Justice should focus first on making victims whole, then on rehabilitating the perpetrators to prevent victimization in the future. Imprisonment serves neither of those goals.
This isn't a matter of teaching the executives of Hertz that no, they don't need to commit crimes to survive, and how to access alternative means of survival, and all that.
They did this because they were greedy, lazy, and they knew they wouldn't suffer much for it. When you're dealing with white-collar sorts of crimes like this, deterrence is a thing.
There are plenty of alternatives that don't involve locking people in cells - and that are probably more effective a deterrent.
Guess which ones get taken a lot more seriously.
I am sorry if your false report causes someone to go to jail, then you need to go to jail as well
People pay tons of money to avoid prison, even temporarily - see lawyers, bail, etc. Same goes for getting prison sentences reduced, even just in part, to house arrest and probation.
Just what amount of fines, house arrest, and probation is going to be more effective a deterrent than prison?
I think there's a reasonable discussion to be had about where the line is between 'enough' deterrence and excessive punishment, but it's a bit absurd to claim that things people happily accept in lieu of going to prison will be more of a deterrent than prison.
So, prison. Maybe a slightly nicer prison, but you're still taking their freedom away.
It doesn't help past victims, it helps future victims. Turns out, people do things that hurt other people if it will 1) benefit them and has 2) never resulted in any consequences.
> People have some really fucked up ideas of justice.
That people who have harmed other people face imprisonment is not one of them.
> rehabilitating the perpetrators to prevent victimization in the future.
Will this be done with a magic wand?
Or phrased differently: without prison sentences the whole situation becomes a pure numbers game: did they get more money out of the false reports/not fixing the bugs causing this misbehavior then they now have to pay in damages.
These kinds of crimes will continue to become the baseline if there are no real consequences to the people actually being responsible for the deeds (this includes the CEO).
The perpetrators are the employees at Hertz that made the decision. Issuing a fine to the company does not rehabilitate or penalize the decision makers.
What else do you do, make them pay a fine that's just a rounding error on their checking account? Having them wear orange instead of pinstripes for a similar number of days will get their full, undivided attention.
Sending people to prison for committing crimes is "fucked up"? We can quibble over which crimes deserve what sentence, but we shouldn't outright dismiss the possibility of imprisoning white collar criminals.
Unironically, yes. Prison is super fucked up.
Prison time barely acts as a deterrent. It doesn't reform criminals. It has high costs for taxpayers.
American prisons are entirely inhumane. Even heard of prison rape? Even violent criminals shouldn't have to endure what goes down in there. With modern technology, house arrest is far better.
Even for extremely violent criminals who are a existent danger, prison is not right. They should be in mental hospitals.
The punishment of prison should be entirely limited to losing your independence and the dignity that comes with it. It should literally be like childhood "time out". These are still human beings and we owe it to them to treat them like people, they just need to be silo'd off from society for a bit sometimes.
What? Why aren't career criminals more brazen in their acts, if not for fear of punishment (which means: prison)?
I totally get the point that you can't just increase the prison sentence and expect the deterrence to scale, but suggesting that punishment "barely acts as a deterrent" sounds insane, especially when we're talking about calculating criminals like Hertz executives. It's not like they have the uncontrollable urge to make false police reports because of some weird psychological defect.
Those are all nice-to-haves, but justice is an equal exchange of bad things done by you to bad things done to you.
I see where you're coming from in general, but the standard for non corporate executives is imprisonment. Even if it's a "fucked up idea", it's the status quo.
Arguing against imprisonment in the context of corporate criminals doesn't do anything to change that status quo. Rather it just helps perpetuate the dual class justice system where the upper class gets respect and treated like humans while the faceless lower class gets draconian sentences to be "tough on crime".
Meanwhile we do the equivalent of charging a $90 penalty for a crime that earned $100.
Retribution: punish the offender. In the state of nature, if someone offended against you, you could hurt or kill them. Now, the state has a sanitized responsibility to fill that role.
Rehabilitation: give the offender time to think about and learn from his offense.
Isolation: remove the person from society for a while so that if rehabilitation fails, society is still relieved from having to deal with the offender’s misbehavior for a time.
Disincentivization: give others an idea of what would happen if they were caught doing a similar offense.
None of these overlap with “making the victim whole,” which is probably why there is a whole separate system of civil law for that which has nothing to do with punishment (excluding, of course, exemplary damages).
If you think there is no excuse for incarceration, then I’m curious how you’d propose handling the problems of sanitized retribution, isolation, and disincentive for crime. It seems pretty obvious (to me) that the world would be pretty gnarly if unrehabilitated criminals lurked among us, free to perpetrate crimes until an angry victim killed them just because they made a business decision that their crimes outweighed the civil penalty, and would be criminals saw this behavior and got the idea that it would be good for them to emulate the successful, unpunished offenders.
That said, a focus on rehabilitation for those who are deemed possible to rehabilitate seems reasonable to me.
On what authority are you making this proclamation?
b) deterrence is important, especially in cases like this: if there are consequences for willfully ignoring something that causes severe harm to others, it's less likely to be willfully ignored in the future. If you can expect to only have to make others whole (if caught), it's a lot easier to just not care. And legal compensation rarely actually makes people whole.
