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> Who said that? What is that even meant to mean?

You used the risk of vigilantism as a reason for the brutal treatment of prisoners.

> What the government can do to stop me from doing that is give me a credible promise of punishing the man for me.

They can also give a credible promise of punishing would-be murderers like you for that kind of vigilantism. There is no evidence to suggest that shorter sentences leads to more vigilantism. Zero. It's something you've made up to justify a barbaric, immoral treatment of prisoners.

> If anything, its the Scandinavians who are unique.

Strawman. The argument was not about everyone going as far as Scandinavia, but about not going to the other far extreme like the US.

> Go to Africa, Asia or South America and you'll find that criminals are given harsh punishments

And yet no single other country worldwide imprisons a large proportion of its population than the US. The US is worse at this than the most brutal authoritarian dictatorships.

> In fact this is more or less true in most of Europe as well

Nowhere near the US extreme.



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