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by nixgeek 814 days ago
Insanely low? Insanely high?

SBF hasn’t really accepted responsibility or apologized through the trial, and didn’t at sentencing either.

Judge Kaplan seems to have taken a balanced view — far from the statutory maximum, less than the U.S. wanted, more than the defense wanted.

There will of course be appeals — SBF has already indicated he will file one.

There’s good coverage of what took place at sentencing today here — https://twitter.com/innercitypress/status/177334004374401064...

Also of note is since this is a federal conviction there is no parole in that system, and so unless SBF is successful in his appeal, he will spend at least 255 months in prison, that’s a 15% reduction versus the total sentence in return for good behavior while serving his sentence.

1 comments

High, generally. The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and US sentences are an outlier in terms of how long they are (they’re not the longest, but the whole picture is kind of shocking).
> The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world

It's actually the 6th:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/262962/countries-with-th...

I get your point, the claim was incorrect. But if you're only beaten by Salvador, Cuba, Rwanda, Turkmenistan, and American Samoa... Well, maybe the overall point stands: "Highest in the world" is hyperbole, that much is true, but the USA has an insanely high rate of incarceration, higher than most countries, and definitely higher than all "developed" countries. As a point of comparison, the next OECD member on that list is Turkey, which has about 34% fewer prisoners per 100k people than the USA.
Assuming the accuracy of that source on the numbers, its actually the 5th.

Yes, the United States is the sixth listed, but the 5th listed is part of the United States, not a separate country. (So are several others, but I don't think Guam or the US Virgin Islands are big enough that they move the US overall rating down far enough to matter.)

A difference in philosophy on prison sentence length. The higher incarceration rate is almost 100% explained by sentences that are on average roughly twice what the UK imposes (as one example).
When you can't solve crimes you have to make the sentences really long as a deterrent.