Fines are stupid legal penalties.
They are, at best, bribes. At worst, legal means of destroying lives while keeping your hands clean.
If a crime is worth a fine, it's worthy of a different penalty.
Also, punishment is stupid anyway.
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I'd like you to unpack that "punishment is stupid" line. There are behaviors that need to be disincentivized. What's your plan if not "punishment"?
ReplyDeleteJonathan Beverley I'm not sure punishments actually reduce the things we want to stop.
ReplyDeleteJail time doesn't seem to prevent crime, merely to mke folks who made mistakes into criminals. Same with economic punishments to banks.
So, I want a bunch of societal changes, neither less than the other:
-- Reduce or eliminate poverty with a minimum basic income
-- Legalize most drugs, sex work, and prolly some other stuff where the laws are what causes victimization.
-- Take a positive stand to pierce corporate charters, allowing for the prosecution of CEOs and board members, rather than fines.
Incarceration criminals as punishment prevents crime. There's absolutely no doubt about that. And not in any bullshit sense either. The basic idea of our criminal justice system is sound.
ReplyDeleteLonger sentences don't reduce crime. Harsh punishments for trivial crimes don't reduce crime. "Scaring them straight" doesn't reduce crime. Etc.
The modern criminal justice system has been repurposed to oppress minorities and extract wealth from them. That's wrong. But the answer isn't to nuke the site from orbit.
William Nichols: What sort of sentences would you like to see for CEOs and board members found guilty of creating corporate structures that abet or demand criminal employee behavior?
ReplyDeleteJonathan Beverley what research are you looking at that enables you to make such strong statements? What I'm seeing, from the National Institute of Justice, for example, seems to indicate the opposite:
ReplyDeleteSending an individual convicted of a crime to prison isn’t a very effective way to deter crime.
Prisons are good for punishing criminals and keeping them off the street, but prison sentences (particularly long sentences) are unlikely to deter future crime. Prisons actually may have the opposite effect: Inmates learn more effective crime strategies from each other, and time spent in prison may desensitize many to the threat of future imprisonment.
https://nij.gov/five-things/pages/deterrence.aspx
Tony Lower-Basch Short term solution: The same punishments they would have without a corporate structure protecting them. So, if we'd send a mobster to prison, then let's do the same to bankers.
ReplyDeleteLong term: The same punishments we'd have without a corporate structure.
I do have a feeling that, if we implemented such things equally, they would change rather dramatically -- and fast.
William Nichols: Makes sense, but I worry that your long-term may mix poorly with your notion that punishment doesn’t work. I may be irrationally invested in the thought of robber-baron CEOs behind bars. Thoughts?
ReplyDeleteTony Lower-Basch Here's a ranking of possible outcomes, from what I think is best to worst:
ReplyDelete1. Nobody in prison. When people do bad things, they get rehabilitated so they can rejoin society. Alternatively, some sort of "You can leave" situation.
2. Robber barons and poor employees in prison.
3. Poor employees in prison, robber barons not in prison.
I think we are currently at (3). I find (2) to be more acceptable. And (1) to be the best. Do you?
I'm uncertain between (1) and (2). (1) seems inherently prone to amplify biases. Somebody's actually got to write the rules about how we judge when somebody is ready to rejoin society.
ReplyDeleteAdam McConnaughey: just off an instant google search: https://ssc.wisc.edu/~sdurlauf/networkweb1/London/Criminology1-15-01.pdf
ReplyDeleteI don't have any opinion on the paper itself, but the first paragraph is a list of citations to my point.
I think you're confusing the recidivism and deterrence. The best result of a justice system, is that people don't commit crimes in the first place, and the best way we know for a justice system to achieve that is that potential criminals believe they will get caught. (note: "justice system", many crimes are a consequence of poverty, and alleviating that is a whole other chicken)
William Nichols: and the place you rehabilitate criminals is called "prison". The fact that the current ones are profit centers calls for reform, not elimination.
ReplyDeleteNorway still calls them prisons...
I'm a bit with William on the idea that punishment ultimately doesn't make sense. But thinking about this corrupts and disables my thinking, the way thinking about the lack of free will does. Anyway, this Radiolab episode did some real brain damage to me, convincing me that no one's really responsible for anything.
ReplyDeletewnycstudios.org - Blame | Radiolab | WNYC Studios