[tzs]

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.

[guitarbill]

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).

[NeuNeurosis]

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.

[tzs]

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.

[ntoskrnl]

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.