Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Another side of this is that the harsher you make the punishments for small crimes, the less you discourage moving up to bigger crimes. Maybe everybody should go to prison for a while to stop crime before it even starts. Disproportionate penalties may be as likely to harden them as reform them. What you get out isn't a repentant model citizen. Unless your goal is to let these people rot and die and just release cor…
This is a reasonable comment, but what does it have to do with the comment you replied to?
For me, "the less you discourage" reads less clearly than "the more you encourage". I realise that the two aren't identical in meaning, but I would have chosen the latter because a compounded minimization ("the less you don't do x") is generally less immediately clear than a maximization ("the more you do x").
This is compounded by your opening of "Another side of this". This can mean "another aspect of the problem you describe which agrees with your point" but it can also mean "another aspect of how sentencing should work that comes to a different conclusion". For many, the latter is more intuitive ("two sides to every story" etc etc).
Not passing judgement on how you worded your post, just explaining why someone might misread it.