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Comment by ericmcer | Hacker News Reader

Is your first instinct that jail is too harsh and we should find them a qualified therapist?

I have several elderly relatives (including my 70+ year old parents) and if a person infected them with TB or Covid through gross negligence I would not wonder how we can help that person. I don't know if I am a bad person or what, but I struggle not to fall into tribalistic patterns mentally and view dangerous outsiders as people who should be shunned instead of people who need help. I guess I was just curious if your first instinct is so generous.

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It's clear that jail does not resolve the consequences of the crime. So then the question is, does the threat of jail achieve deterrance of the behavior you're referring to?

I would probably guess that anyone not thinking about the consequences of their actions on other people are also not thinking about the consequences of their actions on themselves, so jail seems like a pointless threat overall.

You're missing an important element though:

Not all criminals are deterred by threat of prison, and not all prisoners can be rehabilitated. For those people, jail is simply a mechanism to remove a known threat to society.

In this TB case, jail isn't a threat, it's a consequence that will improve the safety of innocent citizens.

Do you consider people with an acute neurosis the same way? Would you shun your sister if she had a sudden mental breakdown and believed to hear voices?

>Do you consider people with an acute neurosis the same way? Would you shun your sister if she had a sudden mental breakdown and believed to hear voices?

This doesn't seem like an honest analogy. The legal/social concern here isn't about the individual, it's about their effect on others, and the extent to which it is willful negligence of something treatable. If someone has a known, treatable mental disorder and, repeatedly, refuses to follow the treatment and then engages in wilful behavior endangering others then yes that can absolutely be an issue. A better example would be epilepsy: in much of the world people with it cannot drive (or are restricted in license type/conditions, no Class C for example), because the accident rate for drivers with epilepsy is over double the baseline. They're not bad people obviously. And my understanding is that just in the last few years some very promising new medications have had studies showing significant improvements without side effects. So perhaps under those treatments it'd be fine for them to drive.

But if someone with epilepsy knew they did, refused treatment, lied about it, got a commercial license and then started side swiping people with a semi, then yes they'd be "shunned" (dealt with). It's the "dangerous" qualifier in OP's post that is the big issue.

Darius McCollum [0] comes to mind. Clearly he might endanger people with his stunts, but just as clearly it's because of his mental illness.

If someone refuses treatment for a fatal illness, isn't that a clear sign of mental illness to you? To me, that's barely different from "God talked to me through my dog's poop and commanded me to poison my neighbor". Yes, clearly you don't want neither the TB-spreader nor the Poisoner running around doing their thing. But is jail the approach you'd go for?

I'd call those cases more crazy than criminal. A psych hospital would be a much better approach imho. Granted, they can look a lot like jails, but maybe that's something that could be changed instead of just using jail as a one-size-fits-all thing.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darius_McCollum

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