You're attempting to reductio ad absurdum prison sentences - I'll apply it to your argument in turn - why send guilty people to prison at all? What's the difference between 1 day imprisonment and 60, or 6000? A sense of proportion is the difference between a black-and-white world and the one we strive for in reality.
We know the mechanics of why it was chosen. What I was asking was by your logic, 22 is less protective of society than 102, which makes me question the validity of "it protects society" reasoning. Why protect less when we have a quantifiably greater level of protection?
> You're attempting to reductio ad absurdum prison sentences
This is incredibly dismissive. We have arbitrary sentencing guidelines. They are based on reasoning, but that doesn't mean they are correct. They are fluid, change from locale to locale, and have unpredictable efficacy.
> why send people to prison at all? What's the difference between 1 day imprisonment and 60
You see, I don't think that's reductio ad absurdum at all. It's a valid question. You can argue for it and against it, but it isn't absurd or contradictory on its face.
> A sense of proportion is the difference between a black-and-white world
All you're saying here is 6000 > 1. We know this. I'm asking why 6000 is right, 1 is wrong, and why we throw away the other 5998.
The answer to all variations of your underlying question in your post is because when handing down sentences, there are multiple, oft-conflicting considerations. We don't only consider societal safety - if we did we'd just jail everyone for life.
6000 is right because it is the right point of balance between keeping society safe and the rights of the imprisoned, while reflecting the seriousness of the crime without being cruel or unusual. Prison sentences inherently take away rights from the prisoner, and this is yet another thing that's thrown onto the pile of considerations for tradeoffs which individually lengthen or shorten the term of imprisonment. It's not a binary decision like you propose (imprisoned vs not imprisoned for any crime), but finding the right balance point (likely region or volume) on multidimensional axes.
I'm not a trial judge, but I can think of the following factors off thr top of my head: nature of crime committed, remorse, amount of harm, restitution (if any), sentencing guidelines in the law, probability of recidivism, safety of society, safety of defendant, sentences issued on similar cases in the past, appeals on similar cases in the past, prosecutor sentencing recommendations, defense sentencing recommendations, time already served, culpability, the number of charges defendant is found guilty of and whether they can be served simultaneously or not, etc. You're ignoring all of these and projecting the sentence to a single dimension (societal safety).
You haven't answered why you think we imprison people in the first place (or if we should). We cant have a fruitful discussion about which sentence durations are "better" without knowing what metrics we are measuring.
This is why I asked why 22 was right and 32 is wrong. "Because the judge said so" is no more useful than my asking "why heads?" and you answering "because that's where it landed when I flipped it."
There might not be a "right answer," and I'm ok with that. But it's odd to decide it's right simply because an authority decided it was.
> You're ignoring all of these and projecting the sentence to a single dimension (societal safety).
I'm not ignoring them, I'm simply responding to the reasoning you gave. By your metrics, 22 gives 12 more years of societal safety than does 10. This is what you responded to me, and I'm trying to point out that I believe it's flawed. If there are more factors included, it doesn't make this reasoning less flawed, it's just a smaller slice of the judgment's pie.
> You haven't answered why you think we imprison people in the first place (or if we should). We cant have a fruitful discussion about which sentence durations are "better" without knowing what metrics we are measuring.
Perhaps inadvertently, I think you hit the nail on the head. We don't have metrics that validate or invalidate any of this. We rely on a set of arbitrary guidelines mediated by emotions and feelings. In a great many cases, I don't think we're accomplishing anything but pushing a problem away and pretending we fixed it.
You will save yourself and others time by steelmanning and front-loading your priors - especially in written discussion forums like HN... Unless you're one of those people who enjoy debating more than learning other perspectives. This thread should not have been this deep when I have been stating "there are other factors" in my second contribution to it, and it turns out you were agreeing all along.
This isn't what happened - my end of the conversation was a reaction to your replies and only your replies.
> This thread should not have been this deep when I have been stating "there are other factors" in my second contribution to it, and it turns out you were agreeing all along.
You did in the prior reply - at least explictly - only. Forgive me for not making assumptions of things you didn't say.
But again, my point was that if "protection of society" is a factor in this complex system, there's not much argument against maximizing that.
All that said ...
> complexity, which I suppose you felt you were strongly hinting at, but I had explicitly mentioned earlier.
This wasn't my conclusion, it was simply a reaction to getting more information in that reply than you had previously offered.
> Unless you're one of those people who enjoy debating more than learning other perspectives.
:(
Getting a reductive comment like this doesn't help.
I don't really see the harm in him working at McDonalds, for example, except maybe he'd embezzle from the till, so put him on fries.
No. Prison should be about punishment combined with rehabilitation, neither at the expense of the other.
It is perfectly OK to say that punishment, the infliction of pain, for a crime, is warranted even if it has no rehabilitative value, assuming that it is not demeaning or cruel.
Why? Several reasons:
1. Punishment has it's own value for the sake of justice. A hypothetical: Imagine there was a drug, with a 10% fatality rate, that perfectly rendered the receiver incapable of murder without any other side effects. They just perfectly gain control of their emotions and reason, or something to that effect. If a person goes and murders 50 individuals, but takes the drug and lives; they've been theoretically perfectly rehabilitated and need to be let back into society, right?
If you think, "of course not," you are now admitting that punishment has a value by itself.
EDIT: Also, this hypothetical, actually exists. Imagine this case with SBF. Imagine if the only penalty for his actions, were that he could not run a banking organization ever again, or hold more than $1,000,000 in any account that he controls. Perfectly rehabilitated, my hypothetical with the drug, in one swoop. He will never be able to commit this crime again.
I think I might very well run and do a financial fraud tomorrow. At least I'll enjoy the high life for several years. You are literally telling me, in that case, I could live for years, possibly decades (if I'm Madoff), and my only punishment will be that I can't do it again. After all, it's only about rehabilitation for myself; and to do otherwise would be punishment for punishment's sake.
2. If punishment is not given out fairly, and is only contingent upon rehabilitation; you are ignoring the rights and feelings of the victims and focusing too heavily on the rights and feelings of the criminal. Victims have feelings and rights, and considering they are the harmed, their feelings and rights ought to be first priority, and the criminal's second. Otherwise, victims feel the need to take things into their own hands. Always have, always will, as part of human nature. That's how you get societal meltdown, followed by vigilantism.
And if you think it sounds reasonable?
While there's some benefit (deterrence) to there being perceived costs to bad behaviour, it's arguable whether punishment for the sake of punishment stands up on its own merits.
In your proposed world, where murderousness is recognised as a treatable illness, it doesn't really seem reasonable to punish to punish or to imprison as a deterrent.
Think about it. Under this hypothetical (which I think is OK, everybody does Trolly Problems all the time), you should be just fine with this result. The deterrence value is there (10% chance of death), I've been rehabilitated permanently so I can be let out a week after I did the murder, it's all good. I might as well add some torture to the mix as well, because the drug will perfectly rehabilitate that too, of course, so it doesn't really matter how I did it either.
Some people are. Some people who have been victimized do forgive and ask for leniency.
There is an emotional and personal aspect to that, but typically we don't set laws that way.
I'd also argue that "it's all good" is not a fair measure for when we consider justice to be served. Practically, when there's nothing left to gain, the scale tips from justice to pure retribution.
I think you're confusing forgiveness with punishment. The two are not incompatible.
If your son hits your daughter, you forgive him immediately (you do not hold hatred or anger in your heart for that action); but you still punish him to deter the future behavior. The two are not incompatible, or at odds with one another. Similarly, it is not incompatible that a man who committed mass murder might be forgiven by the families (in that they won't hold hate in their hearts, or use his name as a curse), but the families may also simultaneously desire that the individual be removed from society.
> Practically, when there's nothing left to gain, the scale tips from justice to pure retribution.
Retribution is part of justice, and is not at odds with it. If I steal $500, I owe $500 as part of justice. If I steal $1,000; I owe $1,000 as part of justice. If I steal $10 billion dollars, a sum I shall never repay, I can only beg forgiveness and pay the most I reasonably can, for a reasonable amount of my life. For justice, at that point, recognizes that a society which allowed me to steal $10 billion in the first place, has some responsibility as well, reducing the required amount for retribution.
Not at all. You said "you should be fine with it," which is really "acceptance" rather than forgiveness, although they go hand in hand.
My point was simply that being fine with it or not being fine with it as an personal, emotional response typically does not guide modern societal rules.
> Retribution is part of justice, and is not at odds with it.
Inherently this is probably true, but we actually have laws that are intended to specifically exclude that as a factor, depending on jurisdiction.
The punishment so that the universe feels more fair to me isn't all that useful. Maybe as you suggest the mob lynchings in this case are unavoidable but I'm not convinced.
Happily (both for those who want to subjectively See Justice Done, and for those who upon reflection find it all a little perverse), the two don't really seem to be separable beyond a certain point.
A heavy sentence is safety for the criminal as well.
Hard to make that argument when discussing fraud, which by definition is intentional deception.
edit: here's the article...https://aeon.co/ideas/punishment-isnt-about-the-common-good-...
Retribution ("spite") is about getting even.
Rehabilitation is about making it so that the person is less likely to offend again when released and more likely to be of positive value to society.
Removal is about locking someone up so they cannot do more crimes.
A good prison system should balance all four.
It also seems like the population of ex-criminals couldn’t be representative of the population as a whole, right?
(FWIW I think the theory of deterrence is probably not correct, I can’t prove a negative, but the burden of proof lies at the feet of people who suggesting it I think).
There are absolutely times that I do not speed because I am concerned about the consequences of getting caught.
There are absolutely students in the school where I teach who follow given rules not because they agree with them, but because they are deterred by consequences. They refrain from climbing the volleyball net not from moral agreement, but because it will get them in trouble.
It's better for people to not commit crimes because they agree on the morals and principles involved... but if people don't agree or have a moment of weakness, the consequences are still influential.
In the case of students, they seem to try and cheat sometimes, so the deterrence doesn’t seem very effective. Anyway, the negative consequence is very disperse (it hurts the reputation of the school if they get through without learning anything). The main bad result falls on them (they waste thousands of dollars to intentionally avoid learning). They also might fail the final, not as a punishment, but as a natural result of not learning the material.
In the case of speeding, everyone here speeds. The flow of traffic is always 5-10 over the speed limit here. People are intentionally breaking the posted speed limit to go the safer speed (going the speed limit here impedes the flow of traffic and makes a more dangerous situation for everyone). I think it is more of an informal decision making process—people just follow the herd—but it is a funny example!
I understand the magnitude of deterrence effects may be in question, or that the relative worth of different types of deterrence are open to debate. But I don't really understand how something that is nearly a universal human experience can be in question. Almost everyone has chosen not to do something because of the consequences of outside rules.
Indeed, we can easily try and see. If I fail to be visible during break duty (so that students think there are unlikely to be consequences), students will climb the volleyball net. :D
> going the speed limit here impedes the flow of traffic and makes a more dangerous situation for everyone).
This has been studied and is itself a silly (untrue) anecdote.
Nope.
> I understand the magnitude of deterrence effects may be in question, or that the relative worth of different types of deterrence are open to debate.
In the context of the thread
> A good prison system should balance all four.
I thought it would be clear that the magnitude and the relative worth were the topic. Sorry if that wasn’t the case! I’m definitely not going to defend the idea that nobody has ever avoided doing something for fear of punishment (although I do think that in a well functioning society, most of the negative consequences should be natural, not artificially imposed as punishments).
> If I fail to be visible during break duty (so that students think there are unlikely to be consequences), students will climb the volleyball net. :D
I think if that’s the sort of thing you are worried about, you must be working with kids. They probably need a stricter treatment, since their brains aren’t done yet.
I think that if too many people see retribution as no longer being applied, some people will start to take matters into their own hands to seek vengeance.
The state has an interest in preventing that and assuring retribution is applied as evenly as possible, and counterbalanced by other mitigating factors (e.g. the degree of offense, the circumstances under which it occurred, likelihood of reoffending, penitence of the guilty, etc.).
So if the government would take a true rehabilitative approach, and maybe arrest people but treat them well, try to help them so they don't do the same behaviors in the future, a percentage of the population might see that as insufficient and take retribution into their own hands.
You've helped me realize why I've actually shifted my professional focus from wanting to change politics to wanting to change culture. Seems a lot of being in government is doing what the people want, and if the people want retribution, then the government has to follow it.
I hope for (and am working towards) a world in which we help people know our pain not by trying to cause the same pain to them, but by expressing our pain to them with more granularity, because the pain they'd feel as a result of retribution will never be the exact same pain we feel, as our contexts are way too complex to replicate exactly.
I really appreciate your comment, thank you for helping me think more deeply about this.
It may not be entirely descriptive, but it certainly is part of it. At some point Gary Plauché becomes common.
It sounds like you're trying to be part of the solution, which I deeply commend. Thank you also for your very thoughtful reply. It's appreciated.
Fraud? The money comes from somewhere; someone is harmed by it (Pratchett's Going Postal has a good line on it - "No, You Have Not. But You Have Stolen, Embezzled, Defrauded And Swindled Without Discrimination, Mr Lipvig. You Have Ruined Businesses And Destroyed Jobs. When Banks Fail, It Is Seldom Bankers Who Starve. Your Actions Have Taken Money From Those Who Had Little Enough To Begin With. In A Myriad Small Ways You Have Hastened The Deaths Of Many. You Do Not Know Them. You Did Not See Them Bleed. But You Snatched Bread From Their Mouths And Tore Clothes From Their Backs. For Sport, Mr Lipvig. For Sport. For The Joy Of The Game.”
But maybe it also has to do with whether people feel victimized. If no one felt victimized, would we punish?
So I imagine it's probably a combination of who feels victimized and who society believes should feel victimized. Because as others may respond, white-collar crime has people who get harmed as a result of the actions, even if it's not as obvious as the person directly punching them in the face.
One could argue that even the fact of breaking the law can harm those who went through great lengths to not break the law.
Yes, I know some of the people who lost money are rich, and much is being made of that by people who want to troll by saying that's the only reason he really got into trouble (e.g., on Reddit). But that's not true: there are plenty of victims from SBFs crimes, both rich and not rich.
And in this kind of discussion I suggest it's helpful to avoid hypotheticals and to look at the real situations and outcomes relating to the case we're talking about.
So if the spite causes people to feel sufficiently afraid to do the action in the future, maybe it deters people from acting that way?
edit: here's the article...https://aeon.co/ideas/punishment-isnt-about-the-common-good-...
Which is why I think the sentence is too low.
There are other ways he could make reparations. One would be to have one-to-one meetings with his victims, where they tell him in person how his actions affected them.
There's a fair chance it would bounce right off SBF, because he clearly has serious personality issues.
Then again, maybe not.
That sounds more like retribution than justice. I.E. wanting to cause him pain because he caused pain in others.
Of course, i don't have a better answer by any means.
Retribution is part of the justice.
Justice would be making the victims whole.
1) revenge ("an eye for an eye") - that's not considered a factor anymore today except as an upside-limit on the punishment, ie, the punishment should not exceed the damage caused. Here, the damage caused was immense, so don't think that'll be a limiting factor.
2) specific prevention - keep that particular perpetrator off the streets, so they can't commit crimes again. There's some argument that old people commit fewer crimes, so when the perpetrator is old enough, one can let them go. Maybe one shouldn't let SBF out until he's older than Madoff was...
3) general prevention, aka deterrence - make sure that the punishment (in conjunction with the probability of being caught) is sufficient to discourage others from committing the crime. This is problematic as apparently most perpetrators seem to think that they won't be caught (which is why capital punishment doesn't necessarily reduce crime rates). I think in this case it's good that the many, many crypto "operators" see that there is some downside in scamming people.
Losing 20 years of your life though will have a drastic effect on the rest of your life. As it should for some crimes.
Or is your argument we should skip from 10 to death, I'm honestly not sure.
The perceived benefit of getting rich and famous can make it easy to overlook the downsides of getting caught.
My perception of some of these financial crimes - Madoff included - is they start off with a small slip, rather than a full dive into fraud. A lot of times it snowballs while the person responsible keeps searching for a way out.
I wonder at what point SBF would have even said what he was doing was immoral. If you're running a Ponzi scheme you think you can salvage, would you compare yourself to Madoff, or would you think "I'm trying to set things right"?
Rather, I'm suggesting that in the eye of the beholder, a very clear case of fraud might be self-perceived as a bump on the road to lawful, legitimate financial dealings.
So the question is if SBF didn't see himself as committing the same crimes as Madoff (even if he was), would Madoff's sentencing and fate even register as a potential deterrent?
Arguably, the social benefit is to deter more major crimes.
If all crimes were X year sentences, then once you comitted one crime you may as well continue, since the punishment is the same either way.
Probably out in 17 years which is still a long time.
I was most surprised by the recommendation of medium security. Not sure how well Sam will do in a medium.