America has one of the most punitive judicial systems in the world and sentences people for longer then any peer country. Instead of doubling down on what's not working, why not look and see what is working other places.

I hear the argument that we need "harsher punishment" pretty much every time any kind of social problem gets discussed in media.

I don't think that the US lacks harsh punishment at all - compared to peer countries, prison conditions are terrible, the incarcerated population is massive, etc.

What I do agree with is that enforcement feels ineffective. Every time a criminal commits an offence, they are spinning a roulette wheel and hoping it doesn't land on "go to prison". Making sentences longer and conditions worse doesn't change the odds that a particular criminal will end up punished, it just means the downside is worse (and increases prison populations). Even when a criminal is caught, they're often bailed and able to abscond. The question should be how to increase the effectiveness of enforcement whilst preserving rights and protections against wrongful punishment.

The other side of the equation is looking at the carrot, not just the stick. If life sucks and people turn to criminality because they feel like they don't live in a society that gives a damn, you have to improve society so people have something to live for.

I think a lot of this weirdly needs to be "vibes based policy" as it were. People need to believe that justice will be done in order to feel secure, and to feel that if they were to commit a crime that they wouldn't get away with it. Objective reality doesn't control behaviour, peoples' beliefs do.

I’m not American but I’m pretty sure you have the same social justice (or lack there of) that enables certain types of criminals to avoid repercussions and continually reoffend.

Yeah, like our incoming president.

Are there sentencing guidelines for judges? Do those guidelines recommend letting the criminals back out, or are the judges going against the guidelines?

we need to arrest the white collar criminals that live in the gated communities too

Problem here is prison capacity. U.S. needs a very large, cheap, ideally profitable imprisonment system to keep all those people in - akin to Soviet gulags. Otherwise catch-and-release is unavoidable unless you just machinegun them - prisons are already overloaded and are extremely expensive to maintain.

The "ideally profitable" part you're looking for are called "private prisons", and they come with a host of side effects that are nothing short of horrific. When a corporation becomes incentivized to strip people of their freedom (regardless of whether they do it correctly or incorrectly), bad outcomes occur.

Why corporations? They need to be state-run, of course, with all employees being public servants directly. And prisoners need to make government money by building roads, houses, etc. Most of them can never be released anyway, too dangerous when young and too sick/needing too much in the way of medical expenses, when old.

Amazing. I think you're being sarcastic, but this is Hacker News, so of course people are engaging with you as if you're being serious because this is considered a perfectly reasonable opinion here.

This is the internet. Coming across unreasonable opinions is not rare. Because sarcasm is hard to convey in text form I think it's better to assume all comments are made sincerely. What makes you think they are being sarcastic?

Optimism.

At least in the US, pretty much everything that is state-run, including state-run companies (like Fannie and Freddie) are notorious for being massive money pits that do not generate profits.

Additionally, what you're proposing is incredibly optimistic from the perspective of how much economic utility prisoners actually have.

The median state's average cost of housing a prisoner is about $65,000 a year, with wealthy coastal states like CA, WA, NYC costing over $100,000 per prisoner per year. [1]

It's a sad economic reality, but many of the people in these prisons aren't even economically capable of producing output that has a market value even meeting the costs it takes it house them, let alone exceeding it, with the exceptions being largely concentrated in the minimum security prisons where white collar criminals and executives are housed (think Martin Shkreli, Bernie Madoff, etc), though you obviously can't ask people like that to perform the same kind of economically productive work that enticed them to get themselves sent to prison in the first place, if that were even possible (would you invest any of your money in a hedge fund that had a CEO working from prison for fraud?).

[1] https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-do-states-spend-on-pr...

> At least in the US, pretty much everything that is state-run, including state-run companies (like Fannie and Freddie) are notorious for being massive money pits that do not generate profits.

Gosh, it's almost like the state is spending tax money to help its citizens! The horror!

Democracy is what gave us these judges. Are you proposing limitations on the ability of the public to elect the officials they want to elect?

Judges can be elected officials, political appointees, or career civil servants. America prefers the first two options, but the third option with less political judges is also worth considering.

If you want prison to be used to keep criminals off the streets, then you have to be willing to put criminals in prison for life for even the most minor offenses, because that's the extent you have to go to for this strategy to work.

I mean can you give any non-absurd answer how you think this works? Someone knocks over a liquor store with a box cutter: is there some magic number of years in prison that they can be released where they won't reoffend?

Every piece of evidence I've seen indicates that the opposite happens: people in prison are traumatized further exacerbating mental illness, connected with other criminals, and then released with a criminal record that makes it even harder for them to obtain legal employment, making crime even more attractive. This effect is generational: children separated from their parents by prison time are more likely to end up in prison themselves. Your "solution" doesn't solve crime, it causes crime.

Not only does your "solution" not work, it's ethically repulsive. The vast majority of crimes are crimes of desperation, and you are so self-absorbed that you're only concerned with solving your own problem--crime--and totally unconcerned with the suffering which causes people to commit crime in the first place. Your only solution is to cause even more suffering by locking people up and throwing away the key.

The causes of crime are economic, and crime will continue until that problem is addressed. It's not hard to see that if you have any care at all for your fellow humans.