Comment Re:20 years over 4 hours? (Score 1) 719
2. Punishments generally reflect how hard it is to catch a crime, not how much damage it causes. This is why you can go to prison for 209320938 years just for copying a movie for your friend.
This is absolutely untrue. Punishments are doled out in accordance to the severity of crime (this is called the retributivist theory of punishment) or according to the amount of deterrence we desire to enforce on the community at large (this is called the utilitarian theory of punishment). These two theories have guided the setting of levels of punishment throughout the history of the Anglo-American justice system.
