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Comment by snovv_crash | Hacker News Reader

I think the argument here is that being in prison is a bad experience and wanting to escape is normal, natural human behaviour. As such, the onus is not on the prisoner to stay inside, but on the guards to keep them there. Escaping is, as such, not a crime in itself.

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Evading a punishment is pretty universally seen as a crime, not sure why you'd think otherwise.

Because it's a natural instinct to seek freedom. It's in human nature. Like, expecting a prisoner to keep sitting in their cell when suddenly all doors spring open is ridiculous.

Sure it’s a natural instinct, but society as a whole views it as ethically, morally, and legally “wrong”. We don’t allow individual’s selfish motives to rule society in other areas.

Either way, the person I was responding to did not say it was a natural desire, they only said it was “not wrong”.

I guess there are different levels on which you can look at this. If a rapist escapes from prison I certainly don't celebrate that. I want him to get captured again as quickly as possible. But I do not think it should add anything to his sentence, at least not for the attempt itself. If he hurt anyone, broke/stole something on his way out that's a different issue.

Not in Germany, apparently.

I can think of at least one nation that disagrees: Germany.

To quote Wikipedia "In some other places like Germany and a number of other countries, it is considered human nature to want to escape from a prison and it is considered as a violation of the right of freedom, so escape is not penalized in itself (in the absence of other factors such as threats of violence, actual violence, or property damage)."

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_escape

Not in most countries.

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