[NmAmDa]

"Swartz potentially faced more jail time for downloading academic papers than he would have if he had helped Al Qaeda build a nuclear weapon. "

Too much for the American values.

[dang]

Please don't take HN threads on flamewar tangents. This was a doozy. Such discussions are predictable, tedious, attract the same minority of commenters over and over and bore/drive away everybody else.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

[NmAmDa]

I am sorry for that. I didn't intend that. Thank you for pointing to the guidelines and I will take this more to heart when commenting.

[dang]

Appreciated!

[mettamage]

It's things like this that make me believe that the US isn't a truly free society. It simply pretends it is.

But all nations have their problems. The US simply has more than one might think.

[xorfish]

The US has the highest prison population per capita in the world.

Mostly because of an outdated view on justice and crime.

[squiggleblaz]

> Mostly because of an outdated view on justice and crime.

Mostly because certain people profit off it. If you have private prisons and lifetime voting bans for someone locked up for a few months you have mega incentives to get a lot of people behind bars.

[nivenkos]

It's good for violent crimes though.

Whereas in Sweden for example, a violent rapist was awarded ~$84k - https://www.gp.se/ledare/v%C3%A5ldt%C3%A4ktsmannens-skadest%... - after he turned out to be a minor but had been tried as an adult, and in the end spent less than 2 years in prison.

Some of ThePirateBay founders had longer sentences, absolute clown world.

[xorfish]

That outdated view in your comment is exactly what I mean.

There might be an argument if the US actually had lower crime or recidivism rates than European countries, but it does not have that.

Yes, it takes some effort to overcome that primal view on justice, but it leads to a more humane society with less crime.

[markdown]

It sounds like that Sweden case is justified. An injustice was done to him, and he got restitution.

That injustice is separate and distinct from the one he committed on a fellow human being, and for that case he spent two years in prison. This sounds unreasonably short, but without further information, who are we to say whether that was acceptable or not? Perhaps two years was enough to help the rapist overcome his violent tendencies.