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Comment by kazagistar | Hacker News Reader

I have an alternative simple rule: laws should save more victims then they create. And anyone who is punished by the legal system counts as a victim of the legal system here of course. In other words, it's a matter of violence reduction, and the war on drugs is a dramatic failure by this metric.

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Thats a good way of ensuring laws only supply to the weakest in society.

"If you imprison me my very large company will shut down and everyone there will lose their jobs. Guess you can't imprison me now, since that will cause more harm than letting me go" - any rich person

Unless the person being imprisoned can actually show a net reduction in jobs, this doesn't follow.

> laws should save more victims then they create

This isn't a simple rule at all. How do you quantify this?

In particular, the courts usually can't make victims whole in criminal cases. E.g. an eye for an eye doubles the number of eye-less people but cures nobody. You would need to quantify crimes that don't occur because potential criminals are deterred, currently incarcerated, or have been rehabilitated. We can't really measure this without making the law, observing changes in victim rates, and assuming causation.

Maybe you need to qualify this with the legal system should also only punish those convicted of crimes. Perhaps threatening to punish family members for crimes is an effective deterrent and ends up preventing more crimes (and thus fewer victims overall), but this isn't a fair system nor one I'd like to live in.

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