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Comment by jimmy1 | Hacker News Reader

Not meaning this in a combative fashion, but why is only what you think right in this case? I think there are plenty of people that were actually OK with the 3 strike penalty, and more that would be OK with 25 years. Why set the bar for the next iteration to keep getting lower? A large segment of the population does not agree with decriminalization of drugs as policy.

Personally I would be a fan of 3 strikes and you are committed to mandatory drug rehabilitation, and aren't let out until you are clean for x number of whatever amount of time seems fair and reasonable.

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The 3-strikes law had an ostensible worthy purpose, which was to prevent incidents in which judges made ill-informed lenient sentencing decisions, which could happen through pure incompetency or ignorance. But like all simplifying algorithms, the downside was a sentencing system that was indifferent and uncompromising to absurdities, such as sentencing someone to life in prison no matter how relatively minor the first- and second- strikes were.

Even the name and implementation of the law -- "3 strikes" -- feels absurd. IIRC from the Congressional debate, the choice of 3 strikes is rooted in the familiarity of the term from America's pastime, not based out of an analysis of penalties and recidivism outcomes.

The problem of ill-informed lenient sentencing decisions was already dealt with by mandatory minimum sentences.

The 3-strikes laws serve a different purpose. The trouble is that some people simply won't get the message that crime is unacceptable. It doesn't matter how long we keep them in prison. Letting them out is like being an accomplice, because they are going to commit that crime. The only solution is to separate these criminals from society.

Creating a legal framework for all recreational substances could be another solution.

They are the same purpose and the same thing. 3-strikes is by its very definition a mandatory minimum sentencing guideline. Moreover, not every kind of felony has a mandatory minimum statute, whereas a broad range of serious crimes could qualify as part of 3-strikes sentencing.

It's true that some criminals may be irredeemable. The ideal is that only these criminals face the punishment intended by 3-strikes, the reality is that otherwise rehabilitatable criminals might be unduly punished. For example, prosecutors can use the statute to pressure a defendant to plead guilty or testify as state's witness, with no ability for judges to act as a check on sentencing if the defendant goes to trial and loses. And of course, there are the criminals who get life in prison for minor, usually drug-related crimes [0].

[0] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/cruel-an...

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/opinion/sunday/california...

That's simply not true. Our criminal justice system isn't aimed towards reform, not really. It's aligned with a puritanical sense of punishment.

It can be many things at once.

1. It can reform. This is often officially implied by names that contain the word "corrections".

2. It can satisfy victims who would otherwise enact their own idea of justice.

3. It can be a deterrent for others.

4. It can be a deterrent for that same person, if later released.

5. It can protect society by making the attackers be dead or physically contained in cages, and thus away from society. It's hard to rape kids when you are all alone in a concrete box.

6. It can fulfill a religious duty.

You seem to think that numbers 2 and 6 are all we get out of the deal. This is not the case. We get all of the above. With the possible exception of number 6, all of them are beneficial.

I'm pretty sure that number 5 is what the American system is mainly about. If you can't behave, you can't be with the rest of us.

The purpose of prison should be to keep dangerous people out of society. It costs society to keep people in prison, so naturally this makes sense - in a way it's our tax for the privilege of not having dangerous people around.

Non-violent offenders should not be in prison. Punishing people with prison doesn't fix the problem, better mental health services and education (real education, not lies about drugs == devil) does much better. If you want to punish drug users, you're right (and in morally questionable standing imo) and you'll have to pay for that, but if you want to reduce the drug problem you're not in the right.

> The purpose of prison should be to keep dangerous people out of society

Whatever happened to purpose of prison being rehabilitation? I mean... they are called correctional facilities. Are we so far gone now that we think criminals are beyond redemption and change?

There are better ways to rehabilitate non-violent offenders. Prisons should focus on rehabilitation, but what sets it apart from other methods of rehabilitation is that they keep dangerous people out of society in the meanwhile.

> Whatever happened to purpose of prison being rehabilitation?

You can't change someone's behavioral tendencies against their will. The criminal has to choose for himself to change and to be rehabilitated. The most you can do is to provide the resources and support he needs to carry out that decision once he's made it.

What you can do is (a) provide a disincentive for committing crimes and (b) separate people with a known tendency for committing crimes from the rest of society. Prison and the death penalty both accomplish these goals, but prison is cheaper and more reversible.

> The most you can do is to provide the resources and support he needs to carry out that decision once he's made it.

To the best of my knowledge, one of the problems with US prisons today is that the resources and support you describe are not widely available.

Yeah, and that sucks, and I'd like it to change. But I don't think turning American prisons into Norwegian-style resort hotel prisons is going to magically convince every American criminal to turn into a productive citizen.

I mean, presumably making it possible for them to be productive citizens would be a pretty good start.

Yup, I think I covered that in the first sentence of the comment you are replying to.

> But I don't think turning American prisons into Norwegian-style resort hotel prisons is going to magically convince every American criminal to turn into a productive citizen.

I think you're arguing against a strawman here. I don't think most people who support moving from the current system towards a more Norwegian-style approach are arguing that it is the panacea that will reform all criminals, only that it will do a lot better that the current system.

It’s not an uncommon fallacy to think that people only commit crimes because of poverty, desperation, or oppression, and that solving these problems is sufficient to stop crime. It’s also not an uncommon fallacy to think some sufficiently liberalized, rehabilitative form of incarceration would actually work for 95% of criminals. The fact that some people are just awful and need to be quarantined from society is uncomfortable, taboo, or alien to a lot of people.

Maybe this comes across to you as a straw man argument because you don’t live somewhere completely insane where there is political opposition to building jails and police stations in the first place because of wacky leftist ideology. Sometimes I envy people who assume I’m arguing with a straw man.

Because I don’t really care about someone’s moral belief in what’s right or wrong as long as it doesn’t effect anyone else.

We have an existence proof that the “War on Drugs” has been a failure, has not made drugs any harder to get, and penalties are unequally applied on the poor and minorities.

> Because I don’t really care about someone’s moral belief in what’s right or wrong as long as it doesn’t effect anyone else.

Moral beliefs tend to eventually end up externalized in some form or fashion. What then? What if I told you that everything we do affects someone else? This post-modernist idea that you can do whatever you want as long as it doesn't affect someone else is a fallacy. Unless you live in an isolated, self sustaining biodome in Antartica, chances are you are impacting at least one other life in extreme cases, if not more.

The "Desert Fathers" of the ancient Church, of whom left the holy cities with the extent purpose of leaving the world to not impact others (or be bothered by the cares of the world) ironically, impacted millions.

Yes and someone else’s moral belief led to miscegenation (interracial marriage) being illegal into the late 60s, Jim Crow laws, laws against homosexuality, and the War on Drugs.

Let’s not forget if those preaching “morality” had their way they would also ban birth control.

You’ll have to excuse me if I don’t pay too much credence to the “moral majority”.

This is flawed perspective and your three examples are a very mixed bag of unequal occurrences. All three of those situations are unlike the other. Jim Crow laws were very much not due to a "majority" -- if you remember, the country went into civil war over the issue of slavery, and the North has always been the more populous part of the country. Laws against Homosexuality were part of the fabric of pretty much most of the world (still so in 72 countries, as well as 70% of the commonwealth states), so not sure you can attribute that to any one particular moral majority, it was more of a global majority, so there goes that comparison out the window. And finally, the War on Drugs had nothing to do with morality, but basically one man's smart campaign to manipulate the public so that he could target minorities and anti-war protestors (later -- the CIA learned you could make a nice dime, so they continued it in the name of "national security" -- wonder where we heard that before)

And finally, your argument is very flawed because systems of morality are what have lead to the greatest human progress for thousands of years, and you are invalidating all of that on some unfortunate decade-long (strong emphasis on decade long, not millennium long) effects of fundamentalists and charlatans who, as history has already judged, were on the wrong side of things? You must have a very bleak outlook on humanity.

As far as US history.

Should I start with the mass slaughter of native Americans, slavery, Japanese internment camps, etc?

All the while the “good Christians” either actively took part or looked the other way?

Certain addictions are pretty much life sentences. Heroin addicts will always want another hit regardless of how good they are at suppressing the addiction. A lot of people OD because they've been clean for so long that their tolerance isn't what it used to be. Maybe rehab should be the first step and not the third. Catch someone as early as possible into their addiction and they might have a fighting chance. Catch them when they've already been through the prison system a couple times and there's little hope. No one wants to hire a recidivist junkie.

There's two overlapping issues being conflated here: whether drug possession and use should be a crime, and how criminals should be punished.

I have no problem with the notion that violent criminals, thieves, and con men should be punished, and that those who persist in their crimes should be permanently removed from civil society. I do have a problem with the notion that someone only guilty of carrying two ounces of cannabis or transporting a particular species of fish across state lines should be punished in a similar fashion. That's because I think one category of felonies should continue to be felonious, and the other category should cease to be felonious.

> Not meaning this in a combative fashion, but why is only what you think right in this case?

The law of noncontradiction: to believe X is necessarily to believe they the belief in not-X is incorrect. One may believe it is right to tolerate or accommodate the incorrect belief, but that's not the same as viewing it as correct.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_noncontradiction

The law of non-contradiction is valid for mathematics and propositional logic, not politics and ethics.

And as far as the law is concerned. The only “ethics” that the government should legislate are behaviors that infringe on someone else’s liberty/property/rights.

If someone feels that drug abuse is “unethical” shouldn’t matter as long as the drug addict is not breaking into your home or otherwise causing you harm.

I think ethics do (or should) play a part in large areas of politics, e.g. taxation, healthcare, foreign policy, criminal justice sanctions, et.c. Governments should legislate based on more than economics alone.

I agree but the war on drugs and deciding that someone should be convicted for using or buying drugs is based solely on someone’s personal belief about what someone else should do with their own body.

Yes, and we should wary of anyone who proposes to forcfully enslave others for simply excersizing their liberty to consume drugs w/o a permit from a prescriber.

> The law of non-contradiction is valid for mathematics and propositional logic, not politics and ethics.

The law of noncontradiction is valid everywhere. One can have a meta-ethical view (which would apply to politics insofar as that depends on ethics) that ethical propositions are neither true nor false but simply subjectively preferred behavior or subjectively opposed behavior, but then one wouldn't actually believe any subordinate ethical proposition to be true; noncontradiction would still hold just fine.

But lots of people believe that ethical propositions can be true or false even if they accept some area of preference, and anyone who believes a particular ethical proposition is true must also believe that any contradictory position (the simplest case of which is simple negation) is false.

If you accept 'areas of preference' don't you also accept that other positions, even those in direct conflict with your own, are not necessarily wrong or false, but could simply be different?

> If you accept 'areas of preference' don't you also accept that other positions, even those in direct conflict with your own, are not necessarily wrong or false, but could simply be different?

If you accept areas of preference, then your beliefs in those areas are not of the form ‘X is right’ or ‘X is wrong’ but ‘X is my preference’ or ‘X is not my preference’. A statement about someone else's preference in that area does not conflict with yours even if the preferences differs (‘A prefers X’ does not contradict ‘B prefers not-X’.) Any statement of universal truth by a third party in the area of preference conflicts with the belief that it is validly an area of preference, OTOH, and cannot simultaneously be viewed as anything but incorrect while believing the area to be validly one of preference.

3 strikes is a lie as a policy though. You can get in trouble once and use up all three strikes if they do separate charges. Don't fall for it.

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