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I don’t have much sympathy for people that commit actual crimes. There are too many innocent people being arrested to worry about the guilty ones. They chose t

I don’t have much sympathy for people that commit actual crimes. There are too many innocent people being arrested to worry about the guilty ones. They chose to spend their money to keep their son out of jail. Thats was their choice. That’s the consequence of the son committing what appears to be a major crime. Hopefully the son learns from that and he should be working to help repay that debt.

actually_a_dog 5y ago
> I don’t have much sympathy for people that commit actual crimes. Even when the "crime" doesn't hurt anybody except the "offender?" GP post strongly implies the charge was some sort of possession charge. Drug addicts do not need to be punished any more than they punish themselves.
- plank_time 5y ago
  GP did not strongly imply it was possession. They said the guy “definitely did something bad”. So it sounds like to me it’s something more than just simple possession. That’s what I’m going with.
  - actually_a_dog 5y ago
    You know, you didn't actually answer the question I asked....
    - shard 5y ago
      I don't think every person who replies to you needs to answer the exact question you asked. This is a general conversation, and people can talk about any interesting point in any part of the preceding text. Tangent conversations are just fine here.
      - actually_a_dog 5y ago
        I don't think me writing a comment compels anyone to do anything about it, so, what's the problem? This is also the specific person I asked the question of originally to whom I am replying. I think when I ask a specific person a question and get a reply from that person, it's fair to expect that the reply answer the question. Wouldn't you agree?
        silly-silly 5y ago
        You'd hope, but people gotta peep.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        shard 5y ago
        You also can't expect people to bother checking whether you are asking the question of the person you originally replied to. I actually thought about it myself for a second, and decided not to.
  - moshmosh 5y ago
    Yeah, it was worse than that, but waaaaaay under something that would get people to say "lock them up and throw away the key!" Also wasn't any kind of hate-related or vulnerable-group-targeting thing, of the kind that would get a person a torrent of death threats on twitter. 100% the kind of thing someone ought to be punished for (unlike simple possession, certainly). The main thing I find objectionable is that one must pay a flat-fee ransom to an assuredly-connected-to-important-people-and-overcharging commercial entity to get one's children out of jail. There are a few things wrong with that, but fundamentally it sucks that how much money you (or your family) have determines so much about how harsh a punishment is. It can be anywhere from "a little annoying but no lasting harm done to anyone" to "everyone in your immediate family's quality of life is now 10-80% worse, measured over a lifetime", for exactly the same crime. [EDIT] and on a less personal level, the thing that bothers me about it is that a justice system that intends to reduce crime rates should avoid at all costs being a driver of poverty.
- meowface 5y ago
  I read the GP post as suggesting an actual crime likely occurred. You, I, and many others (especially people who tend to use HN) don't consider drug use an actual crime. Judges sometimes sentence (actual) criminals to drug rehab programs as an alternative to jail for certain things, e.g. if perhaps someone burglarized homes to fund a drug addiction. I have no idea, though. It would've been better if they gave a little more detail about the nature of the crime.
  - actually_a_dog 5y ago
    Sure, that's possible. But, even if it were some sort of other crime that was exacerbated or precipitated by a drug addiction, the fact that the sentence included the option of rehab + probation seriously limits the badness of that crime. If this were the scenario, and I had to guess, I would say it probably was some sort of property crime. People other than the perpetrator tend not to get seriously (physically) injured in most property crimes, and insurance often covers the damages. In any case, monetary restitution to cover the damage plus rehab. should be a sufficient sentence.
rectang 5y ago
When police selectively enforce the laws, a lack of sympathy for the guilty guarantees that systemic discrimination goes unredressed. It's not just that a dog like Karma exists, it's who the police choose to inflict Karma on.
- plank_time 5y ago
  Just because some people are let off doesn’t mean they the actually-guilty aren’t guilty. Criminals need to be punished. Period. End of story. What is going on in SF and the large jump in crime and violence is a direct consequence of not wanting to prosecute criminals.
HenryBemis 5y ago
Something tells me that if Police (in the USA) sees a white person sleeping on a Porsche in an expenive shopping mall, they will "sit back and stand by" to ensure that nobody will disturb the sleep of the rich-white-folk. It is clear that US Police is thriving on discrimination and malpractice. As long as police officers don't pay out of their own pocket the damages they cause, this won't stop. Guys... (you over in the USA).. you got some major problems to solve. We, on the European side of this planet are super surprised how you let some things STILL be happening, by your various police bodies. You either don't care, or (even worse) you are deeply divided and disagreeing on what's "right" and what's "wrong". It's a pity.
- kube-system 5y ago
  We do care, but you must understand that policing (and the majority of government that Americans interact with) is fragmented by design under our significantly federated system of government. As much discussion as this gets on a national level, meaningful change in this realm means change at the local level. And that's where things start to break down, because the most egregious cases of abuse are happening in places that disproportionately benefit from these abuses.
- dang 5y ago
  We've warned you before not to post nationalistic flamebait to HN. If you do it again we will ban you. (It doesn't matter which country is at issue.) Discussions on sensitive, divisive topics are difficult enough without someone pouring petrol on the fires. It may not be arson, but it's at least negligence, and it's destructive. Please stop. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
ineedasername 5y ago
Except it costs money to incarcerate someone in jail, and doing that & foregoing the dedicated drug treatment also means the person is more likely to relapse and cost society even more money. Especially for drugs, we need to move away from a punishment/vengeance system of justice and towards a rehabilitation/lowest TCO form of treatment.
- plank_time 5y ago
  Punishing criminals is more important than saving money. Simple possession shouldn’t be a crime but crimes themselves shouldn’t be consequence-free otherwise it turns a city into a shithole. Look at SF over the last few years.
  - syshum 5y ago
    The deterrent effect of punishment has been proven many times to be no where near as strong as law abiding people believe it to be. Now you can say "well you just need harsher punishment" but many systems has disproven this as well. Jail should be reserved for people who a direct physical threat to other peoples bodies or properties. Continued incarceration should be viewed from that lens as well. Victim Compensation should be a higher priority instead of punishment, instead we put almost no priority to Victim Compensation instead viewing the crime as a "crime against society" and the person "pays a debt to society" that is the wrong position.
    - dumbfounder 5y ago
      I don’t think these arguments are the opposite of each other the way you assume. I believe that punishment is important. I also believe that reducing the total cost is important, but not always to the point of reducing punishment where people aren’t punished for their crimes. It’s all relative, but here’s an extreme: you murder someone, it costs $10m to prosecute you and put you in jail for life, OR you are given $5m and told you get to keep it unless you commit another crime. The latter might be more effective, (I have no idea) but that doesn’t make it the right choice in my opinion. Obviously an extreme case that will never happen but it’s all grey is what I am trying to say...
moshmosh 5y ago
It's less about sympathy than about how you structure a justice system if you don't want more crime in the future. A lot of things about our justice system work very much counter to how you'd do things if your main goal was to have less crime. See also: banning certain kinds of government college aid for people with drug-related convictions. If you care about recidivism and cycles of poverty & crime why would you make it harder for people who've done their time and gotten out to contribute positively to society? From a sheer fairness and what is justice actually POV, it's bullshit that this is yet another thing a rich family can shrug off, while a poor family is screwed. I don't have a solution for it, but the role money plays in our justice system may well be the biggest problem with it, which is saying something. > Hopefully the son learns from that and he should be working to help repay that debt. Very unlikely, with a record. A decade later and he's doing OK, for values of OK that include "can mostly pay own not-large bills, and only because he's living with his parents, and is steadily and consistently progressing in a low-paying field". Last I checked he's still "in the system" to some extent, as far as ongoing fees and check-ins and such. (for the record, just to set some parameters here, he didn't physically hurt anyone, but it was still quite serious and definitely not something a society would want to go un-punished, that's absolutely true) One imagines the long-term lasting harm to all of: victims, families of victims, perpetrators, and families of perpetrators; happening over and over in high-crime neighborhoods and it's no wonder it's so damn hard to improve those areas. That, on top of everything else that's often wrong with them. Reducing, not increasing, the "blast radius" of crime seems like something you'd focus on if you want to reduce crime rates, when stress and poverty are causal for crime and stress and poverty are part of the effect of same "blast radius".
- plank_time 5y ago
  Was your relative a multiple-time offender? If so, maybe stronger punishment earlier would have put him on the right path sooner. Look, some people will always be fuck ups. That’s the sad reality of the life. Some people, no matter how their are guided, will always eventually fuck up and ruin all the hard work people put into them. They are wired to always make poor decisions no matter what. My best friend is like this. After 40 years of trying to help him, I accept him as he is now with no expectations he will ever get better despite decades of trying to help him. I have a close relative like that too. If they are protected from consequences too early in life, they tend to make larger, irrevocable mistakes later in life and then they are fucked for a long time. In SF crime is running rampant now because of a DA that refuses to prosecute smaller crimes. It has emboldened criminals. Prop 47 has made it so that gangs of thugs enter a store, fill their bags with merchandise and run out with no repercussions. I witnessed this with my own eyes and the manager said they don’t even call the cops anymore because they won’t come. Instead, 15 Walgreens have closed their stores in SF in the last few years because of it. Criminals are arrested 20+ times in the span of a year and they keep getting let go and they are free to continue committing crimes and it’s getting worse and worse. So punishing criminals matter. Putting them on the right path matters but it can’t be consequence-free.
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
>"There are too many innocent people being arrested to worry about the guilty ones." Ow, wow. That's like 17th century thinking right there, when we used to hang people for petty theft, executions were a public holiday, folks thought it would deter crime but it stayed sky high. Also boiling people alive was a thing, and, most egregiously, we overboiled them. I am willing to bet that you or someone in your family or friends has broken some law somewhere at some point, possibly without realising. I don't think this line of thinking leads to a good place.
- plank_time 5y ago
  A close family member almost went to jail because they committed theft over $25,000. Had they gone to jail, I think it would have been easily deserved. I wouldn’t have had much sympathy for them either, and they are like a sibling to me. If you knowingly commit a crime, why exactly should one deserve sympathy when they did it with full knowledge of the consequences?
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    The idea is not thay noone should ever face consequences, but they must be afforded full protections of due process and be treated fairly. The antithesis to this would be the police pinning another nearby robbery on your relative just cause he is guity already, or violating his right in some way.
    - plank_time 5y ago
      I don’t know what your point is then. I said I don’t have sympathy for guilty people because I reserve my sympathy for the innocent people that are caught up in our current “justice” system. That doesn’t seem very controversial but what you are saying is so far off from that I don’t know what your point is.
      - hellotomyrars 5y ago
        I'll step in because I really took a different (and perhaps incorrect) read of the statement "There are too many innocent people being arrested to worry about the guilty ones." On it's own I take this to mean that we need to address the issues in policing and the justice system to have a lot less bullshit and a lot more impact. Time/money (and resulting fallout) spent harassing innocent people creates all manner of problems and is also time/money not spent on actually doing the job. In this I wholly agree. That said, There is still room for nuance and appropriate recourse in actual crime. There are a lot of crimes, and it's pretty clear that in many cases the punishment doesn't fit the crime, or that the crime even makes sense. Ultimately if we ever get our shit figured out I'd assume both of these would be accomplished. I just hope that we get there.
kodah 5y ago
> I don’t have much sympathy for people that commit actual crimes. There are too many innocent people being arrested to worry about the guilty ones. What's an actual crime to you? I bet our definitions differ based on something not-so-quantifiable. A good DA can produce charges against someone to make it look like an actual crime was committed when it's really something petty or much less nefarious. We've seen countless examples of this. Rather than describing my sympathies at some nebulous level, I'd rather say this: I have sympathy for those in the criminal justice system because I realize most people are capable of change and that is mostly ignored by the public and the criminal justice system together. Former criminals are almost never rehabbed, and worse we see many examples of folks who were never criminals being introduced to a system that by default does not care about them but carries maximal implications for their life.
- throwaway7783 5y ago
  I have zero sympathy for someone who stole a $200 necklace that my mother gifted my wife, as a token of remembrance and melted it to get some gold. $200 is not an issue. The memories associated with that artifact, the legacy - That is the issue. And in CA, the laws encourage petty crime like this, because of dollar value. I don't know why I should care about if this thief is capable of change or should be rehabbed. I want to kick the shit out of the thief and get the necklace back, because this person has caused so much anguish to me and my family.
  - plank_time 5y ago
    SB-82 for California would make your crime a misdemeanor, so even more of a slap in the face to you. The cops wouldn’t even bother responding to it if you reported it, it’s sickening.
  - kodah 5y ago
    True, you're owed by this thief, and unfortunately they stole a sum that can likely not be repaid. I imagine there are no amount of years someone can sit in a box that will make you feel better about that. To me, when someone does something like this the criminal justice system is supposed to figure out why they did it (drugs, opportunity, gangs, etc) and rehab them accordingly so they don't go on to repeat this behavior in the future. What happens all too often is we stick them in a box, never rehabilitate them, and they go on to learn more about criminal activity in prison only to commit worse offenses when they get out. You don't have to care, the criminal justice system does because it's within their charter to do so.
nine_k 5y ago
The system has a task to determine whether a person has actually committed a crime, and how serious. You don't want to happen to be a false positive. Nobody does. But with plea bargain, I bet the number of false positives is somehow elevated. Also, prisons are a terrible way to handle criminals. Instead of reforming the criminal and helping reintegration into the law-abiding society, many prison systems, including the US's, produce hardened criminals who learned a lot more of criminal trade during incarceration, or crushed people who have no chance to get to their feet again. Unless a society just kills every criminal, it makes sense to care what happens to them, because they'll be back.
cycomanic 5y ago
So that raises the question, if you are guilty of a crime, e.g. shoplifting but you get punished like a e.g. murderer. Are you innocent or guilty? If you argue they committed a crime, so don't deserve sympathy, then it follows that we don't need to look at the fact if punishment appropriate. We could then just throw people in jail and do away with much of the court system, because with the complexity of the law, you can say with nearly 100% certainty that someone would have committed a crime at some point, so they all are guilty. Proportionality between crime and punishment is a central pillar of a fair justice system. The extrajudicial financial punishments that the article and the OP allude to, are in direct conflict with that. Like one of the previous posters said, daemonizing the guilty is what keeps this system from being fixed.

actually_a_dog 5y ago

> I don’t have much sympathy for people that commit actual crimes. Even when the "crime" doesn't hurt anybody except the "offender?" GP post strongly implies the charge was some sort of possession charge. Drug addicts do not need to be punished any more than they punish themselves.

plank_time 5y ago
GP did not strongly imply it was possession. They said the guy “definitely did something bad”. So it sounds like to me it’s something more than just simple possession. That’s what I’m going with.
- actually_a_dog 5y ago
  You know, you didn't actually answer the question I asked....
  - shard 5y ago
    I don't think every person who replies to you needs to answer the exact question you asked. This is a general conversation, and people can talk about any interesting point in any part of the preceding text. Tangent conversations are just fine here.
    - actually_a_dog 5y ago
      I don't think me writing a comment compels anyone to do anything about it, so, what's the problem? This is also the specific person I asked the question of originally to whom I am replying. I think when I ask a specific person a question and get a reply from that person, it's fair to expect that the reply answer the question. Wouldn't you agree?
      - silly-silly 5y ago
        You'd hope, but people gotta peep.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - shard 5y ago
        You also can't expect people to bother checking whether you are asking the question of the person you originally replied to. I actually thought about it myself for a second, and decided not to.
- moshmosh 5y ago
  Yeah, it was worse than that, but waaaaaay under something that would get people to say "lock them up and throw away the key!" Also wasn't any kind of hate-related or vulnerable-group-targeting thing, of the kind that would get a person a torrent of death threats on twitter. 100% the kind of thing someone ought to be punished for (unlike simple possession, certainly). The main thing I find objectionable is that one must pay a flat-fee ransom to an assuredly-connected-to-important-people-and-overcharging commercial entity to get one's children out of jail. There are a few things wrong with that, but fundamentally it sucks that how much money you (or your family) have determines so much about how harsh a punishment is. It can be anywhere from "a little annoying but no lasting harm done to anyone" to "everyone in your immediate family's quality of life is now 10-80% worse, measured over a lifetime", for exactly the same crime. [EDIT] and on a less personal level, the thing that bothers me about it is that a justice system that intends to reduce crime rates should avoid at all costs being a driver of poverty.
meowface 5y ago
I read the GP post as suggesting an actual crime likely occurred. You, I, and many others (especially people who tend to use HN) don't consider drug use an actual crime. Judges sometimes sentence (actual) criminals to drug rehab programs as an alternative to jail for certain things, e.g. if perhaps someone burglarized homes to fund a drug addiction. I have no idea, though. It would've been better if they gave a little more detail about the nature of the crime.
- actually_a_dog 5y ago
  Sure, that's possible. But, even if it were some sort of other crime that was exacerbated or precipitated by a drug addiction, the fact that the sentence included the option of rehab + probation seriously limits the badness of that crime. If this were the scenario, and I had to guess, I would say it probably was some sort of property crime. People other than the perpetrator tend not to get seriously (physically) injured in most property crimes, and insurance often covers the damages. In any case, monetary restitution to cover the damage plus rehab. should be a sufficient sentence.

rectang 5y ago

When police selectively enforce the laws, a lack of sympathy for the guilty guarantees that systemic discrimination goes unredressed. It's not just that a dog like Karma exists, it's who the police choose to inflict Karma on.

plank_time 5y ago
Just because some people are let off doesn’t mean they the actually-guilty aren’t guilty. Criminals need to be punished. Period. End of story. What is going on in SF and the large jump in crime and violence is a direct consequence of not wanting to prosecute criminals.

HenryBemis 5y ago

Something tells me that if Police (in the USA) sees a white person sleeping on a Porsche in an expenive shopping mall, they will "sit back and stand by" to ensure that nobody will disturb the sleep of the rich-white-folk. It is clear that US Police is thriving on discrimination and malpractice. As long as police officers don't pay out of their own pocket the damages they cause, this won't stop. Guys... (you over in the USA).. you got some major problems to solve. We, on the European side of this planet are super surprised how you let some things STILL be happening, by your various police bodies. You either don't care, or (even worse) you are deeply divided and disagreeing on what's "right" and what's "wrong". It's a pity.

kube-system 5y ago
We do care, but you must understand that policing (and the majority of government that Americans interact with) is fragmented by design under our significantly federated system of government. As much discussion as this gets on a national level, meaningful change in this realm means change at the local level. And that's where things start to break down, because the most egregious cases of abuse are happening in places that disproportionately benefit from these abuses.
dang 5y ago
We've warned you before not to post nationalistic flamebait to HN. If you do it again we will ban you. (It doesn't matter which country is at issue.) Discussions on sensitive, divisive topics are difficult enough without someone pouring petrol on the fires. It may not be arson, but it's at least negligence, and it's destructive. Please stop. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

ineedasername 5y ago

Except it costs money to incarcerate someone in jail, and doing that & foregoing the dedicated drug treatment also means the person is more likely to relapse and cost society even more money. Especially for drugs, we need to move away from a punishment/vengeance system of justice and towards a rehabilitation/lowest TCO form of treatment.

plank_time 5y ago
Punishing criminals is more important than saving money. Simple possession shouldn’t be a crime but crimes themselves shouldn’t be consequence-free otherwise it turns a city into a shithole. Look at SF over the last few years.
- syshum 5y ago
  The deterrent effect of punishment has been proven many times to be no where near as strong as law abiding people believe it to be. Now you can say "well you just need harsher punishment" but many systems has disproven this as well. Jail should be reserved for people who a direct physical threat to other peoples bodies or properties. Continued incarceration should be viewed from that lens as well. Victim Compensation should be a higher priority instead of punishment, instead we put almost no priority to Victim Compensation instead viewing the crime as a "crime against society" and the person "pays a debt to society" that is the wrong position.
  - dumbfounder 5y ago
    I don’t think these arguments are the opposite of each other the way you assume. I believe that punishment is important. I also believe that reducing the total cost is important, but not always to the point of reducing punishment where people aren’t punished for their crimes. It’s all relative, but here’s an extreme: you murder someone, it costs $10m to prosecute you and put you in jail for life, OR you are given $5m and told you get to keep it unless you commit another crime. The latter might be more effective, (I have no idea) but that doesn’t make it the right choice in my opinion. Obviously an extreme case that will never happen but it’s all grey is what I am trying to say...

moshmosh 5y ago

It's less about sympathy than about how you structure a justice system if you don't want more crime in the future. A lot of things about our justice system work very much counter to how you'd do things if your main goal was to have less crime. See also: banning certain kinds of government college aid for people with drug-related convictions. If you care about recidivism and cycles of poverty & crime why would you make it harder for people who've done their time and gotten out to contribute positively to society? From a sheer fairness and what is justice actually POV, it's bullshit that this is yet another thing a rich family can shrug off, while a poor family is screwed. I don't have a solution for it, but the role money plays in our justice system may well be the biggest problem with it, which is saying something. > Hopefully the son learns from that and he should be working to help repay that debt. Very unlikely, with a record. A decade later and he's doing OK, for values of OK that include "can mostly pay own not-large bills, and only because he's living with his parents, and is steadily and consistently progressing in a low-paying field". Last I checked he's still "in the system" to some extent, as far as ongoing fees and check-ins and such. (for the record, just to set some parameters here, he didn't physically hurt anyone, but it was still quite serious and definitely not something a society would want to go un-punished, that's absolutely true) One imagines the long-term lasting harm to all of: victims, families of victims, perpetrators, and families of perpetrators; happening over and over in high-crime neighborhoods and it's no wonder it's so damn hard to improve those areas. That, on top of everything else that's often wrong with them. Reducing, not increasing, the "blast radius" of crime seems like something you'd focus on if you want to reduce crime rates, when stress and poverty are causal for crime and stress and poverty are part of the effect of same "blast radius".

plank_time 5y ago
Was your relative a multiple-time offender? If so, maybe stronger punishment earlier would have put him on the right path sooner. Look, some people will always be fuck ups. That’s the sad reality of the life. Some people, no matter how their are guided, will always eventually fuck up and ruin all the hard work people put into them. They are wired to always make poor decisions no matter what. My best friend is like this. After 40 years of trying to help him, I accept him as he is now with no expectations he will ever get better despite decades of trying to help him. I have a close relative like that too. If they are protected from consequences too early in life, they tend to make larger, irrevocable mistakes later in life and then they are fucked for a long time. In SF crime is running rampant now because of a DA that refuses to prosecute smaller crimes. It has emboldened criminals. Prop 47 has made it so that gangs of thugs enter a store, fill their bags with merchandise and run out with no repercussions. I witnessed this with my own eyes and the manager said they don’t even call the cops anymore because they won’t come. Instead, 15 Walgreens have closed their stores in SF in the last few years because of it. Criminals are arrested 20+ times in the span of a year and they keep getting let go and they are free to continue committing crimes and it’s getting worse and worse. So punishing criminals matter. Putting them on the right path matters but it can’t be consequence-free.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago

>"There are too many innocent people being arrested to worry about the guilty ones." Ow, wow. That's like 17th century thinking right there, when we used to hang people for petty theft, executions were a public holiday, folks thought it would deter crime but it stayed sky high. Also boiling people alive was a thing, and, most egregiously, we overboiled them. I am willing to bet that you or someone in your family or friends has broken some law somewhere at some point, possibly without realising. I don't think this line of thinking leads to a good place.

plank_time 5y ago
A close family member almost went to jail because they committed theft over $25,000. Had they gone to jail, I think it would have been easily deserved. I wouldn’t have had much sympathy for them either, and they are like a sibling to me. If you knowingly commit a crime, why exactly should one deserve sympathy when they did it with full knowledge of the consequences?
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  The idea is not thay noone should ever face consequences, but they must be afforded full protections of due process and be treated fairly. The antithesis to this would be the police pinning another nearby robbery on your relative just cause he is guity already, or violating his right in some way.
  - plank_time 5y ago
    I don’t know what your point is then. I said I don’t have sympathy for guilty people because I reserve my sympathy for the innocent people that are caught up in our current “justice” system. That doesn’t seem very controversial but what you are saying is so far off from that I don’t know what your point is.
    - hellotomyrars 5y ago
      I'll step in because I really took a different (and perhaps incorrect) read of the statement "There are too many innocent people being arrested to worry about the guilty ones." On it's own I take this to mean that we need to address the issues in policing and the justice system to have a lot less bullshit and a lot more impact. Time/money (and resulting fallout) spent harassing innocent people creates all manner of problems and is also time/money not spent on actually doing the job. In this I wholly agree. That said, There is still room for nuance and appropriate recourse in actual crime. There are a lot of crimes, and it's pretty clear that in many cases the punishment doesn't fit the crime, or that the crime even makes sense. Ultimately if we ever get our shit figured out I'd assume both of these would be accomplished. I just hope that we get there.

kodah 5y ago

> I don’t have much sympathy for people that commit actual crimes. There are too many innocent people being arrested to worry about the guilty ones. What's an actual crime to you? I bet our definitions differ based on something not-so-quantifiable. A good DA can produce charges against someone to make it look like an actual crime was committed when it's really something petty or much less nefarious. We've seen countless examples of this. Rather than describing my sympathies at some nebulous level, I'd rather say this: I have sympathy for those in the criminal justice system because I realize most people are capable of change and that is mostly ignored by the public and the criminal justice system together. Former criminals are almost never rehabbed, and worse we see many examples of folks who were never criminals being introduced to a system that by default does not care about them but carries maximal implications for their life.

throwaway7783 5y ago
I have zero sympathy for someone who stole a $200 necklace that my mother gifted my wife, as a token of remembrance and melted it to get some gold. $200 is not an issue. The memories associated with that artifact, the legacy - That is the issue. And in CA, the laws encourage petty crime like this, because of dollar value. I don't know why I should care about if this thief is capable of change or should be rehabbed. I want to kick the shit out of the thief and get the necklace back, because this person has caused so much anguish to me and my family.
- plank_time 5y ago
  SB-82 for California would make your crime a misdemeanor, so even more of a slap in the face to you. The cops wouldn’t even bother responding to it if you reported it, it’s sickening.
- kodah 5y ago
  True, you're owed by this thief, and unfortunately they stole a sum that can likely not be repaid. I imagine there are no amount of years someone can sit in a box that will make you feel better about that. To me, when someone does something like this the criminal justice system is supposed to figure out why they did it (drugs, opportunity, gangs, etc) and rehab them accordingly so they don't go on to repeat this behavior in the future. What happens all too often is we stick them in a box, never rehabilitate them, and they go on to learn more about criminal activity in prison only to commit worse offenses when they get out. You don't have to care, the criminal justice system does because it's within their charter to do so.

nine_k 5y ago

The system has a task to determine whether a person has actually committed a crime, and how serious. You don't want to happen to be a false positive. Nobody does. But with plea bargain, I bet the number of false positives is somehow elevated. Also, prisons are a terrible way to handle criminals. Instead of reforming the criminal and helping reintegration into the law-abiding society, many prison systems, including the US's, produce hardened criminals who learned a lot more of criminal trade during incarceration, or crushed people who have no chance to get to their feet again. Unless a society just kills every criminal, it makes sense to care what happens to them, because they'll be back.

cycomanic 5y ago

So that raises the question, if you are guilty of a crime, e.g. shoplifting but you get punished like a e.g. murderer. Are you innocent or guilty? If you argue they committed a crime, so don't deserve sympathy, then it follows that we don't need to look at the fact if punishment appropriate. We could then just throw people in jail and do away with much of the court system, because with the complexity of the law, you can say with nearly 100% certainty that someone would have committed a crime at some point, so they all are guilty. Proportionality between crime and punishment is a central pillar of a fair justice system. The extrajudicial financial punishments that the article and the OP allude to, are in direct conflict with that. Like one of the previous posters said, daemonizing the guilty is what keeps this system from being fixed.