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.
I hope you realize you're advocating thought control.
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.
Right, but your conception of what is protection is skewed. Looking at it from the perspective of cost to society, what costs more? Having the vandal loose, or spending several thousand tax payer dollars (after police/court costs, jail costs, etc) to have him incarcerated for a few weeks?
As I specified originally, I was referring to people who have committed crimes but do not pose a threat to society, but who are nonetheless given prison time.
I suppose you could argue no such people exist and that everyone who has ever been sent to jail for any offense, no matter how trivial, was certainly going to be a repeat offender. I don't find that terribly likely.
Therefore, since we know damn well that rehabilitation does not occur in our current prison system, the locking up in these instances is intended *solely* to cause psychological pain as a method of punishment.
In support of this is that people are locked up for longer times for crimes judged to be 'more severe'. At the end of this pre-determined time, they are released, period, even if they have shown no signs of character change.
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.
I'll address your second point first - the deterrent is from the pain caused. If psychological pain can act as a deterrent and thus protect society, I see no reason why physical pain could not also act as a deterrent and protect society. Remember, this is in the context of SKFM arguing that caning is somehow uniquely bad in that it is intended to cause pain, unlike all other punishments. I am contending that (a) all punishments are intended to cause pain and (b) physical pain isn't even the worst kind of pain there is and (c) in our current system, you get physical pain in jail as well, likely more than you would from a caning. this latter point is a product of our times and culture, and not a universal one.
As to your first point, yes, it removes them from society, but in order to cause the psychological pain of isolation, not to protect society from them. In the first place, we've already agreed that we are talking about non-violent offenders who are not judged to be at risk of repeat (say, it's their first offense). So there is no reason to suppose they pose a risk to society. And if we did think they posed a risk to society, we wouldn't just let them back out, no questions asked, at the conclusion of their sentence. Yes yes, we ask questions when/if they are given early parole, but the fact remains that the length of time we throw them in jail is calculated by the amount of pain we want to cause them, based on the severity of the crime they committed, and bears no relation whatsoever to a studied and sober observation of the individual in question and how much time of quite reflection is required to rehabilitate him.
All evidence shows that people leave our prisons worse than they went in, so the argument that 'we lock people up to improve them' is completely blown apart, in my opinion.
That leaves 'we lock people up to protect society from them' which, given that they are eventually released, and worse than when they went in, and mass incarceration causes incalculable evils among our society, is similarly busted wide open in the case of non violent non repeat offenders. Note that we do lock up violent offenders to protect society, and I don't particularly have a problem with that. I wouldn't categorize crimes that involve violence against another person as minor though, so we can assume these offenders are not the ones under discussion.
That leaves 'we lock people up to cause them psychological pain as a method of punishment' in which case I see no reason to argue that it would be inhumane to replace decades of psychological pain with a week of physical pain.
Caning seems like an excessively brutal punishment compared to incarceration only if you think that jails are havens of peace, enlightenment, learning, and quiet reflection that turn criminals into model reformed citizens. And this is manifestly not what we have here.
There is no need to contain people who do not pose a threat to society.
Unless you are intending the containment to cause psychological pain.
Locking up violent offenders protects society from them.
Locking up a kid who got a little drunk and painted a mural on someone's wall isn't protecting society at all.
Anyway, this has already been covered. Unless you are advocating we lock up all minor offenders for life, this argument carries no weight. You are going to let them back out after a pre-determined amount of time. Therefore, the purpose of their internment is punishment, not to protect society by removing them from it.
Even two weeks of having a vandal locked up protects society. That's two weeks they will not be vandalizing; even if the second they get out they vandalize something.
By that logic, we would lock vandals up forever to protect society forever. We do not do this, so it is apparent that protecting society is not the primary reason behind locking up vandals.
Additionally, if a vandal that vandalized once and was, say, fined $20 and never vandalized again, was instead put in prison for 3 years, then emerged a hardened criminal and went on a vandalizing spree, incarcerating the vandal would have made society less safe, not more safe.
Incarcerating offenders only protects society if you can show that (a) incarceration does not make offenders more likely to cause crimes when they are eventually released (b) you can show the offender was likely to commit more crimes again in absence of incarceration (c) the costs borne by society, including the cost to incarcerate the offender, the costs borne by his dependents, and any associated opportunity costs, does not outweigh the cost of the crimes he was likely to commit if left at large
Lets say you take that vandal and throw him in jail for a month. His three teenage kids can't pay the rent and get thrown out on the streets. There they turn to a life of drug addiction and violent crime in order to obtain the funds. This is pretty clearly a bad deal for society, so throwing him in jail did not protect society. Even IF you managed to prevent, I dunno, another $500 worth of vandalism by locking him up, the other costs associated with throwing him in jail far outweigh the benefits.
And this is completely ignoring that every dollar spent incarcerating him (which will run to well over $500 for even a one month prison sentence) is a dollar that isn't spent on things like education or job training or unemployment insurance.
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.
And there is a theory of punishment that holds that containment is the primary goal. Personally, I think that this should be the primary purpose behind imprisonment, especially in light of how bad imprisonment is at actually getting people to change.
Look, either caning can be an absurdly brutal punishment that is too painful to contemplate, or it can be not enough of a deterrent. You can't have it both ways
Now, the most notorious country that practices caning, Singapore, has one of the lowest crime rates in the world.
It's not like caning is a walk in the park. It fucking hurts and it can take days, even a week, to recover.
But I'd take a week of physical agony over the years and years of both mental and physical agony that result from rotting away in our overcrowded, underfunded, barbaric prison system.
Splitting up families and locking up low level, non violent offenders for decades for trivial bullshit is just appallingly bad. It would be terrible if our prisons were great. They aren't.
No, we can think that it is both wrong because the sole purpose is pain and ineffective because it doesn't have the deterrent effect of jail. Those are not contrary statements. Just like how you can go "snicker" and "snack"
The severity of punishment for a crime has little to do with how big of a deterrent it is. In a general sense, the immediacy of the punishment, and the perceived chance of being caught dwarf any impact that severity has on deterring crime. While there are always exceptions, criminal who commit crimes believe they aren't going to get caught. There are certain places where exceptionally harsh punishments have some use (charge stacking, and getting people to plea out in exchange for comparatively 'minor' consequences) but that's not particularly relevant to any discussion about deterrence / prevention.
Basically, you're more likely to deter property crime by making it clear that 'EVERY vandal will be caught and prosecuted due to surveillance footage' with a punishment of 40 hours community service / $250 fine than by saying 'every vandal we catch will get 5 years hard time' but enforcing it rarely and inconsistently. That's just basic psychology.
With incarceration, it's true that a person - while in prison - won't be able to commit petty property crimes. That said, that person will eventually get out and that person is provably more likely to escalate and commit more serious crimes following their incarceration. So, unless we are incarcerating people for the rest of their lives - which is entirely untenable and does great social harm / carries great cost in and of itself, incarceration is counterproductive.
Punishments should be 'sufficiently harsh' as to not be a slap on the wrist. They should be proportional to the crime and not overly harsh, if for no other reason than efficiency / cost. They should be structured in a way to offer the most benefit / least cost to society, be it lowest social cost to carry out the sentence, or most likely to prevent any future crimes.
If people would rather take getting brutally beaten with sticks over our 'humane' punishments here, it really calls into question how 'humane' our punishments actually are. That's not advocating for physical / corporal punishment, that's a critique of our system here.
I agree that certainty is much more important than severity, but severity can matter too, I think. If speeding meant having your license revoked immediately, then I suspect that would deter speeding much more effectively than a $200 ticket.
I agree with you that incarceration tends to exacerbate problems. I also think we really over use it. But sometimes we need to just remove people from society to keep them from hurting others. Its unfortunate, but I just don't think that we can sublimate the safety of the innocent to the freedom of a habitual wrong doer.
I don't follow your argument on proportionality based on costs though. You could go jay walking and we could fine you $1,000. We could use the same fine for assault. That is not proportional, but imposes no additional costs.
I'd argue that - at least - for things like minor / property crimes, the punishment should be proportional to the damage those crimes cause to society. This comes from my first principle that we charge people with crimes because of the damage that their crimes do to society. This is imminently clear by looking at any criminal case - it's 'the state vs. the criminal'.
In your example earlier about 'the criminal justice system protects the baker', it may be splitting hairs, but that's NOT the purpose of the criminal justice system. The purpose of the criminal justice system is to protect the society that baker is part of, which by extension protects the baker. It's purpose is not to make the baker whole either, it's purpose is to ensure society functions in the manner that is the best. That's why a criminal case can be prosecuted even if the victim doesn't want to proceed - the criminal justice system is not 'for' the victim. Granted - the victim is usually an exceptionally important witness and their opinion / participation holds a great deal of sway with a jury.
Now, from those principles above, it's perfectly fine to look at the direct damage an individual has caused, other damage they are likely to have gotten away with, and damage to society as a whole. In your speeding example, if speeding meant having your license revoked immediately instead of a $200 ticket, it would simply be untenable. People would still speed, but enforcement would necessarily be sporadic and applied unevenly. If we had some automagic way of revoking the license of every person that crossed the speed limit, the harm that policy would cause would far surpass any harm that could be caused by speeders. It would be a bad and unjust law, and a bad / unjust law should be ignored or repealed.
Your example of fining jay walkers $1,000 strikes me as similar to the 'broken window' fallacy. By taking an amount of money (say, $1000 instead of $15) from a person that's entirely disproportionate to the damage they caused imposes a social cost. Of people fined $1000, some people who would otherwise not have committed crimes / imposed costs to society will end up doing so - not paying for insurance / renewing their license, skipping out on that fine and getting a bench warrant issued, paying and not being able to make rent, etc. If in aggregate, the damage that fine will cause clearly outweighs the damage jaywalkers cause, it's an unjust law and the fine should be proportional to the damage or harm.
By the same token, while incarceration does add a factor of 'unable to commit crimes', you can't incarcerate people forever. It's expensive so there is a direct social cost to incarceration, and when people get out their 'cost' to society will be greater than their 'contribution'. If the harm that's prevented by imprisoning them is significantly less that the harm caused by imprisoning them, than imprisonment is the wrong approach.
EDIT - as a society, we know that people sent to prison suffer extrajudicial punishment and beatings, almost universally. We know that with a certainty, and we don't effectively act to prevent it. Thus, although that beating is unsanctioned, the state is complicit in that that punishment and that is an inherent aspect of any incarceration.
Also, if you revoke people's licenses whenever they speed, it's a fact that more people will drive on suspended licenses, will drive uninsured, and will cause great social harm far surpassing any danger of speeders.
Absolutely correct that it is society that is protected, not just the baker, but the type of protection provided is just against wrongs done like the theft from the baker, not the wrong of a family starving. That is also something government is responsible for, but through a different arm.
But I still don't see how any of this argues for proportionality. It seems like it is just a principle you are accepting, and that's fine, but I really don't agree with that principle. I don't see how the fact that harms are so e to society implies that we should make the punishments proportionate to that societal harm.
I also disagree with the idea that revocation of licenses would just mean everyone loses them and drives without insurance. I think that people would largely stop speeding. The risk would be too great.
I disagree very strongly that a jail sentence is a veiled sentence to rape or beatings. Judges have a very limited range of punishments they can mete out and jail is the strongest, so I think that a jail sentence just represents the harshest punishment available.
In the US penal system, with all of the known issues, a jail sentence is very much a veiled sentence to assault and rape. To the point that it's a common point of "humor" in our society to mention how a jail sentence has an implied sentence of rape attached. You can argue that shouldn't be the case and the system should be changed so that it doesn't happen, but you can't just turn a blind eye to it happening.
At this point, a good half the population considers prison rape a value-add.
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.
And there is a theory of punishment that holds that containment is the primary goal. Personally, I think that this should be the primary purpose behind imprisonment, especially in light of how bad imprisonment is at actually getting people to change.
At which point very few crimes warrant it. The cost of containment vastly outstrips the property damage done by a vandal during that same period.
Clearly deterrence is a goal as well.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
@vorpal - what would you call the appropriate punishment for a man who kills his cheating wife and her lover upon walking into the room and catching them in the act? He doesn't have another wife, so it is very unlikely he will kill again. Should he be jailed, or punished at all?
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
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.
And there is a theory of punishment that holds that containment is the primary goal. Personally, I think that this should be the primary purpose behind imprisonment, especially in light of how bad imprisonment is at actually getting people to change.
At which point very few crimes warrant it. The cost of containment vastly outstrips the property damage done by a vandal during that same period.
Clearly deterrence is a goal as well.
I think that it is worth over spending to keep, for example, the incorrigible vandal in prison instead of having him going out vandalizing all the time. The time lost by the victims in fixing things isn't something that is easily replaced, and so I think that it is important to prevent such harms.
Look, either caning can be an absurdly brutal punishment that is too painful to contemplate, or it can be not enough of a deterrent. You can't have it both ways
Now, the most notorious country that practices caning, Singapore, has one of the lowest crime rates in the world.
It's not like caning is a walk in the park. It fucking hurts and it can take days, even a week, to recover.
But I'd take a week of physical agony over the years and years of both mental and physical agony that result from rotting away in our overcrowded, underfunded, barbaric prison system.
Splitting up families and locking up low level, non violent offenders for decades for trivial bullshit is just appallingly bad. It would be terrible if our prisons were great. They aren't.
No, we can think that it is both wrong because the sole purpose is pain and ineffective because it doesn't have the deterrent effect of jail. Those are not contrary statements. Just like how you can go "snicker" and "snack"
The severity of punishment for a crime has little to do with how big of a deterrent it is. In a general sense, the immediacy of the punishment, and the perceived chance of being caught dwarf any impact that severity has on deterring crime. While there are always exceptions, criminal who commit crimes believe they aren't going to get caught. There are certain places where exceptionally harsh punishments have some use (charge stacking, and getting people to plea out in exchange for comparatively 'minor' consequences) but that's not particularly relevant to any discussion about deterrence / prevention.
Basically, you're more likely to deter property crime by making it clear that 'EVERY vandal will be caught and prosecuted due to surveillance footage' with a punishment of 40 hours community service / $250 fine than by saying 'every vandal we catch will get 5 years hard time' but enforcing it rarely and inconsistently. That's just basic psychology.
With incarceration, it's true that a person - while in prison - won't be able to commit petty property crimes. That said, that person will eventually get out and that person is provably more likely to escalate and commit more serious crimes following their incarceration. So, unless we are incarcerating people for the rest of their lives - which is entirely untenable and does great social harm / carries great cost in and of itself, incarceration is counterproductive.
Punishments should be 'sufficiently harsh' as to not be a slap on the wrist. They should be proportional to the crime and not overly harsh, if for no other reason than efficiency / cost. They should be structured in a way to offer the most benefit / least cost to society, be it lowest social cost to carry out the sentence, or most likely to prevent any future crimes.
If people would rather take getting brutally beaten with sticks over our 'humane' punishments here, it really calls into question how 'humane' our punishments actually are. That's not advocating for physical / corporal punishment, that's a critique of our system here.
I agree that certainty is much more important than severity, but severity can matter too, I think. If speeding meant having your license revoked immediately, then I suspect that would deter speeding much more effectively than a $200 ticket.
I agree with you that incarceration tends to exacerbate problems. I also think we really over use it. But sometimes we need to just remove people from society to keep them from hurting others. Its unfortunate, but I just don't think that we can sublimate the safety of the innocent to the freedom of a habitual wrong doer.
I don't follow your argument on proportionality based on costs though. You could go jay walking and we could fine you $1,000. We could use the same fine for assault. That is not proportional, but imposes no additional costs.
I'd argue that - at least - for things like minor / property crimes, the punishment should be proportional to the damage those crimes cause to society. This comes from my first principle that we charge people with crimes because of the damage that their crimes do to society. This is imminently clear by looking at any criminal case - it's 'the state vs. the criminal'.
In your example earlier about 'the criminal justice system protects the baker', it may be splitting hairs, but that's NOT the purpose of the criminal justice system. The purpose of the criminal justice system is to protect the society that baker is part of, which by extension protects the baker. It's purpose is not to make the baker whole either, it's purpose is to ensure society functions in the manner that is the best. That's why a criminal case can be prosecuted even if the victim doesn't want to proceed - the criminal justice system is not 'for' the victim. Granted - the victim is usually an exceptionally important witness and their opinion / participation holds a great deal of sway with a jury.
Now, from those principles above, it's perfectly fine to look at the direct damage an individual has caused, other damage they are likely to have gotten away with, and damage to society as a whole. In your speeding example, if speeding meant having your license revoked immediately instead of a $200 ticket, it would simply be untenable. People would still speed, but enforcement would necessarily be sporadic and applied unevenly. If we had some automagic way of revoking the license of every person that crossed the speed limit, the harm that policy would cause would far surpass any harm that could be caused by speeders. It would be a bad and unjust law, and a bad / unjust law should be ignored or repealed.
Your example of fining jay walkers $1,000 strikes me as similar to the 'broken window' fallacy. By taking an amount of money (say, $1000 instead of $15) from a person that's entirely disproportionate to the damage they caused imposes a social cost. Of people fined $1000, some people who would otherwise not have committed crimes / imposed costs to society will end up doing so - not paying for insurance / renewing their license, skipping out on that fine and getting a bench warrant issued, paying and not being able to make rent, etc. If in aggregate, the damage that fine will cause clearly outweighs the damage jaywalkers cause, it's an unjust law and the fine should be proportional to the damage or harm.
By the same token, while incarceration does add a factor of 'unable to commit crimes', you can't incarcerate people forever. It's expensive so there is a direct social cost to incarceration, and when people get out their 'cost' to society will be greater than their 'contribution'. If the harm that's prevented by imprisoning them is significantly less that the harm caused by imprisoning them, than imprisonment is the wrong approach.
EDIT - as a society, we know that people sent to prison suffer extrajudicial punishment and beatings, almost universally. We know that with a certainty, and we don't effectively act to prevent it. Thus, although that beating is unsanctioned, the state is complicit in that that punishment and that is an inherent aspect of any incarceration.
Also, if you revoke people's licenses whenever they speed, it's a fact that more people will drive on suspended licenses, will drive uninsured, and will cause great social harm far surpassing any danger of speeders.
Absolutely correct that it is society that is protected, not just the baker, but the type of protection provided is just against wrongs done like the theft from the baker, not the wrong of a family starving. That is also something government is responsible for, but through a different arm.
But I still don't see how any of this argues for proportionality. It seems like it is just a principle you are accepting, and that's fine, but I really don't agree with that principle. I don't see how the fact that harms are so e to society implies that we should make the punishments proportionate to that societal harm.
I also disagree with the idea that revocation of licenses would just mean everyone loses them and drives without insurance. I think that people would largely stop speeding. The risk would be too great.
I disagree very strongly that a jail sentence is a veiled sentence to rape or beatings. Judges have a very limited range of punishments they can mete out and jail is the strongest, so I think that a jail sentence just represents the harshest punishment available.
In the US penal system, with all of the known issues, a jail sentence is very much a veiled sentence to assault and rape. To the point that it's a common point of "humor" in our society to mention how a jail sentence has an implied sentence of rape attached. You can argue that shouldn't be the case and the system should be changed so that it doesn't happen, but you can't just turn a blind eye to it happening.
At this point, a good half the population considers prison rape a value-add.
That is seriously one of the most horrible things I've ever heard another person say. If our society is casually accepting one of the worst acts humanly possible as a value added side effect of our punishment system, then we have a moral obligation to see this rectified.
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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.
I hope you realize you're advocating thought control.
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.
Right, but your conception of what is protection is skewed. Looking at it from the perspective of cost to society, what costs more? Having the vandal loose, or spending several thousand tax payer dollars (after police/court costs, jail costs, etc) to have him incarcerated for a few weeks?
It's just an example. Although if it really worked. . .
@vorpal - what would you call the appropriate punishment for a man who kills his cheating wife and her lover upon walking into the room and catching them in the act? He doesn't have another wife, so it is very unlikely he will kill again. Should he be jailed, or punished at all?
I would call the crime two counts of second degree murder, and punish accordingly. He's killed two fellow humans in a non-premeditated manner, regardless if one is his wife and the other an adulterer.
And how does discussion of second degree manslaughter relate back to the topic of overpunishment of minor crimes?
There is no need to contain people who do not pose a threat to society.
Unless you are intending the containment to cause psychological pain.
Locking up violent offenders protects society from them.
Locking up a kid who got a little drunk and painted a mural on someone's wall isn't protecting society at all.
Anyway, this has already been covered. Unless you are advocating we lock up all minor offenders for life, this argument carries no weight. You are going to let them back out after a pre-determined amount of time. Therefore, the purpose of their internment is punishment, not to protect society by removing them from it.
Even two weeks of having a vandal locked up protects society. That's two weeks they will not be vandalizing; even if the second they get out they vandalize something.
By that logic, we would lock vandals up forever to protect society forever. We do not do this, so it is apparent that protecting society is not the primary reason behind locking up vandals.
Neither I or Feral ever said it was the primary reason. Feral just said that locking people up wasn't soley for punishment's sake.
When you imprison you get punishment and removal in one package.
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zepherinRussian warship, go fuck yourselfRegistered Userregular
Look, either caning can be an absurdly brutal punishment that is too painful to contemplate, or it can be not enough of a deterrent. You can't have it both ways
Now, the most notorious country that practices caning, Singapore, has one of the lowest crime rates in the world.
It's not like caning is a walk in the park. It fucking hurts and it can take days, even a week, to recover.
But I'd take a week of physical agony over the years and years of both mental and physical agony that result from rotting away in our overcrowded, underfunded, barbaric prison system.
Splitting up families and locking up low level, non violent offenders for decades for trivial bullshit is just appallingly bad. It would be terrible if our prisons were great. They aren't.
No, we can think that it is both wrong because the sole purpose is pain and ineffective because it doesn't have the deterrent effect of jail. Those are not contrary statements. Just like how you can go "snicker" and "snack"
The severity of punishment for a crime has little to do with how big of a deterrent it is. In a general sense, the immediacy of the punishment, and the perceived chance of being caught dwarf any impact that severity has on deterring crime. While there are always exceptions, criminal who commit crimes believe they aren't going to get caught. There are certain places where exceptionally harsh punishments have some use (charge stacking, and getting people to plea out in exchange for comparatively 'minor' consequences) but that's not particularly relevant to any discussion about deterrence / prevention.
Basically, you're more likely to deter property crime by making it clear that 'EVERY vandal will be caught and prosecuted due to surveillance footage' with a punishment of 40 hours community service / $250 fine than by saying 'every vandal we catch will get 5 years hard time' but enforcing it rarely and inconsistently. That's just basic psychology.
With incarceration, it's true that a person - while in prison - won't be able to commit petty property crimes. That said, that person will eventually get out and that person is provably more likely to escalate and commit more serious crimes following their incarceration. So, unless we are incarcerating people for the rest of their lives - which is entirely untenable and does great social harm / carries great cost in and of itself, incarceration is counterproductive.
Punishments should be 'sufficiently harsh' as to not be a slap on the wrist. They should be proportional to the crime and not overly harsh, if for no other reason than efficiency / cost. They should be structured in a way to offer the most benefit / least cost to society, be it lowest social cost to carry out the sentence, or most likely to prevent any future crimes.
If people would rather take getting brutally beaten with sticks over our 'humane' punishments here, it really calls into question how 'humane' our punishments actually are. That's not advocating for physical / corporal punishment, that's a critique of our system here.
I agree that certainty is much more important than severity, but severity can matter too, I think. If speeding meant having your license revoked immediately, then I suspect that would deter speeding much more effectively than a $200 ticket.
I agree with you that incarceration tends to exacerbate problems. I also think we really over use it. But sometimes we need to just remove people from society to keep them from hurting others. Its unfortunate, but I just don't think that we can sublimate the safety of the innocent to the freedom of a habitual wrong doer.
I don't follow your argument on proportionality based on costs though. You could go jay walking and we could fine you $1,000. We could use the same fine for assault. That is not proportional, but imposes no additional costs.
I'd argue that - at least - for things like minor / property crimes, the punishment should be proportional to the damage those crimes cause to society. This comes from my first principle that we charge people with crimes because of the damage that their crimes do to society. This is imminently clear by looking at any criminal case - it's 'the state vs. the criminal'.
In your example earlier about 'the criminal justice system protects the baker', it may be splitting hairs, but that's NOT the purpose of the criminal justice system. The purpose of the criminal justice system is to protect the society that baker is part of, which by extension protects the baker. It's purpose is not to make the baker whole either, it's purpose is to ensure society functions in the manner that is the best. That's why a criminal case can be prosecuted even if the victim doesn't want to proceed - the criminal justice system is not 'for' the victim. Granted - the victim is usually an exceptionally important witness and their opinion / participation holds a great deal of sway with a jury.
Now, from those principles above, it's perfectly fine to look at the direct damage an individual has caused, other damage they are likely to have gotten away with, and damage to society as a whole. In your speeding example, if speeding meant having your license revoked immediately instead of a $200 ticket, it would simply be untenable. People would still speed, but enforcement would necessarily be sporadic and applied unevenly. If we had some automagic way of revoking the license of every person that crossed the speed limit, the harm that policy would cause would far surpass any harm that could be caused by speeders. It would be a bad and unjust law, and a bad / unjust law should be ignored or repealed.
Your example of fining jay walkers $1,000 strikes me as similar to the 'broken window' fallacy. By taking an amount of money (say, $1000 instead of $15) from a person that's entirely disproportionate to the damage they caused imposes a social cost. Of people fined $1000, some people who would otherwise not have committed crimes / imposed costs to society will end up doing so - not paying for insurance / renewing their license, skipping out on that fine and getting a bench warrant issued, paying and not being able to make rent, etc. If in aggregate, the damage that fine will cause clearly outweighs the damage jaywalkers cause, it's an unjust law and the fine should be proportional to the damage or harm.
By the same token, while incarceration does add a factor of 'unable to commit crimes', you can't incarcerate people forever. It's expensive so there is a direct social cost to incarceration, and when people get out their 'cost' to society will be greater than their 'contribution'. If the harm that's prevented by imprisoning them is significantly less that the harm caused by imprisoning them, than imprisonment is the wrong approach.
EDIT - as a society, we know that people sent to prison suffer extrajudicial punishment and beatings, almost universally. We know that with a certainty, and we don't effectively act to prevent it. Thus, although that beating is unsanctioned, the state is complicit in that that punishment and that is an inherent aspect of any incarceration.
Also, if you revoke people's licenses whenever they speed, it's a fact that more people will drive on suspended licenses, will drive uninsured, and will cause great social harm far surpassing any danger of speeders.
Absolutely correct that it is society that is protected, not just the baker, but the type of protection provided is just against wrongs done like the theft from the baker, not the wrong of a family starving. That is also something government is responsible for, but through a different arm.
But I still don't see how any of this argues for proportionality. It seems like it is just a principle you are accepting, and that's fine, but I really don't agree with that principle. I don't see how the fact that harms are so e to society implies that we should make the punishments proportionate to that societal harm.
I also disagree with the idea that revocation of licenses would just mean everyone loses them and drives without insurance. I think that people would largely stop speeding. The risk would be too great.
I disagree very strongly that a jail sentence is a veiled sentence to rape or beatings. Judges have a very limited range of punishments they can mete out and jail is the strongest, so I think that a jail sentence just represents the harshest punishment available.
In the US penal system, with all of the known issues, a jail sentence is very much a veiled sentence to assault and rape. To the point that it's a common point of "humor" in our society to mention how a jail sentence has an implied sentence of rape attached. You can argue that shouldn't be the case and the system should be changed so that it doesn't happen, but you can't just turn a blind eye to it happening.
At this point, a good half the population considers prison rape a value-add.
I know that I am a hypocrite when I say this, I understand that sometimes my desire for revenge is more previlent than my desire for justice. I understand the lack of intellectual honesty, and I own it. So with that in mind I will say that for child molestors and rapists I consider this a value added service.
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.
And there is a theory of punishment that holds that containment is the primary goal. Personally, I think that this should be the primary purpose behind imprisonment, especially in light of how bad imprisonment is at actually getting people to change.
You know who else supports this idea? The prison industry. Containment should be a significant factor for major crimes, not trivial ones.
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.
And there is a theory of punishment that holds that containment is the primary goal. Personally, I think that this should be the primary purpose behind imprisonment, especially in light of how bad imprisonment is at actually getting people to change.
At which point very few crimes warrant it. The cost of containment vastly outstrips the property damage done by a vandal during that same period.
Clearly deterrence is a goal as well.
I think that it is worth over spending to keep, for example, the incorrigible vandal in prison instead of having him going out vandalizing all the time. The time lost by the victims in fixing things isn't something that is easily replaced, and so I think that it is important to prevent such harms.
But there's even more time lost in building, maintaining, and manning prisons. Again, it's a net loss to society. Noone disagrees that the victim is going to lose some time in dealing with the vandalism (or what have you), nor that it's important to prevent such harms. But if it costs more to prevent such harms than would be saved, it's not worth pursuing.
I like the idea of heavy use of community service, but it walks a thin line of slave labor, and is ripe for abuse. That said there is so many common tasks around a city that needs to get done by grunt work noone could be assed to pay for, it's amazing.
For more serious crimes, prisoners love getting out to do that shit, because the officers take them out on nice days (because fuck, they have to stand out there and watch, there not going to do it in shitty/hot/cold weather), and the prisoners have huge incentives for good behavior, being able to get some fresh air (It's a well loved program, but that may be because its semi-rare to get out). I dont know if increased frequency would cause it to get old. I can't speak from that point of view, but prison/jail is boring as fuck, getting out every day to work for a few hours probably would be better.
I like the idea of heavy use of community service, but it walks a thin line of slave labor, and is ripe for abuse. That said there is so many common tasks around a city that needs to get done by grunt work noone could be assed to pay for, it's amazing.
For more serious crimes, prisoners love getting out to do that shit, because the officers take them out on nice days (because fuck, they have to stand out there and watch, there not going to do it in shitty/hot/cold weather), and the prisoners have huge incentives for good behavior, being able to get some fresh air (It's a well loved program, but that may be because its semi-rare to get out). I dont know if increased frequency would cause it to get old. I can't speak from that point of view, but prison/jail is boring as fuck, getting out every day to work for a few hours probably would be better.
In practice, that kind of prisoner work release is more a feel-good exercise for the good ol' boys who like chain gangs than anything else. The reason for this is that regulations require security checks of the inmates before they leave and after they get back that takes about two hours each for an average van/bus load. Combine this with drive time and breaks, and you have paid for guards and gas to get around two to three hours of work a day.
Also for a lot of minor crimes related solely to morality like drinking in public I really don't care how many times the law is broken. Something along those lines only deserves so much punishment since the only harm would be some people don't want it to happen but it happened anyway.
Also for a lot of minor crimes related solely to morality like drinking in public I really don't care how many times the law is broken. Something along those lines only deserves so much punishment since the only harm would be some people don't want it to happen but it happened anyway.
There's a beach town near me that has turned public urination into a steady revenue stream. Lots of bars with inadequate facilities +no public toilets means that officers can write tickets in the hundreds every summer weekend. Like a lot of speed traps designed around obscured signs, there's a deliberate financial design behind the enforcement.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
Also for a lot of minor crimes related solely to morality like drinking in public I really don't care how many times the law is broken. Something along those lines only deserves so much punishment since the only harm would be some people don't want it to happen but it happened anyway.
This goes more to what should be illegal than to punishment.
Also for a lot of minor crimes related solely to morality like drinking in public I really don't care how many times the law is broken. Something along those lines only deserves so much punishment since the only harm would be some people don't want it to happen but it happened anyway.
There's a beach town near me that has turned public urination into a steady revenue stream. Lots of bars with inadequate facilities +no public toilets means that officers can write tickets in the hundreds every summer weekend. Like a lot of speed traps designed around obscured signs, there's a deliberate financial design behind the enforcement.
This sort of thing annoys me to no end. I love visiting little towns except for the fact that they treat public facilities like some sort of unseen unicorn of accommodation.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
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.
And there is a theory of punishment that holds that containment is the primary goal. Personally, I think that this should be the primary purpose behind imprisonment, especially in light of how bad imprisonment is at actually getting people to change.
You know who else supports this idea? The prison industry. Containment should be a significant factor for major crimes, not trivial ones.
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.
And there is a theory of punishment that holds that containment is the primary goal. Personally, I think that this should be the primary purpose behind imprisonment, especially in light of how bad imprisonment is at actually getting people to change.
At which point very few crimes warrant it. The cost of containment vastly outstrips the property damage done by a vandal during that same period.
Clearly deterrence is a goal as well.
I think that it is worth over spending to keep, for example, the incorrigible vandal in prison instead of having him going out vandalizing all the time. The time lost by the victims in fixing things isn't something that is easily replaced, and so I think that it is important to prevent such harms.
But there's even more time lost in building, maintaining, and manning prisons. Again, it's a net loss to society. Noone disagrees that the victim is going to lose some time in dealing with the vandalism (or what have you), nor that it's important to prevent such harms. But if it costs more to prevent such harms than would be saved, it's not worth pursuing.
I support containment anytime that we can't stop a person from breaking the law. This isn't just a cost benefit analysis. This is about protecting people from injury.
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.
And there is a theory of punishment that holds that containment is the primary goal. Personally, I think that this should be the primary purpose behind imprisonment, especially in light of how bad imprisonment is at actually getting people to change.
You know who else supports this idea? The prison industry. Containment should be a significant factor for major crimes, not trivial ones.
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.
And there is a theory of punishment that holds that containment is the primary goal. Personally, I think that this should be the primary purpose behind imprisonment, especially in light of how bad imprisonment is at actually getting people to change.
At which point very few crimes warrant it. The cost of containment vastly outstrips the property damage done by a vandal during that same period.
Clearly deterrence is a goal as well.
I think that it is worth over spending to keep, for example, the incorrigible vandal in prison instead of having him going out vandalizing all the time. The time lost by the victims in fixing things isn't something that is easily replaced, and so I think that it is important to prevent such harms.
But there's even more time lost in building, maintaining, and manning prisons. Again, it's a net loss to society. Noone disagrees that the victim is going to lose some time in dealing with the vandalism (or what have you), nor that it's important to prevent such harms. But if it costs more to prevent such harms than would be saved, it's not worth pursuing.
I support containment anytime that we can't stop a person from breaking the law. This isn't just a cost benefit analysis. This is about protecting people from injury.
Who is injured by having an open container in public? Or misdemeanor possession? Or speeding?
And you realize that being a prison guard tends to have a negative effect on a person, so harm is done to the non-criminal public by the act of locking someone up.
Also for a lot of minor crimes related solely to morality like drinking in public I really don't care how many times the law is broken. Something along those lines only deserves so much punishment since the only harm would be some people don't want it to happen but it happened anyway.
This goes more to what should be illegal than to punishment.
Not really. I fully support a town or state's ability to restrict specific kinds of behavior to an extent.
I do not support destroying their lives because in the course of recording some home video at the park, drinking a beer, and falling asleep, the local government has decided they must be separated from society forever since they totally could have not broken the law.
There is no reason to behave as if the act of breaking the law is equal in every case.
Who is injured by having an open container in public? Or misdemeanor possession? Or speeding?
Regarding speeding... part of protecting people from injury includes protecting people from acts which, though not intrinsically injurious, carry an unacceptable risk of injury.
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.
Who is injured by having an open container in public? Or misdemeanor possession? Or speeding?
Regarding speeding... part of protecting people from injury includes protecting people from acts which, though not intrinsically injurious, carry an unacceptable risk of injury.
I agree, but many studies have shown that it's much more dangerous to have someone driving at a speed markedly different than the flow of traffic (average speed), than it is to have someone speeding. And quite frequently, things like speeding or automated red light tickets are used as revenue generation rather than as a safety concern.
Who is injured by having an open container in public? Or misdemeanor possession? Or speeding?
Regarding speeding... part of protecting people from injury includes protecting people from acts which, though not intrinsically injurious, carry an unacceptable risk of injury.
I agree, but many studies have shown that it's much more dangerous to have someone driving at a speed markedly different than the flow of traffic (average speed), than it is to have someone speeding. And quite frequently, things like speeding or automated red light tickets are used as revenue generation rather than as a safety concern.
Oh, yeah, I agree with that.
Well, mostly. Diverging from the average speed of traffic increases the likelihood of an accident... but speed increases the severity of those accidents when they occur.
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.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
Also for a lot of minor crimes related solely to morality like drinking in public I really don't care how many times the law is broken. Something along those lines only deserves so much punishment since the only harm would be some people don't want it to happen but it happened anyway.
This goes more to what should be illegal than to punishment.
Not really. I fully support a town or state's ability to restrict specific kinds of behavior to an extent.
I do not support destroying their lives because in the course of recording some home video at the park, drinking a beer, and falling asleep, the local government has decided they must be separated from society forever since they totally could have not broken the law.
There is no reason to behave as if the act of breaking the law is equal in every case.
If the town decides that it will not tolerate open containers in public and yet someone habitually breaks that law, why can't the town impose a harsh sanction eventually? He is hurting the interests of the town, is he not? What if he does it every single day and people are upset every time that they see his behavior. Must they abide it for all time, if he can pay the fines? What if he can't pay the fines. What do we do then?
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
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.
And there is a theory of punishment that holds that containment is the primary goal. Personally, I think that this should be the primary purpose behind imprisonment, especially in light of how bad imprisonment is at actually getting people to change.
You know who else supports this idea? The prison industry. Containment should be a significant factor for major crimes, not trivial ones.
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.
And there is a theory of punishment that holds that containment is the primary goal. Personally, I think that this should be the primary purpose behind imprisonment, especially in light of how bad imprisonment is at actually getting people to change.
At which point very few crimes warrant it. The cost of containment vastly outstrips the property damage done by a vandal during that same period.
Clearly deterrence is a goal as well.
I think that it is worth over spending to keep, for example, the incorrigible vandal in prison instead of having him going out vandalizing all the time. The time lost by the victims in fixing things isn't something that is easily replaced, and so I think that it is important to prevent such harms.
But there's even more time lost in building, maintaining, and manning prisons. Again, it's a net loss to society. Noone disagrees that the victim is going to lose some time in dealing with the vandalism (or what have you), nor that it's important to prevent such harms. But if it costs more to prevent such harms than would be saved, it's not worth pursuing.
I support containment anytime that we can't stop a person from breaking the law. This isn't just a cost benefit analysis. This is about protecting people from injury.
Who is injured by having an open container in public? Or misdemeanor possession? Or speeding?
And you realize that being a prison guard tends to have a negative effect on a person, so harm is done to the non-criminal public by the act of locking someone up.
If it doesn't hurt society then we shouldn't make it a crime. If we don't want people doing it, then we don't want people doing it and them doing it is a harm.
No one is forced to be a prison guard.
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JuliusCaptain of Serenityon my shipRegistered Userregular
Also for a lot of minor crimes related solely to morality like drinking in public I really don't care how many times the law is broken. Something along those lines only deserves so much punishment since the only harm would be some people don't want it to happen but it happened anyway.
This goes more to what should be illegal than to punishment.
It's perfectly reasonable to not want certain kinds of behaviour to happen as a town without those behaviours being actually injurous to anyone. If the law is reasonable (which by the way I don't think a lot of these laws are but whatever) it can be upheld without punishment increasing based on the number of times someone breaks such a law. The harm is so minor that it would be unjust to do so.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
Also for a lot of minor crimes related solely to morality like drinking in public I really don't care how many times the law is broken. Something along those lines only deserves so much punishment since the only harm would be some people don't want it to happen but it happened anyway.
This goes more to what should be illegal than to punishment.
It's perfectly reasonable to not want certain kinds of behaviour to happen as a town without those behaviours being actually injurous to anyone. If the law is reasonable (which by the way I don't think a lot of these laws are but whatever) it can be upheld without punishment increasing based on the number of times someone breaks such a law. The harm is so minor that it would be unjust to do so.
You are just assuming proportionality though when you say escalating punishments would be unjust. What is your response to my earlier post:
If the town decides that it will not tolerate open containers in public and yet someone habitually breaks that law, why can't the town impose a harsh sanction eventually? He is hurting the interests of the town, is he not? What if he does it every single day and people are upset every time that they see his behavior. Must they abide it for all time, if he can pay the fines? What if he can't pay the fines. What do we do then?
There is no need to contain people who do not pose a threat to society.
Unless you are intending the containment to cause psychological pain.
Locking up violent offenders protects society from them.
Locking up a kid who got a little drunk and painted a mural on someone's wall isn't protecting society at all.
Anyway, this has already been covered. Unless you are advocating we lock up all minor offenders for life, this argument carries no weight. You are going to let them back out after a pre-determined amount of time. Therefore, the purpose of their internment is punishment, not to protect society by removing them from it.
Even two weeks of having a vandal locked up protects society. That's two weeks they will not be vandalizing; even if the second they get out they vandalize something.
By that logic, we would lock vandals up forever to protect society forever. We do not do this, so it is apparent that protecting society is not the primary reason behind locking up vandals.
Neither I or Feral ever said it was the primary reason. Feral just said that locking people up wasn't soley for punishment's sake.
When you imprison you get punishment and removal in one package.
Yes, but when you imprison people who don't need removal, as we do, you are doing it just for the punishment.
Feral appears to be saying that locking people up isn't ALWAYS just about punishment, which is true. I am talking about a specific subset of offenders for whom it is, as they pose no danger to society and thus paying large sums of money to remove them from it does not benefit society.
@vorpal - what would you call the appropriate punishment for a man who kills his cheating wife and her lover upon walking into the room and catching them in the act? He doesn't have another wife, so it is very unlikely he will kill again. Should he be jailed, or punished at all?
He's committed murder. Twice. That makes him a violent offender and a repeat one at that. He should obviously be punished, but besides the punishment, he should be removed from society to protect it. Nor is he guilty of a 'minor non violent crime'.
Let's imagine, I dunno, someone who downloaded MP3's and listened to them. He suffers a tragic accident and loses his hearing.
Locking this person up would in no way be protecting a society from anything - it would serve simply as a form of punishment.
Look, either caning can be an absurdly brutal punishment that is too painful to contemplate, or it can be not enough of a deterrent. You can't have it both ways
Now, the most notorious country that practices caning, Singapore, has one of the lowest crime rates in the world.
It's not like caning is a walk in the park. It fucking hurts and it can take days, even a week, to recover.
But I'd take a week of physical agony over the years and years of both mental and physical agony that result from rotting away in our overcrowded, underfunded, barbaric prison system.
Splitting up families and locking up low level, non violent offenders for decades for trivial bullshit is just appallingly bad. It would be terrible if our prisons were great. They aren't.
No, we can think that it is both wrong because the sole purpose is pain and ineffective because it doesn't have the deterrent effect of jail. Those are not contrary statements. Just like how you can go "snicker" and "snack"
The severity of punishment for a crime has little to do with how big of a deterrent it is. In a general sense, the immediacy of the punishment, and the perceived chance of being caught dwarf any impact that severity has on deterring crime. While there are always exceptions, criminal who commit crimes believe they aren't going to get caught. There are certain places where exceptionally harsh punishments have some use (charge stacking, and getting people to plea out in exchange for comparatively 'minor' consequences) but that's not particularly relevant to any discussion about deterrence / prevention.
Basically, you're more likely to deter property crime by making it clear that 'EVERY vandal will be caught and prosecuted due to surveillance footage' with a punishment of 40 hours community service / $250 fine than by saying 'every vandal we catch will get 5 years hard time' but enforcing it rarely and inconsistently. That's just basic psychology.
With incarceration, it's true that a person - while in prison - won't be able to commit petty property crimes. That said, that person will eventually get out and that person is provably more likely to escalate and commit more serious crimes following their incarceration. So, unless we are incarcerating people for the rest of their lives - which is entirely untenable and does great social harm / carries great cost in and of itself, incarceration is counterproductive.
Punishments should be 'sufficiently harsh' as to not be a slap on the wrist. They should be proportional to the crime and not overly harsh, if for no other reason than efficiency / cost. They should be structured in a way to offer the most benefit / least cost to society, be it lowest social cost to carry out the sentence, or most likely to prevent any future crimes.
If people would rather take getting brutally beaten with sticks over our 'humane' punishments here, it really calls into question how 'humane' our punishments actually are. That's not advocating for physical / corporal punishment, that's a critique of our system here.
I agree that certainty is much more important than severity, but severity can matter too, I think. If speeding meant having your license revoked immediately, then I suspect that would deter speeding much more effectively than a $200 ticket.
I agree with you that incarceration tends to exacerbate problems. I also think we really over use it. But sometimes we need to just remove people from society to keep them from hurting others. Its unfortunate, but I just don't think that we can sublimate the safety of the innocent to the freedom of a habitual wrong doer.
I don't follow your argument on proportionality based on costs though. You could go jay walking and we could fine you $1,000. We could use the same fine for assault. That is not proportional, but imposes no additional costs.
I'd argue that - at least - for things like minor / property crimes, the punishment should be proportional to the damage those crimes cause to society. This comes from my first principle that we charge people with crimes because of the damage that their crimes do to society. This is imminently clear by looking at any criminal case - it's 'the state vs. the criminal'.
In your example earlier about 'the criminal justice system protects the baker', it may be splitting hairs, but that's NOT the purpose of the criminal justice system. The purpose of the criminal justice system is to protect the society that baker is part of, which by extension protects the baker. It's purpose is not to make the baker whole either, it's purpose is to ensure society functions in the manner that is the best. That's why a criminal case can be prosecuted even if the victim doesn't want to proceed - the criminal justice system is not 'for' the victim. Granted - the victim is usually an exceptionally important witness and their opinion / participation holds a great deal of sway with a jury.
Now, from those principles above, it's perfectly fine to look at the direct damage an individual has caused, other damage they are likely to have gotten away with, and damage to society as a whole. In your speeding example, if speeding meant having your license revoked immediately instead of a $200 ticket, it would simply be untenable. People would still speed, but enforcement would necessarily be sporadic and applied unevenly. If we had some automagic way of revoking the license of every person that crossed the speed limit, the harm that policy would cause would far surpass any harm that could be caused by speeders. It would be a bad and unjust law, and a bad / unjust law should be ignored or repealed.
Your example of fining jay walkers $1,000 strikes me as similar to the 'broken window' fallacy. By taking an amount of money (say, $1000 instead of $15) from a person that's entirely disproportionate to the damage they caused imposes a social cost. Of people fined $1000, some people who would otherwise not have committed crimes / imposed costs to society will end up doing so - not paying for insurance / renewing their license, skipping out on that fine and getting a bench warrant issued, paying and not being able to make rent, etc. If in aggregate, the damage that fine will cause clearly outweighs the damage jaywalkers cause, it's an unjust law and the fine should be proportional to the damage or harm.
By the same token, while incarceration does add a factor of 'unable to commit crimes', you can't incarcerate people forever. It's expensive so there is a direct social cost to incarceration, and when people get out their 'cost' to society will be greater than their 'contribution'. If the harm that's prevented by imprisoning them is significantly less that the harm caused by imprisoning them, than imprisonment is the wrong approach.
EDIT - as a society, we know that people sent to prison suffer extrajudicial punishment and beatings, almost universally. We know that with a certainty, and we don't effectively act to prevent it. Thus, although that beating is unsanctioned, the state is complicit in that that punishment and that is an inherent aspect of any incarceration.
Also, if you revoke people's licenses whenever they speed, it's a fact that more people will drive on suspended licenses, will drive uninsured, and will cause great social harm far surpassing any danger of speeders.
Absolutely correct that it is society that is protected, not just the baker, but the type of protection provided is just against wrongs done like the theft from the baker, not the wrong of a family starving. That is also something government is responsible for, but through a different arm.
But I still don't see how any of this argues for proportionality. It seems like it is just a principle you are accepting, and that's fine, but I really don't agree with that principle. I don't see how the fact that harms are so e to society implies that we should make the punishments proportionate to that societal harm.
I also disagree with the idea that revocation of licenses would just mean everyone loses them and drives without insurance. I think that people would largely stop speeding. The risk would be too great.
I disagree very strongly that a jail sentence is a veiled sentence to rape or beatings. Judges have a very limited range of punishments they can mete out and jail is the strongest, so I think that a jail sentence just represents the harshest punishment available.
In the US penal system, with all of the known issues, a jail sentence is very much a veiled sentence to assault and rape. To the point that it's a common point of "humor" in our society to mention how a jail sentence has an implied sentence of rape attached. You can argue that shouldn't be the case and the system should be changed so that it doesn't happen, but you can't just turn a blind eye to it happening.
At this point, a good half the population considers prison rape a value-add.
I know that I am a hypocrite when I say this, I understand that sometimes my desire for revenge is more previlent than my desire for justice. I understand the lack of intellectual honesty, and I own it. So with that in mind I will say that for child molestors and rapists I consider this a value added service.
What about someone who was falsely convicted of such, or, more likely, pled guilty to such as a result of over charging?
The reason it's so widely considered a value-added service is that people feel some crimes deserve worse than mere imprisonment, but aren't comfortable with the death penalty, and so they are happy to have brutal fellow inmates pick up the slack where they perceive the justice system to have failed.
I don't favor the death penalty, but I think this casual flinging prisoners to the wolves for some extra-judicial punishment is just appalling. I'd like to see it stopped. Sadly there does not seem to be any likelihood of that happening anytime soon.
Who is injured by having an open container in public? Or misdemeanor possession? Or speeding?
Regarding speeding... part of protecting people from injury includes protecting people from acts which, though not intrinsically injurious, carry an unacceptable risk of injury.
I agree, but many studies have shown that it's much more dangerous to have someone driving at a speed markedly different than the flow of traffic (average speed), than it is to have someone speeding. And quite frequently, things like speeding or automated red light tickets are used as revenue generation rather than as a safety concern.
Oh, yeah, I agree with that.
Well, mostly. Diverging from the average speed of traffic increases the likelihood of an accident... but speed increases the severity of those accidents when they occur.
Most people who are speeding don't travel at a much faster speed than the speed limit. To reduce the average speed of traffic you are better served by reducing the speedlimit rather than ticketing everyone who exceeds the speed limit. The ones you want to actually get are those who drive much faster than the others on the road, which you can do by covertly following them for a bunch of miles. Giving people tickets for exceeding the speed limit based on one moment isn't going to help reduce danger. (And people might have a good reason for exceeding the speed limit at any given moment, for example I could be trying to overtake a car for the purpose of making the flow of traffic better and the faster I do so the better.*)
This might be a tangent though.
*(Incidentally, this is why I also believe motorcyclists should sort of be allowed to go faster than anyone else. Their small size makes them bad at being stuck in the same flow as much bigger cars. I rather have them be far to the front of me than right behind me. Same reason I don't want to be stuck behind a large truck.)
Yet if our society is to have prisons, those prisons will need guards, so while no specific individual is forced to be a prison guard, somebody is "forced" to, at least for as long as we have some nonzero number of people who need employment and cannot otherwise secure it.
But even aside from concern for the guards themselves, the point is that exposure to the conditions inside the prison has a negative effect on those guards, who are then part of society, and thus that may impact society as well. Unless you intend to lock up the guards as well. And then you'll need more guards....
Also for a lot of minor crimes related solely to morality like drinking in public I really don't care how many times the law is broken. Something along those lines only deserves so much punishment since the only harm would be some people don't want it to happen but it happened anyway.
This goes more to what should be illegal than to punishment.
Not really. I fully support a town or state's ability to restrict specific kinds of behavior to an extent.
I do not support destroying their lives because in the course of recording some home video at the park, drinking a beer, and falling asleep, the local government has decided they must be separated from society forever since they totally could have not broken the law.
There is no reason to behave as if the act of breaking the law is equal in every case.
If the town decides that it will not tolerate open containers in public and yet someone habitually breaks that law, why can't the town impose a harsh sanction eventually? He is hurting the interests of the town, is he not? What if he does it every single day and people are upset every time that they see his behavior. Must they abide it for all time, if he can pay the fines? What if he can't pay the fines. What do we do then?
What interest was harmed? Show me the damage. I can easily show the damage of life in prison. Children lose fathers, family income plummets, my taxes go up in order to destroy these families.
Can you show me the damage of falling asleep in a park that justifies telling kids they'll never live with their father again?
Also for a lot of minor crimes related solely to morality like drinking in public I really don't care how many times the law is broken. Something along those lines only deserves so much punishment since the only harm would be some people don't want it to happen but it happened anyway.
This goes more to what should be illegal than to punishment.
Not really. I fully support a town or state's ability to restrict specific kinds of behavior to an extent.
I do not support destroying their lives because in the course of recording some home video at the park, drinking a beer, and falling asleep, the local government has decided they must be separated from society forever since they totally could have not broken the law.
There is no reason to behave as if the act of breaking the law is equal in every case.
If the town decides that it will not tolerate open containers in public and yet someone habitually breaks that law, why can't the town impose a harsh sanction eventually? He is hurting the interests of the town, is he not? What if he does it every single day and people are upset every time that they see his behavior. Must they abide it for all time, if he can pay the fines? What if he can't pay the fines. What do we do then?
What interest was harmed? Show me the damage. I can easily show the damage of life in prison. Children lose fathers, family income plummets, my taxes go up in order to destroy these families.
Can you show me the damage of falling asleep in a park that justifies telling kids they'll never live with their father again?
That goes back to asking if the law itself is valid. Because otherwise, there is harm to society by rendering a law unenforceable, or tolerating general lawlessness. His individual act of public drinking or vagrancy may not cause significant harm per se, but if that law becomes unenforceable then the locality has to deal with the collective harm of everybody doing that whenever the fuck they want. Widespread public drinking or vagrancy may cause more harm than an individual act.
If the penalties don't escalate, and if they aren't (obviously) high enough to deter in and of themselves, then the law is pointless. Which it may be! But then it should not be the law.
But when somebody ignores the fines for a minor offense, or hits their 20th offense (or some other large number), it becomes a major offense.
I mean, I'm sorry if the law and consequences doesn't have the effect you want. It doesn't justify cruel or unusual punishment because of that. I believe a government is entitled to try and encourage behavior they want. Not scorch the earth of the poor when they fail to stop begging for food.
I mean, I'm sorry if the law and consequences doesn't have the effect you want. It doesn't justify cruel or unusual punishment because of that. I believe a government is entitled to try and encourage behavior they want. Not scorch the earth of the poor when they fail to stop begging for food.
I can agree that a certain degree of willfulness should be considered as well. A homeless person begging for food is distinct from some middle-class jackhole racking up his 39th open container or carpool lane violation this year.
I'd also question whether passively begging for food should be illegal.
Doesn't change the fact that continued disregard for minor laws can become a major violation.
I am saying that depending on the law it shouldn't.
Right. And I'm saying that in every case I can think of it should. Because, frankly, the harm to society from letting anybody who wants to do [X] with minimal consequence being able to do so as they please is greater than the harm of throwing the book at a single offender. This is why minor crimes become major when you commit them a hundred times. At least any crime that should legitimately be criminal to begin with.
That doesn't mean in certain limited instances we can't substitute more compassionate sentencing in lieu of prison; for instance, residential treatment for repeated public intoxication or some kind of involuntary shelter for continued vagrancy. Though with the latter, I'm not sure vagrancy laws are legitimate anyway (homeless people have to be somewhere, for fuck's sake).
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I hope you realize you're advocating thought control.
Right, but your conception of what is protection is skewed. Looking at it from the perspective of cost to society, what costs more? Having the vandal loose, or spending several thousand tax payer dollars (after police/court costs, jail costs, etc) to have him incarcerated for a few weeks?
I suppose you could argue no such people exist and that everyone who has ever been sent to jail for any offense, no matter how trivial, was certainly going to be a repeat offender. I don't find that terribly likely.
Therefore, since we know damn well that rehabilitation does not occur in our current prison system, the locking up in these instances is intended *solely* to cause psychological pain as a method of punishment.
In support of this is that people are locked up for longer times for crimes judged to be 'more severe'. At the end of this pre-determined time, they are released, period, even if they have shown no signs of character change.
I'll address your second point first - the deterrent is from the pain caused. If psychological pain can act as a deterrent and thus protect society, I see no reason why physical pain could not also act as a deterrent and protect society. Remember, this is in the context of SKFM arguing that caning is somehow uniquely bad in that it is intended to cause pain, unlike all other punishments. I am contending that (a) all punishments are intended to cause pain and (b) physical pain isn't even the worst kind of pain there is and (c) in our current system, you get physical pain in jail as well, likely more than you would from a caning. this latter point is a product of our times and culture, and not a universal one.
As to your first point, yes, it removes them from society, but in order to cause the psychological pain of isolation, not to protect society from them. In the first place, we've already agreed that we are talking about non-violent offenders who are not judged to be at risk of repeat (say, it's their first offense). So there is no reason to suppose they pose a risk to society. And if we did think they posed a risk to society, we wouldn't just let them back out, no questions asked, at the conclusion of their sentence. Yes yes, we ask questions when/if they are given early parole, but the fact remains that the length of time we throw them in jail is calculated by the amount of pain we want to cause them, based on the severity of the crime they committed, and bears no relation whatsoever to a studied and sober observation of the individual in question and how much time of quite reflection is required to rehabilitate him.
All evidence shows that people leave our prisons worse than they went in, so the argument that 'we lock people up to improve them' is completely blown apart, in my opinion.
That leaves 'we lock people up to protect society from them' which, given that they are eventually released, and worse than when they went in, and mass incarceration causes incalculable evils among our society, is similarly busted wide open in the case of non violent non repeat offenders. Note that we do lock up violent offenders to protect society, and I don't particularly have a problem with that. I wouldn't categorize crimes that involve violence against another person as minor though, so we can assume these offenders are not the ones under discussion.
That leaves 'we lock people up to cause them psychological pain as a method of punishment' in which case I see no reason to argue that it would be inhumane to replace decades of psychological pain with a week of physical pain.
Caning seems like an excessively brutal punishment compared to incarceration only if you think that jails are havens of peace, enlightenment, learning, and quiet reflection that turn criminals into model reformed citizens. And this is manifestly not what we have here.
PSN: Vorpallion Twitch: Vorpallion
By that logic, we would lock vandals up forever to protect society forever. We do not do this, so it is apparent that protecting society is not the primary reason behind locking up vandals.
Additionally, if a vandal that vandalized once and was, say, fined $20 and never vandalized again, was instead put in prison for 3 years, then emerged a hardened criminal and went on a vandalizing spree, incarcerating the vandal would have made society less safe, not more safe.
Incarcerating offenders only protects society if you can show that (a) incarceration does not make offenders more likely to cause crimes when they are eventually released (b) you can show the offender was likely to commit more crimes again in absence of incarceration (c) the costs borne by society, including the cost to incarcerate the offender, the costs borne by his dependents, and any associated opportunity costs, does not outweigh the cost of the crimes he was likely to commit if left at large
Lets say you take that vandal and throw him in jail for a month. His three teenage kids can't pay the rent and get thrown out on the streets. There they turn to a life of drug addiction and violent crime in order to obtain the funds. This is pretty clearly a bad deal for society, so throwing him in jail did not protect society. Even IF you managed to prevent, I dunno, another $500 worth of vandalism by locking him up, the other costs associated with throwing him in jail far outweigh the benefits.
And this is completely ignoring that every dollar spent incarcerating him (which will run to well over $500 for even a one month prison sentence) is a dollar that isn't spent on things like education or job training or unemployment insurance.
PSN: Vorpallion Twitch: Vorpallion
And there is a theory of punishment that holds that containment is the primary goal. Personally, I think that this should be the primary purpose behind imprisonment, especially in light of how bad imprisonment is at actually getting people to change.
At this point, a good half the population considers prison rape a value-add.
At which point very few crimes warrant it. The cost of containment vastly outstrips the property damage done by a vandal during that same period.
Clearly deterrence is a goal as well.
I think that it is worth over spending to keep, for example, the incorrigible vandal in prison instead of having him going out vandalizing all the time. The time lost by the victims in fixing things isn't something that is easily replaced, and so I think that it is important to prevent such harms.
That is seriously one of the most horrible things I've ever heard another person say. If our society is casually accepting one of the worst acts humanly possible as a value added side effect of our punishment system, then we have a moral obligation to see this rectified.
It's just an example. Although if it really worked. . .
I would call the crime two counts of second degree murder, and punish accordingly. He's killed two fellow humans in a non-premeditated manner, regardless if one is his wife and the other an adulterer.
And how does discussion of second degree manslaughter relate back to the topic of overpunishment of minor crimes?
When you imprison you get punishment and removal in one package.
You know who else supports this idea? The prison industry. Containment should be a significant factor for major crimes, not trivial ones.
But there's even more time lost in building, maintaining, and manning prisons. Again, it's a net loss to society. Noone disagrees that the victim is going to lose some time in dealing with the vandalism (or what have you), nor that it's important to prevent such harms. But if it costs more to prevent such harms than would be saved, it's not worth pursuing.
For more serious crimes, prisoners love getting out to do that shit, because the officers take them out on nice days (because fuck, they have to stand out there and watch, there not going to do it in shitty/hot/cold weather), and the prisoners have huge incentives for good behavior, being able to get some fresh air (It's a well loved program, but that may be because its semi-rare to get out). I dont know if increased frequency would cause it to get old. I can't speak from that point of view, but prison/jail is boring as fuck, getting out every day to work for a few hours probably would be better.
In practice, that kind of prisoner work release is more a feel-good exercise for the good ol' boys who like chain gangs than anything else. The reason for this is that regulations require security checks of the inmates before they leave and after they get back that takes about two hours each for an average van/bus load. Combine this with drive time and breaks, and you have paid for guards and gas to get around two to three hours of work a day.
There's a beach town near me that has turned public urination into a steady revenue stream. Lots of bars with inadequate facilities +no public toilets means that officers can write tickets in the hundreds every summer weekend. Like a lot of speed traps designed around obscured signs, there's a deliberate financial design behind the enforcement.
This goes more to what should be illegal than to punishment.
This sort of thing annoys me to no end. I love visiting little towns except for the fact that they treat public facilities like some sort of unseen unicorn of accommodation.
I support containment anytime that we can't stop a person from breaking the law. This isn't just a cost benefit analysis. This is about protecting people from injury.
Who is injured by having an open container in public? Or misdemeanor possession? Or speeding?
And you realize that being a prison guard tends to have a negative effect on a person, so harm is done to the non-criminal public by the act of locking someone up.
Not really. I fully support a town or state's ability to restrict specific kinds of behavior to an extent.
I do not support destroying their lives because in the course of recording some home video at the park, drinking a beer, and falling asleep, the local government has decided they must be separated from society forever since they totally could have not broken the law.
There is no reason to behave as if the act of breaking the law is equal in every case.
Regarding speeding... part of protecting people from injury includes protecting people from acts which, though not intrinsically injurious, carry an unacceptable risk of injury.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I agree, but many studies have shown that it's much more dangerous to have someone driving at a speed markedly different than the flow of traffic (average speed), than it is to have someone speeding. And quite frequently, things like speeding or automated red light tickets are used as revenue generation rather than as a safety concern.
Oh, yeah, I agree with that.
Well, mostly. Diverging from the average speed of traffic increases the likelihood of an accident... but speed increases the severity of those accidents when they occur.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
If the town decides that it will not tolerate open containers in public and yet someone habitually breaks that law, why can't the town impose a harsh sanction eventually? He is hurting the interests of the town, is he not? What if he does it every single day and people are upset every time that they see his behavior. Must they abide it for all time, if he can pay the fines? What if he can't pay the fines. What do we do then?
If it doesn't hurt society then we shouldn't make it a crime. If we don't want people doing it, then we don't want people doing it and them doing it is a harm.
No one is forced to be a prison guard.
It's perfectly reasonable to not want certain kinds of behaviour to happen as a town without those behaviours being actually injurous to anyone. If the law is reasonable (which by the way I don't think a lot of these laws are but whatever) it can be upheld without punishment increasing based on the number of times someone breaks such a law. The harm is so minor that it would be unjust to do so.
You are just assuming proportionality though when you say escalating punishments would be unjust. What is your response to my earlier post:
If the town decides that it will not tolerate open containers in public and yet someone habitually breaks that law, why can't the town impose a harsh sanction eventually? He is hurting the interests of the town, is he not? What if he does it every single day and people are upset every time that they see his behavior. Must they abide it for all time, if he can pay the fines? What if he can't pay the fines. What do we do then?
Yes, but when you imprison people who don't need removal, as we do, you are doing it just for the punishment.
Feral appears to be saying that locking people up isn't ALWAYS just about punishment, which is true. I am talking about a specific subset of offenders for whom it is, as they pose no danger to society and thus paying large sums of money to remove them from it does not benefit society.
He's committed murder. Twice. That makes him a violent offender and a repeat one at that. He should obviously be punished, but besides the punishment, he should be removed from society to protect it. Nor is he guilty of a 'minor non violent crime'.
Let's imagine, I dunno, someone who downloaded MP3's and listened to them. He suffers a tragic accident and loses his hearing.
Locking this person up would in no way be protecting a society from anything - it would serve simply as a form of punishment.
What about someone who was falsely convicted of such, or, more likely, pled guilty to such as a result of over charging?
The reason it's so widely considered a value-added service is that people feel some crimes deserve worse than mere imprisonment, but aren't comfortable with the death penalty, and so they are happy to have brutal fellow inmates pick up the slack where they perceive the justice system to have failed.
I don't favor the death penalty, but I think this casual flinging prisoners to the wolves for some extra-judicial punishment is just appalling. I'd like to see it stopped. Sadly there does not seem to be any likelihood of that happening anytime soon.
PSN: Vorpallion Twitch: Vorpallion
Most people who are speeding don't travel at a much faster speed than the speed limit. To reduce the average speed of traffic you are better served by reducing the speedlimit rather than ticketing everyone who exceeds the speed limit. The ones you want to actually get are those who drive much faster than the others on the road, which you can do by covertly following them for a bunch of miles. Giving people tickets for exceeding the speed limit based on one moment isn't going to help reduce danger. (And people might have a good reason for exceeding the speed limit at any given moment, for example I could be trying to overtake a car for the purpose of making the flow of traffic better and the faster I do so the better.*)
This might be a tangent though.
*(Incidentally, this is why I also believe motorcyclists should sort of be allowed to go faster than anyone else. Their small size makes them bad at being stuck in the same flow as much bigger cars. I rather have them be far to the front of me than right behind me. Same reason I don't want to be stuck behind a large truck.)
Yet if our society is to have prisons, those prisons will need guards, so while no specific individual is forced to be a prison guard, somebody is "forced" to, at least for as long as we have some nonzero number of people who need employment and cannot otherwise secure it.
But even aside from concern for the guards themselves, the point is that exposure to the conditions inside the prison has a negative effect on those guards, who are then part of society, and thus that may impact society as well. Unless you intend to lock up the guards as well. And then you'll need more guards....
PSN: Vorpallion Twitch: Vorpallion
What interest was harmed? Show me the damage. I can easily show the damage of life in prison. Children lose fathers, family income plummets, my taxes go up in order to destroy these families.
Can you show me the damage of falling asleep in a park that justifies telling kids they'll never live with their father again?
That goes back to asking if the law itself is valid. Because otherwise, there is harm to society by rendering a law unenforceable, or tolerating general lawlessness. His individual act of public drinking or vagrancy may not cause significant harm per se, but if that law becomes unenforceable then the locality has to deal with the collective harm of everybody doing that whenever the fuck they want. Widespread public drinking or vagrancy may cause more harm than an individual act.
If the penalties don't escalate, and if they aren't (obviously) high enough to deter in and of themselves, then the law is pointless. Which it may be! But then it should not be the law.
But when somebody ignores the fines for a minor offense, or hits their 20th offense (or some other large number), it becomes a major offense.
I mean, I'm sorry if the law and consequences doesn't have the effect you want. It doesn't justify cruel or unusual punishment because of that. I believe a government is entitled to try and encourage behavior they want. Not scorch the earth of the poor when they fail to stop begging for food.
I can agree that a certain degree of willfulness should be considered as well. A homeless person begging for food is distinct from some middle-class jackhole racking up his 39th open container or carpool lane violation this year.
I'd also question whether passively begging for food should be illegal.
Doesn't change the fact that continued disregard for minor laws can become a major violation.
I am saying that depending on the law it shouldn't.
Right. And I'm saying that in every case I can think of it should. Because, frankly, the harm to society from letting anybody who wants to do [X] with minimal consequence being able to do so as they please is greater than the harm of throwing the book at a single offender. This is why minor crimes become major when you commit them a hundred times. At least any crime that should legitimately be criminal to begin with.
That doesn't mean in certain limited instances we can't substitute more compassionate sentencing in lieu of prison; for instance, residential treatment for repeated public intoxication or some kind of involuntary shelter for continued vagrancy. Though with the latter, I'm not sure vagrancy laws are legitimate anyway (homeless people have to be somewhere, for fuck's sake).