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PaperclipPerfector  23d ago (text post)   26094 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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Prison sentences are capped at a week, max. But, within a minute of attempting to shoplift or steal a car, the police arrest you, take back the stuff you stole, and send you to jail. What do you think would happen to crime?

A huge explosion. It's basically a slap on the wrist, and only when you're caught. It generalizes very poorly to other crime as well. Want to murder somebody? If you're caught, you're looking at one week. Rape? One week. Million-dollar fraud? One week. I don't think a solution exist which doesn't contain punishment which is highly unpleasant for the punished.

I think bringing back violence might actually be an improvement here. I personally dislike it, but if it works on animals, it probably works wonders on really stupid people as well (unlike more abstract punishments). It seems to work for Singapore (Singapore doesn't have a lot of stupid people, though).

And most of what's wrong with society now is not handled effectively by the government or the police as its social issues. Minor crime and inappropriate behaviour is handled through social norms, social pressure, culture, etc. The government should go after corruption and bigger issues plaguing society rather than wasting time harassing individuals for minor things (inappropirate jokes, building shreds in their gardens, not reporting birthday money to taxes, and things of this nature)

It's basically a slap on the wrist, and only when you're caught

The assumption for the hypothetical is that you're caught every time. It's a slap on the wrist, but you can't actually benefit! So organized small groups stealing over and over wouldn't pop up, because they wouldn't benefit from it. That example was specifically for shoplifting and stealing cars. My argument is they would go down, because you wouldn't actually be able to benefit from doing them anymore. It wasn't intended to apply to rape or fraud. I don't really think there's much you can do about rape on current margins, absent everyone having a camera and audio recorder on them at all times, and fraud's a whole different thing anyway.

I think the implicit assumption that most harm society suffers from criminal action is likely untrue.

Cutting the profit incentive through magic will certainly remove some crime (and likely most of the organized crime), but plenty of crime would remain.

Tax fraud would be eliminated, but murder would likely not drop much. Clearly, we will disincentivize killing your grand-mother for the inheritance or murder-for-hire, and indirectly eliminate some murders conducted in organized crime and other for-profit crimes (such as robberies), but plenty of murders would be wholly unaffected.

The thought experiment was intended to be scoped to things like shoplifting and car theft, should've been more specific about that. But I actually think it'd have a moderate effect on murder for a subtle reason - it'd break up cultures of crime by making the moderately profitable activities they sustain themselves not profitable anymore. Like if you couldn't sell drugs, and couldn't steal stuff, and couldn't do welfare fraud, and so on, that culture becomes less attractive

So it's basically the idea that, if your criminal actions are effectively undone with zero benefits, then you learn not to engage in them. In a mathematical sense, I suppose you're right, but people need to get caught in like 99% of cases, and all the benefits will need to be fully reversible in order for it to work. If I steal a cake and eat it, you cannot make me uneat it, for instance. I think it's difficult to get real-life benefits from this thought experiment. A best case scenarios requires surveillance worse than what China has, so I regard it as an expensive solution for that alone

Absent everyone having a camera and audio recorder on them at all times

I think one of the dangers of low punishments is that, even with the punishment, the actions may still worth worth it. Even if you punish rape and murder, the crime is not undone and the victim still suffers. Two wrongs balance out in a sense, but not in a way which cancels the wrong. I think large companies break a lot of laws because the fines they get are smaller than what they gain doing it. Large companies generally do whatever is the most profitable, so it's quite important that we make crime not worth it financially (companies are amoral after all)

The point is that criminals are not deterred by the length and severeness of the punishment but by the likelihood and immediacy of the punishment.

But that's just not true. If we imagine that there's only a 50% chance of getting caught, there'd be a vast different in attempts with a 1 week cap on sentences vs. a 1 year cap on sentences, I'd think?

It depends what kind of criminals you're thinking about, but most of them don't do any kind of reasonned risk/reward analysis. They simply believe punishment doesn't matter because they won't get caught. It's like reckless driving; a likely result is death, the harshest punishment, but it's infrequent enough that the people doing it discount its possibility to zero. Or teens and unwanted pregnancies, even when there wasn't an easy way out, it still happened all the time because the punishment was infrequent enough as to seem unlikely to happen.

Are you really suggesting that, in the example I suggested, you'd have equal crime rates?

You'd get close to equal crime rates from irrational actors. Rational actors you just need to be sure to not let the benefit of crime outweigh the penalty, but that's a relatively low bar to clear. I think there's likely very few criminals in prison who believe whatever benefit they got from their crime is worth the time spent in prison (and the criminal record). Piling on more punishment after that has very little if any effect. Increasing the catch and conviction rate, however... It would hit the behavioral conditioning that irrational actors need to get.

As an interesting anecdote, I grew up firmly believing the mantra that "crime doesn't pay" and "criminals always get caught". I mean that I believed them literally, that the police had an almost 100% rate of solving crimes. Of course as I grew up I realized it's not really the case. But it still shaped me to be a person who is almost obsessively rule-abiding. Like I have a hard time jaywalking at night when there's absolutely no one watching, I feel dumb not doing it, but when I force myself to do it, it feels like I'm going against a deeply programmed instinct. I wonder what kind of person I would have grown up to be if I had the current perception that criminals almost always get away with crime, and get caught when they're unlucky or sloppy. There's a lot of kids who probably believe that nowadays, from seeing friends and family get away with crime.

Is that true if the cost is very small?

I mean, the thought experiment is comparing two extremes' effect on irrational actors, but any sane policy would adjust punishments so that it doesn't at the same time create unfortunate incentives for rational actors.

But that’s the problem. There can be a bunch of assumptions but do they describe the real world?

In a mathematical sense, I suppose you're right, but people need to get caught in like 99% of cases, and all the benefits will need to be fully reversible in order for it to work

Yes, this was the point of the extreme hypothetical, which I which I should've been more clear about.

I suppose you're right, but people need to get caught in like 99% of cases, and all the benefits will need to be fully reversible in order for it to work

It works for repeated or organized theft, where the criminal's doing it because they're going to resell the goods for money - you can almost entirely stop that by just making costs > benefits.

I think one of the dangers of low punishments is that, even with the punishment, the actions may still worth worth it

Yeah, I'm not proposing low punishments for rape, because the benefit is intrinsic to the act itself and also a very primitive one that's hard to punish, rather than an economic one you can take away.

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