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My life after 44 years in prison

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Re: My life after 44 years in prison

#111

Post by jolux »

peteretep wrote: post #99
rayiner wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In most states, the criminal laws are influenced by the Model Penal Code (MPC). The MPC punishes attempts as severely as completed crimes. The MPC approach is logical. Criminal law punishes moral culpability, not bad outcomes. That's why the act of killing another human may be anything from murder to no crime at all depending on the killer's intent. A would-be murderer's moral culpability is not lessened by the fact…

> Criminal law punishes moral culpability, not bad > outcomes That's untrue for (at least) many traffic violations. You'll get a considerably less harsh sentence for DUI than if you kill someone while DUI, where arguably the moral culpability is identical.

But the prisons would be overflowing if we prosecuted all DUIs as attempted murder...wait they already are.

Re: My life after 44 years in prison

#112

Post by joonoro »

dayon wrote: post #2

Out of society since 1975 and landing in Times Square... that's gotta be like stepping out into an alien world.

What's even scarier is imagine it happening to you now: out in 2050. Wouldn't be surprised if self-driving cars were the norm by then. Probably some crazy new world conflicts to deal with. No more Facebook or Google, a radical new internet. That is, assuming all of this fuss about prison reform nowadays doesn't lead to anything in 44 years.

"Oh by the way, your RSA keys have been worthless for a couple of decades."

Re: My life after 44 years in prison

#113

Post by aphrax »

pakled_engineer wrote: post #102
rtpg wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a decent amount of experimental evidence to counter this realisation though. The yakuza basically never carry guns around anymore because the charges for carrying around a handgun are so high that it's just not worth it. We always say that "well if someone wants a gun they're gonna get it", which is pretty true. But some deterrents can slow down the transition from " I don't like that guy" to "I'm going to ki…

The made Yakuza guys have underlings who carry guns and do violence for them though with the understanding they are to do the time if caught, so in effect nothing has changed. The criminals shooting at each other weekly where I live are all 18-25yr old drug delivery drivers working for established bosses they clearly aren't rational or else they'd realize a few thousand a week isn't worth life in prison. Plenty of th…

just out of interest where do you live?

Re: My life after 44 years in prison

#114

Post by duncan_bayne »

Thriptic wrote: post #104
duncan_bayne wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about reparations for the victim of the theft?

What if the person can't pay the reparations?

That's actually an excellent question.

Bankrupt him? Poor odds for rehabilitation then.

Enslave him? Tempting, but as others have pointed out there's a world of corruption and market distortion awaiting you.

I'm really not sure what the answer is.

Re: My life after 44 years in prison

#115

Post by mcv »

Asbostos wrote: post #56

What I've started to realize about people is that you can't influence them all with deterrents. No matter how long the sentence, or how permanent the memory of the justice system (8 months in prison for robbery, 50 years later), none of that is bad enough to actually stop people committing crimes in the first place. Essentially, people aren't rational. They don't act in their own self interests. I saw this also when…

But also, some people are pushed towards crime by circumstance. If you can't get a legal job, and there's no social security, at some point, crime may be the only remaining source of income. If you want to fight crime, fight poverty. Make sure ex-cons can get jobs and live a normal, respectable life. Make it easy for them, easier than picking up a life of crime again.

Re: My life after 44 years in prison

#116

Post by mcv »

cstross wrote: post #8
jacquesm wrote: post #5

44 years for attempted murder of a police officer, I guess with such a benchmark the next police officer murdering a civilian will be sentenced to at least double that given that they're supposed to set an example. Incredible. What standard of sentencing would essentially take someone's life away for an attempt . Makes you wonder how big a sentence you'd get if you succeeded, more than a lifetime?

His time served is actually twice as long as the average life sentence served for actual murder in the UK. (Some murderers are in for a "whole life" tariff -- ineligible for release on license -- but in general most are eligible for parole hearings after between 8 and 12 years and on average they serve roughly 20 years.) Just in case anyone was thinking that 44 years for attempted murder is a light sentence.

In Netherland, I believe 20 years is the maximum, and with good behaviour, you could be out in 13. The murderer of Pim Fortuyn (in 2002 our first political murder in 400 years) was released from prison recently.

Re: My life after 44 years in prison

#117

Post by saiya-jin »

vacri wrote: post #107
cb18 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sorry, I should have clarified ok, I see. the US is atrociously higher than it's contemporaries (a rate of ~4.8 vs ~1.0-1.5) What is that a rate of, murders per 100k or something? Maybe the US just has a population and/or conditions that are more prone to committing murder, that doesn't mean the country should scale back it's punishment of murderers. It's highly doubtful that the longer sentence length(is the US's lo…

> It's highly doubtful that the longer sentence length(is the US's longer on average?) is somehow contributing to a higher murder rate. More men in prison -> more broken homes -> more people with more damage in their upbringing -> more crime ^^ that's just one potential mechanism for having demographic-sized populations of people locked up. About half a decade ago, it was estimated that one in nine black men in the U…

the last part about justice system is not entirely correct - private prisons are a lucrative business in US, and owners/shareholders have very good reasons to keep as many people jailed for as long as possible. Hence the stats of US leading stats globally.

politically it's much safer to promote harsh sentencing rather than opposite, plus no Amnesty international is going to bribe (to call it correctly - hire lobbyists) US politics into shorter sentencing.

Re: My life after 44 years in prison

#118

Post by 7Z7 »

jrimclean wrote: post #89
cb18 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that criminals for the most part don't think "ah, I can commit this crime, I will 'only' get 5-10 years" and "oh, this crime would be 50 years - in that case I won't do it". With all respect, I don't see how this sentence is relevant to what I wrote. I get that your trying to use it to support the next sentence, but I don't see how it does that either. Extremely long sentences just don't add much to the…

I agree with you, but once a person is in the prison system, the goal should be rehabilitation because almost all prisoners will re enter society at some point. The problem is that the prison system isn't very good at rehabilitation as evidenced by the high rates of recidivism. Ask yourself this: does prison, as it exists today, make convicts better people?

>But what if the BJS’s findings have been fundamentally misunderstood? That’s the provocative contention of a recent paper published in the journal Crime & Delinquency, the title of which is “Following Incarceration, Most Released Offenders Never Return to Prison.”

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2015/1...

Re: My life after 44 years in prison

#119

Post by newjersey »

duncan_bayne wrote: post #69
WalterBright wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think someone pointing a gun at you and threatening your life is a big difference. Don't you?

I think it makes it worse , because of the physical endangerment involved. But in both cases the theft of property is morally equivalent to the thief enslaving me to produce the stolen items for him. If it took me a day to work to earn the money to buy my phone, and you steal it, you've just stolen a day of my life.

How about we start with no jail time for victimless crimes? If you don't endanger anyone but yourself, we don't pursue criminal charges. I'm thinking drug users and people who drink unpasteurized milk.

Re: My life after 44 years in prison

#120

Post by msandford »

vacri wrote: post #108
msandford wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you reconcile that with a very high recidivism rate?[0] The upsides to crime for some people are very high, and the downsides of going to prison are again for those people, not all that high. I think that's pretty obvious. The problem is that you're taking the beliefs about prison that you hold and applying them universally. That's not the correct way to look at it. A person with $1mm in the bank is going to…

> The person who already has a criminal record has very little to lose at least from a reputational perspective. Imprisonment isn't just a loss of reputation, not by a long shot. The loss of reputation is one of the lesser reasons to avoid prison.

Clearly not, but if you've already made it through prison once then you've already figured out how to survive inside. I'm not saying it's fun and nice and carefree, but seemingly for plenty of people it's doable.

The point I was trying to make is that to the normal person who has a clean record and isn't barred from any jobs, can own guns, etc etc keeping their record clean is actually very, very valuable. It's much, much harder to make $100k a year and generally participate in society with a felony record than without.

So if you take $60k a year loss in earning potential times the rest of your life you're talking about maybe $1mm or $2mm a year that you'll probably lose if you commit a crime and get convicted. That's a pretty big deal.

But if you've already got a record that ship has sailed and your earning potential is already much much lower. The spectre of losing the possibility of that life is gone and so there's much less incentive not to commit more crimes.

You say that the reputational loss is a lesser reason to avoid prison but I suspect that most people would argue that a couple million dollars is actually a pretty big deal.

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