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Personally I have come around to the view that purely financial crimes should merit only financial punishments, of a sufficient magnitude to deter the crime. I
by caf 13y ago
Personally I have come around to the view that purely financial crimes should merit only financial punishments, of a sufficient magnitude to deter the crime.
I'd like to think that I would be rational enough to maintain that position even if I was the victim of such a crime.
- mikeash 13y agoThe trouble is that I'm not sure there is a sufficient magnitude to deter all financial crimes. There's an inherent limit to how much financial punishment you can mete out, after all. You can permanently impoverish a person, and that's it. Many people are already permanently impoverished, in which case a financial crime would basically be no risk, with a large potential reward if they can get away with it. Edit: "deter all financial crimes" is poor wording. Of course you can't deter all crimes, and as such that shouldn't be a goal. What I'm really trying to get at is that such a punishment system would give you a large number of people for whom it's not really a punishment at all, or at least not a very significant one.
- rayiner 13y agoThat's ours poor people who have nothing to lose. What do you do when a guy whose broke steals a million dollars?
- ansgri 13y agotake it away and give her some prison time, in this case. The problem is, of course, that in the prison she will be taught how to steal professionally, so an ideal rehabilitative prison should prevent any contact between inmates.