Fantasy arises with despair. ChatGPT: "Pandora's Box is a myth from ancient Greece. Opening it released all evils into the world, leaving only hope inside once closed."
When we imprison someone, we imprison all of them, not just the part that committed the crime. I'm not saying it's wrong to imprison people, or even to execute them. But when we execute someone, we execute all of them, not just the part that was the murderer.
Does anyone know what the result was about the legal case that said that you couldn't evaluate the future threat of an 18- or 19-year-old because the prefrontal cortex wasn't fully developed yet?
This is the main difference between US justice and the rest of the western world. We are a society that is pathologically individualistic, believing in personal agency and responsibility above all else. So it's about punishing the individual, with protecting society being secondary to that. Rehabilitation can be tried for lesser crimes if it doesn't interfere with said punishment. But capital crimes are capital crimes and we do not believe in second chances for those.
It's all about personal responsibility unless you're an officer of a corporation -- then it's all about limiting responsibility and shielding people from the consequences of their choices.
If we punished individuals in corporations more for corporate malfeasance, the corporation (as a whole) would likely get away with it.
Also, that's not to get into the entire "corporate hierarchy makes sure only the bottom rung person is guilty of doing the thing they ordered done."
In fact, there's 3 consequences that need parallel address in corporate cases:
- Corporate (including death)
- Management (incl. informed)
- IC
The major gaps in our current corporate justice system seem to be (1) tail risk penalties to corporations aren't frequent of severe enough (i.e. fine on % of worldwide revenue, until redressed; corporate dissolution), (2) informed management aren't held responsible (RICO standards would be better here -- if you could have done something, and you had an association, you're at fault).
If a corporation commits 1,000,000 crimes, each of which would carry 3 years of prison time, then there should be 3 million years of prison time distributed among the guilty.
If you own 1/1,000,000 of that corporation, then you should the 1/1,000,000 of that prison time, or 3 years.
This is so simple that it should take one explanation in 5th grade for everyone in our society to understand it.
If stockholders were going to prison, I guarantee corporate ethics and HR would get a make-over.
This all seems like a moot point or at least unrelated to "individualism": Prevailing popular wisdom says that East Asian societies are "collectivist" but their prisons are not nicer to be in as a result, and there is still plenty of capital punishment to go around
Edit: you've been posting a lot of nationalistic flamewar comments to HN, and we've already had to warn you about this before. Doing this is not ok on this site, regardless of which nations you have a problem with. We have to ban accounts that won't stop doing this, and I don't want to ban you, so please stop doing this.
As the comment below alluded to, the US is pathologically individualistic.
The consequence of individual freedom are a lot of rights that don't exist in other countries (e.g. owning a firearm because you want to).
But the implications of those freedoms are... difficult.
If someone chooses to use those freedoms to do a terrible thing, what is the correct redress?
The current system essentially admits that we're unwilling to spend the amount of money required to rehabilitate people, and so instead warehouse them in prisons (and then forget about them if they're ever released).
(And add on top of this the destruction of physical social and familial networks in more mobile modern society...)
What's individualistic about collective responsibility? Or about "1 chance and you're dead"?
It seems unrelated if not contradictory.
If you believe in individualism you should be vehemant that you treat each criminal independently and only punish them for things they personally did, right?
And if it's individualism you like - you should give people second chances because you value them and believe in their potential to change.
What USA does with its criminal system feels more like collectivism TBH - "we don't care who did it - you all die and let that be an example to others". Wouldn't be out of place in USSR.
I hate these cultural excuses, they fall apart after thinking about them for 5 seconds.
> What USA does with its criminal system feels more like collectivism TBH - "we don't care who did it - you all die and let that be an example to others".
Could you walk me through how that's your appraisal of the US justice system?
> Within hours, police picked up a suspect, who said Ford was his partner. They arrested Ford, who was 18 at the time, the following day. He has maintained that the two men who entered the house were brothers, and that he was outside in the car the whole time. There was no physical evidence clearly connecting him to the crime. He was so confident that a jury would believe him that he rejected a plea deal and took his case to trial in July 1993. He lost. By October, at age 20, he was on death row.
