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Comment by teiferer | Hacker News Reader

"permanently"

"ever again"

For good reason, modern law systems rarely issue punishments that last a lifetime. People can and do change, and something stupid (and illegal) you did 30 years ago shouldn't be held over your head today. These are rare cases for the absolutely worst crimes. For anything else, you receive a punishment, be it money or months/years in jail, and after that, you deserve a chance to live a life without ongoing punishment. Beyond knowing what you did, and remembering the punishment, which for most people is already a burden heavy enough.

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Punishment should match the crime, to both rehabilitate and be preventative.

White collar crime gets basically no punishment, and looking at career of those people they usually end up falling upwards.

For such cases banning them from being in a management position for X years would be a nice discouragement.

I wouldn't ban them from management, just garnish their wages so they can only earn minimum wage (or minimum living wage). Also, no property ownership beyond a single home.

Without punishment, there’s not much incentive for rehabilitation. Why stop/change/repent instead of just continuing?

>>White collar crime gets basically no punishment, and looking at career of those people they usually end up falling upwards

I mean the article literally says the engineer could have been sent to prison for 75 years for his role in the fraud(effectively a lifetime sentence).

engineer? sure.

execs and upper management who instigate such incidents? almost no real punishment ever happens.

Sam Friedman, the engineer's boss and the CEO was sentenced to 25 years in federal prison.

and how many more fall upwards?

I have no idea, I'm just saying it's a weird comment to make on an article where both the engineer behind the fraud _and_ the management faced consequences of their actions.

have you read the reply thread?

That's just false though. For poor people, if you have a conviction, it follows you forever and impacts your life negatively in a multitude of ways.

Depends where you are, I guess. In a prison-first rehabilitation-last country like USA, yes. In EU, many countries will close your criminal record after some years (7 in Estonia) at which point nobody other than law enforcement itself can see that you have a record. Not to mention that even if the crime you did was fairly recent, no company has the ability to check your background without your permission, and even then it is not something that is being done in the vast majority of places.

In other words, once you've carried out your sentence, in 99% of the cases it's done and behind you, and you can go on living a normal life without anyone else needing to know.

But if you're restarting your life after serving a sentence, if you're poor it will be very hard. If you have wealth you probably can easily put your crime behind you.

This is what people always say, but it sure seems like that guy was able to get a job as School Superintendent in Iowa. His past didn't get in the way of actually getting the job. It was only when ICE showed up that people noticed.

Yes if you lie about your past, you can do those things. Correct.

Not sure how that's relevant.

What horrible crime did that guy commit "firearm charge" you mean being told to put a hunting gun in the car then instantly ticketed for "improper storage" by a racist ranger? The horror.... So glad we got that one /s

If you commit any number of stupid or criminal acts, you are legally blacklisted from the financial industry for life.

Should be unable to be a politician, or take part in the political process beyond voting (eg party donations), too.

This is dangerous because of how easy it is to abuse. Look at Türkiye where İmamoğlu was arrested and had his university degree removed on trumped up charges as he's a potential threat to Erdoğan's chances of re-election.

In Türkiye, certain crimes disbar you from running for election (and you're required to have a university degree).

which would incentivise politically motivated charges for opponents.

Being struck off by professional organisations is a thing, though.

On the one hand I don't want the bar to this discipline raised. On the other hand, I don't want people like us (metaphorically) building bridges that tip every two hundredth car into the river.

Of course not. But 10 years later, rehabilitation could be in the cards?

Five years and a tribunal hearing for doctors in the UK. Seems like they take it on a case-by-case basis.

(source: https://www.mpts-uk.org/-/media/mpts-documents/dc4432-guidan...)

Depends on what you did. In this case: no way. You can fuck right off and you should never be in charge of a company again.

An 18 year old (HS senior) and a 15 year old (HS sophomore) can have sex together and thats a statutory rape charge that will follow you the rest of your life.

And say its 2 17 year olds, and you take nude pictures to send to your partner. Now, having sex is legal here, but a picture? Thats possessing 'child sexual assault imagery'. Nobody would think 17 year olds are 'children'. Even the law routinely charges them as adults.

And getting a felony at all follows you around, unless you can pay the danegeld to have it removed. Of course, staying clean isn't sufficient. Paying $10k or more is.

Happily Canada has Close in Age exceptions depending on the age of the younger party.

In the US it is perfectly normal to impose lifetime penalties for crimes - a felony record can prevent people from voting, housing, employment, and when all those penalties fuck up their life, they are sometimes still barred from receiving welfare. It is only four years since the law changed to allow student loans for people with drug convictions.

And it is absolutely reasonable that a crime committed in the course of your profession could prevent you ever working in that profession again.

Being forced to change the profession is not the same as being in jail forever or being unable employable forever.

> Beyond knowing what you did, and remembering the punishment, which for most people is already a burden heavy enough.

Like, seriously? These people do not feel bad, there is no heavy burden. They are proud of how they earned money, feel like any prosecution is grave injustice and would do it again.

Widely immoral people, whether in politics or business, dont feel sorry for who they are. They made those decisions because there was no moral dilema for them.

They are proud that they earned money, the how (positive or negative) is completely immaterial.

Others who want to earn money and are likewise ambivalent about the means will see a felony conviction for causing grievous public harm in the pursuit of giant piles of money as an endorsement and hire the "reformed" exec at the first opportunity.

Sorry, but in this case I think 'lifetime' is very much appropriate. It's not like they're being sent to the electric chair. They were systematically ripping people off on what matters most to a person: their health. There is a good chance people died as a result of this. And since hardly any of these crooks ever goes to jail (but instead they get to do it again somewhere else) having their name out in the open for ever is very much appropriate.

Personal accountability with consequences that make fraud unpalatable means setting a high bar on white collar crime.

If you are saying that twentysomething founders should not be held accountable for the mistakes of their "youth," then you might be inclined hold the investors personally accountable for funding them--similar to parents being liable for their teenagers' driving mishaps.

I am disinclined to believe that Javice and his ilk are very much corrected by the Department of Corrections or later life experiences.

Well, that's nice that you feel that way. But, you don't get to decide what people "deserve" or what "should" happen.

I happen to disagree. I think these crimes (and many others) should follow you more or less permanently.

My opinions on what "should" be the case have just as much validity as yours.

Please be self aware when you are making baseless moral claims.

I don't think I wrote anything about the validity of other opinions. I have mine, you have yours, that's fine.

A bit of self-awareness would suit yourself well. I didn't make any moral clas, baseless or not.

It's a bit disingenuous to argue "they shouldn't get life without the possibility of parole" when in fact most of this economic white-collar crime goes completely unpunished, or at best gets a fine targeted at the company and never at the individual people who committed the crimes.

Most of these C-suite executives have more than enough money to retire comfortably.

This is more justification for banning people who got rich by doing illegal things from holding positions of power ever.

Not to punish per se, but to prevent them from doing more harm to the public.

Yep! So they need to go to jail, or the "punishment" is moot.

Obviously fining you 5$ for stealing 100 is not gonna work.

What is disingenuous is claiming that putting a crazy punishment on the paper will change anything when absolutely nobody gets caught.

If you tear apart whatever guarantees human rights exist on your places just so your can impose unreasonable punishment to nobody, then don't act surprised when somebody else uses it against real people you sympathize with. (And yeah, if you are from the US or some other place where lifelong punishment is common, you should be fighting to fix this, not to add support to it.)

On the other hand, you could be pushing for those people being punished at all, by reasonable crimes that your law probably already recognizes or that could be added without rotting your society. But yeah, maybe that's too much.

To the contrary. I do find it a disingenuous argument to say "most of this kind of crime goes unpunished, so the cases we do punish, we have to punish for life".

The solution is not harder punishments for those that are punished, but punishing more of them.

Isn't that exactly how the criminal justice system works? Because you know you're not going to catch all the criminals you want the punishment to serve as a deterrent?

Punishing more of them is easily said, when the crime is much harder to prove than shoplifting for example. And I'm skipping the fact that the shoplifter will be represented by an overworked public defender while the exec has a team of lawyers lined up that probably are payed by the company that got richer off illegal behavior

> Isn't that exactly how the criminal justice system works?

No, it's not. We don't catch everybody guilty of petty theft, but those we do catch still don't end up in prison for life.

There was a time when we chopped their right hand off, but I'm glad those days are behind us.

(Reading many of the reactions here though, we are just a thin layer of judges away from mob rule.)

Petty theft nets up to a year in jail, which is far more extreme than - relatively speaking - than handing out lifetime sentences for the damage being discussed here.

If the chances of getting caught are small, and the chances of being convicted are even smaller, should the punishment be harsher to have the same deterrent?

You do understand how the petty theft criminal represented by a public defender is at a disadvantage to the white collar criminal with an army of lawyers paid by the company?

"We should just catch more of them" is like saying we should just solve our energy problem by making nuclear fusion work. Sure, everyone agrees with that but that's just wishful thinking

No, it doesn't work. The US has been actively trying this in many states, so we have data on the relationship between deterrence effect and the likelihood*harshness of punishments - it turns out likelihood really controls the strength of the effect of deterrence. If you have extremely harsh punishments you DO incentivize doing a lot of damage to get away with it, and also incentivize repeat or exacerbated offending. (See: "might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb")

Uh you don't have data on that for white collar crime. If you do, please share.

Petty theft is done for different reasons to white collar crime. I agree with you that the punishment is not a deterrence for small offences.

I think there's a lot of deterrence coming from the Enron case where people actually went to jail. That's just too rare because you quickly get into questions of intent. And to prove intent is really hard.

Lots, actually. Here's one analysis; https://waynelawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/61Wayn...

Your note about 'proving intent is really hard' is kind of the underlying reason - white collar criminals tend to believe they will never be caught/convicted. So making sentences more severe for those who are caught and convicted doesn't actually impact those future criminals, because their calculations say there's no risk of it being applied to them.

You're protesting a lot here.

I do hate economic criminals just as much as everybody else. But I also value honest arguments. The kind of thing this reply of yours didn't provide.

I think this have to ve public Information, giving the right to decide to the next employer. You may employ them, other people may not. I would at least ask some questions.

You can't count the years you evaded law enforcement as time served during the sentencing process.

Sanctimonious nonsense. The are plenty of kinds of crimes for which "modern law systems" commonly, and rightly, impose 'lifetime' penalties or restrictions. Restraining orders are a simple example. And C-suite assholes who commit fraud are rightly, and not rarely, barred from ever leading another company.

Yeah no, sociopathy isn’t something that ever goes away after someone becomes her age.

It's not? Are you a neuroscientist and/or have evidence for that claim? Then we can talk, I'm interested.

Or do you just claim this because that's your gut feeling?

History is the best teacher

That's true. We judge people to be guilty and then they get a punishment. But after the punishment they have payed back their guilt and are now not guilty anymore, that's kind of the deal.

> These are rare cases for the absolutely worst crimes.

If "targeting insurance policies of women with breast cancer for cancellation, using any pretext" is accurate - I'm curious how that compares to the absolutely worst crimes to you.

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