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Hm, wouldn't another way of conceptualizing "the greatest good for the greatest number" be to say "the longer we keep disadvantaged members of society in prison, and the more punitive the measures we take against them, the more trouble they will have finding jobs & contributing to society in positive ways"? In other words, I don't think a "sentencing by the numbers" policy is necessarily justifiable under a robust rendering of utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is just a methodology; it seems unfair to utilitarianism to evaluate it in a weak, narrow-sighted form. Especially when you leverage something like rule utilitarianism, utilitarianism can be made to support things that we traditionally think of as deontic, like rights.