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The US over-reliance on incarceration is lazy and cruel

obviatethestate.substack.com

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Re: The US over-reliance on incarceration is lazy and cruel

#61

Post by bryanlarsen »

w______roy wrote: post #22
bryanlarsen wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Penalty length has very little effect on crime motivation. The most important factor is the likelihood of getting caught. You want to see crime rates drop? Shift a large percentage of the prison budget to the police.

It's not "likelihood of getting caught" because even if you have a 1 in 5 shot at getting away with a crime, desperate folks (or folks with a shaky understanding of probability) will still take the risk. It has to be "certainty of getting caught" which requires more than just more police, but also public messaging, education, etc. See: https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/247350.pdf

Interestingly, that's the link I would use to support my point. From your link:

1. The certainty of being caught is a vastly more powerful deterrent than the punishment.

2. Sending an individual convicted of a crime to prison isn’t a very effective way to deter crime.

3. Police deter crime by increasing the perception that criminals will be caught and punished.

4. Increasing the severity of punishment does little to deter crime.

Re: The US over-reliance on incarceration is lazy and cruel

#62

Post by henryreynolds »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #59

I tend to agree with the conclusion in general, but this blog post is egregious. This math is bogus. The "do X damage pay X penalty" framework is a poor one, for several reasons: 1. At a bare minimum, you have to scale the penalty with the probability of getting caught. If you can do $1500 worth of damage with only a 10% chance of being caught, the criminal has the advantage, because they can expect to do $15,000 wor…

I almost completely agree with everything you said. A few things:

The "do X damage pay X penalty" framework is a simplification for the purpose of convenience. To try calculating all the ephemerals would be tedious, provide little additional illumination, and lose the thread. It's meant to illustrate, NOT be writ into law.

The propaganda element is particularly interesting in light of the effect on mass shooters. It's been established that sensationalizing mass shooters encourages new ones, hence why some media outlets have stopped. I'd question the reach and efficacy of the propaganda, in this case.

You could surely find another person who would spend the proposed 11 days in prison to make the statement, "I also hate satanists enough to break their stuff." Hence, and as you said, we would need to fine tune the punishment to maximize deterrence while minimizing cruelty.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the responsibility of media and society as a whole. If you can punish an offender for propagandizing criminality, as you propose, could we not also punish a news organization for broadcasting their act nationally? Purely hypothetical and ignores all the obvious reasons you can't (e.g. freedom of speech). I'd really like to understand your mental model for the "cost to civilization writ large" and how you determine responsibility.

Re: The US over-reliance on incarceration is lazy and cruel

#63

Post by Ajedi32 »

anonporridge wrote: post #2

Like all high morality, more advanced rehabilitation methods and/or more pleasant segregation of criminals from law abiding members of society, is a privilege of wealth. The richer we collectively are, the more resources we can devote to managing counterproductive individuals more humanely. The poorer we are, the more likely we have to resort to more barbaric methods of order maintenance, like execution. Therefore, i…

I agree with what you said in regards to the higher cost of lax punishments to crime, but:

> Like all high morality

Is wrong. Being poor might make it harder to avoid certain moral failings (e.g. if you're literally starving you might be forced to beak all sorts of moral principles to avoid death), but certainly not all. Not cheating on your spouse isn't a "privilege of wealth", nor is not abusing your children, and a huge number of other morals. And even in those moral situations where wealth is a factor (at least in that its correlated with "high morals") its certainly not the only one, and I think reducing things to an income level is likely to be detrimental to your desired outcomes. (Not saying you were doing that, this is just a word of caution.)

Re: The US over-reliance on incarceration is lazy and cruel

#64

Post by slt2021 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #7
slt2021 wrote: post #3

typical champagne socialist post. just look at Oakland and see if lax on crime policies work.

Penalty length has very little effect on crime motivation. The most important factor is the likelihood of getting caught. You want to see crime rates drop? Shift a large percentage of the prison budget to the police.

wrong! if criminals are released the same day without bail, if they get small punishment - they keep scaling up their crime because they effectively cap their downside - so the correct math is try to maximize upside while downside is limited

Re: The US over-reliance on incarceration is lazy and cruel

#65

Post by bryanlarsen »

slt2021 wrote: post #64
bryanlarsen wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Penalty length has very little effect on crime motivation. The most important factor is the likelihood of getting caught. You want to see crime rates drop? Shift a large percentage of the prison budget to the police.

wrong! if criminals are released the same day without bail, if they get small punishment - they keep scaling up their crime because they effectively cap their downside - so the correct math is try to maximize upside while downside is limited

Only wrong because I oversimplified. Being released the same day is effectively the same as not being caught at all. The research shows that the length of the punishment doesn't have a strong effect. 1 year in jail with a 100% chance of being caught and convicted is a far stronger deterrence than 10 years in jail with a 10% chance of being caught and convicted.

Re: The US over-reliance on incarceration is lazy and cruel

#66

Post by snapplebobapple »

henryreynolds wrote: post #58
mycologos wrote: post #51

I sometimes wonder whether sentencing people to time in prison is the right equilibrium. My understanding is that doing the stuff associated with long prison terms is also associated with not having the longest or most carefully considered time horizon. In that sense, long prison terms are a bad punishment because they're an insufficient deterrent that is very expensive, in terms of both state resources and the priso…

Per the National Institute of Justice, "The certainty of being caught is a vastly more powerful deterrent than the punishment." As a dramatic overgeneralization of the principle, you'll have fewer thefts if every thief is forced to pay for their stolen goods than if 1% of thieves are tortured to death on live television. It suggests that lowering expenditures on prisons, by reducing sentences, and retargeting that mo…

why don't we compromise and torture every thief to death on live television? Both morals and effectiveness can take a win here.

Re: The US over-reliance on incarceration is lazy and cruel

#67

Post by actionfromafar »

dfedbeef wrote: post #35
actionfromafar wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't some prisons for-profit?

Boy howdy, they sure are. Judges end up taking bribes to send people to them too! What a country.

So the prisons will probably lobby against shifting money to more police patrolling for deterrence.

The solution is obviously to allow the for-profit prisons to branch out into for-profict policing, too. /s

Re: The US over-reliance on incarceration is lazy and cruel

#68

Post by w______roy »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #61
w______roy wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "likelihood of getting caught" because even if you have a 1 in 5 shot at getting away with a crime, desperate folks (or folks with a shaky understanding of probability) will still take the risk. It has to be "certainty of getting caught" which requires more than just more police, but also public messaging, education, etc. See: https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/247350.pdf

Interestingly, that's the link I would use to support my point. From your link: 1. The certainty of being caught is a vastly more powerful deterrent than the punishment. 2. Sending an individual convicted of a crime to prison isn’t a very effective way to deter crime. 3. Police deter crime by increasing the perception that criminals will be caught and punished. 4. Increasing the severity of punishment does little to…

Well of course I read the things I link. To clarify, my points are:

1. "Likelihood" ≠ "Certainty" - I might think there's a high chance of getting caught, but unless I'm overwhelmingly certain that I'll get busted, I'll still take a risk. This is an important distinction, because it's not as though there's a linear correlation between likelihood of getting caught and crime rate.

2. This perception can be increased in ways other than just investing in police. A city could invest in cameras and signs that say "you're on camera." They could take out advertisements showing the conviction rate for particular crimes. They could hire rehabilitated offenders to share their stories with kids. The list goes on, there are plenty of ways to spend that money that might be more effective than giving it to police departments.

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