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Comment by copperx | Hacker News Reader

I spent my teenage years in a third-world country. I would be convicted of the following if I had spent those years in the US:

1) Trespassing private property

2) Theft

3) Willful and malicious destruction of property

4) Arson

5) Indecent exposure

6) Consensual rape (my girlfriend was 2 years younger than me)

7) Driving under the influence

I consider myself a highly moral individual, and some people consider me the most level-headed and patient person around.

I would argue that being a vandal in your teenage years may have a positive impact on the rest of the life of some people. You have to be smart about it and try not to hurt you or anyone else too much in the process.

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> You have to be smart about it and try not to hurt you or anyone else too much in the process.

So theft, destruction of property, driving under the influence, and arson are victimless crimes?

Maybe I'm a stickler for rule of law but when you start fucking with other people's stuff, that's not cool (understatement). Especially if it's just because you're bored.

Although I'm sympathetic to your general view, driving under the influence is in fact a victimless crime. If the crime were "causing damage or injury as a result of driving under the influence", then it would have a victim, but getting drunk then driving somewhere and not hurting anyone is still a crime, but has no victim.

You could say you're increasing the risk for everyone else, but the same can be said for use of PCP or meth or some drug that correlates with higher rates of violent crimes, and those are acknowledged to be victimless crimes.

Its a sliding scale. What's the chance of this 'victimless crime' turning into a real one? And that ranges from property damage to manslaughter to killing whole families.

There's a risk/reward analysis at work here, an driving under the influence has had a very, very bad track record.

Well it just is a victimless crime is all. Clearly the author of the parent post didn't hurt anyone, so it had no victim.

It's probably not worth it to get into it, but I think I'd prefer a situation where you don't get punished for "pre-crime" like driving under the influence, but you get punished extra harshly for anything that causes damage as a result of something like that. So crash into a pole when sober, pay a fine. Crash into a pole when drunk, fine plus 3 months in jail. That sort of thing. Similarly you can imagine a lot of the outrage about jaywalking would go away if jaywalking were legal everywhere, but causing an accident or traffic jam while jaywalking would carry a hefty fine. This allows people to make local risk assessment decisions for which they are taking responsibility (it's 2 AM and there are no cars around - is it worth it to cross now knowing that if I do end up causing an accident or traffic jam it'll cost me $500?). Not saying it's a perfect system, but it seems like a start in addressing the legitimate concerns people have about victimless crimes.

Crash into a pedestrian, and you go to jail for 3 extra months?

I am biased because I lost a parent to this, but unlike, say, smoking weed in your house, driving under the influence has a near 100% chance of endangering people around you. Just like how people need a license to drive a car,it's not unreasonable to ask you to not be so selfish as to endanger those around you just because you got wasted and want to drive home in your 3 ton machine.

I was using crashing into a pole because it's something where you can see where you could plausibly have a huge disparity in sentencing outcomes in relative terms (there are always going to be thorny issues when you kill someone because even if you weren't driving drunk they're going to be picking apart all the different fault and negligence aspects anyway). For killing a pedestrian, you'd presumably make it so that killing someone while driving under the influence is presumptively negligent homicide as opposed to something like vehicular manslaughter.

Additionally, it's disingenuous to say there's a "near 100% chance of endangering people around you". That's saying that there's a 100% chance that you've increased the risk by some amount. There's nothing even close to a 100% chance that you will actually do any damage to people around you, or crash. According to [1] there are 112 million self-reported episodes of impaired driving, and 1.4 million arrests, but 10,000 deaths. Obviously these are not hard numbers, but my guess is that driving under the influence likely triples or quadruples an existing (small) risk that you would kill or harm someone. That's not a trivial thing, but it would still mean that in the vast majority of cases, if you drive under the influence, everyone gets home safe.

And in any case, I'm not in favor of people driving under the influence. Similarly I don't think people should drive while tired (it's a similar rate of impairment), but the simple fact is that these crimes by themselves don't have victims, they are just occasionally the cause of actions which do have victims. You can certainly make the case that drunk driving should be against the law for any number of reasons, but that's a separate issue as to whether that crime actually has a victim.

1. http://www.cdc.gov/MotorVehicleSafety/Impaired_Driving/impai...

Don't trivialize those 10,000 deaths. That's one in 11,000 drunk-driving episodes. Deaths, not some euphemistic small risk. Easily worth trying to mitigate. Absolutely makes it worth classifying out of the 'victimless crime' category.

For one thing I'm not trivializing them, I'm saying that saying that "100% of the time you are endangering people" is disingenuous considering there's only a 0.01% that anyone actually dies if you drive under the influence. There's not a whole lot to offer in the "benefits" column of drunk driving, so it's probably not reasonable even for fairly small increases of risk anyway.

And no, it does not make it worth classifying "out of the victimless crime" category, because victimless is not a matter of degree, it's a question of whether or not there is an aggrieved party. Any time there's an accident as a result of drunk driving, then it's got a victim. Otherwise there are only "potential" victims.

Again, I think it's a behavior that needs to be discouraged, because it forces people not capturing any of the benefit (the drinking, the convenience of being able to take your own car afterwards) to assume some of the risk (the chance that a drunk driver will harm them or their property). I'm just saying that driving drunk by itself doesn't inherently have a victim.

Interesting: as mentioned elsewhere, jaywalking used to be called 'walking'. Car companies marketed the idea that pedestrians didn't belong in the road with cars, which up to then had actually been built for pedestrians to walk in.

To be fair, you probably wouldn't have been caught for most of that stuff unless you were doing it during school hours, on school grounds. The knee-jerk massive overreaction stuff is mostly perpetrated by school administrations, whose primary concern is preventing a lawsuit, not contributing to the child's development.

Take into account that "during school hours" and "on school grounds" is a much bigger chunk of kids' lives in the US than it is in most other countries.

In most countries, school is just the place where you have lessons for a few hours, and all other activities, including even lunch breaks, are part of kids' private lives outside of school and outside of school grounds.

Add to that no school buses and no parents driving their kids to and from school in SUV's, and you get a culture in which kids have a considerably chunk of private life outside of either parental or school control.

The problem imho is giving school administrations so much influence and authority over kids in the first place.

>Take into account that "during school hours" and "on school grounds" is a much bigger chunk of kids' lives in the US than it is in most other countries.

Citation needed, my experience has been the opposite (except for Germany). I was getting out of school at 2:45 in the US, 6 in France.

I know there are extracurricular activities, but still.

Nothing unusual for kids: jumping a fence to steal a fruit or play with fireworks. It is quite unlike anything illegal done for profit.

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