Quote:
Originally Posted by loramin
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Of course there are differences ... but none that reasonably explain why the crime rate is the same despite massively harsher penalties.
Look, criminals are bad people who do hurtful things. You want them to hurt and suffer in response: that's natural. In fact, it's very human. We have vengeance hard-wired into our DNA, because when we were evolving it was a key component of social behavior: societies that punished societal transgressors succeeded over ones that didn't.
But we're not in hunter-gatherer tribes anymore! We have these big brains that we also evolved. So either you can stick with your evolved gut vengeance motivation ... or you can use your big evolved human brain to actually look at the studies, and think logically.
Seriously, have whatever political beliefs you want, and want criminals to suffer whatever harsh penalties you can imagine ... but also live in and understand reality. In reality, in general (obviously this doesn't hold true for every crime/punishment) harsher penalties simply don't deter criminals from committing crimes
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Those difference might play a significant role. You can’t just look at penalties and rates in a vacuum IMO, or I’m sure we can do that for a lot of other factors when it comes to offending and make ridiculous correlations
Justice is different from vengeance to me
Again, I feel like I’m a broken record here, but in REALITY, prisons are not effective at rehabilitation, because permanently transforming a sociopath into a good citizen is really fucking hard. So because they are not rehabilitated, it’s safer for the public for them to be in prison and away from them longer