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Comment by dandrews | Hacker News Reader

> "sentences should be appropriate to the seriousness of what was done"

Sentences should be high enough to deter crime, and no higher. If one month of prison time doesn't reduce your petty theft rate significantly, then double it. Measure the new offense rate then double the penalty again. Eventually you'll reach that knee in the curve where any additional punishment you can mete out has little significant effect, and that's your magic number.

The idea of "lesser crimes" should not be used to influence punishment. You cannot linearly compare shoplifting against auto theft or battery - so it's not possible to assign commensurate sentences. Compile the offense rates and then go for the knees, dispassionately.

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This assumes that there is only one variable, the length of prison time, and that the response to that variable is fixed. Both these assumptions are completely wrong.

In Saudi Arabia they will cut your arm off if you're caught stealing. That's a pretty severe punishment. Do you think there's no theft? In Iran you may get executed.

What is most likely going to happen is that this knee will continuously move away from you as you try to pursue it. More punishment isn't going to reduce crime. People's response to punishment will change with that curve and you will get all sorts of unintended consequences. The US system is a living proof of this.

What you need to do is address the social causes of crime. Punishment should be the last resort, minimal and should be as humane as possible. Fines/damages/community service should be strongly preferred to prison terms.

> You cannot linearly compare shoplifting against auto theft or battery

Why can't I? For theft, it's easy to determine the value of the stolen goods.

You seem not to care for the lives of the individual human beings committing the crimes. It's not ethical or moral to sacrifice the one for the benefit of the many.

Because a drunk driver thinks how many years will he spend in prison for causing an accident and killing people and not thinking that nothing will happen because no one will catch him?

I don't understand your question.

My point was that sentence guidelines should generally be data-driven, the dependent variable being the crime rate for a specific offense. I did not mention edge cases, judicial discretion, capital offenses, recidivism, rehabilitation, and other gnarly stuff.

My point is: did criminal made a decision to commit a crime based on facts and rational tough or he made it based on other factors. Was he even capable of doing so(drunk driver, ideological driven crimes). Did he considered the length of sentence, when his goal is to not get caught and not minimising the time of incarceration?

Does in your example crimes with lower rate of catching criminals will end with a very high sentences and few caught will get an unreasonable jail times? "You have pirated a song, an infinity in jail is Your sentence"

"Data-driven" is a reasonable approach, but what data should be allowed to drive? Choosing what kind of data to use and making relevant conclusions from it is the hard part.

Yes. Surprise! People are not rational.

Anyways, the data is in. Putting more people in prison for longer doesn't work. The problem though is that in the short term reversing this policy without any other policy changes may not work either. People aren't as simple as that.

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