About 1% of the general population, and 25% of prisoners are psychopaths. This means that they are unable to care about others in any meaningful sense. Psychopaths make decisions solely through a personal cost benefit analysis.
On top of the psychopaths you have extremely disagreeable people who do understand the pain of their victims, but just don’t care about them, maybe 3-5% of the population.
The only way to encourage these people to behave is to have an effective system that will punish them if they break the law. The expected return of crime needs to be negative to stop these extremely selfish people from engaging in it.
Most people who believe in rehabilitation/restorative justice refuse to believe that such people exist.
The existence of a rehabilitation system is not a deterrent and about 5% of the population would enthusiastically commit their “first crime” then enthusiastically enter the rehabilitation program. They would continue this cycle until they encounter a proper deterrent.
I certainly don’t like the revenge/punishment philosophy of jail, but I think the system should be fixed for everyone (make it truly about rehab when possible, and about protecting society when not possible), but what you propose would only make an unfair system even more unfair. Why should he get off without jail and someone who breaks into a car and comparatively steals pocket change end up in jail?
Not to mention that someone with his background and upbringing should be even more aware of the difference of what’s right or wrong than other criminals.
I’m against all crime but at least I can kind of understand how someone on the edge of society, with poor or no education, etc. would see crime as a viable option, but someone that literally doesn’t need the money? Let him go with a symbolic punishment? I think that’d be worse.
If an impoverished criminal with no education attains affluence solely from their crimes, would the background still factor into the punishment that you give them?
I said I don’t like the punishment philosophy, so since you’re asking what I’d do, let’s first get that out of the way.
To attain affluence solely from crime you’d have to be part of the organized crime, so yes, I’d consider them on par with someone who did what Bankman-Fried did, since money laundering is one of the charges.
It definitely does not rehabilitate as rehabilitation is almost unheard of in most jails or prisons.
Prison is only scary for criminals the first time they enter. Once you've been through the system going to prison a second time is a walk in the park. When I got arrested and sent to prison last year for retweeting a government tweet I walked back in the jail like I ran the place. I knew all the staff, I had my friends there. Even one of the nurses at intake pulled me aside like I was a celebrity and congratulated me for my social justice work. I felt like a boss. Any deterrence factor had long since worn off. And I've only been locked up twice. The other guys around me had been inside dozens of times. One guy had been locked up 70 times.
And we talk about the cost of locking people up, let's say an average of $50K/year in prison costs. People also forget to factor in all the court costs, for the judges, prosecutors, staff etc, probably runs to another $100K+ for a trial. THEN, when someone is locked up they are not generating any income tax or paying any sales taxes. They are not buying any goods or services with their money. There is a huge negative loss there from their lost income and spending to the economy.
Then multiply it by the two or three million who are locked up or on house arrest.
Very quick summary as I can't talk about it much yet (maybe in a few months). I was on bail at my home in Chicago. I was getting arrested every day by the police for no reason. They would come cuff me up, drag me outside, uncuff me. The press caught onto it. I did interviews. The public defender's office tweeted a link to one of the newspaper articles. I retweeted. The police arrested me for it. The judge agreed that I shouldn't be tweeting about police harassment, especially not under a "fake name" (my Twitter username is my first name, and the tweet literally is a newspaper article about me). It took me three months of being in jail to even get in front of the judge to argue it. And we reargued it and lost again. After that I just sucked it up. I got out six months later after three months in a supermax.
Out of interest did you make the same arguments about Martin Shkreli (arrogant and unlikable child of immigrants who did a much smaller scale scam similar to SBFs but where everyone was eventually repaid in full) and about Andrew Auernheimer (annoying and racist child of a working class single mother who performed a fairly successful hack without any personal gain) and about Brian Salcedo (working class, non-college-educated guy from the Midwest who carried out a fairly basic hack of a corporation attempting to profit financially but with no realistic chance of success)?
Just asking, because all three of those guys did several years of federal time.
I somewhat agree with what you say about prison, but I'm not sure we should start with the charismatic and media-savvy child of politically connected Stanford professors, who had plenty of opportunities to do well and live a full life without stealing anything or cheating anyone.
Though I was unjustly convicted under false pretenses by federal prosecutors willing to lie and misrepresent the law and my rights were deeply violated, having been to prison in the process I found it filled with quite a large number of people who absolutely should be there. One drug dealer, for example, laughed about forcing a desperate woman to fuck his dog for dope. There were also a pair of twins that tried to acquire a toddler for use as a sex slave.
There were also some people that shouldn't have been there, perhaps not put in prison on false charges like me, but taking years off their life was a basic injustice that did nothing to advance society and likely encouraged further criminality.
All nice and stable societies have long-term incarceration. Japan has notoriously hard prisons, even worse than most federal facilities in the United States. If I could, I would change how the prisons worked and treated their prisoners. I would definitely segregate off some of the categories of prisoners from others, and we surely have enough facilities to do so. But without the ability to denaturalize people and permanently expel them to a prison colony, you are going to need large numbers of people in longterm confinement. I'd say society would be much better off if half the prisoners I met never walked free, and a quarter were never incarcerated in the first place. The US justice system has 3 major problems: it convicts too many people, lets the wrong people avoid prison, and has too many people given kid glove sentences who really should go down for a lot longer. Even having been falsely convicted and tortured by the United States, I am not so foolish as to believe in prison abolition.
I am fully aware that the Western world is full of people that think that those that disagree with them should be locked up for their opinions. Thankfully you haven't completely taken over the courts yet, but you are surely getting close.
Be careful what you wish for, generally going around throwing your political enemies in prisons has frequently had longterm consequences for the safety of the people doing so and the people that support it.
There needs to be a real cultural shift here, and spaces like HN are doing a really bad job. The moderation heavily favors this privileged SV mindset, and criticism, results in extra scrutiny.
> Out of interest did you make the same arguments about Martin Shkreli (arrogant and unlikable child of immigrants who did a much smaller scale scam similar to SBFs but where everyone was eventually repaid in full)
There is more to Shkreli and his sociopathic capitalism.
Shkreli showing his real stripes:
A drug comes before the FDA for approval, and it is opened up for comment. Shkreli lodges an objection to approval of this drug.
Why? Because it's unsafe? No, trials thus far have shown it to be safer than existing drugs.
Why? Because it's less effective? No, it's also been shown to be more effective than existing drugs?
Perhaps it's more expensive? No, cost of R&D and production, and estimated retail costs are expected to be lower than existing drugs.
Huh, odd. So why did Shkreli oppose this drug getting to the market?
Because he and his company had just bought the patent to one of those 'existing drugs' recently, and this drug coming to market would torpedo demand for his drug, and torpedo the profitability of his investment in buying the patent.
Man of the people, fighting for healthcare rights, Martin Shkreli.
Sure, and we'll just trust that he'll be honest about what jobs he's doing and how much money he's earning. This is one of the lessons from the guy behind fyre festival - even whilst on bail he started another fraud. Yes it would be nice if we could put people on the naughty step when they've done something wrong, but we can't. Sam Bankman-friend is a convicted fraudster, the idea that given the chance of freedom that he'd do anything other than continue to commit fraud is kind of ridiculous.
There's a lot of jobs you could give someone who's a non-violent white collar offender where the cost of monitoring would be trivial, and where society overall would be getting a better deal than paying to keep someone in a cage.
Like, send SBF to Antarctica to clean toilets for the next 10 years, or do the same at a military base, or allow them to work exclusively on oil platforms etc.
Disagreeing that this should be done is one thing, but to claim that it can't be accomplished due to logistical difficulties just shows a severe lack of imagination.
A US federal prisoner costs (according to some quick searching) ~$120/day, the minimum wage is ~$7.25. So to a first approximation you could get the guy a blue collar job paying taxes, and pay someone else to do nothing but watch him for 15 hours a day to certify that he's still doing manual labor, and still come out ahead.
Surely we can do better than that, right? Like I imagine for a white-collar rich boy capping his income at $55k+inflation which includes the monetary values of gifts and any income from debt has to be pre-approved [1] would be far far more devastating, less cruel, and less drain on society. And this lasts for x years or until he pays back the damages.
[1] so he could buy a car and house but not skirt the rule by using loans against an asset portfolio to make more "income" for himself.
Guy famous for one of the biggest scams in history: "sure, I'll abide the rules where I report all of my earnings even if that means you tax everything I earn beyond 55k"
Why would he bother looking for a job with income over the limit? What would stop him immediately starting another scam? Who would even hire such a guy to begin with?
I'm sure Starbucks would take him. And he might choose to not bother working a better paying job, that's fine. And the threat is that if he starts another scam he gets house arrest then jail in addition.
This is just the original sentence with extra steps. The hypothetical “second chance” you’re attempting to give him was used up every time he chose to take another step in perpetuating his fraud.
I’m not a fan of the current imprisonment establishment either, but this solution doesn’t seem viable.
People go to prison for three-ish reasons: To reform the criminal, to deter crime, and to offer restitution in the form of punishment to the victims of the crime, and arguably to keep society safe.
I feel bad that Sam is going to go away for life, and ideally we'd live in a society where we don't need prison to reform people, but Sam is a case where there is considerable deterrent effect and well as a public protection interest. When someone steals so much from so many and admits no fault, that's not a person who can go to a day program and reform their ways, they need severe consequences to get the to honestly reform.
There's also what the victims say should be done. Just thousands and thousands of people felt pain, and will get a say in the sentencing. If they all forgive, sure, it's okay to give him a light sentence, but the degree of suffering SBF caused is just so profound people will want justice to an un-repentant fraudster who stole their future.
I assume some people killed themselves because of the financial ruin his fraud created. I have to imagine a lot of people's lives fell apart, relationships were destroyed, families broken up. Because of the choices this man made to enrich himself.
Victims of crime deserve revenge in some part and the state is the mechanism to deliver that revenge. We should always remember the victims of crimes first.
> Wouldn't a lifetime ban on all white-collar work suffice? And being forced to pay anything he makes over a certain threshold to his victims?
The administration fees to monitor and enforce all that wouldn't be cheaper for the state.
> what's the point of putting him in prison.
To keep him from scamming more people, since zebras don't change their stripes. Especially desperate ones that would be prevented from working white-collar jobs and forced to pay restitution from what they make at other legitimate jobs. And as others have already said, a deterrent.
As others pointed out, some form of deterrent is just as important as vengeance for the victims. Just my opinion but it feels like tech is getting a bit too full of people who think they can do all sorts of terrible things because they are actually saving humanity in the distant future via AI or blockchain or whatever. My understanding is SBF fell into this line of thinking and I don’t think we should reward this kind of antisocial behavior with get out of jail free cards.
This is one of those philosophical points I don't think everyone realizes about the law, possibly because not everyone has felt the feelings that underpin the philosophy.
The revenge part of justice isn't there because it benefits the convicted's rehabilitation. It's there because it increases the ambient peace of society to have the state take upon itself (and codify, and normalize) the very human desire to seek a balancing of the scales by bringing someone low who brought you low.
We punish criminals with discomfort, constraint, and loss of freedom so that their victims don't hunt them down and cave in their skulls with a two-by-four. We give them what's coming to them so they don't get what's coming to them directly from those they've wronged.
At some number of 0s, white collar crimes are more damaging to society than violent ones. $10 billion definitely meets that threshold, there has to be a deterrent.
The number of years of savings he stole from people is less than the maximum time he can get in prison, so if anything, he's getting off light.
If there were justice in this world his mind would be put in a simulation and he'd be forced to do all of the things that the people who lost money did to get theirs in real time. Let him feel that loss before you then wake him up and make him spend the rest of his time in prison.
Only victimless crimes should involve rehabilitation. If you harm others, punishment is fitting as a deterrent and to restrict your freedom to repeat the crime.
You know the $8 billion dollars he set on fire came from people right? Lots of people basically lost their life savings or had their lives ruined right? How many lives do you have to destroy in the process of "business" before we should care as a society?
1. How people forget King Solomon after just a few thousand years. Put yourself in somebody who lost their life savings to SBF. What do you think happens? Prison serves a primal need-- it punishes the perpetrator so the wronged don't kill him and then the family of the wronged don't escalate from there.
2. Prison makes SBF a spectacle-- commit fraud, go to jail and be miserable.
3. How the hell are you going to ban "white-collar" work?
4. How many tens of millions of $$ do you think SBF has hidden? How many favors are owed to him? He's never going to have to work another day in his life.
I also have conflicting opinions on this, but the usual reasoning is more about deterrence than revenge. We want others who might try these things to see that they can and do get punished.
Yes - a lot of victims of crimes want some token of revenge. We should honor the victim's wishes within a reasonable way. Revenge brings comfort and closure to many people - it's an entirely natural emotion. People very likely ended their own lives and he ruined the lives of many people due to his rampant fraud. Think about those people first.
Secondly, punishment is a big part of why prison exists. It should, hopefully, dissuade a decent amount of people from committing crimes. It keeps "honest people honest" to some degree.
> Because that's what this is if he gets more than 10 years in prison.
I guess I sort of agree here but not entirely. We grant a lot of trust in elites that have access to these financial apparatus and it can be very difficult to detect fraudulent actions. For this reason, fraud and financial crime at this level should be punished harshly. The most effective way of doing this is to remove an individuals freedom.
I'd agree prisons could be more humane and modernized. Caging people all day isn't the best, especially if they will remain for many years. Some initial harsh punishment (hard labor, isolation for a couple years) followed up by easier rehab incarceration and eventual parole (15 years from now) would suit this particular case IMO.
> Wouldn't a lifetime ban on all white-collar work suffice?
I think putting him to work until he pays off every stolen dollar would suffice. Making minimum wage stamping license place, it should only take him ~540,906 years[1] of work to pay off his debt to society.
The guy's admitted no fault, no remorse, and kept trying to do the slick-conman-swindle in front of the judge and jury. He's learned no lessons, and we're all better off without having to worry about predators like him.
If you can get 2 years for stealing a car, this seems reasonable.
When you can get more than that for shoplifting[1] or stealing a car, I don't think it's appropriate at all. If we're going to overhaul the entire justice system at the same time, then sure.
I agree, but shoplifting is on the rise and becoming so prevalent that it is hurting normal law abiding citizens. I'm not sure what it is, but more should be done to deter shoplifting.
That's interesting. Illinois rolled back their application of burglary to shoplifting offenses because it was giving such lengthy sentences for petty offenses.
What?!?!? Why him, or why white collar crime specifically? He simply HAS to get a substantial prison sentence.
He is among the worst of the worst in society. It's really easy to do what he did. Everyone's got a story, or could come up with one if you let them.
We have punishments for the worst of the worst in society. I think we should be more lenient, and under my values he might not be going away for 10 years, but there should be something substatial here.
I find it quite shocking to find people on HN that think he should get NO prison, but perhaps this is a typo.
