I don’t have much sympathy for people that commit actual crimes. There are too many innocent people being arrested to worry about the guilty ones.
They chose to spend their money to keep their son out of jail. Thats was their choice. That’s the consequence of the son committing what appears to be a major crime. Hopefully the son learns from that and he should be working to help repay that debt.
It's less about sympathy than about how you structure a justice system if you don't want more crime in the future. A lot of things about our justice system work very much counter to how you'd do things if your main goal was to have less crime. See also: banning certain kinds of government college aid for people with drug-related convictions. If you care about recidivism and cycles of poverty & crime why would you make it harder for people who've done their time and gotten out to contribute positively to society?
From a sheer fairness and what is justice actually POV, it's bullshit that this is yet another thing a rich family can shrug off, while a poor family is screwed. I don't have a solution for it, but the role money plays in our justice system may well be the biggest problem with it, which is saying something.
> Hopefully the son learns from that and he should be working to help repay that debt.
Very unlikely, with a record. A decade later and he's doing OK, for values of OK that include "can mostly pay own not-large bills, and only because he's living with his parents, and is steadily and consistently progressing in a low-paying field". Last I checked he's still "in the system" to some extent, as far as ongoing fees and check-ins and such.
(for the record, just to set some parameters here, he didn't physically hurt anyone, but it was still quite serious and definitely not something a society would want to go un-punished, that's absolutely true)
One imagines the long-term lasting harm to all of: victims, families of victims, perpetrators, and families of perpetrators; happening over and over in high-crime neighborhoods and it's no wonder it's so damn hard to improve those areas. That, on top of everything else that's often wrong with them. Reducing, not increasing, the "blast radius" of crime seems like something you'd focus on if you want to reduce crime rates, when stress and poverty are causal for crime and stress and poverty are part of the effect of same "blast radius".
> A lot of things about our justice system work very much counter to how you'd do things if your main goal was to have less crime.
If you think about it, keeping families uneducated and perpetually in debt means more bargaining power for those who have the money to lobby and change the system. What incentive do they have to do that?
Was your relative a multiple-time offender? If so, maybe stronger punishment earlier would have put him on the right path sooner.
Look, some people will always be fuck ups. That’s the sad reality of the life. Some people, no matter how their are guided, will always eventually fuck up and ruin all the hard work people put into them. They are wired to always make poor decisions no matter what. My best friend is like this. After 40 years of trying to help him, I accept him as he is now with no expectations he will ever get better despite decades of trying to help him. I have a close relative like that too. If they are protected from
consequences too early in life, they tend to make larger, irrevocable mistakes later in life and then they are fucked for a long time.
In SF crime is running rampant now because of a DA that refuses to prosecute smaller crimes. It has emboldened criminals. Prop 47 has made it so that gangs of thugs enter a store, fill their bags with merchandise and run out with no repercussions. I witnessed this with my own eyes and the manager said they don’t even call the cops anymore because they won’t come. Instead, 15 Walgreens have closed their stores in SF in the last few years because of it. Criminals are arrested 20+ times in the span of a year and they keep getting let go and they are free to continue committing crimes and it’s getting worse and worse.
So punishing criminals matter. Putting them on the right path matters but it can’t be consequence-free.
I don't think I've been advancing the idea that this should have been consequence-free. I just think some people (who, fortunately, haven't had much insight into "the system") may not be aware how the burden, financial and otherwise, for punishment can be in excess of the explicit punishment for a crime, and fall on far more people than just the offender, in ways that result in punishment being de facto much worse for the poor than the rich, even when prison time is in some way involved, and cause significant harm to families and communities in ways that don't seem particularly useful to the pursuit of justice. I find some of the ways these things are applied to be poverty-reinforcing, which is a really bad idea if you want less crime to happen, rather than more.
> In SF crime is running rampant now because of a DA that refuses to prosecute smaller crimes.
Just so you know, the DA came into office in Jan of 2020. That’s well after Prop 47 and nothing to do with him. If you look at clearance rates published by SFPD to compare 2020 to 2019, you’ll find that they are the same year over year at a surprisingly low 9% overall.
I see a lot of FUD spread about our DA where people don’t seem to actually look into what the DA’s office has done in cases or how often arrests are even made. In these convenience store robberies, it sounds like arrests aren’t even being made. No arrest and the DA’s office can’t bring charges. Just because it’s not a felony doesn’t mean they shouldn’t arrest and charge. Even if the person is released, the charges make repeat crimes more severe.
This sounds like cooking the metrics to me. If the police aren't making the arrests at all, sounds like someone up there is trying exceedingly hard to prevent this.
Just because the facts don't match your preconceptions doesn't mean you can just dismiss them. Proof that they are cooked, otherwise you don't have an argument.
I’ve always wondered, if someone is an irredeemable fuck up, what’s the point of punishing them? They’re not going to get better and it’s probably not even their fault.
I agree. If they're an imminent danger to others, lock them up strictly for segregation and not gratuitous vengeance (that is, be as nice to them as practical given that you're locking them up), if they're manageable, leave them be.
Except it costs money to incarcerate someone in jail, and doing that & foregoing the dedicated drug treatment also means the person is more likely to relapse and cost society even more money.
Especially for drugs, we need to move away from a punishment/vengeance system of justice and towards a rehabilitation/lowest TCO form of treatment.
I agree w/ you in principle, but it's also worth pointing out that drug rehab in the US (and globally, but the US is the worst out of the countries I know enough about to assess) is a joke, court-mandated especially, eg: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/review-finds-many-wh.... putting aside the indentured servitude model, whether court-mandated or not, far too many rehabs adhere strictly to ineffective 12-step programs rather than harm reduction.
they're not necessarily worse than jail ofc, but they don't serve any useful therapeutic purpose either
A good start to reform would be to stop making crime a profit center for corporations that provide prison and rehab services. Their interests are the lowest quality at the highest price, and they will lobby politicians towards that end even if it's not in the best interests of turning a criminal back into a productive member of society.
The government may tend to lack efficiency, but at least its lack of profit motive wouldn't completely taint the whole system.
true, although I think it's worth pointing out that private prisons aren't as big a driver of mass incarceration in the US as a lot of people think. the privatization of services like food or health within public prisons, or replacing mail or in-person visitation w/ extortionate electronic systems, is probably much more significant.
similarly most exploitative prison labor doesn't take the form of producing goods for private companies (like the Whole Foods cheese thing) but consists of using inmates to reducing staffing & other costs inside the prison, like making them work in the kitchens or laundry
edit: immigration detention is the notable exception - about 70% of immigration detainees are held in private prisons, compared to about 10% of prison inmates
moving towards evidence based, medication assisted rehab is a HUGE step in the right direction which does actually work - especially opiates. Soboxone, naltrexone etc. sadly seems like Meth/stims don't really have any good clinical stepping stones; it's an awful drug.
there's no neat middle ground like buprenorphine but meth & some other stimulants can be prescribed in the US, so that's better than nothing - at least helps w/ problems of contamination, dose ambiguity, health risks associated w/ smoking/injecting etc
totally. I'm very passionate about this, like probably most Americans who have families now touched by addiction.
I am 100% in favor of unscheduling all drugs and providing addicts under Dr. care actual pharmaceuticals. Including opiates. Even if they still inject it's still a LOT safer.
When are we going to see some of this settlement money expanding treatment?!
If anyone hasn't watched it, I highly recommend the new HBO doc from Gibney "Crime of the Century" shows some new evidence just confirms how evil Purdue is and specifically Richard Sackler.
They present evidence that the FDA employee who wrote the label wrote it in a hotel with Purdue employee.
This is HUGE. That label is what they used to market the original "Big Lie" that OxyContin “Delayed absorption as provided by OxyContin tablets, is believed to reduce the abuse liability of a drug” which is on the same level as cigarette companies being horrible and deliberately killing hundreds of thousands of us.
Second half focuses on the Kapoor's fentanyl corporate crime syndicate. at least he is serving a small amount of jail time. Sadly now corporations are moving on to Asia and Africa. It's disgusting and makes me so angry.
it's monstrous yeah. did you see the thing about McKinsey recommending that Purdue pay a rebate to pharmacies for every OD death, to assuage their concerns over dispensing large quantities of opioids? https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/mckinsey-consultants-pro...
one thing I don't think that's talked about enough re: the opioid crisis is labor injuries - imo people taking opioids in order to be able to work through injuries they've incurred on the job played a big part in it. doesn't diminish the guilt of the Sacklers et al, ofc, but it wasn't purely an overprescription problem
AND it seems worse incentive! dole out more, kill more people, and you're pharmacy will make higher profit.
Yes I agree just the general idea of 'needing' to treat all pain, and companies skirting workers comp time off is gross. Might as well dope up Amazon warehouse workers. Given them vyvanse and longer shifts... That's what purdue marketed and completely changed how Drs treat. That 1-10 face chart that is still in my Drs office was made and distributed by Purdue.
The hbo doc actually goes into the distributors. How one gov. prosecutor used the existing DEA law to order a stop on one factory warehouse for filling orders that were magnitudes larger than like last months, and are are clearly abuse or diversion.
But then this same prosecutor who had a great reputation for being tough got hired by these Pharma corps, and lobbied to change that law so they can't shut it down anymore. It passed congress unanimous consent. he used his position to say 'this isn't effective' and lie about what it actually did, and most LAs and members didn't bother to read it...
I'm aware of that. but some rehabs adhere to the harm reduction model & too many don't, which is why you get people ODing because their rehab thought expecting someone to stay fully abstinent after a month or two of inpatient was a better idea than putting them on suboxone while they got long-term psychiatric help. the 12-step approach is partly responsible for the abstinence dogma, hence my mention of it
Be careful what you wish for. The best ROI form of punishment is fines. Government loves fines because they make money rather than cost money. Nobody wants to live in a police state that hands out fines for everything.
Punishing criminals is more
important than saving money.
Simple possession shouldn’t be a crime but crimes themselves shouldn’t be consequence-free otherwise it turns a city into a shithole. Look at SF over the last few years.
Only if your goal is vengeance and not less crime. You get less crime with drug rehab and education programs for prisoners.
Would you rather have less crime & better society, or punish people for some vague notion of consequences, even knowing it's a worse outcome for society? Because the consequences of a crime, whatever they are, should also be chosen to have the least negative drain on society.
Amazingly, a huge portion of people believe, like this person, that the role of the legal system is to punish people rather than to produce a just and safe society. A huge amount of abuse in policing, courts, and prisons suddenly starts to make sense when you realize that people want people they perceive as low caste to suffer and they see crime not as a chronic condition but as an immutable property of one's soul.
The roles of sentencing in a criminal justice system are:
* Prevention
* Deterrence
* Veangance
The least-useful of these is veangance. Legislators think it is needed to forestall private acts of veangance. But in itself it serves no purpose.
To deter crime, people have to believe that the likelihood of their being caught and punished is high; without that belief, it doesn't matter how severe the penalties are set.
Prevention by detention is an extreme sanction, and extremely costly. It's only appropriate for incorrigible psychopaths. "Prevention" by court-ordered medical treatment (e.g. rehab, chemical castration) is a human-rights violation. Prevention by supervision, harm-reduction, or education are evidence-based responses that actually have a chance of improving things.
When the punishment is too harsh the rational response is increased hostility towards the society responsible for the punishment.
People are not stupid. They know life is short, treat them like pariahs that don’t belong to your society and they will surprise you with their despise for the rules of the society that made clear they are not welcome in it.
The deterrent effect of punishment has been proven many times to be no where near as strong as law abiding people believe it to be. Now you can say "well you just need harsher punishment" but many systems has disproven this as well.
Jail should be reserved for people who a direct physical threat to other peoples bodies or properties. Continued incarceration should be viewed from that lens as well.
Victim Compensation should be a higher priority instead of punishment, instead we put almost no priority to Victim Compensation instead viewing the crime as a "crime against society" and the person "pays a debt to society" that is the wrong position.
I don’t think these arguments are the opposite of each other the way you assume. I believe that punishment is important. I also believe that reducing the total cost is important, but not always to the point of reducing punishment where people aren’t punished for their crimes. It’s all relative, but here’s an extreme: you murder someone, it costs $10m to prosecute you and put you in jail for life, OR you are given $5m and told you get to keep it unless you commit another crime. The latter might be more effective, (I have no idea) but that doesn’t make it the right choice in my opinion. Obviously an extreme case that will never happen but it’s all grey is what I am trying to say...
> it costs $10m to prosecute you and put you in jail for life, OR you are given $5m and told you get to keep it unless you commit another crime
I don't think that would work simply because after that person spends the $5M, the government can't claw it back even if that person commits another crime, and if they are in the state where they are considering another crime, the extra $5M debt would probably not deter them too much. This proposal would need to be reworked to align long term incentives of the person with not committing another crime. It would also need to disincentivize people from committing crimes just so they can get this benefit.
In a somewhat related vein, I recall there being a proposal to provide basic housing to the chronically homeless, as certain homeless people cost the taxpayers millions due to arrests and illnesses from being homeless. Although there is no angle of punishment here, there is still the angle of those homeless not deserving free housing. I believe however that there is a strong case for providing such housing, when viewed from a dispassionate point of view, as it is both fiscally prudent as well as humane in reducing suffering.
Your example is so outlandish, it serves no purpose.
In your scenario you are adding an incentive to a single commit murder. You are trying to make the point justice is not about utilitarianism but about morality on some level - but your example is so unmoored from reality that it is useless.
If giving people millions of dollars also lowered crime, then I would be all for it - improve the economy, lower taxes, and reduce crime! What a score!
The only real reason to object to it would be problems unlisted in this analogy - like the obvious incentive to murder. But we're axiomatically handwaving those intuitive signs of a bad choice away due to a "those turn out to not be an issue".
The problem here is your conclusion ("yes this may look good on paper but your gut instinct clearly tells you this is a bad idea regardless") is based on using your gut instinct, in a hypothetical that axiomatically requires you to ignore your gut instinct. In other words, you're breaking your own rules.
I can tell you from personal experience that if the "victim" ends up being a large insurance company that had to cover a claim due to an act of the defendant there is in fact quite some emphasis on Victim Compensation.
This is wrong in practice. This is the theory put forth by Chesa Boudin and it has been an utter failure in SF. Criminals end up continuing to commit crimes because they know there are no consequences. Victims get victimized twice, once by the criminal and another by the “justice” system and the taxpayers end holding the bag in terms of cost with no real benefit because the criminals will continue to commit worse and worse crimes, leaving a trail of victims with no justice.
This idea of restorative justice is an abject failure. It might work for first time offenders, which I’m okay with trying on, but once criminals commit crimes multiple times, we need to protect society from them. Locking them up is the best way to do this.
The tides are turning against the idea that criminals shouldn’t see jails, because of how much of a failure it has been. I used to think maybe we shouldn’t be so hard on crime, but after not only being the victim but seeing what it had done to SF, I’m firmly in the camp of throwing criminals in jail. Mainly moderates like myself feel the exact same way in the last 2-3 years and it will show more and more in voting, especially in SF.
The US already has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and it's also by far the most dangerous and crime-ridden developed country in the world: there are 7x (seven) times more murders than any other OECD country!
Both Colombia and Mexico are OECD countries and have higher murder rates than the United States. Lithuania's is close. The U.S. is roughly on par with Greenland for murders per capita.
Sorry, my bad, the study above is for high-income OECD countries as opposed to all of them. Mexico and Colombia are both much poorer than the US, and Greenland is both not a country and a bit of a special case since the locals struggle so much with alcohol.
no it is not, Chesa Boudin did not in anyway advocate for Victim Compensation, he was advocating diversion programs completely different
>Criminals end up continuing to commit crimes because they know there are no consequences.
Absolutely nothing in my statement is about no consequences. It is saying that we can have difference consequences than mass incarceration, one that actually makes the victims of crime, specifically property crime, whole again. Which are current system does not
You seem to believe I am advocating for SF style policy of just not prosecuting theft crimes at all, there is NOTHING in my statement that aligns with that position. Simply opposing Jail time for those offense, which further burdens society and does nothing for the victims is not a solution to shoplifting and theft, nor is the other extreme of just let shoplifters go
The fact that you have a tribal binary response of "if you do not want harsh prison must mean you want no consequences" show your lack of understanding of this topic, there are lots of other models out there
I'm not arguing for a universal policy. Clearly circumstances must be taken into account for repeat offenders.
Drug addiction and the crimes that spring from it are a different matter. There is a clear cause for the crime: the addiction. Fix that, no more repeat offenses. However most rehab programs for addicts that end up in the criminal justice system aren't that great, so that's another area that needs fixing.
Regardless, my point is just that consequences for criminal acts should never be simple punishment if there are options with a better net benefit for society. That will of course mean there has to be a detergent aspect to things as well, which may take the form of a punishment, but not a punishment for its own sake.
When police selectively enforce the laws, a lack of sympathy for the guilty guarantees that systemic discrimination goes unredressed. It's not just that a dog like Karma exists, it's who the police choose to inflict Karma on.
>"There are too many innocent people being arrested to worry about the guilty ones."
Ow, wow. That's like 17th century thinking right there, when we used to hang people for petty theft, executions were a public holiday, folks thought it would deter crime but it stayed sky high.
Also boiling people alive was a thing, and, most egregiously, we overboiled them.
I am willing to bet that you or someone in your family or friends has broken some law somewhere at some point, possibly without realising. I don't think this line of thinking leads to a good place.
A close family member almost went to jail because they committed theft over $25,000. Had they gone to jail, I think it would have been easily deserved. I wouldn’t have had much sympathy for them either, and they are like a sibling to me. If you knowingly commit a crime, why exactly should one deserve sympathy when they did it with full knowledge of the consequences?
The idea is not thay noone should ever face consequences, but they must be afforded full protections of due process and be treated fairly.
The antithesis to this would be the police pinning another nearby robbery on your relative just cause he is guity already, or violating his right in some way.
I don’t know what your point is then. I said I don’t have sympathy for guilty people because I reserve my sympathy for the innocent people that are caught up in our current “justice” system. That doesn’t seem very controversial but what you are saying is so far off from that I don’t know what your point is.
Keeping someone in prison costs tax payers about $70,000 per year (directly). In addition to that, it increases the chance that their family will need government aid, decreases the average educational level reached by their children, and isn't especially effective at deterring crime.
Furthermore, just because someone is guilty doesn't mean that the law is just. In the past, we have locked up people for (illegally) escaping slavery, being gay, publishing books the government doesn't like, and many other unjust laws. Currently, there are about 3 million people in prison for no crime other than drug possession, despite the fact that countries like Portugal have shown that decriminalizing drugs yields far better outcomes for individuals and society as a whole.
Lastly protecting the rights of the guilty is critical because doing so is the only thing in the US that protects the rights of the innocent. Countries like the UK are set up to charge officers and prosecutors who violate rights with crimes. In the US, however, we've decided that the better approach is to prevent misconduct by not allowing evidence that was obtained improperly. We as a society can not be lax on misconduct against the guilty because it is the only defense the US has against misconduct against the innocent.
"Countries like the UK are set up to charge officers and prosecutors who violate rights with crimes."
Woah, hang on. I've lived in the UK all my life; I've never heard of a prosecutor being charged. Officers can usually escape charges by taking early retirement; policemen are hardly ever charged with violating the rights of members of the public, even if they kill them.
I'll step in because I really took a different (and perhaps incorrect) read of the statement "There are too many innocent people being arrested to worry about the guilty ones."
On it's own I take this to mean that we need to address the issues in policing and the justice system to have a lot less bullshit and a lot more impact. Time/money (and resulting fallout) spent harassing innocent people creates all manner of problems and is also time/money not spent on actually doing the job. In this I wholly agree.
That said, There is still room for nuance and appropriate recourse in actual crime. There are a lot of crimes, and it's pretty clear that in many cases the punishment doesn't fit the crime, or that the crime even makes sense.
Ultimately if we ever get our shit figured out I'd assume both of these would be accomplished. I just hope that we get there.
> I don’t have much sympathy for people that commit actual crimes.
Even when the "crime" doesn't hurt anybody except the "offender?" GP post strongly implies the charge was some sort of possession charge. Drug addicts do not need to be punished any more than they punish themselves.
I read the GP post as suggesting an actual crime likely occurred. You, I, and many others (especially people who tend to use HN) don't consider drug use an actual crime. Judges sometimes sentence (actual) criminals to drug rehab programs as an alternative to jail for certain things, e.g. if perhaps someone burglarized homes to fund a drug addiction.
I have no idea, though. It would've been better if they gave a little more detail about the nature of the crime.
Sure, that's possible. But, even if it were some sort of other crime that was exacerbated or precipitated by a drug addiction, the fact that the sentence included the option of rehab + probation seriously limits the badness of that crime.
If this were the scenario, and I had to guess, I would say it probably was some sort of property crime. People other than the perpetrator tend not to get seriously (physically) injured in most property crimes, and insurance often covers the damages. In any case, monetary restitution to cover the damage plus rehab. should be a sufficient sentence.
GP did not strongly imply it was possession. They said the guy “definitely did something bad”. So it sounds like to me it’s something more than just simple possession. That’s what I’m going with.
Yeah, it was worse than that, but waaaaaay under something that would get people to say "lock them up and throw away the key!" Also wasn't any kind of hate-related or vulnerable-group-targeting thing, of the kind that would get a person a torrent of death threats on twitter.
100% the kind of thing someone ought to be punished for (unlike simple possession, certainly). The main thing I find objectionable is that one must pay a flat-fee ransom to an assuredly-connected-to-important-people-and-overcharging commercial entity to get one's children out of jail. There are a few things wrong with that, but fundamentally it sucks that how much money you (or your family) have determines so much about how harsh a punishment is. It can be anywhere from "a little annoying but no lasting harm done to anyone" to "everyone in your immediate family's quality of life is now 10-80% worse, measured over a lifetime", for exactly the same crime.
[EDIT] and on a less personal level, the thing that bothers me about it is that a justice system that intends to reduce crime rates should avoid at all costs being a driver of poverty.
I don't think every person who replies to you needs to answer the exact question you asked. This is a general conversation, and people can talk about any interesting point in any part of the preceding text. Tangent conversations are just fine here.
I don't think me writing a comment compels anyone to do anything about it, so, what's the problem? This is also the specific person I asked the question of originally to whom I am replying. I think when I ask a specific person a question and get a reply from that person, it's fair to expect that the reply answer the question. Wouldn't you agree?
You also can't expect people to bother checking whether you are asking the question of the person you originally replied to. I actually thought about it myself for a second, and decided not to.
> I don’t have much sympathy for people that commit actual crimes. There are too many innocent people being arrested to worry about the guilty ones.
What's an actual crime to you? I bet our definitions differ based on something not-so-quantifiable. A good DA can produce charges against someone to make it look like an actual crime was committed when it's really something petty or much less nefarious. We've seen countless examples of this.
Rather than describing my sympathies at some nebulous level, I'd rather say this: I have sympathy for those in the criminal justice system because I realize most people are capable of change and that is mostly ignored by the public and the criminal justice system together. Former criminals are almost never rehabbed, and worse we see many examples of folks who were never criminals being introduced to a system that by default does not care about them but carries maximal implications for their life.
I have zero sympathy for someone who stole a $200 necklace that my mother gifted my wife, as a token of remembrance and melted it to get some gold. $200 is not an issue. The memories associated with that artifact, the legacy - That is the issue. And in CA, the laws encourage petty crime like this, because of dollar value.
I don't know why I should care about if this thief is capable of change or should be rehabbed. I want to kick the shit out of the thief and get the necklace back, because this person has caused so much anguish to me and my family.
True, you're owed by this thief, and unfortunately they stole a sum that can likely not be repaid. I imagine there are no amount of years someone can sit in a box that will make you feel better about that.
To me, when someone does something like this the criminal justice system is supposed to figure out why they did it (drugs, opportunity, gangs, etc) and rehab them accordingly so they don't go on to repeat this behavior in the future. What happens all too often is we stick them in a box, never rehabilitate them, and they go on to learn more about criminal activity in prison only to commit worse offenses when they get out. You don't have to care, the criminal justice system does because it's within their charter to do so.
How does this stop the next thief from doing the same? Looks like I will loose everytime and the thief has no consequences other than someone analyzing why they did it? Who cares about my loss?
Keep in mind, I'm not advocating putting someone in a box. I have no solution either. I haven't seen proof that doing what CA is doing reduces pretty crime either. So paint me skeptical
Ideally the magic would be in the rehab actually solving the problem. Maybe it's helping them get their lives back on track or correcting a mental health issue. I wouldn't say the thief loses money, a court taking guardianship of someone to do rehab isn't going to be a day at the spa or something. They're going to have to do pretty life changing work in that paradigm. I don't know if you've ever done enough introspection to change your life, but that is not some easy or fun endeavor imo.
The purpose of the criminal justice system wasn't to make you feel better or to get you your stuff back. Sometimes that happens but it's mostly by chance and not by design. Really, the system wasn't built to facilitate revenge, that's just the way it works now. That's where things like insurance come in. No insurance program is going to value a family heirloom the way you value it though.
I'm yet to see this magic happen anywhere in the world. Also doesn't address repeat offenders. The purpose of the criminal justice system is enforcement, judiciary and corrections. You are talking about just corrections. I don't even see enforcement for many many crimes.
And, yes, no insurance will cover my emotional loss. "justice" in the system seems to be missing.
If the answer to that is "deal with it", I'm obliged to return in kind the same mindset to thieves.
Right. The line of thinking around "criminals are victims of circumstances" has always stumped me. It completely marginalizes the actual victims of crime,
"property damage is no big deal, covered by insurance". I wonder how many people advocating that line have gone through such a thing themselves
SB-82 for California would make your crime a misdemeanor, so even more of a slap in the face to you. The cops wouldn’t even bother responding to it if you reported it, it’s sickening.
The system has a task to determine whether a person has actually committed a crime, and how serious. You don't want to happen to be a false positive. Nobody does.
But with plea bargain, I bet the number of false positives is somehow elevated.
Also, prisons are a terrible way to handle criminals. Instead of reforming the criminal and helping reintegration into the law-abiding society, many prison systems, including the US's, produce hardened criminals who learned a lot more of criminal trade during incarceration, or crushed people who have no chance to get to their feet again. Unless a society just kills every criminal, it makes sense to care what happens to them, because they'll be back.
So that raises the question, if you are guilty of a crime, e.g. shoplifting but you get punished like a e.g. murderer. Are you innocent or guilty? If you argue they committed a crime, so don't deserve sympathy, then it follows that we don't need to look at the fact if punishment appropriate. We could then just throw people in jail and do away with much of the court system, because with the complexity of the law, you can say with nearly 100% certainty that someone would have committed a crime at some point, so they all are guilty.
Proportionality between crime and punishment is a central pillar of a fair justice system. The extrajudicial financial punishments that the article and the OP allude to, are in direct conflict with that.
Like one of the previous posters said, daemonizing the guilty is what keeps this system from being fixed.
We've warned you before not to post nationalistic flamebait to HN. If you do it again we will ban you. (It doesn't matter which country is at issue.)
Discussions on sensitive, divisive topics are difficult enough without someone pouring petrol on the fires. It may not be arson, but it's at least negligence, and it's destructive. Please stop.
We do care, but you must understand that policing (and the majority of government that Americans interact with) is fragmented by design under our significantly federated system of government. As much discussion as this gets on a national level, meaningful change in this realm means change at the local level. And that's where things start to break down, because the most egregious cases of abuse are happening in places that disproportionately benefit from these abuses.
They chose to spend their money to keep their son out of jail. Thats was their choice. That’s the consequence of the son committing what appears to be a major crime. Hopefully the son learns from that and he should be working to help repay that debt.