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Comment by worrycue | Hacker News Reader

I think the penalties of many laws weren’t made with fairness in mind but deterrence. The penalty goes up until crime rate comes down. It makes sense I guess, it’s not meant to be a trade - much less a fair one - but to stop/reduce crime.

Edit: That said, super heavy penalties for what are often victimless crimes might not be good for society overall - might be better to allow the existing offence rate for that crime.

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"Discovered" crime rate goes down. Many folks actually got better at covering their tracks. The ones that didn't? yeah...

It’s still a factor in a potential offender’s mental calculation.

If the penalty is very high you will still think very hard about it even if you are good at evading detection.

Not really. It is the risk of getting caught that is a deterrent. If jaywalking was a capital offense but only one person in 300,000,000 a year got arrested and convicted for it, it wouldn't put a huge dent in jaywalking. Whereas a fine of say $75 and a 95% catch rate will pull jaywalking down to almost zero pretty quickly.

Yet , countries with the highest crime rates have the toughest punishments.

That is one of the clearest examples of both causal directions being plausible.

Depends on the crime and the punishment. I'd like to see the data you used to make this claim, since looking at many single cases it is certainly not clear that your claim is true.

Is that true? Crime across the Islamic world is remarkably low despite many countries being much more unstable. East-Asia, another region with generally harsh punishments is very safe. Like, even large Chinese cities with over ten million citizens and incomes far below what you see in the West have very low crime rates. Not to speak of more comparable countries lke Singapore.

The Islamic world is also notorious for how corrupt and non transparent it is, so getting accurate crime statistics beyond murder is going to be hard.

I mean it's not Narnia, you can ask people who live there. I've spent a lot of time in the MENA region. The countries of the Arabian peninsula who are comparably wealthy to the US are practically crime free. When I lived in Amman, the capital of Jordan when the population was a quarter(!) refugees, other than some petty theft in touristy places violent crime isn't really a thing. It was a safer place than a significant amount of American cities.

Of course you can, but that isn't necessarily a reliable source.

For instance in the former soviet and satellite states people felt like there was no crime, because of propaganda despite the fact that there was a huge amount of it.

>I think the penalties of many laws weren’t made with fairness in mind but deterrence.

It's a very common misconception that laws prohibit a given action. Getting straight to the point, they don't and can't: Mere words on paper can't stop a swinging fist, per se. The pen is not mightier than the sword.

Rather, the point of laws is deterence by consequence. You can swing that fist, and no piece of legalese can stop you in your endeavour, but that piece of legalese can and will stipulate the consequences for swinging that fist. The hope being the consequences will convince you to not swing that fist. The pen is not mightier than the sword, but the gavel can be mightier than the sword.

Obligatory IANAL.

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