[doublekill]

Having someone else do your prison time was fairly common. Now with more cooperation between organizations and improved biometrics it has dropped.

Different people would be arrested, show up to court, or enter the prison. Impossible for organizations downstream to detect or assume a switch had happened.

[texasbigdata]

This seems similar to the Catholic concept of buying indulgences as a carbon offset type concept against sins. Pay to play

[mjh2539]

It's not; indulgences remit the temporal punishment associated with sin (mortal sins incur eternal punishment in additional to temporal punishment; merely venial sins incur only temporal punishment). Mortal sin can be forgiven only through contrition and reconciliation. Temporal sin can be forgiven at the leisure of the Church (i.e., through indulgences). To commit a sin with the intention of attempting to obtain forgiveness through reconciliation afterward is itself a mortal sin.

Indulgences still exist, and you can still purchase them in the sense that you can make a donation to a priest to offer the sacrifice of the Mass for a specific intention (like the remittance of a portion of the temporal punishment for the sins of a friend or loved one), and the offering of the sacrifice has indulgences associated with it in addition.

This is not the only way to gain indulgences. There are many ways to gain them. Praying for the souls of the faithful departed on All Souls Day (in combination with the usual conditions, i.e. a) being in a state of grace, b) having the interior disposition of complete detachment from sin, even venial sin, c) having sacramentally confessed their sins, d) receiving the Holy Eucharist, and e) pray for the intentions of the Supreme Pontiff) on November 2nd allows for one to obtain a plenary indulgence (which remit ALL temporal punishment) either for oneself or for a person of your choosing.

[foobarian]

This sounds like a World of Warcraft quest.

[athriren]

i have a certain fondness for both MMOs and the faith i lost. this is not that far off if you also allow that people seem to get a lot of meaning out of the quest even though you may no longer believe it actually describes the existing state of things.

the companionship you feel with the others on the journey with you, the feeling of losing yourself in something much bigger than you, the structured life with a clear definition of The Good (do these is this order to achieve digital/eternal reward)...this analogy works.

[Thorrez]

>To commit a sin with the intention of attempting to obtain forgiveness through reconciliation afterward is itself a mortal sin.

Source? If you do it with a mortal sin I can understand it would be a second mortal sin. But it seems harsh to make a venial sin into a mortal sin from this.

[simonh]

The venial sin isn't the problem, you're attempting to deceive God through manipulation. I would think anyway, not a Catholic.

[Thorrez]

I'm not sure I would call it deceit, God is all-knowing. I would consider it taking God's mercy for granted and treating him like a mechanical forgiveness dispenser.

I'm hesitant to say it's always a mortal sin, because it seems like it can happen in a lighthearted manner. For example if someone struggles with gluttony, that person might think "I know I shouldn't have a 2nd hamburger, but I'm weak and it would taste so good, I'll have it now and go to confession later". That doesn't seem like mortal sin territory to me.

[mensetmanusman]

That is a common misunderstanding of canonical Catholic teaching about "indulgentia a culpa et a poena".

Keeping the carbon offset analogy, an indulgence in the Catholic sense would be more akin to first making sure you are carbon neutral (all parties are at peace and forgiven/reconciled), then you spend %10 of your salary to go beyond that and offset the carbon credits of the person you wronged.

[joubert]

Instead of sticking with the carbon credits analogy I'll articulate more directly what I understand from reading up on indulgences at https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07783a.htm

For a sin that has already been forgiven, an indulgence is associated payment you owe that if you didn't pay, you will spend more time in purgatory.

If this is an accurate reading, does it not dilute the meaning of "forgiven"? Does it not amount to a money-making racket at best, or, more probably, extortion?

[klodolph]

You have some good points, maybe you should write them up and post them up where church-goers would see them, like a church door or something.

[pbourke]

“What’s wrong with the church?! We’ve got some theses!! (You’ll never guess how hard-hitting no. 95 is!) <next>”

[eru]

Though, of course, the church door bit almost surely never happened.

[Thorrez]

>Does it not amount to a money-making racket at best, or, more probably, extortion?

The vast vast vast majority of indulgences have no money aspect at all. See the list of plenary (meaning all temporal punishment is removed) indulgences on Wikipedia[1], none of them involve money.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indulgence#Plenary_indulgences

[mensetmanusman]

From your link:

“ Least of all is an indulgence the purchase of a pardon which secures the buyer's salvation or releases the soul of another from Purgatory. “

One might associate it with helping move an individual from a smaller circle to a larger circle of ethics: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanding_Circle

“ Singer discusses the relationship between biological capacity for altruism and morality. He argues that altruism, when directed to one's small circle of family, tribe or even nation, is not moral, but it becomes so when applied to wider circles. “

E.g. charity where you sacrifice your individual goods for the larger community is good for the soul.

[el_nahual]

An even bigger misconception is that indulgences were actually bought on behalf of _someone else_.

They were meant to address a very real problem with catholic heaven/hell theology:

What if I belong in heaven, but somene I love, who I can't possibly imagine spending eternity without, belongs in hell?

Indulgences were originally meant to address this: the party that belonged in heaven could, through their sacrifice, guarantee a spot in heaven for their loved one. It was only later that the "sacrifice" become strictly monetary.

[eru]

As far as I know, indulgences never got you out of hell. They were to shorten your time in purgatory.

[Thorrez]

>An even bigger misconception is that indulgences were actually bought on behalf of _someone else_.

Are you saying it's true that indulgences can be obtained for others or that it's false that indulgences can be obtained for others?

In reality indulgences can be obtained for yourself, or for others, including those in Purgatory. They can't be obtained for people in Hell.

>It was only later that the "sacrifice" become strictly monetary.

Indulgences are not strictly monetary. The vast majority involve no money at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indulgence#Plenary_indulgences

[mjh2539]

Indulgences for the damned were inefficacious and applied to the Church suffering in purgatory.

[friendlybus]

Until Teztel started selling carbon offsets for dead polluters. An offered coin springs a dead soul from purgatory.

[mensetmanusman]

Sounds like a new ICO opportunity :)

Would be interesting if there were a climate change coin...

oh wait, https://earth-token.com/

[schoen]

The obvious response is that every PoW coin is a climate change coin.

:-(

[tripzilch]

So common in fact, like language, it becomes a prescriptivism / descriptivism thing ...

[WalterBright]

Positively identifying people was very difficult before fingerprinting came along. The police used all kinds of schemes of erratic accuracy.

[alexpotato]

Several years ago I read the book Fingerprints by Colin Beavan [0] and it was really eye opening how different life was before we had modern forms of identification.

Example 1: In countries that had little formal legal structures and rudimentary identification (e.g. India in the early 1800s), it was incredibly easy to be a criminal and just move from town to town while acquiring new identities. In other words, there was a huge upside to becoming a career criminal since it was both difficult to catch you (no forensic evidence) and even if you were caught, you could just reboot your life.

Example 2: He mentions a case where a gentleman was charged TWICE for crimes that were later found to have been committed by someone else who had only a passing resemblance.

I read this book before Twitter/Facebook became ubiquitous and every like, share, comment was public knowledge but even at the time, it was mind boggling how different "identity" was back then.

0 - https://amzn.to/3kDqEgj

[eatingCake]

The flipside of this would be that anyone from out-of-town would be shunned under the assumption that they had left their previous town for negative reasons.

[eru]

That's probably part of the reason the branding of the hand worked reasonably well in practice in Britain.

If you plead the 'benefit of the clergy', you were branded, so you didn't do it again.

[tsimionescu]

Isn't photo ID much more relevant for the above than fingerprints? Usually fingerprints are used to investigate crime scenes, not to ascertain identity of an already known person (you don't normally ascertain that this person here is Alex A by their fingerprints - you use them to see if Alex A was in the room where the jewelry got stolen).

[WalterBright]

Fingerprints are much more reliable than photos.

I was watching a show on TV last night where they were minutely examining a newly discovered photo of Lincoln to see if it was really Lincoln or someone else. One analyst gave it an "85% probability it was Lincoln".

[drpgq]

Jeez I’m wondering what the going price would be for that today.

[kbenson]

I've seen reports that it's somewhat common for the rich in China[1], so there might be some info on what it costs there, and maybe some extrapolation could be made. Either the "serve prison in lieu of me" or "say you were the one that committed the crime" version. There are weird perverse incentives at play in some of the laws of criminal justice system in China.[2]

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4339051

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10173395 (warning, the linked article describes very disturbing behavior and specific instances)

[stubish]

Not so long ago the heir to the Red Bull fortune was alleged to have driven his Ferrari through a police check point at speed, killing an officer. Since it was a police officer killed, the matter was investigated and the mangled Ferrari found on the estate. One of the house hold staff came forward, claiming he was the driver. Apparently this is somewhat expected in these situations. But it did ruffle lots of feathers, so the poor heir had to go on the run for a while. But no worry, a few years later all charges are dropped because everyone has been compensated and it was a while ago, so lets just let bygones be bygones, and go back to dealing with the stress of being a member of Thailand's 2nd wealthiest family.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-24/thailand-charges-agai...

[bjcy]

To add the latest update to the story, the public outcry continues to be strong and after going back-and-forth on whether to pursue prosecution of the heir, the police asked Interpol to issue a red notice: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/05/world/asia/thailand-red-b...

[eru]

It may sound a bit barbaric, but the family of the victim might be better off with a chunk of money than with the knowledge that the perpetrator is serving time.

(However, if you look at the incentives and deterrence, inflicting inefficient punishment like sending someone to prison for a long time, might still make sense.)

[wpietri]

No reason we can't do both.

[eru]

There's a maximum amount of punishment you want to mete out to convicts. Otherwise everything would carry a penalty worse than death.

So there's a trade-off between handing out more of that punishment in fines to be paid to the victim or in economically inefficient activities like prison time.

As a related matter, I think corporal punishment deserves more consideration. Mostly because it's cheaper to administer than prison, and also avoids forcible socializing convicts only with each other as happens in prison.

(Of course, it's a punishment with a certain cruelty. Alas violence and injury are a common enough sight in overcrowded prisons, too.)

[kbenson]

> the family of the victim might be better off with a chunk of money than with the knowledge that the perpetrator is serving time.

Justice isn't always about providing benefit to those harmed. It's also about providing a framework in which crime is avoided by all because they know there are repercussions they can't avoid.

When the expectation is that you're rich and you can get away with killing someone either through paying someone to take the fall or bribery, then that will happen more often. If the expectation is that everyone is equal under the law, that will happen less.

The US isn't perfect in this regard, but I think it's a lot better than what's being described here. If Ivanka Trump drove recklessly and killed someone, it would be a lot harder for it to play out the same way here. That's not to say she would necessarily face justice, just that it's a lot harder to get out of it, so there wouldn't necessarily be an expectation that it will go away. There's a huge difference in expecting to get away with something and knowing it's uncertain when the consequences are years in prison.

[eru]

However, do compare wrongful death claims in the US which are handled in a civil suit.

O.J. Simpson famously got off with 'not guilty' in the murder case, but lost the civil suit.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongful_death_claim and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O._J._Simpson_murder_case#Civi...

[taneq]

This reminds me of the classic phrase, “the butler did it”. It took me ages to realise that butlers aren’t naturally villainous, but rather were expected to take the fall for any malfeasance committed by the family.

[dyingkneepad]

> It took me ages to realise that butlers aren’t naturally villainous, but rather were expected to take the fall for any malfeasance committed by the family.

I just realized that in Oct 28th, 2020. Thanks for that.

[coldtea]

This might or might not be true, but it's not the origin of "the butler did it".

The origin of the phrase is in the classical detective story trope.

[dragonwriter]

> The origin of the phrase is in the classical detective story trope.

Which, if I'm not mistaken, itself doesn't derive from household staff taking the fall for their employers, but from them being omnipresent but, by strong social custom, ignored.

[effingwewt]

edit- after reading up on this, I'm not sure where you got your information from but everything I could find shows it to just be the common detective/mystery trope.

[fouc]

It just follows logically that historically some powerful families would have paid off a fall guy if necessary, and they could have used a butler in some cases. This could've been the origin of the term, before it even showed up in murder mysteries. Perhaps from the 1700s

[coldtea]

>This could've been the origin of the term, before it even showed up in murder mysteries. Perhaps from the 1700s

The thing is, it doesn't show up in murder mysteries themselves (except only as a fourth-wall breaking meta-reference to the trope).

It originates with murder mystery readers -- as the name of a trope.

[rhizome]

I bet a good butler is much harder to find than a patsy.

[whatshisface]

But... Were they really?

[hoppla]

Is this happening in movies under my nose?

[runnr_az]

Whoa.

[alasdair_]

There have even been death penalty cases that someone else takes the fall for, usually a terminally ill patient who wants their family looked after.

[haramboy]

Per a friend still happening in India and affordable to a surprising percentage of the population

[warent]

Probably more of a price in terms of favors and relationships than money. e.g. If a mob could somehow bust you out then you belong to them for some percent of the prison time. Just a guess though.

[eru]

Do you mean busting out as in a violent prison break, or having the right connections and bribes and intimidation behind the scenes?