I think that punishment for crime should scale not just on the basis of the severity of the crime (which obviously is a very important indicator for the level of risk to society a given criminal poses) but also to the privilege level of the defendant. I also think that criminal behavior before the age of 25 should be penalized differently from criminal behavior after the age of 25.

Essentially I think younger/poorer should be a mitigating factor and older/richer should do the opposite. If you're old enough to know better and did it anyway that's a really bad mark against you. If you have a position of privilege and power and you do something bad that is also a huge mark against you. Essentially I think that privilege confers noblesse oblige, and that instead we've created a system where more wealth/power = less punishment despite it being morally significantly worse.

Rich people love putting systems in place to heavily punish criminal acts against them by poors 'as a deterrent'. Time and time again studies have shown that there are real limits to deterrence wrt desperate people... but the wealthy think that deterrence works well because it works extremely well on them. I would go so far as passing a constitutional amendment that made it so that if you had a net worth of >5M the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment goes away. Call it the Sackler amendment so that we can torture them to death in public. I'm not sure what else you could do to find justice for their crimes against the people of this country. Life in prison (even in solitary confinement) really is kind of a slap on the wrist for killing 2-3x as many people as the Vietnam War on purpose. I'd be completely fine doing the same to all the other pharma execs/salespeople who helped fuel the opioid epidemic. At a certain point you just have to show people there's a line you don't cross or really bad stuff starts to happen.

I also think the FBI should be massively de-prioritizing investigating crimes committed by less privileged people. Expecting local cops/prosecutors to go toe to toe with the resources that powerful people can bring to bear isn't realistic or fair, which is a huge part of why they generally don't. Nobody wants to spend 3 years fighting a war against someone with vastly more resources than you just to watch him get a slap on the wrist from the judge who may or may not have been one of his fraternity brothers.

This is hyperbole, no?

Of course.

OP, whereabouts are you from?

First off, when you said FBI, did you mean police? I think most people, no matter how liberal, would argue that a case that got pushed up to the FBI should probably be investigated to the fullest, regardless of the demographic of the suspected suspect.

If you were to substitute police for FBI, isn't this what already happens to an extent? My understanding is that in less privileged populations crime rate clearance is abysmal. It seems most arguments are that we should decriminalize drug use, reduce police abuse and improve police/community relations, and hopefully this leads to better crime clearance. And at the policy level the goal is to change incentive structures so there is less incentive for criminal activity.

I have never heard anyone argue the problem is that we are too tough and efficient in combating legitimate crime in less privileged neighborhoods. Every developed nation that has better crime statistics than ours has much higher crime clearance across the board (and much lower criminal activity overall).

I think maybe your heart is in the right place, but your solutions would make things much worse for the vast majority of people in less privileged neighborhoods that aren't criminals.

God forbid people from privileged backgrounds experience any injustice at all. That sarcasm very much isn’t hyperbole. The hyperbole part of my post was torturing people to death. Having a separate national police force dedicated to chasing rich people seems like something that's time is long past due. So does changing the way we punish people for committing crimes. Great power = great responsibility logically leads to the idea that those with significant power should pay a significantly higher price for screwing up their duty to society.

We moved roughly every six months when I was a kid. The longest stretches we stayed in one place were Maine from 2nd-6th grade and San Antonio from 10th-12th. We still moved house to house a lot during those two periods of relative stability, but I honestly can't remember all the different places we lived when I was growing up.

My parents are both from the greater Louisville area but didn't meet there. My dad was the black sheep of an upper middle class Jewish family and my maternal grandparents were hillbillies who were part of the big early 20th century diaspora from the SE corner of KY. Both of them were quite mentally ill.

If you base on system based on different classes of inherent rights, I think it is optimistic to believe that wealthy people will be the ones negatively affected.

A limit on how much you can spend on political donations, legal defenses and lobbying seems like it would get you closer to your goal. Basically a limit on how much wealth you can apply to get the right politicians, get the right laws passed and how much legal muscle you can muster in court.

I'm sure there are practical (and principled) problems with my suggestion too, but it seems better than making an arbitrary class system... in the belief that this would cure a class system.

The problem I'm trying to address is pervasive impunity for the ruling class. It's something that has created huge amounts of moral hazard through US history and it's only getting worse. Much in the same way that violent people with extremely powerful guns necessitate the use of SWAT teams the resources that the wealthy can bring to bear to avoid justice necessitates specialized law enforcement.

Starting with the Civil War (just because I don't feel like going back further) there's a long list of crimes committed by extremely wealthy people that didn't experience anything like punishment. The more that happens the more flagrant the violations get.

In the US today 'punishable by a fine' essentially means 'legal for rich people'. More serious crimes they usually get mild sentences for, even when convicted through a jury trial.

Your statement that different classes of inherent rights is bad makes very little sense given that we already have that in this country. It's one set of punishments for the haves and another much more draconian set of punishments for the have-nots. I think it should be exactly the opposite.

Right now there hundreds of millions of dollars (probably billions but I'm not going to go look it up) of uncollected fines for various violations that large corporations haven't bothered to pay. I got a misdemeanor charge in high school that I never bothered to pay (it was like 500 bucks)... in my mid 20's I got arrested for that in another state and spent 48 hours in jail waiting for the local cops to figure out what the warrant was for. I have a jail nickname over some extremely minor 10 year old violation but they can just not pay six and seven figure sums and nothing happens. American justice in action.

I think you're pointing to genuine problems but some of your proposed solutions aren't so great.

One big problem facing the lower classes is the standard of defence they receive. The public defender can't dedicate the same amount of time, let alone other resources, that a wealthy defendant would benefit from.

When it comes to fines I think some kind of means testing would be reasonable, but you'd still run into outliers where I don't know how many millions you'd have to fine Bill Gates for littering before he noticed it had left his account.

Otherwise, what we're really getting at is that wealth imbalances lead to power imbalances and it seems to me that that is an issue that is much wider than how to sentence criminals.

It's not just about the quality of defense. It's about the actual criminal codes. White collar crimes generally carry much less punishment than blue collar crimes.

The Sacklers are walking free right now. That's definitive proof that we need drastically more draconian punishments for the rich. If that seems unfair consider how unfair it is that millions of people were unnecessarily addicted to opiates on their behalf and hundreds of thousands of those people died.

That's how the law works. Someone does something awful and ruins that something for everyone else. Rich people need to be held to a higher standard than the less fortunate not a lower one. The Sacklers are the perfect example of why that is.

So what problem is this trying to solve, exactly?

It sounds like you just want more rich people in prison. How does that help the crime problem in our cities?

I asked where you're from because the OP seemed to be written by someone who has been living in a bubble. Who, specifically, are the people you want to be let off easy because they're "desperate?" Drug dealers? Burglars? Rapists? Drunk drivers?

You're never more than 2 clicks on the internet away from a comment complaining about the incarceration rates in the USA. You seem to want to make that problem worse by adding more white collar criminals. Who does that help?

I mean obviously we should end drug prohibition, legalize prostitution, and greatly reduce sentences for most crimes that aren't murder. Pretty hard to justify longer than a 5-7 year sentence for any situation where anyone wasn't seriously injured, and impossible to justify more than 2-3 for a property crime, and then only if it's a repeat violation.

That'll solve the incarceration rate problem. We should take some of the space that opens up and fill it full of people who, despite this country giving them an enormous amount, felt it wasn't enough and had to take a bit more than what they legally had coming. We're trying to reduce the risk to the average citizen of being harmed by a criminal. Right now fraud is definitely the most dangerous thing for everyone reading this message. If someone burglarizes my house I could lose five figures worth of stuff tops. A fraudster could take my entire net worth + everything my credit could borrow. Way scarier for anyone middle class +.

The next time someone tells me that I've been stolen from but it's a 'civil matter' I'm going to lose my damn mind.

Ok. I am not sure that making prison sentences shorter without ameliorating the incentives for crime in the first place will lead towards a good outcome, and will probably lead toward a worse outcome, but the rest sounds fine in theory.

So you effectively eliminate the punishment for "property crime" and think this will improve things in impoverished areas of the country?

Milwaukee already has a major theft/burglary problem for instance. They know they only get a slap on the wrist, so we've got teenagers being arrested for the 4th/5th time in stolen vehicles. You say that it's no big deal because nobody was injured. Our mayor appears to agree because he constantly refers to it as simply "joy riding" and downplays the incidents as kids being kids. I certainly don't know anyone who stole a car by age 13. Perhaps I just wasn't desperate enough?

You also seem to grossly overestimate the number of people in prison solely for drugs and prostitution. "Crimes that aren't murder" is a very, very large group, so I'm not sure what to say there.

Lots of feelings, not a lot of common sense. If you want to abandon any hope of rehabilitation for some or the rougher parts of the country, definitely go ahead and dial back the already lax criminal justice system. You clearly haven't even given a single thought toward the law abiding citizens who live in these neighborhoods. Shocking, I know, but not every single poor person is a criminal in prison.

Every 6 months or so, my neighborhood gets hit by people who go up and down every block checking car doors to pilfer what they can out of unlocked vehicles in peoples' driveway. I ****ed up once and left mine unlocked and they grabbed the change from the ashtray, dumped the contents of my glovebox, and used the garage door opener on my visor to take 2 bikes and a new-in-the-box air compressor from my garage. They took my garage door opener as well, presumably to come back at a later date in case I was stupid and didn't unpair the main unit.

During winter, there's probably a couple posts a month on Nextdoor from someone who goes to start their car to warm it up, heads back inside to finish their coffee or whatever, and comes back out to an empty driveway a few minutes later. The criminals obviously know that people will leave unattended cars running and it makes an easy steal. Are we to simply accept this as a reality of living in Milwaukee? There should be no expectation of punishment if the thieves are caught because reasons?

I wouldn't argue that incarceration has no place in dealing with crime, but it seems like it might be useful to distinguish between retribution (or punishment) and crime prevention as goals. They aren't necessarily the same thing. What if carceral decisions actually contribute (via negative feedback loops, e.g. the difficulty ex-cons face finding employment, prison socialization, etc.) to on-going crime? I think it's likely that this has an important effect in the US. You can call it "common sense" if you want, but it's not at all clear to me that putting more people in prison for longer actually accomplishes as much as you might want in deterring crime, or that there might not be better methods.

Note that I'm grunching this thread quite a bit, I haven't had a chance to really read it. I'm not sure I entirely agree with BoredSocial either, i.e. I'm not sure that locking up more white collar criminals for longer to prevent fraud is a great idea either.

semi devil's advocate play here, more as playing the opposite angle than anything else

I feel like before I make my point I need to throw out there that I agree that low level drug offenses/prostitution charges etc sentences need to be eliminated/the amount of prisoners needs to be drastically lowered.


Would it make sense from society's POV to give "rich" criminals the option to pay a significantly higher fine in exchange for not going to jail (pending the severity of the crime)? They still go on probation, they can get resentenced if they **** up again, but you can use that money for other things, such as possibly subsiding prison/parole costs for lower income inmates? This could potentially lower the recidivism rate of certain people when they do get out.


Not saying this is a great idea or anything, but I think the case could be made that society as a whole is better off with more restitution/finances than time in jail. I'm curious on others thoughts

I think it's an interesting idea, and probably makes sense in a lot of cases, although you have to make the financial impact of the sentence large enough that you're not incentivizing people to pay for the privilege of committing crime as just another privilege of being (even more literally) "**** you" rich.

But I like the idea of trying to find solutions other than just putting people into prisons, not just for the wealthy but for everyone.

we need to do speeding tickets and other citations based on income like some northern European countries. that's how you can get your extra money.

so if its a 250 dollar fine for someone that last made 40k according to the irs
then its a 3,125 dollar fine for someone that last made 500k.

Agreed that it would need be a massive amount for it to be effective. If someone can think "I'm fine paying that fine so I can commit this crime" then it's not high enough. It would need to be something where someone is facing jail time and their lawyer comes to them and says "ok, this is your other option" and it not be a clear cut choice imo. It's a fine line.

completely and utterly biased opinion, but I don't want someone driving a Ferrari in front of me and going 50 MPH

obviously not a serious answer but i would assume someone that wants flat percentage taxes would jump at the idea of a flat percentage punishment. if not then im pretty sure there's a tell there....

I actually think objectively I'd be cool with a flat percentage across the board for taxes, fines, etc (I think?!). I've always felt it weird when a pro (male) athlete gets fined like 5K when they are making like 3 mil+ a year. Like who the **** would care?

The problem is that the wealthy can look at the fines/lawsuits that will come from their behavior as a cost of doing business... which enables these options to be viable and even massively +EV.

Ford decided that having some double digit number of their customers burned alive would be cheaper than making a bunch of expensive repairs.

Chemical companies are probably poisoning all of us right now so that they can sell us stuff. (This is serious. We're seeing significant new health problems emerging where we're struggling to pinpoint the causes. Google PFOA.)

Pharma companies and medical device companies routinely cause serious harm to people and just write a check when the bill comes due.

Banks doing shady stuff has already caused such a massive economic problem that the entire global economy's debt:income ratio is massively out of line, which at some point is going to cause a massive correction.

The fossil fuel industry has basically manufactured the global warming crisis for profit. They've intentionally stopped anyone from doing anything about it because it would be catastrophic for their bottom line.

And all of that is possible because between lawyers and lobbyists the rich have a whole suite of options for profiting off of harming the public. This is what impunity looks like. Impunity is a massive driver of criminal behavior. People tend to do what they think they can get away with.

I'm not a believer in the death penalty for the crimes we currently use it on. Expecting someone who is about to murder someone to refrain from murdering them because they might get the death penalty is a little silly. Expecting people with a lot to lose to be worried about negative consequences and minimize their own risk is not. We need the punishments to be severe enough that it isn't worth the risk. We gotta change the underlying math before they literally destroy the world. I wasn't serious about torturing them to death, but I'm as serious as a heart attack about giving them life with no parole 100% in solitary. If getting caught doing something deeply evil means you get the full El Chapo treatment people will make different choices to begin with.

My understanding, and as usual not remembering where I read it, is that there's a diminishing return on harsher sentences and the much overlooked part is the likelihood of getting caught.

Raising a penalty from a fine to a year in prison might have some impact while raising it from one year to five years has much less of an impact beyond being more devastating to the individuals who get prosecuted.

On the other hand, if you can raise the chance of people getting caught then people are less likely to commit the offence. Nearly everyone you meet here will admit to having sped on a motorway but not many people speed through the average speed check areas because the perception is that you aren't going to get away with it.

As for the rehab thing, I know there was an interview with Robert Sapolsky where he talked about how as we're learning more about psychology the more we're finding that a lot of people who commit crimes are damaged people. The analogy he makes is that a damaged car might have to be taken off the road for a while, or even forever, but no one perceives the car as "evil" and seeks retribution. The move for our criminal justice systems might be to start treating criminals as people who need our help and compassion, rather than as evil and in need of punishment. I think there's some issues there (like how to avoid falling in to Stalinist re-education camps) but it certainly seems to me that lowering recidivism is a better aim for society as a whole than retribution can be.

How would you argue in favor of this before the SCOTUS w/r/t the 14th Amendment?