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PaperclipPerfector  26d ago (text post)   26117 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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Crémieux Recueil: I just saw a cost-benefit analysis of prisons where prisons save society money until you factor out $50,000 per prisoner per year for "suffering", then they cost society "money".

Scott Alexander: I think this is an inaccurate description of the study.

It costs society money if you take the author's mainline beliefs, if you adjust for current incarceration costs (I didn't do this adjustment because then you'd have to inflate crime costs as well, and I didn't know how to do this, but plausibly cost disease has driven up incarceration costs faster than inflation), or if you're thinking about blue states (which have higher incarceration costs than red states). I described it as saving society a small amount of money under the most generous possible assumptions, but being net negative otherwise.

But also, it does seem like low-key torturing hundreds of thousands of people, ~5% of whom are innocent, is a "social welfare cost". The process used to value that cost at $50,000 is no sillier than the process used to value a murder at -$9.4MM, or any of the other crime numbers in the paper.

Crémieux Recueil: I think it is sillier, since a point of prison for many is to punish, whereas there's no justification for murder.

One commenter posited a reductio that should probably be addressed: by this logic is everything you can buy free after accounting for "joy" or "forgone suffering"?

Scott Alexander: Not just free, but positive sum! If we didn't count the value of joy in buying things, we would have to model all trades as exploitative - stupid people getting tricked into giving companies money for no reason.

If we discount the suffering involved in prison because prisoners are bad people, we should also discount the suffering involved in murder insofar as murder victims may also be bad people (eg drug dealers, gang members, etc). I think a virtue-weighted utilitarianism would be fun to think about, but I've never heard anyone seriously propose it.

Crémieux Recueil: A voluntary purchase should be positive-sum to an individual, but if I buy an expensive truck, I may strain the family budget enough to turn it negative at the household level regardless of my personal enjoyment of the truck.

If I'm involuntarily committing someone to prison and generating enormous surplus for society, throwing in suffering for them, that relatively few outside of prison care about, messes up the whole equation by mixing up costs and benefits across levels of aggregation and treating all the numbers alike when they aren't. If the weight for suffering was adjusted to reflect that, that might make things fine, but no one can reasonably stand on a high estimated cost of prisoner suffering if they're doing cost-benefit analyses for the society we live in.

Given that criminals are generally disliked, suffering is being given a value above prisoners' incomes outside of prison (before and after imprisonment), and false-positive rates are low (especially for long-term prisoners), suffering probably adds value to society anyway. That's part of the now academically neglected retributive function of prison.

Scott Alexander: I think this is a good place to apply Thatcher's Law ("there's no such thing as Society"). Benefits go to individuals - people who don't get robbed, people who don't get stabbed, etc. Even indirect benefits go to individuals - people who live in nicer communities. It's perfectly valid to count costs to other people against the benefits to these people.

But also, aren't you supposed to be based and IQ-pilled? Have you met the average prisoner? They've got the IQ and self-restraint of like a ten-year old child. I don't really know who it benefits to keep creating people without the skills necessary to live in modern society and then, when they fail to live in modern society, say "Yeah, they deserve to be tortured for that".

I'm totally fine with the consequentialist position of weighing their suffering against the suffering of their victims, I could even potentially be convinced that this suggests incarceration at or above current margins. I just don't see why we have to add "desert" into it, which I think implies some kind of failure to exercise a self-restraint that these people never had in the first place. You wouldn't say that a kid deserves to suffer super hard for some arbitrary number of years because they hit their sibling. You'd give them whatever punishment you expected, through deterrence and/or incapacitation, to either make them a better person or protect their sibling in the future. Why hold criminals to a higher standard?

Crémieux Recueil: Making the analysis entirely individual-level is consistent with what I've said. But I don't think the analysis as it was done actually does that adequately, and it ends up extremely overweighting the suffering of criminals beyond all reason. If you're being "based and IQ-pilled" this stands up: those people average far lower incomes before imprisonment than even $50k/yr.

Now regarding desert, having it as a guiding principle in criminal justice doesn't mean to engage in exorbitant punishment, but it does mean to punish people fairly and equally. If you kill a stranger in cold blood and Bob with a 75 IQ kills a stranger in cold blood, you should both receive the same punishment even if Bob didn't really know any better. If you remove desert from the equation, you necessarily move towards illiberal justice, and I have a strong preference for liberalism and find it hard to imagine rational and workable criminal justice without it.

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