If the states wasnt as corrupt as we joke about Asia being, they would invest all this wasted jail money in education and crack down on slave labor in the penal system.
This whole story, while sad, is a joke.
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Nope. I donât know his story. I was referring to the Les Mis-era-and-earlier Europe that you invoked.
And in every country with low âinequalityâ and good âsocial safety netsâ, youâll find a rate of crime high enough to be irritating to the law-abiding majority.
Crime is irritating in all countries, isnât it? I mean apart from perhaps a few microstates⌠But I tend to feel safer in, say, Japan or even Canada as compared to, say, any second or third world country that comes to mind.
My point was merely that threatening draconian punishments, in and of itself, doesnât have much of an effect on crime, because human brains donât really work like that; and criminals, almost be definition, have less awareness than most of the natural consequences of crime. I wasnât trying to take in the whole body of observations of Criminology.
I wonât say you donât know what youâre talking about, as I assume youâve read expert opinions on the matter, but I think thereâs an important caveat here. The minutiae of sentencing are lost on the general public, law-abiding and otherwise, but the overall picture, not so much. Itâs not like if you pass a law changing the minimum/maximum sentence for a specific crime you should expect to see an increase/decrease within X amount of time, but if you add or abolish the death penalty and publicize it widely, then your mileage might vary. (This is not a pro- or anti-DP argument btw.) Same thing if you go from zero penalty to major penalty or vice-versa, of course.
I feel like there are 2 types of criminals:
The habitual criminal is the one, either due to circumstance or mental problem, commits crimes on a regular basis. Perhaps itâs necessary to survive in the community he comes from, or learned behavior from watching others.
Then you have the accidental criminal/crimes of passion. Accidental criminal is someone breaking a law he didnât know existed (environmental regulations being one of many, or theft because he picked up âabandonedâ items), and crime of passion is someone committing a crime or crimes out of anger.
I believe that the different types of criminals need different types of treatment/deterrence, not to mention to even identify them. Unfortunately that would require an enormous amount of human resources to even begin to identify what kind of criminal he is since youâd have to interview and study each and every individual involved in depth. Kinda like doing a PhD Thesis on a single individual basically.
So society comes up with a one size fit all strategy. Break a certain statute and this is the punishment, and judges are given discretion to decide on how serious they should be. The problem arises when the punishment is far too brutal for the crime or too expensive.
You have to realize in ancient times lengthy imprisonment (anything more than a week) is rare, if it even happened at all. Criminals were swiftly punished, often corporal, fines, or if the crime is serious enough, execution. While I donât like the idea of executions I would not be against corporal punishments if it meant less incarcerations. Because while corporal punishment is painful, it gets the message across, the criminal receives the pain, and he recovers and hopefully never does it again. While incarceration costs money and it robs a person of life, especially for something not serious.
Thatâs actually a good example. If bike theft were subject to (say) capital punishment, the person wanting to take a rusty bike from the street would be more likely to ask a lawyer or at least a cop or bureaucrat before proceeding.
Conversely, if the maximum penalty for murder were just a year or two in prison, there would be more murders, even though many of them would still be made to look like accidents.
Itâs easy to pick one period of history in one particular place and say, look, that place was riddled with social injustice, therefore that must have been the cause of the high crime rate. This is known as âpainting the bullseye around the bulletholeâ.
âSocial justiceâ is a tricky concept to pin down, but if you develop some sort of scale for it, you might use (say) Spearmanâs rho to determine how it relates to crime. Establishing causality is a whole different ballgame; the fact that social injustice correlates with crime does not in and of itself suggest that the flow of causality is unidirectional. Iâd argue that one feeds the other; a society ruled by criminals (eg., most of Latin America and Africa) is inevitably going to be âsocially unequalâ.
Communist states are in theory highly âequalâ and have âsocial safety netsâ, but those historically could ascribe their (relatively) low crime rate to radical social surveillance, ie., the certainty of being caught. This is consistent with most research on the subject: however much people dislike surveillance and âinvasion of privacyâ, when it reliably leads to criminal careers being curtailed, itâs highly successful. The punishment that follows is important only to the extent that the criminal should be prevented from carrying out further crimes.
OTOH Iâll agree with you that the most effective way of curtailing crime is to ensure that people are not motivated to commit crimes. âSocial justiceâ absolutely is a means of achieving that, but itâs a lot more complicated than instituting policies about âequalityâ or âsocial safety netsâ (= taxing the rich and spending the proceeds on âprogrammesâ for the poor).
For every example like that that you can find, I can find you the opposite. For example the homicide rate in the Philippines - where there is no discernible process of law and order, and society is massively unequal - is about the same as the US.
Iâm sure you can do the correlation yourself if you care to look up the numbers. I reckon youâll end up with rho slightly positive but close to zero.
I have a degree in Psychology and have always had a bit of an interest in criminology. I donât need to read âexpert opinionsâ when scientific results are available. Experts, IMHO, typically canât tell their ass from a hole in the ground.
Not really sure what youâre saying. I wonât argue that the severity of sentencing has no effect whatsoever. As noted, if a thief is kept of the streets for 10 years instead of just 1 year, then by definition heâs committing fewer crimes. Iâm just pointing out that the general conclusion from the research is that severity of sentencing matters much less to the criminal than the certainty of being caught and sentenced. This is borne out by experience in the UK, where crime has exploded since criminal convictions have become much less certain, partly due to policy changes in how criminals are charged in the first place, partly due to changes in the police which make arrest much less likely, and partly due to more stringent requirements for evidence. The chances of any sort of punishment for any given crime are close to zero, and most habitual scumbags figure this out quite quickly.
This is a completely different proposition.
If you execute everyone for any infraction of the law, soon even the executioners and judges would have to be executed too.
There are so many laws out there everyone is violating them at all times.
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So then perhaps more energy spent on enforcing laws, rehabilitation of behaviours and, most importantly, education to avoid such crimes would be a far better use of time and resourcesâŚbe it government, corporate or personal.
Thatâs definitely not my suggestion (btw).
There are so many laws out there everyone is violating them at all times.
No, not really. If you take every law from every jurisdiction and apply it universally, thatâs one thing: you just need one jurisdiction in which, say, itâs illegal not to worship the Flying Spaghetti Monster, plus another one in which worshipping him (it?) is illegal. Then everyone on the planet is a criminal, end of story.
With a living tree legal system, yes you still have old laws that most people donât even know about, but if push comes to shove the courts can find them unenforceable because standards of human rights etc. have evolved.
Then why are you invoking it? I was fairly specific: inequality and lack of a social safety net. The point being, you can have the most virtuous mind and soul, but if your kids are starving, your virtuous mind and soul will lead you to find a solution for them one way or another. Thus not having starving kids (and not starving yourself) makes it easier for you to be law abiding.
Like I always say when generalizations of western countries come up, America is special. 
And we were talking more about petty crime than homicide. My impression is that itâs worse in PI than US, but I havenât looked it up.
Exactly.
Not really â see above.