Please don't post snarky comments, especially not about divisive topics, where the effect is that of trolling.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13830801 and marked it off-topic.

Admittedly I didn't put a lot of time into making my point but there was a point: it's disingenuous to portray offenders as hapless victims of cruel cruel prison, when the real victims they f'd over, don't get to choose or buy better treatment.

There are still two problems with putting it this way: name-calling and a logic error. We can edit out the name-calling as follows:

it's misleading to portray offenders as victims of prison, when their own victims don't get to choose or buy better treatment

Now the statement is probably fine to post to HN in the sense that it meets the basic standard for civility and substantiveness.

As a reader, though, I'd go further. I would read the meat of the claim this way: "it's misleading to portray offenders as victims, when they victimized others". This is a logic error because the categories are not mutually exclusive. It's possible for victimizers to also be victims, typically by somebody else. Indeed, that dynamic is so common that a cliché ("the cycle of violence") exists to name it.

But we don't have to agree on that bit to have a thoughtful conversation about it. If you'd posted the rewritten statement ("it's misleading...") and someone replied like I did here ("the categories..."), the thread would be fine.

Ha! Ironically enough, the namecalling part you're pointing out now, is the result of my loosening-up on my own self-editorial controls, because I knew this part of the thread wouldn't end up seeing much daylight, and I started treating it as a one-on-one correspondence! (And I was still rushing a bit.)

What I'm getting at is more that making offenders into victims is precisely the intent of the whole system. It's not that the categories are supposed to be mutually exclusive, it's that we are trying to make them as close as possible to 100% mutually overlapping. (If they were 100% mutually exclusive that would mean one class of people was victimizing another class and getting away with it.)

Now... is it cruel to do this? Probably. It might be nothing more than vengeance. Does it lead to recidivism ("cycle of violence")? Yup. But it exists for the benefit of the victims. (Does it actually benefit the victims? Not necessarily. It doesn't bring back their murdered relatives for example. But at least they have a sense that they live in a just world where someone's looking out for them.)

So in other words it is intentionally cruel. Which is why, if anyone is worried about the cruelty of the system, there are ways of staying out of its jaws, mostly involving not being a jerk to your fellow man in the first place. (Does this guarantee you won't be wrongly convicted or even stop-and-frisked? No.)

Anyway you're doing your editorial job and I don't particularly mind being detached from the thread -- actually I'm sort of enjoying this part now. But there are basic parts of who I am that don't fit in with Hacker News, too.

The common phrase is "If you don't like it, don't get locked up."

Most people don't get to pick and choose when they wind up in the wrong situation. It isn't just criminals that get locked up.

Save the deluxe jail cells for all those non-criminals then.