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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

Europe always seemed to be tougher on crime than America. Like, you get caught doing or even dealing hard drugs in the states, 9 times out of 10 nothing will happen, especially in west coast cities. But do that in France (or more intense, Switzerland)? The police are plentiful and they come down fast so that small things (like shoplifting) don’t turn into big things. America is just weird, we actually are really permissive to a lot of smaller crime and aren’t putting someone in jail until they actually kill someone. It’s law and order but not really, definitely when compared to Europe.

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It really is weird. Some little things are let go, but ultimately the "Land of the Free" locks more of it's own population behind bars than any other nation on Earth. A lot more. It's not even close. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...)

There are certain pockets where some drug offenses and low value shoplifting don't go as harshly punished, but others where they will destroy a person's entire life over it. Only a few states have legalized or decriminalized certain drugs. There are even states that legalized marijuana but left people behind bars who were locked up for doing what anyone outside of prison could now do freely.

Massive crimes tend to go unpunished or punished very lightly compared to minor crimes. Companies like Philips Respironics and Johnson & Johnson are literal serial killers who continued to sell products that they knew would give their customers cancer. They even tried to hide what they knew from the public so that more people would buy the dangerous products and die. Many people were involved in that, and there's no doubt about the guilt, but no one ever saw a single day behind bars for that.

Same with Purdue after they knowingly and intentionally hooked millions on deadly and addictive drugs, or the countless data breaches that go unpunished, or DuPont which managed to pollute the bodies of every last human and animal on the planet. Even the CrowdStrike incident (which resulted in multiple deaths) didn't end with a single person being punished to the extent that a person committing a minor crime would, for example, the purse snatcher who got 45 years in prison (https://www.aclu.org/news/smart-justice/extreme-sentencing)

You know, I think we (the USA) are just messed up: we don't really have as much law and order that we think we do, and while countries like France focus on reforming people earlier by coming down hard on small crimes, we don't, and so we have a lot more people in prison for heavier crimes because we don't believe in fixing problems before they start.

I can't say about France. But in Switzerland, there is a "three strikes" system where if you are caught with drug, the first time you have a $100 fine; Then a higher fine, called "Day-fine" which is proportional to your income; Then maybe, just maybe, a jail sentence.

Comparing that to the US, where if you get caught dealing marijuana, you get a 5 years minimum sentence. That seems disproportionate to me. Maybe police in the US is more compassionate than some militants make it seem, and that's why they don't like catching people for that kind of crime?

Looking at Wikipedia[1] it appears the number of policemen per people is two times higher in the US than Switzerland, and about the same as France. If it is true that "the police are plentiful and they come down fast" in Switzerland (which I would not agree with), it is twice as true in the US.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...

> Comparing that to the US, where if you get caught dealing marijuana, you get a 5 years minimum sentence.

That is literally no state in the USA, discounting the states (like the one I live in) where marijuana is legal.

I had Switzerland swat come down hard on me just because I wasn't registered correctly in the apartment I was living in when I was staying in Lausanne. You don't screw around with swiss cops.

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