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Comment by Afton | Hacker News Reader

We change the laws making it harder for it to happen again. We restrict the actions of the individual to make them less able to do it again. We attempt to understand the circumstances that led to them engaging in this behaviour and attempt to mitigate both directly in the case of the individual, and generally for the class of people that this particular criminal represents.

IOW: We try to mitigate and reduce. I am not one tiny bit interested in 'getting back' at the individual. Prison as 'punishment' is fundamentally stupid.

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You never answered the question of what happens to someone who zeros out your net worth. Possibly decades of savings gone.

Mitigation and reduction is already being done. Punishment is a fundamental deterrent that has been used by societies around the world for thousands of years.

And somehow you contrived a solution in your imagination that you think is so correct that you can judge everyone else as dumb.

I don't understand the point of your first sentence. I absolutely answered. What I didn't give you was some bad thing to make up for the bad thing that they did. Because I think that is stupid. Notice that I think punishment is generally stupid. I didn't say that people who use punishment are stupid. Sometimes they are, sometimes they're ignorant, sometimes they just have a blind spot, and sometimes they just disagree with this position.

> is a fundamental deterrent that has been used by societies around the world for thousands of years.

Lots of things have been done for thousands of years, and we now realize that some of them were bad ideas. I believe that punishment should absolutely go in the bucket of last resorts. IMO it represents an absolute failure of the imagination of our society.

Your last sentence doesn't make any sense, doesn't address any point I made, no matter how briefly. It's just you insulting me. I don't think that is likely to convince anyone. Like punishment, we do it because it feels good. I think we can be better than that. This is a point that we might not agree on.

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