Can you explain your line of thinking for saying this?
Because to me, the standard for such a big company, getting so many public dollars, that is responsible for the safety of a ton of Americans (and more) should obviously be more strict (for at least those reasons) compared to an individual who can't afford a good lawyer who had just a little too much weed on them.
The largest share of convicted inmates in the US were convicted of violent crimes such as murder, rape, robbery, or assault. Simple marijuana possession makes up a tiny share. And less than half of the violent crimes committed in the US lead to a conviction.
1) Citation needed. Particularly if you're talking about federal inmates, state, or both.
2) It's disingenuous (re: primacy bias) to lead off with murder and rape, which account for a far smaller portion of "violent" crime than robbery (which I assume includes burglary, in which the victim and perpetrator don't make contact) and assault (which, again, does not require the victim and perpetrator to physically make contact (that's battery)).
All of this is aside fact that an individual who allegedly commits a heinous act against another person or small group of people is in a completely different class from a large corporation whose products put millions at risk (and the executives and managers who sign off on those company's decisions). There is quite the destructive myopia behind the increasingly punitive (rather than rehabilitative) nature of incarceration for the former, when the latter get off so easy.
To summarize, 44% of current federal inmates are there for drug-charges. The second most category is weapons charges at 22%. So a good 2/3 of current federal inmates are there for non-violent crimes. Sex offense is third most common at 13% I’m sure many are there for illegal sex work or consumption rather than for sexual violence. A whopping 4.6% is in federal prison for immigrating (which isn’t even a crime; unless this category includes human trafficking, which I would call a violent crime).
EDIT: As for all US prisoners, here is the data I found (see table 16 on page 29):
62% are there for violent crimes and 12.5% for drug charges. Note that many large states—such as California—don’t imprison for drug possession any more, and this table does not include sentences shorter than 1 year. This methodology of counting current prison population is biased for more serious crimes with longer sentencing, as most crimes have shorter sentencing but serious and especially violent crimes have longer sentencing and thus are over-represented among the current prison population at any one point in time.
> Here is the official statistic for federal inmates
Federal inmates are a tiny minority of inmates in the United States, because the vast majority of crimes are prosecuted at the state level. There are about 147,000 convicted federal inmates compared to over a million held in state prisons and 103,000 convicts held in local jails.
> This methodology of counting current prison population is biased for more serious crimes with longer sentencing
This strikes me as an attempt to move the goalposts, given that we're several comments deep into a thread which started with the claim that "95% of US inmates are on plea deal".
> This strikes me as an attempt to move the goalposts.
This is HN, threads are supposed to get more interesting as they get longer. I was simply expending on my parent’s point by providing the data which was lacking, and my editorialization was to provide the necessary context.
Edit (re: move the goalpost): If you want to play fallacy bingo, then you were the one that actually placed the goalpost, and it was placed on a demonstrably biased spot. Moving the goalpost away from a biased spot is not a logical fallacy, it is a correction.
> Edit (re: move the goalpost): If you want to play fallacy bingo, then you were the one that actually placed the goalpost
This is false.
This is the ancestor comment that set the goalpost with the statement that "95% of US inmates are on plea deal". Neither that comment nor any of its ancestors were mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40906705
And it's rather rich of you to accuse me of dishonesty when you're the one providing misleading and unrepresentative statistics by focusing on federal inmates in particular.
I'd say the Sackler's committed premeditated violent crime, "at scale". One could even argue that they would be eligible for the death penalty and yet they keep half the winnings.
> It's disingenuous (re: primacy bias) to lead off with murder and rape, which account for a far smaller portion of "violent" crime than robbery (which I assume includes burglary, in which the victim and perpetrator don't make contact) and assault (which, again, does not require the victim and perpetrator to physically make contact (that's battery)).
From the above source, within state prisons (which is the majority of incarcerated Americans), 163,000 are serving sentences for murder, 168,000 for rape, 128,000 for robbery and 154,000 for assault. So technically I should have led off with rape instead of murder; my bad.
You are technically correct that assault doesn't require the victim and perpetrator to make contact. For instance, pointing a loaded gun at somebody (outside of self defense) is considered aggravated assault. On the other hand, many states do not actually have separate assault and battery statutes, and the two seem to be classified together under "assault".
Conversely, robbery and burglary are separated (burglary is categorized as a property crime rather than a violent crime). In addition to the 128,000 prisoners convicted of robbery, there are another 79,000 who were convicted of burglary.
> All of this is aside fact that an individual who allegedly commits a heinous act against another person or small group of people is in a completely different class from a large corporation whose products put millions at risk (and the executives and managers who sign off on those company's decisions). There is quite the destructive myopia behind the increasingly punitive (rather than rehabilitative) nature of incarceration for the former, when the latter get off so easy.
The 737 Max has caused a total of 346 fatalities in two crashes taking place in 2018 and 2019, neither of which took place inside US jurisdiction but let's set that aside for the sake of argument. Chicago alone had 592 homicides in 2018, 521 in 2019, 798 in 2020, 856 in 2021, 738 in 2022, 648 in 2023, and 312 year-to-date, (source: heyjackass.com) nearly all of which were committed by the sort of neighborhood ne'er-do-wells who sometimes end up getting mass-incarcerated. You tell me which is the bigger problem. Personally I wouldn't mind a legal system in which someone at Boeing could be held criminally liable for manslaughter (which accounts for another 20,000 state-level inmates in the United States), but I don't think Boeing's planes are a statistically significant cause of wrongful death.
You're conflating inmate population with convictions, the latter being more salient in a discussion of plea deals. As another poster mentioned, these statistics are methodologically biased towards more serious crimes with longer sentences. That is, a convicted murderer or rapist goes through the trial process once (barring appeals) for a "spot" in prison that lasts 10-20 or more years. Multiple convicted robbers with short sentences would take an equivalent "spot" during the same time. They would account for a larger percentage of pleas/plea deals over time than a snapshot of carceral representation would suggest. That the figures are within a few thousand of each other, category-by-category, probably means that there are way more robbers and assaulters passing through prison than rapists and murderers. Which makes sense, if you put any stake in FBI arrest statistics.
>The 737 Max has caused a total of 346 fatalities in two crashes taking place in 2018 and 2019 [...]
I suppose that's one way of looking at it. Another is that a few hundred people committed murder in Chicago, usually with single-digit victims, and a good many of them are seeing prison time for their heinous actions. Meanwhile, a handful of high-powered executives and managers signed off on a small number of decisions that also lead to hundreds of death, along with multiple accidents that could have resulted in even more. Per alleged offender, these people have done far worse; dozens or hundreds dead each, depending on how you measure culpability. None of these people are so much as seeing the inside of a court room, let alone convictions or prison time. Boeing is not alone; officials from companies that have participated in much more destructive and heinous behavior stand with them in getting off scot-free.
It's a question of what we value our prison system(s) for. I would hope for efficient deterrence and rehabilitation. That is, sentences likely to dissuade people from committing crimes, and best efforts to prevent offenders from offending again. You seem to think that the street-level homicide rate is too high, and I'd agree. I would say that, as such murders are generally crimes of passion or disordered thinking - instinct or illness (psychological, social) rather than reason - harsh punishments are not necessarily useful in deterring them.
On the other hand, the deaths that Boeing has caused happened because of a purposeful decision-making process. It was hyper-rational. The failing was corruption. These types of moral (if not criminal) offenses stand to be deterred effectively with harshly punitive consequences; if the decision to put so many lives at risk is a cost-benefit analysis, simply make the costs outweigh the benefits. And, ideally, we wouldn't shield the perpetrators from indictment overseas, if the charges were similar to what we'd bring. What's happening is already a stain on our system - in fact, its lack of effectiveness calls into question its legitimacy - and you can add damage to international relations, that our carceral state is so out-of-wack and incapable of doing right by past and potential victims.
> You're conflating inmate population with convictions, the latter being more salient in a discussion of plea deals. As another poster mentioned, these statistics are methodologically biased towards more serious crimes with longer sentences.
While it's true that people serving longer sentences represent a higher proportion of inmates than they do convictions, it also doesn't seem obvious to me which base denominator is more important. If anything, weighing convictions according to how serious they are seems more sensible than treating a small misdemeanor conviction equivalently with a murder conviction.
Furthermore, plea bargaining cuts both ways: the net effect of a plea bargain is often a conviction on a lesser charge, with less or sometimes no prison time.
> It's a question of what we value our prison system(s) for. I would hope for efficient deterrence and rehabilitation. That is, sentences likely to dissuade people from committing crimes, and best efforts to prevent offenders from offending again. You seem to think that the street-level homicide rate is too high, and I'd agree. I would say that, as such murders are generally crimes of passion or disordered thinking - instinct or illness (psychological, social) rather than reason - harsh punishments are not necessarily useful in deterring them.
I don't necessarily think the threat of incarceration deters common criminals very much, but it does separate them from the population, which is preferable to simply leaving them on the street.
>You seem to think that the street-level homicide rate is too high, and I'd agree. I would say that, as such murders are generally crimes of passion or disordered thinking - instinct or illness (psychological, social) rather than reason - harsh punishments are not necessarily useful in deterring them.
I think this entirely depends on the circumstances around the murder. Was it committed by someone without a significant criminal record because they got angry about something? Or was it committed by a gang member as part of their criminal enterprise (in which case, it was not a "crime of passion" or a result of "disordered thinking", but rather sociopathic thinking)?
For the former, I agree that harsh punishments probably aren't that useful for deterrence, though they do tend to make victims (or their families) feel better. For the latter, however, I'd argue that long prison sentences, while they may not rehabilitate these hardened criminals, at least serve to keep them out of society.
To relate back to Boeing, I think their actions are similar in a way to those of people in violent organized crime gangs. They were done without conscience, and purely for material gain, so they probably should be treated similarly.
Because to me, the standard for such a big company, getting so many public dollars, that is responsible for the safety of a ton of Americans (and more) should obviously be more strict (for at least those reasons) compared to an individual who can't afford a good lawyer who had just a little too much weed on them.