[wredcoll]

So your hypothetical is that someone reads the headline "elderly woman kills family of four with car due to incapacity, receives no jail time" and goes "oh, no jail? No biggie" but if they read a headline "... and receives life in prison" they're going to rush out and take away grandma's keys because now they care?

Really?

[sagarm]

The message that incapacity, even to the point of killing four people, will be excused is quite clear.

The deterrence argument is used to throw the book at people committing minor crimes like shoplifting. Let's apply it to quadruple homicide, eh?

Mary Long Fau should have died in prison.

[wredcoll]

> The deterrence argument is used to throw the book at people committing minor crimes like shoplifting

And it doesn't work there, so why would it work for impaired driving?

You seem to be operating under the idea that because she didn't go to jail, there were no consequences. This seems false.

[barry-cotter]

> And it doesn't work there, so why would it work for impaired driving?

It does actually. See how thieves resident in Florida travel to New York to work because of the different enforcement regimes for one of the clearest possible examples[1].

Even if deterrence didn’t work at all putting people in prison is good because of incapacitation. Committing crimes is stupidly right tailed[2]. Every career criminal in jail for a year is a year society doesn’t suffer their crimes.

[1] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/02/02/cnns_john...

[2] https://sk.sagepub.com/ency/edvol/the-sage-encyclopedia-of-e...

[mlyle]

Note that New York seems to have much lower property crime rates than Florida. It's usually difficult to compare this between jurisdictions but it seems pretty clear cut in this case.

It also seems like the percentage of goods lost to retail theft is slightly lower in New York than Florida.

c.f. you have a thirdhand cherry-picked quote from someone on a political site that implies differently.