It's not like you can use an alternative without facing jail time if you don't give up the keys.
If you're genuinely innocent, the 2 years is horrid. If you're actually guilty, it's a cheap way to serve your time.
It's a weird and perverse law that shouldn't exist, but it's likely in time the government will need to move the needle one way or the other, as habitual criminals are getting used to doing the maths.
If the punishment for rape is harsher than the punishment for murder than anyone committing it may as well remove the evidence by using a blender.
People (even criminals) are not perfectly economic thinkers. That's probably a good thing. I have this terrible thought of a quant rapist: juggling their risk that the victim stays quiet or otherwise acts (police or revenge). Deciding on the Kelly Criterion for losing 20 years in prison.
I'd watch a movie about a killer using statistics properly. It is annoying when muderers are cast as being idiots. I imagine the protagonist runs a hedge fund and gets bored of getting away with white collar crime.
why is that a good thing?
Perfect economic thinkers are good, because they'd be predictable and can be reasoned with. Providing economic incentives to such means you can direct behaviour in an easy and efficient way.
Irrational thinkers cannot be reasoned with via economic rationality. Therefore, either you have to stack the incentives so high that the cost becomes overbearing, or you use some other means of control that's less nice.
Utility is a flawed way to capture ethics.
Ethics is an agreement between people in society, which cannot be captured via economic rationalism alone, but economic rationalism can take into account current ethics, as well as other actors' propensity for more or less ethics.
1. Pragmatism - Justice can be effectively framed around practical outcomes and societal safety, it requires no moral framework.
2. Remorse and Emotional Response - Feelings of remorse can be understood as conditioned responses shaped by environmental influences rather than as reflections of moral responsibility; remorse does not necessitate moral weight as they can arise from societal conditioning and past experiences.
3. CBT - Cognitive Behavioral Approaches demonstrate that behavioral and emotional changes can occur without delving into moral implications, and requires no moral reflection.
4. Behavioral Accountability - Individuals can be held accountable for their actions based solely on their observable behavior and its consequences, without the need for moral judgments. The focus is on modifying harmful behaviors through interventions and reinforcements rather than assigning moral blame.
So, this framework provides a rational and effective approach to understanding and managing human behavior, focusing on the pragmatic aspects of justice, rehabilitation, and accountability, it does not require an already shaky and subjective moral judgment or moral accountability, and as thus, need not be morally justified.
If you want me to elaborate (with examples, too), I am willing to as my time allows.
Whether there's justice or not in a rapist serving their sentence and going free (given that, one assumes, the sentencing guidelines were decided by dispassionate thinkers trying to reason about society as a whole)... It goes out the window if a family lives in so much fear they decide to "fix" the issue by taking the law into their own hands.
Then the society has to decide whether to jail the family, and so on.
Hammurabi's code seems harsh by modern standards, but at the time it was positively progressive. It was attempting to replace a retaliatory tradition so bloody it could wipe out entire bloodlines. He was trying to impose an upper limit on consequence to allow a society of semi-strangers to reach some meta-stability.
At the start of the movie Heat, one of the hot head robbers kills one of the guards. De Niro, the leader of the robbers, immediately kills the other guard and says something along the lines of 'it's capital murder either way so may as well not leave any witnesses'. Ultimately, it's Di Nero being non-rational and driven by emotion that leads to the final scene in the movie.
This imperfection feeds into the argument for not punishing rape as harshly as murder: the rapist is likely to misjudge the chances of the murder being discovered and traced back to them, when doing the risk math to decide how to proceed. If their imperfect thinking leads them to overestimate their chance of pulling off the perfect murder (or the perfect coverup after one) then that pushes the chance of equal punishment leading to more murders higher.
"Doing risk math" oversells it for crimes of opportunity, where decisions about how to keep the action quiet after it has happened is going to be very emotion/panic (rather than facts/stats) driven, but for premeditated attacks I suspect things will flip the other way.
I don't know of a paper on that specific question, but for example, Gary Becker got his Nobel prize because he applied economics to a wide range of human behavior including crime and punishment. Here is a famous paper of his on crime:
on edit: got confused as to who was whom in the nesting.
on second edit: I also don't know if there is anywhere that has execution for rape, it was a hypothetical as I read it.
Liberal Europeans and Americans like to say that no civilized country executes criminals, but in fact several developed democratic countries in Asia do, and to say they aren't civilized seems absurd. Executing criminals seems to work well for them. Very curious.
If you're saying the first bit, you're saying that it's a disqualifier from the second.
Not to mention at least in the US the death penalty is more expensive than a lifelong prison sentence, so it's simply not a good idea.
It's an interesting story, but the historical record of how English law changed is, I think, a bit more interesting. Kids in London would steal. They'd go on trial. A jury of Londoners would see what looked like a twelve-year-old in the docket and just flat-out refuse to find them guilty because they couldn't sleep with themselves thinking they'd sent some kid to the gallows. This pattern became such an issue that merchants petitioned the King to pull back the penalties because as the system was implemented, it was going to stop protecting their property from thievery.
I have nothing to hide, but I’m still not giving you access to my photo library.
In the US, the secret FISA court hasn't turned down a single warrant. Either the government is only coming to them with completely justified cases or they're just a rubber stamp. Either way, there's no oversight so we have no way of knowing.
RIPA notices do indeed assume you’re in possession of the keys of anything encrypted and you must disclose when asked nicely.
You just need an airtight provable way of showing you have a way to destroy that key when you push a button and do that before the notice arrive. I suspect that’s after they seize your stuff.
[0] https://www.independent.co.ug/activist-convicted-uk-terror-o...
Surely you're joking!
No way that really happened or it was an empty apology like.
> I'm sorry you made yourself suspicious
Second time some busybody reported to the police that I was carrying a knife. This was a Santoku knife that I'd literally bought and was still in the plastic packaging but you could see it through the plastic bag I was carrying it in. We had a bit of a laugh about it and they apologised for wasting my time. They did however arrest me so that they could do a formal search and had right to as they had reasonable suspicion I was carrying it as a weapon. I'm not bothered they were very reasonable and so was I.
In the US both of those would have been handled with an Investigatory detention - same as being pulled over for a traffic stop. Not even remotely an arrest.
> They did however arrest me so that they could do a formal search and had right to as they had reasonable suspicion I was carrying it as a weapon.
What "reasonable suspicion"? They could see the "weapon" that had been reported and at that point it should have been "have a nice day" and then them trundling themselves over to whoever called it in and charged them with making a false report.
I swear, UK police seem generally nicer than US cops but infinitely dumber and the shit you brittons put up with in terms of having your rights violated is astounding.
I'm not from the UK, but it seems likely that this is just a question of semantics. Many US traffic stops are far more stressful—and handled in a way that is far less conciliatory—than the "arrest" that OP describes. It doesn't sound like they were taken to a police station or even necessarily handcuffed, more just formally detained.
As for US detentions: It doesn't especially matter if they're not technically "arrests" in US parlance, you're still being stopped by the police and you still can't go anywhere until they let you because there's a too-high probability that they'll find an excuse to make your life miserable if you don't cooperate.
Buying a knife and carrying it home is 100% legal, so there's nothing to "get away with" here.
Carrying a Santoku knife in public is only illegal if it's being carried without a "good reason" and carrying a newly purchased knife home is certainly a good reason.
The police have the power to stop and search people when they have "reasonable grounds" to suspect they're carrying a weapon; if the knife is clearly visible that's certainly reasonable grounds. So the search was not illegal.
A stop-and-search means being "detained" in the sense that you are not free to leave until the search is completed, but it's not an "arrest" that would appear on your arrest record. Perhaps there was a miscommunication about the distinction between being 'detained' and being 'arrested' ?
https://professional-troublemaker.com/2018/04/10/u-k-knife-c...
The article you linked does not support the claim that the UK police not liking someone's face is sufficient for them to be allowed to stop and search someone.
In fact, this goes directly against the PACE guidelines as described at https://www.college.police.uk/app/stop-and-search/fair
> A person’s physical appearance [...] cannot be used as the reason for stopping and searching them [...] unless there is information or intelligence giving a specific description of a person suspected of carrying an item for which there is a power to search.
Guidelines have never stopped authoritarian hell holes. They can just make shit up.
The police have to conduct stops in a certain manner, because of the law that gives them the power to stop people: They are legally required to tell the person they're being detained for the purposes of a search, the purpose of the search, the grounds for the search, and the legal power used.
Getting a load of jargon thrown at you about "detained" and "offensive weapon" and "Police and Criminal Evidence Act" sound a bit officious, but once they've stopped you they've got to give you the officious jargon, it's required by law.
Also, while it's rare that the police will have occasion to stop and search a middle class, middle age white guy like myself, when the situation does come up, it's reasonable for them to do it thoroughly and by the book. They should treat a report of me carrying a knife the same as they'd treat a report of a black teenager in a bad neighbourhood carrying a knife.
Shooting. They would probably have shot him.
Watch this if you're curious how that looks like:
> they're sitting there with these like blank A4 Bits of Paper writing down everything I'm telling them like you know bits of interest and it's exactly the same thing the Russians did when they interrogated me [...] to be honest interactions with the Russians have been pretty much the same as inter with the British government
I didn't do my research before going to the UK for the first time two months ago and just went with my gut feeling, that is, deleting files from my phone that I don't want to end up in a government system through Cellebrite's "accelerated justice" or whatnot. Never done this for any other country before (I cross borders on a weekly basis). Seeing this video and the Ugandan article from the sibling comment, that was definitely the right move
I just use devices with ephemeral storage for crossing borders to save myself from having to do any research on any particular country’s device privacy practices.
Facetious comment aside the only time I’ve had problems with border security anywhere is getting a large carpet back home from Azerbaijan. This was very interesting and required them to examine every square centimetre of it. China, US, UK, Europe all really boring. Russia was incompetent. They didn’t even check anything at all (2012)
Are they arresting you?
Because they have to let you in.
What if you say you forgot? I actually had times (after not having used my phone for a month or two) that I (& my muscles) forgot my PIN (not for the SIM card) and I had to do a factory reset.
An Immigration Officer may search you until they are satisfied you are a citizen. As long as you have a passport (or emergency travel document) listing you a citizen, this should be straightforward and they're unlikely to have grounds for any further search. At that point, you have been let into the country.
Customs Officers are much more likely to have grounds for a search — if they believe you are bringing prohibited material on the electronic device into the country (and "reasonable grounds" is low, as it typically is for customs — "you're acting kinda sus" is a reasonable ground), they can search your device. It is an offence to refuse a search, so while you've been admitted to the UK, you could be arrested for that offence.
This is all broadly comparable to most other countries immigration and customs laws; the UK is not an outlier here.
The problems with the UK are primarily things that apply to everyone, not just at the border — for example the Terrorism Act 2000 and Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. But again, in the border case — that's basically all going to be _after_ you are admitted to the UK.
Guess, I better delete that big file of random numbers from my computer.
That's the UK.