I’ll take my payment in the form of a free Onion subscription.
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Question, though… For what of people, including many celebrating this, prison abolishment is a major political position, we are told that prison has to be reformatory and not punitive if at all.
How does are square that position with a situation like this?
Racism, prison slavery and for-profit-prisons are the major political positions most of us are against. Frame the question properly or don’t ask.
We realize some folks are irredeemable, and when all other solutions don’t pan out – in the hoosegow for ya. 
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The ideal would be Scandinavian-style prisons that are about treating prisoners humanely while also isolating predators who can’t be reformed in a way that keeps them from doing further damage.
That’s obviously not what’s going on here, but we’re working with the system we have. While most of us are highly critical of the how the American carceral state operates, I’m not sure anyone commenting in this topic believes in complete abolition of prisons.
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That’s a nice straw man you’ve built there. I like the hat.
I don’t know anyone who holds the position you describe. I do know lots of people (especially fellow Canadians and Happy Mutants) who hold that prison should serve two purposes. Rehabilitation and keeping dangerous people out of society until we’re confident they are no longer dangerous. Neither is punishment and the latter is not at odds with cheering for imprisonment of Holmes. That woman is dangerous.
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Basically, as a repository of those too dangerous to be out free…
Not intended to be one. I did write that at the end of the day, so what I was trying to ask may not have come across fully. So let me rephrase slightly.
There are two visions of how the justice system should operate (again, not does currently, but should). One is reformative/rehabilitative, and the other is retributive/punitive. These are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The current system we have in most places in the world is pretty biased towards retributive justice.
My question was more on what should be the intent in a case like this. Is it about taking someone dangerous off the streets? Or about punishing her for her crimes? Or are we trying to reform this person?
To the first option, the extremely laissez faire response would be something like “She’s non-violent, so what are you actually trying to prevent?” The purpose of making it impossible for someone else to be cheated by her has been more or less served because nobody would trust her anymore. I know that you can counter-argue about several well-exposed fraudsters whom people manage to trust with their money/lives/whatever again and again, but still…
To the second, again, for a non-violent crime, should the punishment necessarily include losing one’s physical freedom? I can think up a series of restrictions to her ability to act - for example, make it impossible for her to hold an executive position in any company (that’s a punishment that actually exists in India, for example - they can take away your Director Identification Number, making you ineligible to serve on any board). Hefty fines - crippling ones even - would also serve the purpose.
To the third, I honestly don’t believe that she can be reformed. She’s too deeply enmeshed in that culture, and I doubt she can do it any other way.
Basically, I feel like prison is unavoidable - especially for violent criminals, but that it should be used as sparingly as possible. I’m not able to figure out what exactly the purpose of incarcerating her would be.
I wouldn’t be so quick to call her crimes non-violent. I mean, people died.
But I think that you are overlooking another objective of the penal system: deterrence. Even the humane prisons of Scandinavia are not preferable to freedom, and that dissuades many (not all) from crime.
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There’s something odd about arguing both “she is beyond reformation, this is just who she is” and “there’s no risk of her doing it again”. If you think she is going to keep trying to defraud people, then the state has an interest in protecting them from that, even if most of the ones who follow the news should know better.
It’s also kind of odd to me that the topic of what exactly prison is supposed to accomplish mostly seems to come up for high-profile sociopaths who let others die for profit, as if there is some special concern that those are the ones we need to worry are being treated too harshly.
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No “but still” about it. She was able to con the NYT into writing a puff piece on her even as she was making her last-ditch attempts to stay out of prison. You’re assuming everyone will know she’s a sociopathic woo peddler who should be infamous for causing harm to people; that’s not the case. Prison is where she belongs so that her ability to harm people is reduced.
As another example, there’s a certain narcissistic grifter who’s been plying his trade since the 1980s. He managed to parlay his talent for bamboozling people into occupying the highest office in the country, where (like Holme) he not only continued to enrich himself but also enabled the physical harm of people. He lost the office, but at least 27% of the people still want him back there again. Others regularly call for him to be in prison so his ability to harm people is also reduced-- are they also wrong or your straw-man “hypocrites”?
You may say that these two are outliers, but they’re high-profile ones who would still doubtless prey on people despite their infamy as long as they were allowed to participate in society. What about all the lesser-known quacks and grifters whose actions do real damage on a smaller scale? Should these inveterate and compulsive woo peddlers be allowed to roam free on the even less sure assumption that everyone will know what they are and what they’ve done?
Medical woo is one of several ways that fraud can do physical harm to victims. People commit suicide, charitable foundations that prevent harm are hobbled or have to shut down, people lose access to medical care they might have otherwise had, etc. The idea that Holmes and her ilk are non-violent offenders because they didn’t commit direct assaults diminishes the debate over actual non-violent offenders who shouldn’t have been in prison.
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I think it’s about making it harder for her to continue her con game.
Deterrence and harm control come into play, without prison it’s not like she was going to stop. She still seems to believe her own horseshit on some level. Why not? I’m sure it is more fun to think of oneself as a misguided genius than a delusional egomaniac or callous grifter. Now it will be legally harder for her. Though I’m sure she will sell a book or something eventually.
I find her less sympathetic personally because she had so many better opportunities.
The world was so thirsty for some one like her and now every woman inventor will find it that much harder to get support because of her. But it’s still better than absorbing the desire to punish women that would arise if she had gotten away with it. Harm reduction perhaps if only a little. I see it that way too. Let her be held accountable for her own actions.
Prison is just what we have to work with and surely it’s a flawed system. I’m just glad it’s not so flawed that she outmaneuvered it.
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The idea that she has been fully exposed as a fraud, so she can never do it again does not quite mesh with what we’ve seen in US politics and other areas over the past decade.
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I answered that question in my post. You’ve resummarized my post at length about the different roles prison can play depending on how people view it. I’ve already answered the question of how most people here probably view it, if not most Americans. We know most Americans (certainly conservatives and many liberals who don’t think about it much) do gleefully cheer for prison as punishment.
Your original post was apparently attempting to draw a connection between us on BB cheering for Holmes’ imprisonment as an endorsement of prison as punishment. I am here to say (again) that one does not follow from the other. You can cheer for schadenfreude, yes, but you can also cheer for a dangerous woman being taken out of society. The latter is what I am doing, and probably most others here as well.
Personally, I believe prison cells should be nice basic apartments (as Norway does, for example). Being confined in a building is already punishing and prison should not be about punishment. Making the facilities poor is cruelty, plain and simple. In Holmes’ case, as others have elaborated upthread, she is dangerous and needs to be kept out of society for a while. It would be nice if we could rehabilitate her as well, but frankly prison isn’t very good at that. However we haven’t found any way to do that yet, so we keep trying. Rehabilitation is one of those things that societies should always strive for, no matter how low the success rate of current methods. If we don’t, our values lose all meaning.
Prison-as-punishment is popular with conservatives because it is fundamentally an essentialist argument. You are a good person or a bad person, and bad people get punished. Conservatives (and many liberals) don’t grasp the idea that we’re all just people and we sometimes do good things and sometimes do bad things depending on circumstances.
Human essentialists always believe that they would never do crime X, even if placed in an identical cultural, familial, and socioeconomic position as the criminal in question. This is a comforting fiction and nothing more.
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Yet it seems to be very popular around here lately… I’ve seen this used several times, in fact.
Weird you never hear men accused of the same?
I think a good rule of thumb is to say “would we say this about a man in the same case”… Has anyone ever accused a man of having children to get out of shit? No one would say that about men, only about women…
Not a single person would say this about a man. Ever…
In america? No one would any sort of understanding of our system would say that, because we know it’s not the case. Anyone saying that about prisons in the US is lying and we can dismiss what they have to say. Now, there are certainly people working to make that a reality in the US, but we all are aware that this is not the case.
One case in Norway I can think of where their reform-based system did not work is Varg Vikernes… Norway, in generally, as a much, much lower recidivism rate, and that is not changed by Varg being a major outlier.
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Of all her bullshit this one makes the most logical sense. It would only be harder to have children after being incarcerated. If there’s any chance for her to experience motherhood it’d be best to do it before prison. I don’t think it’s so hard to believe that she actually wanted to be able to have children and didn’t want to lose the chance. And as for the kids, honestly they’re rich kids and they’ll be raised by professional nannies with masters degrees in childhood development. They’ll probably be fine. In fact, it’s more than likely they’ll be more well-positioned in life than the kids of anyone I’ve ever known personally.
Incidentally, a lot of people hate their mothers.
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I think, as a society, we need to rethink the concept of “evil” and criminality to a greater extent. When we use “evil” to describe people’s actions (however true it might be), we place them into this category of not being fully human. It’s like how we imagine Nazis in our pop culture… If we compare American films with European films, you see far less of that sort of “cartoonish” depictions of nazis, what they did and why, and a much better picture of how something like the holocaust can happen, and how just normal people can carry this kind of thing out. Most of us in the US don’t read people like Primo Levi, who had a much more nuanced take on his time in the camps.
By trying to make someone like her into a kind of cartoonishly evil person, a master manipulator, we do ourselves a disservice in understanding just what she did, why she might have done it, and how others can and could do the same, because of the systems that we’re living in. We individualize it, so we can feel safe in knowing that it’s only due to her own person defects, and it makes us gloss over the structural issues that we should address to make sure someone doesn’t do something similar. Because what made her crimes possible, is still possible today. Nothing is going to change if we see her as some kind of supervillian rather than a human being who did awful things in part due to the systems we live in…
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People are very eager to dictate which humans should be allowed to exist in the world and which ones should be precluded from entering it, aren’t they?
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Yep. All because they think they know better about what is “good and true” in the world…
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I’m not - I was presenting a (slightly ad absurdum) argument. I’m wondering what the threshold for taking away someone’s liberty by law is. Physical violence for sure. These cases are not so clear to me.
For both Holmes and the other narcissistic grifter you spoke of (well, aside from the sexual assault accusations) what are the mechanisms the justice system can try, and what is the escalation to jail time? When is financial fraud big enough that they go into the prison system?
You’ve got to the heart of my question; what’s a large enough scale to warrant prison time? And what do you do with the smaller ones who don’t warrant it? What else do you couple prison time with, to actually make it effective? Fines and damages for sure, but what else?
And had the conviction been for medical malpractice, I wouldn’t even have this question. It was for financial fraud, instead. Enough others have remarked that the system seems to think that potential medical harm is less concerning than financial fraud and that’s not something to be proud of…
So, at some level, prison is about deterrence, in your opinion? Well, clearly it’s not enough deterrence because she’s just the one grifter who got caught…
Which result could have been obtained without prison. Take a look at the DIN example I gave above. You can’t start a company if you’ve been convicted of fraud. Ever. There are any number of other restrictions that I believe should go before prison.
Yeah, no sympathies for her. As someone who’s building his own startup, Holmes and the rest of the fake-it-make-it crowd are just making it harder for the rest of us who just want to run our own shops…
I don’t follow… As you say, it makes it more difficult for every inventor (and much much worse for every woman inventor). I didn’t get your second sentence here…
Yet, so many people have, and continue to do so. Like the “narcissistic grifter” @gracchus mentioned above…
There’s definitely an element of this in all of us (including me); part of what I’m doing here is trying to examine why someone like me who doesn’t theoretically believe in prison as punishment still feels some satisfaction in seeing her and others go to jail…
The tone I see a lot (not just here) is more the former than the latter. I mean, I understand because there’s a part of me that feels the same way. It’s hard to get past that cultural training. We justify ourselves by saying that it’s about harm reduction, but I think for many, it’s not only that.
Yeah, so that gets back to the question of what it’s for. If harm reduction and rehabilitation are the main goals, punishment is an undesirable side-effect. Can we figure out a way to get what’s desirable while reducing the side-effect? Norway is one really good example, for sure.
It’s usually very case-by-case. Only a few convicts are capable of rehabilitation. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t stop trying…
Yeah, it’s the “many liberals” part I find hard to get past…
Same at least in India. A bit better in that all prisons are state-run (so no for-profit cruelty), but a lot worse in that prison conditions can be horrendous…
My line of thought here is about how it should be, not how it is.
No, it isn’t. Someone can be a hustler, a con artist and an unrepentant criminal, but that needn’t have anything to do with wanting to have children.
Every rich kid with absent parents and horrible relationships as an adult to the contrary? I do feel sorry for those kids…
The system she was (is?) living in pushes you to fake it till you make it. If your entire subculture is built around the elevator pitch and cheap equity capital, is it vicious or virtuous to be preternaturally good at navigating that system?
It shouldn’t take away the personal responsibility, but in all these cases, I believe we need to look at the system itself.
Yeah, that’s my point about her specifically. It’s the whole VC, sillicon valley structure built on neo-liberalism. 
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In other words, you’re wasting everyone’s time Just Asking Questions about settled law and sentencing guidelines.
You answered your own question here. I’ve highlighted the relevant part.
She was found guilty on four counts of fraud by a jury of her peers and sentenced to prison on that basis. She’ll no doubt appeal, but that’s not evidence that anything untoward or unjust occurred here.
As noted above, financial fraud can result in harms to victims other than their bank balances. Also, no-one has brought up medical malpractise (as distinct from medical fraud like Theranos), so your shoddy attempt to shift the goalposts has no bearing here.
Plenty of people manage to work their way around late-stage capitalism’s unfair demands without defrauding or harming other people. I hate the game, but I also hate the player who eagerly embraces it and hurts others in their attempt to win it.
Just as most of us here recognise that the carceral state is highly dysfunctional, so also do we recognise that neoliberalism has toxic elements (indeed, we often acknowledge how the state of the former is in large part a result of the latter).
That critique of the system still doesn’t prompt any chin-stroking concern on my part that a compulsive grifter will be isolated from society for a decade.
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