[nkozyra]

> 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.

[sangnoir]

> 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.

[nkozyra]

> 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.

[sangnoir]

> 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.

[nkozyra]

> 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.

[sangnoir]

Forgive me for going meta: Your "Socratic method" falls short when you ignore obvious context. You assumed the liat of reasons I stated was exhaustive, I clarified in my reply that it wasn't and then after another back-and-forth you suggested I may have "inadvertently" stumbled upon the the real reason of your concerns: complexity, which I suppose you felt you were strongly hinting at, but I had explicitly mentioned earlier.

You will save yourself and others time by steelmanning and front-loading your priors - especially in written discussion forums like HN... Unless you're one of those people who enjoy debating more than learning other perspectives. This thread should not have been this deep when I have been stating "there are other factors" in my second contribution to it, and it turns out you were agreeing all along.

[nkozyra]

> You will save yourself and others time by steelmanning and front-loading your priors

This isn't what happened - my end of the conversation was a reaction to your replies and only your replies.

> This thread should not have been this deep when I have been stating "there are other factors" in my second contribution to it, and it turns out you were agreeing all along.

You did in the prior reply - at least explictly - only. Forgive me for not making assumptions of things you didn't say.

But again, my point was that if "protection of society" is a factor in this complex system, there's not much argument against maximizing that.

All that said ...

> complexity, which I suppose you felt you were strongly hinting at, but I had explicitly mentioned earlier.

This wasn't my conclusion, it was simply a reaction to getting more information in that reply than you had previously offered.

> Unless you're one of those people who enjoy debating more than learning other perspectives.

:(

Getting a reductive comment like this doesn't help.