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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it makes sense to say you support the right to reintegration and then argue that the idea of 'potential future victims' is enough to remove someone from a job. Anyone can be a potential future victim following that logic, so this person could never really be integrated at all.

I think sex offenders elicit emotional responses in these discussions and that the position isn't tenable at least for someone who purports to favor reintegration.

I'll pick a particularly thorny and controversial example but I think it's necessary. Imagine a member of a minority group with a background of severe violent crime spoke at a conference, he went to prison and served his sentence. Now someone attending says they don't feel save with him in the room and that the person should never hold an administrative job again. What would be the response to that?

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The response would probably be that they can't fire him because he's a minority. But that doesn't make it right. It just means that minorities can get away with stuff that nobody should be able to get away with,

if someone was found guilty, went to prison and served their sentence, I have trouble to characterize this as 'getting away with it' given that they, in the most literal sense imaginable, did not. This doesn't just do away with rehabilitation but even with punitive justice, because the punishment served is justified on the basis that the punished has afterwards repaid their debt to society.

If not even prison is sufficient we're firmly in the realm of tribal outcasts and I don't think that's generally speaking a popular form of justice among liberally minded software developers at conferences.

I used to agree with your general statement, until I worked with some people who were victims of violent crimes. Their trauma did not go away with a set unit of time served, but follows them forever.

The idea of neatly packaged-and-served justice doesn’t mesh with the reality of trauma inflicted by the crimes. Some stigma should remain with perpetrators, regardless of time served.

Not every crime can sufficiently be paid in the scope of one lifetime and more importantly not every person can be rendered safe for the rest of society in any finite term. I don't think its incompatible with the notion of justice to suppose that someone can represent an inextinguishable risk to society despite serving their sentence.

Rather than questioning the entire concept of justice one can simply question whether the implementation of justice is in this instance sufficiently sound. To give an extreme example its probably best that the prolific serial killer Gary Ridgeway remain in prison until he's dead. If our justice system were dumb enough to release him one wouldn't be obliged to accept or reject the entire concept of justice as one piece. One could simply reject whether Gary was a safe fellow to be around.

This isn't even hypothetical there are actually serial killers who are free men post conviction.

https://www.ibtimes.com/brazils-most-notorious-serial-killer...

Completing a prison term (or being found "not guilty", for that matter) does not spare you from civil litigation; why would it spare you from ostracism?

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