[mycologos]

I sometimes wonder whether sentencing people to time in prison is the right equilibrium. My understanding is that doing the stuff associated with long prison terms is also associated with not having the longest or most carefully considered time horizon. In that sense, long prison terms are a bad punishment because they're an insufficient deterrent that is very expensive, in terms of both state resources and the prisoners' time.

Unfortunately, any deterrent has to by its nature be unpleasant, so if prison terms are off the table, you end up with instinctively gross and backwards-seeming things like inflicting physical violence on prisoners. That, uh, doesn't seem good either.

For the sake of brevity, at the risk of glibness: it seems like a system created with little consideration for its users, who are very different people from its designers.

[henryreynolds]

Per the National Institute of Justice, "The certainty of being caught is a vastly more powerful deterrent than the punishment."

As a dramatic overgeneralization of the principle, you'll have fewer thefts if every thief is forced to pay for their stolen goods than if 1% of thieves are tortured to death on live television.

It suggests that lowering expenditures on prisons, by reducing sentences, and retargeting that money toward enforcement would yield positive effects.

https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/five-things-about-deterr...

[snapplebobapple]

why don't we compromise and torture every thief to death on live television? Both morals and effectiveness can take a win here.