Reply to post: Re: Keep him please.

Re: Keep him please.

While I agree with everything you've written (and made a similar comment myself, above), one of the observations I deleted was on the exact subject of the cost of prosecution and incarceration. If I were British I would be glad to have the Americans take on that cost. The eventual outcome is going to be the same either way: a fine and restitution that will never be paid and a minimum-security prison term of a few years. It's quite hard to kill oneself in a prison -- unless you know too much about the powerful, obviously -- and people who steal cryptocurrency aren't exactly going to attract the kind of lethal attention from guards and fellow inmates that cannibals and child rapists do. At the end of it all, he'll be in the UK, alive but not well and with a permanent blot on his record that will make productive participation in civil society quite difficult. It would surprise me if he, like most former prisoners, doesn't end up an habitual offender. None of this depends on where he's tried or sentenced, so from a practical standpoint the US and UK ought to rochambeau for it, with the loser paying.

It's true that prison is supposed to be a deterrent. Certainly it deters me from many actions I might otherwise take, but it also seems to me that there are many people for whom it doesn't function that way at all. There have always been people the law seems powerless to deter or punish effectively. In the past they were removed through capital punishment or transportation, but it's impossible to take seriously the idea that even public hangings effectively deterred others when the need for more of them never diminished. The entire modern idea of crime and punishment is merely depressing: former inmates have few prospects and usually develop additional criminal contacts while incarcerated, so they almost always become repeat offenders. The near-certainty of another prison term doesn't deter them regardless of how horrible it is. No one has the stomach for capital punishment so they simply spend their lives walking through the revolving doors while the rest of us pay an obscene price for it, not to mention the crime itself.

I should note that this particular case would likely be tried under federal jurisdiction in the US, and the federal prison system is operated by the government so the considerations around privately-run prisons are not germane. But the cost of publicly-operated prisons is no trivial matter and I don't see that it's any better for the tax revenue to end up in the pockets of guards than those of some private operator's CEO. Whether you want to highlight the "prison-industrial complex" as another poster did or the fatcat guards' unions, the problem is the same: crime may not pay, but failing to punish it effectively sure does.

So in principle I want him extradited because his lawyer's argument is an atrocity against common sense. In practice I accept that the only difference that will make to the overall outcome is that Americans will pay for his inevitable imprisonment instead of Britons. How depressing that we as a collection of societies failed so miserably to convince this young man to do right, failed equally to protect others from his depredations, and will now fail once more by punishing him in a way that costs us a great deal of money yet neither deters others nor reforms him. If you want your pound of flesh you will not find me opposed, but your victory will be a pyrrhic one.