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I have come to understand this brutal sentencing structure, or at least some of the reasoning. It appears to be the "other side" of the question "how many guilt
by duaneb 11y ago
I have come to understand this brutal sentencing structure, or at least some of the reasoning. It appears to be the "other side" of the question "how many guilty men should go free for how many innocent men"? The strength of the punishment is proportional to how hard it is to convict with certainty. The aggressive sentencing is greatly exaggerated to form a disincentive for all the men we cannot convict.
Justice strikes me of an area where humans tend to reason intuitively. It's also an area that is extremely difficult to measure in any quantitative way. I would be highly interested in understanding what drives existing criminals--my own intuition tells me these sentences are not very preventative, but allow for the illusion of making progress against crime, particularly violent crime. (These people are monsters! Thank god they're gone for life, or the dangerous part of their life.)
- justinpombrio 11y agoMy understanding is that this has been studied, and criminals are deterred almost entirely by the certainty of being caught, and almost not at all by the severity of punishment.
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoVaries. Texas sentenced petty criminals to hoe potatoes in the desert sun. Petty crime recidivism plummeted in Texas.
- mseebach 11y agoThe problem with this line of argument is the assumption that deterrence is the only purpose of punishment. Justice (in the hard-to-quantify sense referenced by the GP) for the victim and community (and on a practical tangent, the deterrence of vigilante justice) is a pretty significant purpose of punishment.
- marcoperaza 11y agoLet's not forget retribution. We intuitively feel that it is wrong for someone to live well after having caused someone else so much suffering.
- Fjolsvith 11y agoWe most certainly do not feel this way. An eye for an eye is not a life for an eye.
- girvo 11y agoWe might not, but a sizeable portion of the populace does
- marcoperaza 11y agoI honestly doubt that you have no problem with a heinous murderer living comfortably in his mansion and never serving time in prison. I'm not talking about taking limbs and eyes here...
- zimpenfish 11y agoWithout wishing to get into politics, that almost certainly already happens - if you have money or standing, you can get away with a lot.
- Fjolsvith 11y agoIf he mounts a good defense and is proven innocent, then he never committed the crime.
- Natsu 11y agoThere is the fact that criminals are less able to commit further crimes while in prison. It's not foolproof by any means, but I'm kind of comforted by the fact that the man who deliberately ambushed and murdered mom with a hammer, then later threatened to do something like that to grandma cannot, in fact, pay us a visit barring some failure of the prison system.
- duaneb 11y ago> There is the fact that criminals are less able to commit further crimes while in prison. This presupposes we catch the criminals. This doesn't really match up with reality—it's actually quite difficult to get any conviction from some murder cases, for instance. In a limited sense, what happens to the individual doesn't matter nearly as much as laws affect crime rates.
- Natsu 11y agoI was pointing out that prison, as a sentence, serves a use beyond mere retribution. The fact that some criminals are never caught is not relevant to that claim.
- Fjolsvith 11y agoThe disincentive of aggressive sentencing is just well-wishing. When I committed my crime, I was not even aware of what laws I was breaking or even the amount of punishment I could receive. Most of the men I knew in prison also were not thinking of consequences at the time they were being bad boys. I would say the main exception to this were the men who had been in organized crime.