Flawed
If not sure what this Fibonacci approach to sentencing is meant to achieve and how.
If it's meant to make the threat of prison more intimidating since the stakes are higher then I don't see how it would affect this guy. He'd been in prison 23 times - cumulatively he must have spent a great chunk of time out of society anyway and it didn't seem to deter him. In fact other posters have pointed out it possibly made him more likely to offend through being institutionalised.
Isn’t this similar to the 3 strikes type of approaches tried in other countries – did they work?
You could try making the conditions less appealing and increasing the deterrence potency – e.g. if you gave every inmate a harmless but painful electric shock every day ala Pavlov, would that strengthen the resolve never to re-offend?
Also isn’t this just going to increase the prison costs – I don’t see outsourcing to India or Siberia as a low cost option, why are they going to do it except for the opportunity to make a profit?
Anyway, this all hinges on whether, in the words of a former minister,”Prison Works”. The article shows that for this guy it doesn’t and I’d like to see numbers on how many it does. Without raw data, you can’t determine if you’re putting resources into a cost-effective solution – is it worth tripling the prison bill to get the crime rate down by 2% ? The bulk of crime being committed by a small core of repeat offenders would appeal to a different solution than a profile which described most criminals as low-level habitual
Side-questions
1) If someone committed consecutive 4 crimes with raw sentence tariffs of 1 year each, do they get 1, 2, 2, 2 or 1, 2, 3, 4 years – I guess the 2nd as your argument is that the prior *assigned* sentence didn’t work?
2) If the initial conviction is found to be unsafe, will they be able to claim compensation for the subsequent accumulated years?