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Comment by donmcronald | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty crazy how rich people get to argue they have mental health issues, but poor people can't. If she were a poor person that robbed a convenience store it would be straight to jail and no one would care about any past trauma.

I also think it's kind of BS to be honest. To me it feels like one step away from "the defendant is a psychopath that feels no remorse, so never developed the ethics needed to understand that murder is wrong, so they shouldn't be culpable."

It's rich people paying "experts" to skew the perception of what's right and what's wrong.

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And yeah, if someone who doesn’t have enough to eat steals from a grocery store we throw em in jail. I’d venture most people in prison were traumatized at some point. Take into account their circumstances. This is an educated privileged woman who defrauded everyone around her for years. I expect her to get community service, frankly. The only reason she’d end up in jail is that she took rich peoples money.

I agree with your broader point even if I think this characterization is exaggerated. The system is skewed toward the rich; however, I do think sentencing should factor in the likelihood of re-offending, and I would intuit that rich people (especially white-collar criminals) are less likely to re-offend due to some combination of greater fear of prison ("more to lose") and damage to their reputation ("people don't tend to trust fraudsters multiple times" though there are exceptions to every rule). Poorer people are probably more likely to re-offend due to systemic issues, and at least in my major US city we have a perennial problem of violent gun offenders being released after only a few months or years only to re-offend (typically disproportionately in poorer communities, perpetuating the poverty cycle). I very much doubt that differences in likelihood of re-offending account for the entire sentencing disparity between rich and poor; however, to the extent that it contributes to the disparity, we shouldn't try to solve for that gap by lightening sentences on account of poverty, but by addressing the upstream systemic issues (notably, lighter sentencing often perpetuates systemic issues, as with my anecdote about violent gun offenders).

>"however, I do think sentencing should factor in the likelihood of re-offending,"

This is very troubling thinking. The problem here is - not only are you sentencing them for future, 'possible' crimes but you are doing it on the basis of demographics - there are huge issues to consider here.

And what would it buy that isn't accounted for by using something more individual and predictive of re-offending -- like whether (and how frequently) they have offended in the past -- which is used in sentencing guidelines?

You’re confusing correlation with causation. Sentencing someone because they are likely to reoffend will affect poor people differently than rich people in aggregate due to aforementioned systemic effects but it doesn’t follow that someone is being sentenced on the basis of their individual poverty or wealth.

Holmes is reportedly looking to start a new company [1].

That’s necessary but insufficient conditions for her to re-offend, but if she doesn’t feel any significant personal consequences due to the fraud she committed at Theranos, why wouldn’t she try it again?

[1] https://www.eonline.com/news/1026009/after-the-1-billion-dow...

I don’t know Holmes, but one could conceive of a person being afraid to go through her ordeal again but with a high probability of being caught (how is the SEC and everyone else not going to watch her like a hawk?) and a high probability of a harsher sentence. Of course we could psychoanalyze whichever way, although I would guess she will behave better this time around.

1st - is there actually a higher statistical likelihood of poor people reoffending? Rich people go to jail less often, so I’d imagine those that do might even have a higher rate.

2nd - if you wanted to drop the reoffense rate, as well as the offense rate, what would you do? Why aren’t we doing it?

1. I'm not sure. It's only my assumption, but it should definitely be verified. Obviously if the assumption is bad then my conclusion is no good.

2. Several broad categories of solutions spring to mind with their own tradeoffs:

2.1 Invest in rehabilitation. Difficulties are cost and probably political problems due to ignorance (or maybe I'm ignorant for my faith in rehabilitation?).

2.2 Longer sentencing (or rather require prisoners to serve more of their sentence more frequently, as opposed to early probation, etc). Downside is cost, ethics, and politics (a lot of well-meaning, typically upper- and upper-middle-class folks believe that longer sentences harms communities of color more than violent re-offenders, or rather they don't consider the costs of the latter).

2.3 Death penalty. Downside is ethics.

2.1 - What does "rehab" constitute? Crimes of need are not likely to go away unless people's situation improves.

2.2 - We punish more people for longer than anywhere else in the world. Our prison population backs that up. (https://www.apa.org/images/2014-10-incarceration-chart2_tcm7...). Its absolutely not the case that we get better outcomes. There's no evidence to support that longer sentences will solve anything.

2.3 - Has its own problems - a nontrivial amount of people are put to death who are later exonerated. Its costly. Its also not an effective deterrent

Further reading: https://www.apa.org/monitor/2014/10/incarceration

2.1 you said we were talking about reducing recidivism, not reducing crime overall. To reduce crime in general, I mentioned addressing the systemic upstream factors like poverty and inequality.

2.2 Point blank if you imprison people they aren’t a threat to society while they’re being held. It’s not a good idea IMO, but you didn’t ask for my preferred ideas.

2.3 right, like I said: ethics

In general I think we’re agreeing, but your tone seems to suggest otherwise. Hopefully I’m just misreading.

It's worth noting that the right response probably isn't locking either of them up. There are a couple of different basic theories of imprisonment, and the US is on the extreme end of the spectrum philosophically (which is part of why it has the world's largest per capita prison population). Most western countries don't put people in jail to punish them, but either to rehabilitate them, or in the case that that's impossible, to protect society from them. For both individuals there are more effective solutions than imprisonment: Davila should be banned from being a corporate executive, and a person robbing a convenience store would probably needs a social worker and stronger welfare benefits. (I'm assuming a person doing it out of need rather than, say, being a kleptomaniac.)

I certainly agree that the US has a lot of room for improvement, but the US's policy on imprisonment is largely based on protecting society and deterring future crime (whether it succeeds in those aims is a separate question). Rehabilitation is part of protecting society, and while I agree that the US should invest more in proactive rehabilitation, it would be a mistake to ignore all of the great work we're doing toward rehabilitation (there are a lot of educational opportunities available to prisoners) even if the investment isn't yet world-class. Further, I want to ephasize your point that the disinvestment in rehabilitation is only part of the reason that the US has so many prisoners--the much more significant reason is that the US has distinct systemic issues on the front-end that create more criminals than many other wealthy western countries. "Rehabilitation" on the backend is probably not a feasible solution to closing this gap, but rather we need to focus on preventative causes that address the problem at its root--probably focusing on issues like inequality and poverty.

A poor person that magically had the kind of lawyers Holmes uses would do just as well. Unequal access to legal resources is the root of the problem.

Bravo! That's exactly the problem and not a easy one to solve.

Pay public defenders millions of dollars a year and hire enough to assign dozens to each case.

There’s solutions, just not realistic or affordable ones :(

>Pay public defenders millions of dollars a year

Payed from the same side as the prosecutor? And the prosecutor just gets the 'normal' pay or millions too?

Public defenders are paid for by the government.

>Public defenders

Those are normally Not the Superstars Defenders right? That's what we talk about here, if your rich you can afford the best Defender/Attorney-Team.

Your wrote that:

>A poor person that magically had the kind of lawyers Holmes uses would do just as well. Unequal access to legal resources is the root of the problem.

Yes, and if we paid public defenders superstar salaries, that’s where the talent would be. I’m not saying this is a practical choice to make, though.

My understanding is that federal public defenders have a really good reputation. It's at the state level that they're given obscene workloads and laughable salaries. Forget superstar salaries, funding adequately-sized PD offices would be a massive improvement over the status quo.

Ordinarily, it wouldn't cost that much to have a decent public defender system. Unfortunately, the entire system is built around people pleading to charges, and if every single defendant had high quality representation, the resulting flood of actual trials would paralyze the system.

True. Though I would say an underlying issue here is that too much stuff is criminalized. Case counts shouldn’t be that high to begin with.

Randomise the choice of lawyer.

I think there are probably a lot of people in jails and prisons who have undiagnosed mental illness, though.

I don't remember where I heard the following claim: a substantial rate of death row inmates in some study were shown to have prefrontal cortical abnormalities.

It's an interesting question if it's possible that understanding of the brain ever reaches a point where things of that nature can be detected and/or treated, either before or after a crime, instead of jailing people or sending them away.

Agree. This reminds me of the afluenza defense somewhat. [*] https://newsfeed.time.com/2013/12/12/the-affluenza-defense-j...

Usually successfully arguing that it was mental health gets you institutionalized anyway [0], so its not always as simple as saying rich people get to get off easy with the insanity defense. They've got to avoid the consequences of that as well, which they may or may not have a better ability to do with their wealth. Usually it seems they'll be able to get a lawyer good enough to get off not guilty.

[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/27/magazine/when-not-guilty-...

That's exactly what it is, but remember the government does this all the time. Even in their experimentation efforts of giving Sisyphus and having children eat radioactive material. They'll find psychologist to agree that something isn't morally wrong and use that as a basis for their experiments.

Perhaps the wealth is the problem. The courts should cure these people of their malady by removing their money.

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