>Politicians, super rich people, and companies that disregard/disrespect the law rarely end up with long prison sentences (or any meaningful punishment).

That's something we've got to fix. But just because that happens, it doesn't mean we don't have to be hard on "not elite" criminals.

>If punishment was applied uniformly, maybe you'd have more people respecting the law?

I don't believe so. You think crack dealers, murderers or rapists do their thing because Mr. Richguy didn't go to prison for stealing a few millions? I don't see how those two things are related at all.

Maybe the case of some anarchist terrorists who wanted to sow discord through crime, but that's a tiny minority.

Yeah, that's not true though. It depends on what your objectives are. Throwing away people who aren't well suited currently to living in society into a bin with a whole bunch of other such people, exploiting them, abusing them then releasing them back into society is a surefire plan for the 76% recidivism rates in the US. [1]

If you wrote an algorithm, then some tests, and your tests showed it failed 76% of the time, do you really think you'd look at that and think: "great, it's working, so let's do more of that?" If so, I doubt you'd be long for the world of paid employment. Yet that's exactly what you're advocating here. Assuming, that is, your goal is to reduce crime.

Let's re-frame the conversation. If 76% of high school students failed to graduate, would you point at that and say the kids are scum, failures, it's their fault they couldn't hack it? Clearly the system works. Here's a pick-axe and a hard hat, good luck with your future in the coal mines. Or would you say hmm, clearly there's room for improvement in the way we teach people or the things we teach? Let's figure out how to fix this.

Now if you just want an institutionalized way to abuse people, it definitely fits the bill.

[1] https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/recidivism-am...

It's interesting, I often wonder where people who share your mindset get their philosophies and worldview, as if the world were black and white, good and evil, fair and meritocratic. I thought we knew better than that now?

The reality is that other systems in the world have much, much lower recidivism rates (20% in Norway, where they actually treat people humanely [1] the trope goes). The incarceration rates in the US are off the charts [2] and the recidivism rates are too. So either the people born in the US are overwhelmingly more likely to "just be scum who belong in prison for some reason" or there's more at play here, institutionally speaking. And furthermore, what happened in 1980 [3] that made huge portions of the population (3X more) suddenly "become scum"?

You absolutely can change peoples behavior. People don't want to be bad people. Some don't know how, and the evidence shows if you show them a better way, they grow and respond. Giving people room to live up to your expectations works, whether in your day job in management or in prisoner rehabilitation. The data bears that out. Yeah, definitely not everyone, but it's fair to say that we can do better.

On a joking note, I do wish you luck in your testing career ;)

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/why-norways-prison-system-is...

[2] https://www.apa.org/monitor/2014/10/incarceration

[3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._incarceration_r...

>So either the people born in the US are overwhelmingly more likely to "just be scum who belong in prison for some reason"

There's a lot of people who literally believe this, and most of their reasoning boils down to "Norway is all white". Have you ever heard "America is different, X can't work here because America is so diverse"?

Thing is, I totally randomly met a British criminologist while visiting Svalbard a few years ago and I spent a while talking to him. He generally agrees that homogeneity reduces problems in a society. If everyone's the same, everyone kind of gets along. There is merit to that argument for better or worse, although I believe we can also move past that in time.

Regarding incarceration rates specifically, the next 3 leading jailers behind the US (Russia, the Ukraine and Poland) are unbelievably homogeneous. I believe Poland is almost 97% white [1]. They're my people, so I think I can safely say, they consider a mild tan to represent diversity. There are homogenous countries that lock people up, and there are homogenous countries that don't. There are also diverse countries that lock people up, and diverse countries that don't.

I was trying to be very careful in not comparing Norway's incarceration rate (which is, itself, 1/10th of the US) but rather their substantially lower recidivism rate which I think one can more easily treat as an apples-to-apples comparison, meaning that there is room to improve on the process.

[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2005-10-16-051015...

Have you ever met these people? How do you know they can’t function in society?

> it doesn't mean we don't have to be hard on "not elite" criminals.

Does being hard mean scamming them? Because that's what we're talking about here, not about applying longer sentences or other harsh punishments.

It’s often not even the prisoners who are scammed - the people paying for these things are disproportionately the wives, girlfriends and children left behind.

Not only is GP correct in that there are plenty of people that unduly evade prison, there's also plenty of people in there that don't belong there at all (innocents, but also folks that could have gotten off with community service or house arrest or ...).

In short, the US prison population is sufficiently skewed away from justice that holding incarceration against someone is disingenuous.

I'd say that the biggest cases of disrespect for the law, by far, are committed by those who hijack the concept itself in an attempt to force their morality on everyone else - eg the perpetrators of drug criminalization.

Law only works when the transgressors are few. When the law is at odds with society, society adopts to being at odds with the law. If one truly believes in the rule of law, then it behooves them to reject nonsensical applications of it that undermine its credibility.