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The crime rate as a whole would go way down, because prisons aren't great at solving recidivism, whereas a vigilante's answer to "I can't afford to run a prison personally so what should I do with the criminal I caught instead?" is much more final, and in a world where nobody is afraid of cops or DAs or judges, the concept of law doesn't disappear, it just ends up in the hands of vigilantes.
The murder rate specifically might go up on net, though. Vigilante justice is not renowned for its high accuracy or respect for innocent-until-proven-guilty ethics.
Quoted for truth. You can't even calculate QALYs lost to murder by just summing up victims' remaining life expectancies, either. Everyone afraid to walk down a street at night because it might be dangerous is losing QALYs. Every transit line that gets voted down because people are afraid to make it easier for criminals to reach their suburb is an ongoing cost in QALYs. Every child stuck playing inside after their parents saw a news story of a free-range kid murdered on the other side of the country is losing QALYs. Air pollution deaths are calculated in a "well, we can't directly trace this lung cancer to that coal plant, but we can poke some statistics really hard with a stick" fashion; if you don't do the same with murder then it's not an apples-to-apples comparison.
Very impactful paragraph, thank you.
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