> The difference is society gets 12 additional years of safety which it wouldn't get otherwise.
Naturally, by this logic I have to ask: why not 32 years? 52? 102? Aren't we doing society a disservice by ever allowing criminals to leave prison?
> Ostensibly
I chose this word carefully, because I think a lot of our preconceived notions on criminal behavior have not been validated by the real world, including the deterrent effects of long-term imprisonments.
> Naturally, by this logic I have to ask: why not 32 years? 52? 102?
Because the sentencing judge applied the guidelines provided by law as written by legislature, considered case-law, the specifics of this case and applied their professional judgement to come up with a 25-year sentence as an appropriate one for the crimes committed. If the defendant disagrees, they can appeal the sentence to get a second opinion.
You're attempting to reductio ad absurdum prison sentences - I'll apply it to your argument in turn - why send guilty people to prison at all? What's the difference between 1 day imprisonment and 60, or 6000? A sense of proportion is the difference between a black-and-white world and the one we strive for in reality.
> Because the sentencing judge applied the guidelines provided by law as written
We know the mechanics of why it was chosen. What I was asking was by your logic, 22 is less protective of society than 102, which makes me question the validity of "it protects society" reasoning. Why protect less when we have a quantifiably greater level of protection?
> You're attempting to reductio ad absurdum prison sentences
This is incredibly dismissive. We have arbitrary sentencing guidelines. They are based on reasoning, but that doesn't mean they are correct. They are fluid, change from locale to locale, and have unpredictable efficacy.
> why send people to prison at all? What's the difference between 1 day imprisonment and 60
You see, I don't think that's reductio ad absurdum at all. It's a valid question. You can argue for it and against it, but it isn't absurd or contradictory on its face.
> A sense of proportion is the difference between a black-and-white world
All you're saying here is 6000 > 1. We know this. I'm asking why 6000 is right, 1 is wrong, and why we throw away the other 5998.
> What I was asking was by your logic, 22 is less protective of society than 102, which makes me question the validity of "it protects society" reasoning
The answer to all variations of your underlying question in your post is because when handing down sentences, there are multiple, oft-conflicting considerations. We don't only consider societal safety - if we did we'd just jail everyone for life.
6000 is right because it is the right point of balance between keeping society safe and the rights of the imprisoned, while reflecting the seriousness of the crime without being cruel or unusual. Prison sentences inherently take away rights from the prisoner, and this is yet another thing that's thrown onto the pile of considerations for tradeoffs which individually lengthen or shorten the term of imprisonment. It's not a binary decision like you propose (imprisoned vs not imprisoned for any crime), but finding the right balance point (likely region or volume) on multidimensional axes.
I'm not a trial judge, but I can think of the following factors off thr top of my head: nature of crime committed, remorse, amount of harm, restitution (if any), sentencing guidelines in the law, probability of recidivism, safety of society, safety of defendant, sentences issued on similar cases in the past, appeals on similar cases in the past, prosecutor sentencing recommendations, defense sentencing recommendations, time already served, culpability, the number of charges defendant is found guilty of and whether they can be served simultaneously or not, etc. You're ignoring all of these and projecting the sentence to a single dimension (societal safety).
You haven't answered why you think we imprison people in the first place (or if we should). We cant have a fruitful discussion about which sentence durations are "better" without knowing what metrics we are measuring.
> We don't only consider societal safety - if we did we'd just jail everyone for life.
This is why I asked why 22 was right and 32 is wrong. "Because the judge said so" is no more useful than my asking "why heads?" and you answering "because that's where it landed when I flipped it."
There might not be a "right answer," and I'm ok with that. But it's odd to decide it's right simply because an authority decided it was.
> You're ignoring all of these and projecting the sentence to a single dimension (societal safety).
I'm not ignoring them, I'm simply responding to the reasoning you gave. By your metrics, 22 gives 12 more years of societal safety than does 10. This is what you responded to me, and I'm trying to point out that I believe it's flawed. If there are more factors included, it doesn't make this reasoning less flawed, it's just a smaller slice of the judgment's pie.
> You haven't answered why you think we imprison people in the first place (or if we should). We cant have a fruitful discussion about which sentence durations are "better" without knowing what metrics we are measuring.
Perhaps inadvertently, I think you hit the nail on the head. We don't have metrics that validate or invalidate any of this. We rely on a set of arbitrary guidelines mediated by emotions and feelings. In a great many cases, I don't think we're accomplishing anything but pushing a problem away and pretending we fixed it.