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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

If I broke into a person's house and stole $1000, even if I didn't directly hurt that person, I could expect to get several years in prison, basically regardless of the state. Lets say three years to be conservative on this?

Sam Bankman Fried stole billions of dollars [1], probably often around $1000 at a time from tens of thousands of people. If going with my logic, he should be getting a lot longer than 25 years, upwards of hundreds or thousands of years. Obviously, it's not a linear relationship, the crime was non-violent, first-time-offender, etc. I'm just saying that 25 years seems pretty fair to me considering the magnitude of the crime.

I am one of the victims (well, of Gemini Earn anyway), and I think if I were given the choice, I'd probably sentence him to 20-25 years.

[1] Or at least so grossly mismanaged that there's no real purpose in drawing a distinction.

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> If I broke into a person's house and stole $1000, even if I didn't directly hurt that person, I could expect to get several years in prison

Almost definitely not, especially if it was your first crime. It’s pretty unlikely you’d even be caught.

Severity of the punishment has extremely diminishing returns on discouraging future crimes. The only other impetus for a longer sentence is if you think the defendant is likely to commit more crimes when released. Besides that, longer sentences are hard to justify.

I do think that Sam Bankman Fried will commit more fraud the second he is able to. He hasn't shown any remorse, and he just blames everyone else for this mess even when there's dead-to-rights evidence.

Your logic is strange. With robbery, the primary crime is the violence (or para-violent threat), and not the theft. This is easy to demonstrate: the punishment for breaking into someone's home in many jurisdictions is essentially the same, even if you steal nothing.

"the primary crime is the violence"

citation needed

Was the sentence "this is easily demonstrated by..." not originally part of the post you're replying to?

"If I broke into a person's house and stole"

The owners, the police, the prosecutor and the jury would be far more interested in the breaking and entry charge than the $1000.

In fact, in every state of the Union, if you're facing me whilst committing the act of trespassing inside my home, I can legally punch a hole through your torso with a 9mm.

Many states (15) have a duty to retreat, not everywhere is a stand your ground state (35 states). It's complicated, but most of the time in your home there is an exception.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duty_to_retreat in all of those states the duty to retreat doesn't apply if in your home (or workplace)

They specifically mentioned a scenario where someone is trespassing into the home. There isn't a single state that has a duty to retreat requirement that pertains to home invaders.

I specified that the perp is both facing me and in my home (as opposed to my possibly 1000 acre lot - I wish). This scenario is legitimate self defense in all 50 states (unlike some states in Europe)

> Sam Bankman Fried stole billions of dollars [1], probably often around $1000 at a time from tens of thousands of people. If going with my logic, he should be getting a lot longer than 25 years, upwards of hundreds or thousands of years.

Apparently that logic applied to Bernie Madoff. He got 150 years. How are these cases so similar and yet got radically different sentences?

Even more, Madoff actually turned himself in. I doubt he was "remorseful", mostly just realizing how insolvent he was, but it demonstrates at least some accountability on his end.

> How are these cases so similar and yet got radically different sentences?

Partially in that SBF's victims will get "100%" back, based on the USD value of their holdings at the time.

Madoff victims, especially the wealthily got a large haircut on their holdings and clawbacks on money they had taken out as far as 5 years back from sentencing.

Also Maddoff's fraud went on for 15+ years, SBF's was maybe a year to 18 months at the most?

These two cases are so widely different that you can't really compare them except at a superficial level, ie they were both fraud, and that's about where the similarities end.

> These two cases are so widely different that you can't really compare them except at a superficial level, ie they were both fraud, and that's about where the similarities end.

I have to disagree on that. Mostly because the order of magnitude of both scams is the same (billions) and both destroyed how many lives?

And sure, maybe FTX victims will get 100% back, but when? How long until you see that money back?

a lot of the answer is that Madoff wasn't trying for 25 years. When you're 71, they're both a life sentence.

Madoff's system was only a Ponzi; there were no investments; all new clients' money was used to finance returns and withdrawals of previous clients.

SBF's system was to use clients' money to do illiquid investments. Was it fraud? YES, because he lied to his clients and said he didn't invest their money. And that's why he was tried and punished. But was it the same kind of fraud as Madoff? NO.

In law, intent is everything. If you kill someone by accident, or in self-defense, or after planning their murder for years, the law will treat that very differently; yet in all cases the result is the same (the person is dead).

Same with fraud. It's not the same if it's a pure fraud where there is no possibility that the victims will ever see their money back, or if it's a fraud where it's possible they will be made whole, even if that possibility only exists in the mind of the perpetrator, because the mind of the perpetrator is what the legal system is interested in.

They don't stack like that, there is a curve with points and considerations like if it's your first time offending and the malice involved. Those points correlate to years. Judges don't have to follow the points, but they almost always do and if they don't, may have to explain it or have their case messed with in appeals

You’ve identified one of the primary failures of the courts. As the number of victims raises the punishment for each victim decreases in our judicial system. Victim count is an aggravating factor and should be a multiple when calculating punishment. Instead we have a system that pretends to grant justice but is an actuality a tool of injustice and repression wielded by people whose entire perspective can be effectively reduced to might makes right. Despite our toys and complicated rhetoric we’re still just violent animals holding those with the least autonomy the most accountable and those with the most autonomy can escape the consequences of their violence indefinitely. A mass revolt or protest of the judicial system in the next generation would not surprise me in the least.

Does this mean we would stop charging people with victimless crimes? If so, I'm all for it.

> If I broke into a person's house and stole $1000, even if I didn't directly hurt that person, I could expect to get several years in prison, basically regardless of the state. Lets say three years to be conservative on this?

We are seeing this kind of crime on a regular basis in our neighborhood. The cops have pretty much given up. They also mentioned that even if they make an arrest, the bail is set so low, these guys would be out quickly. Overall, my impression is there is zero deterrence for these kind of crimes here (a pretty affluent neighborhood in one of the tech cities in the west coast)

Breaking and entering into someone's house and stealing their cash is very different from having an obligation to pay them out cash and not fulfilling it. While it may be the same amount of money, it's a radically different relationship between parties.

Why do you think SBF requires 20-25 years to rehabilitate?

We don’t rehabilitate in this country.

"Won't someone please think of the poor criminals" is definitely a tough sell in the US.

Compassion for criminals who get what they deserve is false compassion. The victim is the proper object of compassion.

The three purposes of punishment are retribution, rehabilitation, and deterrence. Him getting 25 years isn't undeserved.

Why do you think he will ever rehabilitate?

Prison is not and shouldn't be about rehabilitation. It's society that requires to be less exposed to SBF, by 20-25 years.

He's a first-time non-violent offender. If that wasn't the case, I'd agree with you.

First-time sentenced for crimes against 1000s of people.

Everyone keeps repeating "first time offender", but I think that term is kind of misleading.

If I stole exactly one empty car exactly one time, then yes, I'd be a first time offender in the sense everyone thinks it. If I stole a thousand empty cars, and only got caught after the 999th, then sure, legally I'd be a "first time offender", but I would have still committed the crime a thousand times.

This wasn't a one-time clerical error that he failed to report. This was an intentional bit of theft that kept going for years. It's really not a "first time offense", and I don't think it's fair to categorize it as such.

My client has never stolen billions before. Mercy, your honor!

If you commit ten robberies before you're caught are you a first time offender? What vapid logic

Vapid logic and yet you were stimulated enough to reply.

"Habitual offender" has an actual legal definition in most countries that does not align with your views.

Punishment should be good enough deterrent for others. Otherwise it would be worth for someone to consider to commit a first time non-violent crime to steal e.g. $10m and get 5 years sentence, suck it up (or even commit such crime in country that has good prisons like nordic countries) and then enjoy retirement after still being young (after hiding your cash loot). Most people will never earn such money during 5 years and many will never earn during lifetime.

> Punishment should be good enough deterrent for others.

On that subject: The Russians seem to have leaked videos of the accused ISIS terrorists being tortured: "Though the goriest clips were not shown on state television, the brutal treatment of the defendants was made clear. And the decision by the Russian authorities to showcase it so publicly in court, in a way they had almost never done before, was intended as a sign of revenge and a warning to potential terrorists, analysts said." [0]

Will it work? Doubtful, because:

1. We should never underestimate the human susceptibility to overconfidence — and to rationalizing away warnings from past experience: "Well, when I do it, I won't make their mistakes." (Cf. the first chapter of The Right Stuff, describing several episodes in which a military test pilot gets killed in a crash; with each fatal crash, the dead pilot's colleagues think, How could he have been so stupid? I'd have never done [fill in action]. Yeah, right ....)

2. Plus: That sort of thing just motivates the real fanatics to escalate the cycle of revenge and punishment. (I'm rereading Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August; she describes how WWI started out in somewhat the same way.)

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/26/world/europe/russia-terro...

I don't see any much how this is related. I remember in a book "The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie To Everyone — Especially Ourselves"

There was a quote something like "We don't lock our doors because we are afraid of people stealing, we lock our doors because it is an easy way to take away the temptation to steal from a lot of people who would otherwise be honest"

Very good book and it showed via study that there is some threshold where at one point more people would be dishonest. It there would be completely no punishment for any stealing (even if non-voilent) I'm pretty sure more people would consider stealing.

TLDR; the idea of a punishment is not to completely prevent such behavior in the future in society but to reduce such behavior across whole society.

I don't even normally believe in "punishment" because I don't actually think it works. I think SBF will spend 20-25 years in prison, continuously blaming every human on earth except himself the entire time. If he thought what he was doing was wrong, he wouldn't have continued to do it for so long.

That said, I also have no reason to think that if he's not locked away, he won't just do the same or similar scam again. He hasn't shown any remorse, and he just pretends to be ignorant of all the crimes. If not put into jail, I suspect he'd just go to a country with difficult extradition laws and do some other cryptocurrency scam from there. Putting him in jail for 20 years at least avoids it for 20 years.

Punishment does work. What do you imagine instead? Nothing? Quoting [0]:

  First, that punishment has three purposes – retribution, rehabilitation, and deterrence – does not entail that each of these purposes must be realized in a given act of punishment in order for that act to be morally legitimate.  For example, we may justly imprison a recidivist thief even if we know from experience that he is extremely unlikely to change his ways as a result of his imprisonment and even if circumstances make it unlikely that his particular imprisonment will deter other thieves.  Similarly, the fact that a given act of capital punishment may not fulfill all of the ends of punishment does not by itself suffice to make that act morally illegitimate.

  Second, while there is obviously a sense in which capital punishment can prevent rehabilitation, there is also a sense in which it actually facilitates rehabilitation.  How so?  Consider first that a wrongdoer cannot truly be rehabilitated until he comes to acknowledge the gravity of his offense.  But the gravity of an offense is more manifest when the punishments for that offense reflect its gravity – that is to say, when the principle of proportionality is respected.  A society in which armed robbery was regularly punished with at most a small fine would be a society in which armed robbers would have greater difficulty coming to see the seriousness of their crimes, and in which they would for that reason be less likely to be rehabilitated.  Similarly, a society in which even the most sadistic serial murderers are given the same punishments as bank robbers is going to be a society in which sadistic serial murderers will have greater difficulty in coming to see the seriousness of their crimes, and thus will be less likely to be rehabilitated.

[0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/10/on-rehabilitation-a...

> Punishment does work.

I should clarify. I think punishment mostly makes the punishee angry with the punisher. I don't think that they generally feel like they are paying their penance. If they didn't already think that what they were doing is wrong, I really don't see how they are going to suddenly start just because they were punished.

I generally think that the way that Scandinavia does prisons is better. I think that punishing people specifically with the intent of making their life worse is viscerally satisfying (the retribution part of that quote), but I think it's not actually a good thing to organize a society around increasing suffering. The US has a higher murder rate than Western European countries, despite having stricter punishments, including the death penalty. There can be thousands of factors that influence that, obviously, but it doesn't seem to be massively deterring crime.

I think prisons are basically a necessary evil; there are certain people that are antithetical to a functioning society, and so it's probably better to separate them from most people. I think the point should be, though, to not view these things as "punishment" but more "a chance at reformation".

Prisons in the US used to have college education programs, and job training programs, so that when you left you had a means of supporting yourself that wasn't criminal. If I understand correctly, this is still the case in Sweden, and I think that's a good idea.

Now of course, there are humans that are so warped that really no amount of job training is going to help them (e.g. a Jeffrey Dahmer), and at that point you really do just need to treat it like punishment.

You think he can be rehabilitated? By American prisons? Seriously? Look around; that didn’t happen.

Incarceration is not only about rehabilitation, it’s also about justice and deterrence

I don't know that it will actually "deter" anyone, I think most criminals think they're not going to get caught, but I think it comes down to the much simpler "it's hard to commit more fraud when you're in prison".

I'm not going to say it's impossible, maybe he could be managing this big crypto empire from jail, but it would certainly be harder to do all that from prison.

professional criminals absolutely think about what’s getting prosecuted and how much hard time you’re looking at. It’s a business to them so it becomes just a part of the risk equation.

For the “isolation from society” i think it’s the least compelling part of lengthy incarceration. You can probably achieve the same effect with just house arrest and other such restrictions

They tried that with Sam Bankman Fried and he broke the terms of his house arrest almost immediately.

I believe he will immediately start new scams and rope in fool me twice grade investors and be very effective if he has a nice WFH environment instead of the filtered mail and computer with no network kind of an environment.

He probably is a higher risk of racking up 25 more years every 18 months than a shank specialist.

That's the thing; I think a lot of the violent offenders who steal money in prison are often just desperate people. They never had a lot of money, so they mug someone and steal the wallet and car of someone that they think is better off with the hope of actually having money. It's still wrong, I don't support it, but it's at least a much more sympathetic action.

People like Sam Bankman Fried are much harder for me to feel bad over. He was never struggling to pay rent or having to worry about not being able to afford groceries next month. He was already well off, and just decided to gamble with other (poorer) people's money because he wanted more money.

This means, to me, that this was a more cold and calculated thing, not something out of desperation or frustration, just greed. Robbing someone that you think is rich is bad. Robbing someone you think is poor is something supervillains do. If he's already been able to square that circle once, I see no reason that he wouldn't be able to do it again.

Forgive me for not crying over how he might actually have to pay consequences for his actions.

> I don't know that it will actually "deter" anyone…

I think there is probably a significant number of people who wouldn't normally be criminals, and thus aren't technically being "deterred", but would end up being just that little bit less scrupulous if they regularly see prominent examples of criminal behavior going unpunished.

Deterrence would involve beheading him this afternoon.

Really, my preferred punishment for him would be a sentence of 25 years working in a non-managerial, non-ownership hourly position in the quick-service restaurant or janitorial fields, earning not more than the Federal minimum.

> Deterrence would involve beheading him this afternoon.

i think you missed the whole "justice" point there.

spending 25 year behind bars with 21+ yrs mandatory seems like enough to deter most people.

He won't do 25. He'll do ten, and it won't be at Devil's Island either.

I'm not sure that's a sufficiently bad outcome to deter the next crypto narcissist.

federal convictions are 85% minimum (though he can be pardoned, in theory)

You‘re in luck, because federal prisoners can be forced to work for even less

No, that's bad for us, as we would be on the hook to subsidize his upkeep. I want him to join the working poor. I'd accept him getting EBT or Section 8 as part of his sentence...maybe.

Rehabilitation simply isn't the only purpose of incarceration.

He’s shown no remorse. He could continue to show no remorse and be out in 25 years, no rehabilitation necessary.

Why do you think punishment is only about rehabilitation?

Punishment has three purposes, namely, retribution, rehabilitation, and deterrence.

I also don't know how much rehabilitation actually occurs in our prisons. From what I understand, not much.

The better question is likely why anyone thinks the US justice system is actually about rehabilitation.

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