> I don't favor speeding tickets at all; as far as I can see, they're just a way for governments to capriciously collect extra revenue from people without giving it the politically unpopular name of "taxes".

> Repeated-burglaries guy is obviously opting out of functioning in society. If the cost of keeping him out of it exceeds the cost he inflicts by his presence, I'd say we should keep him incarcerated and spend less, not just tell him "OK, burgle all you want".

So reckless, dangerous driving is part of being a functional member of society, but 3 (apparently) non-violent and (in the scheme of things) minor thefts over 44 years gets someone thrown in jail for the rest of their life. That could be 30+ years on the dole. We (the taxpayers) are paying for his feeding, his clothing, his medical, his guards, his shelter. I seriously doubt another 3 thefts over the remainder of his life is worth that cost.

The thing is, it's not just the financial cost of a theft, it's the emotional and practical cost too.

Having had 5 laptops stolen in one hit - because I was updating staff that weekend and the guy got lucky - the cost of changing passwords, and the nagging feeling I may have missed something somewhere and I may get hit with another internet theft....

Then the feeling that the guy(s?) were in my house while my partner and I were sleeping. Na. People who do this need to be taken out of society.

For the speeding point, you can kill people at 30mph if something goes wrong with the car or you do something stupid.

You just seriously advocated having someone who stole your laptop locked up in prison for life because of the inconvenience they caused you?

Wow.

Best I can tell it's an issue of philosophy. Many people in the US (my people, lucky me) are fearful and angry. We really seem to like our vengeance (consider the country music songs that were coming out post 9/11 as we entered Afghanistan and Iraq). When it comes to crime we don't bother with "rehabilitation". When it comes to mental health, that's clearly a lack of personal responsibility. If I can tell that they aren't really a knight in King Arthur's court on a holy quest, then they should be able to realize it too. Lock them up, throw away the key.

Two points:

- Driving below the speed of surrounding traffic is much more likely to cause an accident than driving at a "high" speed. The speed of traffic is essentially always above the speed limit. (Which might itself give you pause in characterizing it as "reckless, dangerous driving".)

- Reckless, dangerous driving is an independent offense, which can be (and is) charged separately from speeding.

1) I've not seen the numbers, but I'll concede that's likely true, particularly on highways.

2) For someone who wants long sentences for other offenses, it seems odd that you don't see that control of speed (particularly on city streets, my view on highway speed limits is different) and ticketing of speeders is also a pretty effective mitigator of reckless driving on those same streets. It doesn't stop it, we'll never stop crime until everyone becomes a saint (IOW, never), but reducing the occurrence is a nice tradeoff.

Now that that's out of the way, care to respond to the part where you suggest the cost of life in prison (to the taxpayers) is worth preventing 3 more non-violent burglaries (if he keeps to his average)?

"If the cost of keeping him out of [society] exceeds the cost he inflicts by his presence, I'd say we should keep him incarcerated and spend less"

You know what it costs to imprison a human being for 40-50 years? I doubt it outweighs a couple of stolen wallets...

Party of the first part: If condition C holds, response R is called for.

Party of the second part (indignant): But condition C holds!

What's your point?

50 years of imprisonment at a guesstimated cost of $30000/year: $1.5mil. Cost of two wallets: $100.

What about the huge time cost of replacing everything that was in the wallet, if replaceable, and the intangible emotional feelings of insecurity that result from letting wallet-stealers run free stealing wallets? Probably doesn’t exceed $1.5 million, but to say the cost of a wallet theft is only $50 shows absolutely no sympathy for a victim, and is not that far removed from saying, “well, the guy who stole it probably needed the money more than you do.”

Oh come on... Speeding clearly implies more risk, in the case of an impact (in the city for example) the end result can be much worse.

On the other hand a guy who has comitted 2-3 non violent crimes in his life because hes probably broke and has mental issues. I am not saying thats ok, but spending the life in prison for that? He wouldnt even have to go to prison for that in the country i live in.

Burglary is punished so severely because, like you said, the end result can be much worse than just stealing property. Can you honestly say that chances of speeding causing any harm what so ever are comparable to chances of burglary turning into an assault, rape or murder?

It's quite worrying that a country seems to do some sort of precog on these people; i'm sure there are cases where stealing a wallet goes on to assault, rape or murder. I don't think locking people up because that could happen is a brilliant plan. Why not lock up a lot more people? I mean little boys who torture (and kill) animals turn into killers? It's pretty vague and weird to think like that.

This guy obviously has issues and they need to be looked at; locking him up has no use whatsoever besides 'making the public feel safe'. While it makes things less safe; if I know I'll go to jail the rest of my life, i'll make sure to kill the people in the room so I have a chance of escaping; what have I to lose? This guy didn't think like that, but with this kind of strangely harsh punishment, why would I hold back on any crime I commit?

Indeed, it's very stange to think like that. We don't punish some future consequences. We punish dangerous and harmful behavior. "Dangerous" does not mean "correlated with some future harmful developments". It means the immediate possibility of harm. This is why torturing animals is not dangerous (for humans at least), speeding is a minor danger and burglary is a severe danger.

Also, I believe you are implying that the guy from the OP got life in prison for the single burglary. I appologize if I get it wrong but in case you really are: even OP says it is not so. It's been his third strike i.e. he had been convicted for two more violent/gun/drug related crimes before (more burglaries in his particular case).

You:

> Burglary is punished so severely because, like you said, the end result can be much worse than just stealing property.

Also you:

> We don't punish some future consequences. We punish dangerous and harmful behavior.

Please help me make these two statements make sense together. In this case, the severe penalty is only justifiable with a view of what might happen or what might have happened (that he might steal again, that he might become violent in future thefts, that he might have hurt those men). Now to the first might, I'll grant it's actually pretty likely. But to the second might, it's hardly clear, every summary I found suggested none of the past thefts or youthful cocaine charge (possession? couldn't find specifics) were violent. And the third might is the justification you offered in the earlier post. Which means, what, punish people for how bad their crimes could have been rather than how bad they actually were? I was in a car accident (my fault, rear ended a guy), it could have resulted in a fatality had it been at higher speeds (we were, at most, moving 10mph), should I be treated as if I had committed vehicular manslaughter?

What might happen in a crime ought to be irrelevant, what did happen is the important part. And again, in this case it appears that violence didn't enter into the equation. Might the victims have felt there could have been violence? Sure, but fear of violence (in this case he didn't even threaten violence, he came up with a lame story and ran off) is not the same as being the victim of violence.

I guess the problem is that you are conflating this particular burglary and burglary and general. I only meant burglary in general.

Also, we don't punish every possible outcome of every action. We, however, punish more likely and more harmful (= more dangerous by definition) outcomes more. In your example, if you had been at higher speeds or if you had been drunk you'd had been punished more even for the same outcome.

>What might happen in a crime ought to be irrelevant, what did happen is the important part.

You are free to believe this. I hope you vote libertarian to remove all kinds of licencing (starting from driving and ending with medical), various safety inspections, crimes like stalking, conspiracies to commit other crimes, blackmail, death threats etc.

Take a wallet off someone's table and run? Theft. I call the police.

Break my door down in the middle of the night? I may blow your head off.

Big and important difference.

> If the cost of keeping him out of it exceeds the cost he inflicts by his presence

You do realize that it costs $40,000+ per year to incarcerate someone, right? So to meet your justification for imprisonment, this guy would have to be an excellent criminal. Why not just give him $40,000 per year and let him be free? He'd probably not need to burgle anymore.

It costs USD40k per year per prisoner? Wow.

As I understand it's substantially more than 40k GBP per year per prisoner. If the American system is costing less in the order of half what we're paying it must be absolutely horrendous.

Which is a side point to the absurdity of whole-life mandatory sentencing. It's incredibly expensive and pure vengeance; there's no way the cost to society in cash or emotional harm terms is minimised by spending MILLIONS of dollars depriving these people of their liberty for decades. So why does the Land Of The Free do it? Short, often community based sentences with strong rehabilitation would be orders of magnitude cheaper and have a very similar effect on the ultimate crime rate.

Well, when you have the most prisoners in the world both by number and proportion of population, you'd hope it would be cheap!

> Why not just give him $40,000 per year and let him be free? He'd probably not need to burgle anymore.

If we did this, I suspect we'd see a sharp rise in burglaries.

As to the figure itself, another commenter noted that the low end of prison costs seemed to be Lousisiana, in which operating a prison cost $13K / year. That would make the per-prisoner cost much, much lower than that.

I may be missing something as I've just skimmed this thread, but 13K has got to be referring to the per-prisoner cost. Unless the prison has no utility consumption, no services, no food, and has one employee who's a part-time janitor.

As a second point, and speaking without knowledge, it's conceivable for a prison to be bringing in revenue such that it only operates at a loss of (for example) $13K annually.

Plausible. The other comment doesn't actually specify what kind of costs it's referring to; I initially thought it was per-prisoner costs and decided on second thought that $167k per prisoner per year in new york made no sense at all.

Food for a year is barely even noticeable in $13K; if they cost $5 / day to feed that would come in under $2K / year. Where's all the money going?

At a guess, staffing the prison. People are the most expensive part of most businesses.

why do you think there would be a sharp rise in burglaries?

Because I think people would be willing to do much more than just rob someone's house in order to get a $40K / year stipend for life.

Honestly, I didn't (and don't) expect that to be a controversial prediction.

Well, it's not without controversy, surely. You're (a) focusing on the very short term; presumably people would only commit one burglary under this model over their entire lifetime; and (b) you're not being generous to the original case but taking it at a very literalistic level. It would be more generous to the point to suggest that the $40k/year would be spread out to support low-income folks who might have otherwise needed it. So, about 1% of American adults are imprisoned (and about 2% are on some form of probation or parole). On the other hand, 16% of our population lives in poverty. So we might reasonably expect to instead reduce the prison population by, say, half, and kick back that money to the impoverished. The salient point is that this would give a (1/2) * 1% / 16% = 1/32 dilution of the money, so we're talking about giving all the poor people in the US $1k - $2k per year in order to reduce the rate of crime being committed. This makes their finances at least 5% better (the poverty line is about $20,000 for the 16% statstic).

So the more-generous question is, would being at least 5% better off financially reduce crime more than the 50%-shorter sentences for crime would increase it? I have no idea.