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Comment by SilkRoadie | Hacker News Reader

The guy vandalised property, wasted police and court time so he could "have an experience." This is why his sentance was harsh. The judge wanted to deter this nonsense going forwards and the judge is right to do this. I have little sympathy for his treatment.

> The whole process this guy went through to report on the state of affairs is valuable because it puts the depth of reality on what is otherwise a known but relatively abstract situation. We all know that the judicial system is unfair in an abstract sense, but without seeing actual, real-life examples it does not get driven home nearly as strongly.

The key point here is that you get can get real-life examples by interviewing people caught up in the legal system. There are plenty of them, it isn't difficult to fact check the circumstances of their arrest. All this is possible without wasting police time.

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> All this is possible without wasting police time

How many police officers are there in New York city? How many people do they arrest or otherwise spend time on every single day? How many hours did his case take out of the total hours spent? 0.001% ?

That's not "waste" in any meaningful way of the word, and not even an argument in this discussion.

How can you defend someone who repeatedly vandalises a public space just so he can prance around a cell and say how horrible it is? It is easy enough to find people who have had these experience and document them.

I am sure the math could be done on the actual cost of this persons misadventure. The cost of reporting the incident, trawling through CCTV, looking for the person responsible, holding the person responsible in a cell, processing the paper work, the courts time, cleaning up after him etc.

It is likely to be tens of thousands of dollars when everything is said and done. Such a waste of resources just so someone could write a story about his experience..

Imagine if more people wanted to spend their weekend in a cell just to see what it is like.. its rediculous and takes the police and prosecutors away from dealing with real criminals.

Granted some light has been shed on the state of the system in this article but the author could have achieved the same effect by interviewing people who have been through it.

> How can you defend someone who ..

I didn't really, I just pointed out that the "wasting of resources" argument is pretty silly since he actually used very little resources, in the scale of things.

I do however think he did (try to) do something worthwhile, at a personal expense.

> Imagine if more people wanted to spend their weekend in a cell just to see what it is like..

Yeah, call me when that happens.

Also, it doesn't matter that it would be bad if everyone did it. What would happen if everyone decided to take the subway at 10.00 tomorrow? IT WOULD BE CHAOS!! Does that mean I can't take the subway at 10 tomorrow?

> the author could have achieved the same effect by interviewing people who have been through it.

No-one would read that.. I'm sure I can dig up thousands of pages of reports like that.. not exactly making the headlines.

> Such a waste of resources just so someone could write a story about his experience..

Dude...he didn't do it so that he could write about the experience, he did it so that we could read about it. That's a qualitative difference.

While I agree in general with your assessment, some people don't understand until they see "someone like them" i.e., not a poor unfortunate soul or a criminal.

Someone who steps out of their comfort zone, and gets "the experience" has a more visceral feeling - for those who can't imagine themselves poor, unfortunate, or having to turn to crime, this is the only way they can truly "experience" it.

I'm not without reservations about the utility of this man's approach in documenting the harsh criminal "justice" system, but it does add another angle.

> The guy vandalised property, wasted police and court time

The DA wasted court time. The judge was accepting the plea bargain and the DA decided to waste time. They could have easily fined him to more than make up for any wasted time it took to track him down after he turned himself in.

Does the "send a message" thing work? Other than the obvious disconnect to whatever message is thought to be sent and whether that message is received let alone understood, any apparent examples I've encountered only make me consider possible inherent unfairness or corruption, not anything else.

Either the "system" is responding fairly and accurately to the level of "wrong" or it's just a bunch of power brokers in exercise, not contemplating justice.

Then people like you would dismiss that "unreliable source". Like how the mass surveillance stuff had been leaked previously even by insiders, but was dismissed for years.

> people like you

What kind of person do you think I am?

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