I would also attack the notion of "evidence" here. The previous poster is not making an empirical argument at all, he's only pretending to. If Scandinavia had more crime than SF, he would pick another example (notice how he dismisses Singapore for...reasons). He's defending an a priori belief, as am I. Empiricism fails us here, we're arguing over values.
> It strikes me as really strange to consider punishments for crimes as a sort of state-sponsored revenge.
Justice is carried out by a disinterested third party (the state), revenge is not.
My point wasn't that punishment doesn't deter crime (it clearly does), but that crime rates are far more dependent on social and economic factors.
Singapore and Scandinavia are quite similar in this regard (socially harmonious and prosperous, with a well educated lower class), even though they differ completely on attitudes towards crime and punishment. Both nations have low crime.
America and Brazil (for example) both have a poorly educated, struggling-to-survive underclass whose needs are broadly ignored by the rest of society. Both have high crime rates.
Give me a country with a despised underclass and low crime and I'll gladly concede.
Literally Singapore has a massive underclass of migrant workers from South Asia, who are given limited visas that don't allow them the rights of even a normal work visa. In 2020 hundreds of thousands of them were locked in tiny dormitories for over six months straight while covid spread like wildfire through them (the vast majority of Singapore's 60k covid cases were in migrant worker dormitories). Their salaries are less than $500/month.
(Edit: replaced “work“ with “wifi”)
There aren’t that many places for dorm workers to roam. The most popular place is Little India, where they can procure goods that they are familiar with. I do see dorm workers regularly buying provisions at the same neighbourhood stores that I go to.
China?
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2017/04/china-must-co...
Chinese National: "Yes. I hear they received 2 days."
Westerner: "2 days! That isn't that bad. You can do a lot more time in the states -- well at least in Texas. It's legal now on the entire west coast."
Chinese National: "No. No. 2 days to live."
For instance, you could both support programs to prevent people turning to crime (proactively), without changing the strictness of enforcement. Assuming they were effective, that would make progress on both the safety and social justice angles.
This is how you create effective change at scale - not focusing on the points where your values guarantee conflict, but finding approaches that can have broad support.
Values can depend on descriptive background assumptions and in such cases value arguments can improve by making progress on factual topics. In the case of the justness of punishment: the topic of determinism. The recent discussion by Daniel Dennett and Greg Caruso in their book "Just Deserts - Debating Free Will" is a useful read.
The US has the largest prison population in the world by a large margin and we still have a relatively high crime rate overall, especially when it comes to violent crime. Putting more people in prison is not a solution to our problems as we can clearly see.
It really helps to look at the numbers to wrap your head around it, but here is a lot of good data to start understanding the issue. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html
There is a lot of data and research out there regarding these issues, that's the good news. The bad news is that few people want to take the time to read it.
One more: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-prisons-make-u...
No one wants to put more people in jail.
I think poster is saying instead, policy should not encourage more criminals.
If you have X pool of existing law breakers, policy goal is to keep a % subset of X out of the prison system.
However, policy is increasing the size of X, to X+1.
This is a pretty interesting and concise way to frame this, because I definitely would support such a policy.
Punishments carried out by justice systems are a means to an end. It's sad that even today it's considered the most effective tool for general safety and protection of society.
It strikes me as really strange to consider punishments for crimes as a sort of state-sponsored revenge.