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Privately Enforced and Punished Crime

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Re: Privately Enforced and Punished Crime

#51

Post by mjw1007 »

Avery3R wrote: post #3
umvi wrote: post #2

My initial thought is that this would create a "wild west" type society where bounty hunters go around and have shootouts with criminals, but without police training. Also, how are cash fines going to work against broke criminals? "Oh, you stole a bunch of money because you have no money. Pay a fine"

As I understood it, the legal liability insurance pays. The criminal then has to deal with whatever repercussions are laid out in their contract with the insurance company.

Then, presumably, if the criminal doesn't follow the contract the case ends up in civil court.

And if the criminal refuses to submit to the judgement of the civil court, that's contempt of court which needs to somehow be enforceable.

You could make the contempt of civil court a criminal matter, but then the same insurer ends up having to pay restitution to itself and this doesn't seem to end well.

Or if the civil court has its own enforcement arm then we don't seem to have moved enforcement to the place he thinks we have.

Re: Privately Enforced and Punished Crime

#53

Post by nickik »

rosser wrote: post #43
johndevor wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it the justice system that fills the prisons?

Many private prison contracts have terms requiring a minimum number of prisoners. The state is thus contractually obligated to convict people . How is this OK?

Yes. But that is only possible because the justice system allows that.

I totally agree that these contracts should not be legal. But the argument is still correct overall, the prisons don't put people in prison.

And the US had overpopulated prisons before private prisons. In fact, the VERY REASON why private prisons were established was because there were so many prisoners that the government were just not efficient enough to organize it at that scale in some cases.

Fundamentally it is the bad laws and the bad legal system that leads to this.

Re: Privately Enforced and Punished Crime

#54

Post by [deleted] »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #48
rosser wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many private prison contracts have terms requiring a minimum number of prisoners. The state is thus contractually obligated to convict people . How is this OK?

Ooooor, move people from the public system to the private one, creating inefficiencies. Let's not call conspiracy, this is getting silly.

[deleted]

Re: Privately Enforced and Punished Crime

#55

Post by Retric »

nickik wrote: post #31
Retric wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'are very different' How so? You are also making an argument, but I don't follow the reasoning.

Putting people into a house and stopping them from leaving the house is the same as 'detection, prosecution'. Pretty sure there are pretty different people who handle these things. And as the punishment proposed is about money, that is also incredibly different then 'stop people from leaving house'. So, other then that the functionality is now with the government and that one proposes to privatize it. What do they ha…

Ok, the argument about private prisons is not that they fail to detain people.

It's a question of second order effects relating to different incentives of private institutions vs government organizations. Governments see prisoners and thus prisons as a net loss because they pay for them. Private companies see prisons and thus prisoners as a profit center because they are paid to detain them.

Re: Privately Enforced and Punished Crime

#56

Post by nine_k »

saagarjha wrote: post #4
Avery3R wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understood it, the legal liability insurance pays. The criminal then has to deal with whatever repercussions are laid out in their contract with the insurance company.

So you're trading government-run prison for an insurance-run one?

At least you have some choice when you choose your insurance! (Unless they outsource it.)

Re: Privately Enforced and Punished Crime

#57

Post by tlb »

fao_ wrote: post #37
tlb wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For that matter, the current legal system assumes that you have time to read the criminal law. Presumably, the insurance companies will be strongly motivated to teach their clients how to stay out of trouble.

> Presumably, the insurance companies will be strongly motivated to teach their clients how to stay out of trouble. Why? If your clients don't stay out of trouble, you get free indentured servants. It seems to me there is incentive to make it harder to stay within the confines of your contract.

In the framework proposed in the article, if an insurer's clients don't stay out of trouble, the insurer has to pay fines on their behalf. If they can't pay their insurance premiums, they become indentured servants until they can.

The indentured servants aren't free and probably aren't profitable. These are people who can't make enough money on the open market to pay their premiums, so it seems unlikely that the workhouse will be able to generate more profit per worker than that. Given that insurance companies will lose money for everyone that converts from paying premiums into a workhouse laborer, they'll be highly motivated to get them back into the real world with a job, modulo the risk of them getting into trouble and causing another fine. So I don't see the incentive you mention to get them to break the contract.

Re: Privately Enforced and Punished Crime

#58

Post by nine_k »

will_brown wrote: post #44

Intent is built into the very foundations of US criminal law (very rarely is any crime strict liability, where no intent is required). I’ve never seen a system of insurance that insures willful acts, seems like insurance reform would be step 2 after the proposed criminal reform. It seems very strange to suspend imprisonment for a system where everyone has to buy insurance for their own potential criminal conduct and…

An insurance is a "right to commit crime" as much as an insurance is a "right to crash your car into someone else's". If you have a car and an insurance, you can just try for yourself. The insurance would pay for your liabilities in that case, but they would likely not be happy to do so, and will efficiently communicate their unhappiness to you.

Your next round of insurance will cost significantly more after that, and if they decide that it wasn't an accident but a deliberate act, it might as well cost s much as a new car.

Re: Privately Enforced and Punished Crime

#59

Post by nickik »

Retric wrote: post #55
nickik wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putting people into a house and stopping them from leaving the house is the same as 'detection, prosecution'. Pretty sure there are pretty different people who handle these things. And as the punishment proposed is about money, that is also incredibly different then 'stop people from leaving house'. So, other then that the functionality is now with the government and that one proposes to privatize it. What do they ha…

Ok, the argument about private prisons is not that they fail to detain people. It's a question of second order effects relating to different incentives of private institutions vs government organizations. Governments see prisoners and thus prisons as a net loss because they pay for them. Private companies see prisons and thus prisoners as a profit center because they are paid to detain them.

If the people who put criminal in prison had to pay for it with their own money, there would not be as many people in prison as there would be far more efficient ways to deal with the situation in 70-90% of cases.

That's the whole point of the argument about intensives. The very problem here is not the privatization but rather that the government wants to imprison so many people.

The very reason the US has private prisons is because there were to many prisoners and many governments couldn't handle it. A ineffective legal system and bad laws created the problem.

People focus to much on privatization. Government run prisons have many of the same intensives and are often equally as bad. Government prison guard unions for example are amounts the strongest supporters of harsher punishments including for things like weed.

But honestly, so long as the laws are bad, no system will really improve anything systematically.

Re: Privately Enforced and Punished Crime

#60

Post by drivingmenuts »

This reads like the premise of a bad movie. When I hit the part about requiring insurance, I heard the ghost audio of a record screech.

Yes, he's trying to solve a real problem. This ain't the solution.

Requiring insurance for drivers is one thing - being able to afford a car presumes some ability to afford insurance. However, his solution requires insurance just to exist.

That's not workable.

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