A living death: Sentenced to die behind bars for what? • Hacker News Board

Re: A living death: Sentenced to die behind bars for what?

#361

Post by chongli » Sat, Nov 16, 2013, 4:29 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #340

spodek wrote: post #7

It's a crying shame. Normally that's an empty phrase, but it describes this. I can't imagine reading this and not feeling tears well up. No sense of what I would call humanity. From what perspective does this make the world a better place? What am I missing about being human that this fits into that I don't understand?

The ACLU page is rather manipulative in that they construe the facts very favorably to the convicted. E.g. "After serving two years in prison during his mid-twenties for inadvertently killing someone during a bar fight." Oh yes, he just accidentally killed someone in a bar fight. Happens all the time really, right up there with leaving your credit card with the hostess after getting a little too tipsy. It would be le…

instead of trying to paint an accurate picture with statistics.

People are even more unmoved by accurate pictures painted by statistics than they are of "minorities living on the edge". That's the problem here. The ACLU is trying to relate to people on a human level so that they can build some support. So what if they end up producing something very biased? Is this a scientific paper in peer review? I think most people are aware of the fact that the ACLU is a civil liberties advocacy organization and that this naturally biases towards the left wing.

Re: A living death: Sentenced to die behind bars for what?

#362

Post by drostie » Sat, Nov 16, 2013, 4:30 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #270

willvarfar wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why do you think there would be a sharp rise in burglaries?

Because I think people would be willing to do much more than just rob someone's house in order to get a $40K / year stipend for life. Honestly, I didn't (and don't) expect that to be a controversial prediction.

Well, it's not without controversy, surely. You're (a) focusing on the very short term; presumably people would only commit one burglary under this model over their entire lifetime; and (b) you're not being generous to the original case but taking it at a very literalistic level. It would be more generous to the point to suggest that the $40k/year would be spread out to support low-income folks who might have otherwise needed it. So, about 1% of American adults are imprisoned (and about 2% are on some form of probation or parole). On the other hand, 16% of our population lives in poverty. So we might reasonably expect to instead reduce the prison population by, say, half, and kick back that money to the impoverished. The salient point is that this would give a (1/2) * 1% / 16% = 1/32 dilution of the money, so we're talking about giving all the poor people in the US $1k - $2k per year in order to reduce the rate of crime being committed. This makes their finances at least 5% better (the poverty line is about $20,000 for the 16% statstic).

So the more-generous question is, would being at least 5% better off financially reduce crime more than the 50%-shorter sentences for crime would increase it? I have no idea.

Re: A living death: Sentenced to die behind bars for what?

#363

Post by rlanday » Sat, Nov 16, 2013, 4:38 PM UTC

bsandbox wrote: post #324

jmadsen wrote: post #285

I think at the root of this is a very prevalent attitude among a many people in America toward "not letting people get away with things" I don't think you can look at this in a vacuum - you need to see these punishments as simply another manifestation of this attitude. This is not a "this group vs. that group" thing; you may find this among "fire and brimstone" Democrats just as often as your "Limburgh Republicans".…

I think people's sense of personal safety is a bigger driver than revenge. In general, people want a hard line on anything that impacts their sense of personal safety. In order to feel safe, people want punishment to prevent others from committing the same crime. (Of course the flaw in this thinking is that punishment does not always prevent criminals from committing a crime).

If you lock up a repeat offender, you can at least prevent that person from committing more crimes.

Re: A living death: Sentenced to die behind bars for what?

#364

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Nov 16, 2013, 4:40 PM UTC

nhaehnle wrote: post #229

lancewiggs wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really liked this "own a problem" perspective from an HR post (1). Pick a problem to help solve, prioritise that and deprioritise everything else to solve it. You can also shift to work for an institution which is genuinely trying to do good, such as the World Bank or a not-for-profit. Or you can do what you can from within your own organisation to get them to be working to improve the world rather than take advant…

" ... such as the World Bank ... " Just keep in mind the World Bank is considered by many as an instrumental part of a quasi-colonial system of institutions that is set up to exploit the third world through their advocacy for unfavorable debt and a certain economical bias. I'm sure they also do some good, but they are at least a somewhat ambiguous organization.

[deleted]

Re: A living death: Sentenced to die behind bars for what?

#365

Post by enko » Sat, Nov 16, 2013, 4:42 PM UTC

omni wrote: post #356

enko wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that is attempted murder basically Oh come on. I've lost my license for what you'd call DUI - made a stupid decision to drive the 1.5km back home from a pub, got a 1 year ban and a hefty fine. Yes, it was a stupid thing to do and I deserve what I got, but attempted murder ? Don't be ridiculous. At most repeated DUI is criminal negligence, and negligence on the part of whomever supplied the offender with the vehicle…

Grabbing a stat off of Wikipedia, almost 18,000 people died in drinking-related vehicular accidents in the US in 2006. Maybe attempted murder is a little extreme, but I think negligent homicide would be right on the mark. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drunk_driving_in_the_United_Sta...

Yeah, not trying to downplay its seriousness. I honestly did not know how much alcohol impairs one's driving ability - I would have thought maybe 2 or 3 times, turns out it's more like 20x. Well, I learned my lesson.

I was just saying that attempted murder is when you actually attempt to murder someone. It's not the same, not at all.

As a whimsical thought experiment, care to explain why the other 60% of fatal accidents should not be classed as criminal negligence by one party or another? : P

edit: since this got a few upvotes, I'd like to expand. I'm in my late thirties; I got my drivers' license in the early nineties. I was never really educated on drink driving the way people are today.

I didn't take it seriously enough. I thought it would be OK; I didn't know the risks properly, and I certainly didn't know the penalties. I had no idea that being a couple of times over the limit led to a 20x+ increased risk of accident. Maybe I was stupid to not know that, nonetheless I had never properly internalised that fact.

Maybe everyone here is smarter than me - it certainly seems like that most of the time - but I am not completely stupid, and my internal risk profile was totally wrong about this. If you're of a similar age as me - earned your license decades ago, in a more permissive time - I beg you not to make the same mistakes I made. Drink driving is never an option. It is not even on the table. You are endangering yourself, the community, your reputation, and everyone you love. Catch a god damn taxi, like I wish I had done that night.

Drink driving - not even once. From one hacker to another. Please.

Re: A living death: Sentenced to die behind bars for what?

#366

Post by gambiting » Sat, Nov 16, 2013, 4:43 PM UTC

enko wrote: post #349

reginaldjcooper wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multiple DUIs do deserve a severe punishment IMO, because that is attempted murder basically and they are a danger to the public. The rest I agree are ridiculous. Huffing drugs three times does not deserve permanent incarceration.

> that is attempted murder basically Oh come on. I've lost my license for what you'd call DUI - made a stupid decision to drive the 1.5km back home from a pub, got a 1 year ban and a hefty fine. Yes, it was a stupid thing to do and I deserve what I got, but attempted murder ? Don't be ridiculous. At most repeated DUI is criminal negligence, and negligence on the part of whomever supplied the offender with the vehicle…

Yeah, I am going to side with the attempted murder interpretation. You should have lost your licence permanently as well. But hey, that's just my opinion.

Re: A living death: Sentenced to die behind bars for what?

#367

Post by rlanday » Sat, Nov 16, 2013, 4:47 PM UTC

nitrogen wrote: post #261

thaumasiotes wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Party of the first part: If condition C holds, response R is called for. Party of the second part (indignant) : But condition C holds! What's your point?

50 years of imprisonment at a guesstimated cost of $30000/year: $1.5mil. Cost of two wallets: $100.

What about the huge time cost of replacing everything that was in the wallet, if replaceable, and the intangible emotional feelings of insecurity that result from letting wallet-stealers run free stealing wallets? Probably doesn’t exceed $1.5 million, but to say the cost of a wallet theft is only $50 shows absolutely no sympathy for a victim, and is not that far removed from saying, “well, the guy who stole it probably needed the money more than you do.”

Re: A living death: Sentenced to die behind bars for what?

#368

Post by drostie » Sat, Nov 16, 2013, 4:50 PM UTC

PeterisP wrote: post #342

whiddershins wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel a man could steal 1000 wallets and not deserve 10 years in jail, much less life in prison. even if he never, ever, ever, learned his lesson. I personally would not send a person to prison for life for a property crime, and a small one at that. This phrase is repeated often in this thread, "draw the line," but some people will not conform, some people will commit petty criminal acts, for a lifetime. IMHO that i…

"I feel a man could steal 1000 wallets and not deserve 10 years in jail" After, say, 100 wallets stolen how do you prevent the next 900 victims from suffering? The victims have absolute rights for protection and compassion; but a repeat offender has intentionally chosen to throw away whatever ties with society he had. There's a social contract about things we do and don't do to each other; we generally don't take oth…

I think the point is that for each wallet stolen we would send a guy to jail for, say, two days. If we think that the guy has stolen approximately 100 wallets we prevent the next 900 from suffering by imprisoning him for the most part of a year, and that's it.

What I haven't seen yet is a comparison of cash, not to the cost of imprisonment, but to the cost of getting a job. That is, if someone is in prison for 200 days, that costs a few tens of thousands of dollars to the US taxpayer, so the arguments being advanced in these threads say "this should be a response only to someone who is stealing $10,000 from us, otherwise the government is taking much more from us in taxes than the guy was taking from us in crime." That makes some amount of sense. It ignores certain problems (like "who do the taxes come from?" and psychological damage from getting mugged and so on), but it does have some core "thrust" to it.

On the other hand, to be an effective deterrent to crime, you'd figure that we'd want to make the crime net-unprofitable; that is, you'd want the 9-to-5 job at $7/hour to be a more profitable way of living than stealing $100 wallets. So this would suggest that for an expected number of 100 wallets stolen you should really incarcerate for, say, 2 years or so, so that the original crime "really doesn't pay", in the sense that you lose job-access for a total sum of more money than you gained. (That punishment might also have to be increased if the chance of catching someone who steals 100 wallets is not 100%.)

Re: A living death: Sentenced to die behind bars for what?

#369

Post by enko » Sat, Nov 16, 2013, 4:51 PM UTC

chongli wrote: post #361

rayiner wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ACLU page is rather manipulative in that they construe the facts very favorably to the convicted. E.g. "After serving two years in prison during his mid-twenties for inadvertently killing someone during a bar fight." Oh yes, he just accidentally killed someone in a bar fight. Happens all the time really, right up there with leaving your credit card with the hostess after getting a little too tipsy. It would be le…

instead of trying to paint an accurate picture with statistics. People are even more unmoved by accurate pictures painted by statistics than they are of "minorities living on the edge". That's the problem here. The ACLU is trying to relate to people on a human level so that they can build some support. So what if they end up producing something very biased? Is this a scientific paper in peer review? I think most peop…

> people are aware of the fact that the ACLU is a civil liberties advocacy organization and that this naturally biases towards the left wing

Does it? I can think of any number of civil liberties which I would associate with the "right" wing of American politics. Right to bear arms, for example, freedom of speech and religion, right to life. The "stand your ground" phenomenon, a very American thing, is definitely right-wing.

It seems to me more that the "right" and "left" have adopted certain civil liberties for their pet causes, and the ACLU, a left wing organisation for sure, advocates for their favoured issues. But let's not confuse that specific organisation and their agenda with the general concept of "civil liberties" per se.

Re: A living death: Sentenced to die behind bars for what?

#370

Post by shanusmagnus » Sat, Nov 16, 2013, 4:53 PM UTC

was_hellbanned wrote: post #110

rfnslyr wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anybody else constantly live in a state of guilt? So many lives lost and wars fought just to get us to where we are, and we reap the benefits. I feel so guilty for having a good paying job in the city. I'm not adding any value to the world, none at all. I tinker with a few codes every day and make silly amounts of money, when there's people struggling to put food on the table working 18 hour days. I need to do s…

Take some of your money and travel. Go to Cambodia and don't be shy with your cash. Visit the landmine museum, do some crying, and see how the resilient people are (slowly) making a comeback. Buy all the trinkets and crap off the swarming children. Hire a guide. Stimulate their local economy, then come back with a greater appreciation of everything in your life. Vote (I suggest independent, since mainstream are diffe…

This is a beautiful answer, thank you. Here's a twist that I read about from Tyler Cowen, from marginalrevolution: for reasons a child of your comment has pointed out, handouts to the people asking for handouts creates something of a perverse incentive; Cowen recommends going to random people in third world countries who seem to be in need but are _not_ begging for money, and give them your money. Not sure about the practical effects of this (there's a whiff of the kind of paternalism that economists, including Cowen himself, debunks in other economic domains) but thought-provoking nonetheless.