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Comment by commodoreboxer | Hacker News Reader

You're in support of life imprisonment as punishment for somebody who gets into a couple fights?

Yes. This is the reasonable position to take. Fighting isn't normal. Nobody should be able to use physical size/strength as a way to impose their will on someone else. Fighting should be treated exactly like rape.

You can also find plenty of examples where in fights, someone got thrown to the ground on their head, and got a concussion. That shit can be life altering.

By your logic, half or more of all children would be in prison before they even hit 10 years old. Fighting and violence is very normal, and it takes a lot of teaching and social pressure to make it as rare as it is.

The difference with kids is that you have a way higher chance of them being able to change their behavior, and you can also do things like go after their parents, so you don't have to jail them. But again, juvenile detention centers are thing, with kids as young as 10 years old being able to be put in there, and plenty do.

>Fighting and violence is very normal

Yes, I understand this. People make irrational choices all the time.There are very little things that prevent someone from drinking and getting behind the wheel of a car or a truck. And yet, the support for mandatory breathalyzer devices standard in vehicles to be able to operate them is never going to be high. So people are making the irrational choice to risk getting killed by a drunk driver rather than lose some fake "freedom". And people like the commenters here also make the irrational choice to view fighting in a way less serious light then it should be.

In this case, though the problem is solved - a person who should not be in society is not, and it should remain that way.

I'm with you 100% on this. Fighting is way more tolerated than it should be. If you're a grown adult and decide to go hands on with someone, for whatever stupid (non self-defense) reason, you should go to prison for a long time. I don't know about life, but at least 10 years. There is no justifiable reason for a grown adult who can use words to solve his problems to get physically violent with someone. This is true for the whole spectrum from beating someone senseless, to hitting your wife, to getting drunk and shoving someone in a bar. We don't need belligerent assholes in society.

If someone has absent or irresponsible parents, or parents who are violent themselves, when will they have a chance to learn anything else if you punish them with life imprisonment the moment they get into a fight past the age of majority? Your pacifist ideals are not bad, but the actual effect of sending people to prison for life from one fight would be horrific and incredibly cruel, not to mention that it would invariably be abused to target the poor and minority groups while the lawyer-on-retainer class get to avoid the consequences. To stop people from victimizing others repeatedly, the common method is to increase sentences for repeat offenders. Maybe that doesn't currently exist in the UK, but it's a much more a humane solution than life imprisonment without a realistic chance of redemption.

The way to not go to prison is pretty simple - don't attack people. Don't even know why we are debating this. Once you do, you clearly aren't fit to be in society, and things like "humane" no longer apply to you. Poor or minority status doesn't matter. There is nothing about those two things that compel a person to go on the assault.

It's feels you simply don't have empathy or even imagination.

Your "cut and dry" philosophy flies in the face of reality.

A kid is raised in the hood, beaten by their parents, watches someone get shot to death in a drive by one day and the next week someone shot in the back by cops. In school they quickly learn that bullies leave you alone if you punch back. On the street doubly so, they learn demonstrating a willingness for violence mostly gets you left alone.

At 17 years old they're at a McDonald's and someone shoulder checks them. Maybe it was an accident, maybe it wasn't, but the kid tosses a "what the fuck?", and the other person had done it by accident but is mad at the reaction so on a whim says "fuck you bitch." Our main character throws a punch, a fight ensues, the cops come, he's arrested.

This person should be jailed forever?

This makes no sense to me from any analysis angle. Ethically, practically, capitalistically, no matter how I slice it I can't square it. If you argued for him to be immediately executed it would at least make a little bit of capitalistic sense and be logical within the context of a fucked up ethical system (a non evidence based one) but no instead you want them locked up for life.

Why? And why not argue instead for summary execution of the undesirables?

I think it's very weird to say that fighting should be treated the same as rape. Come on, everybody has had some kind of fights in their life. Everyone is angry sometimes and has at least the urge to do harm to someone else that they're very angry at, because they feel unfairly treated for example. And some people might actually have very difficult lives or psychological situations, and the chances for them to have such feelings and the chance for them to snap is higher.

The solution in many cases I would say is not punishment / imprisonment, but rather help, in the form of therapy or education or something. Of course some restrictions and some kind of warning and period where you are watched more closely are suitable, but it doesn't have to be hard punishment right away.

Fighting is unethical, but many prisons and law cases are much more unethical than most fights.

Ings, now 18, was given the DPP at Reading Crown Court in April, after pleading guilty to two robberies and two common assaults, while asking that a further four robberies, one attempted robbery and one assault occasioning actual bodily harm be taken into consideration.

Not just a couple fights.

This person has a longer record than a “couple” fights. I’m not the person you replied to but I support life imprisonment unless there is certainty of there being no future victims. It could be you, or me, or our family members that suffers due to an irresponsible release of a dangerous person. And it happens all the time, unfortunately.

As an example, in Seattle there was a documentary called “Seattle is Dying” that covered the trend of crimes and repeat offenders, due to the city’s lenient restorative justice policies. A person featured in that documentary had been arrested nearly 50 times and convicted more than 35 times. But he was nevertheless released back into the streets, due to progressive restorative justice policies. He ultimately murdered his girlfriend before killing himself, inside the infamous CHAZ/CHOP autonomous zone:

https://komonews.com/news/operation-crime-justice/travis-ber...

It wasn’t a couple. It was seven.

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