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Comment by eduardordm | Hacker News Reader

First, a rant: I always get shocked about how the US justice system works, where punishing (and revenge) is obviously more important than protecting humans. He should have been released as soon as he posed no threat to others. If the US keeps its current course there will be more people inside prisons than outside of them in the future.

He certainly has a lot of expectations. I can only imagine the pressure he is putting upon himself right now. My only advice is for him to find the first regular job he can. That will give him more time to learn programming (if he wants to do that) and release a bit of the pressure to succeed fast.

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I'll agree with the first regular job. He's been socially isolated for 18 years and probably has very little ability to function in the real world. A job at Pizza Hut or Starbucks will put some money in his pocket, get him self-sufficient, and interacting with people. He'll be able to rent an apartment and then he can spend time coding and learning in his off hours.

While he's doing that he's going to have to hit the pavement and find someone willing to take a chance on him. That will be the tough part. He needs to build a resume. Contracting might be a good way to start.

Lots of luck to him. Have him start a blog so we can follow how it's going. I'd find the insights into the prison system and his work toward the future very interesting, if he's will to share.

I'll definitely suggest the blog to him. While researching his situation I came across someone on Quora who was just recently released after 25 years. He writes extensively on the subject you're curious about:

http://michaelsantos.com/

http://www.quora.com/Michael-Santos-4

One quote from those links in particular stands out:

> "The links above provide definitive proof that a prisoner can indeed write books. Bringing those books to market, however, could expose the person in prison to disciplinary problems. Since I brought many books to market during my lengthy odyssey, authorities frequently charged me with the disciplinary infraction of “conducting a business.” They locked me in solitary confinement numerous times and they frequently uprooted my family by transferring me in chains to prisons across state lines. "

I think that inmates should not be able to "conduct business" if they are illegal, indeed. And should not have cellphones or anything of the sort. But in this case, the guys should have been congratulated and his sentence reduced somewhat.

> he's going to have to ... find someone willing to take a chance on him. He needs to build a resume. Contracting might be a good way to start.

These are very good points. The conceptual difference between a contractor and an employee may make it a lot easier to find rewarding work for someone that would "fail" most companies' background checks.

I'm all for challenging the current US justice system, but I'm not sure why "posed no threat" is your only standard for who should be in prison. He did actually violate the property rights of other people. Prison, in mine and many others' opinions, is not just about rehabilitation.

Then slap an anklet on him and make him say sorry once a week until you're satisfied.

"You violated our property rights, so we're going to feed, clothe, and house you for the next twenty years and resent you for it" is something a crazy person would say.

I think because I live in an extremely violent place it changed the way I think about prisons. I'm not saying that you or me are right or wrong, really.

Most criminals are already living in hell. You send them to a prison with this idea that you are punishing them with the clear intention of feeling good in some way (maybe closure?).

What people lack of understanding is that prisons are not real punishment for those who are actually there. Some of them might even like it. So, prisons are not efficient in punishment nor rehabilitation. What are those things?

> What people lack of understanding is that prisons are not real punishment for those who are actually there. Some of them might even like it. So, prisons are not efficient in punishment nor rehabilitation.

Maybe they're not effective punishment or rehabilitation, but I would certainly say they're an effective deterrent. They might not be a punishment for anyone in there, but they could still be (and at least in my case, certainly are) seen as a punishment for some people who aren't in there. I would bet that a prison sentence is a much better deterrent than, say, volunteer hours or a fine. Whether deterring bank robberies is a valuable enough goal is a matter of opinion I suppose.

Obviously this is all conjecture, if someone can pull up a study showing that prison sentences don't have any deterrent effect over other forms of punishment then I'd accept that I'm wrong... But I'd be somewhat shocked if that were the case.

By the by, there's no definitive research that shows that prison sentences act as a deterrent against crime. And there's a lot of research on crime & punishment out there.

https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q...

> if someone can pull up a study showing that prison sentences don't have any deterrent effect over other forms of punishment then I'd accept I'm wrong...

Certainly: http://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/e199912.htm

This is not some joe-schmoe study either, from the executive summary: "Fifty studies dating from 1958 involving 336,052 offenders produced 325 correlations between recidivism and (a) length of time in prison and recidivism or (b) serving a prison sentence vs. receiving a community-based sanction."

In particular: "The essential conclusions reached from this study were:

1. Prisons should not be used with the expectation of reducing criminal behaviour.

2. On the basis of the present results, excessive use of incarceration has enormous cost implications.

3. In order to determine who is being adversely affected by prison, it is incumbent upon prison officials to implement repeated, comprehensive assessments of offenders’ attitudes, values, and behaviours while incarcerated.

4. The primary justification of prison should be to incapacitate offenders (particularly, those of a chronic, higher risk nature) for reasonable periods and to exact retribution."

Summary points 1 and 4 are key: Prisons are not effective deterrence, but they are great tools for indirect retribution suffered by the victim(s).

Also in response to your last comment "I'd be somewhat shocked [..]": There are plenty of things that goes against simple human intuition--that's what science is for. Believe the facts, and disregard intuition.

That study only looks at the deterrent effect on existing criminals, not the general populace. I think there is confusion about the word "deterrent". I always thought about 'deterrent' in this context as: "Prisons are a deterrent.. just the thought of serving time in jail will deter anyone from committing a crime." Whereas the study you linked reports: "We have found that criminals who serve longer sentence are no more deterred from committing another crime than those who served short sentences."

Fair enough. There are plenty of studies out there regarding this topic, though a definitive conclusion is probably beyond any one single study. See papers Justin McCrary have published (he's done quite a bit of work in this area).

One such paper takes an interesting approach, combing the criminal records to see if the fact that deterrence is stiffened after 18 has an deterrent effect on crime rate by comparing juvenile offenders that are months pre-18 and 'adult' offenders that have just recently turned 18. The finding is 'surprisingly' a negative. Only very minor drop off rate is seen.

You can read the paper here: http://www.nber.org/papers/w11491.pdf

> prisons are not real punishment

I think Aaron Swartz would disagree.

> punishing them with the clear intention of feeling good in some way

This plays some role, but I'd say the biggest reason people give in favor of having prisons is rational: Deterrence. If crimes aren't punished, what stops people from stealing when they want something they can't afford? What stops the strong from beating up the weak for fun, for profit, or as a way to resolve disputes in their favor? What stops the weak from shooting the strong because they finally get tired of being beaten up? What reason is there to adhere to contracts and agreements necessary for effective commerce if it would be more beneficial to one party to break them?

If you agree that punishment is necessary, but prison is somehow deficient as a punishment, what's the alternative? The punishment has to be sufficiently undesirable to cause most people to avoid crime in order to avoid the punishment. In addition, if it's going to be implemented in the US, it can't be cruel and unusual punishment since that is strictly Constitutionally prohibited, and if it's going to be implemented in a relatively free and democratic society, it has to show respect for generally accepted human rights principles. This excludes solutions like lashing, waterboarding, more extreme torture, massive expansions of the death penalty (I believe England as late as the 1500's would hang homeless children for stealing clothes to keep warm in the winter), or collective punishment (punishing someone else instead of or in addition to a criminal, e.g. many authoritarian regimes are willing to punish opponents by jailing, torturing, and/or killing their innocent friends, relatives, and children).

I do think that US criminal justice could be better. Currently many crimes are punished too harshly, sometimes sentences are inconsistent, current implementation of plea bargaining sometimes leads to terrible injustices, public defenders are woefully underfunded, the education system doesn't do a good job of covering these issues, and life is far too difficult for people after a felony conviction (discrimination against workers with felony records is legal and widespread; this sort of discrimination shouldn't be illegal, but culturally we need to be more willing to let people have second chances).

The Aaron Swartz analogy doesn't work. The point that the parent was trying to make was that for your average violent and even non-violent criminal (typically low-income upbringing, living in run-down conditions, living on the "streets" but not in a homeless sense), prisons are not real punishment. In fact, conditions in prison can for some be an improvement. Aaron grew up in an upper-middle class environment. Prison would have been a total change for him.

The problem with deterrence is that criminals by their very nature do not think about the consequences of their actions. This is a generalization, but criminals tend to have poor impulse control and don't think about the future. This is why many studies have shown that the death penalty does not work as a deterrent - a murderer is not being rational in their decision to murder someone. They either do it in the heat of the moment (can't control their temper), or they do because of overwhelming emotion/hate/spite/sociopathy (premeditated murder).

Here's the flaw in your argument against the necessity of deterrence:

If a policy effectively prevents a targeted category of people from becoming criminals, then most criminals won't be from that targeted category.

Say p ~ 10% of people either don't think about the consequences of their actions or don't care whether they go to jail. Say q ~ 90% do care about the consequences of their actions and do care whether they go to jail.

Under a system where deterrence is a strong element, most criminals will be from p. But remove the deterrent, and you'll start seeing more criminals from q.

Let me clarify. I did not say that deterrence is utterly without use. When I said that there is a problem with deterrence, I meant that the current state of deterrence in our justice system is broken. There is a mistaken belief that more punishment necessarily entails greater deterrence, which is many times not the case. There is really a threshold when it comes to deterrence. There is very little to no deterrent effect of the death penalty vs. life without parole, as others have posted here. In fact, I personally find it hard to believe that a life sentence versus, say, 50 years in prison, has any additional deterrent effect for something like murder. The rational 90% would still be adequately deterred.

What is it about then? I see only one reason for a person to be locked up:

1- He poses a threat to society and should be removed, as not to endanger others.

Prison it is not about education, it is not about rehabilitation. It is required to keep dangerous individuals from causing further harm (the other option would be the capital punishment).

Prisons are also used as punishment, but that's a side-effect. There are other ways of having a non-violent (or no longer violent) person repay his debt to society.

Putting people in prison for anything other than physical violence is ridiculous.

In this case, there was likely violence involved, but we do not have details, so I'll refrain from trying to apply the reasoning to this case.

>> "Prisons are also used as punishment, but that's a side-effect. There are other ways of having a non-violent (or no longer violent) person repay his debt to society."

Is this accurate? Depriving someone of normal civilian rights seems pretty punitive to me. And regarding other ways for people to repay their debts to societies: I'm interested in hearing what else we could be doing with these people.

Well, if you will allow wikipedia quotes:

>For most of history, imprisoning has not been a punishment in itself, but rather a way to confine criminals until corporal or capital punishment was administered.

> I'm interested in hearing what else we could be doing with these people.

"These people" casts a very wide net.

My personal point of view: any time that someone is convicted because of material/monetary damages, this individual should not be locked up. He should be paying for that in some other way. Some other way could be with labor - or simple fines.

Violent crimes, on the other hand, are a different matter. Take the China or the US approach, I don't particularly care, as I want those people removed from the society the fastest way possible.

This case in particular is pretty severe, as it involved firearms and threatening people. I do not have much sympathy for the guy because of that. However, since he was released, his criminal record should be sealed. After all, if he was released, then he is assumed to have "paid off" his debt and also presumed non-violent.

Either let people really pay for their crimes or keep them locked up indefinitely. Releasing unemployable people is not a good thing to do. If anything, this person is now much more likely to commit crimes, as legal work opportunities are greatly reduced. Not to mention living with other criminals for most of his adult life...

Traditionally, there are three reasons for locking people up:

- punishment: you did something bad, so you should suffer.

- revenge: you did something bad to me; I'll be happy to see you suffer.

- prevention: you did something bad; to prevent you from repeating that (for a while), we'll lock you up.

Perhaps surprisingly, "paying back one's debt to society" does not figure here. Also, why do you think punishment would be paying back one's debts?

What do you propose we do about a man who kills his wife (or some other enemy) over a long held grudge and poses exactly zero threat to anyone else?

I feel like our system probably shouldn't really cater to sadists.

Prisons is not only about threat to others, its also about punishment. Someone could maybe kill a whole family, then after a year in prison have an "enlightenment", become religious, have regrets about the killing, and knowing himself that he won't do it again, he still deserves his full prison sentence!

That's moralizing. Punishment is something parents do to their kids or churches do to their congregants. I certainly understand why people strongly believe the prison system should be used to try to balance the grand metaphysical scales of justice, but I tend to think it should be used to make society safer and better.

Thinking that criminal justice should be about personal punishment, not social outcomes, is what leads to people being thrown in prison for selling sex or consuming drugs.

You're wrong. The whole system should be based on crime prevention, not punishment.

There should be better predictors of how likely a person is going to repeat the crime and keep him locked up for that amount of time. Also, predictors of how likely it is for someone to make their first crime, so it could be prevented in the first place.

I'm pretty sure that it's possible to predict future criminals from their Facebook data etc, and just send those people somewhere else where their environment matches their behavior.

> Also, predictors of how likely it is for someone to make their first crime, so it could be prevented in the first place.

They have those, and they're quite accurate. They're also illegal.

> predict future criminals from their Facebook data etc, and just send those people somewhere else

Sending someone to Siberia because there's a possibility that they might commit a crime in the future? Welcome to Soviet Norightsistan, comrade.

You don't know the details of the crime. For a sentence that long, it likely involved a firearm or some type of physical violence. Protecting the public probably meant locking this guy up until he reached middle age.

Having said that, now that he's paid his debt, it does seem like the system should do more to help him return to productive society.

Yes, a firearm was involved. It was not, however, discharged. Nor was anyone injured during the offense. This was his first offense; he thought (irrational, of course) it was his only option after his small business started falling apart.

Oh, that's good to know. What if a security guard had pulled a weapon on him? Would anyone have been injured then? Or what if one of the other customers had rushed him?

I used to think that a man (it's almost always a man) brings a loaded gun to a crime for one reason - to murder someone who got in his way. I've since mollified my stance on that, but still, the fact that no-one was injured isn't in itself really exculpatory.

We're assuming, of course, that the gun was loaded.

Involving a firearm in the commission of a crime is an instant ticket on the Felony Express. If he hadn't had a gun (first offense or not, discharged or not, loaded or not, real or not) he likely would have been out a long time ago.

When you have a gun in that situation the number of things that can go wrong increases by an order of magnitude. The adrenaline could make him pull the trigger when he didn't really mean to. Someone in the bank tackling him could make it go off. Hell, it could jam and he could blow his own hand off.

I'm glad he's turned his life around but we can't have people committing armed robbery and going back out onto the street in three months.

What if the gun wasn't even loaded? Of course, this is absolutely irrelevant to the question. What's done is done. He just wants to move forward and I'm really more interested in helping him to find options.

A bank teller can't know the gun isn't loaded. PTSD is a real bitch and could easily have ruined the tellers life permanently. If there were any customers in the bank they could have been a victim too. Families could have been destroyed.

Frankly 18 years sounds kinda cheap. If you have to rob a bank, at least tie a chain around the atm at 1 am -- more money and less hurt to all concerned.

I'm curious. What do you think the going rate for a bank robbery should be? Assuming that a weapon was plainly visible, but not fired? 30 years? 40?

However long it takes to make them not be worth it, though no minimum sentences. An normal of 30 years might do it, with some real incentives for reintegrating into society upon release as well as possible time of for good behavior (but not getting into fights is not enough to qualify for good behavior).

I agree, it is pretty strict but that is because it is a very serious crime due to the direct impact the gun has on people. Steal the ATM, break into the place in the night, sell cocaine, whatever, but don't fucking threaten peoples life.

Exactly what @tomjen3 said.

Even if you have a plastic toy you spray painted black, that's the same thing as having one in the chamber. The teller still thinks s/he is going to die.

> I'm glad he's turned his life around but we can't have people committing armed robbery and going back out onto the street in three months.

I think this is a straw man. Most of us agree that armed robbery is a crime that deserves some punishment. However, if 18 years was his sentence, I want his sentence to be 18 years, not a subsequent lifetime of being unable to contribute meaningfully to society. He's not out in three months, he's spent half of my life in prison.

He shouldn't have committed the crime in the first place. End of story. If he knew that bank robbing was a crime and he committed it anyway, he deserves whatever punishment was meted out to him. People could (or may) have been killed over his greed for money.

That being said, I have no problems with the notion of helping ex-cons try to turn their lives around, after they've paid their debt to society. I am a supporter of Delancey Street organization in SF, which helps ex-cons reintegrate with society by giving them jobs in the moving industry, cooking, selling Christmas trees, etc.

He told me the details of his crime: No one was injured. And he has completed his entire sentence.

I'm glad, and I hope he is able to reintegrate back into society easily. There are programs like the Delancey Street program in SF that help ex-cons reintegrate by providing them with jobs and support. And then he should try to go to school and further educate himself at night time. Hopefully he gets a break, but he needs to realize it's a tough road ahead, since many people without criminal records are still unemployed, and having a felony conviction will likely make it very hard for him. If he joins a religious organization, maybe he can get help through them as well.

Unfortunately, SF is infinitely more progressive than rural Indiana, so those types of programs will be harder to come by. But this suggestion will definitely go on the list.

The word progressive does not seem to mean what it used to mean.

What does it mean now? And what did it used to mean?

OK, I have to ask though, did he use a gun or a threat of a gun? Or was this just one where he had a note that said put the money in a bag this is a robbery?

He had a gun, though I don't know if it was actually displayed.

"He shouldn't have committed the crime in the first place"

It's always easy to judge in hindsight.

"If he knew that bank robbing was a crime and he committed it anyway"

So it would be 0K if he didn't know?

He "deserves whatever punishment was meted out to him"? What if the law dictated life in prison, or the death penalty, or for him to be drawn and quartered?

People, particularly young men in their early 20s, mess up. He certainly needed to be put in prison for years, but decades? The person someone is when they're 30 is wildly different from who they were when they were 20, biologically.

Even if his crime actually ended in someone being injured or killed.

We're not talking about Jean Valjean who stole a loaf of bread to feed his family. It's someone who committed a violent crime of robbing a bank because they wanted someone else's money, and they didn't want to earn it the slow, hard way. They knew what they were doing was wrong. They need to accept the consequences of their actions, including 18 years in jail. I'm sure the person in question has done this, and that's why I have problems with any efforts in rehabilitating him now that he has served his time.

If you can't do the time, don't do the crime. It's as simple as that. If the punishment were death for robbing a bank were death, and you still went ahead and did it, whose fault is that? People need to take responsibility for their own actions. They didn't accidentally rob a bank, or they weren't somehow tricked into robbing a bank. They knowingly decided to do it. If the sentence was 18 years, then I'm satisfied that justice was served.

Rarely are the minds of people who will go to this level as simple as greed. Often times it's to save a life that is falling apart, the stress of the situation leading you to make decisions that turn out to be bad. Is it selfish? Sometimes. Is it greed? Maybe to an extent. Is it simple? Never. In fact that's the only thing that is simple, that these things are always complicated.

So, suppose the crime were downloading academic articles, and the punishment was to be up to 35 years in prison...

What you're arguing for is the inherent rightness of State violence. But the government can be wrong, and it often is wrong. If it's wrong, it's not moral to say, "Well, the government said it would do [wrong thing] to him, who am I to question it?" Instead, you question it and call it into doubt, not try to make a descriptive consequence into a prescriptive consequence.

I wonder what your response would have been if he had committed a similar crime but was an Afghan insurgent.

Pretty much the same, actually. If anything, I'd suggest even more leniency.

Next question: Would you hire the bank robber guy?

I ask because I don't think I could do it

(assuming I were in a position to hire)

It certainly would influence my hiring decision. Not a show stopper, but certainly a minor negative. Probably the damage done by lost opportunities for experience would be worse than having a record, though. That even functions as an excuse of sorts--I suspect I'd actually like someone who was in prison for five years and got a degree over someone who lived off a trust fund for five years and did nothing.

All depends on the person, though, and what exactly I'm hiring for. And someone coming out of prison after 20 years? The fact that they committed a crime is long past, but it's hard to overstate how damaging decades in prison is. People have a really hard time adjusting, and any hire of someone like that I did would be out of charity, not out of expecting to get any value out of the person. If they manage to do well, I'd take that as an unexpected plus.

What does Afghan insurgent mean in this context? Do you mean an Afghani citizen robbing a bank in the USA? Or an Afghan insurgent who also decides to rob an Afghan bank? Or an Afghan insurgent who robs a bank in the USA (presumably in an attempt to further the insurgency)?

I'm taking a wild guess and claiming that you have no idea about spending about a quarter of your life time (that's if you're lucky) in prison. End of story. You cannot possibly understand what it means to be in prison for such a long time and not being free but as if you could you're claiming that he deserved what he got.

> People could (or may) have been killed over his greed for money.

Yes, but according to the OP, noone was injured. This is not Minority Report.

> That being said, I have no problems with the notion of helping ex-cons try to turn their lives around, after they've paid their debt to society

The thing is: he hasn't! We was locked up, so we could not pay for anything. The only thing that he lost was time, and society gained nothing - and incurred in even greater expenses.

If he was instead forced to pay his debt by working off, then we could say that the debt was repaid.

And, from his point of view, his debt will never be repaid, as he is now unemployable because of his police record.

I have never been convicted, arrested or even questioned by the police (US or otherwise), but the system horrifies me.

> he deserves whatever punishment was meted out to him

Ok. So if we chopped off a hand from every thief, would have he deserved that? Or how about hanging? We used to hang horse thieves; if we hung bank robbers, would that be just?

It's true that he shouldn't have committed the crime in the first place. But we aren't just allowed to consider whether punishments fit crimes; as citizens, it's our duty. Our government is of, by, and for the people. It's entirely reasonable for eduardordm to question the length of the sentence.

The US prison system is messed up, but mostly with regard to nonviolent/drug offenders. I am very libertarian, but I don't think this is a valid criticism in this case. Robbing a bank is not "making a mistake once". Buying coke or shoplifting is making a mistake. Bank robbery is a premeditated, violent, serious crime, and society is right to punish it severely. If you're committing bank robbery, you're likely also committing lots of other crimes: assault, threats, criminal confinement, fleeing police, etc.

> First, a rant: I always get shocked about how the US justice system works, where punishing (and revenge) is obviously more important than protecting humans.

A simplistic view of how the currently policy such came about will probably do little to help change it, as arguments against it from that point will not sway people who don't believe that's the cause.

Possible other reasons someone might favor longer prison sentences (by no means exhaustive): * Crime deterrence through harsher penalties. * The perception that these are inherently bad people, and should be kept away from society for as long as possible. * Corporate/union entities that benefit from a larger prison system.

Unless you target the actual reason someone holds a view, it's hard to argue against it effectively (but not impossible, you can just provide so many negatives that whatever positives they think they get are overwhelmed).

Remember, the US prison system is for profit. So that probably had something to do with his lengthy term.

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