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Academic and Work Pursuits, Polanski and Commie Debates
Received my results for the first two units of my MBA, Financial Management and Management Perspectives; I passed both with Distinction grades. This was an enormous relief, especially for the Financial Management exam, which I thought was extremely difficult at the time. It also means that, assuming I complete Marketing and Information Systems, I will have a Graduate Certificate in Management (Technology Systems) by the end of next month. Then on to the Graduate Diploma. On a related angle, I have been given the necessary task of trying to make some sense of the internal wiki, external website and some of our marketing material. It doesn't make sense to pitch with generic marketing speak to scientists, for some well-known reasons, which have recently become evident at the Australian Synchrotron.
The events of Roman Polanksi's extradition for sexual assault have been long discussed. If you have the stomach for it, you can read the testimony of the young Samantha Geimer on the events themselves. When some members of the entertainment industry tried to defend Polanksi on the grounds of his international cultural reputation, most people responded to this with appropriate outrage. An unexpected angle however has come from the Sparticist League who have defended Polanski because Samantha was sexually experienced and had tried quaaludes previous. You can read the Sparticist League's position in the Communist Party of Great Britian newspaper in issue 794 and my response in 795.
The events of Roman Polanksi's extradition for sexual assault have been long discussed. If you have the stomach for it, you can read the testimony of the young Samantha Geimer on the events themselves. When some members of the entertainment industry tried to defend Polanksi on the grounds of his international cultural reputation, most people responded to this with appropriate outrage. An unexpected angle however has come from the Sparticist League who have defended Polanski because Samantha was sexually experienced and had tried quaaludes previous. You can read the Sparticist League's position in the Communist Party of Great Britian newspaper in issue 794 and my response in 795.
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I'm uncomfortable about that approach - while I understand the victim in this case wanted to get on with her life, it's a very abusable system. Too much incentive to intimidate/bribe the victim.
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The significant difference that I am suggesting is that the State does not take up the position of an adversary against the wishes of the parties involved. There are too many examples, especially in regards of victimless crimes, where both parties suffer through the proceedings.
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But IMHO, the point of the justice system isn't to avenge past wrongs, it's to prevent future ones. The point of jailing Polanski is to discourage the next guy who's thinking about taking advantage of some under-age girl. While the court should be considerate to those involved, there are future victims who are also affected by leniency.
And, yes, there is a problem with 'victimless crimes'; I think the solution there is to include prior consent as a defense.
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My concern here is entirely on who claim to be the receiver of damage. Generic things like "harm to society" have an unfortunate habit of meaning "whatever the majority/ruling class doesn't like"; such as the application of the death penalty for working on the Sabbath.
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But one way or another, a legal system needs to be able to acknowledge some situations where the specific victims can't be identified. If I vent a crapload of pollutants into the air and the rate of respiratory illness goes up 10%, nobody can prove exactly which cases were my fault, but it's still pretty clear that I'm harming somebody. I view this one in a similar light.
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But who are "those victims"? There's no way to distinguish between the 1000 people who would have gotten sick regardless of my actions, and the 100 people whose illness actually is my fault. On probabilities, we can be pretty sure that I hurt somebody, but we don't even know for sure how many people, since there will be random variation in the background rates.
By the same token, if we let rapists go free because their past victims forgive them, that causes harm to real, visceral people - assuming we accept the argument that lower chances of going to jail reduce the deterrent effect, which I don't think is a terribly controversial one.
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That part is in dispute (and in the case in point, I don't think Polanksi, for example, is recidivist). Indeed, in this particular crime, recidivist rates area among the lowest, and those which are repeat offenders suffer from mental pathologies). Unlike the example of pollution, where there is continuing harm with emissions this is typically unlikely to be the case.
As for the deterrent effect, surely it is obvious that if this is reduced by given the victim the power to take up the adversarial then the option is available to increase the punishment applied where the victim wants proceedings to continue? Certainly that would be better than the dragging a victim, both real or 'socially determined', through a process against their will?
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I'm not talking about recidivism. What I said above was that the point of jailing Polanski is to deter the next guy who's thinking about doing something like this. (I grant that this is unlikely to have much effect on the pathological repeat offenders; this is more about deterring the non-pathological types who might try it once if they think they can get away with it.)
As for the deterrent effect, surely it is obvious that if this is reduced by given the victim the power to take up the adversarial then the option is available to increase the punishment applied where the victim wants proceedings to continue?
I don't find that an appealing argument, for a couple of reasons:
- IMHO, the punishment a person receives for an act should be based on the factors that are within their own sphere of control. If I try to shoot somebody, that shouldn't be treated any more lightly because (unbeknownst to me) they're wearing a ballistic vest. The perpetrator should be held responsible for their own choices, not whether the victim feels forgiving. (Since I'm looking at this from the angle of deterrence, there is no guarantee that the prospective victim next time around would feel the same way.)
- It has the potential to exacerbate systemic inequities. I strongly suspect that you'd see social pressure on victims to show more leniency to 'nice' white college kids than to the Scary Black Man who commits the same offence. Unequal punishments are already a major problem, but at least in the current system we can look at a judge's sentencing records etc. and call public attention to the worst cases. With decisions made by the victims, there are even less options for addressing the problem, because everybody in the justice system can wash their hands - "nothing to do with us".
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Even if the next guy thinks - somehow - that the victim will be of the same mind as Samantha Geimer then I believe then I believe as deterrence that can be incorporated into more severe sentencing.
The perpetrator should be held responsible for their own choices, not whether the victim feels forgiving.
Yes, and this is our fundamental difference. In my opinion (coming from my "almost anarchist" legal theory), crimes must have victims, and the victims must also feel whether the crime is worth proceeding upon. Otherwise you will end up with victimless crimes, and, where there is a victim, punish the victim further by acting against their express will.
It has the potential to exacerbate systemic inequities.
I acknowledge that is possible, however it is a different matter.
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My recollection, and it's been a while since I looked at the studies, is that the severity of a sentence doesn't actually have a lot of influence on deterrence; what has a larger effect is the probability of conviction.
crimes must have victims, and the victims must also feel whether the crime is worth proceeding upon
How would you deal with a situation where it's not possible to determine the victim's wishes?
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That is interesting. I would like to have a look at such data. I would think that basic risk analysis would work out to as punishment times likelihood%.
How would you deal with a situation where it's not possible to determine the victim's wishes?
*nods* I have thought about this, in the most obvious cases (e.g., a murder victim can hardly call for prosecution). In these cases I would do agree for public prosecution. However, I may disagree where there was clear and prior statements to the contrary (the famous German voluntary cannibalism case comes to mind)
My main interest here is to ensure that actions are not taken that against the desires of real or imagined victims.
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It does, but if people were that rational about risk decisions, nobody would buy lottery tickets.
On criminology, see e.g. Nagin & Pogarsky, Integrating Celerity, Impulsivity, and Extralegal Sanction Threats into a Model of General Deterrence: Theory and Evidence:
Further, as discussed here, harsher penalties can have paradoxical effects: they make juries more reluctant to convict, lowering the rate of conviction, and from the would-be criminal's side the reduced risk of conviction can outweigh the increased consequences.
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Most people do risk analysis on lottery tickets; it's just based on affordable fun rather than probability of winning.
Two prominent findings from this literature are that punishment certainty is far more consistently found to deter crime than punishment severity
OK, that seems to be fair enough; than you for that. It then becomes a multiple metric of ratios, ie., what increase in punishment severity reflects what change in punishment certainty.
the extra-legal consequences of crime seem at least as great a deterrent as the legal consequences
That part is certainly interesting. It seems that despite the existential angst of 'hell is society', it would appear that social isolation is even worse.
Further, as discussed here...
From the abstract: This article shows that optimal fines should rise with the severity of the infraction, that is, the penalty should "fit the crime."
In other words, this certainly does not contradict with what I have been describing. The severity of the infraction is, and must be, a subjective matter when a victim is involved, assuming that tests of sincerity are confirmed.