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Azathoth123 comments on What are your contrarian views? - Less Wrong Discussion

10 Post author: Metus 15 September 2014 09:17AM

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Comment author: Azathoth123 18 September 2014 11:33:08PM 2 points [-]

Is your claim that they're in prison for crimes they didn't commit, or that we should let more crimes go unpunished?

Comment author: Lumifer 19 September 2014 02:17:47AM 5 points [-]

I'm not the OP, but I'll throw a quote into this thread:

There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.

Comment author: Azathoth123 19 September 2014 05:58:35AM *  2 points [-]

So which crimes would you take off the books and what percent of prisoners would that remove?

Comment author: Lumifer 19 September 2014 02:34:33PM 5 points [-]

We can start with the drug war, things like civil forfeiture, and go on from there. You might be interested in this book.

The problems with the US criminal justice system go much deeper than just the abundance of laws, of course.

Comment author: Azathoth123 19 September 2014 11:20:31PM 2 points [-]

things like civil forfeiture

Civil forfeiture doesn't fill prisons.

You might be interested in this book.

The problem with having to many felonies is not that prisons get filled with people being punished for silly things, it's that the people who do get punished for silly things tend to correlate with the people actively opposing the current administration.

Comment author: Lumifer 20 September 2014 12:41:58AM 1 point [-]

There are a LOT of problems with having too many felonies, but that's a large discussion not quite in the LW bailiwick...

Comment author: Azathoth123 20 September 2014 01:57:00AM 1 point [-]

Agreed, but the discussion was about there supposedly being too many people in prison.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 20 September 2014 04:11:03PM -1 points [-]

False dichotomy, It's about sentence length, eg three strikes.

Comment author: Azathoth123 20 September 2014 06:57:06PM *  1 point [-]

So if we reduced sentences what effect do you think that would have on crime rates? Remember three strikes was passed in response to crime rates being too high.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 20 September 2014 09:03:27PM *  0 points [-]

Drastically increasing sentences didn't drastically reduce crime, so...

Comparable countries have lower crime rates and lower prison populations, so they must be doing something right.

You don't have to keep moving the big lever up and down: you can get Smart on Crime.

Comment author: Azathoth123 20 September 2014 10:15:57PM 0 points [-]

Drastically increasing sentences didn't drastically reduce crime, so...

Well, the crime did fall. Whether it was due to increased sentences or something else is still being debated.

Comparable countries have lower crime rates and lower prison populations,

They also have fewer people from populations with high predisposition to violence (and yes, I mean blacks).

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 20 September 2014 11:02:12PM 1 point [-]

The last was disappointingly predictable.

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