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No, it’s not arbitrary. It’s dialectical. “The line” is drawn by laws passed by well-constituted popular government and based on long-standing precedent.

• zbentley 5y ago
  Like the laws that result in extreme racial bias in sentencing, or an outsize proportion of inmates locked away due to mandatory minimums for nonviolent drug crimes? The laws that don't take into account abuse by prison staff or other inmates, secondary effects on inmates like PTSD, or tertiary effects on society from things like grooming? The "long standing precedent" of drug criminalization that was willed into existence by public hysteria campaigns spearheaded by a highly agendaed political elite in a short span of time in the 1980s and 90s? The "well constituted popular government" whose judges and sentencing behavior vary so much between states that which side of a street you live/get arrested on can be the difference between months and life in prison? The government that turns a blind eye to prisons whose conditions are condemned by other governments (the UN) as torture? Once you depart from the minority of incarcerations that are reasonably unquestionable (e.g. demonstrably uncorrectable violent sociopaths), you will find abundant arbitrariness at every level: in the formulation of laws, their application by courts, their enforcement by police, and the conditions of their punishments. "Arbitrary" is the rule. "Dialectical" (which I interpret as "civically intended, publicly acknowledged proportional consequences") is the exception.