Some people cannot believe how atheist, how uncouth many have become. Several people believe that they should do anything that they are slick enough, or bad and bold enough, to and that people are nothing but another commodity. Every word they speak is hip or profane. Their working vocabulary is not two hundred words. (Personally speaking, people are some of the most valuable assets in the World when they are good.) There are members of the human population who live and think like predatory animals, and their consumption of marijuana and other drugs would astound you. The drugs give them a feeling of contentment. They enjoy hours of floating, day dreaming, imaginary conversations with their New York musician friends. And then they come down off of their highs and spend a lot of time sleeping when they are not out hustling day and night. Typically, marijuana is a habit-forming drug that, which may or may not be addictive, and usually leads to the use of other addictive drugs. And it will only take you a little while before you are out on the streets looking to locate a peddler of “snow”—cocaine. It is when people get back into that familiar snow feeling that they began to want to talk. #RyanPhillippe 1 of 6

Cocaine produces, for those who sniff its powdery white crystals, an illusion of supreme well-being, and a soaring overconfidence in both physical and mental ability. You think you could whip heavyweight champions like Danny Garcia and Adonis Stevenson, and that you are smarter than anyone like Bill Gates or Paris Hilton. There is also a feelings of timelessness.  And there are intervals of ability to recall and review things that happened years back with an astonishing clarity. People high on cocaine will bend your ear, you know, talking to you annoyingly and so much to the point that your ear will move back. And people on narcotics like cocaine will give you a hard time, just to keep you in line. They think you need it and want it too. A dope fiend might feel evil and slap you are worse than ever. And when a dope fiend comes down off of cocaine, they will “lay dead,” or inactively, until they feel the need to get high or get some more money. And to pay for their drug habits, they will rob people, steal thinks even out of their own grandmother’s house and sell them on the cheap, they may even try to sale people. Heck, a dope fiend will even still your baby’s crib and sell it. Unfortunately, there are always people who cannot be deterred or reformed. #RyanPhillippe 2 of 6

The punishment must fit the crime; the penalty relates to the general aims of the system, to prevent further crime, and perhaps to reform the criminal. However, some believe that trying to construct a table of equivalents so that the amount of suffering inflicted by the criminal could be meted out to the offender in some other form. How can such a table be drawn up? How many years must a blackmailer spend in prison to experience suffering equal to his victim’s? Is it possible, in any case, to make comparison of suffering between persons? Of course, we do assess the gravity of an offense and try to ensure that the punishment for a trivial offense and try to ensure that the punishment for a trivial offense is less severe than for a serious one. However, this is possible only because we take for granted an existing scale of penalties and grade new offenses accordingly. Such grading does not imply an intrinsic relation between the crime and the penalty apart from that established scale. Penalties prescribed by the law ought to reflect the moral heinousness of the offense. The most serious offenses against morals deserve the most severe penalties.  For what makes one offense more serious than another? #RyanPhillippe 3 of 6

We tend to concentrate on deterrence, turning away from the actual crime act except as one of a class actions that might be prevented by punishing the particular instance severely enough (but only just enough) to make the action unattractive enough to the offender and possible future offenders. The aim is presumably to select a penalty at which the aggregate of suffering actually inflicted would be the smallest possible. Thieves, murderers, dope-peddlers, the extortionist, and the smugglers are commit different levels of crimes, and we cannot typically justify severe penalties for trivial offense, nor justify weak penalties for serious crimes. A parking offense should never be more severe than physically forcing someone into a sex act, that would be monstrous. The goal of law enforcement is not minimize the number of offenses, but to minimize the total amount of suffering for victims and predators. If we call parking offenses trivial, we mean that each one causes relatively little suffering; therefore, we are prepared to put up with a large number of them rather than incur the cost of making offenders suffer heavy penalties. #RyanPhillippe 4 of 6

Extortion (a criminal act involving demanding money or something else of value from a person by threat of exposing information), on the other hand, cases so much suffering that if heavier penalties would yield to even a small reduction in the number of offenses, there might be a net gain even though offenders would suffer more than they did before. Therefore, one might agree that severe penalties ought to be restricted to serious offenses, but we call an offense serious precisely because it causes a great deal of suffering. If a person knew they were going to get hanged for parking on the wrong side of the street on street cleaning day, I am sure that individual would probably sell their car to avoid such a harsh penalty. It is only serious crimes that deserve severe penalties. Expected consequences might establish a kind of standard penalty for each class of offenses. Officials drafting new rules might consider whether a proposed maximum penalty would keep offenses down to manageable proportions, or people concerned about road accidents might argue that heavier penalties for motoring offenses would make drivers more careful. #RyanPhillippe 5 of 6

Conversations have convinced me that the ideality of the material World is through insight reliance on reason. Deciding the sentence in a particular case, however, is clearly a different matter. The maximum penalty is a limiting factor, but questions like the degree of responsibility, provocation, and the offender’s previous record are all relevant. However, one might reasonably ask why, as a matter of principle, they should be relevant. These mutually related stages are found to be in every aspect of experience, and since there are no things-in-themselves behind experience, they characterize all aspects of our World. Justice means to be fair. Justice presupposed people pressing claims and justifying them by rules or standards. This distinguished it from charity, benevolence, or generosity. No one can claim alms or gift as a right. However, although this account is appropriate to questions of distributive justice, where the problem is to allocate benefits, it is not so obviously true of corrective (or retributive) justice. It is farfetched to describe a criminal trial as a conflict between an accused man’s interest in being let alone and the community’s interest (if he has one) in punishing him. Nevertheless, sentencing criminals and giving judgment in favor of one part to a dispute rather than another have this in common with distribution—that they all may have involved overriding claim and treating one person more harshly than another. All presuppose general principles by which such distinctions are regulated and justified. #RyanPhillippe 6 of 6