> They do actually.

The US has extremely long sentences. It has an incredibly high incarceration rate - higher than South Africa in it's apartheid prime, higher than China or Russia ever had, and yet crime there is no better than in it's contemporary developed-nation allies. In fact, for the one crime that is most directly and easily comparable - murder - the US is atrociously higher than it's contemporaries (a rate of ~4.8 vs ~1.0-1.5). The ridiculously long sentences in the US are not making the US any safer than it's contemporaries.

ok, I see.

the US is atrociously higher than it's contemporaries (a rate of ~4.8 vs ~1.0-1.5)

What is that a rate of, murders per 100k or something?

Maybe the US just has a population and/or conditions that are more prone to committing murder, that doesn't mean the country should scale back it's punishment of murderers. It's highly doubtful that the longer sentence length(is the US's longer on average?) is somehow contributing to a higher murder rate.

What did you think about how I described sentence length as being a function of cost-benefit analysis?

That isn't to say that I think all sentences are optimum, or even near optimum, some have gotten completely out of whack, or altogether unnecessary, drug crimes for example.

More men in prison -> more broken homes -> more people with more damage in their upbringing -> more crime

^^ that's just one potential mechanism for having demographic-sized populations of people locked up. About half a decade ago, it was estimated that one in nine black men in the US were either imprisoned or on parole. That's a lot of families missing an important member (even if not a father, a missing husband/son/brother is also an issue).

One of the problems with discussing crime (particularly in the US) is that people tend to focus on the criminal as a single individual, and not about the demographic-scale effects.

> What did you think about how I described sentence length as being a function of cost-benefit analysis?

Extremely long sentences haven't been shown to be an effective deterrent, and if anything, they mean that the prisoner is more likely to cause problems inside (if you're jailed for life, you can basically kill with impunity in the jail, for example). Long sentences mean more prisoners inside costing the taxpayer, less workers outside generating tax dollars, fewer families with present parents, and a broader 'criminal class' (and higher recidivism - if the only thing you know how to do is crime, because your skills have rotted...).

The justice system as a whole is meant to keep society running smoothly, and the penal system is part of that - it doesn't stand alone, separate unto itself. If rehabilitation and shorter sentences means that society runs better, then that should be targeted. The equation isn't as simple as "crime X costs Y dollars damage, incarceration costs Z dollars per diem, calculate for recidivism". Imprisonment has a lot of social knock-on effects.

politically it's much safer to promote harsh sentencing rather than opposite, plus no Amnesty international is going to bribe (to call it correctly - hire lobbyists) US politics into shorter sentencing.

> I would think your not saying that [...] I get that your trying to use it to support the next sentence [...]

I offer this feedback in the spirit that writing well is important and valuable to practice.

If you believe the criminal justice system to be about reform rather than punishment, then the first question to ask is "Is this person reformed, or should they remain in prison?".

If the answer is the former, and they're still behind bars, then something's very broken with the system. There are innumerable accounts of genuinely reformed prisoners—completely changed people—that pose no danger to society, being left to rot in prison on the account of their unduly harsh sentencing.

This is just my kind of off-the-cuff theorizing, but I had that factored in to the cost column as well. I wasn't speaking about a purely monetary cost. Things like the cost to society of having the person locked away, the cost or not of a society looking at itself and knowing it is a society that locks people away for offense X for Y years.

Another cost to consider outside the above cost column is that crimes of many sorts incur huge costs, both monetarily and through things like social cohesion to a society. And it is in mitigating these potential costs that the benefits come from in the above cost-benefit analysis.

I don't particularly think of myself as an über-rationalist, but ethics more or less comes down to cost-benefit as well. How do you arrive at your ethics, by weighing certain things against other things[1], or do you just go with your gut?

The question of reform is surely one that pulls at the heartstrings if your prone to having your emotions played on.

How can reform be adequately determined? I have no answers for that.

Do you believe that sentences are levied with the expectation that minimal reform will occur or do you think that judges take that into consideration? I'm going to leave this one to the people that devote their lives to it, judges.

I have heard of people released early for 'good behavior,' so this is not an unheard of thing. It's understandable that as you move up the offence ladder, the possibility of a commuted sentence on the grounds of 'good behavior' or 'reform' would become more and more remote.

[1]here is something of an ethical brain teaser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem

I think you're generalizing a bit. Utilitarian ethics come down to cost-benefit analysis, but that's only for people who are perfectly rational. Even then, this really only works for a definition of rational that comes down to essentially evaluating mathematically the costs and benefits of things without accounting for inherent irrationality.

To complicate the (overplayed) trolley car problem and perhaps see what I'm thinking on this subject, consider it likes this:

If instead of one person you had push two skinnier people instead of one fat person onto the tracks to save the other four, would it change the decision you made? If you do nothing, the trolley driver is responsible for the involuntary manslaughter of four people but you are innocent. If you push two people, you are guilty of the voluntary manslaughter of two people and will serve 50 years in prison.

If there was only one person to push, you would serve 25 years in prison for their voluntary manslaughter. But does this affect whether or not you push people? I doubt it. From a selfish point of view, the best course of action is to not do anything. However, I suspect that for people who are willing to kill fewer people to save more, the number killed does not matter so long as more are saved.

Applying the law to an ethical thought experiment is inherently fraught and I don't mean to imply that this is an academically defensible suggestion however I hope it serves to illustrate why I don't agree with you.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2015/1...

Do you know if prison systems that have more of a reform focus have reduced recidivism rates? If so, what can be learned from these systems?

If it has been shown, that certain methods lead to better outcomes, what are the obstacles to implementing these changes in the US, or other countries?

_You_ may be able to. But most people who commit crimes, don't. They're experiencing brief or not-so-brief lapses in their planning capability, and they're not looking more than five minutes into the future; Extra sentencing is useless as a deterrent to these people, because they're resistant to any consideration of sentencing. They're just not looking that far ahead. Organized crime is the exception to this rule.

Notably, they're not immune to the effects of a high arrest rate. If someone has a 90% chance of 1 year in jail, it is an inordinately more powerful deterrent than a 10% chance of 10 years in jail.

The cost being the cost to incarcerate the person, and the benefit being the person's inability to commit a similar crime for X number of years. So for really bad crimes that carry a really long sentence, the benefit to society of there not being a potential recurrence of the criminal's acts outweighs the cost of the incarceration.

This is a different consideration. This is "incapacitation" rather than "deterrence". It's explicitly giving up on the ability of a prisoner to make decisions, either before the crime or after the sentence; A criminal is thus destined to commit crimes, and 'taking them off the street' is the goal. That's basically how we've approached this for the last ~40 years of progressively expanding incarceration rates, unlike most of the other countries around the world. And that's a fairly inhumane, morally questionable view to take, not least the end of the racial persecution of minorities for being minorities dovetails precisely with the racial persecution of minorities for being criminal in some way, living in a place with high criminality or being tangentially involved in the drug war. Broken windows policing, where crimes may be invented, or activities criminalized, in order to get "at-risk" individuals into the system, where they are never permitted to fully leave.

We talk about lynching as some sort of widespread historical horror, but it only happened to 5000 or so individuals. There are over a million black men in prison, and a lot more than 5000 dead as a result of things like the drug war and racialized pushes for ever-expanding sentencing.

Why do I bring race into it? Because repeated waves of contentious race relations are the big sociological delta between our country, and most of the rest of the developed world. And overt or not, it's been central to how we've done any number of things differently, from the suburbs to the prisons to welfare to the healthcare system to our present political dysfunction.