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Comment by maxheadroom | Hacker News Reader

>Punishment is a deterrent and has been proven so for millennia.

A proven deterrent? Do you have any facts to back-up your posit? The crime and recidivism rates would seem to indicate the contrary; especially, in the states.

Essentially, we should - in theory - have no crime by now (given it's been over a millennium) as all rates should've diminished to zero, yeah?

At best, punishment as a deterrent is keeping the for-profit prison-industrial complex in business and that's about the extent of any benefit[s] (if it can even be called that) it might be providing to society.

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This is absurd. Something can work in some cases for some people and yet not in all cases. It's not a matter of always working or never working.

There's a line of thought I keep seeing in this thread: a purpose of imprisonment is deterrence by punishment. people still commit crimes. therefore deterrence by punishment doesn't work. therefore prisons should be replaced with free-range daycare for adults.

You don't have to like the idea of restricting someone's freedom. But would you rather that a violent offender be in prison and unable to cause further harm? I would.

It's not an either-or kind of thing, where we can either put people in a hell-on-earth where they're traumatized or we can let them go free. It's possible to acknowledge that a person has done something terrible while also treating them with some basic human dignity. Lots of professions agree that you get from people what you expect, and when you expect people to act with dignity many of them do.

Prison doesn't have to be a place where punishment is meted out upon some imperfect soul for an eternity. It can just as easily be a place where the inmates are expected to make an effort to understand why they are there and how they can move on from that chapter of their life. And we can still lock up the unrepentant for a very long time.

Many of the Christians that I've talked to use the phrase "hate the sin, love the sinner." Maybe it's time we took that to heart and allow our prison population the dignity of being treated like human beings?

And by your ridiculous standards, crime in Sweden should be going down, yet it is booming. The rate of sex crimes alone has tripled since 2014.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Sweden

This has nothing to do with an actual increase in crime, and everything to do with the reclassification of sex crimes in Sweden.

What reclassification? And how would you account for the fact that every other type of crime also increased? Assault, robbery, threats, gun homicides, detonated hand grenades?

Just curious, how would you account for the increase in those crimes?

The reason we use "deterrent" instead of "prevention" is that we understand that punishment cannot prevent all the crime. Some people will not be deterred by a threat of punishment.

If you entertain such a possibility then it is easy to see that the system with ideal deterrence (i.e. it detters everyone who could possibly be deterred) will also have 100% recidivism as the only people who get punished are the ones who cannot be deterred and will keep committing crimes no matter what.

> The reason we use "deterrent" instead of "prevention" is that we understand that punishment cannot prevent all the crime.

No, the reason is because of the four main theories of criminal punishment, deterrence, rehabilitation (also known as reformation), and incapacitation—that is, all but retribution—are all forms of prevention, and so “prevention” lacks specificity.

> If you entertain such a possibility then it is easy to see that the system with ideal deterrence (i.e. it detters everyone who could possibly be deterred) will also have 100% recidivism as the only people who get punished are the ones who cannot be deterred and will keep committing crimes no matter what.

This assumes that the system not only has ideal deterrence, but entirely lacks both rehabilitation and incapacitation.

"Deterrence in relation to criminal offending is the idea or theory that the threat of punishment will deter people from committing crime and reduce the probability and/or level of offending in society." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterrence_(penology)

So, punishment as a deterrent is currently a theory.

> Theory

I want to reply to wickedsickeune below, "Gravity is also a theory," but I think the thread's hit max-depth.

The word "theory" in the context of Deterrence_(penology) is not the same as the word "theory" in "theory of Gravity." The _Theory_ of Gravity refers to a model or explanation that follows from observed facts.

Deterrence, according to the Wikipedia page, doesn't fit that definition of the word.

> Despite numerous studies using a variety of data sources, sanctions, crime types, statistical methods and theoretical approaches, there remains little agreement in the scientific literature about whether, how, under what circumstances, to what extent, for which crimes, at what cost, for which individuals and, perhaps most importantly, in which direction do various aspects of contemporary criminal sanctions affect subsequent criminal behavior.

(Off-topic) It's sometimes (always?) possible to reply despite the missing "reply" button. Click the timestamp of the post to see it on its own page. That page seems to have a reply button even when the thread does not.

Thanks for this comment! I realized I was missing something when I got a reply (with my post being at the same depth as the one I couldn't reply to).

> Deterrence, according to the Wikipedia page, doesn't fit that definition of the word.

Yes, because the word "theory" was used erroneously. Saying that its currently a hypothesis would have been better.

> Yes, because the word "theory" was used erroneously. Saying that its currently a hypothesis would have been better.

No, it was used correctly; “theory” has definitions other than those in the context of empirical science and the use of “hypothesis” would have been at least as wrong as the scientific sense of “theory”.

Gravity is also a theory. The word "theory" scientifically, does not mean "idea". It means a rigorously tested and researched collection of co-related ideas that reinforce each other. Do not use it to dismiss something's value.

> The word "theory" scientifically, does not mean "idea". It means a rigorously tested and researched collection of co-related ideas

@wickedsickeune

That is how I meant it. I posted that to refute @maxheadroom's comment:

> A proven deterrent? Do you have any facts to back-up your posit?

> So, punishment as a deterrent is currently a theory.

The use of “theory” in that sentence is not in the scientific sense; it is a philosophical rather than a predictive model. (There are predictive models of deterrence, some of which might be theories, or perhaps hypotheses, in the scientific sense, but that's not what the quote is discussing.)

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