Hammond has a history of taking political protest over the line to breaking into things, destroying property, etc.

Also important to remember is the fact that Anonymous didn't just leak the e-mails, but stole a bunch of credit card numbers and made $700k worth of charges.

To be fair, I think the sentence is too long, but more because I have a philosophical problem with the sentencing guidelines and how it punishes repeat offenders and not because I think Hammond was particularly singled out.

You know full well what "Anonymous" is, and attempting to attribute everything bad that's ever happened on the internet to every defendant that ever gets grouped in with "Anonymous" is ridiculous.

I honestly don't appreciate Anonymous. If you want to be an activist, show your face and your identity. The world doesn't need an incubator of batman.

> "The actual group of Anonymous [...]"

There is no such thing. Not in any traditional sense. Talking about "Anonymous, the group" is like talking about "Kilroy, the GI."

I wonder how many people here are even going to get that reference...

I thought it was a good comparison because of the "graffiti/website defacement" angle.

How is that different than working for the Gambinos? Anonymous members were part of an "ongoing criminal enterprise", and anybody who didn't realize what that means is too stupid to be out roaming the streets.

The Gambino crime family is actually an organization or group in the traditional sense. "Anonymous" is more analogous to "The Mafia". A useful term if you are okay with being imprecise, but the reality of "The Mafia" is encompasses a very broad set of groups that more often than not have absolutely nothing to do with each other.

Of course there are a few differences between the concept of "Anonymous" and the concept of "The Mafia". Groups that identify as "The Mafia" have more in common with each other than groups who identify as "Anonymous" (the former are all organized crime groups, the later can be any group from organized crime groups, to people who wear silly masks and protest fringe religions, to people who call the parents of kids who abuse cats and post pictures to facebook.) Furthermore, if I burn down a local business and then claim to be The Mafia, mainstream media would mock me for delusionally thinking I had any claim to the term. If I defaced a local businesses website and then claimed to be "Anonymous", the media would lap that bullshit up.

Can you expand on that?

I believe in judicial discretion in sentencing, but it should be used to account for extenuating circumstances of the offense, not the character of the offender. E.g. someone who stole food to feed their hungry child should get a reduced sentence, whether he or she is a hardened drug dealer or a sympathetic single mother.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restorative_justice

> Restorative justice is an approach to justice that focuses on the needs of the victims and the offenders, as well as the involved community, instead of satisfying abstract legal principles or punishing the offender. It is based on a theory of justice that considers crime and wrongdoing to be an offence against an individual or community, rather than the state. [..] it shows the highest rates of victim satisfaction and offender accountability.

So the question is would 2, 5 or 10 years in prison make any difference in making Hammond (and others in the community) stop conducting political property destruction? I doubt it.

Focusing so heavily on the punishment side of it is an incomplete solution and often creates a negative reactionary effect in the community.

The basic purpose of criminal law is to establish norms for behavior. Punishing any given offender or satisfying any given victim is secondary to establishing a norm so 10 other people won't do the same thing. This is a distinct concept from "deterrence." The idea of deterrence is to force people to include the probability-weighted cost of a jail sentence into their cost-benefit analysis. A jail sentence twice as long means a twice as strong deterrent effect. However, given the practical probabilities of getting caught for many crimes, deterrence doesn't really exist. Say 2 years for stealing a bike times a 0.1% chance of getting caught = deterrent effect of 0.73 days in jail per bike. The punishment isn't deterring anyone. What's keeping people from stealing bikes is the social norm created by making bike stealing illegal and punishing offenders.

This rationale for criminal punishment supports having crimes be punished in proportion to how egregious a violation of the social norm has occurred. That's why punishing someone less for stealing food to feed a hungry child is justifiable. Within a restorative justice theory less punishment is appropriate because a small breach of social norms requires less healing, but that only focuses on the singular event. The additional justification is that a small breach of the social norm requires less punishment in order to maintain the norm for everyone else.

At some point in the 1960's, people (mostly liberals) decided that criminal law should be about rehabilitating the offender. This led to a focus on the offender, rather than the offense. Hence three strikes laws, ridiculous sentencing enhancements or reductions for whether an offender seems contrite at sentencing, etc. Ironically, this thought process also led to an inflation of sentences, because people more easily rationalized increasing maximum sentences when those maximums would only be applied to "bad people."

Of course restorative justice isn't coextensive with the 1960's idea of rehabilitative justice, so I'm not saying it suffers from the same problems.

Once you start making assertions like this, you're already into a particular kind of theory of justice. There are a few. It's not really possible to say that there is one true purpose of criminal law.

Now, if you qualified it with our current legal system, it absolutely subscribes to a particular notion of what justice is. And maybe you mean to, without explicitly noting it. But given we're in a discussion about different forms of justice, it would make sense that not everyone agrees with this assertion, and therefore, your others.

  deterrence force[s] people to include the probability-weighted 
  cost of a jail sentence into their cost-benefit analysis.
  ... given the practical probabilities of getting caught 
  for many crimes, deterrence doesn't really exist.

Even if the punishment were immediate execution a-la Judge Dredd, we would still have people committing crimes, because they irrationally believe that they'll never get caught, or that what they are doing isn't a crime. Or, in some cases, are acting through emotion rather than rationality.

For effective rehabilitation program you need a few things - low sentences for non violent crimes , social norms that not reject the ex felons and allow the reintegration.

Also you need robust job market and social safety network.

And i think that sentencing should be done on scientific grounds and not moral ones.

I'm not saying the current system is rehabilitative, but rather that it's a perverse consequence of attempts in the 1960's at making the penal system rehabilitative. The rehabilitative approach shifted the focus from the offense to the offender. This is logical: in a penal system the punishment fits the crime. In a rehabilitative system, the punishment is tailored to the offender (ideally with an eye towards reducing recidivism).

That backfired, because it turns out criminal offenders aren't particularly sympathetic. Once the focus was on the offender, it became much easier for people to justify long sentences and harsh punishment than when the focus was on the crime in the abstract.

The deep irony of the focus on the offender is that it allows us to punish Jamal from the hood much more harshly than Johnny from the suburbs for the same exact crime, all because Johnny doesn't have a rap sheet of minor offenses and is socialized to look contrite and afraid at sentencing.

So I wouldn't call today's policies rehabilitative, they are very much neoliberalist, much like American economic policy.

Why shouldn't they? The purpose of imprisonment is not only restorative or rehabilitative, but also to keep the offender from doing further harm to society. If, by reoffending, someone shows beyond doubt that they can't learn from their mistakes, why should they receive the same punishment for their nth crime that someone else receives for their first? Failure to punish repeat offenders more harshly amounts to sanctioning sociopathy.

Anyone who has been injured by a four-time DUI offender would probably have a strong opinion on this. At some point, it is indeed necessary and appropriate to write offenders off as hopeless.

Fundamentally, in the US, the issue is that prison is not for rehabilitation, it is for containment and retribution. We don't provide for their mental health. We don't provide for their safety. We force non-violent criminals into association with violent criminals. There are people who can't be rehabilitated, but we never really try so we have no way of distinguishing the repeat offenders who learned but had a moment of stupidity from those who simply didn't learn.

[1] http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/cruel-and-unusual-...

Sentencing laws in general are a really terrible idea IMHO.

Because punishment has many goals, and one of them is removal of negative agents from society.

If someone seems sorry, or it's his first crime, there's a likelihood it will be his last crime, and releasing him earlier makes sense.

If someone is not sorry, or keeps committing crimes when released, then perhaps a higher penalty will at least somewhat deter them, and if not - they'll have less opportunity to repeat the crime.

Attacking civilian targets is wrong regardless of which side is doing it. Having previously engaged in the same behavior does not make the act any less wrong, or the vilification any less deserved.

What about a single civilian in a civilian building filled with a company of soldiers? In the law of armed conflict this kind of thing is called "perfidy" and brings no protection.

...while in Norway, you typically only get the maximum 21 years of imprisonment for multiple murders. And even that is apparently with the possibility of an early release after 14 years and unsupervised weekend parole after 7 years. And even with murder on your hands, they just might send you off to Bastøy to rehabilitate yourself properly. And somehow, the crime rate in Norway is still much lower, as are the reoffending rates.

I just wonder, what comes next in the US, two years for littering, perhaps?

Since we're being honest here, if someone murdered someone close to me and then got unsupervised weekend parole after 7 years, they'd be dead in an alley their first weekend out. Maybe Norweigans are very different, culturally. Maybe I'm just a vengeful asshole who should just deal with it - but I doubt I'm alone over here. But this could also just be a reaction to violent crime - I don't feel as though most non-violent crime deserves harsh sentences. Hell, I'd settle for large fines in most cases.

This is why the federated approach to governing was a big part of the American founding fathers literature (focusing on state-level power), which they viewed as a counter-point to the negative side-effects of centralized Monarchy systems in Europe.

The American government has been reversing it's course - centralizing law (and law enforcement) to a national level - over the last century. Making experimentation with new systems and adaptation to better systems much more difficult.

The length of this sentence is absolutely a cultural thing - perhaps some would feel that 7 years before unsupervised weekends is a fitting punishment. I can guarantee you that most Americans do not - if you want to see a rapid increase in vigilantism in the U.S., try reduced sentences for things like murder.

Oh, and I would fully expect to have the court system hit me the harshest penalty they could - they hate vigilantism. But that's irrelevant to the decision that got me there.

well, theoretically you can get up to 1 year in many states, though i suspect usually it is much-much less harsh than that.

http://www.ncsl.org/research/environment-and-natural-resourc...

Quote from wiki about previous 2006 cause:

Charges of 2.5 million dollars in damages was assessed based on $500 per credit card, for each of the 5,000 credit card numbers in Hammond's possession, despite the fact that no money had been spent

As opposed to the billions lost in 2008, and the people rewarded with bailouts for their fraud?

Pshyeah, hokay. Justice is truly being served here.

TH;DR: I said it to highlight the commonality of mass hysteria fueled hyper-punishment for socially distasteful actions.