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Comment by sjwpv | Hacker News Reader

>Politicians, super rich people, and companies that disregard/disrespect the law rarely end up with long prison sentences (or any meaningful punishment).

That's something we've got to fix. But just because that happens, it doesn't mean we don't have to be hard on "not elite" criminals.

>If punishment was applied uniformly, maybe you'd have more people respecting the law?

I don't believe so. You think crack dealers, murderers or rapists do their thing because Mr. Richguy didn't go to prison for stealing a few millions? I don't see how those two things are related at all.

Maybe the case of some anarchist terrorists who wanted to sow discord through crime, but that's a tiny minority.

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Yeah, that's not true though. It depends on what your objectives are. Throwing away people who aren't well suited currently to living in society into a bin with a whole bunch of other such people, exploiting them, abusing them then releasing them back into society is a surefire plan for the 76% recidivism rates in the US. [1]

If you wrote an algorithm, then some tests, and your tests showed it failed 76% of the time, do you really think you'd look at that and think: "great, it's working, so let's do more of that?" If so, I doubt you'd be long for the world of paid employment. Yet that's exactly what you're advocating here. Assuming, that is, your goal is to reduce crime.

Let's re-frame the conversation. If 76% of high school students failed to graduate, would you point at that and say the kids are scum, failures, it's their fault they couldn't hack it? Clearly the system works. Here's a pick-axe and a hard hat, good luck with your future in the coal mines. Or would you say hmm, clearly there's room for improvement in the way we teach people or the things we teach? Let's figure out how to fix this.

Now if you just want an institutionalized way to abuse people, it definitely fits the bill.

[1] https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/recidivism-am...

> it doesn't mean we don't have to be hard on "not elite" criminals.

Does being hard mean scamming them? Because that's what we're talking about here, not about applying longer sentences or other harsh punishments.

It’s often not even the prisoners who are scammed - the people paying for these things are disproportionately the wives, girlfriends and children left behind.

Not only is GP correct in that there are plenty of people that unduly evade prison, there's also plenty of people in there that don't belong there at all (innocents, but also folks that could have gotten off with community service or house arrest or ...).

In short, the US prison population is sufficiently skewed away from justice that holding incarceration against someone is disingenuous.

I'd say that the biggest cases of disrespect for the law, by far, are committed by those who hijack the concept itself in an attempt to force their morality on everyone else - eg the perpetrators of drug criminalization.

Law only works when the transgressors are few. When the law is at odds with society, society adopts to being at odds with the law. If one truly believes in the rule of law, then it behooves them to reject nonsensical applications of it that undermine its credibility.

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