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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31307 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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(ii) I have a weird sympathy towards Retributivism as a theory of justice and crime. More specifically, I have a lot of negative animus towards what I see as excessively utilitarian approaches to criminal justice, that regard criminals as just another type of citizen to be managed. As soon as we stop regarding criminals as people, but just factors of (dis)production, then I think we do them and our society a disservice; it's treating them as cattle. Instead, I'm sympathetic towards a more contractualist approach that mandates we treat all citizens as autonomous individuals who enter into an implicit social contract by virtue of enjoying the benefits of society, such that we would be doing them a disservice of sorts if we didn't punish them for their crimes. Let me try to put that in a maxim: you're an adult, you're a citizen; you fucked up, now you pay the price. If we didn't make you pay the price, we'd be treating you like a child or an animal.

Yes, the reductio ad absurdums of the alternative theories of punishment are very persuasive to me. If you go down the deterrence road, you end up with something like Gary Becker's approach: punish harshly but monitor laxly, since this is more cost-efficient as a way of deterring crime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Becker#Crime_and_punishment

If you go down the rehabiliation road, then it's hard to explain what's wrong with a Clockwork Orange view of crime: neuter the capacity of the criminal to commit crimes, even if they want to do so. If you say, "They need to appreciate why their crime was wrong," then this goes beyond rehabilitationism, and introduces an abstract concept of justice that is more appropriate in a view like retributivism.

Finally, there is expressivism (punishment is an expression of society's disapproval of the criminal act) but that doesn't explain why we should punish criminals, rather than any group that society tends to dislike, e.g. Satanists or Morris dancers.

If you go down the deterrence road, you end up with something like Gary Becker's approach: punish harshly but monitor laxly, since this is more cost-efficient as a way of deterring crime.

I think that's not true, because it fails to consider the high time preference of the habitual criminal. So rather than deterring crime, that leads to anarcho-tyranny. Ordinary people are constantly on edge fearful they'll commit (or be falsely convicted of) some crime (like walking on the grass in that ST:TNG episode) and suffer a harsh punishment. Habitual criminals will just do what they want enjoying the lack of monitoring, and rarely will suffer the harsh punishment. It may be cheap but it's not effective.

How is that a time preference issue?

If a habitual criminal distinguishes between prob1(capture)*utility(punishment_1) = r and prob2(capture)*utility(punishment_2) = r, then they are irrational, since their expected utilities are the same in either case. By contrast, there is nothing intrinsically irrational about high time preference.

With more monitoring, a criminal will be caught sooner; the punishment is thus less far in the future and less discounted.

Ah, makes sense. I would definitely like to look more into this topic when I have time.

What’s wrong with cost-effective punishment? I think it’s clear we spend too much resources monitoring and judging crime, and not enough actually punishing (eg, people with a ludicrous amount of convictions still plying their trade in public). That sounds like something tough-on-crime politicians say constantly. The standard response would be that the certainty of punishment is more important than the amount of punishment. I think reality has disproven that notion.

Probably because most street criminals are bad out calculating expected values, and calibrate based on the simplistic heuristic “am I likely to be caught?”.

This assumes that they have just enough time preference and rationality to understand the difference between likely and less likely punishment, but not enough to grasp the difference in severity. Somehow they’ve mastered probabilities, but the concrete difference between 1 year suspended and 5 years in prison eludes them.

At some point “bad at” equals “incapable”. If they are incapable of controlling themselves at all (and some undoubtedly aren’t) , it’s a waste of resources.

This assumes that they have just enough time preference and rationality to understand the difference between likely and less likely punishment, but not enough to grasp the difference in severity.

Yes, that's what high time preference means.

On a high enough time preference, the value of the future drops to zero. Today’s crime spree fun will always be more valuable than tomorrow’s freedom.

Yes, at a high enough time preference punishment doesn't matter at all. If someone has a time preference that's higher than your average puppy, deterrence simply won't work and incapacitation is all there is. I think even most habitual criminals aren't that bad, though perhaps the raving homeless drug addicts are.

They possess a high score on what we might call ‘Pikeman’s z’ that makes them behave irrationnally and criminally, and a component of that factor is their high time preference T. But the z factor has other components, like an inability to accurately estimate the likelihood of something happening L (like getting caught). The plan is to give them a purely L test in the hope that they’d do well on that at least, but sadly T and L are largely correlated and they are way below average in L too.

Well the law is complex. There are approx a million gradients for simple crimes.

What’s wrong with cost-effective punishment?

From a deterrent perspective, nothing, but a lot of people think it's unjust to deliberately have fewer convictions and harsher sentences. One more fundamental reason to think that's undesirable is that it increases the element of luck in the legal system, whereas it seems like having a legal system that is less based on luck is more just.

It's an iterative game. Law of large numbers, they'll get their due.

The cost of lower surveillance is exactly that it is less likely that criminals will get their due, even in iterative games. After all, if a criminal is caught for one crime in a long criminal career, it doesn't follow that they will be punished proportionately for their past crimes.

I think it’s clear we spend too much resources monitoring and judging crime, and not enough actually punishing

In addition to what @HaroldWilson said, which is a correct summary of the literature, this seems to be factually incorrect; we apparently spend relatively a lot on punishing, and relatively little on policing:

It stands to reason that a society with ~1 homicide / 100,000 needs to spend proportionnally less on prisons than the one with 6/100,000.

Note that, because the United States is more violent than the EU, you might expect that the US would have a higher level of spending — but it wouldn’t obviously suggest there should be a different mix between police and prison.

I beg to differ. You need police for traffic violations and murder, but you can’t send people to prison for parking tickets.

But surely that doesn't explain much of the discrepancy. While murder carries relativity long sentences, few people are in jail for homicide.

And, my point is NOT that current spending is unreasonable. Rather, I am making an empirical claim. Note also that the US apparently has a pretty low number of police per capita, compared to most Western European countries outside Scandinavia. So, I don’t see much evidence that the US spends too much on policing and not enough on punishment.

Re that block quote, is it from the linked article?

Realize that “Homicide” and “parking tickets “ are representative of heavier and lighter forms of criminal behaviour respectively.

The data is all over the place on this police/prison ratio. If you go by homicide rate, the US is not spending nearly enough on prison.

One thing missing in this discussion is the cost of judging them, which are major costs the ‘catch a few and pound’ strategy is supposed to alleviate. Seems pointless to go through the trouble of making sure they’re guilty if they’re not going to be punished/incapacitated anyway. ‘if it weren’t for the lawyers, old boy, we wouldn’t need lawyers’.

Re that block quote, is it from the linked article?

Don't you have ways of figuring that out? The answer is Yes.

The data is all over the place on this police/prison ratio.

What data are you referring to?

If you go by homicide rate, the US is not spending nearly enough on prison.

I am really not sure what you are trying to say. What, precisely, are you saying the US should spend more money on, and why?

One thing missing in this discussion is the cost of judging them, which are major costs the ‘catch a few and pound’ strategy is supposed to alleviate.

But isn't "catch a few and pound" precisely what you are advocating when you say, "it’s clear we spend too much resources monitoring and judging crime, and not enough actually punishing"? And I am skeptical that, in a system in which something like 98% of convictions are via plea bargains, the cost of judicial proceedings is all that high.

More murders (higher homicide rate) should equal more time spent in prison (therefore higher prison costs, in a rich society squeamish about the death penalty). Accordingly, all else equal the US should spend 6 times more of its gdp on incarceration than western europe (instead of 0.5% : 0.2%, 2.5 : 1). Policing is a separate issue. I am arguing for longer sentences, which does not require more police. As Gary Becker says: “maximize the fine and minimize surveillance. “

I am arguing for longer sentences, which does not require more police

I see. I misunderstood and thought when you said " it’s clear we spend too much resources monitoring and judging crime," that you meant we spend too much on policing.

More murders (higher homicide rate) should equal more time spent in prison (therefore higher prison costs, in a rich society squeamish about the death penalty). Accordingly, all else equal the US should spend 6 times more of its gdp on incarceration than western europe

Why 6x more? As I understand it, US crime rate other than homicide isn't that much higher than those countries, and homicide arrests make up a very small percentage of violent crime, let alone all crime.

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Because most of the literature points in the direction that a high chance of being caught and effective is by far the most important factor in determining deterrence rather than severity of punishment. Criminals are not paragons of rationality, breaking out their calculator to work out the expected returns before committing the offence. Quick and reliable punishment creates a much stronger link between offence and punishment in the mind than the occasional criminal being caught and spending years in the slammer. Which it to say that you cannot simply assume that in practice deterrence is sentence length x chance of conviction.

Even if those studies weren't suspect, it's not just about deterrence, is it? Incapacitation and retribution are impaired by these almost nominal punishments.

The original comment here though was saying that it would be a better use of resources to catch fewer criminals but give them harsher sentences, which hardly seems like it would be a good thing for incapacitation. The point is where is the marginal dollar or pound currently best spent, and I think the evidence indicates policing rather than prisons at the moment.

The original comment here though was saying that it would be a better use of resources to catch fewer criminals but give them harsher sentences, which hardly seems like it would be a good thing for incapacitation.

Yes it would be. I'm saying the length of the sentences matters more than getting caught. If I have 100 hardened criminals, and I give half of them a 10 years sentence, that's 500 years' worth of incapacitation. Catch and release them all after 1 year provides only 100 years of incapacitation (for greater monitoring and judging costs).

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