4 ms·

The issue is that criminals for the most part don't think "ah, I can commit this crime, I will 'only' get 5-10 years" and "oh, this crime would be 50 years - in

by vacri 11y ago

The issue is that criminals for the most part don't think "ah, I can commit this crime, I will 'only' get 5-10 years" and "oh, this crime would be 50 years - in that case I won't do it". Extremely long sentences just don't add much to the mix.

blisterpeanuts 11y ago
There's a tremendous body of evidence suggesting the opposite. Maybe not so much for first time offenders, but people with some experience in the criminal justice system are remarkably knowledgeable about the law, sentences, and exactly what consequences will ensue for particular behavior.
- rl3 11y ago
  How do you reconcile that with a very high recidivism rate?[0] If anything, you're disproving your own argument. [0] http://www.bjs.gov/content/reentry/recidivism.cfm http://www.bjs.gov/content/reentry/recidivism.cfm
  - msandford 11y ago
    > How do you reconcile that with a very high recidivism rate?[0] The upsides to crime for some people are very high, and the downsides of going to prison are again for those people, not all that high. I think that's pretty obvious. The problem is that you're taking the beliefs about prison that you hold and applying them universally. That's not the correct way to look at it. A person with $1mm in the bank is going to look at a Porsche and a Camry very differently than a person with $5k in the bank. A person with a criminal record who understands how stacked against him/her society is, is going to look at crime from a much more calculating position than a person with a spotless one. A person with a spotless record has something to lose by committing a crime; the possibility of losing the spotless record. The person who already has a criminal record has very little to lose at least from a reputational perspective.
    - rl3 11y ago
      I understand your point that a portion of the recidivism is attributable to calculated risk on behalf of career criminals, but I think that in and of itself is a pretty sad state of affairs. >A person with a criminal record who understands how stacked against him/her society is I would argue that society being stacked against convicts is not congruent with the goal of reform. At the risk of "taking the beliefs I hold about prison and applying them universally", I'd say the U.S. criminal justice system today resembles a vindictive meat grinder that excels at taking deeply troubled people and placing them in an environment that's detrimental to their rehabilitation. It's hard to argue in favor of tough sentencing when the correctional system effectively operates as an overflow for other failed systems—be it mental health, political, education, social welfare, or public safety.
      - msandford 11y ago
        Yeah I'm not necessarily arguing in favor of tough sentencing, just trying to explain that criminals are still people and still think very, very logically. They just operate from a fact-base that's unfathomable to people who have it pretty good. Very few people wake up and say "How can I totally screw up my life today?" and think of a way, and then execute those plans to knowingly cause themselves harm. Most of the time they just have a very different set of assumptions and givens about life.
    - vacri 11y ago
      > The person who already has a criminal record has very little to lose at least from a reputational perspective. Imprisonment isn't just a loss of reputation, not by a long shot. The loss of reputation is one of the lesser reasons to avoid prison.
      - msandford 11y ago
        Clearly not, but if you've already made it through prison once then you've already figured out how to survive inside. I'm not saying it's fun and nice and carefree, but seemingly for plenty of people it's doable. The point I was trying to make is that to the normal person who has a clean record and isn't barred from any jobs, can own guns, etc etc keeping their record clean is actually very, very valuable. It's much, much harder to make $100k a year and generally participate in society with a felony record than without. So if you take $60k a year loss in earning potential times the rest of your life you're talking about maybe $1mm or $2mm a year that you'll probably lose if you commit a crime and get convicted. That's a pretty big deal. But if you've already got a record that ship has sailed and your earning potential is already much much lower. The spectre of losing the possibility of that life is gone and so there's much less incentive not to commit more crimes. You say that the reputational loss is a lesser reason to avoid prison but I suspect that most people would argue that a couple million dollars is actually a pretty big deal.
cb18 11y ago
The issue is that criminals for the most part don't think "ah, I can commit this crime, I will 'only' get 5-10 years" and "oh, this crime would be 50 years - in that case I won't do it". With all respect, I don't see how this sentence is relevant to what I wrote. I get that your trying to use it to support the next sentence, but I don't see how it does that either. Extremely long sentences just don't add much to the mix. They do actually. You can look at the length of a sentence as corresponding roughly to a cost benefit analysis pertaining to the given crime. The cost being the cost to incarcerate the person, and the benefit being the person's inability to commit a similar crime for X number of years. So for really bad crimes that carry a really long sentence, the benefit to society of there not being a potential recurrence of the criminal's acts outweighs the cost of the incarceration.
- Pyxl101 11y ago
  FYI, you've written "your" in recent comments when you meant to write "you're". > I would think your not saying that [...] I get that your trying to use it to support the next sentence [...] I offer this feedback in the spirit that writing well is important and valuable to practice.
- vacri 11y ago
  I don't know if your meaning to say we should do away with criminal sentencing? - sorry, I should have clarified that disposing of excessive sentences does not mean disposing of sentences altogether. > They do actually. The US has extremely long sentences. It has an incredibly high incarceration rate - higher than South Africa in it's apartheid prime, higher than China or Russia ever had, and yet crime there is no better than in it's contemporary developed-nation allies. In fact, for the one crime that is most directly and easily comparable - murder - the US is atrociously higher than it's contemporaries (a rate of ~4.8 vs ~1.0-1.5). The ridiculously long sentences in the US are not making the US any safer than it's contemporaries.
  - cb18 11y ago
    sorry, I should have clarified ok, I see. the US is atrociously higher than it's contemporaries (a rate of ~4.8 vs ~1.0-1.5) What is that a rate of, murders per 100k or something? Maybe the US just has a population and/or conditions that are more prone to committing murder, that doesn't mean the country should scale back it's punishment of murderers. It's highly doubtful that the longer sentence length(is the US's longer on average?) is somehow contributing to a higher murder rate. What did you think about how I described sentence length as being a function of cost-benefit analysis? That isn't to say that I think all sentences are optimum, or even near optimum, some have gotten completely out of whack, or altogether unnecessary, drug crimes for example.

by vacri 11y ago

blisterpeanuts 11y ago

There's a tremendous body of evidence suggesting the opposite. Maybe not so much for first time offenders, but people with some experience in the criminal justice system are remarkably knowledgeable about the law, sentences, and exactly what consequences will ensue for particular behavior.

rl3 11y ago
How do you reconcile that with a very high recidivism rate?[0] If anything, you're disproving your own argument. [0] http://www.bjs.gov/content/reentry/recidivism.cfm http://www.bjs.gov/content/reentry/recidivism.cfm
- msandford 11y ago
  > How do you reconcile that with a very high recidivism rate?[0] The upsides to crime for some people are very high, and the downsides of going to prison are again for those people, not all that high. I think that's pretty obvious. The problem is that you're taking the beliefs about prison that you hold and applying them universally. That's not the correct way to look at it. A person with $1mm in the bank is going to look at a Porsche and a Camry very differently than a person with $5k in the bank. A person with a criminal record who understands how stacked against him/her society is, is going to look at crime from a much more calculating position than a person with a spotless one. A person with a spotless record has something to lose by committing a crime; the possibility of losing the spotless record. The person who already has a criminal record has very little to lose at least from a reputational perspective.
  - rl3 11y ago
    I understand your point that a portion of the recidivism is attributable to calculated risk on behalf of career criminals, but I think that in and of itself is a pretty sad state of affairs. >A person with a criminal record who understands how stacked against him/her society is I would argue that society being stacked against convicts is not congruent with the goal of reform. At the risk of "taking the beliefs I hold about prison and applying them universally", I'd say the U.S. criminal justice system today resembles a vindictive meat grinder that excels at taking deeply troubled people and placing them in an environment that's detrimental to their rehabilitation. It's hard to argue in favor of tough sentencing when the correctional system effectively operates as an overflow for other failed systems—be it mental health, political, education, social welfare, or public safety.
    - msandford 11y ago
      Yeah I'm not necessarily arguing in favor of tough sentencing, just trying to explain that criminals are still people and still think very, very logically. They just operate from a fact-base that's unfathomable to people who have it pretty good. Very few people wake up and say "How can I totally screw up my life today?" and think of a way, and then execute those plans to knowingly cause themselves harm. Most of the time they just have a very different set of assumptions and givens about life.
  - vacri 11y ago
    > The person who already has a criminal record has very little to lose at least from a reputational perspective. Imprisonment isn't just a loss of reputation, not by a long shot. The loss of reputation is one of the lesser reasons to avoid prison.
    - msandford 11y ago
      Clearly not, but if you've already made it through prison once then you've already figured out how to survive inside. I'm not saying it's fun and nice and carefree, but seemingly for plenty of people it's doable. The point I was trying to make is that to the normal person who has a clean record and isn't barred from any jobs, can own guns, etc etc keeping their record clean is actually very, very valuable. It's much, much harder to make $100k a year and generally participate in society with a felony record than without. So if you take $60k a year loss in earning potential times the rest of your life you're talking about maybe $1mm or $2mm a year that you'll probably lose if you commit a crime and get convicted. That's a pretty big deal. But if you've already got a record that ship has sailed and your earning potential is already much much lower. The spectre of losing the possibility of that life is gone and so there's much less incentive not to commit more crimes. You say that the reputational loss is a lesser reason to avoid prison but I suspect that most people would argue that a couple million dollars is actually a pretty big deal.

cb18 11y ago

The issue is that criminals for the most part don't think "ah, I can commit this crime, I will 'only' get 5-10 years" and "oh, this crime would be 50 years - in that case I won't do it". With all respect, I don't see how this sentence is relevant to what I wrote. I get that your trying to use it to support the next sentence, but I don't see how it does that either. Extremely long sentences just don't add much to the mix. They do actually. You can look at the length of a sentence as corresponding roughly to a cost benefit analysis pertaining to the given crime. The cost being the cost to incarcerate the person, and the benefit being the person's inability to commit a similar crime for X number of years. So for really bad crimes that carry a really long sentence, the benefit to society of there not being a potential recurrence of the criminal's acts outweighs the cost of the incarceration.

Pyxl101 11y ago
FYI, you've written "your" in recent comments when you meant to write "you're". > I would think your not saying that [...] I get that your trying to use it to support the next sentence [...] I offer this feedback in the spirit that writing well is important and valuable to practice.
vacri 11y ago
I don't know if your meaning to say we should do away with criminal sentencing? - sorry, I should have clarified that disposing of excessive sentences does not mean disposing of sentences altogether. > They do actually. The US has extremely long sentences. It has an incredibly high incarceration rate - higher than South Africa in it's apartheid prime, higher than China or Russia ever had, and yet crime there is no better than in it's contemporary developed-nation allies. In fact, for the one crime that is most directly and easily comparable - murder - the US is atrociously higher than it's contemporaries (a rate of ~4.8 vs ~1.0-1.5). The ridiculously long sentences in the US are not making the US any safer than it's contemporaries.
- cb18 11y ago
  sorry, I should have clarified ok, I see. the US is atrociously higher than it's contemporaries (a rate of ~4.8 vs ~1.0-1.5) What is that a rate of, murders per 100k or something? Maybe the US just has a population and/or conditions that are more prone to committing murder, that doesn't mean the country should scale back it's punishment of murderers. It's highly doubtful that the longer sentence length(is the US's longer on average?) is somehow contributing to a higher murder rate. What did you think about how I described sentence length as being a function of cost-benefit analysis? That isn't to say that I think all sentences are optimum, or even near optimum, some have gotten completely out of whack, or altogether unnecessary, drug crimes for example.