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What's good enough is always going to be an individual decision, but it's better to be able to reference a concrete expectation of jail time.
by mseebach 9y ago
What's good enough is always going to be an individual decision, but it's better to be able to reference a concrete expectation of jail time.
- baddox 9y agoThat’s certainly true. Deterrence is one of the classic justifications for punishment (and for crimes like this that don’t involve direct violence or specific victims, it’s perhaps the best or most significant justification). But still, the strength of the deterrence is related not just to the specific punishment, but also the likelihood of being caught. I don’t have any data to back this up, but my intuition is that crimes like this of this magnitude are very difficult and thus unlikely to discover and successfully prosecute, especially down to the level of specific engineers. My guess is that this whole situation will provide some deterrence at the large corporation level, but probably not much deterrence at the individual engineer level.
- jogundas 9y agoIt is not the expectation of jail time, but certainty of a punishment is what matters. See https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2016/03/criminal-justice https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2016/03/crimina... and references therein for actual research.