There is no need to contain people who do not pose a threat to society.
Unless you are intending the containment to cause psychological pain.
Locking up violent offenders protects society from them.
Locking up a kid who got a little drunk and painted a mural on someone's wall isn't protecting society at all.
Anyway, this has already been covered. Unless you are advocating we lock up all minor offenders for life, this argument carries no weight. You are going to let them back out after a pre-determined amount of time. Therefore, the purpose of their internment is punishment, not to protect society by removing them from it.
Even two weeks of having a vandal locked up protects society. That's two weeks they will not be vandalizing; even if the second they get out they vandalize something.
By that logic, we would lock vandals up forever to protect society forever. We do not do this, so it is apparent that protecting society is not the primary reason behind locking up vandals.
Neither I or Feral ever said it was the primary reason. Feral just said that locking people up wasn't soley for punishment's sake.
When you imprison you get punishment and removal in one package.
Yes, but when you imprison people who don't need removal, as we do, you are doing it just for the punishment.
Feral appears to be saying that locking people up isn't ALWAYS just about punishment, which is true. I am talking about a specific subset of offenders for whom it is, as they pose no danger to society and thus paying large sums of money to remove them from it does not benefit society.
@vorpal - what would you call the appropriate punishment for a man who kills his cheating wife and her lover upon walking into the room and catching them in the act? He doesn't have another wife, so it is very unlikely he will kill again. Should he be jailed, or punished at all?
He's committed murder. Twice. That makes him a violent offender and a repeat one at that. He should obviously be punished, but besides the punishment, he should be removed from society to protect it. Nor is he guilty of a 'minor non violent crime'.
Let's imagine, I dunno, someone who downloaded MP3's and listened to them. He suffers a tragic accident and loses his hearing.
Locking this person up would in no way be protecting a society from anything - it would serve simply as a form of punishment.
Look, either caning can be an absurdly brutal punishment that is too painful to contemplate, or it can be not enough of a deterrent. You can't have it both ways
Now, the most notorious country that practices caning, Singapore, has one of the lowest crime rates in the world.
It's not like caning is a walk in the park. It fucking hurts and it can take days, even a week, to recover.
But I'd take a week of physical agony over the years and years of both mental and physical agony that result from rotting away in our overcrowded, underfunded, barbaric prison system.
Splitting up families and locking up low level, non violent offenders for decades for trivial bullshit is just appallingly bad. It would be terrible if our prisons were great. They aren't.
No, we can think that it is both wrong because the sole purpose is pain and ineffective because it doesn't have the deterrent effect of jail. Those are not contrary statements. Just like how you can go "snicker" and "snack"
The severity of punishment for a crime has little to do with how big of a deterrent it is. In a general sense, the immediacy of the punishment, and the perceived chance of being caught dwarf any impact that severity has on deterring crime. While there are always exceptions, criminal who commit crimes believe they aren't going to get caught. There are certain places where exceptionally harsh punishments have some use (charge stacking, and getting people to plea out in exchange for comparatively 'minor' consequences) but that's not particularly relevant to any discussion about deterrence / prevention.
Basically, you're more likely to deter property crime by making it clear that 'EVERY vandal will be caught and prosecuted due to surveillance footage' with a punishment of 40 hours community service / $250 fine than by saying 'every vandal we catch will get 5 years hard time' but enforcing it rarely and inconsistently. That's just basic psychology.
With incarceration, it's true that a person - while in prison - won't be able to commit petty property crimes. That said, that person will eventually get out and that person is provably more likely to escalate and commit more serious crimes following their incarceration. So, unless we are incarcerating people for the rest of their lives - which is entirely untenable and does great social harm / carries great cost in and of itself, incarceration is counterproductive.
Punishments should be 'sufficiently harsh' as to not be a slap on the wrist. They should be proportional to the crime and not overly harsh, if for no other reason than efficiency / cost. They should be structured in a way to offer the most benefit / least cost to society, be it lowest social cost to carry out the sentence, or most likely to prevent any future crimes.
If people would rather take getting brutally beaten with sticks over our 'humane' punishments here, it really calls into question how 'humane' our punishments actually are. That's not advocating for physical / corporal punishment, that's a critique of our system here.
I agree that certainty is much more important than severity, but severity can matter too, I think. If speeding meant having your license revoked immediately, then I suspect that would deter speeding much more effectively than a $200 ticket.
I agree with you that incarceration tends to exacerbate problems. I also think we really over use it. But sometimes we need to just remove people from society to keep them from hurting others. Its unfortunate, but I just don't think that we can sublimate the safety of the innocent to the freedom of a habitual wrong doer.
I don't follow your argument on proportionality based on costs though. You could go jay walking and we could fine you $1,000. We could use the same fine for assault. That is not proportional, but imposes no additional costs.
I'd argue that - at least - for things like minor / property crimes, the punishment should be proportional to the damage those crimes cause to society. This comes from my first principle that we charge people with crimes because of the damage that their crimes do to society. This is imminently clear by looking at any criminal case - it's 'the state vs. the criminal'.
In your example earlier about 'the criminal justice system protects the baker', it may be splitting hairs, but that's NOT the purpose of the criminal justice system. The purpose of the criminal justice system is to protect the society that baker is part of, which by extension protects the baker. It's purpose is not to make the baker whole either, it's purpose is to ensure society functions in the manner that is the best. That's why a criminal case can be prosecuted even if the victim doesn't want to proceed - the criminal justice system is not 'for' the victim. Granted - the victim is usually an exceptionally important witness and their opinion / participation holds a great deal of sway with a jury.
Now, from those principles above, it's perfectly fine to look at the direct damage an individual has caused, other damage they are likely to have gotten away with, and damage to society as a whole. In your speeding example, if speeding meant having your license revoked immediately instead of a $200 ticket, it would simply be untenable. People would still speed, but enforcement would necessarily be sporadic and applied unevenly. If we had some automagic way of revoking the license of every person that crossed the speed limit, the harm that policy would cause would far surpass any harm that could be caused by speeders. It would be a bad and unjust law, and a bad / unjust law should be ignored or repealed.
Your example of fining jay walkers $1,000 strikes me as similar to the 'broken window' fallacy. By taking an amount of money (say, $1000 instead of $15) from a person that's entirely disproportionate to the damage they caused imposes a social cost. Of people fined $1000, some people who would otherwise not have committed crimes / imposed costs to society will end up doing so - not paying for insurance / renewing their license, skipping out on that fine and getting a bench warrant issued, paying and not being able to make rent, etc. If in aggregate, the damage that fine will cause clearly outweighs the damage jaywalkers cause, it's an unjust law and the fine should be proportional to the damage or harm.
By the same token, while incarceration does add a factor of 'unable to commit crimes', you can't incarcerate people forever. It's expensive so there is a direct social cost to incarceration, and when people get out their 'cost' to society will be greater than their 'contribution'. If the harm that's prevented by imprisoning them is significantly less that the harm caused by imprisoning them, than imprisonment is the wrong approach.
EDIT - as a society, we know that people sent to prison suffer extrajudicial punishment and beatings, almost universally. We know that with a certainty, and we don't effectively act to prevent it. Thus, although that beating is unsanctioned, the state is complicit in that that punishment and that is an inherent aspect of any incarceration.
Also, if you revoke people's licenses whenever they speed, it's a fact that more people will drive on suspended licenses, will drive uninsured, and will cause great social harm far surpassing any danger of speeders.
Absolutely correct that it is society that is protected, not just the baker, but the type of protection provided is just against wrongs done like the theft from the baker, not the wrong of a family starving. That is also something government is responsible for, but through a different arm.
But I still don't see how any of this argues for proportionality. It seems like it is just a principle you are accepting, and that's fine, but I really don't agree with that principle. I don't see how the fact that harms are so e to society implies that we should make the punishments proportionate to that societal harm.
I also disagree with the idea that revocation of licenses would just mean everyone loses them and drives without insurance. I think that people would largely stop speeding. The risk would be too great.
I disagree very strongly that a jail sentence is a veiled sentence to rape or beatings. Judges have a very limited range of punishments they can mete out and jail is the strongest, so I think that a jail sentence just represents the harshest punishment available.
In the US penal system, with all of the known issues, a jail sentence is very much a veiled sentence to assault and rape. To the point that it's a common point of "humor" in our society to mention how a jail sentence has an implied sentence of rape attached. You can argue that shouldn't be the case and the system should be changed so that it doesn't happen, but you can't just turn a blind eye to it happening.
At this point, a good half the population considers prison rape a value-add.
I know that I am a hypocrite when I say this, I understand that sometimes my desire for revenge is more previlent than my desire for justice. I understand the lack of intellectual honesty, and I own it. So with that in mind I will say that for child molestors and rapists I consider this a value added service.
What about someone who was falsely convicted of such, or, more likely, pled guilty to such as a result of over charging?
The reason it's so widely considered a value-added service is that people feel some crimes deserve worse than mere imprisonment, but aren't comfortable with the death penalty, and so they are happy to have brutal fellow inmates pick up the slack where they perceive the justice system to have failed.
I don't favor the death penalty, but I think this casual flinging prisoners to the wolves for some extra-judicial punishment is just appalling. I'd like to see it stopped. Sadly there does not seem to be any likelihood of that happening anytime soon.
You said that people should not be jailed as punishment. How is jailing this man not a punishment? He is not a danger to anyone. His wife is already dead.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
Basically, the only thing keeping the fine for a given act from becoming a "voluntary tax" is escalation for repeated offenses.
For ANY offense.
This is the correct answer. If the goal if a fine is to curb behavior and someone engaged in it repeatedly despite the fine, then we need to escalate the sanction as a means of curbing the behavior. If we do not care about curbing it, then why impose the fine?
I mean, I'm sorry if the law and consequences doesn't have the effect you want. It doesn't justify cruel or unusual punishment because of that. I believe a government is entitled to try and encourage behavior they want. Not scorch the earth of the poor when they fail to stop begging for food.
I can agree that a certain degree of willfulness should be considered as well. A homeless person begging for food is distinct from some middle-class jackhole racking up his 39th open container or carpool lane violation this year.
I'd also question whether passively begging for food should be illegal.
Doesn't change the fact that continued disregard for minor laws can become a major violation.
How many parking tickets do I need to get before I need to go to prison?
How many times do I need to get a hummer from my wife in certain southern states before I should be thrown in Sing-Sing?
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
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JuliusCaptain of Serenityon my shipRegistered Userregular
Also for a lot of minor crimes related solely to morality like drinking in public I really don't care how many times the law is broken. Something along those lines only deserves so much punishment since the only harm would be some people don't want it to happen but it happened anyway.
This goes more to what should be illegal than to punishment.
It's perfectly reasonable to not want certain kinds of behaviour to happen as a town without those behaviours being actually injurous to anyone. If the law is reasonable (which by the way I don't think a lot of these laws are but whatever) it can be upheld without punishment increasing based on the number of times someone breaks such a law. The harm is so minor that it would be unjust to do so.
You are just assuming proportionality though when you say escalating punishments would be unjust. What is your response to my earlier post:
If the town decides that it will not tolerate open containers in public and yet someone habitually breaks that law, why can't the town impose a harsh sanction eventually? He is hurting the interests of the town, is he not? What if he does it every single day and people are upset every time that they see his behavior. Must they abide it for all time, if he can pay the fines? What if he can't pay the fines. What do we do then?
You do realize that arguing for escalating punishments is itself an argument assuming proportionality, right? Because proportionality is merely stating that the punishment should fit the crime, that it should consider the actual ramifications to society of the crime and thus should consider the context of the crime. And to say that a person's prior breaking of the law should affect the punishment for a crime is saying the context should play a role in the punishment.
You cannot both hold that there should be escalating punishments and that the punishment should be completely divorced from the real world context in which it happens.
But whatever. That doesn't even matter. You're just giving me a hypothetical case of the law not being adequate while completely ignoring the fact that the case couldn't possibly be realistic in the real world. There aren't people breaking these laws that could afford to pay the fine each day. Millionaires aren't in the habit of constant public intoxication that would be frowned upon. And those who couldn't afford the fines would, you know, be prosecuted for not paying the fines.
That doesn't mean in certain limited instances we can't substitute more compassionate sentencing in lieu of prison; for instance, residential treatment for repeated public intoxication or some kind of involuntary shelter for continued vagrancy. Though with the latter, I'm not sure vagrancy laws are legitimate anyway (homeless people have to be somewhere, for fuck's sake).
Always wondered about vagrancy laws, myself. At least we don't have debtor's prisons anymore.
That doesn't mean in certain limited instances we can't substitute more compassionate sentencing in lieu of prison; for instance, residential treatment for repeated public intoxication or some kind of involuntary shelter for continued vagrancy. Though with the latter, I'm not sure vagrancy laws are legitimate anyway (homeless people have to be somewhere, for fuck's sake).
Always wondered about vagrancy laws, myself. At least we don't have debtor's prisons anymore.
I mean, I'm sorry if the law and consequences doesn't have the effect you want. It doesn't justify cruel or unusual punishment because of that. I believe a government is entitled to try and encourage behavior they want. Not scorch the earth of the poor when they fail to stop begging for food.
I can agree that a certain degree of willfulness should be considered as well. A homeless person begging for food is distinct from some middle-class jackhole racking up his 39th open container or carpool lane violation this year.
I'd also question whether passively begging for food should be illegal.
Doesn't change the fact that continued disregard for minor laws can become a major violation.
How many parking tickets do I need to get before I need to go to prison?
How many times do I need to get a hummer from my wife in certain southern states before I should be thrown in Sing-Sing?
For the former, 789.
The latter, on the other hand, is an invalid law. Supreme Court ruling and everything.
Plenty of people suffer permanent nerve damage from things like caning. And most people who get it will at least have scars for life . Its a brutal barbaric practice not a thorough spanking.
Plenty of people suffer permanent nerve damage from things like caning. And most people who get it will at least have scars for life . Its a brutal barbaric practice not a thorough spanking.
Not going to link to it, but anyone who thinks it is a joke of a punishment should Google Image Search "caning scars."
Also Singapore has alow crime rate because it takes that approach to everything not just one punishment. Its a police state. Its easier to convict people. Even absurdly minor things like spitting are ticketable offense
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
Also for a lot of minor crimes related solely to morality like drinking in public I really don't care how many times the law is broken. Something along those lines only deserves so much punishment since the only harm would be some people don't want it to happen but it happened anyway.
This goes more to what should be illegal than to punishment.
It's perfectly reasonable to not want certain kinds of behaviour to happen as a town without those behaviours being actually injurous to anyone. If the law is reasonable (which by the way I don't think a lot of these laws are but whatever) it can be upheld without punishment increasing based on the number of times someone breaks such a law. The harm is so minor that it would be unjust to do so.
You are just assuming proportionality though when you say escalating punishments would be unjust. What is your response to my earlier post:
If the town decides that it will not tolerate open containers in public and yet someone habitually breaks that law, why can't the town impose a harsh sanction eventually? He is hurting the interests of the town, is he not? What if he does it every single day and people are upset every time that they see his behavior. Must they abide it for all time, if he can pay the fines? What if he can't pay the fines. What do we do then?
You do realize that arguing for escalating punishments is itself an argument assuming proportionality, right? Because proportionality is merely stating that the punishment should fit the crime, that it should consider the actual ramifications to society of the crime and thus should consider the context of the crime. And to say that a person's prior breaking of the law should affect the punishment for a crime is saying the context should play a role in the punishment.
You cannot both hold that there should be escalating punishments and that the punishment should be completely divorced from the real world context in which it happens.
But whatever. That doesn't even matter. You're just giving me a hypothetical case of the law not being adequate while completely ignoring the fact that the case couldn't possibly be realistic in the real world. There aren't people breaking these laws that could afford to pay the fine each day. Millionaires aren't in the habit of constant public intoxication that would be frowned upon. And those who couldn't afford the fines would, you know, be prosecuted for not paying the fines.
Efficiency of punishments and proportionality are not the same thing. Just because I don't want to jail someone for keying a car once (because the cost is massive relative to the benefit) does not mean that I am accepting proportionality. If the punishment could be cost less, like the obedience chips I mentioned earlier or god striking criminals down with lightning or pushing people though some sort of portal into exile in another world, then I would endorse any of those things for the murderer and the keyer of cars. Just because we don't actually have a cost less or low cost punishment that we can use for all crimes does not mean that I accept proportionality.
By the way, I was serious in that parking tickets should perhaps, eventually, lead to jail time. What number should be required? I don't know. Figure out what the median among offenders is, the standard deviations, maybe look at the top 1% or 0.1% of offenders. Create a cutoff there.
So, say, you get 120 in a year (or whatever number/span)? That's one every three days. Obviously fines aren't working, you're treating them like a tax. So now you get a charge, with both a larger fine and the potential for jail time. The judge tells you that your next parking ticket, or maybe two or three (since it's easy to get one by accident), will result in a three-day or five-day sentence. Guess what? Now you'll take it quite seriously. Further offenses can carry larger sentences (though obviously there'd be a cap, we're talking about a misdemeanor here).
I say this as somebody who did, in fact, commit something I saw as a bullshit no-big-deal infraction a few times, and had a judge tell me that no, it was in fact a major infraction, and the next time I did it (I was on my third offense) I'd be going to jail for realsies. Guess what? Didn't do it anymore. The fines alone weren't sufficient deterrent, jail time was. If jail time isn't...well, they're in jail, problem solved.
In the case of car-related fines, like parking tickets or speeding tickets, this usually isn't a problem...we take away the license before it gets to that point. Washington in particular takes it away after, IIRC, five moving violations in two years. Thirty day suspension the first time, and they only get longer if you can't stay clean after that. But choose to drive anyway? That's a criminal offense, and carries jail time. The behavior is stopped, one way or another...either you are no longer driving, or when we catch you you go to jail. That doesn't translate well to non-vehicular offenses, since we don't have a similar "privilege" to take away. So for something like open containers or public intoxication or whatever, we'd just have to escalate directly.
EDIT: It's six tickets in one year for a suspension, or five in two years for a probation (then two more gets you a suspension). After suspension you're back on probation (for a year), where it's now a suspension for every ticket, of increasing length, reaching a full year on the fourth suspension (including the original suspension). Basically, treat traffic tickets like a tax, the penalty escalates until you can no longer legally drive. Drive anyway, and you go to jail. You're given a lot of leeway up until that fifth ticket, after that it's no-shit you-will-take-this-seriously time.
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
I mean, I'm sorry if the law and consequences doesn't have the effect you want. It doesn't justify cruel or unusual punishment because of that. I believe a government is entitled to try and encourage behavior they want. Not scorch the earth of the poor when they fail to stop begging for food.
I can agree that a certain degree of willfulness should be considered as well. A homeless person begging for food is distinct from some middle-class jackhole racking up his 39th open container or carpool lane violation this year.
I'd also question whether passively begging for food should be illegal.
Doesn't change the fact that continued disregard for minor laws can become a major violation.
How many parking tickets do I need to get before I need to go to prison?
Only one.
If it goes to a court and they order the payment and you refuse, its contempt.
There is no need to contain people who do not pose a threat to society.
Unless you are intending the containment to cause psychological pain.
Locking up violent offenders protects society from them.
Locking up a kid who got a little drunk and painted a mural on someone's wall isn't protecting society at all.
Anyway, this has already been covered. Unless you are advocating we lock up all minor offenders for life, this argument carries no weight. You are going to let them back out after a pre-determined amount of time. Therefore, the purpose of their internment is punishment, not to protect society by removing them from it.
Even two weeks of having a vandal locked up protects society. That's two weeks they will not be vandalizing; even if the second they get out they vandalize something.
By that logic, we would lock vandals up forever to protect society forever. We do not do this, so it is apparent that protecting society is not the primary reason behind locking up vandals.
Neither I or Feral ever said it was the primary reason. Feral just said that locking people up wasn't soley for punishment's sake.
When you imprison you get punishment and removal in one package.
Yes, but when you imprison people who don't need removal, as we do, you are doing it just for the punishment.
Feral appears to be saying that locking people up isn't ALWAYS just about punishment, which is true. I am talking about a specific subset of offenders for whom it is, as they pose no danger to society and thus paying large sums of money to remove them from it does not benefit society.
@vorpal - what would you call the appropriate punishment for a man who kills his cheating wife and her lover upon walking into the room and catching them in the act? He doesn't have another wife, so it is very unlikely he will kill again. Should he be jailed, or punished at all?
He's committed murder. Twice. That makes him a violent offender and a repeat one at that. He should obviously be punished, but besides the punishment, he should be removed from society to protect it. Nor is he guilty of a 'minor non violent crime'.
Let's imagine, I dunno, someone who downloaded MP3's and listened to them. He suffers a tragic accident and loses his hearing.
Locking this person up would in no way be protecting a society from anything - it would serve simply as a form of punishment.
Look, either caning can be an absurdly brutal punishment that is too painful to contemplate, or it can be not enough of a deterrent. You can't have it both ways
Now, the most notorious country that practices caning, Singapore, has one of the lowest crime rates in the world.
It's not like caning is a walk in the park. It fucking hurts and it can take days, even a week, to recover.
But I'd take a week of physical agony over the years and years of both mental and physical agony that result from rotting away in our overcrowded, underfunded, barbaric prison system.
Splitting up families and locking up low level, non violent offenders for decades for trivial bullshit is just appallingly bad. It would be terrible if our prisons were great. They aren't.
No, we can think that it is both wrong because the sole purpose is pain and ineffective because it doesn't have the deterrent effect of jail. Those are not contrary statements. Just like how you can go "snicker" and "snack"
The severity of punishment for a crime has little to do with how big of a deterrent it is. In a general sense, the immediacy of the punishment, and the perceived chance of being caught dwarf any impact that severity has on deterring crime. While there are always exceptions, criminal who commit crimes believe they aren't going to get caught. There are certain places where exceptionally harsh punishments have some use (charge stacking, and getting people to plea out in exchange for comparatively 'minor' consequences) but that's not particularly relevant to any discussion about deterrence / prevention.
Basically, you're more likely to deter property crime by making it clear that 'EVERY vandal will be caught and prosecuted due to surveillance footage' with a punishment of 40 hours community service / $250 fine than by saying 'every vandal we catch will get 5 years hard time' but enforcing it rarely and inconsistently. That's just basic psychology.
With incarceration, it's true that a person - while in prison - won't be able to commit petty property crimes. That said, that person will eventually get out and that person is provably more likely to escalate and commit more serious crimes following their incarceration. So, unless we are incarcerating people for the rest of their lives - which is entirely untenable and does great social harm / carries great cost in and of itself, incarceration is counterproductive.
Punishments should be 'sufficiently harsh' as to not be a slap on the wrist. They should be proportional to the crime and not overly harsh, if for no other reason than efficiency / cost. They should be structured in a way to offer the most benefit / least cost to society, be it lowest social cost to carry out the sentence, or most likely to prevent any future crimes.
If people would rather take getting brutally beaten with sticks over our 'humane' punishments here, it really calls into question how 'humane' our punishments actually are. That's not advocating for physical / corporal punishment, that's a critique of our system here.
I agree that certainty is much more important than severity, but severity can matter too, I think. If speeding meant having your license revoked immediately, then I suspect that would deter speeding much more effectively than a $200 ticket.
I agree with you that incarceration tends to exacerbate problems. I also think we really over use it. But sometimes we need to just remove people from society to keep them from hurting others. Its unfortunate, but I just don't think that we can sublimate the safety of the innocent to the freedom of a habitual wrong doer.
I don't follow your argument on proportionality based on costs though. You could go jay walking and we could fine you $1,000. We could use the same fine for assault. That is not proportional, but imposes no additional costs.
I'd argue that - at least - for things like minor / property crimes, the punishment should be proportional to the damage those crimes cause to society. This comes from my first principle that we charge people with crimes because of the damage that their crimes do to society. This is imminently clear by looking at any criminal case - it's 'the state vs. the criminal'.
In your example earlier about 'the criminal justice system protects the baker', it may be splitting hairs, but that's NOT the purpose of the criminal justice system. The purpose of the criminal justice system is to protect the society that baker is part of, which by extension protects the baker. It's purpose is not to make the baker whole either, it's purpose is to ensure society functions in the manner that is the best. That's why a criminal case can be prosecuted even if the victim doesn't want to proceed - the criminal justice system is not 'for' the victim. Granted - the victim is usually an exceptionally important witness and their opinion / participation holds a great deal of sway with a jury.
Now, from those principles above, it's perfectly fine to look at the direct damage an individual has caused, other damage they are likely to have gotten away with, and damage to society as a whole. In your speeding example, if speeding meant having your license revoked immediately instead of a $200 ticket, it would simply be untenable. People would still speed, but enforcement would necessarily be sporadic and applied unevenly. If we had some automagic way of revoking the license of every person that crossed the speed limit, the harm that policy would cause would far surpass any harm that could be caused by speeders. It would be a bad and unjust law, and a bad / unjust law should be ignored or repealed.
Your example of fining jay walkers $1,000 strikes me as similar to the 'broken window' fallacy. By taking an amount of money (say, $1000 instead of $15) from a person that's entirely disproportionate to the damage they caused imposes a social cost. Of people fined $1000, some people who would otherwise not have committed crimes / imposed costs to society will end up doing so - not paying for insurance / renewing their license, skipping out on that fine and getting a bench warrant issued, paying and not being able to make rent, etc. If in aggregate, the damage that fine will cause clearly outweighs the damage jaywalkers cause, it's an unjust law and the fine should be proportional to the damage or harm.
By the same token, while incarceration does add a factor of 'unable to commit crimes', you can't incarcerate people forever. It's expensive so there is a direct social cost to incarceration, and when people get out their 'cost' to society will be greater than their 'contribution'. If the harm that's prevented by imprisoning them is significantly less that the harm caused by imprisoning them, than imprisonment is the wrong approach.
EDIT - as a society, we know that people sent to prison suffer extrajudicial punishment and beatings, almost universally. We know that with a certainty, and we don't effectively act to prevent it. Thus, although that beating is unsanctioned, the state is complicit in that that punishment and that is an inherent aspect of any incarceration.
Also, if you revoke people's licenses whenever they speed, it's a fact that more people will drive on suspended licenses, will drive uninsured, and will cause great social harm far surpassing any danger of speeders.
Absolutely correct that it is society that is protected, not just the baker, but the type of protection provided is just against wrongs done like the theft from the baker, not the wrong of a family starving. That is also something government is responsible for, but through a different arm.
But I still don't see how any of this argues for proportionality. It seems like it is just a principle you are accepting, and that's fine, but I really don't agree with that principle. I don't see how the fact that harms are so e to society implies that we should make the punishments proportionate to that societal harm.
I also disagree with the idea that revocation of licenses would just mean everyone loses them and drives without insurance. I think that people would largely stop speeding. The risk would be too great.
I disagree very strongly that a jail sentence is a veiled sentence to rape or beatings. Judges have a very limited range of punishments they can mete out and jail is the strongest, so I think that a jail sentence just represents the harshest punishment available.
In the US penal system, with all of the known issues, a jail sentence is very much a veiled sentence to assault and rape. To the point that it's a common point of "humor" in our society to mention how a jail sentence has an implied sentence of rape attached. You can argue that shouldn't be the case and the system should be changed so that it doesn't happen, but you can't just turn a blind eye to it happening.
At this point, a good half the population considers prison rape a value-add.
I know that I am a hypocrite when I say this, I understand that sometimes my desire for revenge is more previlent than my desire for justice. I understand the lack of intellectual honesty, and I own it. So with that in mind I will say that for child molestors and rapists I consider this a value added service.
What about someone who was falsely convicted of such, or, more likely, pled guilty to such as a result of over charging?
The reason it's so widely considered a value-added service is that people feel some crimes deserve worse than mere imprisonment, but aren't comfortable with the death penalty, and so they are happy to have brutal fellow inmates pick up the slack where they perceive the justice system to have failed.
I don't favor the death penalty, but I think this casual flinging prisoners to the wolves for some extra-judicial punishment is just appalling. I'd like to see it stopped. Sadly there does not seem to be any likelihood of that happening anytime soon.
You said that people should not be jailed as punishment. How is jailing this man not a punishment? He is not a danger to anyone. His wife is already dead.
I said I did not think jailing of non -repeat non-violent minor offenders was a good idea.
You have presented me with an example involving a violent, major, repeated offense (two murders). It literally fails to have a single characteristic in common with what I am talking about.
There is no need to contain people who do not pose a threat to society.
Unless you are intending the containment to cause psychological pain.
Locking up violent offenders protects society from them.
Locking up a kid who got a little drunk and painted a mural on someone's wall isn't protecting society at all.
Anyway, this has already been covered. Unless you are advocating we lock up all minor offenders for life, this argument carries no weight. You are going to let them back out after a pre-determined amount of time. Therefore, the purpose of their internment is punishment, not to protect society by removing them from it.
Even two weeks of having a vandal locked up protects society. That's two weeks they will not be vandalizing; even if the second they get out they vandalize something.
By that logic, we would lock vandals up forever to protect society forever. We do not do this, so it is apparent that protecting society is not the primary reason behind locking up vandals.
Neither I or Feral ever said it was the primary reason. Feral just said that locking people up wasn't soley for punishment's sake.
When you imprison you get punishment and removal in one package.
Yes, but when you imprison people who don't need removal, as we do, you are doing it just for the punishment.
Feral appears to be saying that locking people up isn't ALWAYS just about punishment, which is true. I am talking about a specific subset of offenders for whom it is, as they pose no danger to society and thus paying large sums of money to remove them from it does not benefit society.
@vorpal - what would you call the appropriate punishment for a man who kills his cheating wife and her lover upon walking into the room and catching them in the act? He doesn't have another wife, so it is very unlikely he will kill again. Should he be jailed, or punished at all?
He's committed murder. Twice. That makes him a violent offender and a repeat one at that. He should obviously be punished, but besides the punishment, he should be removed from society to protect it. Nor is he guilty of a 'minor non violent crime'.
Let's imagine, I dunno, someone who downloaded MP3's and listened to them. He suffers a tragic accident and loses his hearing.
Locking this person up would in no way be protecting a society from anything - it would serve simply as a form of punishment.
Look, either caning can be an absurdly brutal punishment that is too painful to contemplate, or it can be not enough of a deterrent. You can't have it both ways
Now, the most notorious country that practices caning, Singapore, has one of the lowest crime rates in the world.
It's not like caning is a walk in the park. It fucking hurts and it can take days, even a week, to recover.
But I'd take a week of physical agony over the years and years of both mental and physical agony that result from rotting away in our overcrowded, underfunded, barbaric prison system.
Splitting up families and locking up low level, non violent offenders for decades for trivial bullshit is just appallingly bad. It would be terrible if our prisons were great. They aren't.
No, we can think that it is both wrong because the sole purpose is pain and ineffective because it doesn't have the deterrent effect of jail. Those are not contrary statements. Just like how you can go "snicker" and "snack"
The severity of punishment for a crime has little to do with how big of a deterrent it is. In a general sense, the immediacy of the punishment, and the perceived chance of being caught dwarf any impact that severity has on deterring crime. While there are always exceptions, criminal who commit crimes believe they aren't going to get caught. There are certain places where exceptionally harsh punishments have some use (charge stacking, and getting people to plea out in exchange for comparatively 'minor' consequences) but that's not particularly relevant to any discussion about deterrence / prevention.
Basically, you're more likely to deter property crime by making it clear that 'EVERY vandal will be caught and prosecuted due to surveillance footage' with a punishment of 40 hours community service / $250 fine than by saying 'every vandal we catch will get 5 years hard time' but enforcing it rarely and inconsistently. That's just basic psychology.
With incarceration, it's true that a person - while in prison - won't be able to commit petty property crimes. That said, that person will eventually get out and that person is provably more likely to escalate and commit more serious crimes following their incarceration. So, unless we are incarcerating people for the rest of their lives - which is entirely untenable and does great social harm / carries great cost in and of itself, incarceration is counterproductive.
Punishments should be 'sufficiently harsh' as to not be a slap on the wrist. They should be proportional to the crime and not overly harsh, if for no other reason than efficiency / cost. They should be structured in a way to offer the most benefit / least cost to society, be it lowest social cost to carry out the sentence, or most likely to prevent any future crimes.
If people would rather take getting brutally beaten with sticks over our 'humane' punishments here, it really calls into question how 'humane' our punishments actually are. That's not advocating for physical / corporal punishment, that's a critique of our system here.
I agree that certainty is much more important than severity, but severity can matter too, I think. If speeding meant having your license revoked immediately, then I suspect that would deter speeding much more effectively than a $200 ticket.
I agree with you that incarceration tends to exacerbate problems. I also think we really over use it. But sometimes we need to just remove people from society to keep them from hurting others. Its unfortunate, but I just don't think that we can sublimate the safety of the innocent to the freedom of a habitual wrong doer.
I don't follow your argument on proportionality based on costs though. You could go jay walking and we could fine you $1,000. We could use the same fine for assault. That is not proportional, but imposes no additional costs.
I'd argue that - at least - for things like minor / property crimes, the punishment should be proportional to the damage those crimes cause to society. This comes from my first principle that we charge people with crimes because of the damage that their crimes do to society. This is imminently clear by looking at any criminal case - it's 'the state vs. the criminal'.
In your example earlier about 'the criminal justice system protects the baker', it may be splitting hairs, but that's NOT the purpose of the criminal justice system. The purpose of the criminal justice system is to protect the society that baker is part of, which by extension protects the baker. It's purpose is not to make the baker whole either, it's purpose is to ensure society functions in the manner that is the best. That's why a criminal case can be prosecuted even if the victim doesn't want to proceed - the criminal justice system is not 'for' the victim. Granted - the victim is usually an exceptionally important witness and their opinion / participation holds a great deal of sway with a jury.
Now, from those principles above, it's perfectly fine to look at the direct damage an individual has caused, other damage they are likely to have gotten away with, and damage to society as a whole. In your speeding example, if speeding meant having your license revoked immediately instead of a $200 ticket, it would simply be untenable. People would still speed, but enforcement would necessarily be sporadic and applied unevenly. If we had some automagic way of revoking the license of every person that crossed the speed limit, the harm that policy would cause would far surpass any harm that could be caused by speeders. It would be a bad and unjust law, and a bad / unjust law should be ignored or repealed.
Your example of fining jay walkers $1,000 strikes me as similar to the 'broken window' fallacy. By taking an amount of money (say, $1000 instead of $15) from a person that's entirely disproportionate to the damage they caused imposes a social cost. Of people fined $1000, some people who would otherwise not have committed crimes / imposed costs to society will end up doing so - not paying for insurance / renewing their license, skipping out on that fine and getting a bench warrant issued, paying and not being able to make rent, etc. If in aggregate, the damage that fine will cause clearly outweighs the damage jaywalkers cause, it's an unjust law and the fine should be proportional to the damage or harm.
By the same token, while incarceration does add a factor of 'unable to commit crimes', you can't incarcerate people forever. It's expensive so there is a direct social cost to incarceration, and when people get out their 'cost' to society will be greater than their 'contribution'. If the harm that's prevented by imprisoning them is significantly less that the harm caused by imprisoning them, than imprisonment is the wrong approach.
EDIT - as a society, we know that people sent to prison suffer extrajudicial punishment and beatings, almost universally. We know that with a certainty, and we don't effectively act to prevent it. Thus, although that beating is unsanctioned, the state is complicit in that that punishment and that is an inherent aspect of any incarceration.
Also, if you revoke people's licenses whenever they speed, it's a fact that more people will drive on suspended licenses, will drive uninsured, and will cause great social harm far surpassing any danger of speeders.
Absolutely correct that it is society that is protected, not just the baker, but the type of protection provided is just against wrongs done like the theft from the baker, not the wrong of a family starving. That is also something government is responsible for, but through a different arm.
But I still don't see how any of this argues for proportionality. It seems like it is just a principle you are accepting, and that's fine, but I really don't agree with that principle. I don't see how the fact that harms are so e to society implies that we should make the punishments proportionate to that societal harm.
I also disagree with the idea that revocation of licenses would just mean everyone loses them and drives without insurance. I think that people would largely stop speeding. The risk would be too great.
I disagree very strongly that a jail sentence is a veiled sentence to rape or beatings. Judges have a very limited range of punishments they can mete out and jail is the strongest, so I think that a jail sentence just represents the harshest punishment available.
In the US penal system, with all of the known issues, a jail sentence is very much a veiled sentence to assault and rape. To the point that it's a common point of "humor" in our society to mention how a jail sentence has an implied sentence of rape attached. You can argue that shouldn't be the case and the system should be changed so that it doesn't happen, but you can't just turn a blind eye to it happening.
At this point, a good half the population considers prison rape a value-add.
I know that I am a hypocrite when I say this, I understand that sometimes my desire for revenge is more previlent than my desire for justice. I understand the lack of intellectual honesty, and I own it. So with that in mind I will say that for child molestors and rapists I consider this a value added service.
What about someone who was falsely convicted of such, or, more likely, pled guilty to such as a result of over charging?
The reason it's so widely considered a value-added service is that people feel some crimes deserve worse than mere imprisonment, but aren't comfortable with the death penalty, and so they are happy to have brutal fellow inmates pick up the slack where they perceive the justice system to have failed.
I don't favor the death penalty, but I think this casual flinging prisoners to the wolves for some extra-judicial punishment is just appalling. I'd like to see it stopped. Sadly there does not seem to be any likelihood of that happening anytime soon.
You said that people should not be jailed as punishment. How is jailing this man not a punishment? He is not a danger to anyone. His wife is already dead.
I said I did not think jailing of non -repeat non-violent minor offenders was a good idea.
You have presented me with an example involving a violent, major, repeated offense (two murders). It literally fails to have a single characteristic in common with what I am talking about.
There is a very good chance that this man will do less harm to society than the vandal though. He committee a crime of passion and the motivation for that crime is gone forever. Contrast the person who keeps keying cars and who will always do it unless we lock him up.
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knitdanIn ur baseKillin ur guysRegistered Userregular
Well yeah there is a very good chance that kid will do a lot of harm to society.
He might even grow up to be a corporate lawyer.
“I was quick when I came in here, I’m twice as quick now”
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
There is no need to contain people who do not pose a threat to society.
Unless you are intending the containment to cause psychological pain.
Locking up violent offenders protects society from them.
Locking up a kid who got a little drunk and painted a mural on someone's wall isn't protecting society at all.
Anyway, this has already been covered. Unless you are advocating we lock up all minor offenders for life, this argument carries no weight. You are going to let them back out after a pre-determined amount of time. Therefore, the purpose of their internment is punishment, not to protect society by removing them from it.
Even two weeks of having a vandal locked up protects society. That's two weeks they will not be vandalizing; even if the second they get out they vandalize something.
By that logic, we would lock vandals up forever to protect society forever. We do not do this, so it is apparent that protecting society is not the primary reason behind locking up vandals.
Neither I or Feral ever said it was the primary reason. Feral just said that locking people up wasn't soley for punishment's sake.
When you imprison you get punishment and removal in one package.
Yes, but when you imprison people who don't need removal, as we do, you are doing it just for the punishment.
Feral appears to be saying that locking people up isn't ALWAYS just about punishment, which is true. I am talking about a specific subset of offenders for whom it is, as they pose no danger to society and thus paying large sums of money to remove them from it does not benefit society.
@vorpal - what would you call the appropriate punishment for a man who kills his cheating wife and her lover upon walking into the room and catching them in the act? He doesn't have another wife, so it is very unlikely he will kill again. Should he be jailed, or punished at all?
He's committed murder. Twice. That makes him a violent offender and a repeat one at that. He should obviously be punished, but besides the punishment, he should be removed from society to protect it. Nor is he guilty of a 'minor non violent crime'.
Let's imagine, I dunno, someone who downloaded MP3's and listened to them. He suffers a tragic accident and loses his hearing.
Locking this person up would in no way be protecting a society from anything - it would serve simply as a form of punishment.
Look, either caning can be an absurdly brutal punishment that is too painful to contemplate, or it can be not enough of a deterrent. You can't have it both ways
Now, the most notorious country that practices caning, Singapore, has one of the lowest crime rates in the world.
It's not like caning is a walk in the park. It fucking hurts and it can take days, even a week, to recover.
But I'd take a week of physical agony over the years and years of both mental and physical agony that result from rotting away in our overcrowded, underfunded, barbaric prison system.
Splitting up families and locking up low level, non violent offenders for decades for trivial bullshit is just appallingly bad. It would be terrible if our prisons were great. They aren't.
No, we can think that it is both wrong because the sole purpose is pain and ineffective because it doesn't have the deterrent effect of jail. Those are not contrary statements. Just like how you can go "snicker" and "snack"
The severity of punishment for a crime has little to do with how big of a deterrent it is. In a general sense, the immediacy of the punishment, and the perceived chance of being caught dwarf any impact that severity has on deterring crime. While there are always exceptions, criminal who commit crimes believe they aren't going to get caught. There are certain places where exceptionally harsh punishments have some use (charge stacking, and getting people to plea out in exchange for comparatively 'minor' consequences) but that's not particularly relevant to any discussion about deterrence / prevention.
Basically, you're more likely to deter property crime by making it clear that 'EVERY vandal will be caught and prosecuted due to surveillance footage' with a punishment of 40 hours community service / $250 fine than by saying 'every vandal we catch will get 5 years hard time' but enforcing it rarely and inconsistently. That's just basic psychology.
With incarceration, it's true that a person - while in prison - won't be able to commit petty property crimes. That said, that person will eventually get out and that person is provably more likely to escalate and commit more serious crimes following their incarceration. So, unless we are incarcerating people for the rest of their lives - which is entirely untenable and does great social harm / carries great cost in and of itself, incarceration is counterproductive.
Punishments should be 'sufficiently harsh' as to not be a slap on the wrist. They should be proportional to the crime and not overly harsh, if for no other reason than efficiency / cost. They should be structured in a way to offer the most benefit / least cost to society, be it lowest social cost to carry out the sentence, or most likely to prevent any future crimes.
If people would rather take getting brutally beaten with sticks over our 'humane' punishments here, it really calls into question how 'humane' our punishments actually are. That's not advocating for physical / corporal punishment, that's a critique of our system here.
I agree that certainty is much more important than severity, but severity can matter too, I think. If speeding meant having your license revoked immediately, then I suspect that would deter speeding much more effectively than a $200 ticket.
I agree with you that incarceration tends to exacerbate problems. I also think we really over use it. But sometimes we need to just remove people from society to keep them from hurting others. Its unfortunate, but I just don't think that we can sublimate the safety of the innocent to the freedom of a habitual wrong doer.
I don't follow your argument on proportionality based on costs though. You could go jay walking and we could fine you $1,000. We could use the same fine for assault. That is not proportional, but imposes no additional costs.
I'd argue that - at least - for things like minor / property crimes, the punishment should be proportional to the damage those crimes cause to society. This comes from my first principle that we charge people with crimes because of the damage that their crimes do to society. This is imminently clear by looking at any criminal case - it's 'the state vs. the criminal'.
In your example earlier about 'the criminal justice system protects the baker', it may be splitting hairs, but that's NOT the purpose of the criminal justice system. The purpose of the criminal justice system is to protect the society that baker is part of, which by extension protects the baker. It's purpose is not to make the baker whole either, it's purpose is to ensure society functions in the manner that is the best. That's why a criminal case can be prosecuted even if the victim doesn't want to proceed - the criminal justice system is not 'for' the victim. Granted - the victim is usually an exceptionally important witness and their opinion / participation holds a great deal of sway with a jury.
Now, from those principles above, it's perfectly fine to look at the direct damage an individual has caused, other damage they are likely to have gotten away with, and damage to society as a whole. In your speeding example, if speeding meant having your license revoked immediately instead of a $200 ticket, it would simply be untenable. People would still speed, but enforcement would necessarily be sporadic and applied unevenly. If we had some automagic way of revoking the license of every person that crossed the speed limit, the harm that policy would cause would far surpass any harm that could be caused by speeders. It would be a bad and unjust law, and a bad / unjust law should be ignored or repealed.
Your example of fining jay walkers $1,000 strikes me as similar to the 'broken window' fallacy. By taking an amount of money (say, $1000 instead of $15) from a person that's entirely disproportionate to the damage they caused imposes a social cost. Of people fined $1000, some people who would otherwise not have committed crimes / imposed costs to society will end up doing so - not paying for insurance / renewing their license, skipping out on that fine and getting a bench warrant issued, paying and not being able to make rent, etc. If in aggregate, the damage that fine will cause clearly outweighs the damage jaywalkers cause, it's an unjust law and the fine should be proportional to the damage or harm.
By the same token, while incarceration does add a factor of 'unable to commit crimes', you can't incarcerate people forever. It's expensive so there is a direct social cost to incarceration, and when people get out their 'cost' to society will be greater than their 'contribution'. If the harm that's prevented by imprisoning them is significantly less that the harm caused by imprisoning them, than imprisonment is the wrong approach.
EDIT - as a society, we know that people sent to prison suffer extrajudicial punishment and beatings, almost universally. We know that with a certainty, and we don't effectively act to prevent it. Thus, although that beating is unsanctioned, the state is complicit in that that punishment and that is an inherent aspect of any incarceration.
Also, if you revoke people's licenses whenever they speed, it's a fact that more people will drive on suspended licenses, will drive uninsured, and will cause great social harm far surpassing any danger of speeders.
Absolutely correct that it is society that is protected, not just the baker, but the type of protection provided is just against wrongs done like the theft from the baker, not the wrong of a family starving. That is also something government is responsible for, but through a different arm.
But I still don't see how any of this argues for proportionality. It seems like it is just a principle you are accepting, and that's fine, but I really don't agree with that principle. I don't see how the fact that harms are so e to society implies that we should make the punishments proportionate to that societal harm.
I also disagree with the idea that revocation of licenses would just mean everyone loses them and drives without insurance. I think that people would largely stop speeding. The risk would be too great.
I disagree very strongly that a jail sentence is a veiled sentence to rape or beatings. Judges have a very limited range of punishments they can mete out and jail is the strongest, so I think that a jail sentence just represents the harshest punishment available.
In the US penal system, with all of the known issues, a jail sentence is very much a veiled sentence to assault and rape. To the point that it's a common point of "humor" in our society to mention how a jail sentence has an implied sentence of rape attached. You can argue that shouldn't be the case and the system should be changed so that it doesn't happen, but you can't just turn a blind eye to it happening.
At this point, a good half the population considers prison rape a value-add.
I know that I am a hypocrite when I say this, I understand that sometimes my desire for revenge is more previlent than my desire for justice. I understand the lack of intellectual honesty, and I own it. So with that in mind I will say that for child molestors and rapists I consider this a value added service.
What about someone who was falsely convicted of such, or, more likely, pled guilty to such as a result of over charging?
The reason it's so widely considered a value-added service is that people feel some crimes deserve worse than mere imprisonment, but aren't comfortable with the death penalty, and so they are happy to have brutal fellow inmates pick up the slack where they perceive the justice system to have failed.
I don't favor the death penalty, but I think this casual flinging prisoners to the wolves for some extra-judicial punishment is just appalling. I'd like to see it stopped. Sadly there does not seem to be any likelihood of that happening anytime soon.
You said that people should not be jailed as punishment. How is jailing this man not a punishment? He is not a danger to anyone. His wife is already dead.
I said I did not think jailing of non -repeat non-violent minor offenders was a good idea.
You have presented me with an example involving a violent, major, repeated offense (two murders). It literally fails to have a single characteristic in common with what I am talking about.
There is a very good chance that this man will do less harm to society than the vandal though. He committee a crime of passion and the motivation for that crime is gone forever. Contrast the person who keeps keying cars and who will always do it unless we lock him up.
I'll say one murder even unrepeated is worse than about a billion car keyings
sorry
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
There is no need to contain people who do not pose a threat to society.
Unless you are intending the containment to cause psychological pain.
Locking up violent offenders protects society from them.
Locking up a kid who got a little drunk and painted a mural on someone's wall isn't protecting society at all.
Anyway, this has already been covered. Unless you are advocating we lock up all minor offenders for life, this argument carries no weight. You are going to let them back out after a pre-determined amount of time. Therefore, the purpose of their internment is punishment, not to protect society by removing them from it.
Even two weeks of having a vandal locked up protects society. That's two weeks they will not be vandalizing; even if the second they get out they vandalize something.
By that logic, we would lock vandals up forever to protect society forever. We do not do this, so it is apparent that protecting society is not the primary reason behind locking up vandals.
Neither I or Feral ever said it was the primary reason. Feral just said that locking people up wasn't soley for punishment's sake.
When you imprison you get punishment and removal in one package.
Yes, but when you imprison people who don't need removal, as we do, you are doing it just for the punishment.
Feral appears to be saying that locking people up isn't ALWAYS just about punishment, which is true. I am talking about a specific subset of offenders for whom it is, as they pose no danger to society and thus paying large sums of money to remove them from it does not benefit society.
@vorpal - what would you call the appropriate punishment for a man who kills his cheating wife and her lover upon walking into the room and catching them in the act? He doesn't have another wife, so it is very unlikely he will kill again. Should he be jailed, or punished at all?
He's committed murder. Twice. That makes him a violent offender and a repeat one at that. He should obviously be punished, but besides the punishment, he should be removed from society to protect it. Nor is he guilty of a 'minor non violent crime'.
Let's imagine, I dunno, someone who downloaded MP3's and listened to them. He suffers a tragic accident and loses his hearing.
Locking this person up would in no way be protecting a society from anything - it would serve simply as a form of punishment.
Look, either caning can be an absurdly brutal punishment that is too painful to contemplate, or it can be not enough of a deterrent. You can't have it both ways
Now, the most notorious country that practices caning, Singapore, has one of the lowest crime rates in the world.
It's not like caning is a walk in the park. It fucking hurts and it can take days, even a week, to recover.
But I'd take a week of physical agony over the years and years of both mental and physical agony that result from rotting away in our overcrowded, underfunded, barbaric prison system.
Splitting up families and locking up low level, non violent offenders for decades for trivial bullshit is just appallingly bad. It would be terrible if our prisons were great. They aren't.
No, we can think that it is both wrong because the sole purpose is pain and ineffective because it doesn't have the deterrent effect of jail. Those are not contrary statements. Just like how you can go "snicker" and "snack"
The severity of punishment for a crime has little to do with how big of a deterrent it is. In a general sense, the immediacy of the punishment, and the perceived chance of being caught dwarf any impact that severity has on deterring crime. While there are always exceptions, criminal who commit crimes believe they aren't going to get caught. There are certain places where exceptionally harsh punishments have some use (charge stacking, and getting people to plea out in exchange for comparatively 'minor' consequences) but that's not particularly relevant to any discussion about deterrence / prevention.
Basically, you're more likely to deter property crime by making it clear that 'EVERY vandal will be caught and prosecuted due to surveillance footage' with a punishment of 40 hours community service / $250 fine than by saying 'every vandal we catch will get 5 years hard time' but enforcing it rarely and inconsistently. That's just basic psychology.
With incarceration, it's true that a person - while in prison - won't be able to commit petty property crimes. That said, that person will eventually get out and that person is provably more likely to escalate and commit more serious crimes following their incarceration. So, unless we are incarcerating people for the rest of their lives - which is entirely untenable and does great social harm / carries great cost in and of itself, incarceration is counterproductive.
Punishments should be 'sufficiently harsh' as to not be a slap on the wrist. They should be proportional to the crime and not overly harsh, if for no other reason than efficiency / cost. They should be structured in a way to offer the most benefit / least cost to society, be it lowest social cost to carry out the sentence, or most likely to prevent any future crimes.
If people would rather take getting brutally beaten with sticks over our 'humane' punishments here, it really calls into question how 'humane' our punishments actually are. That's not advocating for physical / corporal punishment, that's a critique of our system here.
I agree that certainty is much more important than severity, but severity can matter too, I think. If speeding meant having your license revoked immediately, then I suspect that would deter speeding much more effectively than a $200 ticket.
I agree with you that incarceration tends to exacerbate problems. I also think we really over use it. But sometimes we need to just remove people from society to keep them from hurting others. Its unfortunate, but I just don't think that we can sublimate the safety of the innocent to the freedom of a habitual wrong doer.
I don't follow your argument on proportionality based on costs though. You could go jay walking and we could fine you $1,000. We could use the same fine for assault. That is not proportional, but imposes no additional costs.
I'd argue that - at least - for things like minor / property crimes, the punishment should be proportional to the damage those crimes cause to society. This comes from my first principle that we charge people with crimes because of the damage that their crimes do to society. This is imminently clear by looking at any criminal case - it's 'the state vs. the criminal'.
In your example earlier about 'the criminal justice system protects the baker', it may be splitting hairs, but that's NOT the purpose of the criminal justice system. The purpose of the criminal justice system is to protect the society that baker is part of, which by extension protects the baker. It's purpose is not to make the baker whole either, it's purpose is to ensure society functions in the manner that is the best. That's why a criminal case can be prosecuted even if the victim doesn't want to proceed - the criminal justice system is not 'for' the victim. Granted - the victim is usually an exceptionally important witness and their opinion / participation holds a great deal of sway with a jury.
Now, from those principles above, it's perfectly fine to look at the direct damage an individual has caused, other damage they are likely to have gotten away with, and damage to society as a whole. In your speeding example, if speeding meant having your license revoked immediately instead of a $200 ticket, it would simply be untenable. People would still speed, but enforcement would necessarily be sporadic and applied unevenly. If we had some automagic way of revoking the license of every person that crossed the speed limit, the harm that policy would cause would far surpass any harm that could be caused by speeders. It would be a bad and unjust law, and a bad / unjust law should be ignored or repealed.
Your example of fining jay walkers $1,000 strikes me as similar to the 'broken window' fallacy. By taking an amount of money (say, $1000 instead of $15) from a person that's entirely disproportionate to the damage they caused imposes a social cost. Of people fined $1000, some people who would otherwise not have committed crimes / imposed costs to society will end up doing so - not paying for insurance / renewing their license, skipping out on that fine and getting a bench warrant issued, paying and not being able to make rent, etc. If in aggregate, the damage that fine will cause clearly outweighs the damage jaywalkers cause, it's an unjust law and the fine should be proportional to the damage or harm.
By the same token, while incarceration does add a factor of 'unable to commit crimes', you can't incarcerate people forever. It's expensive so there is a direct social cost to incarceration, and when people get out their 'cost' to society will be greater than their 'contribution'. If the harm that's prevented by imprisoning them is significantly less that the harm caused by imprisoning them, than imprisonment is the wrong approach.
EDIT - as a society, we know that people sent to prison suffer extrajudicial punishment and beatings, almost universally. We know that with a certainty, and we don't effectively act to prevent it. Thus, although that beating is unsanctioned, the state is complicit in that that punishment and that is an inherent aspect of any incarceration.
Also, if you revoke people's licenses whenever they speed, it's a fact that more people will drive on suspended licenses, will drive uninsured, and will cause great social harm far surpassing any danger of speeders.
Absolutely correct that it is society that is protected, not just the baker, but the type of protection provided is just against wrongs done like the theft from the baker, not the wrong of a family starving. That is also something government is responsible for, but through a different arm.
But I still don't see how any of this argues for proportionality. It seems like it is just a principle you are accepting, and that's fine, but I really don't agree with that principle. I don't see how the fact that harms are so e to society implies that we should make the punishments proportionate to that societal harm.
I also disagree with the idea that revocation of licenses would just mean everyone loses them and drives without insurance. I think that people would largely stop speeding. The risk would be too great.
I disagree very strongly that a jail sentence is a veiled sentence to rape or beatings. Judges have a very limited range of punishments they can mete out and jail is the strongest, so I think that a jail sentence just represents the harshest punishment available.
In the US penal system, with all of the known issues, a jail sentence is very much a veiled sentence to assault and rape. To the point that it's a common point of "humor" in our society to mention how a jail sentence has an implied sentence of rape attached. You can argue that shouldn't be the case and the system should be changed so that it doesn't happen, but you can't just turn a blind eye to it happening.
At this point, a good half the population considers prison rape a value-add.
I know that I am a hypocrite when I say this, I understand that sometimes my desire for revenge is more previlent than my desire for justice. I understand the lack of intellectual honesty, and I own it. So with that in mind I will say that for child molestors and rapists I consider this a value added service.
What about someone who was falsely convicted of such, or, more likely, pled guilty to such as a result of over charging?
The reason it's so widely considered a value-added service is that people feel some crimes deserve worse than mere imprisonment, but aren't comfortable with the death penalty, and so they are happy to have brutal fellow inmates pick up the slack where they perceive the justice system to have failed.
I don't favor the death penalty, but I think this casual flinging prisoners to the wolves for some extra-judicial punishment is just appalling. I'd like to see it stopped. Sadly there does not seem to be any likelihood of that happening anytime soon.
You said that people should not be jailed as punishment. How is jailing this man not a punishment? He is not a danger to anyone. His wife is already dead.
I said I did not think jailing of non -repeat non-violent minor offenders was a good idea.
You have presented me with an example involving a violent, major, repeated offense (two murders). It literally fails to have a single characteristic in common with what I am talking about.
There is a very good chance that this man will do less harm to society than the vandal though. He committee a crime of passion and the motivation for that crime is gone forever. Contrast the person who keeps keying cars and who will always do it unless we lock him up.
I'll say one murder even unrepeated is worse than about a billion car keyings
sorry
I just mean from a protecting society standpoint. If we think jail is for protecting society from danger, I think there is a stronger case for jailing the repeat vandal than the cuckholded killer who acts out of passion.
Edit: and this is why I reject proportionality. The worse crime (murder) doesn't warrant jail as much as the repeat minor crime, IMO.
There is no need to contain people who do not pose a threat to society.
Unless you are intending the containment to cause psychological pain.
Locking up violent offenders protects society from them.
Locking up a kid who got a little drunk and painted a mural on someone's wall isn't protecting society at all.
Anyway, this has already been covered. Unless you are advocating we lock up all minor offenders for life, this argument carries no weight. You are going to let them back out after a pre-determined amount of time. Therefore, the purpose of their internment is punishment, not to protect society by removing them from it.
Even two weeks of having a vandal locked up protects society. That's two weeks they will not be vandalizing; even if the second they get out they vandalize something.
By that logic, we would lock vandals up forever to protect society forever. We do not do this, so it is apparent that protecting society is not the primary reason behind locking up vandals.
Neither I or Feral ever said it was the primary reason. Feral just said that locking people up wasn't soley for punishment's sake.
When you imprison you get punishment and removal in one package.
Yes, but when you imprison people who don't need removal, as we do, you are doing it just for the punishment.
Feral appears to be saying that locking people up isn't ALWAYS just about punishment, which is true. I am talking about a specific subset of offenders for whom it is, as they pose no danger to society and thus paying large sums of money to remove them from it does not benefit society.
@vorpal - what would you call the appropriate punishment for a man who kills his cheating wife and her lover upon walking into the room and catching them in the act? He doesn't have another wife, so it is very unlikely he will kill again. Should he be jailed, or punished at all?
He's committed murder. Twice. That makes him a violent offender and a repeat one at that. He should obviously be punished, but besides the punishment, he should be removed from society to protect it. Nor is he guilty of a 'minor non violent crime'.
Let's imagine, I dunno, someone who downloaded MP3's and listened to them. He suffers a tragic accident and loses his hearing.
Locking this person up would in no way be protecting a society from anything - it would serve simply as a form of punishment.
Look, either caning can be an absurdly brutal punishment that is too painful to contemplate, or it can be not enough of a deterrent. You can't have it both ways
Now, the most notorious country that practices caning, Singapore, has one of the lowest crime rates in the world.
It's not like caning is a walk in the park. It fucking hurts and it can take days, even a week, to recover.
But I'd take a week of physical agony over the years and years of both mental and physical agony that result from rotting away in our overcrowded, underfunded, barbaric prison system.
Splitting up families and locking up low level, non violent offenders for decades for trivial bullshit is just appallingly bad. It would be terrible if our prisons were great. They aren't.
No, we can think that it is both wrong because the sole purpose is pain and ineffective because it doesn't have the deterrent effect of jail. Those are not contrary statements. Just like how you can go "snicker" and "snack"
The severity of punishment for a crime has little to do with how big of a deterrent it is. In a general sense, the immediacy of the punishment, and the perceived chance of being caught dwarf any impact that severity has on deterring crime. While there are always exceptions, criminal who commit crimes believe they aren't going to get caught. There are certain places where exceptionally harsh punishments have some use (charge stacking, and getting people to plea out in exchange for comparatively 'minor' consequences) but that's not particularly relevant to any discussion about deterrence / prevention.
Basically, you're more likely to deter property crime by making it clear that 'EVERY vandal will be caught and prosecuted due to surveillance footage' with a punishment of 40 hours community service / $250 fine than by saying 'every vandal we catch will get 5 years hard time' but enforcing it rarely and inconsistently. That's just basic psychology.
With incarceration, it's true that a person - while in prison - won't be able to commit petty property crimes. That said, that person will eventually get out and that person is provably more likely to escalate and commit more serious crimes following their incarceration. So, unless we are incarcerating people for the rest of their lives - which is entirely untenable and does great social harm / carries great cost in and of itself, incarceration is counterproductive.
Punishments should be 'sufficiently harsh' as to not be a slap on the wrist. They should be proportional to the crime and not overly harsh, if for no other reason than efficiency / cost. They should be structured in a way to offer the most benefit / least cost to society, be it lowest social cost to carry out the sentence, or most likely to prevent any future crimes.
If people would rather take getting brutally beaten with sticks over our 'humane' punishments here, it really calls into question how 'humane' our punishments actually are. That's not advocating for physical / corporal punishment, that's a critique of our system here.
I agree that certainty is much more important than severity, but severity can matter too, I think. If speeding meant having your license revoked immediately, then I suspect that would deter speeding much more effectively than a $200 ticket.
I agree with you that incarceration tends to exacerbate problems. I also think we really over use it. But sometimes we need to just remove people from society to keep them from hurting others. Its unfortunate, but I just don't think that we can sublimate the safety of the innocent to the freedom of a habitual wrong doer.
I don't follow your argument on proportionality based on costs though. You could go jay walking and we could fine you $1,000. We could use the same fine for assault. That is not proportional, but imposes no additional costs.
I'd argue that - at least - for things like minor / property crimes, the punishment should be proportional to the damage those crimes cause to society. This comes from my first principle that we charge people with crimes because of the damage that their crimes do to society. This is imminently clear by looking at any criminal case - it's 'the state vs. the criminal'.
In your example earlier about 'the criminal justice system protects the baker', it may be splitting hairs, but that's NOT the purpose of the criminal justice system. The purpose of the criminal justice system is to protect the society that baker is part of, which by extension protects the baker. It's purpose is not to make the baker whole either, it's purpose is to ensure society functions in the manner that is the best. That's why a criminal case can be prosecuted even if the victim doesn't want to proceed - the criminal justice system is not 'for' the victim. Granted - the victim is usually an exceptionally important witness and their opinion / participation holds a great deal of sway with a jury.
Now, from those principles above, it's perfectly fine to look at the direct damage an individual has caused, other damage they are likely to have gotten away with, and damage to society as a whole. In your speeding example, if speeding meant having your license revoked immediately instead of a $200 ticket, it would simply be untenable. People would still speed, but enforcement would necessarily be sporadic and applied unevenly. If we had some automagic way of revoking the license of every person that crossed the speed limit, the harm that policy would cause would far surpass any harm that could be caused by speeders. It would be a bad and unjust law, and a bad / unjust law should be ignored or repealed.
Your example of fining jay walkers $1,000 strikes me as similar to the 'broken window' fallacy. By taking an amount of money (say, $1000 instead of $15) from a person that's entirely disproportionate to the damage they caused imposes a social cost. Of people fined $1000, some people who would otherwise not have committed crimes / imposed costs to society will end up doing so - not paying for insurance / renewing their license, skipping out on that fine and getting a bench warrant issued, paying and not being able to make rent, etc. If in aggregate, the damage that fine will cause clearly outweighs the damage jaywalkers cause, it's an unjust law and the fine should be proportional to the damage or harm.
By the same token, while incarceration does add a factor of 'unable to commit crimes', you can't incarcerate people forever. It's expensive so there is a direct social cost to incarceration, and when people get out their 'cost' to society will be greater than their 'contribution'. If the harm that's prevented by imprisoning them is significantly less that the harm caused by imprisoning them, than imprisonment is the wrong approach.
EDIT - as a society, we know that people sent to prison suffer extrajudicial punishment and beatings, almost universally. We know that with a certainty, and we don't effectively act to prevent it. Thus, although that beating is unsanctioned, the state is complicit in that that punishment and that is an inherent aspect of any incarceration.
Also, if you revoke people's licenses whenever they speed, it's a fact that more people will drive on suspended licenses, will drive uninsured, and will cause great social harm far surpassing any danger of speeders.
Absolutely correct that it is society that is protected, not just the baker, but the type of protection provided is just against wrongs done like the theft from the baker, not the wrong of a family starving. That is also something government is responsible for, but through a different arm.
But I still don't see how any of this argues for proportionality. It seems like it is just a principle you are accepting, and that's fine, but I really don't agree with that principle. I don't see how the fact that harms are so e to society implies that we should make the punishments proportionate to that societal harm.
I also disagree with the idea that revocation of licenses would just mean everyone loses them and drives without insurance. I think that people would largely stop speeding. The risk would be too great.
I disagree very strongly that a jail sentence is a veiled sentence to rape or beatings. Judges have a very limited range of punishments they can mete out and jail is the strongest, so I think that a jail sentence just represents the harshest punishment available.
In the US penal system, with all of the known issues, a jail sentence is very much a veiled sentence to assault and rape. To the point that it's a common point of "humor" in our society to mention how a jail sentence has an implied sentence of rape attached. You can argue that shouldn't be the case and the system should be changed so that it doesn't happen, but you can't just turn a blind eye to it happening.
At this point, a good half the population considers prison rape a value-add.
I know that I am a hypocrite when I say this, I understand that sometimes my desire for revenge is more previlent than my desire for justice. I understand the lack of intellectual honesty, and I own it. So with that in mind I will say that for child molestors and rapists I consider this a value added service.
What about someone who was falsely convicted of such, or, more likely, pled guilty to such as a result of over charging?
The reason it's so widely considered a value-added service is that people feel some crimes deserve worse than mere imprisonment, but aren't comfortable with the death penalty, and so they are happy to have brutal fellow inmates pick up the slack where they perceive the justice system to have failed.
I don't favor the death penalty, but I think this casual flinging prisoners to the wolves for some extra-judicial punishment is just appalling. I'd like to see it stopped. Sadly there does not seem to be any likelihood of that happening anytime soon.
You said that people should not be jailed as punishment. How is jailing this man not a punishment? He is not a danger to anyone. His wife is already dead.
I said I did not think jailing of non -repeat non-violent minor offenders was a good idea.
You have presented me with an example involving a violent, major, repeated offense (two murders). It literally fails to have a single characteristic in common with what I am talking about.
There is a very good chance that this man will do less harm to society than the vandal though. He committee a crime of passion and the motivation for that crime is gone forever. Contrast the person who keeps keying cars and who will always do it unless we lock him up.
Sorry, but a person who - fit of passion or not - has proven they are incapable of following one of the most basic rules of human society and murders two people is not comparable in any way to a person who does some property damage. A murder is utterly unlike property damage in that a murderer takes something that can never, under no circumstances, be replaced. Their actions create huge societal damage and costs, in a way that's pretty much unparalleled by any sort of property damage or anything we could begin to classify as a 'minor crime'.
You say that the 'motivation for that crime is gone forever', but what's to keep that guy from re-marrying? They can certainly get married again and their new wife can cheat on them, again. Putting them right back in that same position. Or being in any other situation where they have a 'fit of passion' - getting dumped, getting a bad review at work, getting cut off in traffic, etc? The law doesn't say 'don't murder, unless you're really, really understandably pissed off'. Plenty of people catch their spouse cheating and don't start blowing people away.
Now, circumstances are taken into account - that's why the person in your scenario would be charged with second degree murder or possibly even manslaughter, and depending on their personal circumstances they might even have a chance with the insanity defense.
As a society, we've determined that the costs of imprisoning - separating from society - murderers is a worthwhile cost. Since the costs on society from a single murder are so massively higher than the cost of almost any amount of property damage, the economics of containment become more effective. Spending $300,000-500,000 to contain someone for ten or twenty years to ensure they don't murder again is worthwhile due to the cost of those murders - spending that same amount of money to prevent someone from maybe doing a few thousand dollars in property damage, isn't. The chance of a minor criminal repeating their offenses and having their punishments escalated as a result is acceptable because you can fix a keyed car.
On another topic, I think that there are certain minor victimless 'crimes' that really should be treated as a voluntary tax on bad behavior. However, for this to be effective and just, those taxes should be in some way progressive based on the income / means of the person who commits them so the wealthy can't just 'buy' special privileges.
For example, parking ticket fines should scale up based on the value of the vehicle / the income of the offender in some way. Since the purpose of paid / controlled parking is revenue generation and controlling a limited supply of spaces, I think it's acceptable to allow someone to receive an essentially unlimited number of tickets for expired meters / etc as long as they are paying them. Stuff like parking in handicap spaces or double parking / blocking traffic should have stiffer penalties, and possibly be treated as points-based violations rather than simple 'parking' offenses.
But in general, almost all crimes are treated with a sliding scale where repeated violations become serious / major crimes. Here in Michigan, a person convicted of Malicious Destruction of Property ($200-1000) would face a five year felony with one prior conviction. They would face a ten year felony if their third conviction was in the $1000-20,000 range. Five - Ten year felonies are definitely in the 'serious' range.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
There is no need to contain people who do not pose a threat to society.
Unless you are intending the containment to cause psychological pain.
Locking up violent offenders protects society from them.
Locking up a kid who got a little drunk and painted a mural on someone's wall isn't protecting society at all.
Anyway, this has already been covered. Unless you are advocating we lock up all minor offenders for life, this argument carries no weight. You are going to let them back out after a pre-determined amount of time. Therefore, the purpose of their internment is punishment, not to protect society by removing them from it.
Even two weeks of having a vandal locked up protects society. That's two weeks they will not be vandalizing; even if the second they get out they vandalize something.
By that logic, we would lock vandals up forever to protect society forever. We do not do this, so it is apparent that protecting society is not the primary reason behind locking up vandals.
Neither I or Feral ever said it was the primary reason. Feral just said that locking people up wasn't soley for punishment's sake.
When you imprison you get punishment and removal in one package.
Yes, but when you imprison people who don't need removal, as we do, you are doing it just for the punishment.
Feral appears to be saying that locking people up isn't ALWAYS just about punishment, which is true. I am talking about a specific subset of offenders for whom it is, as they pose no danger to society and thus paying large sums of money to remove them from it does not benefit society.
@vorpal - what would you call the appropriate punishment for a man who kills his cheating wife and her lover upon walking into the room and catching them in the act? He doesn't have another wife, so it is very unlikely he will kill again. Should he be jailed, or punished at all?
He's committed murder. Twice. That makes him a violent offender and a repeat one at that. He should obviously be punished, but besides the punishment, he should be removed from society to protect it. Nor is he guilty of a 'minor non violent crime'.
Let's imagine, I dunno, someone who downloaded MP3's and listened to them. He suffers a tragic accident and loses his hearing.
Locking this person up would in no way be protecting a society from anything - it would serve simply as a form of punishment.
Look, either caning can be an absurdly brutal punishment that is too painful to contemplate, or it can be not enough of a deterrent. You can't have it both ways
Now, the most notorious country that practices caning, Singapore, has one of the lowest crime rates in the world.
It's not like caning is a walk in the park. It fucking hurts and it can take days, even a week, to recover.
But I'd take a week of physical agony over the years and years of both mental and physical agony that result from rotting away in our overcrowded, underfunded, barbaric prison system.
Splitting up families and locking up low level, non violent offenders for decades for trivial bullshit is just appallingly bad. It would be terrible if our prisons were great. They aren't.
No, we can think that it is both wrong because the sole purpose is pain and ineffective because it doesn't have the deterrent effect of jail. Those are not contrary statements. Just like how you can go "snicker" and "snack"
The severity of punishment for a crime has little to do with how big of a deterrent it is. In a general sense, the immediacy of the punishment, and the perceived chance of being caught dwarf any impact that severity has on deterring crime. While there are always exceptions, criminal who commit crimes believe they aren't going to get caught. There are certain places where exceptionally harsh punishments have some use (charge stacking, and getting people to plea out in exchange for comparatively 'minor' consequences) but that's not particularly relevant to any discussion about deterrence / prevention.
Basically, you're more likely to deter property crime by making it clear that 'EVERY vandal will be caught and prosecuted due to surveillance footage' with a punishment of 40 hours community service / $250 fine than by saying 'every vandal we catch will get 5 years hard time' but enforcing it rarely and inconsistently. That's just basic psychology.
With incarceration, it's true that a person - while in prison - won't be able to commit petty property crimes. That said, that person will eventually get out and that person is provably more likely to escalate and commit more serious crimes following their incarceration. So, unless we are incarcerating people for the rest of their lives - which is entirely untenable and does great social harm / carries great cost in and of itself, incarceration is counterproductive.
Punishments should be 'sufficiently harsh' as to not be a slap on the wrist. They should be proportional to the crime and not overly harsh, if for no other reason than efficiency / cost. They should be structured in a way to offer the most benefit / least cost to society, be it lowest social cost to carry out the sentence, or most likely to prevent any future crimes.
If people would rather take getting brutally beaten with sticks over our 'humane' punishments here, it really calls into question how 'humane' our punishments actually are. That's not advocating for physical / corporal punishment, that's a critique of our system here.
I agree that certainty is much more important than severity, but severity can matter too, I think. If speeding meant having your license revoked immediately, then I suspect that would deter speeding much more effectively than a $200 ticket.
I agree with you that incarceration tends to exacerbate problems. I also think we really over use it. But sometimes we need to just remove people from society to keep them from hurting others. Its unfortunate, but I just don't think that we can sublimate the safety of the innocent to the freedom of a habitual wrong doer.
I don't follow your argument on proportionality based on costs though. You could go jay walking and we could fine you $1,000. We could use the same fine for assault. That is not proportional, but imposes no additional costs.
I'd argue that - at least - for things like minor / property crimes, the punishment should be proportional to the damage those crimes cause to society. This comes from my first principle that we charge people with crimes because of the damage that their crimes do to society. This is imminently clear by looking at any criminal case - it's 'the state vs. the criminal'.
In your example earlier about 'the criminal justice system protects the baker', it may be splitting hairs, but that's NOT the purpose of the criminal justice system. The purpose of the criminal justice system is to protect the society that baker is part of, which by extension protects the baker. It's purpose is not to make the baker whole either, it's purpose is to ensure society functions in the manner that is the best. That's why a criminal case can be prosecuted even if the victim doesn't want to proceed - the criminal justice system is not 'for' the victim. Granted - the victim is usually an exceptionally important witness and their opinion / participation holds a great deal of sway with a jury.
Now, from those principles above, it's perfectly fine to look at the direct damage an individual has caused, other damage they are likely to have gotten away with, and damage to society as a whole. In your speeding example, if speeding meant having your license revoked immediately instead of a $200 ticket, it would simply be untenable. People would still speed, but enforcement would necessarily be sporadic and applied unevenly. If we had some automagic way of revoking the license of every person that crossed the speed limit, the harm that policy would cause would far surpass any harm that could be caused by speeders. It would be a bad and unjust law, and a bad / unjust law should be ignored or repealed.
Your example of fining jay walkers $1,000 strikes me as similar to the 'broken window' fallacy. By taking an amount of money (say, $1000 instead of $15) from a person that's entirely disproportionate to the damage they caused imposes a social cost. Of people fined $1000, some people who would otherwise not have committed crimes / imposed costs to society will end up doing so - not paying for insurance / renewing their license, skipping out on that fine and getting a bench warrant issued, paying and not being able to make rent, etc. If in aggregate, the damage that fine will cause clearly outweighs the damage jaywalkers cause, it's an unjust law and the fine should be proportional to the damage or harm.
By the same token, while incarceration does add a factor of 'unable to commit crimes', you can't incarcerate people forever. It's expensive so there is a direct social cost to incarceration, and when people get out their 'cost' to society will be greater than their 'contribution'. If the harm that's prevented by imprisoning them is significantly less that the harm caused by imprisoning them, than imprisonment is the wrong approach.
EDIT - as a society, we know that people sent to prison suffer extrajudicial punishment and beatings, almost universally. We know that with a certainty, and we don't effectively act to prevent it. Thus, although that beating is unsanctioned, the state is complicit in that that punishment and that is an inherent aspect of any incarceration.
Also, if you revoke people's licenses whenever they speed, it's a fact that more people will drive on suspended licenses, will drive uninsured, and will cause great social harm far surpassing any danger of speeders.
Absolutely correct that it is society that is protected, not just the baker, but the type of protection provided is just against wrongs done like the theft from the baker, not the wrong of a family starving. That is also something government is responsible for, but through a different arm.
But I still don't see how any of this argues for proportionality. It seems like it is just a principle you are accepting, and that's fine, but I really don't agree with that principle. I don't see how the fact that harms are so e to society implies that we should make the punishments proportionate to that societal harm.
I also disagree with the idea that revocation of licenses would just mean everyone loses them and drives without insurance. I think that people would largely stop speeding. The risk would be too great.
I disagree very strongly that a jail sentence is a veiled sentence to rape or beatings. Judges have a very limited range of punishments they can mete out and jail is the strongest, so I think that a jail sentence just represents the harshest punishment available.
In the US penal system, with all of the known issues, a jail sentence is very much a veiled sentence to assault and rape. To the point that it's a common point of "humor" in our society to mention how a jail sentence has an implied sentence of rape attached. You can argue that shouldn't be the case and the system should be changed so that it doesn't happen, but you can't just turn a blind eye to it happening.
At this point, a good half the population considers prison rape a value-add.
I know that I am a hypocrite when I say this, I understand that sometimes my desire for revenge is more previlent than my desire for justice. I understand the lack of intellectual honesty, and I own it. So with that in mind I will say that for child molestors and rapists I consider this a value added service.
What about someone who was falsely convicted of such, or, more likely, pled guilty to such as a result of over charging?
The reason it's so widely considered a value-added service is that people feel some crimes deserve worse than mere imprisonment, but aren't comfortable with the death penalty, and so they are happy to have brutal fellow inmates pick up the slack where they perceive the justice system to have failed.
I don't favor the death penalty, but I think this casual flinging prisoners to the wolves for some extra-judicial punishment is just appalling. I'd like to see it stopped. Sadly there does not seem to be any likelihood of that happening anytime soon.
You said that people should not be jailed as punishment. How is jailing this man not a punishment? He is not a danger to anyone. His wife is already dead.
I said I did not think jailing of non -repeat non-violent minor offenders was a good idea.
You have presented me with an example involving a violent, major, repeated offense (two murders). It literally fails to have a single characteristic in common with what I am talking about.
There is a very good chance that this man will do less harm to society than the vandal though. He committee a crime of passion and the motivation for that crime is gone forever. Contrast the person who keeps keying cars and who will always do it unless we lock him up.
Sorry, but a person who - fit of passion or not - has proven they are incapable of following one of the most basic rules of human society and murders two people is not comparable in any way to a person who does some property damage. A murder is utterly unlike property damage in that a murderer takes something that can never, under no circumstances, be replaced. Their actions create huge societal damage and costs, in a way that's pretty much unparalleled by any sort of property damage or anything we could begin to classify as a 'minor crime'.
You say that the 'motivation for that crime is gone forever', but what's to keep that guy from re-marrying? They can certainly get married again and their new wife can cheat on them, again. Putting them right back in that same position. Or being in any other situation where they have a 'fit of passion' - getting dumped, getting a bad review at work, getting cut off in traffic, etc? The law doesn't say 'don't murder, unless you're really, really understandably pissed off'. Plenty of people catch their spouse cheating and don't start blowing people away.
Now, circumstances are taken into account - that's why the person in your scenario would be charged with second degree murder or possibly even manslaughter, and depending on their personal circumstances they might even have a chance with the insanity defense.
As a society, we've determined that the costs of imprisoning - separating from society - murderers is a worthwhile cost. Since the costs on society from a single murder are so massively higher than the cost of almost any amount of property damage, the economics of containment become more effective. Spending $300,000-500,000 to contain someone for ten or twenty years to ensure they don't murder again is worthwhile due to the cost of those murders - spending that same amount of money to prevent someone from maybe doing a few thousand dollars in property damage, isn't. The chance of a minor criminal repeating their offenses and having their punishments escalated as a result is acceptable because you can fix a keyed car.
On another topic, I think that there are certain minor victimless 'crimes' that really should be treated as a voluntary tax on bad behavior. However, for this to be effective and just, those taxes should be in some way progressive based on the income / means of the person who commits them so the wealthy can't just 'buy' special privileges.
For example, parking ticket fines should scale up based on the value of the vehicle / the income of the offender in some way. Since the purpose of paid / controlled parking is revenue generation and controlling a limited supply of spaces, I think it's acceptable to allow someone to receive an essentially unlimited number of tickets for expired meters / etc as long as they are paying them. Stuff like parking in handicap spaces or double parking / blocking traffic should have stiffer penalties, and possibly be treated as points-based violations rather than simple 'parking' offenses.
But in general, almost all crimes are treated with a sliding scale where repeated violations become serious / major crimes. Here in Michigan, a person convicted of Malicious Destruction of Property ($200-1000) would face a five year felony with one prior conviction. They would face a ten year felony if their third conviction was in the $1000-20,000 range. Five - Ten year felonies are definitely in the 'serious' range.
I fully understand everything in this post and agree that it is the status quo. I just disagree, because I really think that we should use jail to protect society, and while I would certainly punish this man, I so t think we need to protect ourselves from him. Now, this could vary based on the facts. If he has a violent history, then we probably should jail him, but if we are talking a mild mannered man who had never gotten into a fight or been violent as an adult but who just snaps without thinking in this particular situation? I really don't see the danger. Contrast the vandal who keys 50 cars a day every day and shows no sign of stopping despite arrests. Yes, it may cost less to just keep fixing cars, but I don't think that this is just about cost. Its about 50 people a day not deserving to be harmed just so this asshole can walk free.
Sliding fines. . . I understand the impetus. I just don't agree though. I think fines should be used solely in response to behavior we want to discourage, and if we want to raise revenue then we should sell permits. Either speeding is a safety matter we want to stop (and fines make sense) or it is something we accept and just want to tax, andvthenbwe should capture that revenue more efficiently by selling speeding passes and raising fines on people that don't have them.
There is no need to contain people who do not pose a threat to society.
Unless you are intending the containment to cause psychological pain.
Locking up violent offenders protects society from them.
Locking up a kid who got a little drunk and painted a mural on someone's wall isn't protecting society at all.
Anyway, this has already been covered. Unless you are advocating we lock up all minor offenders for life, this argument carries no weight. You are going to let them back out after a pre-determined amount of time. Therefore, the purpose of their internment is punishment, not to protect society by removing them from it.
Even two weeks of having a vandal locked up protects society. That's two weeks they will not be vandalizing; even if the second they get out they vandalize something.
By that logic, we would lock vandals up forever to protect society forever. We do not do this, so it is apparent that protecting society is not the primary reason behind locking up vandals.
Neither I or Feral ever said it was the primary reason. Feral just said that locking people up wasn't soley for punishment's sake.
When you imprison you get punishment and removal in one package.
Yes, but when you imprison people who don't need removal, as we do, you are doing it just for the punishment.
Feral appears to be saying that locking people up isn't ALWAYS just about punishment, which is true. I am talking about a specific subset of offenders for whom it is, as they pose no danger to society and thus paying large sums of money to remove them from it does not benefit society.
@vorpal - what would you call the appropriate punishment for a man who kills his cheating wife and her lover upon walking into the room and catching them in the act? He doesn't have another wife, so it is very unlikely he will kill again. Should he be jailed, or punished at all?
He's committed murder. Twice. That makes him a violent offender and a repeat one at that. He should obviously be punished, but besides the punishment, he should be removed from society to protect it. Nor is he guilty of a 'minor non violent crime'.
Let's imagine, I dunno, someone who downloaded MP3's and listened to them. He suffers a tragic accident and loses his hearing.
Locking this person up would in no way be protecting a society from anything - it would serve simply as a form of punishment.
Look, either caning can be an absurdly brutal punishment that is too painful to contemplate, or it can be not enough of a deterrent. You can't have it both ways
Now, the most notorious country that practices caning, Singapore, has one of the lowest crime rates in the world.
It's not like caning is a walk in the park. It fucking hurts and it can take days, even a week, to recover.
But I'd take a week of physical agony over the years and years of both mental and physical agony that result from rotting away in our overcrowded, underfunded, barbaric prison system.
Splitting up families and locking up low level, non violent offenders for decades for trivial bullshit is just appallingly bad. It would be terrible if our prisons were great. They aren't.
No, we can think that it is both wrong because the sole purpose is pain and ineffective because it doesn't have the deterrent effect of jail. Those are not contrary statements. Just like how you can go "snicker" and "snack"
The severity of punishment for a crime has little to do with how big of a deterrent it is. In a general sense, the immediacy of the punishment, and the perceived chance of being caught dwarf any impact that severity has on deterring crime. While there are always exceptions, criminal who commit crimes believe they aren't going to get caught. There are certain places where exceptionally harsh punishments have some use (charge stacking, and getting people to plea out in exchange for comparatively 'minor' consequences) but that's not particularly relevant to any discussion about deterrence / prevention.
Basically, you're more likely to deter property crime by making it clear that 'EVERY vandal will be caught and prosecuted due to surveillance footage' with a punishment of 40 hours community service / $250 fine than by saying 'every vandal we catch will get 5 years hard time' but enforcing it rarely and inconsistently. That's just basic psychology.
With incarceration, it's true that a person - while in prison - won't be able to commit petty property crimes. That said, that person will eventually get out and that person is provably more likely to escalate and commit more serious crimes following their incarceration. So, unless we are incarcerating people for the rest of their lives - which is entirely untenable and does great social harm / carries great cost in and of itself, incarceration is counterproductive.
Punishments should be 'sufficiently harsh' as to not be a slap on the wrist. They should be proportional to the crime and not overly harsh, if for no other reason than efficiency / cost. They should be structured in a way to offer the most benefit / least cost to society, be it lowest social cost to carry out the sentence, or most likely to prevent any future crimes.
If people would rather take getting brutally beaten with sticks over our 'humane' punishments here, it really calls into question how 'humane' our punishments actually are. That's not advocating for physical / corporal punishment, that's a critique of our system here.
I agree that certainty is much more important than severity, but severity can matter too, I think. If speeding meant having your license revoked immediately, then I suspect that would deter speeding much more effectively than a $200 ticket.
I agree with you that incarceration tends to exacerbate problems. I also think we really over use it. But sometimes we need to just remove people from society to keep them from hurting others. Its unfortunate, but I just don't think that we can sublimate the safety of the innocent to the freedom of a habitual wrong doer.
I don't follow your argument on proportionality based on costs though. You could go jay walking and we could fine you $1,000. We could use the same fine for assault. That is not proportional, but imposes no additional costs.
I'd argue that - at least - for things like minor / property crimes, the punishment should be proportional to the damage those crimes cause to society. This comes from my first principle that we charge people with crimes because of the damage that their crimes do to society. This is imminently clear by looking at any criminal case - it's 'the state vs. the criminal'.
In your example earlier about 'the criminal justice system protects the baker', it may be splitting hairs, but that's NOT the purpose of the criminal justice system. The purpose of the criminal justice system is to protect the society that baker is part of, which by extension protects the baker. It's purpose is not to make the baker whole either, it's purpose is to ensure society functions in the manner that is the best. That's why a criminal case can be prosecuted even if the victim doesn't want to proceed - the criminal justice system is not 'for' the victim. Granted - the victim is usually an exceptionally important witness and their opinion / participation holds a great deal of sway with a jury.
Now, from those principles above, it's perfectly fine to look at the direct damage an individual has caused, other damage they are likely to have gotten away with, and damage to society as a whole. In your speeding example, if speeding meant having your license revoked immediately instead of a $200 ticket, it would simply be untenable. People would still speed, but enforcement would necessarily be sporadic and applied unevenly. If we had some automagic way of revoking the license of every person that crossed the speed limit, the harm that policy would cause would far surpass any harm that could be caused by speeders. It would be a bad and unjust law, and a bad / unjust law should be ignored or repealed.
Your example of fining jay walkers $1,000 strikes me as similar to the 'broken window' fallacy. By taking an amount of money (say, $1000 instead of $15) from a person that's entirely disproportionate to the damage they caused imposes a social cost. Of people fined $1000, some people who would otherwise not have committed crimes / imposed costs to society will end up doing so - not paying for insurance / renewing their license, skipping out on that fine and getting a bench warrant issued, paying and not being able to make rent, etc. If in aggregate, the damage that fine will cause clearly outweighs the damage jaywalkers cause, it's an unjust law and the fine should be proportional to the damage or harm.
By the same token, while incarceration does add a factor of 'unable to commit crimes', you can't incarcerate people forever. It's expensive so there is a direct social cost to incarceration, and when people get out their 'cost' to society will be greater than their 'contribution'. If the harm that's prevented by imprisoning them is significantly less that the harm caused by imprisoning them, than imprisonment is the wrong approach.
EDIT - as a society, we know that people sent to prison suffer extrajudicial punishment and beatings, almost universally. We know that with a certainty, and we don't effectively act to prevent it. Thus, although that beating is unsanctioned, the state is complicit in that that punishment and that is an inherent aspect of any incarceration.
Also, if you revoke people's licenses whenever they speed, it's a fact that more people will drive on suspended licenses, will drive uninsured, and will cause great social harm far surpassing any danger of speeders.
Absolutely correct that it is society that is protected, not just the baker, but the type of protection provided is just against wrongs done like the theft from the baker, not the wrong of a family starving. That is also something government is responsible for, but through a different arm.
But I still don't see how any of this argues for proportionality. It seems like it is just a principle you are accepting, and that's fine, but I really don't agree with that principle. I don't see how the fact that harms are so e to society implies that we should make the punishments proportionate to that societal harm.
I also disagree with the idea that revocation of licenses would just mean everyone loses them and drives without insurance. I think that people would largely stop speeding. The risk would be too great.
I disagree very strongly that a jail sentence is a veiled sentence to rape or beatings. Judges have a very limited range of punishments they can mete out and jail is the strongest, so I think that a jail sentence just represents the harshest punishment available.
In the US penal system, with all of the known issues, a jail sentence is very much a veiled sentence to assault and rape. To the point that it's a common point of "humor" in our society to mention how a jail sentence has an implied sentence of rape attached. You can argue that shouldn't be the case and the system should be changed so that it doesn't happen, but you can't just turn a blind eye to it happening.
At this point, a good half the population considers prison rape a value-add.
I know that I am a hypocrite when I say this, I understand that sometimes my desire for revenge is more previlent than my desire for justice. I understand the lack of intellectual honesty, and I own it. So with that in mind I will say that for child molestors and rapists I consider this a value added service.
What about someone who was falsely convicted of such, or, more likely, pled guilty to such as a result of over charging?
The reason it's so widely considered a value-added service is that people feel some crimes deserve worse than mere imprisonment, but aren't comfortable with the death penalty, and so they are happy to have brutal fellow inmates pick up the slack where they perceive the justice system to have failed.
I don't favor the death penalty, but I think this casual flinging prisoners to the wolves for some extra-judicial punishment is just appalling. I'd like to see it stopped. Sadly there does not seem to be any likelihood of that happening anytime soon.
You said that people should not be jailed as punishment. How is jailing this man not a punishment? He is not a danger to anyone. His wife is already dead.
I said I did not think jailing of non -repeat non-violent minor offenders was a good idea.
You have presented me with an example involving a violent, major, repeated offense (two murders). It literally fails to have a single characteristic in common with what I am talking about.
There is a very good chance that this man will do less harm to society than the vandal though. He committee a crime of passion and the motivation for that crime is gone forever. Contrast the person who keeps keying cars and who will always do it unless we lock him up.
Sorry, but a person who - fit of passion or not - has proven they are incapable of following one of the most basic rules of human society and murders two people is not comparable in any way to a person who does some property damage. A murder is utterly unlike property damage in that a murderer takes something that can never, under no circumstances, be replaced. Their actions create huge societal damage and costs, in a way that's pretty much unparalleled by any sort of property damage or anything we could begin to classify as a 'minor crime'.
You say that the 'motivation for that crime is gone forever', but what's to keep that guy from re-marrying? They can certainly get married again and their new wife can cheat on them, again. Putting them right back in that same position. Or being in any other situation where they have a 'fit of passion' - getting dumped, getting a bad review at work, getting cut off in traffic, etc? The law doesn't say 'don't murder, unless you're really, really understandably pissed off'. Plenty of people catch their spouse cheating and don't start blowing people away.
Now, circumstances are taken into account - that's why the person in your scenario would be charged with second degree murder or possibly even manslaughter, and depending on their personal circumstances they might even have a chance with the insanity defense.
As a society, we've determined that the costs of imprisoning - separating from society - murderers is a worthwhile cost. Since the costs on society from a single murder are so massively higher than the cost of almost any amount of property damage, the economics of containment become more effective. Spending $300,000-500,000 to contain someone for ten or twenty years to ensure they don't murder again is worthwhile due to the cost of those murders - spending that same amount of money to prevent someone from maybe doing a few thousand dollars in property damage, isn't. The chance of a minor criminal repeating their offenses and having their punishments escalated as a result is acceptable because you can fix a keyed car.
On another topic, I think that there are certain minor victimless 'crimes' that really should be treated as a voluntary tax on bad behavior. However, for this to be effective and just, those taxes should be in some way progressive based on the income / means of the person who commits them so the wealthy can't just 'buy' special privileges.
For example, parking ticket fines should scale up based on the value of the vehicle / the income of the offender in some way. Since the purpose of paid / controlled parking is revenue generation and controlling a limited supply of spaces, I think it's acceptable to allow someone to receive an essentially unlimited number of tickets for expired meters / etc as long as they are paying them. Stuff like parking in handicap spaces or double parking / blocking traffic should have stiffer penalties, and possibly be treated as points-based violations rather than simple 'parking' offenses.
But in general, almost all crimes are treated with a sliding scale where repeated violations become serious / major crimes. Here in Michigan, a person convicted of Malicious Destruction of Property ($200-1000) would face a five year felony with one prior conviction. They would face a ten year felony if their third conviction was in the $1000-20,000 range. Five - Ten year felonies are definitely in the 'serious' range.
I fully understand everything in this post and agree that it is the status quo. I just disagree, because I really think that we should use jail to protect society, and while I would certainly punish this man, I so t think we need to protect ourselves from him. Now, this could vary based on the facts. If he has a violent history, then we probably should jail him, but if we are talking a mild mannered man who had never gotten into a fight or been violent as an adult but who just snaps without thinking in this particular situation? I really don't see the danger. Contrast the vandal who keys 50 cars a day every day and shows no sign of stopping despite arrests. Yes, it may cost less to just keep fixing cars, but I don't think that this is just about cost. Its about 50 people a day not deserving to be harmed just so this asshole can walk free.
Sliding fines. . . I understand the impetus. I just don't agree though. I think fines should be used solely in response to behavior we want to discourage, and if we want to raise revenue then we should sell permits. Either speeding is a safety matter we want to stop (and fines make sense) or it is something we accept and just want to tax, andvthenbwe should capture that revenue more efficiently by selling speeding passes and raising fines on people that don't have them.
Except that the vandal who is keying 50 cars a day isn't committing a 'minor crime'. He's causing tens, probably hundreds, of thousands of dollars in property damage every day. He's probably going to get picked up, and if he shows no signs of remorse / no signs of stopping have the book thrown at him and spend several years in prison for felonious malicious destruction of property. That situation isn't exactly relevant to a discussion of 'minor crimes', especially as we've already acknowledge that in aggregate or when repeated, minor crimes can become major / serious crimes.
Now, if that vandal keyed 50 cars and got picked up, but shows remorse and is stopping, it's foolhardy to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars unnecessarily to imprison him. We've acknowledged over, and over, and over that at some point, repeated minor crimes become major / serious crimes. EDIT - foolhardy to spend tens / hundreds of thousands of dollars in a way that isn't necessarily foolhardy with a proven murderer.
Fines (and taxes) can serve more than one purpose. For example, tobacco taxes serve to raise revenue, and they also serve as an incentive to quit smoking. Those two positions aren't mutually exclusive. They go together even better when the purpose of the fines / taxes is not to raise general revenue, but to directly mitigate the damage that undesirable activity causes while additionally acting as an incentive to stop engaging in that activity (thus also eliminating the need to mitigate damages).
Cigarette taxes that fund health care programs, and additionally fund smoking cessation programs would be one example.
There's no reason that a given activity has to only serve one purpose at a time. Incarceration can serve as rehabilitation, containment, and punishment at the same time. Fines can serve as revenue generation, punishment, and cost mitigation. Community service can serve as rehabilitation, punishment, and cost mitigation. Etc.
If we acknowledge that the purpose of parking fines (let's say) is to punish / deter illegal parking and to raise revenue, there is no reason not to structure the fees in a sliding schedule that maximizes both goals. If a $10 fine serves as no deterrent for someone making six figures, there's no reason that fine shouldn't slide to the point where it's (roughly) the same deterrent as it would be for the 'average' person. Two birds, one stone.
There is no need to contain people who do not pose a threat to society.
Unless you are intending the containment to cause psychological pain.
Locking up violent offenders protects society from them.
Locking up a kid who got a little drunk and painted a mural on someone's wall isn't protecting society at all.
Anyway, this has already been covered. Unless you are advocating we lock up all minor offenders for life, this argument carries no weight. You are going to let them back out after a pre-determined amount of time. Therefore, the purpose of their internment is punishment, not to protect society by removing them from it.
Even two weeks of having a vandal locked up protects society. That's two weeks they will not be vandalizing; even if the second they get out they vandalize something.
By that logic, we would lock vandals up forever to protect society forever. We do not do this, so it is apparent that protecting society is not the primary reason behind locking up vandals.
Neither I or Feral ever said it was the primary reason. Feral just said that locking people up wasn't soley for punishment's sake.
When you imprison you get punishment and removal in one package.
Yes, but when you imprison people who don't need removal, as we do, you are doing it just for the punishment.
Feral appears to be saying that locking people up isn't ALWAYS just about punishment, which is true. I am talking about a specific subset of offenders for whom it is, as they pose no danger to society and thus paying large sums of money to remove them from it does not benefit society.
@vorpal - what would you call the appropriate punishment for a man who kills his cheating wife and her lover upon walking into the room and catching them in the act? He doesn't have another wife, so it is very unlikely he will kill again. Should he be jailed, or punished at all?
He's committed murder. Twice. That makes him a violent offender and a repeat one at that. He should obviously be punished, but besides the punishment, he should be removed from society to protect it. Nor is he guilty of a 'minor non violent crime'.
Let's imagine, I dunno, someone who downloaded MP3's and listened to them. He suffers a tragic accident and loses his hearing.
Locking this person up would in no way be protecting a society from anything - it would serve simply as a form of punishment.
Look, either caning can be an absurdly brutal punishment that is too painful to contemplate, or it can be not enough of a deterrent. You can't have it both ways
Now, the most notorious country that practices caning, Singapore, has one of the lowest crime rates in the world.
It's not like caning is a walk in the park. It fucking hurts and it can take days, even a week, to recover.
But I'd take a week of physical agony over the years and years of both mental and physical agony that result from rotting away in our overcrowded, underfunded, barbaric prison system.
Splitting up families and locking up low level, non violent offenders for decades for trivial bullshit is just appallingly bad. It would be terrible if our prisons were great. They aren't.
No, we can think that it is both wrong because the sole purpose is pain and ineffective because it doesn't have the deterrent effect of jail. Those are not contrary statements. Just like how you can go "snicker" and "snack"
The severity of punishment for a crime has little to do with how big of a deterrent it is. In a general sense, the immediacy of the punishment, and the perceived chance of being caught dwarf any impact that severity has on deterring crime. While there are always exceptions, criminal who commit crimes believe they aren't going to get caught. There are certain places where exceptionally harsh punishments have some use (charge stacking, and getting people to plea out in exchange for comparatively 'minor' consequences) but that's not particularly relevant to any discussion about deterrence / prevention.
Basically, you're more likely to deter property crime by making it clear that 'EVERY vandal will be caught and prosecuted due to surveillance footage' with a punishment of 40 hours community service / $250 fine than by saying 'every vandal we catch will get 5 years hard time' but enforcing it rarely and inconsistently. That's just basic psychology.
With incarceration, it's true that a person - while in prison - won't be able to commit petty property crimes. That said, that person will eventually get out and that person is provably more likely to escalate and commit more serious crimes following their incarceration. So, unless we are incarcerating people for the rest of their lives - which is entirely untenable and does great social harm / carries great cost in and of itself, incarceration is counterproductive.
Punishments should be 'sufficiently harsh' as to not be a slap on the wrist. They should be proportional to the crime and not overly harsh, if for no other reason than efficiency / cost. They should be structured in a way to offer the most benefit / least cost to society, be it lowest social cost to carry out the sentence, or most likely to prevent any future crimes.
If people would rather take getting brutally beaten with sticks over our 'humane' punishments here, it really calls into question how 'humane' our punishments actually are. That's not advocating for physical / corporal punishment, that's a critique of our system here.
I agree that certainty is much more important than severity, but severity can matter too, I think. If speeding meant having your license revoked immediately, then I suspect that would deter speeding much more effectively than a $200 ticket.
I agree with you that incarceration tends to exacerbate problems. I also think we really over use it. But sometimes we need to just remove people from society to keep them from hurting others. Its unfortunate, but I just don't think that we can sublimate the safety of the innocent to the freedom of a habitual wrong doer.
I don't follow your argument on proportionality based on costs though. You could go jay walking and we could fine you $1,000. We could use the same fine for assault. That is not proportional, but imposes no additional costs.
I'd argue that - at least - for things like minor / property crimes, the punishment should be proportional to the damage those crimes cause to society. This comes from my first principle that we charge people with crimes because of the damage that their crimes do to society. This is imminently clear by looking at any criminal case - it's 'the state vs. the criminal'.
In your example earlier about 'the criminal justice system protects the baker', it may be splitting hairs, but that's NOT the purpose of the criminal justice system. The purpose of the criminal justice system is to protect the society that baker is part of, which by extension protects the baker. It's purpose is not to make the baker whole either, it's purpose is to ensure society functions in the manner that is the best. That's why a criminal case can be prosecuted even if the victim doesn't want to proceed - the criminal justice system is not 'for' the victim. Granted - the victim is usually an exceptionally important witness and their opinion / participation holds a great deal of sway with a jury.
Now, from those principles above, it's perfectly fine to look at the direct damage an individual has caused, other damage they are likely to have gotten away with, and damage to society as a whole. In your speeding example, if speeding meant having your license revoked immediately instead of a $200 ticket, it would simply be untenable. People would still speed, but enforcement would necessarily be sporadic and applied unevenly. If we had some automagic way of revoking the license of every person that crossed the speed limit, the harm that policy would cause would far surpass any harm that could be caused by speeders. It would be a bad and unjust law, and a bad / unjust law should be ignored or repealed.
Your example of fining jay walkers $1,000 strikes me as similar to the 'broken window' fallacy. By taking an amount of money (say, $1000 instead of $15) from a person that's entirely disproportionate to the damage they caused imposes a social cost. Of people fined $1000, some people who would otherwise not have committed crimes / imposed costs to society will end up doing so - not paying for insurance / renewing their license, skipping out on that fine and getting a bench warrant issued, paying and not being able to make rent, etc. If in aggregate, the damage that fine will cause clearly outweighs the damage jaywalkers cause, it's an unjust law and the fine should be proportional to the damage or harm.
By the same token, while incarceration does add a factor of 'unable to commit crimes', you can't incarcerate people forever. It's expensive so there is a direct social cost to incarceration, and when people get out their 'cost' to society will be greater than their 'contribution'. If the harm that's prevented by imprisoning them is significantly less that the harm caused by imprisoning them, than imprisonment is the wrong approach.
EDIT - as a society, we know that people sent to prison suffer extrajudicial punishment and beatings, almost universally. We know that with a certainty, and we don't effectively act to prevent it. Thus, although that beating is unsanctioned, the state is complicit in that that punishment and that is an inherent aspect of any incarceration.
Also, if you revoke people's licenses whenever they speed, it's a fact that more people will drive on suspended licenses, will drive uninsured, and will cause great social harm far surpassing any danger of speeders.
Absolutely correct that it is society that is protected, not just the baker, but the type of protection provided is just against wrongs done like the theft from the baker, not the wrong of a family starving. That is also something government is responsible for, but through a different arm.
But I still don't see how any of this argues for proportionality. It seems like it is just a principle you are accepting, and that's fine, but I really don't agree with that principle. I don't see how the fact that harms are so e to society implies that we should make the punishments proportionate to that societal harm.
I also disagree with the idea that revocation of licenses would just mean everyone loses them and drives without insurance. I think that people would largely stop speeding. The risk would be too great.
I disagree very strongly that a jail sentence is a veiled sentence to rape or beatings. Judges have a very limited range of punishments they can mete out and jail is the strongest, so I think that a jail sentence just represents the harshest punishment available.
In the US penal system, with all of the known issues, a jail sentence is very much a veiled sentence to assault and rape. To the point that it's a common point of "humor" in our society to mention how a jail sentence has an implied sentence of rape attached. You can argue that shouldn't be the case and the system should be changed so that it doesn't happen, but you can't just turn a blind eye to it happening.
At this point, a good half the population considers prison rape a value-add.
I know that I am a hypocrite when I say this, I understand that sometimes my desire for revenge is more previlent than my desire for justice. I understand the lack of intellectual honesty, and I own it. So with that in mind I will say that for child molestors and rapists I consider this a value added service.
What about someone who was falsely convicted of such, or, more likely, pled guilty to such as a result of over charging?
The reason it's so widely considered a value-added service is that people feel some crimes deserve worse than mere imprisonment, but aren't comfortable with the death penalty, and so they are happy to have brutal fellow inmates pick up the slack where they perceive the justice system to have failed.
I don't favor the death penalty, but I think this casual flinging prisoners to the wolves for some extra-judicial punishment is just appalling. I'd like to see it stopped. Sadly there does not seem to be any likelihood of that happening anytime soon.
You said that people should not be jailed as punishment. How is jailing this man not a punishment? He is not a danger to anyone. His wife is already dead.
I said I did not think jailing of non -repeat non-violent minor offenders was a good idea.
You have presented me with an example involving a violent, major, repeated offense (two murders). It literally fails to have a single characteristic in common with what I am talking about.
There is a very good chance that this man will do less harm to society than the vandal though. He committee a crime of passion and the motivation for that crime is gone forever. Contrast the person who keeps keying cars and who will always do it unless we lock him up.
Sorry, but a person who - fit of passion or not - has proven they are incapable of following one of the most basic rules of human society and murders two people is not comparable in any way to a person who does some property damage. A murder is utterly unlike property damage in that a murderer takes something that can never, under no circumstances, be replaced. Their actions create huge societal damage and costs, in a way that's pretty much unparalleled by any sort of property damage or anything we could begin to classify as a 'minor crime'.
You say that the 'motivation for that crime is gone forever', but what's to keep that guy from re-marrying? They can certainly get married again and their new wife can cheat on them, again. Putting them right back in that same position. Or being in any other situation where they have a 'fit of passion' - getting dumped, getting a bad review at work, getting cut off in traffic, etc? The law doesn't say 'don't murder, unless you're really, really understandably pissed off'. Plenty of people catch their spouse cheating and don't start blowing people away.
Now, circumstances are taken into account - that's why the person in your scenario would be charged with second degree murder or possibly even manslaughter, and depending on their personal circumstances they might even have a chance with the insanity defense.
As a society, we've determined that the costs of imprisoning - separating from society - murderers is a worthwhile cost. Since the costs on society from a single murder are so massively higher than the cost of almost any amount of property damage, the economics of containment become more effective. Spending $300,000-500,000 to contain someone for ten or twenty years to ensure they don't murder again is worthwhile due to the cost of those murders - spending that same amount of money to prevent someone from maybe doing a few thousand dollars in property damage, isn't. The chance of a minor criminal repeating their offenses and having their punishments escalated as a result is acceptable because you can fix a keyed car.
On another topic, I think that there are certain minor victimless 'crimes' that really should be treated as a voluntary tax on bad behavior. However, for this to be effective and just, those taxes should be in some way progressive based on the income / means of the person who commits them so the wealthy can't just 'buy' special privileges.
For example, parking ticket fines should scale up based on the value of the vehicle / the income of the offender in some way. Since the purpose of paid / controlled parking is revenue generation and controlling a limited supply of spaces, I think it's acceptable to allow someone to receive an essentially unlimited number of tickets for expired meters / etc as long as they are paying them. Stuff like parking in handicap spaces or double parking / blocking traffic should have stiffer penalties, and possibly be treated as points-based violations rather than simple 'parking' offenses.
But in general, almost all crimes are treated with a sliding scale where repeated violations become serious / major crimes. Here in Michigan, a person convicted of Malicious Destruction of Property ($200-1000) would face a five year felony with one prior conviction. They would face a ten year felony if their third conviction was in the $1000-20,000 range. Five - Ten year felonies are definitely in the 'serious' range.
I fully understand everything in this post and agree that it is the status quo. I just disagree, because I really think that we should use jail to protect society, and while I would certainly punish this man, I so t think we need to protect ourselves from him. Now, this could vary based on the facts. If he has a violent history, then we probably should jail him, but if we are talking a mild mannered man who had never gotten into a fight or been violent as an adult but who just snaps without thinking in this particular situation? I really don't see the danger. Contrast the vandal who keys 50 cars a day every day and shows no sign of stopping despite arrests. Yes, it may cost less to just keep fixing cars, but I don't think that this is just about cost. Its about 50 people a day not deserving to be harmed just so this asshole can walk free.
Sliding fines. . . I understand the impetus. I just don't agree though. I think fines should be used solely in response to behavior we want to discourage, and if we want to raise revenue then we should sell permits. Either speeding is a safety matter we want to stop (and fines make sense) or it is something we accept and just want to tax, andvthenbwe should capture that revenue more efficiently by selling speeding passes and raising fines on people that don't have them.
Except that the vandal who is keying 50 cars a day isn't committing a 'minor crime'. He's causing tens, probably hundreds, of thousands of dollars in property damage every day. He's probably going to get picked up, and if he shows no signs of remorse / no signs of stopping have the book thrown at him and spend several years in prison for felonious malicious destruction of property. That situation isn't exactly relevant to a discussion of 'minor crimes', especially as we've already acknowledge that in aggregate or when repeated, minor crimes can become major / serious crimes.
Now, if that vandal keyed 50 cars and got picked up, but shows remorse and is stopping, it's foolhardy to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars unnecessarily to imprison him. We've acknowledged over, and over, and over that at some point, repeated minor crimes become major / serious crimes. EDIT - foolhardy to spend tens / hundreds of thousands of dollars in a way that isn't necessarily foolhardy with a proven murderer.
Fines (and taxes) can serve more than one purpose. For example, tobacco taxes serve to raise revenue, and they also serve as an incentive to quit smoking. Those two positions aren't mutually exclusive. They go together even better when the purpose of the fines / taxes is not to raise general revenue, but to directly mitigate the damage that undesirable activity causes while additionally acting as an incentive to stop engaging in that activity (thus also eliminating the need to mitigate damages).
Cigarette taxes that fund health care programs, and additionally fund smoking cessation programs would be one example.
There's no reason that a given activity has to only serve one purpose at a time. Incarceration can serve as rehabilitation, containment, and punishment at the same time. Fines can serve as revenue generation, punishment, and cost mitigation. Community service can serve as rehabilitation, punishment, and cost mitigation. Etc.
If we acknowledge that the purpose of parking fines (let's say) is to punish / deter illegal parking and to raise revenue, there is no reason not to structure the fees in a sliding schedule that maximizes both goals. If a $10 fine serves as no deterrent for someone making six figures, there's no reason that fine shouldn't slide to the point where it's (roughly) the same deterrent as it would be for the 'average' person. Two birds, one stone.
The issue here is that there are no vandals who key 50 cars a day. If there were, we'd probably be dealing with someone who was mentally ill, not the vehicular version of the Joker. Such a person would need mental help, not incarceration.
When your argument needs hyperbolic fantasy cases to resonate in any way, you don't have an argument. We might as well be arguing about imprisoning minor shoplifters for life based on the fact that Lex Luthor once stole 1,000 cakes.
There is no need to contain people who do not pose a threat to society.
Unless you are intending the containment to cause psychological pain.
Locking up violent offenders protects society from them.
Locking up a kid who got a little drunk and painted a mural on someone's wall isn't protecting society at all.
Anyway, this has already been covered. Unless you are advocating we lock up all minor offenders for life, this argument carries no weight. You are going to let them back out after a pre-determined amount of time. Therefore, the purpose of their internment is punishment, not to protect society by removing them from it.
Even two weeks of having a vandal locked up protects society. That's two weeks they will not be vandalizing; even if the second they get out they vandalize something.
By that logic, we would lock vandals up forever to protect society forever. We do not do this, so it is apparent that protecting society is not the primary reason behind locking up vandals.
Neither I or Feral ever said it was the primary reason. Feral just said that locking people up wasn't soley for punishment's sake.
When you imprison you get punishment and removal in one package.
Yes, but when you imprison people who don't need removal, as we do, you are doing it just for the punishment.
Feral appears to be saying that locking people up isn't ALWAYS just about punishment, which is true. I am talking about a specific subset of offenders for whom it is, as they pose no danger to society and thus paying large sums of money to remove them from it does not benefit society.
@vorpal - what would you call the appropriate punishment for a man who kills his cheating wife and her lover upon walking into the room and catching them in the act? He doesn't have another wife, so it is very unlikely he will kill again. Should he be jailed, or punished at all?
He's committed murder. Twice. That makes him a violent offender and a repeat one at that. He should obviously be punished, but besides the punishment, he should be removed from society to protect it. Nor is he guilty of a 'minor non violent crime'.
Let's imagine, I dunno, someone who downloaded MP3's and listened to them. He suffers a tragic accident and loses his hearing.
Locking this person up would in no way be protecting a society from anything - it would serve simply as a form of punishment.
Look, either caning can be an absurdly brutal punishment that is too painful to contemplate, or it can be not enough of a deterrent. You can't have it both ways
Now, the most notorious country that practices caning, Singapore, has one of the lowest crime rates in the world.
It's not like caning is a walk in the park. It fucking hurts and it can take days, even a week, to recover.
But I'd take a week of physical agony over the years and years of both mental and physical agony that result from rotting away in our overcrowded, underfunded, barbaric prison system.
Splitting up families and locking up low level, non violent offenders for decades for trivial bullshit is just appallingly bad. It would be terrible if our prisons were great. They aren't.
No, we can think that it is both wrong because the sole purpose is pain and ineffective because it doesn't have the deterrent effect of jail. Those are not contrary statements. Just like how you can go "snicker" and "snack"
The severity of punishment for a crime has little to do with how big of a deterrent it is. In a general sense, the immediacy of the punishment, and the perceived chance of being caught dwarf any impact that severity has on deterring crime. While there are always exceptions, criminal who commit crimes believe they aren't going to get caught. There are certain places where exceptionally harsh punishments have some use (charge stacking, and getting people to plea out in exchange for comparatively 'minor' consequences) but that's not particularly relevant to any discussion about deterrence / prevention.
Basically, you're more likely to deter property crime by making it clear that 'EVERY vandal will be caught and prosecuted due to surveillance footage' with a punishment of 40 hours community service / $250 fine than by saying 'every vandal we catch will get 5 years hard time' but enforcing it rarely and inconsistently. That's just basic psychology.
With incarceration, it's true that a person - while in prison - won't be able to commit petty property crimes. That said, that person will eventually get out and that person is provably more likely to escalate and commit more serious crimes following their incarceration. So, unless we are incarcerating people for the rest of their lives - which is entirely untenable and does great social harm / carries great cost in and of itself, incarceration is counterproductive.
Punishments should be 'sufficiently harsh' as to not be a slap on the wrist. They should be proportional to the crime and not overly harsh, if for no other reason than efficiency / cost. They should be structured in a way to offer the most benefit / least cost to society, be it lowest social cost to carry out the sentence, or most likely to prevent any future crimes.
If people would rather take getting brutally beaten with sticks over our 'humane' punishments here, it really calls into question how 'humane' our punishments actually are. That's not advocating for physical / corporal punishment, that's a critique of our system here.
I agree that certainty is much more important than severity, but severity can matter too, I think. If speeding meant having your license revoked immediately, then I suspect that would deter speeding much more effectively than a $200 ticket.
I agree with you that incarceration tends to exacerbate problems. I also think we really over use it. But sometimes we need to just remove people from society to keep them from hurting others. Its unfortunate, but I just don't think that we can sublimate the safety of the innocent to the freedom of a habitual wrong doer.
I don't follow your argument on proportionality based on costs though. You could go jay walking and we could fine you $1,000. We could use the same fine for assault. That is not proportional, but imposes no additional costs.
I'd argue that - at least - for things like minor / property crimes, the punishment should be proportional to the damage those crimes cause to society. This comes from my first principle that we charge people with crimes because of the damage that their crimes do to society. This is imminently clear by looking at any criminal case - it's 'the state vs. the criminal'.
In your example earlier about 'the criminal justice system protects the baker', it may be splitting hairs, but that's NOT the purpose of the criminal justice system. The purpose of the criminal justice system is to protect the society that baker is part of, which by extension protects the baker. It's purpose is not to make the baker whole either, it's purpose is to ensure society functions in the manner that is the best. That's why a criminal case can be prosecuted even if the victim doesn't want to proceed - the criminal justice system is not 'for' the victim. Granted - the victim is usually an exceptionally important witness and their opinion / participation holds a great deal of sway with a jury.
Now, from those principles above, it's perfectly fine to look at the direct damage an individual has caused, other damage they are likely to have gotten away with, and damage to society as a whole. In your speeding example, if speeding meant having your license revoked immediately instead of a $200 ticket, it would simply be untenable. People would still speed, but enforcement would necessarily be sporadic and applied unevenly. If we had some automagic way of revoking the license of every person that crossed the speed limit, the harm that policy would cause would far surpass any harm that could be caused by speeders. It would be a bad and unjust law, and a bad / unjust law should be ignored or repealed.
Your example of fining jay walkers $1,000 strikes me as similar to the 'broken window' fallacy. By taking an amount of money (say, $1000 instead of $15) from a person that's entirely disproportionate to the damage they caused imposes a social cost. Of people fined $1000, some people who would otherwise not have committed crimes / imposed costs to society will end up doing so - not paying for insurance / renewing their license, skipping out on that fine and getting a bench warrant issued, paying and not being able to make rent, etc. If in aggregate, the damage that fine will cause clearly outweighs the damage jaywalkers cause, it's an unjust law and the fine should be proportional to the damage or harm.
By the same token, while incarceration does add a factor of 'unable to commit crimes', you can't incarcerate people forever. It's expensive so there is a direct social cost to incarceration, and when people get out their 'cost' to society will be greater than their 'contribution'. If the harm that's prevented by imprisoning them is significantly less that the harm caused by imprisoning them, than imprisonment is the wrong approach.
EDIT - as a society, we know that people sent to prison suffer extrajudicial punishment and beatings, almost universally. We know that with a certainty, and we don't effectively act to prevent it. Thus, although that beating is unsanctioned, the state is complicit in that that punishment and that is an inherent aspect of any incarceration.
Also, if you revoke people's licenses whenever they speed, it's a fact that more people will drive on suspended licenses, will drive uninsured, and will cause great social harm far surpassing any danger of speeders.
Absolutely correct that it is society that is protected, not just the baker, but the type of protection provided is just against wrongs done like the theft from the baker, not the wrong of a family starving. That is also something government is responsible for, but through a different arm.
But I still don't see how any of this argues for proportionality. It seems like it is just a principle you are accepting, and that's fine, but I really don't agree with that principle. I don't see how the fact that harms are so e to society implies that we should make the punishments proportionate to that societal harm.
I also disagree with the idea that revocation of licenses would just mean everyone loses them and drives without insurance. I think that people would largely stop speeding. The risk would be too great.
I disagree very strongly that a jail sentence is a veiled sentence to rape or beatings. Judges have a very limited range of punishments they can mete out and jail is the strongest, so I think that a jail sentence just represents the harshest punishment available.
In the US penal system, with all of the known issues, a jail sentence is very much a veiled sentence to assault and rape. To the point that it's a common point of "humor" in our society to mention how a jail sentence has an implied sentence of rape attached. You can argue that shouldn't be the case and the system should be changed so that it doesn't happen, but you can't just turn a blind eye to it happening.
At this point, a good half the population considers prison rape a value-add.
I know that I am a hypocrite when I say this, I understand that sometimes my desire for revenge is more previlent than my desire for justice. I understand the lack of intellectual honesty, and I own it. So with that in mind I will say that for child molestors and rapists I consider this a value added service.
What about someone who was falsely convicted of such, or, more likely, pled guilty to such as a result of over charging?
The reason it's so widely considered a value-added service is that people feel some crimes deserve worse than mere imprisonment, but aren't comfortable with the death penalty, and so they are happy to have brutal fellow inmates pick up the slack where they perceive the justice system to have failed.
I don't favor the death penalty, but I think this casual flinging prisoners to the wolves for some extra-judicial punishment is just appalling. I'd like to see it stopped. Sadly there does not seem to be any likelihood of that happening anytime soon.
You said that people should not be jailed as punishment. How is jailing this man not a punishment? He is not a danger to anyone. His wife is already dead.
I said I did not think jailing of non -repeat non-violent minor offenders was a good idea.
You have presented me with an example involving a violent, major, repeated offense (two murders). It literally fails to have a single characteristic in common with what I am talking about.
There is a very good chance that this man will do less harm to society than the vandal though. He committee a crime of passion and the motivation for that crime is gone forever. Contrast the person who keeps keying cars and who will always do it unless we lock him up.
I disagree entirely. People who lose their temper and murder not one, but two people, because they are angry, are very likely to murder other people the next time they get angry.
His motivation is not gone in the least. The motivation was 'I want to hurt people who made me mad' and we all go through life being made angry by other people multiple times every day (at least, if you commute to work).
I think you would be hard pressed to find an example of someone more likely to harm society than someone who murders people when he gets upset. Like, that's almost literally the exact sort of criminal who most poses a threat to society.
Anyway as I stated, that's most assuredly not a non-repeat non-violent minor crime so...
There is a very good chance that this man will do less harm to society than the vandal though. He committee a crime of passion and the motivation for that crime is gone forever. Contrast the person who keeps keying cars and who will always do it unless we lock him up.
The problem with your example is that we have no guarantee that the motivation is gone forever. The man may find another lover in the future, or may find himself in another situation in which is temper could be lost (road rage, for example). So, repeated murder from the same motivation (extreme emotional state) can occur again. And if you let the initial murderer off on the basis that "Well, his wife is dead now, so he doesn't have anyone else to love" then you're not punishing him at all for the crime. So when faced with a similar situation in the future, he will have no reason to act any different than he did in the past.
This also means that the murderer will not have undergone any rehabilitation, such as a psychic evaluation, which could have avoided a future occurance just by making sure he gets on the correct medication (anti-psychotic, anti-depressent, what have you).
Another take on your arguement would be a mugging, where you release the mugger without charge because hey, the victim is now broke and the mugger has enough cash that he won't do it again now. Surely you can see that this won't prevent future muggings when the mugger runs out of cash.
There is no need to contain people who do not pose a threat to society.
Unless you are intending the containment to cause psychological pain.
Locking up violent offenders protects society from them.
Locking up a kid who got a little drunk and painted a mural on someone's wall isn't protecting society at all.
Anyway, this has already been covered. Unless you are advocating we lock up all minor offenders for life, this argument carries no weight. You are going to let them back out after a pre-determined amount of time. Therefore, the purpose of their internment is punishment, not to protect society by removing them from it.
Even two weeks of having a vandal locked up protects society. That's two weeks they will not be vandalizing; even if the second they get out they vandalize something.
By that logic, we would lock vandals up forever to protect society forever. We do not do this, so it is apparent that protecting society is not the primary reason behind locking up vandals.
Neither I or Feral ever said it was the primary reason. Feral just said that locking people up wasn't soley for punishment's sake.
When you imprison you get punishment and removal in one package.
Yes, but when you imprison people who don't need removal, as we do, you are doing it just for the punishment.
Feral appears to be saying that locking people up isn't ALWAYS just about punishment, which is true. I am talking about a specific subset of offenders for whom it is, as they pose no danger to society and thus paying large sums of money to remove them from it does not benefit society.
@vorpal - what would you call the appropriate punishment for a man who kills his cheating wife and her lover upon walking into the room and catching them in the act? He doesn't have another wife, so it is very unlikely he will kill again. Should he be jailed, or punished at all?
He's committed murder. Twice. That makes him a violent offender and a repeat one at that. He should obviously be punished, but besides the punishment, he should be removed from society to protect it. Nor is he guilty of a 'minor non violent crime'.
Let's imagine, I dunno, someone who downloaded MP3's and listened to them. He suffers a tragic accident and loses his hearing.
Locking this person up would in no way be protecting a society from anything - it would serve simply as a form of punishment.
Look, either caning can be an absurdly brutal punishment that is too painful to contemplate, or it can be not enough of a deterrent. You can't have it both ways
Now, the most notorious country that practices caning, Singapore, has one of the lowest crime rates in the world.
It's not like caning is a walk in the park. It fucking hurts and it can take days, even a week, to recover.
But I'd take a week of physical agony over the years and years of both mental and physical agony that result from rotting away in our overcrowded, underfunded, barbaric prison system.
Splitting up families and locking up low level, non violent offenders for decades for trivial bullshit is just appallingly bad. It would be terrible if our prisons were great. They aren't.
No, we can think that it is both wrong because the sole purpose is pain and ineffective because it doesn't have the deterrent effect of jail. Those are not contrary statements. Just like how you can go "snicker" and "snack"
The severity of punishment for a crime has little to do with how big of a deterrent it is. In a general sense, the immediacy of the punishment, and the perceived chance of being caught dwarf any impact that severity has on deterring crime. While there are always exceptions, criminal who commit crimes believe they aren't going to get caught. There are certain places where exceptionally harsh punishments have some use (charge stacking, and getting people to plea out in exchange for comparatively 'minor' consequences) but that's not particularly relevant to any discussion about deterrence / prevention.
Basically, you're more likely to deter property crime by making it clear that 'EVERY vandal will be caught and prosecuted due to surveillance footage' with a punishment of 40 hours community service / $250 fine than by saying 'every vandal we catch will get 5 years hard time' but enforcing it rarely and inconsistently. That's just basic psychology.
With incarceration, it's true that a person - while in prison - won't be able to commit petty property crimes. That said, that person will eventually get out and that person is provably more likely to escalate and commit more serious crimes following their incarceration. So, unless we are incarcerating people for the rest of their lives - which is entirely untenable and does great social harm / carries great cost in and of itself, incarceration is counterproductive.
Punishments should be 'sufficiently harsh' as to not be a slap on the wrist. They should be proportional to the crime and not overly harsh, if for no other reason than efficiency / cost. They should be structured in a way to offer the most benefit / least cost to society, be it lowest social cost to carry out the sentence, or most likely to prevent any future crimes.
If people would rather take getting brutally beaten with sticks over our 'humane' punishments here, it really calls into question how 'humane' our punishments actually are. That's not advocating for physical / corporal punishment, that's a critique of our system here.
I agree that certainty is much more important than severity, but severity can matter too, I think. If speeding meant having your license revoked immediately, then I suspect that would deter speeding much more effectively than a $200 ticket.
I agree with you that incarceration tends to exacerbate problems. I also think we really over use it. But sometimes we need to just remove people from society to keep them from hurting others. Its unfortunate, but I just don't think that we can sublimate the safety of the innocent to the freedom of a habitual wrong doer.
I don't follow your argument on proportionality based on costs though. You could go jay walking and we could fine you $1,000. We could use the same fine for assault. That is not proportional, but imposes no additional costs.
I'd argue that - at least - for things like minor / property crimes, the punishment should be proportional to the damage those crimes cause to society. This comes from my first principle that we charge people with crimes because of the damage that their crimes do to society. This is imminently clear by looking at any criminal case - it's 'the state vs. the criminal'.
In your example earlier about 'the criminal justice system protects the baker', it may be splitting hairs, but that's NOT the purpose of the criminal justice system. The purpose of the criminal justice system is to protect the society that baker is part of, which by extension protects the baker. It's purpose is not to make the baker whole either, it's purpose is to ensure society functions in the manner that is the best. That's why a criminal case can be prosecuted even if the victim doesn't want to proceed - the criminal justice system is not 'for' the victim. Granted - the victim is usually an exceptionally important witness and their opinion / participation holds a great deal of sway with a jury.
Now, from those principles above, it's perfectly fine to look at the direct damage an individual has caused, other damage they are likely to have gotten away with, and damage to society as a whole. In your speeding example, if speeding meant having your license revoked immediately instead of a $200 ticket, it would simply be untenable. People would still speed, but enforcement would necessarily be sporadic and applied unevenly. If we had some automagic way of revoking the license of every person that crossed the speed limit, the harm that policy would cause would far surpass any harm that could be caused by speeders. It would be a bad and unjust law, and a bad / unjust law should be ignored or repealed.
Your example of fining jay walkers $1,000 strikes me as similar to the 'broken window' fallacy. By taking an amount of money (say, $1000 instead of $15) from a person that's entirely disproportionate to the damage they caused imposes a social cost. Of people fined $1000, some people who would otherwise not have committed crimes / imposed costs to society will end up doing so - not paying for insurance / renewing their license, skipping out on that fine and getting a bench warrant issued, paying and not being able to make rent, etc. If in aggregate, the damage that fine will cause clearly outweighs the damage jaywalkers cause, it's an unjust law and the fine should be proportional to the damage or harm.
By the same token, while incarceration does add a factor of 'unable to commit crimes', you can't incarcerate people forever. It's expensive so there is a direct social cost to incarceration, and when people get out their 'cost' to society will be greater than their 'contribution'. If the harm that's prevented by imprisoning them is significantly less that the harm caused by imprisoning them, than imprisonment is the wrong approach.
EDIT - as a society, we know that people sent to prison suffer extrajudicial punishment and beatings, almost universally. We know that with a certainty, and we don't effectively act to prevent it. Thus, although that beating is unsanctioned, the state is complicit in that that punishment and that is an inherent aspect of any incarceration.
Also, if you revoke people's licenses whenever they speed, it's a fact that more people will drive on suspended licenses, will drive uninsured, and will cause great social harm far surpassing any danger of speeders.
Absolutely correct that it is society that is protected, not just the baker, but the type of protection provided is just against wrongs done like the theft from the baker, not the wrong of a family starving. That is also something government is responsible for, but through a different arm.
But I still don't see how any of this argues for proportionality. It seems like it is just a principle you are accepting, and that's fine, but I really don't agree with that principle. I don't see how the fact that harms are so e to society implies that we should make the punishments proportionate to that societal harm.
I also disagree with the idea that revocation of licenses would just mean everyone loses them and drives without insurance. I think that people would largely stop speeding. The risk would be too great.
I disagree very strongly that a jail sentence is a veiled sentence to rape or beatings. Judges have a very limited range of punishments they can mete out and jail is the strongest, so I think that a jail sentence just represents the harshest punishment available.
In the US penal system, with all of the known issues, a jail sentence is very much a veiled sentence to assault and rape. To the point that it's a common point of "humor" in our society to mention how a jail sentence has an implied sentence of rape attached. You can argue that shouldn't be the case and the system should be changed so that it doesn't happen, but you can't just turn a blind eye to it happening.
At this point, a good half the population considers prison rape a value-add.
I know that I am a hypocrite when I say this, I understand that sometimes my desire for revenge is more previlent than my desire for justice. I understand the lack of intellectual honesty, and I own it. So with that in mind I will say that for child molestors and rapists I consider this a value added service.
What about someone who was falsely convicted of such, or, more likely, pled guilty to such as a result of over charging?
The reason it's so widely considered a value-added service is that people feel some crimes deserve worse than mere imprisonment, but aren't comfortable with the death penalty, and so they are happy to have brutal fellow inmates pick up the slack where they perceive the justice system to have failed.
I don't favor the death penalty, but I think this casual flinging prisoners to the wolves for some extra-judicial punishment is just appalling. I'd like to see it stopped. Sadly there does not seem to be any likelihood of that happening anytime soon.
You said that people should not be jailed as punishment. How is jailing this man not a punishment? He is not a danger to anyone. His wife is already dead.
I said I did not think jailing of non -repeat non-violent minor offenders was a good idea.
You have presented me with an example involving a violent, major, repeated offense (two murders). It literally fails to have a single characteristic in common with what I am talking about.
There is a very good chance that this man will do less harm to society than the vandal though. He committee a crime of passion and the motivation for that crime is gone forever. Contrast the person who keeps keying cars and who will always do it unless we lock him up.
I'll say one murder even unrepeated is worse than about a billion car keyings
sorry
Not if the murdered "person" (I use the term very loosely) is SKFM, one of his gangster clients, or his expensive wife.
That doesn't mean in certain limited instances we can't substitute more compassionate sentencing in lieu of prison; for instance, residential treatment for repeated public intoxication or some kind of involuntary shelter for continued vagrancy. Though with the latter, I'm not sure vagrancy laws are legitimate anyway (homeless people have to be somewhere, for fuck's sake).
Always wondered about vagrancy laws, myself. At least we don't have debtor's prisons anymore.
In Wisconsin males go to jail if they can't pay birthing costs if the mother of their child doesn't have health insurance
The money doesn't go to the mother, or the hospital, it's a fine imposed by the state for having a child out of wedlock essentially
Efficiency of punishments and proportionality are not the same thing. Just because I don't want to jail someone for keying a car once (because the cost is massive relative to the benefit) does not mean that I am accepting proportionality. If the punishment could be cost less, like the obedience chips I mentioned earlier or god striking criminals down with lightning or pushing people though some sort of portal into exile in another world, then I would endorse any of those things for the murderer and the keyer of cars. Just because we don't actually have a cost less or low cost punishment that we can use for all crimes does not mean that I accept proportionality.
honestly since guilt is so clear cut in this one it'd probably be in our best interest to just preemptively execute anyone who gets a girl pregnant in Wisconsin who isn't married or wealthy
A man who kills two people in a fit of jealous rage has serious, highly dangerous mental issues, like severe anger problems. He is much more likely to be a danger to society and other people than someone who keys cars.
"Crimes of passion" aren't spontaneous, totally isolated abnormalities. Acts of extreme violence are committed by people who have a potential for violence. Catching your wife cheating is not an extreme situation in this case - no healthy person would react to that situation with extreme violence.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
Yeah, the death penalty in
America is astoundingly inefficient. I think life without parole in supermax is actually cheaper.
I went with a crazy high number because I thought it was a number everyone would agree represented a real harm, but Zag is right that it stops being a minor crime then. My view is really just that jail is not good at anything other than keeping people from harming others. I don't think we should use it as often as we do, because I don't think that keeping people from harming others is always appropriate, and jail is much to expensive to be used for other things. Ideally, I would like to see jail only uses for people that won't stop committing crimes, regardless of what the crime is. That doesn't mean that a one off killer should go free. I think that we should just do a better job of evaluating these types of criminals and crafting appropriate punishments which may include institutionalized psychiatric care, fines, community service, etc. So I care less about the severity of the crime than I do the chance of recidivism when it come to jail sentences.
This has been a really interesting conversation, and it is challenging some of my views to be sure.
Incarceration is definitely a poor correctional measure in general. When the goal is to prevent recidivism, and ideally also to improve the offender's life through that prevention, incarceration is often counter-productive.
It is impossible to discuss superior correctional methods without simply acknowledging that correctional reform is a politically dangerous or impossible goal, as are the kinds of reform that would address the endemic roots of crime.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
Taxes are another issue entirely though. Sin taxes actually work because the behavior is believed to be in elastic, and so that are great revenue raisers. If you actually want to curb behavior then you should not count on the revenue raised by those fines, because, by definition, succeeding on the deterrent side means failing on the revenue side.
A great example of this tension is red light camera usage. While ostensibly meant to promote safety, they generate a lot of money, but I have heard of towns shutting them down because the cameras work too well in curbing people going through red lights, resulting in a drop in revenue vs traditional tickets. What these towns should do is raise taxes and keep the cameras (that achieves both objectives) but because of tax opposition, it is easier to just sacrifice the safety gains. . .
Traffic cameras are almost entirely about raising revenue. They do not generally increase safety, replacing one type of collision with another.
As you note, often the cities simply remove them when they aren't generating money anymore.
Some cities decide to just shorten the yellow light duration (which is very dangerous) and raise more funds that way, which shows where their priorities are.
Traffic cameras are almost entirely about raising revenue. They do not generally increase safety, replacing one type of collision with another.
As you note, often the cities simply remove them when they aren't generating money anymore.
Some cities decide to just shorten the yellow light duration (which is very dangerous) and raise more funds that way, which shows where their priorities are.
I thought it's debatable, as red light cameras do tend to reduce the number of severe cross-traffic accidents in exchange for a larger number of people getting rear ended. I really hate red light cameras, but where I live people are so bad about dangerously ignoring red lights that it would almost be preferable...of course, the optimal solution would be a regular police presence that actually stops and tickets people who run the lights. EDIT - and yes, a bunch of cities are horrible, awful crotches by doing things like fucking up yellow light timing.
We don't get the police presence because of cuts, so traffic control suffers, so people start suggesting 'less good' solutions like cameras.
With sin taxes, it really depends on what the revenue is used for. If you're looking for a revenue stream to fund public schools with so you don't need to raise income / property / sales taxes, yeah...politicians probably don't want to curb that behavior. If, on the other hand, the goal is to completely deter that behavior and revenue raised by the sin tax is earmarked entirely towards curbing that behavior / mitigating damage that behavior causes, as that behavior decreases your need for that revenue should decrease as well. That's assuming the behavior is elastic, of course.
Of course, we could talk about me getting my unicorn, because sin taxes are always seen as non or less controversial revenue streams.
I also want to note something interesting I read about 'small' sin taxes / fines. Instituting an insufficiently low fine / punishment can actually encourage unwanted behavior. I recall reading studies on a daycare that instituted a small ($5) fine when parents picked children up late, but they found that it became more - not less of a problem. By having a fine, it turned a social pressure into a simple monetary transaction and made violations more - not less acceptable.
Traffic cameras are almost entirely about raising revenue. They do not generally increase safety, replacing one type of collision with another.
As you note, often the cities simply remove them when they aren't generating money anymore.
Some cities decide to just shorten the yellow light duration (which is very dangerous) and raise more funds that way, which shows where their priorities are.
I thought it's debatable, as red light cameras do tend to reduce the number of severe cross-traffic accidents in exchange for a larger number of people getting rear ended.
That's generally true - they reduce t-boning and increase rear-ending. Usually they produce more rear-ending than they reduce t-boning, but rear-ending tends to be less severe so the effects tend to cancel out.
Nevertheless, the public safety benefits of traffic cameras has not done well in the studies that have been conducted. Many studies just tout the reduction in t-bone collisions and say the cameras are working. Studies that actually examine all collisions and injuries at the intersection tend to show another story. I had thought the net effect was generally neutral but it appears from several studies that the net effect in terms of safety may actually be negative.
From wikipedia...
In the U.S. and Canada, a number of studies have examined whether red light cameras produce a safety benefit. A 2005 study by the U.S. Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) suggests red light cameras reduce dangerous right-angle crashes.[65] This study also found there can be an increase in the number of rear-end collisions, leading to the total number of collisions remaining unchanged. This FHWA study has been criticized on grounds that one of its co-directors has performed research for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), a private corporation representing the auto insurance industry that profits significantly from insurance surcharges on drivers ticketed by red light cameras.[66][67][68] The FHWA study has also been criticized as containing critical methodological and analytical flaws and failing to explain an increase in fatalities associated with red light camera use:[69]
(…)the authors spotlight the statistical difficulties of including the cost of fatalities, while ignoring the practical implications of such events (…) assuming that each angle injury crash had a societal cost of $64,468, when in fact the cost was $82,816 before camera use and $100,176 after camera use(…)[68][70]
IIHS research on the safety effects of red light cameras has also been criticized as biased and methodologically flawed.[71]
Not all studies have been favorable to the use of red light cameras. A 2004 study of 17,271 crashes from North Carolina A & T University showed that the presence of red light cameras increased the overall number of crashes by 40%.[72] This research received no peer review and is considered flawed by the IIHS.[73] A 2005 Virginia Department of Transportation study of the long-term effects of camera enforcement in the state found a decrease in the number of right-angle crashes with injuries, but an increase in rear-end crashes and an overall increase in the number of crashes causing injuries.[74] In 2007, the department issued an updated report which showed that the overall number of crashes at intersections with red light cameras increased. This report concluded that the decision to install red light cameras should be made on an intersection-by-intersection basis as some intersections saw decreases in crashes and injuries that justified the use of red light cameras, while others saw increases in crashes, indicating that the cameras were not suitable in that location.[75] This study, too, is considered flawed by the IIHS.[76] Aurora, Colorado experienced mixed results with red light cameras; after starting camera enforcement at 4 intersections, crashes decreased by 60% at one, increased 100% at two, and increased 175% at the fourth.[77] According to the IIHS, most studies suggest the increase in rear-end collisions decreases once drivers have become accustomed to the new dynamics of the intersection.[1] Some locations experience a decrease in rear-end collisions at intersections with red light cameras over time, for instance, in Los Angeles such collisions fell 4.7% from 2008 to 2009.[78] However, a 2010 analysis by the Los Angeles City Controller found L.A.'s red light cameras hadn't demonstrated an improvement in safety,[79] specifically that of the 32 intersections equipped with cameras, 12 saw more crashes than before the cameras were installed, 4 had the same number, and 16 had fewer crashes; also that factors other than the cameras may have been responsible for the reduced crashes at the 16 intersections.[80] And in Winnipeg, Manitoba, crashes were found to have significantly increased in the years following the deployment of red light cameras.[81] In 2010, Arizona completed a study of their statewide 76 photo enforcement cameras[82] and decided they would not renew the program in 2011; lower revenue than expected, mixed public acceptance and mixed accident data were cited.[83]
The IIHS, which so strenuously objects to studies that show red light cameras do not improve public safety, profits greatly from the installation and operation of red light cameras, so as far as I'm concerned their opinion can be discounted entirely.
Han says some city and county governments have gone through "gyrations" to keep their red-light cameras operating.
"Some increased fines from $50 to $100 per offense," he says. "Some play with traffic signals to get more incidences of red-light running. Some added speed enforcement to the red-light camera program over time."
Han and his colleagues analyzed the broader effects of such strategies.
For instance, cutting the duration of a yellow light by one second — from four seconds to three, for example — results in a higher frequency of drivers running a red light — as high as 110 percent, according to the study.
And if the speed limit around an intersection goes up, drivers are more likely to be caught in the "dilemma zone" — where they must quickly consider their options, and have less room to stop comfortably. According to one report in the study, raising the limit by 10 mph makes it 45 percent more likely that drivers will run the light.
Both of those measures, in addition to generating more revenue, can raise the risk of a crash occurring, the researchers say.
Another strategy that was reported in the Tennessee paper but not closely studied is the practice of municipalities removing signs warning drivers of an upcoming signal.
Decreasing the yellow time, removing warning signs, increasing the speed limit...it's quite clear that revenue generation is often (usually?) the primary motivation. That's why cities usually scrap their red light cameras as soon as they stop making money, regardless of if they have or have not made the intersections safer (and there are some specific intersections which have been made safer by red light cameras).
The motorists.org site (which is by no means neutral on the issue) has lots of lists of studies showing further evidence of this view:
Namely, when cities simply stop recording the number of accidents at intersections when it becomes obvious cameras are making them less safe, or try to hide that information from the public. It's about $$$ not, safety. The safety argument is just an excuse designed to get the populace to accept an imposition which would otherwise prove unpalatable. This is neither the first nor last time this artifice has been employed.
As it stands, the only people for whom red light cameras represent a clear and unambiguous good are those people who are paid to install and maintain said cameras.
Red light cameras can clearly make an intersection safer.
Every study I've read suggests that longer yellows and increased all-way-red dwell time can accomplish the same.
Though there's no reason you can't combine the two (safety improvements and enforcement). But yeah, the long and short of it is that red light cameras create a new incentive, by their very presence, to decrease safety. A red light camera that catches no red light runners costs the city money (generally, IIRC some are run 100% on contingency by the owners). And removing the camera reduces city revenue. You can already see this in failure to improve intersections...one intersection in my city sees like 90% of its red light infractions for a right-on-red that should, based on street layout and traffic pattern, have a green right arrow (it's a T-intersection, no u-turns for perpendicular traffic, into a college campus).
I don't doubt that cities would take actions to decrease safety if it meant more revenues, and history has shown this to be the case.
I've rather wondered about right hand turn on red. In my state it's legal as long as you actually stop first. I gather in your area (or at that specific intersection, we have some like that near me as well) right hand turns on red are prohibited.
Actually we've got some intersections where right hand turns on red are permitted from one lane but not the other, just to make things even more confusing.
I've rather wondered about right hand turn on red. In my state it's legal as long as you actually stop first. I gather in your area (or at that specific intersection, we have some like that near me as well) right hand turns on red are prohibited.
Actually we've got some intersections where right hand turns on red are permitted from one lane but not the other, just to make things even more confusing.
No, right-on-red is permitted at the intersection, the camera merely tickets for failure to fully stop first.
Thing is, given the nature of the intersection, they shouldn't have to. They're on a major north/south avenue (five lanes), the light is at the entrance to the college (on the right), and while that light is red the only traffic is from the college on the right (it's a T-intersection), with no U-turns allowed for those vehicles. It's a protected right turn, and should have a green right arrow, so that no stop is necessary.
But a green right arrow would cost money, while ticketing kids for rolling rights on red makes money.
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For ANY offense.
You said that people should not be jailed as punishment. How is jailing this man not a punishment? He is not a danger to anyone. His wife is already dead.
This is the correct answer. If the goal if a fine is to curb behavior and someone engaged in it repeatedly despite the fine, then we need to escalate the sanction as a means of curbing the behavior. If we do not care about curbing it, then why impose the fine?
How many parking tickets do I need to get before I need to go to prison?
How many times do I need to get a hummer from my wife in certain southern states before I should be thrown in Sing-Sing?
You do realize that arguing for escalating punishments is itself an argument assuming proportionality, right? Because proportionality is merely stating that the punishment should fit the crime, that it should consider the actual ramifications to society of the crime and thus should consider the context of the crime. And to say that a person's prior breaking of the law should affect the punishment for a crime is saying the context should play a role in the punishment.
You cannot both hold that there should be escalating punishments and that the punishment should be completely divorced from the real world context in which it happens.
But whatever. That doesn't even matter. You're just giving me a hypothetical case of the law not being adequate while completely ignoring the fact that the case couldn't possibly be realistic in the real world. There aren't people breaking these laws that could afford to pay the fine each day. Millionaires aren't in the habit of constant public intoxication that would be frowned upon. And those who couldn't afford the fines would, you know, be prosecuted for not paying the fines.
We just put people in jail for not being able to pay fines imposed on them as part of their sentence. The poor get put into prison for this while the rich have no problem paying their fines.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debtors'_prison#Modern_debtors.27_prisons_.281970_-_current.29
For the former, 789.
The latter, on the other hand, is an invalid law. Supreme Court ruling and everything.
Not going to link to it, but anyone who thinks it is a joke of a punishment should Google Image Search "caning scars."
Efficiency of punishments and proportionality are not the same thing. Just because I don't want to jail someone for keying a car once (because the cost is massive relative to the benefit) does not mean that I am accepting proportionality. If the punishment could be cost less, like the obedience chips I mentioned earlier or god striking criminals down with lightning or pushing people though some sort of portal into exile in another world, then I would endorse any of those things for the murderer and the keyer of cars. Just because we don't actually have a cost less or low cost punishment that we can use for all crimes does not mean that I accept proportionality.
So, say, you get 120 in a year (or whatever number/span)? That's one every three days. Obviously fines aren't working, you're treating them like a tax. So now you get a charge, with both a larger fine and the potential for jail time. The judge tells you that your next parking ticket, or maybe two or three (since it's easy to get one by accident), will result in a three-day or five-day sentence. Guess what? Now you'll take it quite seriously. Further offenses can carry larger sentences (though obviously there'd be a cap, we're talking about a misdemeanor here).
I say this as somebody who did, in fact, commit something I saw as a bullshit no-big-deal infraction a few times, and had a judge tell me that no, it was in fact a major infraction, and the next time I did it (I was on my third offense) I'd be going to jail for realsies. Guess what? Didn't do it anymore. The fines alone weren't sufficient deterrent, jail time was. If jail time isn't...well, they're in jail, problem solved.
In the case of car-related fines, like parking tickets or speeding tickets, this usually isn't a problem...we take away the license before it gets to that point. Washington in particular takes it away after, IIRC, five moving violations in two years. Thirty day suspension the first time, and they only get longer if you can't stay clean after that. But choose to drive anyway? That's a criminal offense, and carries jail time. The behavior is stopped, one way or another...either you are no longer driving, or when we catch you you go to jail. That doesn't translate well to non-vehicular offenses, since we don't have a similar "privilege" to take away. So for something like open containers or public intoxication or whatever, we'd just have to escalate directly.
EDIT: It's six tickets in one year for a suspension, or five in two years for a probation (then two more gets you a suspension). After suspension you're back on probation (for a year), where it's now a suspension for every ticket, of increasing length, reaching a full year on the fourth suspension (including the original suspension). Basically, treat traffic tickets like a tax, the penalty escalates until you can no longer legally drive. Drive anyway, and you go to jail. You're given a lot of leeway up until that fifth ticket, after that it's no-shit you-will-take-this-seriously time.
Only one.
If it goes to a court and they order the payment and you refuse, its contempt.
I said I did not think jailing of non -repeat non-violent minor offenders was a good idea.
You have presented me with an example involving a violent, major, repeated offense (two murders). It literally fails to have a single characteristic in common with what I am talking about.
PSN: Vorpallion Twitch: Vorpallion
There is a very good chance that this man will do less harm to society than the vandal though. He committee a crime of passion and the motivation for that crime is gone forever. Contrast the person who keeps keying cars and who will always do it unless we lock him up.
He might even grow up to be a corporate lawyer.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
I'll say one murder even unrepeated is worse than about a billion car keyings
sorry
I just mean from a protecting society standpoint. If we think jail is for protecting society from danger, I think there is a stronger case for jailing the repeat vandal than the cuckholded killer who acts out of passion.
Edit: and this is why I reject proportionality. The worse crime (murder) doesn't warrant jail as much as the repeat minor crime, IMO.
Sorry, but a person who - fit of passion or not - has proven they are incapable of following one of the most basic rules of human society and murders two people is not comparable in any way to a person who does some property damage. A murder is utterly unlike property damage in that a murderer takes something that can never, under no circumstances, be replaced. Their actions create huge societal damage and costs, in a way that's pretty much unparalleled by any sort of property damage or anything we could begin to classify as a 'minor crime'.
You say that the 'motivation for that crime is gone forever', but what's to keep that guy from re-marrying? They can certainly get married again and their new wife can cheat on them, again. Putting them right back in that same position. Or being in any other situation where they have a 'fit of passion' - getting dumped, getting a bad review at work, getting cut off in traffic, etc? The law doesn't say 'don't murder, unless you're really, really understandably pissed off'. Plenty of people catch their spouse cheating and don't start blowing people away.
Now, circumstances are taken into account - that's why the person in your scenario would be charged with second degree murder or possibly even manslaughter, and depending on their personal circumstances they might even have a chance with the insanity defense.
As a society, we've determined that the costs of imprisoning - separating from society - murderers is a worthwhile cost. Since the costs on society from a single murder are so massively higher than the cost of almost any amount of property damage, the economics of containment become more effective. Spending $300,000-500,000 to contain someone for ten or twenty years to ensure they don't murder again is worthwhile due to the cost of those murders - spending that same amount of money to prevent someone from maybe doing a few thousand dollars in property damage, isn't. The chance of a minor criminal repeating their offenses and having their punishments escalated as a result is acceptable because you can fix a keyed car.
On another topic, I think that there are certain minor victimless 'crimes' that really should be treated as a voluntary tax on bad behavior. However, for this to be effective and just, those taxes should be in some way progressive based on the income / means of the person who commits them so the wealthy can't just 'buy' special privileges.
For example, parking ticket fines should scale up based on the value of the vehicle / the income of the offender in some way. Since the purpose of paid / controlled parking is revenue generation and controlling a limited supply of spaces, I think it's acceptable to allow someone to receive an essentially unlimited number of tickets for expired meters / etc as long as they are paying them. Stuff like parking in handicap spaces or double parking / blocking traffic should have stiffer penalties, and possibly be treated as points-based violations rather than simple 'parking' offenses.
But in general, almost all crimes are treated with a sliding scale where repeated violations become serious / major crimes. Here in Michigan, a person convicted of Malicious Destruction of Property ($200-1000) would face a five year felony with one prior conviction. They would face a ten year felony if their third conviction was in the $1000-20,000 range. Five - Ten year felonies are definitely in the 'serious' range.
I fully understand everything in this post and agree that it is the status quo. I just disagree, because I really think that we should use jail to protect society, and while I would certainly punish this man, I so t think we need to protect ourselves from him. Now, this could vary based on the facts. If he has a violent history, then we probably should jail him, but if we are talking a mild mannered man who had never gotten into a fight or been violent as an adult but who just snaps without thinking in this particular situation? I really don't see the danger. Contrast the vandal who keys 50 cars a day every day and shows no sign of stopping despite arrests. Yes, it may cost less to just keep fixing cars, but I don't think that this is just about cost. Its about 50 people a day not deserving to be harmed just so this asshole can walk free.
Sliding fines. . . I understand the impetus. I just don't agree though. I think fines should be used solely in response to behavior we want to discourage, and if we want to raise revenue then we should sell permits. Either speeding is a safety matter we want to stop (and fines make sense) or it is something we accept and just want to tax, andvthenbwe should capture that revenue more efficiently by selling speeding passes and raising fines on people that don't have them.
Except that the vandal who is keying 50 cars a day isn't committing a 'minor crime'. He's causing tens, probably hundreds, of thousands of dollars in property damage every day. He's probably going to get picked up, and if he shows no signs of remorse / no signs of stopping have the book thrown at him and spend several years in prison for felonious malicious destruction of property. That situation isn't exactly relevant to a discussion of 'minor crimes', especially as we've already acknowledge that in aggregate or when repeated, minor crimes can become major / serious crimes.
Now, if that vandal keyed 50 cars and got picked up, but shows remorse and is stopping, it's foolhardy to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars unnecessarily to imprison him. We've acknowledged over, and over, and over that at some point, repeated minor crimes become major / serious crimes. EDIT - foolhardy to spend tens / hundreds of thousands of dollars in a way that isn't necessarily foolhardy with a proven murderer.
Fines (and taxes) can serve more than one purpose. For example, tobacco taxes serve to raise revenue, and they also serve as an incentive to quit smoking. Those two positions aren't mutually exclusive. They go together even better when the purpose of the fines / taxes is not to raise general revenue, but to directly mitigate the damage that undesirable activity causes while additionally acting as an incentive to stop engaging in that activity (thus also eliminating the need to mitigate damages).
Cigarette taxes that fund health care programs, and additionally fund smoking cessation programs would be one example.
There's no reason that a given activity has to only serve one purpose at a time. Incarceration can serve as rehabilitation, containment, and punishment at the same time. Fines can serve as revenue generation, punishment, and cost mitigation. Community service can serve as rehabilitation, punishment, and cost mitigation. Etc.
If we acknowledge that the purpose of parking fines (let's say) is to punish / deter illegal parking and to raise revenue, there is no reason not to structure the fees in a sliding schedule that maximizes both goals. If a $10 fine serves as no deterrent for someone making six figures, there's no reason that fine shouldn't slide to the point where it's (roughly) the same deterrent as it would be for the 'average' person. Two birds, one stone.
The issue here is that there are no vandals who key 50 cars a day. If there were, we'd probably be dealing with someone who was mentally ill, not the vehicular version of the Joker. Such a person would need mental help, not incarceration.
When your argument needs hyperbolic fantasy cases to resonate in any way, you don't have an argument. We might as well be arguing about imprisoning minor shoplifters for life based on the fact that Lex Luthor once stole 1,000 cakes.
I disagree entirely. People who lose their temper and murder not one, but two people, because they are angry, are very likely to murder other people the next time they get angry.
His motivation is not gone in the least. The motivation was 'I want to hurt people who made me mad' and we all go through life being made angry by other people multiple times every day (at least, if you commute to work).
I think you would be hard pressed to find an example of someone more likely to harm society than someone who murders people when he gets upset. Like, that's almost literally the exact sort of criminal who most poses a threat to society.
Anyway as I stated, that's most assuredly not a non-repeat non-violent minor crime so...
PSN: Vorpallion Twitch: Vorpallion
The problem with your example is that we have no guarantee that the motivation is gone forever. The man may find another lover in the future, or may find himself in another situation in which is temper could be lost (road rage, for example). So, repeated murder from the same motivation (extreme emotional state) can occur again. And if you let the initial murderer off on the basis that "Well, his wife is dead now, so he doesn't have anyone else to love" then you're not punishing him at all for the crime. So when faced with a similar situation in the future, he will have no reason to act any different than he did in the past.
This also means that the murderer will not have undergone any rehabilitation, such as a psychic evaluation, which could have avoided a future occurance just by making sure he gets on the correct medication (anti-psychotic, anti-depressent, what have you).
Another take on your arguement would be a mugging, where you release the mugger without charge because hey, the victim is now broke and the mugger has enough cash that he won't do it again now. Surely you can see that this won't prevent future muggings when the mugger runs out of cash.
Not if the murdered "person" (I use the term very loosely) is SKFM, one of his gangster clients, or his expensive wife.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
In Wisconsin males go to jail if they can't pay birthing costs if the mother of their child doesn't have health insurance
The money doesn't go to the mother, or the hospital, it's a fine imposed by the state for having a child out of wedlock essentially
honestly since guilt is so clear cut in this one it'd probably be in our best interest to just preemptively execute anyone who gets a girl pregnant in Wisconsin who isn't married or wealthy
Save the state a lot of money
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Well I was talking about immediate summary execution, but it doesn't matter since it was hyperbole anyway
I'm aware real, actual, death row costs a fortune because we care about not accidentally executing an innocent person
"Crimes of passion" aren't spontaneous, totally isolated abnormalities. Acts of extreme violence are committed by people who have a potential for violence. Catching your wife cheating is not an extreme situation in this case - no healthy person would react to that situation with extreme violence.
America is astoundingly inefficient. I think life without parole in supermax is actually cheaper.
I went with a crazy high number because I thought it was a number everyone would agree represented a real harm, but Zag is right that it stops being a minor crime then. My view is really just that jail is not good at anything other than keeping people from harming others. I don't think we should use it as often as we do, because I don't think that keeping people from harming others is always appropriate, and jail is much to expensive to be used for other things. Ideally, I would like to see jail only uses for people that won't stop committing crimes, regardless of what the crime is. That doesn't mean that a one off killer should go free. I think that we should just do a better job of evaluating these types of criminals and crafting appropriate punishments which may include institutionalized psychiatric care, fines, community service, etc. So I care less about the severity of the crime than I do the chance of recidivism when it come to jail sentences.
This has been a really interesting conversation, and it is challenging some of my views to be sure.
It is impossible to discuss superior correctional methods without simply acknowledging that correctional reform is a politically dangerous or impossible goal, as are the kinds of reform that would address the endemic roots of crime.
A great example of this tension is red light camera usage. While ostensibly meant to promote safety, they generate a lot of money, but I have heard of towns shutting them down because the cameras work too well in curbing people going through red lights, resulting in a drop in revenue vs traditional tickets. What these towns should do is raise taxes and keep the cameras (that achieves both objectives) but because of tax opposition, it is easier to just sacrifice the safety gains. . .
As you note, often the cities simply remove them when they aren't generating money anymore.
Some cities decide to just shorten the yellow light duration (which is very dangerous) and raise more funds that way, which shows where their priorities are.
PSN: Vorpallion Twitch: Vorpallion
I thought it's debatable, as red light cameras do tend to reduce the number of severe cross-traffic accidents in exchange for a larger number of people getting rear ended. I really hate red light cameras, but where I live people are so bad about dangerously ignoring red lights that it would almost be preferable...of course, the optimal solution would be a regular police presence that actually stops and tickets people who run the lights. EDIT - and yes, a bunch of cities are horrible, awful crotches by doing things like fucking up yellow light timing.
We don't get the police presence because of cuts, so traffic control suffers, so people start suggesting 'less good' solutions like cameras.
With sin taxes, it really depends on what the revenue is used for. If you're looking for a revenue stream to fund public schools with so you don't need to raise income / property / sales taxes, yeah...politicians probably don't want to curb that behavior. If, on the other hand, the goal is to completely deter that behavior and revenue raised by the sin tax is earmarked entirely towards curbing that behavior / mitigating damage that behavior causes, as that behavior decreases your need for that revenue should decrease as well. That's assuming the behavior is elastic, of course.
Of course, we could talk about me getting my unicorn, because sin taxes are always seen as non or less controversial revenue streams.
I also want to note something interesting I read about 'small' sin taxes / fines. Instituting an insufficiently low fine / punishment can actually encourage unwanted behavior. I recall reading studies on a daycare that instituted a small ($5) fine when parents picked children up late, but they found that it became more - not less of a problem. By having a fine, it turned a social pressure into a simple monetary transaction and made violations more - not less acceptable.
That's generally true - they reduce t-boning and increase rear-ending. Usually they produce more rear-ending than they reduce t-boning, but rear-ending tends to be less severe so the effects tend to cancel out.
Nevertheless, the public safety benefits of traffic cameras has not done well in the studies that have been conducted. Many studies just tout the reduction in t-bone collisions and say the cameras are working. Studies that actually examine all collisions and injuries at the intersection tend to show another story. I had thought the net effect was generally neutral but it appears from several studies that the net effect in terms of safety may actually be negative.
From wikipedia...
The IIHS, which so strenuously objects to studies that show red light cameras do not improve public safety, profits greatly from the installation and operation of red light cameras, so as far as I'm concerned their opinion can be discounted entirely.
I thought this NPR posting http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/08/13/211723717/a-dilemma-zone-for-red-light-cameras-safety-vs-cash did a good job illustrating the almost inevitable mission creep from 'make things safer' to 'maintain our revenue flow' which soon starts encompassing actions that make the intersection manifestly less safe such as
Decreasing the yellow time, removing warning signs, increasing the speed limit...it's quite clear that revenue generation is often (usually?) the primary motivation. That's why cities usually scrap their red light cameras as soon as they stop making money, regardless of if they have or have not made the intersections safer (and there are some specific intersections which have been made safer by red light cameras).
The motorists.org site (which is by no means neutral on the issue) has lots of lists of studies showing further evidence of this view:
http://www.motorists.org/red-light-cameras/studies
Namely, when cities simply stop recording the number of accidents at intersections when it becomes obvious cameras are making them less safe, or try to hide that information from the public. It's about $$$ not, safety. The safety argument is just an excuse designed to get the populace to accept an imposition which would otherwise prove unpalatable. This is neither the first nor last time this artifice has been employed.
As it stands, the only people for whom red light cameras represent a clear and unambiguous good are those people who are paid to install and maintain said cameras.
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Every study I've read suggests that longer yellows and increased all-way-red dwell time can accomplish the same.
Though there's no reason you can't combine the two (safety improvements and enforcement). But yeah, the long and short of it is that red light cameras create a new incentive, by their very presence, to decrease safety. A red light camera that catches no red light runners costs the city money (generally, IIRC some are run 100% on contingency by the owners). And removing the camera reduces city revenue. You can already see this in failure to improve intersections...one intersection in my city sees like 90% of its red light infractions for a right-on-red that should, based on street layout and traffic pattern, have a green right arrow (it's a T-intersection, no u-turns for perpendicular traffic, into a college campus).
I don't doubt that cities would take actions to decrease safety if it meant more revenues, and history has shown this to be the case.
Actually we've got some intersections where right hand turns on red are permitted from one lane but not the other, just to make things even more confusing.
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No, right-on-red is permitted at the intersection, the camera merely tickets for failure to fully stop first.
Thing is, given the nature of the intersection, they shouldn't have to. They're on a major north/south avenue (five lanes), the light is at the entrance to the college (on the right), and while that light is red the only traffic is from the college on the right (it's a T-intersection), with no U-turns allowed for those vehicles. It's a protected right turn, and should have a green right arrow, so that no stop is necessary.
But a green right arrow would cost money, while ticketing kids for rolling rights on red makes money.