You can't post like this to HN. We have to ban accounts that do, so please don't do it again.
You may not owe arsonists better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. We want thoughtful, curious conversation.
In the past, these people were usually in prison for a long stay. But we just had a person go threaten the life of a judge, leave to go commit two armed robberies, after just getting out of prison after serving one year of a five year sentence for double attempted murder.
We just don't put monsters in prison nearly as much as we should.
Since peaking in 2009, the US prison population has dropped by 2.3% per year, with a 14% drop during COVID. This has gotten a lot of innocent people murdered as there is no theory of justice that can rationalize only giving someone a single year in prison for attempted double murder, especially when that person gets out and immediately goes on to threaten a judge and then later that night does a double armed robbery.
As El Salvador shows, yes, you can incarcerate your way out of endemic violent crime.
Well .. we could build these things called prisons and use them. However, for some reason, saying this obvious thing makes you 'the bad guy' in Washington and my home state of Oregon. It's almost as if people here refuse to see that there are individuals who cannot be left to their own devices. And until we figure it out, these kinds of problems will continue to compound as the social fabric slowly weathers
EDIT, since Hacker news won't let me respond:
Oregon is actually short of prisons and prison staff (simply not funded) and, in Portland at least, we've stopped imprisoning arrestees because we don't have enough prison space or staff to support them: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/multnomah-county-jail-halt...
