sp6r=underrated wrote:UcanUwill wrote:Wow, American justice system aint fooling around. I have said this, but my garbage place is the opposite, you can honestly kill a person and probably get less... I think the right system would be somewhere in between, and altho such harsh law enforcing is one concervative thing I prefer, but thats freaking harsh man, crazy.
A consistent finding in criminal justice research is that certainity of punishment does a better job stopping crime than severity of punishment.
The US is a high crime society because we do a terrible job solving crimes and try to make up for it by over-punishing people.
Yeah I work in criminal justice and this is very true. Politicians and enforcement folks always front on how 'strong'/tough they are by talking about sentencing and zero tolerance etc and never by how what they're doing, like, works. Part of the unfortunate fact that almost nothing about our system is set up to work or be the best idea. Politicians generally control every aspect of enforcement and prosecution policy and direction, and they generally have zero interest in what works and are instead 100% motivated by what reaction or attitude they think their voters want to hear. Crime's going up? I'm your savior and will hire more police now, don't care what they're actually doing or if they even have some idea of how they can address it. Crime's going down? Great job police or (for those on the left) whatever random community group is taking credit for the drop, don't care what the factors really are and how to continue them going in that direction. It's all just following the winds rather than trying to direct them.
EDIT: also if you think 3.5 years for a pretty significant long-term fraud scheme sounds excessive, Ucan, you wouldn't last ten minutes in the average US court.
