5 ms·

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 an

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...
    - shigawire 5y ago
      Your example is so outlandish, it serves no purpose. In your scenario you are adding an incentive to a single commit murder. You are trying to make the point justice is not about utilitarianism but about morality on some level - but your example is so unmoored from reality that it is useless.
    - shard 5y ago
      > 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 I don't think that would work simply because after that person spends the $5M, the government can't claw it back even if that person commits another crime, and if they are in the state where they are considering another crime, the extra $5M debt would probably not deter them too much. This proposal would need to be reworked to align long term incentives of the person with not committing another crime. It would also need to disincentivize people from committing crimes just so they can get this benefit. In a somewhat related vein, I recall there being a proposal to provide basic housing to the chronically homeless, as certain homeless people cost the taxpayers millions due to arrests and illnesses from being homeless. Although there is no angle of punishment here, there is still the angle of those homeless not deserving free housing. I believe however that there is a strong case for providing such housing, when viewed from a dispassionate point of view, as it is both fiscally prudent as well as humane in reducing suffering.
      - MichaelBurge 5y ago
        Pay the $5 million over 50 years. If they commit a crime early, they keep the years they were crime-free and lose the rest.
    - Qwertious 5y ago
      If giving people millions of dollars also lowered crime, then I would be all for it - improve the economy, lower taxes, and reduce crime! What a score! The only real reason to object to it would be problems unlisted in this analogy - like the obvious incentive to murder. But we're axiomatically handwaving those intuitive signs of a bad choice away due to a "those turn out to not be an issue". The problem here is your conclusion ("yes this may look good on paper but your gut instinct clearly tells you this is a bad idea regardless") is based on using your gut instinct, in a hypothetical that axiomatically requires you to ignore your gut instinct. In other words, you're breaking your own rules.
  - plank_time 5y ago
    This is wrong in practice. This is the theory put forth by Chesa Boudin and it has been an utter failure in SF. Criminals end up continuing to commit crimes because they know there are no consequences. Victims get victimized twice, once by the criminal and another by the “justice” system and the taxpayers end holding the bag in terms of cost with no real benefit because the criminals will continue to commit worse and worse crimes, leaving a trail of victims with no justice. This idea of restorative justice is an abject failure. It might work for first time offenders, which I’m okay with trying on, but once criminals commit crimes multiple times, we need to protect society from them. Locking them up is the best way to do this. The tides are turning against the idea that criminals shouldn’t see jails, because of how much of a failure it has been. I used to think maybe we shouldn’t be so hard on crime, but after not only being the victim but seeing what it had done to SF, I’m firmly in the camp of throwing criminals in jail. Mainly moderates like myself feel the exact same way in the last 2-3 years and it will show more and more in voting, especially in SF.
    - Clewza313 5y ago
      The US already has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and it's also by far the most dangerous and crime-ridden developed country in the world: there are 7x (seven) times more murders than any other OECD country! https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(15)01030-X/pdf https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(15)01030-X/pdf Yet you're proposing doubling down on a clearly broken approach?
      - torstenvl 5y ago
        Both Colombia and Mexico are OECD countries and have higher murder rates than the United States. Lithuania's is close. The U.S. is roughly on par with Greenland for murders per capita.
        Clewza313 5y ago
        Sorry, my bad, the study above is for high-income OECD countries as opposed to all of them. Mexico and Colombia are both much poorer than the US, and Greenland is both not a country and a bit of a special case since the locals struggle so much with alcohol.
  - c22 5y ago
    I can tell you from personal experience that if the "victim" ends up being a large insurance company that had to cover a claim due to an act of the defendant there is in fact quite some emphasis on Victim Compensation.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  Only if your goal is vengeance and not less crime. You get less crime with drug rehab and education programs for prisoners. Would you rather have less crime & better society, or punish people for some vague notion of consequences, even knowing it's a worse outcome for society? Because the consequences of a crime, whatever they are, should also be chosen to have the least negative drain on society.
  - elzbardico 5y ago
    When the punishment is too harsh the rational response is increased hostility towards the society responsible for the punishment. People are not stupid. They know life is short, treat them like pariahs that don’t belong to your society and they will surprise you with their despise for the rules of the society that made clear they are not welcome in it.
  - UncleMeat 5y ago
    Amazingly, a huge portion of people believe, like this person, that the role of the legal system is to punish people rather than to produce a just and safe society. A huge amount of abuse in policing, courts, and prisons suddenly starts to make sense when you realize that people want people they perceive as low caste to suffer and they see crime not as a chronic condition but as an immutable property of one's soul.
    - denton-scratch 5y ago
      The roles of sentencing in a criminal justice system are: * Prevention * Deterrence * Veangance The least-useful of these is veangance. Legislators think it is needed to forestall private acts of veangance. But in itself it serves no purpose. To deter crime, people have to believe that the likelihood of their being caught and punished is high; without that belief, it doesn't matter how severe the penalties are set. Prevention by detention is an extreme sanction, and extremely costly. It's only appropriate for incorrigible psychopaths. "Prevention" by court-ordered medical treatment (e.g. rehab, chemical castration) is a human-rights violation. Prevention by supervision, harm-reduction, or education are evidence-based responses that actually have a chance of improving things.
ultrastable 5y ago
I agree w/ you in principle, but it's also worth pointing out that drug rehab in the US (and globally, but the US is the worst out of the countries I know enough about to assess) is a joke, court-mandated especially, eg: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/review-finds-many-who-work-during-rehab-arent-being-paid/2020/07/07/fed8e2ae-c062-11ea-8908-68a2b9eae9e0_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/review-finds-many-wh.... putting aside the indentured servitude model, whether court-mandated or not, far too many rehabs adhere strictly to ineffective 12-step programs rather than harm reduction. they're not necessarily worse than jail ofc, but they don't serve any useful therapeutic purpose either
- refurb 5y ago
  Drug rehab and harm reduction aren’t the same thing.
  - ultrastable 5y ago
    I'm aware of that. but some rehabs adhere to the harm reduction model & too many don't, which is why you get people ODing because their rehab thought expecting someone to stay fully abstinent after a month or two of inpatient was a better idea than putting them on suboxone while they got long-term psychiatric help. the 12-step approach is partly responsible for the abstinence dogma, hence my mention of it
- ineedasername 5y ago
  A good start to reform would be to stop making crime a profit center for corporations that provide prison and rehab services. Their interests are the lowest quality at the highest price, and they will lobby politicians towards that end even if it's not in the best interests of turning a criminal back into a productive member of society. The government may tend to lack efficiency, but at least its lack of profit motive wouldn't completely taint the whole system.
  - ultrastable 5y ago
    true, although I think it's worth pointing out that private prisons aren't as big a driver of mass incarceration in the US as a lot of people think. the privatization of services like food or health within public prisons, or replacing mail or in-person visitation w/ extortionate electronic systems, is probably much more significant. similarly most exploitative prison labor doesn't take the form of producing goods for private companies (like the Whole Foods cheese thing) but consists of using inmates to reducing staffing & other costs inside the prison, like making them work in the kitchens or laundry edit: immigration detention is the notable exception - about 70% of immigration detainees are held in private prisons, compared to about 10% of prison inmates
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
Be careful what you wish for. The best ROI form of punishment is fines. Government loves fines because they make money rather than cost money. Nobody wants to live in a police state that hands out fines for everything.

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...
  - shigawire 5y ago
    Your example is so outlandish, it serves no purpose. In your scenario you are adding an incentive to a single commit murder. You are trying to make the point justice is not about utilitarianism but about morality on some level - but your example is so unmoored from reality that it is useless.
  - shard 5y ago
    > 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 I don't think that would work simply because after that person spends the $5M, the government can't claw it back even if that person commits another crime, and if they are in the state where they are considering another crime, the extra $5M debt would probably not deter them too much. This proposal would need to be reworked to align long term incentives of the person with not committing another crime. It would also need to disincentivize people from committing crimes just so they can get this benefit. In a somewhat related vein, I recall there being a proposal to provide basic housing to the chronically homeless, as certain homeless people cost the taxpayers millions due to arrests and illnesses from being homeless. Although there is no angle of punishment here, there is still the angle of those homeless not deserving free housing. I believe however that there is a strong case for providing such housing, when viewed from a dispassionate point of view, as it is both fiscally prudent as well as humane in reducing suffering.
    - MichaelBurge 5y ago
      Pay the $5 million over 50 years. If they commit a crime early, they keep the years they were crime-free and lose the rest.
  - Qwertious 5y ago
    If giving people millions of dollars also lowered crime, then I would be all for it - improve the economy, lower taxes, and reduce crime! What a score! The only real reason to object to it would be problems unlisted in this analogy - like the obvious incentive to murder. But we're axiomatically handwaving those intuitive signs of a bad choice away due to a "those turn out to not be an issue". The problem here is your conclusion ("yes this may look good on paper but your gut instinct clearly tells you this is a bad idea regardless") is based on using your gut instinct, in a hypothetical that axiomatically requires you to ignore your gut instinct. In other words, you're breaking your own rules.
- plank_time 5y ago
  This is wrong in practice. This is the theory put forth by Chesa Boudin and it has been an utter failure in SF. Criminals end up continuing to commit crimes because they know there are no consequences. Victims get victimized twice, once by the criminal and another by the “justice” system and the taxpayers end holding the bag in terms of cost with no real benefit because the criminals will continue to commit worse and worse crimes, leaving a trail of victims with no justice. This idea of restorative justice is an abject failure. It might work for first time offenders, which I’m okay with trying on, but once criminals commit crimes multiple times, we need to protect society from them. Locking them up is the best way to do this. The tides are turning against the idea that criminals shouldn’t see jails, because of how much of a failure it has been. I used to think maybe we shouldn’t be so hard on crime, but after not only being the victim but seeing what it had done to SF, I’m firmly in the camp of throwing criminals in jail. Mainly moderates like myself feel the exact same way in the last 2-3 years and it will show more and more in voting, especially in SF.
  - Clewza313 5y ago
    The US already has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and it's also by far the most dangerous and crime-ridden developed country in the world: there are 7x (seven) times more murders than any other OECD country! https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(15)01030-X/pdf https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(15)01030-X/pdf Yet you're proposing doubling down on a clearly broken approach?
    - torstenvl 5y ago
      Both Colombia and Mexico are OECD countries and have higher murder rates than the United States. Lithuania's is close. The U.S. is roughly on par with Greenland for murders per capita.
      - Clewza313 5y ago
        Sorry, my bad, the study above is for high-income OECD countries as opposed to all of them. Mexico and Colombia are both much poorer than the US, and Greenland is both not a country and a bit of a special case since the locals struggle so much with alcohol.
- c22 5y ago
  I can tell you from personal experience that if the "victim" ends up being a large insurance company that had to cover a claim due to an act of the defendant there is in fact quite some emphasis on Victim Compensation.
ineedasername 5y ago
Only if your goal is vengeance and not less crime. You get less crime with drug rehab and education programs for prisoners. Would you rather have less crime & better society, or punish people for some vague notion of consequences, even knowing it's a worse outcome for society? Because the consequences of a crime, whatever they are, should also be chosen to have the least negative drain on society.
- elzbardico 5y ago
  When the punishment is too harsh the rational response is increased hostility towards the society responsible for the punishment. People are not stupid. They know life is short, treat them like pariahs that don’t belong to your society and they will surprise you with their despise for the rules of the society that made clear they are not welcome in it.
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  Amazingly, a huge portion of people believe, like this person, that the role of the legal system is to punish people rather than to produce a just and safe society. A huge amount of abuse in policing, courts, and prisons suddenly starts to make sense when you realize that people want people they perceive as low caste to suffer and they see crime not as a chronic condition but as an immutable property of one's soul.
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    The roles of sentencing in a criminal justice system are: * Prevention * Deterrence * Veangance The least-useful of these is veangance. Legislators think it is needed to forestall private acts of veangance. But in itself it serves no purpose. To deter crime, people have to believe that the likelihood of their being caught and punished is high; without that belief, it doesn't matter how severe the penalties are set. Prevention by detention is an extreme sanction, and extremely costly. It's only appropriate for incorrigible psychopaths. "Prevention" by court-ordered medical treatment (e.g. rehab, chemical castration) is a human-rights violation. Prevention by supervision, harm-reduction, or education are evidence-based responses that actually have a chance of improving things.

ultrastable 5y ago

I agree w/ you in principle, but it's also worth pointing out that drug rehab in the US (and globally, but the US is the worst out of the countries I know enough about to assess) is a joke, court-mandated especially, eg: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/review-finds-many-who-work-during-rehab-arent-being-paid/2020/07/07/fed8e2ae-c062-11ea-8908-68a2b9eae9e0_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/review-finds-many-wh.... putting aside the indentured servitude model, whether court-mandated or not, far too many rehabs adhere strictly to ineffective 12-step programs rather than harm reduction. they're not necessarily worse than jail ofc, but they don't serve any useful therapeutic purpose either

refurb 5y ago
Drug rehab and harm reduction aren’t the same thing.
- ultrastable 5y ago
  I'm aware of that. but some rehabs adhere to the harm reduction model & too many don't, which is why you get people ODing because their rehab thought expecting someone to stay fully abstinent after a month or two of inpatient was a better idea than putting them on suboxone while they got long-term psychiatric help. the 12-step approach is partly responsible for the abstinence dogma, hence my mention of it
ineedasername 5y ago
A good start to reform would be to stop making crime a profit center for corporations that provide prison and rehab services. Their interests are the lowest quality at the highest price, and they will lobby politicians towards that end even if it's not in the best interests of turning a criminal back into a productive member of society. The government may tend to lack efficiency, but at least its lack of profit motive wouldn't completely taint the whole system.
- ultrastable 5y ago
  true, although I think it's worth pointing out that private prisons aren't as big a driver of mass incarceration in the US as a lot of people think. the privatization of services like food or health within public prisons, or replacing mail or in-person visitation w/ extortionate electronic systems, is probably much more significant. similarly most exploitative prison labor doesn't take the form of producing goods for private companies (like the Whole Foods cheese thing) but consists of using inmates to reducing staffing & other costs inside the prison, like making them work in the kitchens or laundry edit: immigration detention is the notable exception - about 70% of immigration detainees are held in private prisons, compared to about 10% of prison inmates

throwaway0a5e 5y ago

Be careful what you wish for. The best ROI form of punishment is fines. Government loves fines because they make money rather than cost money. Nobody wants to live in a police state that hands out fines for everything.