Note: I'm not convinced prison should be off the table.
If were going to make a radical policy change in sentencing then it has to be done for everyone all at once.
There is more to Shkreli and his sociopathic capitalism.
Shkreli showing his real stripes:
A drug comes before the FDA for approval, and it is opened up for comment. Shkreli lodges an objection to approval of this drug.
Why? Because it's unsafe? No, trials thus far have shown it to be safer than existing drugs.
Why? Because it's less effective? No, it's also been shown to be more effective than existing drugs?
Perhaps it's more expensive? No, cost of R&D and production, and estimated retail costs are expected to be lower than existing drugs.
Huh, odd. So why did Shkreli oppose this drug getting to the market?
Because he and his company had just bought the patent to one of those 'existing drugs' recently, and this drug coming to market would torpedo demand for his drug, and torpedo the profitability of his investment in buying the patent.
Man of the people, fighting for healthcare rights, Martin Shkreli.
Though I was unjustly convicted under false pretenses by federal prosecutors willing to lie and misrepresent the law and my rights were deeply violated, having been to prison in the process, I found it filled with quite a large number of people who absolutely should be there. One drug dealer, for example, laughed about forcing a desperate woman to fuck his dog for dope. There were also a pair of twins that tried to acquire a toddler for use as a sex slave.
There were also some people that shouldn't have been there, perhaps not put in prison on false charges like me, but taking years off their life was a basic injustice that did nothing to advance society and likely encouraged further criminality.
All nice and stable societies have long-term incarceration. Japan has notoriously hard prisons, even worse than most federal facilities in the United States. If I could, I would change how the prisons worked and treated their prisoners. I would definitely segregate off some of the categories of prisoners from others, and we surely have enough facilities to do so. But without the ability to denaturalize people and permanently expel them to a prison colony, you are going to need large numbers of people in longterm confinement. I'd say society would be much better off if half the prisoners I met never walked free, and a quarter were never incarcerated in the first place.
Be careful what you wish for, generally going around throwing your political enemies in prisons has frequently had longterm consequences for the safety of the people doing so and the people that support it.
Just asking, because all three of those guys did several years of federal time.
I somewhat agree with what you say about prison, but I'm not sure we should start with the charismatic and media-savvy child of politically connected Stanford professors, who had plenty of opportunities to do well and live a full life without stealing anything or cheating anyone.