It seems intuitive that the jail time for rape or murder should always be more than the jail time for crimes that just involve illegally obtaining money or goods, and that within a given type of crime the more severe a particular case is the longer the sentence should be.
The problem with that is (1) human lifespan places an upper limit on jail time, and (2) the possible severity of money crimes has a very very very large range.
Even if we made murder and rape always result in life sentences, and put the most severe money crimes at just under that, because of the range of severity possible with money crimes I think we'd end up with a fairly large value for money crimes required to get enough jail time to actually discourage doing that crime.
Another way to look at it is from the bottom instead of the top. How big should a money crime be to earn you a year in jail? That threshold should be a small enough that people don't find it worthwhile to just alternate doing that crime and then spending a year in jail over and over.
As the amount of money made in the crime goes up, so too does the necessary jail time to make alternating doing the crime and serving your jail time less lucrative than earning an honest living. Because of the large range of possible financial crimes you necessarily end up with it possible to get long sentences.
The whole thing would be more believable if e.g. bankers went to jail. When sentencing repeatedly seems to have no relation to societal harm, it's fine to ask if the judicial system isn't corrupted in some way (talking about the UK specifically here).
Yeah, I'm going to have to disagree with you on the use of jail time as a deterrence to criminal action. While we like to believe that is the case
"One problem with deterrence theory is that it assumes that human beings are rational actors who consider the consequences of their behavior before deciding to commit a crime; however, this is often not the case."
https://www.sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01...
There is a ton of research in this same vein.
That only seems to be considering aspects of deterrence that depend on the person making a choice:
> In broad terms punishment may be expected to affect deterrence in one of two ways. First, by increasing the certainty of punishment, potential offenders may be deterred by the risk of apprehension. For example, if there is an increase in the number of state troopers patrolling highways on a holiday weekend, some drivers may reduce their speed in order to avoid receiving a ticket. Second, the severity of punishment may influence behavior if potential offenders weigh the consequences of their actions and conclude that the risks of punishment are too severe.
Jail time can reduce crime by a third mechanism (I'm not sure if this would be considered "deterrence" or something else but to the people the crimes would be committed against it doesn't really matter) which does not involve any decisions on the part of the person, rational or not.
Namely, during their time in jail their opportunities for committing crimes are greatly reduced. Consider someone who would normally rob one bank every 6 months. If that person spends 10 years in jail every time they are caught, and is caught within a month after each robbery, they are going to commit under 10 bank robberies over their lifetime.
If they only spend 1 year in jail after every robbery they could commit they could do 80 or more robberies over their lifetime.
Whether the cost of keeping them in jail 10 times as long is worth it for a nearly order of magnitude reduction in the number of robberies they commit is worth it is an entirely different question.
IMO sentences should scale with the harm done, not absolute dollar amounts. Violent crime with a real-life victim should always be treated more harshly than crime where the "victim" is a megacorporation's intellectual property.
If white-collar crime is big enough to where thousands of people lose their jobs, that is real societal harm and should be sentenced accordingly. But if someone decreases the profits of a monopoly from $5 billion to $4.999 billion, I'm a little less sympathetic.
Taking the sentence at face value, even the initial 7 year sentence seems really extreme given the actual damages but from the article:
> Over a period of more than 10 years
> Precisely when King began serving his initial prison sentence of seven years and four months is unclear but given the June 2022 instruction that he cannot travel abroad, assuming that he served substantially less than the 88-month sentence imposed in 2019 seems reasonable.
They made £5M over 10 years and the main guy actually spent 3 or fewer years in prison.
Ultimately this seems exceedingly reasonable to me. Granted I’m from the US and I’m not familiar at all with the justice system in the UK.
The thing is 10 years in Jail is not going to teach them anything or protect society. The only victims are the broadcast companies, not like it ruined anyone's life. I think 1 year in Jail would have been more than enough, those people are not going to start again anytime soon anyways.
I completely agree with you and that’s the thing; he was sentenced to 7 years in 2019 but he’s already out of prison and has a passport. He was free in less than 3.
He is presumably out on some kind of supervised release which is probably good. He had the motivation and ability to execute on an admittedly illegal business — he can now put those same skills to work doing something productive and the supervision will presumably make sure he isn’t committing fraud or anything.
It's worth mentioning here in the US this would not be possible. Federal sentencing guidelines require 85% of time served. Someone with a 7 year sentence would have to serve at least 6 years of it under normal circumstances.
If they qualified for a drug rehabilitation program (RDAP) they could get that down to 5 years assuming they documented their addiction and how it influenced their crimes early in their legal case.
With some of the new First Step Act and similar changes it's theoretically possible to reduce the sentence by more if they participated in qualifying rehabilitative programs, but many of the federal prisons don't actually offer the programs yet despite lying and saying they do to meet legislative due dates.
There is (for most crimes) an entitlement to release on licence after 1/2 or 2/3 of the sentence, with the rest being served in the community but subject to recall to prison. So the most important takeaway is that the 'headline' numbers are higher than those actually served. Given the crime and the date of sentence it's very likely that he served three years and eight months inside. Some of that might have happened before his trial if he was remanded in custody: time spent in prison pre-trial is counted towards the sentence.
The 'additional' time for not paying £963k is designed to be coercive. The court has, in theory, decided that not only does he owe the money but he can be expected to find it. And the prison in default is supposed to encourage him to do so. Importantly, it's not an either/or: he still owes the money even if he serves the default sentence.
My surface level understanding from the article is that this was a little bit more for-profit organized-crime kind of thing than your average person ripping movies and making them available to others for free.
Like, it sounds like this guy might actually have all that money from the activity.
It's actually quite common in the US to have drug offenders serve significantly longer sentences than many violent crimes and even sexual abuse of children. It also depends heavily on if the state or federal government prosecutes them. As an example a child abuser prosecuted at the state level might receive an 8 year sentence with a larger portion of it suspended or served as parole, whereas a drug case prosecuted by the federal government might get a sentence of 10 years of which they are required by law to serve 8.5 (85%) in addition to their 5 years of supervised release.
Many people have some kind of mistaken belief that all drug offenders are just friendly dopes like their neighborhood pot dealer. However, illegal drugs are not only directly the leading cause of death among Americans age 18-45, the trafficking business also adds considerable marginal violence. Two famous examples are the 90s crack wars and the Miami cocaine wars. While drug related murders today get little press outside of local if-it-bleeds-it-leads coverage, a considerable number of persons are still getting murdered every year in drug related violence.
Contrariwise illegal streaming has never directly killed anyone and illegal streamer gangs aren’t doing drivebys or otherwise murdering people.
The problem with that is (1) human lifespan places an upper limit on jail time, and (2) the possible severity of money crimes has a very very very large range.
Even if we made murder and rape always result in life sentences, and put the most severe money crimes at just under that, because of the range of severity possible with money crimes I think we'd end up with a fairly large value for money crimes required to get enough jail time to actually discourage doing that crime.
Another way to look at it is from the bottom instead of the top. How big should a money crime be to earn you a year in jail? That threshold should be a small enough that people don't find it worthwhile to just alternate doing that crime and then spending a year in jail over and over.
As the amount of money made in the crime goes up, so too does the necessary jail time to make alternating doing the crime and serving your jail time less lucrative than earning an honest living. Because of the large range of possible financial crimes you necessarily end up with it possible to get long sentences.