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Comment by munk-a | Hacker News Reader

If someone is caught in a vicious spiral not only does Therapy sound like a better option than prison but even just a one time bailout might allow them to self-correct... I still think it'd be a good idea to have the therapy in place though.

At the end of the day - people make mistakes, helping people out of those mistakes results in recidivism less often than you'd suspect.

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I know of an employer at which one of the finance people had embezzled about 50K over the course of one or two years (from their employer). And at the same time they also embezzled 5K from the community sports league for which they did volunteer accounting/finance stuff.

They ended up being arrested and convicted for stealing from the sports league, and they went to jail for a few months but they had some arrangement where they could leave every weekday morning to go to work and then return to jail in the evening.

Their arrest and conviction was well known by and within their employer (from which they were known to have embezzled the 50K) since they needed to request leave to show up to court and also because the local papers covered it extensively due to it impacting the sports league.

They were not fired, presumably because their employer did not want to run the risk of tarnishing its sterling reputation of properly managing its finances.

Lots of things sounds like a better option when you remove the constraints of actual human behavior (see also: economics). Unfortunately human behavior is what it is regardless of whether your strategy accounts for it or not. So again, for the cheap seats, therapy is a complete waste of time in 100% of instances where the individual in question isn't genuinely pursuing change.

Yes, and an individual's convictions remain static forever and cannot be influenced by others. You can't convince me otherwise.

Your argument sounds tautological.

K. You probably shouldn't pursue a career as a therapist or have kids then unless you enjoy staggering around in a haze of cognitive dissonance.

That’s one flavor of embezzler, there probably a sociopath flavor as well. Sending a sociopath to therapy generally doesn’t work.

Yes - but it's very difficult to tell whether someone is a sociopath if they're good at it. I think it'd probably be safer to err on the side of therapy and let the therapist's recommendation or repeat offenses dictate whether jail time is justified.

> I think it'd probably be safer to err on the side of therapy and let the therapist's recommendation or repeat offenses dictate whether jail time is justified.

Repeat offenses as a signal? Sure!

Therapist's recommendation? I'm skeptical. Their primary data is whatever the subject self-reports, and their secondary data is their somewhat subjective opinion on whether the subject has improved.

If the subject does not want to stop and they are smart enough to figure out how to embezzle or to get high enough to embezzle, there's very little chance that the therapist would see through them.

It's like EQ tests - the subject can make the test results say whatever they want the test results to say.

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