It's also notable that when you're looking for an entry level job it's always been really difficult regardless of the market. College grads with little to no work experience not being able to find jobs isn't a new thing or finding something under their education level isn't really a new thing at least for non ivy league students.
Fairly new - things that used to be paid jobs for entry level workers have generally turned into internships that get paid in "experience."
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
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"
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.
I'd like to add that it's not public caning. That's a factoid invented by the U.S. media. It's an administrative punishment, not a public spectacle. It is not open to the public, and the consequences of caning are as often exaggerated as they are dismissed.
Personally, I'm a big fan of constructive punishment. Forcing vandals to rebuild/clean/repaint things they've damaged through community service would be a good example. I'd also advocate increasingly harsh punishments on parties that abuse public trust/power. This would mean that government officials abusing their powers would face strong consequences, white collar crime that plunges thousands of people to debt/poverty could potentially bankrupt the company/bank, and send individuals responsible to prison/face immense fines, etc. The central idea is really about repairing the damage, with rehabilitation as a secondary objective. Pure vindictiveness should never enter the equation. The system should encourage faith in the institutions and the law, through strong adherence to integrity and upholding its own standards.
Also, regarding poverty and crime, being disenfranchised is not some blanket reduction on the need for impulse control. As much as I like that quote by Anatole France, stealing bread and sleeping under the bridges are crimes of need, while senseless vandalism doesn't feed you or give you shelter. It's simply malicious. This should be taken into account in sentencing. If people need to steal food to stay alive, the system is failing at some point, and this should be taken as an indication to fix the problem. Barring outright mental problems, vandalism doesn't have a similar justification. As far as U.S. War of Drugs goes, that's just a corporate gambit of For Profit Prisons to fill up on non-violent, easy to look after slave labour in the form of people caught smoking weed.
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MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
I really had to think on this one. One bourbon, one old fashioned, and one gigantic portion of short ribs later, I think I have digested this post.
No, here's the real difference between gun-against-your-head and stealing bread to not starve. You've never been hungry in your life. Not really. Not real hunger, like "we have absolutely no money and we have absolutely no food and there's nothing we can do and nothing we can eat." You don't know the slow death of starvation, the pain, the weakness, the clouding of the mind and the narrowing of horizons down to that gnawing unceasing physical need that cannot be fulfilled, the illness that can then come to attack bodies already weakened and worse, not just yourself being hungry, but seeing this same suffering on the faces of your loved ones, especially the youngest, children who have nothing to do with the societal or economic or whatever situations at large that caused this but are dragged along for the worst ride. And this isn't a one-time occurrence. You'll get food again eventually, somehow, but once you've eaten again and can think about more time in the future than just the next meal, you know there will soon come a time again when there won't be a next meal and you'll have to go through all the same pain again.
For you, though, it's only ever been a minor discomfort, temporary and with promise of being relieved shortly and easily. Oh of course people can resist committing crimes when they are in a minor discomfort. You don't understand real hunger and what that is like. You do understand what it would be like to have a gun pointed at your head. That's why you can empathize with that example but not the example of stealing to eat.
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.
I'd like to add that it's not public caning. That's a factoid invented by the U.S. media. It's an administrative punishment, not a public spectacle. It is not open to the public, and the consequences of caning are as often exaggerated as they are dismissed.
Personally, I'm a big fan of constructive punishment. Forcing vandals to rebuild/clean/repaint things they've damaged through community service would be a good example. I'd also advocate increasingly harsh punishments on parties that abuse public trust/power. This would mean that government officials abusing their powers would face strong consequences, white collar crime that plunges thousands of people to debt/poverty could potentially bankrupt the company/bank, and send individuals responsible to prison/face immense fines, etc. The central idea is really about repairing the damage, with rehabilitation as a secondary objective. Pure vindictiveness should never enter the equation. The system should encourage faith in the institutions and the law, through strong adherence to integrity and upholding its own standards.
Also, regarding poverty and crime, being disenfranchised is not some blanket reduction on the need for impulse control. As much as I like that quote by Anatole France, stealing bread and sleeping under the bridges are crimes of need, while senseless vandalism doesn't feed you or give you shelter. It's simply malicious. This should be taken into account in sentencing. If people need to steal food to stay alive, the system is failing at some point, and this should be taken as an indication to fix the problem. Barring outright mental problems, vandalism doesn't have a similar justification. As far as U.S. War of Drugs goes, that's just a corporate gambit of For Profit Prisons to fill up on non-violent, easy to look after slave labour in the form of people caught smoking weed.
I'd be in favor of sending the entirety of godlman sachs to the mines
if we dont have mines to send them to we can make them buy mines and then send them
I'm not familiar with either of those references. Is that a veiled way of saying my post was a wall 'o text? I can trim it down.
It's a pretty overt way of saying that the idea of public caning is so absurd that I immediately assume you're writing satire.
Why is it absurd when it is currently practiced in countries with far less crime problems than our own, and was practiced for hundreds of years before that, and is clearly potentially less damaging than what we currently do to people convicted of crimes?
I honestly, sincerely, without satire of any kind, would rather be publicly caned than convicted of a felony and sent to jail for years.
Because caning is literally intended to inflict pain, while none of our punishments are?
last time my brother was in jail he was beaten by a bunch of guys so bad he had to be in the infirmary for a week
his crime was "open container of alcohol in a public place" btw
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
I really had to think on this one. One bourbon, one old fashioned, and one gigantic portion of short ribs later, I think I have digested this post.
No, here's the real difference between gun-against-your-head and stealing bread to not starve. You've never been hungry in your life. Not really. Not real hunger, like "we have absolutely no money and we have absolutely no food and there's nothing we can do and nothing we can eat." You don't know the slow death of starvation, the pain, the weakness, the clouding of the mind and the narrowing of horizons down to that gnawing unceasing physical need that cannot be fulfilled, the illness that can then come to attack bodies already weakened and worse, not just yourself being hungry, but seeing this same suffering on the faces of your loved ones, especially the youngest, children who have nothing to do with the societal or economic or whatever situations at large that caused this but are dragged along for the worst ride. And this isn't a one-time occurrence. You'll get food again eventually, somehow, but once you've eaten again and can think about more time in the future than just the next meal, you know there will soon come a time again when there won't be a next meal and you'll have to go through all the same pain again.
For you, though, it's only ever been a minor discomfort, temporary and with promise of being relieved shortly and easily. Oh of course people can resist committing crimes when they are in a minor discomfort. You don't understand real hunger and what that is like. You do understand what it would be like to have a gun pointed at your head. That's why you can empathize with that example but not the example of stealing to eat.
You are right. I have never been hungry like that and cannot empathize. I regard it as a societal failure that we let people reach that point. But it happens, and the question is what we do about it. On a welfare level, we absolutely need to fix this, but the criminal justice system's job is to protect the baker, not to provide food for the starving family. So while the family should not starve and the baker should not be harmed to feed the family, the criminal justice system has to only focus on the later problem.
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.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
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.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
I'm not familiar with either of those references. Is that a veiled way of saying my post was a wall 'o text? I can trim it down.
It's a pretty overt way of saying that the idea of public caning is so absurd that I immediately assume you're writing satire.
Why is it absurd when it is currently practiced in countries with far less crime problems than our own, and was practiced for hundreds of years before that, and is clearly potentially less damaging than what we currently do to people convicted of crimes?
I honestly, sincerely, without satire of any kind, would rather be publicly caned than convicted of a felony and sent to jail for years.
Because caning is literally intended to inflict pain, while none of our punishments are?
last time my brother was in jail he was beaten by a bunch of guys so bad he had to be in the infirmary for a week
his crime was "open container of alcohol in a public place" btw
That is an awful, awful story, but he was not sentenced to a beating. He was sentenced to jail and was hurt because of a flaw in the jail system. Contrast caning, where the beating is I teed as the 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.
zagdrob on
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
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.
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zepherinRussian warship, go fuck yourselfRegistered Userregular
I like caneing restitution and community service as forms of punishment for minor crimes.
I just feal like the cane is a value engineered solution. Way cheaper than imprisonment.
Being poor may limit those choices, but it does not rob you of your agency.
How much does agency weigh? Can you measure it by putting a human being on a big scale at the moment of death, when agency leaves the body?
About as much as your sense of self or memories?
People make choices and are responsible for them. Being I poverty does not alter this. Everyone has the exact same capability not to break the law.
I disagree. Everyone does not have the same capability not to break the law. It's only the wealthy that can commit institutional fraud, for example. Those in poverty have the least capability to break the law, but they have the most to gain from doing so. Let's create an example to demonstrate this:
You have a bank with around $100,000 USD on hand. You have a person in poverty with an annual pre-tax salary of $10,000 USD, and a person of means with an annual pre-tax salary of $600,000 USD.
In this example, the poor person has the potential to gain 10 years of salary (tax free!) if he can pull off one crime. If he's caught, he goes from a life of scrabbling for survival and fear of not having his next meal to a guaranteed number of meals per day and a roof over his head. The punishment, for him, may not be any worse than the life he was living before hand.
On the flip side, the rich person is only looking at gaining two months worth of salary and is risking his lifestyle for one far less desirable.
So, who is more likely to commit this crime?
I realize that robbing a bank for $100,000 USD isn't exactly a minor crime, but it's also one with a huge potential to get caught and carries are much stiffer penalty. The same idea could be applied for shoplifting, where again the poor person is less disincentivized to avoid stealing than the rich person. The poor person has less to lose and more to gain.
Like I said, I would want the least restrictive setting, but if it is a choice of more freedom for the man we know to have a hair trigger violent response or ensuring he does not attack people, I will always choose the later.
What about "Innocent until proven guilty?" You're now not punishing this man for his choice, but instead you're punishing him simply because he could have made that choice. You just finished saying "Everyone has the exact same capability not to break the law." and now you're going against that and pre-judging persons for choices they may make.
I'm not familiar with either of those references. Is that a veiled way of saying my post was a wall 'o text? I can trim it down.
It's a pretty overt way of saying that the idea of public caning is so absurd that I immediately assume you're writing satire.
Why is it absurd when it is currently practiced in countries with far less crime problems than our own, and was practiced for hundreds of years before that, and is clearly potentially less damaging than what we currently do to people convicted of crimes?
I honestly, sincerely, without satire of any kind, would rather be publicly caned than convicted of a felony and sent to jail for years.
Because caning is literally intended to inflict pain, while none of our punishments are?
Ask the people who get tortured in prisons by other inmates how much non-pain their sentence carries.
His is a flaw in the system that should be rectified. It is a national point if shame that it has not been. With caning, the intended punishment is the infliction of pain.
The problem with caning (note, I'm agreeing with you, stop that) is that it only meets the criteria for punishment and revenge and completely ignores improvements in society (restitution and rehabilitation).
Personally, I think that rehabilitation should be the number one goal for jailable offenses, and societal improvements be the number one for non-jailable offenses. Stuff like community service can much more easily be accommodated by the poor than a fine, and is much more inconvenient for the wealthy. It's overall a more fair punishment.
I agree that it is a complicated issue, but we can't do anything but simplify and hold people blameworthy, because we need to be able to count on people to follow the rules, and the alternative to trusting someone to follow the rules is to lock them up (we used to use asylums) right off the bat, because we can't just have people who are not capable (or not capable enough) of following the rules walking around endangering other people. Put another way, if we don't subscribe to a person having the choice to follow the rules, how can we even give them the chance to do so?
This is a good argument for use in deciding what is or isn't legal.
It is a poor argument for use in deciding what to do with someone who has committed a crime.
I don't follow. Why would this be relevant in defending what is illegal and not in sentencing?
Being poor may limit those choices, but it does not rob you of your agency.
How much does agency weigh? Can you measure it by putting a human being on a big scale at the moment of death, when agency leaves the body?
About as much as your sense of self or memories?
People make choices and are responsible for them. Being I poverty does not alter this. Everyone has the exact same capability not to break the law.
Eh, not really.
I mean, agency isn't a binary thing. It's not something you either have or you do not. Human behavior is as much situational as it is individual. See: fundamental attribution bias. Also see: old adages about walking in another man's shoes.
At the most dramatic level, poverty is associated with mental illness, and the legal framework for dealing with mental illness's effects on behavior are pretty rough. (As they have to be, at our current level of understanding.) An individual with, for example, bipolar disorder, does not have same capacity to follow the law... even if that individual passes the blunt legal sanity check that they know right from wrong.
But that's a dramatic example, just to illustrate the point. Mental illness is one extreme end of the scale - in the middle, between illness and health, there is a huge spectrum of both personal and contextual issues that can affect a person's ability to follow rules. Anger issues, impulse control issues, difficulties dealing with authority, etc.
Even a relatively normal person can be driven to extreme behavior by extreme circumstances. If you get into a car wreck, get yelled at by your boss, come home to an abusive spouse - your ability to follow rules like "don't break shit" and "don't hit people" is impaired.
So somebody broke a car window. Obviously, we may imagine an alternative history where this person did not break the car window. But they did, and they did so for reasons. (Whether those reasons are morally defensible or not is another story.) There was a causal chain of events both endogenous and exogenous to that person leading up to that broken window. To blame the behavior on "agency" without acknowledging that 'agency' means different things in different contexts, you might as well be talking about a soul. If you're not at least a little bit determinist when discussing human behavior, you're being simplistic.
I agree that it is a complicated issue, but we can't do anything but simplify and hold people blameworthy, because we need to be able to count on people to follow the rules, and the alternative to trusting someone to follow the rules is to lock them up (we used to use asylums) right off the bat, because we can't just have people who are not capable (or not capable enough) of following the rules walking around endangering other people. Put another way, if we don't subscribe to a person having the choice to follow the rules, how can we even give them the chance to do so?
Question: Do you believe that coercion diminishes mens rea?
You are coming across as saying you do not. That, in the extreme example, someone holding a gun to your head and demanding you do something does not, in any way, restrict your ability to choose. And that is a completely indefensible position.
At literal gun point, yes. Hungry and stealing bread? No.
At what point is hunger a biological gun to your head? Coercion is not binary. You are trying to draw a line where none can be drawn.
Edit: A formal proof of the concept:
Assume that:
1)There exists some distance away at which a drawn gun is universally equivalent to a gun to your head
2)Moving the gun an arbitrarily small fixed distance further away does not make it cease being a gun to your head
It then follows:
3)Formalizing the premises, a gun X meters away is to your head, and if a gun is Y meters away and to your head, a gun Y-a meters away is a gun to your head, where a is the aforementioned arbitrary distance
4)By induction, 0 grains of sand is a large pile of sand (Admittedly, I have to choose an actual, fixed distance in 2 or else the series is uncountably infinite. However, there is a physical minimum length below which length has no meaning, and choosing that still works)
5)Since 4 is obviously ridiculous, either 1 or 2 is false
6)2 is not false, since its truth is obvious
7)Therefore 1 is false.
That is to say, the notion of a gun to your head cannot be defined in absolute terms (Call this 0, I suppose, and 1 follows naturally - and thus negating 1 negates 0 by modus tollens). This shouldn't require proof, but I don't have anything else at this point (though I find the idea that "I can offer nothing but a formal mathematical proof" rather odd).
A gun to your head creates a binary choice. You must obey immediately or die immediately. Hunger, poverty, etc. may limit your options, but they never reduce them to an immediate life or death decision.
I'm fairly certain humans can be in a state where if they don't eat anything they will die immediately. Or where if they don't find shelter they will die immediately. Or where if they don't have medical care they will die immediately.
People need more than agency to stay alive.
But even if you are nearly starving to death, there will still be options other than stealing the particular food you steal. Maybe you beg. Maybe you can go to a soup kitchen. Maybe you can find discarded food in a garbage can. There will likely be any number of alternatives.
But this is all tangenital. The discussion was whether someone with a diminished capacity for self control should be viewed as having agency in choosing whether or not to key a car or commit other vandalism. My replies to feral set out my feelings on this matter.
Two of the things you've suggested here are crimes very nearly everywhere. The third simply isn't always an option. And you're right, it isn't the job of the justice system to ensure a proper welfare system exists.
However
You are claiming the starving person with zero options is in a different situation than a person with a gun to their head because instead of breaking the law buy stealing they can break the law by digging through the trash. And I can't say I see a notable difference.
I'm also not even going to touch on the sheer indignity of telling people to go do that if they're oh so hungry.
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.
So, it's ok for society as a whole to commit an injustice by starving a family, but wrong if the family commits the injustice against society to survive?
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.
Because if the goal of criminal punishment is to protect society, then the severity of the punishment should be proportional to the harm done to society. A worse crime is punished more severely.
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.
Part of the problem is that many laws are only very loosely enforced. Speeding is an excellent example of this, as it's applied in such a limited manner in my area (central Louisiana) that everyone speeds. The odds of getting caught are very very low. Losing your license wouldn't be a deterent, because it's enforced by the same mechanism.
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.
Agreed. It is a failure on the part of our prison system that such things occur. It doesn't help at all, however, that our judicial system has severly overloaded the prison system with trivial non-violent crimes.
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.
Unless your view of the criminal justice system is that it provides institutional revenge, or possibly revenue, disproportionate punishments are counterproductive to it's purpose / goals. Disproportionate punishments, in practice, result in conditions that increase - not decrease - crime. People are provably more likely to become criminals after facing disproportionate punishments like incarceration for minor crimes, excessively stiff fines, or restrictions on their activities that are difficult to comply with.
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.
Some people will comply, but if enforcement is not regular and consistent people who are inclined to speed will accept the risk and participate in the activity. I'll grant speeding / traffic violations are slightly different as many people (I think McDermott commented on how he actually budgets for speeding tickets) take risk / reward into account and there is a certain rational amount of acceptance of being caught by most people.
I think when most criminals commit crimes, they truly believe they won't get caught - they are smarter, better, etc and will get away with it. Thus, the severity of the punishment doesn't really enter into the calculation.
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.
Through this thread you've argued that the state has a responsibility to you to ensure that your property is protected or 'made whole' if you are the victim of a crime. That there is a personal obligation to you - as a victim - to protect you and prevent you from being victimized again in the future.
Considering that rape / beatings are so common and systematic in prisons / jails as to be de facto institutionalized - as well as being rarely punished or prevented, by sentencing a person to jail a judge / jury - and society as a whole - is responsible for the pain and suffering that individual sustains in prison. This isn't just something that occasionally happens despite the best efforts of society / the prison system, this is something that happens almost universally to anyone who is incarcerated in more than a local drunk tank (and sometimes, even then).
I don't doubt you would hold the criminal justice system responsible for damage you suffered if the same person vandalized your property repeatedly, and each time after being caught they were released with nothing more than a slap on the wrist (or the police ignored it entirely) so they can target you again. Why would you absolve the criminal justice system of responsibility in the rape / beating of prisoners, but hold it responsible for the damage you suffer?
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.
And the case for proportionality is that without it, respect for the law erodes. Prohibition was the best demonstration of this - people didn't stop drinking alcohol, they just went underground. If you made speeding punishable by license revocation, there will be some people who will conform - but most people will ignore the law.
I'm pretty sure that being homeless is pretty near to being functionally illegal.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
I really don't see how proportionality effects any of these things. Criminalizing the wrong behavior can absolutely erode respect for the law (although even there, with sufficient enforcement you can probably over come it). I don't think that the severity of punishments for drinking during prohibition was the problem. The problem was trying to criminalize it at all. Now, one could argue that trying to criminalize a starving person stealing food is similarly fruitless, as a starving person is going to steal instead of starving to death, but the different is one of harm prevention. When we penalize drinking, the harm is a diffuse "moral" harm against society, where as when we penalize drinking and driving (which is just as inevitable as drinking) we are trying to protect against physical danger to everyone in society.
But all of that is unrelated to proportionality. There may be punishments which we think create more net harm than good (and I agree with this) and that is a good reason not to impose them, but again, that is unrelated to proportionality. If it is a good idea to impose the punishment of caning (I do not think it is, but many here seem to) then why is it not just as good of an idea to impose it for jay walking as for drunk driving? If we are accepting that a punishment is effective and does not create harms on net, why shouldn't that punishment apply to all crimes?
I'm pretty sure that being homeless is pretty near to being functionally illegal.
Alot of the laws that make being homeless illegal are probably, in themselves, illegal. But what homeless person is going to be able to hire a lawyer to challenge the laws? And what group of others will go to court on behalf of the homeless?
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
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.
And the case for proportionality is that without it, respect for the law erodes. Prohibition was the best demonstration of this - people didn't stop drinking alcohol, they just went underground. If you made speeding punishable by license revocation, there will be some people who will conform - but most people will ignore the law.
That it is widely known and jokes about does not mean that the intention of the judge is to inflict it. They don't have many other options. Fines don't really work on judgement proof people afterall, so what else do they have but jail? This is compounded by sentence guidelines and mandatory sentences.
Since this is a topic about small crimes it is probably better to move away from jail though. Is anyone advocating that a vandal or shoplifter be jailed here (at least if they are not a repeat offender)?
I really don't see how proportionality effects any of these things. Criminalizing the wrong behavior can absolutely erode respect for the law (although even there, with sufficient enforcement you can probably over come it). I don't think that the severity of punishments for drinking during prohibition was the problem. The problem was trying to criminalize it at all. Now, one could argue that trying to criminalize a starving person stealing food is similarly fruitless, as a starving person is going to steal instead of starving to death, but the different is one of harm prevention. When we penalize drinking, the harm is a diffuse "moral" harm against society, where as when we penalize drinking and driving (which is just as inevitable as drinking) we are trying to protect against physical danger to everyone in society.
But all of that is unrelated to proportionality. There may be punishments which we think create more net harm than good (and I agree with this) and that is a good reason not to impose them, but again, that is unrelated to proportionality. If it is a good idea to impose the punishment of caning (I do not think it is, but many here seem to) then why is it not just as good of an idea to impose it for jay walking as for drunk driving? If we are accepting that a punishment is effective and does not create harms on net, why shouldn't that punishment apply to all crimes?
If you accept that there are punishments that create more net harm than good and shouldn't be imposed, I don't understand why you don't accept proportionality. Certainly, the harm / good of a given punishment (incarceration, fines, etc) will vary depending on how it's applied, and the net harm / good will vary depending on the circumstances of the crime itself. Cost (harm) and Benefit (good) aren't always consistent depending on the application. The good / harm of one day in jail and twenty years are going to be vastly different.
Not every crime is the same in the harm - either in amount, or types. A punishment that's exceptionally effective for preventing one type of crime may be utterly ineffective with another. It's also possible that - as a society - the consequences of an offender repeating are small enough to accept a higher amount of risk for a far more cost effective punishment. People tend to respond best to punishments that are proportional to the offense, and consistently and quickly implemented.
Basically, just because community service is a good and effective punishment for vandals doesn't mean that community service is a good and effective punishment for murderers. And just because incarceration is effective (for some definitions of effective) for murderers, doesn't mean it's a good and effective punishment for vandals.
I have a feeling SKFM's society would see the entire ruling class lined up against the wall and shot within a week of their glorious regime taking hold and throwing people in ovens for graffitti or whatever
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"
As I've explained, the sole purpose of any punishment is to inflict pain. There is a chance the pain will reform / rehabilitate the offender, but we don't waive the punishment if there is no chance of rehabilitation, and the point of the punishment is to punish, not rehabilitate. We punish people who break the law, even if there is no chance at all they will be a repeat offender
Locking up non violent offenders who pose no danger to others is intended solely to inflict psychological pain on them (and in our current jail system, bonus physical pain as well!)
Fining offenders is intended solely to inflict financial pain on them.
Caning is intended solely to inflict physical pain on them.
In all cases, we are secondarily hoping that the pain suffered will help both to deter other criminals, and the offender in question from repeat behavior. I see no particular reason to suppose that physical pain is any less an effective agent of rehabilitation than financial or psychological pain. In any case, the most effective rehabilitation is most emphatically NOT done by inflicting pain.
Now, there is no evidence whatsoever that caning is ineffective in terms of treating minor crimes. In the times and places where it has been/is currently practiced, minor crime rates were/are much lower than we have here in the US today. It's also obvious that our 'jailtime', despite being brutal and barbaric, is having precisely no deterrent effect at all, given the increasingly large number of people convicted and thrown in jail. It is also exacting a ruinous toll on us as a society.
In short, you seem to be saying "Caning people is way to painful and brutal for us to try, and if we did, it's not enough of a punishment to really deter people"
Which is a contradiction.
As I've noted earlier, you seem to think any amount of psychological pain is preferable to even the tiniest bit of physical pain. This is clearly not true. I have zero doubt that every single one of us in this thread would undergo a great deal of physical pain in order to spare a loved one certain psychological pain.
I'm not arguing that beating people with sticks is a fine, upstanding, enlightened past time we should engage it, just that it is in all ways preferable to what we are currently doing. I'm not saying it's the ideal method of punishing minor crimes, simply that it has been tried, it worked reasonably well, was quite cheap, did not involve mass incarcerations of entire segments of society, and is more humane than what we are doing, despite its brutality.
What we are doing is more brutal and barbaric than caning, and also expensive, and also ineffective. Caning, while brutal, is more humane than what we are doing, much cheaper, and potentially also more effective. All this discussion is taking place in the context of our current system, of long jail times for minor nonviolent offenses (often with side orders of rapes and beatings) is not.working.at.all.
You can't just handwave away and say "Well it's not the judges intent it doesn't work".
As I've explained, the sole purpose of any punishment is to inflict pain. There is a chance the pain will reform / rehabilitate the offender, but we don't waive the punishment if there is no chance of rehabilitation, and the point of the punishment is to punish, not rehabilitate. We punish people who break the law, even if there is no chance at all they will be a repeat offender
Locking up non violent offenders who pose no danger to others is intended solely to inflict psychological pain on them (and in our current jail system, bonus physical pain as well!)
Solely?
No, it's also intended to contain them.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
I really don't see how proportionality effects any of these things. Criminalizing the wrong behavior can absolutely erode respect for the law (although even there, with sufficient enforcement you can probably over come it). I don't think that the severity of punishments for drinking during prohibition was the problem. The problem was trying to criminalize it at all. Now, one could argue that trying to criminalize a starving person stealing food is similarly fruitless, as a starving person is going to steal instead of starving to death, but the different is one of harm prevention. When we penalize drinking, the harm is a diffuse "moral" harm against society, where as when we penalize drinking and driving (which is just as inevitable as drinking) we are trying to protect against physical danger to everyone in society.
But all of that is unrelated to proportionality. There may be punishments which we think create more net harm than good (and I agree with this) and that is a good reason not to impose them, but again, that is unrelated to proportionality. If it is a good idea to impose the punishment of caning (I do not think it is, but many here seem to) then why is it not just as good of an idea to impose it for jay walking as for drunk driving? If we are accepting that a punishment is effective and does not create harms on net, why shouldn't that punishment apply to all crimes?
If you accept that there are punishments that create more net harm than good and shouldn't be imposed, I don't understand why you don't accept proportionality. Certainly, the harm / good of a given punishment (incarceration, fines, etc) will vary depending on how it's applied, and the net harm / good will vary depending on the circumstances of the crime itself. Cost (harm) and Benefit (good) aren't always consistent depending on the application. The good / harm of one day in jail and twenty years are going to be vastly different.
Not every crime is the same in the harm - either in amount, or types. A punishment that's exceptionally effective for preventing one type of crime may be utterly ineffective with another. It's also possible that - as a society - the consequences of an offender repeating are small enough to accept a higher amount of risk for a far more cost effective punishment. People tend to respond best to punishments that are proportional to the offense, and consistently and quickly implemented.
Basically, just because community service is a good and effective punishment for vandals doesn't mean that community service is a good and effective punishment for murderers. And just because incarceration is effective (for some definitions of effective) for murderers, doesn't mean it's a good and effective punishment for vandals.
That isn't proportionality though. For example, let's say that we could implant an obedience chip in anyone who commits a crime which will prevent them from committing that particular crime again, or, at the same cost, an obedience chip which will prevent them from committing any crime ever again for the rest of their lives. Proportionality would say that the former is preferable, but efficiency argues in favor of the latter.
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.
I really don't see how proportionality effects any of these things. Criminalizing the wrong behavior can absolutely erode respect for the law (although even there, with sufficient enforcement you can probably over come it). I don't think that the severity of punishments for drinking during prohibition was the problem. The problem was trying to criminalize it at all. Now, one could argue that trying to criminalize a starving person stealing food is similarly fruitless, as a starving person is going to steal instead of starving to death, but the different is one of harm prevention. When we penalize drinking, the harm is a diffuse "moral" harm against society, where as when we penalize drinking and driving (which is just as inevitable as drinking) we are trying to protect against physical danger to everyone in society.
But all of that is unrelated to proportionality. There may be punishments which we think create more net harm than good (and I agree with this) and that is a good reason not to impose them, but again, that is unrelated to proportionality. If it is a good idea to impose the punishment of caning (I do not think it is, but many here seem to) then why is it not just as good of an idea to impose it for jay walking as for drunk driving? If we are accepting that a punishment is effective and does not create harms on net, why shouldn't that punishment apply to all crimes?
If you accept that there are punishments that create more net harm than good and shouldn't be imposed, I don't understand why you don't accept proportionality. Certainly, the harm / good of a given punishment (incarceration, fines, etc) will vary depending on how it's applied, and the net harm / good will vary depending on the circumstances of the crime itself. Cost (harm) and Benefit (good) aren't always consistent depending on the application. The good / harm of one day in jail and twenty years are going to be vastly different.
Not every crime is the same in the harm - either in amount, or types. A punishment that's exceptionally effective for preventing one type of crime may be utterly ineffective with another. It's also possible that - as a society - the consequences of an offender repeating are small enough to accept a higher amount of risk for a far more cost effective punishment. People tend to respond best to punishments that are proportional to the offense, and consistently and quickly implemented.
Basically, just because community service is a good and effective punishment for vandals doesn't mean that community service is a good and effective punishment for murderers. And just because incarceration is effective (for some definitions of effective) for murderers, doesn't mean it's a good and effective punishment for vandals.
That isn't proportionality though. For example, let's say that we could implant an obedience chip in anyone who commits a crime which will prevent them from committing that particular crime again, or, at the same cost, an obedience chip which will prevent them from committing any crime ever again for the rest of their lives. Proportionality would say that the former is preferable, but efficiency argues in favor of the latter.
Your example is strange, and has nothing to do with proportionality.
Proportionality quite simply states that the punishment should fit the crime. IE, you don't punish a jaywalker in the same way you punish a serial murder, even though both have broken the law.
If, as it appears, you don't believe in the concept of proportionality, you are going to have a very difficult time in a thread devoted to the punishment for minor crimes as you wont' believe that minor crimes is even a legitimate category, and will be talking at cross-purposes to everyone else in the thread.
I want to note that while I agree with Vorpal that a physical punishment like caning is likely - in almost all ways - to be better / preferable to our currently fucked up system of incarceration, I see that as an argument to improve our current system. Not an argument to institute caning / other physical punishment.
I'd like to see safe, properly populated prisons with a focus on education and rehabilitation. Separation of violent and non-violent offenders. Diligent investigation, reporting and punishment for beatings / rapes, as well as every hospitalization or death. Strong anti-gang policies.
Halfway houses and work programs designed to transition convicts back into the rest of the world with the means to support themselves / their families without lapsing back into crime. Proper mental health care for people with mental issues across the board. Rehab programs that are mandatory for people with addictions / substance abuse problems who commit crimes.
Those kinds of things. That we'll never see because our nation has a 'fuck criminals, their fault' attitude and is content to pour billions of dollars into a deplorable private industry.
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zepherinRussian warship, go fuck yourselfRegistered Userregular
I'm pretty sure that being homeless is pretty near to being functionally illegal.
Alot of the laws that make being homeless illegal are probably, in themselves, illegal. But what homeless person is going to be able to hire a lawyer to challenge the laws? And what group of others will go to court on behalf of the homeless?
Or more to the point, the punishment for being homeless is to be taken off the street put in a climate controlled facility with food, shower and a bed. Also an added advantage of being homeless, is that you probably look way too fucked up or crazy to recieve all the sex you never wanted.
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.
It's almost like you've never read any criminology in your life.
The first prisons in the US were built based on one of two competing theories - the Haviland system, which originated in Pennsylvania, and the Auburn system, which originated in New York.
The major purpose of both systems was rehabilitation. The Auburn system was intended to work similarly to your concept - hard labor and punishment to reform prisoners.
The Haviland system was based on the Quaker belief that all people are basically good, and that through peaceful prayer, reflection, and penitence, the prisoner would come to see the error of their ways. Hence the term penitentiary.
The law is nothing if not based on tradition, and consequently both models influence today's criminal justice system - though, in deference to your point, the Auburn much more than the Pennsylvania system. This is why, for instance, a prisoner who is being evaluated at a parole hearing isn't merely expected to demonstrate a fear of punishment, but an internal sense of remorse (or penance) for their crime. It isn't nearly enough for a would-be parolee to say "I won't do it again, because I don't want to get caught."
And this sort of thing filters down into lower crimes, too. Try going to traffic court and saying "I won't speed again because I don't want to get caught" to a judge and see how far it gets you as opposed to saying "I won't speed again because I'm really sorry and it was wrong."
It's true that our prison system has diverged from its original goal of rehabilitation, but that doesn't mean that we've replaced the competing goals and systems with a single overarching goal of punishment uber alles. Our criminal justice system is not nearly so single-minded that you can make a hard principled statement like "the sole purpose of our criminal justice system is XYZ." Our criminal justice system, and the punishments it metes out, have multiple competing goals, some of them rational, and some of them not so rational.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
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.
If he's a serial alcoholic vandalizer it does. Protecting "society" includes private property.
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.
Incarcerating someone for X days/years works in two ways. One, it removes them from society for a period of time so they can't be destructive during that time and two, it's a deterrent to not do it in the first place, or do it again which also protects "society". If rehabilitation actually occurs it's even better, which I admit doesn't occur in the prison system.
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.
I'm pretty sure that being homeless is pretty near to being functionally illegal.
Alot of the laws that make being homeless illegal are probably, in themselves, illegal. But what homeless person is going to be able to hire a lawyer to challenge the laws? And what group of others will go to court on behalf of the homeless?
Or more to the point, the punishment for being homeless is to be taken off the street put in a climate controlled facility with food, shower and a bed. Also an added advantage of being homeless, is that you probably look way too fucked up or crazy to recieve all the sex you never wanted.
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.
That's true, but it also harms society because locking up anyone isn't free. It costs something like $100 / day to incarcerate someone.
If (out of my ass) one in ten vandals was going to vandalize again during those two weeks, and do $5,000 in damage, locking up vandals for two weeks still leaves society $9,000 in the hole.
That doesn't count the economic losses of the vandals that are going to lose their jobs (you can't just miss two weeks of work) or the money that's going to go towards their fines / fees / lawyer instead of economically useful expenses. Etc, etc, etc.
Those two weeks may be a net value to society, but they aren't some universal 'good'. There is a cost associated.
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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"
I'd like to add that it's not public caning. That's a factoid invented by the U.S. media. It's an administrative punishment, not a public spectacle. It is not open to the public, and the consequences of caning are as often exaggerated as they are dismissed.
Personally, I'm a big fan of constructive punishment. Forcing vandals to rebuild/clean/repaint things they've damaged through community service would be a good example. I'd also advocate increasingly harsh punishments on parties that abuse public trust/power. This would mean that government officials abusing their powers would face strong consequences, white collar crime that plunges thousands of people to debt/poverty could potentially bankrupt the company/bank, and send individuals responsible to prison/face immense fines, etc. The central idea is really about repairing the damage, with rehabilitation as a secondary objective. Pure vindictiveness should never enter the equation. The system should encourage faith in the institutions and the law, through strong adherence to integrity and upholding its own standards.
Also, regarding poverty and crime, being disenfranchised is not some blanket reduction on the need for impulse control. As much as I like that quote by Anatole France, stealing bread and sleeping under the bridges are crimes of need, while senseless vandalism doesn't feed you or give you shelter. It's simply malicious. This should be taken into account in sentencing. If people need to steal food to stay alive, the system is failing at some point, and this should be taken as an indication to fix the problem. Barring outright mental problems, vandalism doesn't have a similar justification. As far as U.S. War of Drugs goes, that's just a corporate gambit of For Profit Prisons to fill up on non-violent, easy to look after slave labour in the form of people caught smoking weed.
No, here's the real difference between gun-against-your-head and stealing bread to not starve. You've never been hungry in your life. Not really. Not real hunger, like "we have absolutely no money and we have absolutely no food and there's nothing we can do and nothing we can eat." You don't know the slow death of starvation, the pain, the weakness, the clouding of the mind and the narrowing of horizons down to that gnawing unceasing physical need that cannot be fulfilled, the illness that can then come to attack bodies already weakened and worse, not just yourself being hungry, but seeing this same suffering on the faces of your loved ones, especially the youngest, children who have nothing to do with the societal or economic or whatever situations at large that caused this but are dragged along for the worst ride. And this isn't a one-time occurrence. You'll get food again eventually, somehow, but once you've eaten again and can think about more time in the future than just the next meal, you know there will soon come a time again when there won't be a next meal and you'll have to go through all the same pain again.
For you, though, it's only ever been a minor discomfort, temporary and with promise of being relieved shortly and easily. Oh of course people can resist committing crimes when they are in a minor discomfort. You don't understand real hunger and what that is like. You do understand what it would be like to have a gun pointed at your head. That's why you can empathize with that example but not the example of stealing to eat.
Is solicitation a minor crime? Wife who hired a hitman to kill her husband gets no jail time. The husband was never killed, of course.
I'd be in favor of sending the entirety of godlman sachs to the mines
if we dont have mines to send them to we can make them buy mines and then send them
last time my brother was in jail he was beaten by a bunch of guys so bad he had to be in the infirmary for a week
his crime was "open container of alcohol in a public place" btw
You are right. I have never been hungry like that and cannot empathize. I regard it as a societal failure that we let people reach that point. But it happens, and the question is what we do about it. On a welfare level, we absolutely need to fix this, but the criminal justice system's job is to protect the baker, not to provide food for the starving family. So while the family should not starve and the baker should not be harmed to feed the family, the criminal justice system has to only focus on the later problem.
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.
Harsh punishment doesn't deter. Consistent enforcement deters.
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.
That is an awful, awful story, but he was not sentenced to a beating. He was sentenced to jail and was hurt because of a flaw in the jail system. Contrast caning, where the beating is I teed as the punishment.
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.
I just feal like the cane is a value engineered solution. Way cheaper than imprisonment.
I disagree. Everyone does not have the same capability not to break the law. It's only the wealthy that can commit institutional fraud, for example. Those in poverty have the least capability to break the law, but they have the most to gain from doing so. Let's create an example to demonstrate this:
You have a bank with around $100,000 USD on hand. You have a person in poverty with an annual pre-tax salary of $10,000 USD, and a person of means with an annual pre-tax salary of $600,000 USD.
In this example, the poor person has the potential to gain 10 years of salary (tax free!) if he can pull off one crime. If he's caught, he goes from a life of scrabbling for survival and fear of not having his next meal to a guaranteed number of meals per day and a roof over his head. The punishment, for him, may not be any worse than the life he was living before hand.
On the flip side, the rich person is only looking at gaining two months worth of salary and is risking his lifestyle for one far less desirable.
So, who is more likely to commit this crime?
I realize that robbing a bank for $100,000 USD isn't exactly a minor crime, but it's also one with a huge potential to get caught and carries are much stiffer penalty. The same idea could be applied for shoplifting, where again the poor person is less disincentivized to avoid stealing than the rich person. The poor person has less to lose and more to gain.
What about "Innocent until proven guilty?" You're now not punishing this man for his choice, but instead you're punishing him simply because he could have made that choice. You just finished saying "Everyone has the exact same capability not to break the law." and now you're going against that and pre-judging persons for choices they may make.
The problem with caning (note, I'm agreeing with you, stop that) is that it only meets the criteria for punishment and revenge and completely ignores improvements in society (restitution and rehabilitation).
Personally, I think that rehabilitation should be the number one goal for jailable offenses, and societal improvements be the number one for non-jailable offenses. Stuff like community service can much more easily be accommodated by the poor than a fine, and is much more inconvenient for the wealthy. It's overall a more fair punishment.
Two of the things you've suggested here are crimes very nearly everywhere. The third simply isn't always an option. And you're right, it isn't the job of the justice system to ensure a proper welfare system exists.
However
You are claiming the starving person with zero options is in a different situation than a person with a gun to their head because instead of breaking the law buy stealing they can break the law by digging through the trash. And I can't say I see a notable difference.
I'm also not even going to touch on the sheer indignity of telling people to go do that if they're oh so hungry.
So, it's ok for society as a whole to commit an injustice by starving a family, but wrong if the family commits the injustice against society to survive?
Because if the goal of criminal punishment is to protect society, then the severity of the punishment should be proportional to the harm done to society. A worse crime is punished more severely.
Part of the problem is that many laws are only very loosely enforced. Speeding is an excellent example of this, as it's applied in such a limited manner in my area (central Louisiana) that everyone speeds. The odds of getting caught are very very low. Losing your license wouldn't be a deterent, because it's enforced by the same mechanism.
Agreed. It is a failure on the part of our prison system that such things occur. It doesn't help at all, however, that our judicial system has severly overloaded the prison system with trivial non-violent crimes.
Unless your view of the criminal justice system is that it provides institutional revenge, or possibly revenue, disproportionate punishments are counterproductive to it's purpose / goals. Disproportionate punishments, in practice, result in conditions that increase - not decrease - crime. People are provably more likely to become criminals after facing disproportionate punishments like incarceration for minor crimes, excessively stiff fines, or restrictions on their activities that are difficult to comply with.
Some people will comply, but if enforcement is not regular and consistent people who are inclined to speed will accept the risk and participate in the activity. I'll grant speeding / traffic violations are slightly different as many people (I think McDermott commented on how he actually budgets for speeding tickets) take risk / reward into account and there is a certain rational amount of acceptance of being caught by most people.
I think when most criminals commit crimes, they truly believe they won't get caught - they are smarter, better, etc and will get away with it. Thus, the severity of the punishment doesn't really enter into the calculation.
Through this thread you've argued that the state has a responsibility to you to ensure that your property is protected or 'made whole' if you are the victim of a crime. That there is a personal obligation to you - as a victim - to protect you and prevent you from being victimized again in the future.
Considering that rape / beatings are so common and systematic in prisons / jails as to be de facto institutionalized - as well as being rarely punished or prevented, by sentencing a person to jail a judge / jury - and society as a whole - is responsible for the pain and suffering that individual sustains in prison. This isn't just something that occasionally happens despite the best efforts of society / the prison system, this is something that happens almost universally to anyone who is incarcerated in more than a local drunk tank (and sometimes, even then).
I don't doubt you would hold the criminal justice system responsible for damage you suffered if the same person vandalized your property repeatedly, and each time after being caught they were released with nothing more than a slap on the wrist (or the police ignored it entirely) so they can target you again. Why would you absolve the criminal justice system of responsibility in the rape / beating of prisoners, but hold it responsible for the damage you suffer?
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.
And the case for proportionality is that without it, respect for the law erodes. Prohibition was the best demonstration of this - people didn't stop drinking alcohol, they just went underground. If you made speeding punishable by license revocation, there will be some people who will conform - but most people will ignore the law.
Yep. Begging too in most places.
I'm pretty sure that being homeless is pretty near to being functionally illegal.
But all of that is unrelated to proportionality. There may be punishments which we think create more net harm than good (and I agree with this) and that is a good reason not to impose them, but again, that is unrelated to proportionality. If it is a good idea to impose the punishment of caning (I do not think it is, but many here seem to) then why is it not just as good of an idea to impose it for jay walking as for drunk driving? If we are accepting that a punishment is effective and does not create harms on net, why shouldn't that punishment apply to all crimes?
Alot of the laws that make being homeless illegal are probably, in themselves, illegal. But what homeless person is going to be able to hire a lawyer to challenge the laws? And what group of others will go to court on behalf of the homeless?
That it is widely known and jokes about does not mean that the intention of the judge is to inflict it. They don't have many other options. Fines don't really work on judgement proof people afterall, so what else do they have but jail? This is compounded by sentence guidelines and mandatory sentences.
Since this is a topic about small crimes it is probably better to move away from jail though. Is anyone advocating that a vandal or shoplifter be jailed here (at least if they are not a repeat offender)?
If you accept that there are punishments that create more net harm than good and shouldn't be imposed, I don't understand why you don't accept proportionality. Certainly, the harm / good of a given punishment (incarceration, fines, etc) will vary depending on how it's applied, and the net harm / good will vary depending on the circumstances of the crime itself. Cost (harm) and Benefit (good) aren't always consistent depending on the application. The good / harm of one day in jail and twenty years are going to be vastly different.
Not every crime is the same in the harm - either in amount, or types. A punishment that's exceptionally effective for preventing one type of crime may be utterly ineffective with another. It's also possible that - as a society - the consequences of an offender repeating are small enough to accept a higher amount of risk for a far more cost effective punishment. People tend to respond best to punishments that are proportional to the offense, and consistently and quickly implemented.
Basically, just because community service is a good and effective punishment for vandals doesn't mean that community service is a good and effective punishment for murderers. And just because incarceration is effective (for some definitions of effective) for murderers, doesn't mean it's a good and effective punishment for vandals.
As I've explained, the sole purpose of any punishment is to inflict pain. There is a chance the pain will reform / rehabilitate the offender, but we don't waive the punishment if there is no chance of rehabilitation, and the point of the punishment is to punish, not rehabilitate. We punish people who break the law, even if there is no chance at all they will be a repeat offender
Locking up non violent offenders who pose no danger to others is intended solely to inflict psychological pain on them (and in our current jail system, bonus physical pain as well!)
Fining offenders is intended solely to inflict financial pain on them.
Caning is intended solely to inflict physical pain on them.
In all cases, we are secondarily hoping that the pain suffered will help both to deter other criminals, and the offender in question from repeat behavior. I see no particular reason to suppose that physical pain is any less an effective agent of rehabilitation than financial or psychological pain. In any case, the most effective rehabilitation is most emphatically NOT done by inflicting pain.
Now, there is no evidence whatsoever that caning is ineffective in terms of treating minor crimes. In the times and places where it has been/is currently practiced, minor crime rates were/are much lower than we have here in the US today. It's also obvious that our 'jailtime', despite being brutal and barbaric, is having precisely no deterrent effect at all, given the increasingly large number of people convicted and thrown in jail. It is also exacting a ruinous toll on us as a society.
In short, you seem to be saying "Caning people is way to painful and brutal for us to try, and if we did, it's not enough of a punishment to really deter people"
Which is a contradiction.
As I've noted earlier, you seem to think any amount of psychological pain is preferable to even the tiniest bit of physical pain. This is clearly not true. I have zero doubt that every single one of us in this thread would undergo a great deal of physical pain in order to spare a loved one certain psychological pain.
I'm not arguing that beating people with sticks is a fine, upstanding, enlightened past time we should engage it, just that it is in all ways preferable to what we are currently doing. I'm not saying it's the ideal method of punishing minor crimes, simply that it has been tried, it worked reasonably well, was quite cheap, did not involve mass incarcerations of entire segments of society, and is more humane than what we are doing, despite its brutality.
What we are doing is more brutal and barbaric than caning, and also expensive, and also ineffective. Caning, while brutal, is more humane than what we are doing, much cheaper, and potentially also more effective. All this discussion is taking place in the context of our current system, of long jail times for minor nonviolent offenses (often with side orders of rapes and beatings) is not.working.at.all.
You can't just handwave away and say "Well it's not the judges intent it doesn't work".
PSN: Vorpallion Twitch: Vorpallion
Solely?
No, it's also intended to contain them.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
That isn't proportionality though. For example, let's say that we could implant an obedience chip in anyone who commits a crime which will prevent them from committing that particular crime again, or, at the same cost, an obedience chip which will prevent them from committing any crime ever again for the rest of their lives. Proportionality would say that the former is preferable, but efficiency argues in favor of the latter.
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.
PSN: Vorpallion Twitch: Vorpallion
Your example is strange, and has nothing to do with proportionality.
Proportionality quite simply states that the punishment should fit the crime. IE, you don't punish a jaywalker in the same way you punish a serial murder, even though both have broken the law.
If, as it appears, you don't believe in the concept of proportionality, you are going to have a very difficult time in a thread devoted to the punishment for minor crimes as you wont' believe that minor crimes is even a legitimate category, and will be talking at cross-purposes to everyone else in the thread.
PSN: Vorpallion Twitch: Vorpallion
I'd like to see safe, properly populated prisons with a focus on education and rehabilitation. Separation of violent and non-violent offenders. Diligent investigation, reporting and punishment for beatings / rapes, as well as every hospitalization or death. Strong anti-gang policies.
Halfway houses and work programs designed to transition convicts back into the rest of the world with the means to support themselves / their families without lapsing back into crime. Proper mental health care for people with mental issues across the board. Rehab programs that are mandatory for people with addictions / substance abuse problems who commit crimes.
Those kinds of things. That we'll never see because our nation has a 'fuck criminals, their fault' attitude and is content to pour billions of dollars into a deplorable private industry.
It's almost like you've never read any criminology in your life.
The first prisons in the US were built based on one of two competing theories - the Haviland system, which originated in Pennsylvania, and the Auburn system, which originated in New York.
The major purpose of both systems was rehabilitation. The Auburn system was intended to work similarly to your concept - hard labor and punishment to reform prisoners.
The Haviland system was based on the Quaker belief that all people are basically good, and that through peaceful prayer, reflection, and penitence, the prisoner would come to see the error of their ways. Hence the term penitentiary.
The law is nothing if not based on tradition, and consequently both models influence today's criminal justice system - though, in deference to your point, the Auburn much more than the Pennsylvania system. This is why, for instance, a prisoner who is being evaluated at a parole hearing isn't merely expected to demonstrate a fear of punishment, but an internal sense of remorse (or penance) for their crime. It isn't nearly enough for a would-be parolee to say "I won't do it again, because I don't want to get caught."
And this sort of thing filters down into lower crimes, too. Try going to traffic court and saying "I won't speed again because I don't want to get caught" to a judge and see how far it gets you as opposed to saying "I won't speed again because I'm really sorry and it was wrong."
It's true that our prison system has diverged from its original goal of rehabilitation, but that doesn't mean that we've replaced the competing goals and systems with a single overarching goal of punishment uber alles. Our criminal justice system is not nearly so single-minded that you can make a hard principled statement like "the sole purpose of our criminal justice system is XYZ." Our criminal justice system, and the punishments it metes out, have multiple competing goals, some of them rational, and some of them not so rational.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
If he's a serial alcoholic vandalizer it does. Protecting "society" includes private property.
Incarcerating someone for X days/years works in two ways. One, it removes them from society for a period of time so they can't be destructive during that time and two, it's a deterrent to not do it in the first place, or do it again which also protects "society". If rehabilitation actually occurs it's even better, which I admit doesn't occur in the prison system.
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.
Whelp, we are back to Poe's Law again.
That's true, but it also harms society because locking up anyone isn't free. It costs something like $100 / day to incarcerate someone.
If (out of my ass) one in ten vandals was going to vandalize again during those two weeks, and do $5,000 in damage, locking up vandals for two weeks still leaves society $9,000 in the hole.
That doesn't count the economic losses of the vandals that are going to lose their jobs (you can't just miss two weeks of work) or the money that's going to go towards their fines / fees / lawyer instead of economically useful expenses. Etc, etc, etc.
Those two weeks may be a net value to society, but they aren't some universal 'good'. There is a cost associated.