you miss the point. prisons are a massive industry with serious lobbying clout. Putting lots of people in prison for a long time isn't a punishment to the prisoner, it's a gift to the prison system. The "punishment" is just a side effect, and the longer it lasts, the richer the people in power get.
the harm inflicted by a crime has been detached from the relative prison sentence for a long time. Classic example is getting more time in jail (and loosing your house) for having a marajuana joint than if you raped someone. Fortunately this is changing in the case of marajuana but there are many other drugs for which a single personal dose will still get you more time than rape.
What can happen in certain states, is that repeat offenders are hit with escalating prison terms each time they are convicted (the classic example are the three-strikes-your-out laws), whereby someone can be sentenced to a life term.
In those cases, sentences don't translate to actual prison terms since non-violent offenders are routinely paroled.
There's still a lot of heavy handedness, and I question the justice of escalating sentencing, but the comments above create a false impression of the US justice system.
I've rarely seen a prison term issued by a US court which I have not found to be excessive relative to my experience with sentences in Germany.
The statistic of the total number of prisoners in the US per capita is well-known and gives us a strong indication that sentencing must be a factor. Still, I'd love to see some official data on this.
It's not as if these laws arise in a vacuum.
Ross Ulbricht got double life imprisonment + 40 years for a non violent crime.
It was, in fact, pay of the allegations of the crimes he was charged with, and it explicitly was a sentencing factor. He wasn't charged with, say, attempted murder or conspiracy to commit murder for the alleged murder-for-hire scheme, though.
It was used as an aggravation factor (if that's the right word) at sentencing, that's true. But he wasn't charged with it.
Does that really sound logical to you?
> Federal prosecutors alleged that Ulbricht had paid $730,000 in murder-for-hire deals targeting at least five people,[29] allegedly because they threatened to reveal Ulbricht's Silk Road enterprise.[37][38] Prosecutors believe no contracted killing actually occurred.[29] Ulbricht was not charged in his trial in New York federal court with any murder-for-hire,[29][39] but evidence was introduced at trial supporting the allegations.[29][38] The evidence that Ulbricht had commissioned murders was considered by the judge in sentencing Ulbricht to life, and was a factor in the Second Circuit's decision to affirm the life sentence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Ulbricht#Silk_Road,_arres...
eg. If you punch someone in an altercation, they might fall and hit their head and die - and people have been jailed for doing so - but if the same punch happens to not cause a fall, it will likely result in minimal bruising and perhaps a concussion that will heal in a few weeks.
Do these crimes deserve the same sentence or does outcome matter?
If you shoot at me with intention to kill, and miss, attempted murder almost always carries the same weight as murder so outcome does not matter.
If you punch me in the face on top of a cliff, and I stumbke and fall to my death, your intention may only have been tissue damage, but you were careless as to (reasonable potential) consequences.
And yes the falling and hitting ones head is iirc seen as a reasonably predictable consequence.
Not a perfect example, but let's say an addict robs someone on the street, buys a big score of her favorite drug and then sells some of that to an addict friend. Would that be considered three strikes?
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2011/08/11/139536686...
Do you have a source for this ever actually happening?
Here's a selection of decade+ prison sentences for marijuana: https://www.boulderdefenseattorney.com/top-10-non-violent-ma...
Skimming through your link, I don’t see anything involving someone with a single joint being incarcerated for anywhere near a rape charge.
Some of those sentences may be out of line on their own, but you also don’t have people being put away for 20 years for being caught smoking a joint.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_in_the_United_States#Pros...
Do you have evidence that it is not commonly how rape cases against affluent white men are prosecuted or sentenced?
Indeed, my understanding is that rape is typically not prosecuted at all. :-/
Sentences are delivered by judges. There have been prominent examples of judges bribed by prison systems to deliver harsh sentences, but that doesn't seem to be the norm.
Am I naive thinking that most judges deliver the sentence they believe is just, and that if something needs to be reformed, it's their perception of justice and not just the prison system?
Often, legislature decides the sentence length due to mandatory minimums.
So then it really needs legislative reform to adjust those minimum sentences.
He compares our current lease enforcement system to a chokehold: "Butler describes a chokehold as “a process of coercing submission that is self-reinforcing. A chokehold justifies additional pressure on the body because a body does not come into compliance, but a body cannot come into compliance because of the vice grip that is on it.” That, he says, is the black experience in the United States. "
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ezra-klein-show/id...
China - disappeared for comparing xi jing ping the dictator to Winnie the Pooh, or mention Hong Kong or Taiwan in a postiive light on wechat
Singapore - 2 years in jail for selling gum, death penalty for Having drugs
Vietnam - 34 years for drug trafficking
Also, a friend's weed dealer was busted about a while ago. He got 8 years, not 34 years, from what I heard.
I'm not trying to paint a rosy picture here. Theres huge corruption in the government and a lot of pollution and traffic problems. But it's not the dystopia that it's often portrayed as in the west. On the contrary, it's a beautiful and easy country in which to live, as long as you're above the poverty line. But food and necessities are amazingly cheap here and only about 10% are below the national poverty line here (in the US it's around 12%).
What do they have against gum?
Gum tends to end up everywhere and is super hard to relive once dried.
But there are other high penalities for dirting the streets/parks/houses related offenses.
But then it's a city where you could (theoretically) walk barefoot in the streets without worrying about dirt it similar. Through it's probably not legal either and you do have to worry about burning you feed on the hot asphalt ;=}
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170420003622/http://thediploma...
https://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/prison-popul...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_...
If you don’t get to live in a city because you lack the permit, is a rural Chinese citizen jailed in their home town?
If you don’t get to do stuff like drive without your male guardian present, is that Saudi woman watched over by a prison guard?
If you’re a German kid and you’re just tracked into trade school, did society put you to work for it below what you’re worth? Like prisoners being paid below minimum wage to make Victoria’s Secret underwear?
I’m not a hack, I know these things are different than jail. Coercion and incarceration takes many forms around the world though. Expand your mind beyond the formalism of the jail cell and you start to see it everywhere. That’s not necessarily a bad thing - that’s the self awareness this writer is asking for.
Besides, there’s also Belarus.
https://www.statista.com/chart/3848/the-us-murder-rate-compa...
Hacking an online store and a sensitive clinical system should be punished with very different levels of punishment.
If medical systems he hacked could have hurt people then this is basically conscious intention to hurt others, and it doesn't matter that he didn't. So in this particular case its really hard to stand on his side. If we were talking about some credit card scam - than I would gladly support you that we better try and change a person, and prison is super overkill for this type of crime. But if we are talking about hurting others - this can't be justified.
I'd like prison to achieve the kind of justice that yes, does provide some sense of justice to victims, but aims to reform criminals and reduce crime. Now, independent of this case, America is clearly failing, because our recidivism rate is (depending on the study you look at) between 40% and 70% over a matter of months and years, which is pretty terrible [1]. Many other first-world countries are achieving far better rates. And for per-capita imprisonment, America is literally the worst in the world according to Wikipedia [2]. Last I checked, a couple of years ago, it was second.
But back to this specific article. Yes, this person was convicted of a serious crime and went to jail. But while there they were isolated in a way I consider a violation of the 8th amendment without due process. Not only do I consider this a failing of "justice" in its own right, but it's left this person less able to go and rejoin society in a productive way. Poverty is one of the strongest predictors of criminality: how is this helpful to anyone? Just because you want to punish it and doing so seems fair, doesn't mean the way the US justice system will implement that punishment is doing something good in the end. You can reform that system without just excusing serious crimes.
[1] https://atlascorps.org/recidivism-united-states-overview/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
edit: I feel like this is the same kind of misunderstanding everyone's having with the #BlackLivesMatter vs #BackTheBlue stuff right now. People complain about the way some police are doing their jobs, and point out ways some other police departments or police in other countries do it much better, and the alternative we consider is no police. What the actual fuck? Can't we just have police tone down the tactics and approach the problem a different way? Since when is saying that police are killing people too easily and too often saying that they just shouldn't have even arrested the person?
To keep a person from doing something harmful again when we don't know any other way to make them not do it and we aren't willing to risk more harm.
Sure, if we could magically change the person so they would see what they did before as bad and never do it again, we wouldn't have to keep them in prison. But we don't have any way of doing that. What techniques we do have for "rehabilitating" people are simply not very reliable, so there's a limit to how much we are willing to depend on them as an alternative to incarceration.
It doesn't matter that we can't see the future when we can look at the present in other locations and see better results. We do know another way - the US prison system is just blind to it.
It doesn't seem like it was in the state's interest to lock this person up for 10 years. Two years would have been plenty to get the point across, for a fraction of the cost, plus the potential generational damage caused by a kid growing up fatherless in the formative 2-12 years.
A better analogy, that maybe is more fitting, is you blow through a stoplight and kill someone.
That's definitely negligence but there was no intent to hurt someone, the intent was to speed to a destination.
The intent here was to use computing resources to launch an attack on another hacker group, nothing that would have intently harmed a person at the clinic. They could have accidentally hurt someone though.
And if they did it would be recklessness, certainly negligent , but their intent was not to kill someone.
And this is why we in the US have different laws for different situations that take into account negligence, intent, premeditation etc.
None of them are alright but the state of mind the person committing the crime was in makes it varying degrees of bad.
Someone who accidentally kills someone and someone who plots a cold blooded murder have both taken a life but, the one who killed on accident isn't as heinous or maybe as morally reprehensible.
Life is mostly varying shades of grey and not strictly good or bad and that's why society has complex laws to dole out different punishments depending on situation.
And finally, the hacker never harmed anyone in this case arguing on what they might have done is an abuse of the system imo. I might get up right now and burn my neighborhood to the ground, but you cant condemn me of it before I actually do it. (I won't)
No one mindlessly hacks a utility control system.
10 years is egregious and heavily punitive. The prosecutor that speculated that he "could of caused harm" and that was what the entire punishment was predicated on. Our legal system is entirely draconian when it comes to computer crimes.
This should have been criminally probation or a few months in jail and a civil suit brought by the client for any actual damages.
I'm not saying there was no wrong doing but you're not going to convince me that the minor damages were worth 10 years of this guys life.
A more reasonable sentence would have been 2-3x the cost of the cleanup—and details on the systems that were compromised—plus a certain amount of (extrajudicial) social ostracism along the lines of ISPs not being willing to sell him Internet access based on his past history of abusing such privileges.
Because you seem to be focusing on the outcome/consequences of someone that committed a crime and got caught.
It's not like the punishment is the result of "bad luck" or "unexpected circumstances", it was a deliberate conscious action, right?
Also some of these actions aren't a burst of irrationality and poor thought process - they are planned and recurrent, done through stretches of time in a consistent manner.
So on one hand, it seems severe punishment, on the other hand, people severely push boundaries while knowing it's wrong and with severe punishment - what would they do if it was less severe?
Edit: just to make it clear, I'M NOT SUPPORTING HEAVY SENTENCES.
Harsh punishment fosters resentment.
Isolation is a form of torture.
Cutting off prisoners from society makes reintegration and rehabilitation difficult.
A person who is incapable of participating in society is going to be pushed to the fringes and will more than likely become a drain on society rather than a contributor.
Severity is a huge factor. We don't really have a gradient of consequences, and much of what we do have is limited to privileged individuals. When was the last time you heard of a nonviolent drug offender being given the option to serve his sentence over weekends or in a minimum security facility?
Unless you're a wealthy elite with a very expensive team of lawyers, you're going to "Pound me in the ass Prison". We even make jokes about how extreme the conditions are in our prisons and use those poor conditions as deterrent.
On top of that, we've privatized our prisons so the operators are constantly looking for opportunities to profit. In the post the author talks about per minute charges for email. Some prisons no longer allow face-to-face visitation and instead require the use of video conferencing technology that costs money. Beyond nickle and diming inmates, they're reducing staffing and quality of everything to save as much money as possible. That in itself is punishing torture.
Harsh punishments do not seem to actually function as a determent in real life. From my perspective, harsh punishments is more about revenge than anything else. They're a simple way to feel like you're doing the right thing, as long as you don't examine it too closely. And most people don't want to examine it too closely.
Agreed. I'm not saying their approach was exactly unbiased or scientific, but Penn & Teller in their "Bullshit!" show put forward the following considerations:
- If a violent crime is "spur of the moment", by definition it never takes the judicial system into consideration. People who violently murder their loved ones in a fit of rage don't think of the consequences. People who shoot strangers over a car accident don't, either.
- If the crime is planned with anticipation, such as in many white collar crimes but also planned robberies, kidnappings, etc: the perpetrators always think they are smarter than the law and won't get caught. The possible consequences are irrelevant to them, because they simply don't think they'll get caught.
That's a nice idealized model of human decision-making except for that it's not even approximately how people actually make decisions.
[1] A journalism/essay book from my country (not the US), depicting the lives of youngsters in shanty towns, interviewed many of them. A surprising number of them claimed they didn't expect to live past 30, and didn't make any plans because plans were meaningless to them. If they died for whatever reason, "so be it". (By the way, in my mind this isn't an indictment of these people, but rather of the society which makes them believe they have no choice and no future).
There are different opinions on what the main purpose of incarceration is (punishment, deterrence, rehabilitation, protecting society), but let's for a minute assume it's deterrence, aka "stop people from trying to commit a crime".
How well would you say incarceration as deterrence is working so far? Regarding shootings, muggings, robbery, murder, rape, even "white collar" crimes. Would you say prison (and even the death penalty) as deterrence has significantly helped reduce or stop crime in the US?
Imposing a disproportionate punishment "to set an example" makes you more dangerous to society than the person you're punishing. I'm not saying that actions which harm others should not result in repercussions, but the punishment must fit the crime for the law to be legitimate. Even if that occasionally means that some people weigh the risk of getting caught and decide that the odds against being punished are low enough to make the risk worthwhile.
Arguably the UK is soft on hacking as there are several News international Hacks that should be doing 5-10
The idea behind their long sentences is that if you know you get super long sentences you won't commit crime. Rehabilitation isn't in the agenda. That this is known to not work well is ignored by large part of the government.
The lawmaker in the US panicked when making hacking laws as they didn't understood it and people told them that is viable that expert hackers can literally singlehandedly start amagedon by having nuclear missels. Through unreasonable penalties for hacking are not unreasonable.
Or at least that's how it looks to me.
The way people get looked up in the US is known to be one of the worst approaches to rehabilitation, it's bad to a degree that it's making it more likely for you to commit crimes when you come out instead of less because you have become totally out of touch with socity and normal life.
Not many people are locked up for a few years for a traffic violation
Setting the bar at "North Korea" is simply childish and unhelpful.
It's probably choosing between two kinds of hell, but if given the chance, I'll 100% no-questions-asked go to live in North Korea rather than be incarcerated 10 years in a US prison. (It goes without saying that I'd rather live free in the US, I hope this doesn't need saying. Also it goes without saying that I'd rather live in another country rather than North Korea; this is a thought experiment where these are the only two options).
Of course, prison in North Korea must be hell too, but that's not what we're talking about.
Finally, comparing the US to North Korea -- is that really the bar we want to use?
I don't consider myself a bleeding heart lib but I think that a decade in prison is excessive for most non-violent crimes. I'm American but I live in Asia so maybe I'm now an outsider. I'm not aware of any other country that punishes this harshly.
Serious questions: Does any other country routinely punish so severely? To what end? At what financial and psychic cost to society? If we're unique (exceptional?) why do we do this to ourselves?