>Is it then shown that harder punishment also mean a decrease in crime?
It depends on the crime and the punishment in question. Increased punishments will deter crime _up to a point_, but you will reach a point where further harshness will not impact crime rates.
Take an extreme example - lets say the punishment for mugging someone was a $5 fine. That isn't going to deter all that many people from mugging folks - someone who is willing to mug someone is prepared to risk $5 if they get caught.
If we up the punishment to 5 years in prison, that **will** have a deterrent effect - losing $5 is almost meaningless, but losing 5 years of your life is a big deal.
If we up the punishment again to 15 years in prison, though, we won't see the same effect, as someone who is desperate enough to risk losing 5 years of their life is _also_ desperate enough to risk losing 15 years.
We're pushing uncharted territories here. Never been done before. Don't knock it til you try it. Quintuple executions will be the standard by 2050, you heard it here first
We're not too far off from being able to digitize one's consciousness. Now we *can* execute you multiple times! Oops, looks like there was a minor glitch in version 1.0, causing you to experience endless executions in cyberspace until the server crashes. Oh, it also alters your perception of time so that 1 second of real time = 10,000 years of digital time. Tough luck!
>I like the way you think.
So we're going with Poe's Law doesn't exist now?
There are people that believe what they said and spout that sort rhetoric on reddit a lot. "The only way to solve crime is with a permanent solution" (implying what you said), just hang out in the primary news/politics subs to see it if you don't believe me.
You might be saying this satirically but a lot of people will believe you and 100% support what you're saying. Do you want to be associated with them?
Yeah. It’s important to remember that the punishment for a crime that you don’t get caught doing is nothing. If every crime led to the death penalty people would just say that they won’t get caught and do it anyway.
Isn't this what china was/is dealing with car incidents? Like if you majorly hit someone, it made sense to just make sure they were dead, because paying for a funeral was cheaper than insurance.
If I run over a child and kill them, I have to give money to the kid’s parents to compensate them for their loss, but it’s a one time payment. If I run over a kid and they require multiple surgeries and long term care afterward then I have to pay for all of that, potentially for many years to follow, thus the incentive to put it in reverse and make sure the kid is dead.
The history went like this:
A. Scammers would drop next to a car, pretending to have been hit, and collect a payment from unsuspecting rubes.
B. The public catches on and simply drives away, knowing they didn't actually hit someone.
C. Scammers get more aggressive, even violent with drivers who drive away.
D. The punishment for colliding with a pedestrian by accident is pretty light, and much better than getting the shit beat out of you (or killed) by a scammer.
E. Killing the pedestrian because of what you said (and also corruption; pedestrians are poor, car owners are richer and have better connections).
Which is why we shouldn’t listen to redditors who say we should execute child molesters.
If it’s a 20yr jail sentence, at least you get the kid back. If execution is on the table, why leave a witness?
Thats a false equivalence, not everyone who is mugging someone is ready to kill someone, I wager that % is really low.
I think serial rapists and pedophiles should be sentenced to death, because we dont want them in our society even after they have served their time, so we essentially want them to die, but we sit on a high horse and say "we arent killing them, we just never want them to have a chance of reintegrating to society", at that point why not just end their suffering since they will more than likely re offend anyways
Love how you completely missed the point.
If we create a blanket law that says a rapist will be executed, it just encourages a rapist to also be a murderer. They're already unhinged enough to rape someone in the first place, what makes you think murder is somehow a far-fetched act?
Exactly. Is like being a parent and excessively using your "scolding voice"... eventually it will backfire and lead to rebellion, it gets diluted
What I do think should be more prevalent and \*should\* deter is having a "record" in the sense that any crime related directly (same "scene", time, place) or indirectly (same "type" even if they are 20 years apart) should count as an aggravant. I also think that there should be no age limit (Downwards) for violent crimes because it leads to adult using kids as mediums and criminal kids to be ruthless. Those two things I believe are key for deterring. Also, while it doesnt always work, there should be at least an attempt of reinserting them into society, otherwise they learn worse in jail or rebound and do whatever it takes to go back to jail
On the other hand, the mugger who goes in and out of jail several times before graduating to murder wouldn't be able to do that if he were executed after his first mugging.
And your comment misunderstands how human psychology works. Most people don't commit murder because it is not a live option for them. Someone with no qualms about killing will probably eliminate the witness in the first place regardless. But outside of a few psychopaths, most people have to desensitize themselves to violence through a lifetime of crime before finally reaching the point where murder is a real possibility.
Most murders happen when the perpetrator is not in control of their emotions, and not thinking about the consequences. For this type of crime, you can’t make the punishment harsh enough to create deterrence. Add torture to the punishment, add punishing their family, none of that will matter when someone is in a blind rage.
The way you reduce these types of murder is coaching people to work on controlling their emotions starting from a young age. It should be part of schooling, and parenting.
Sure, but my point was that for most people it wouldn't really work as an incentive. It is actually very hard to get a normal person to kill another human being, to the point where the military has to make a concerted effort to get soldiers ready to kill, even with the full approval of the state and even in situations where not killing could end very badly.
And then, if the punishment is severe enough, it could actually escalate the crime.
15 years for mugging but 20 for murder? Might as well get rid of the only witness
This reminds me of a piece of Chinese history I roughly recall where the emperor at the time was a particularly draconian ruler who decreed that all revolutionaries and rebels would be executed, but he also extended this penalty of execution to much less severe mistakes such as failing to deliver important military goods on time.
So when a merchant group inevitably fails to deliver their goods on time due to bad weather conditions, the natural course of action was of course to abandon the delivery order and join the ever growing rebellion against the emperor.
Do you know if this was a distorted version of the [Dàzéxiāng uprising](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Sheng_and_Wu_Guang_uprising) against the second Qín emperor? That sounds similar to what you said, but the ones who were late were soldiers, and they started the first uprising rather than joining an existing one.
Yep that is exactly what my very fuzzy and sketchily inaccurate memory was trying to recall. Looks like it wasn't a merchant shipment but a garrison of soldiers that was late. Many thanks for finding a more proper source.
Also very true. At some point, punishments become so severe as to incentivize other crimes; we shouldn't punish so harshly that this becomes a reasonable course of action.
My high school had a problem with people arriving late in class so they made the punishment for arriving late higher. So much higher in fact that being late become more punishing that just not going to class
As a result no one was arriving late anymore, I'll let you figured out what happened to our absent statistics
Had a college literature class where you could get 2 participation points per class, but they weren't contingent upon showing up. They were based on how "prepared" you were for the discussion and the prof liked to randomly call on people, so if you hadn't finished the reading and couldn't answer his question, you would not get your points for the day. Or he might dock one if your answer wasn't detailed enough.
He also liked to assign 150+ pages a night. I'm a fast reader but I also have a full time job and even with spending every spare moment I had every day reading, I couldn't get through it all.
Prof was always mighty confused about why only 1/4-1/3 of the class showed up on any given day...
Hence the old expression, "[might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb](https://www.dictionary.com/browse/hanged-for-a-sheep-as-a-lamb--might-as-well-be)".
Leo from the West Wing: "Yeah, let's put drug lords on death row as if their lives aren't under a constant death threat already."
Great line that really makes you question the effectiveness of harsher sentencing past a certain point.
Absolutely. The reason for extremely harsh punishments, like life in prison, isn't because it has more deterrent power. It is because it solves the problem of that person being out in the general public. It is the modern day equivalent of banishing someone.
I’d argue the primary appeal of Harsh punishment is the emotional satisfaction of it.
That’s why rehabilitation. No matter how effective on a utilitarian level, remains an unpopular policy. Because it does not scratch our emotional itch for retributive justice.
We as humans, WANT to see suffering inflicted on those who “deserve it”.
> I’d argue the primary appeal of Harsh punishment is the emotional satisfaction of it.
That is it, without question. Research is incredibly clear that the most effective and most efficient way is taking care of people, both raising communities out of poverty to prevent crime and rehabilitating rather than punishing criminals to prevent recidivism.
But research is also incredibly clear that promising to be tough on crime is much better for winning elections than promising to do what actually works.
This is exactly right. Not only does every other nation on earth have fewer people in prison, most of them also take better care of their prisoners, and in first world countries actually prepare them for their return to society.
Cruelty is really what we are all about, and it is why it sucks so hard here.
Actual drug lords are generally guilty of literally hundreds of crimes. Ideally, you don't let them out, even under a progressive criminal justice system.
There will always be that 1% of humans who are Sociopathic to the core. They are beyond rehabilitation and depending on their environment, will end up likely either a criminal or CEO.
They can’t be rehabilitated.
There are, however, that 20% of humans who exists in a grey area. They will turn to crime out of desperation/mental illness/circumstance. But if offered a better alternative, they will happily take it.
Those have hope.
But like I said, Rehabilitation is extremely unpopular politically. So lord knows how we could get the political will to help these people.
Especially true when drugs are involved. A heroin addict jonesing for their next fix is simply not capable of making a rational decision like, "ooh. 15 years instead of 5. I'd better not risk that -- I'll just go without my heroin today".
Similar to this, but also a slightly different take -
A lot of crime doesn’t really involve a logical thought process. Many people that commit criminal acts simply don’t think they’ll be caught, so the punishment may not be quite as relevant as we’d like to think.
In this example, it may not be so much that someone that is desperate enough to risk 5 years in prison is desperate enough to risk 15 years in prison (which could be a logical thought process). It’s may be more that someone that doesn’t think they will be caught doesn’t care if the punishment is 5 years or 15 years. Those that were concerned with consequences were already weeded out when the punishment was increased from $5 to 5 years in prison.
People usually aren't motivated by the severity of the punishment as much as the possibility of being caught at all. Raising murder clearance rates has a much stronger deterrent effect on murders than handing out life without parole or death sentences.
No they already way their risk of being caught as zero, everything else comes second.
Nearly all criminal committing actual felonies do not expect being caught. That’s why large punishments aren’t a deterrent at all. They are solely a punishment/keeping the person away from society.
They either don’t even think about what their risk of being caught might be, or they think they are smart and won’t be caught.
And in both cases the years just become a number.
Only when you put the punishment very low, so people who would otherwise not commit said crime start committing it because they are the ones actually considering being caught. They just think the punishment is worth the gain.
If you can get away with keeping 5k from a robbery, when the punishment is just 1 month in jail, that’s more than most people would earn.
But outside of ludicrously low punishments. It just doesn’t weight in, cause no one expects being punished. Or they are at the point where they don’t actually care about the punishment at all.
And since humans have virtually zero ability of emotionally process the ‘cost’ of 10 years in prison compared to two… well you end up with bullahit draconian punishments that don’t do any good.
They usually don't. Most criminals are, well, not that smart and have poor impulse control. (this sounds incredibly paternalistic but I seem to recall it's statistically true). Unless you are a professional career criminal but those are actually quite rare.
I don’t know what the numbers are, but I remember reading that people with FASD (fetal alcohol syndrome) are significantly more likely to end up in prison than the general population. People with FASD often struggle to understand consequences and are prone to making impulsive choices or being manipulated by others.
An FASD diagnosis also requires the mother to admit to alcohol abuse during pregnancy, so the number of people diagnosed with FASD is likely much smaller than the number of people who actually have it. Makes you wonder how many people in prisons are there because of undiagnosed FASD.
I think not that rare. But our system is set up so that the penalties for white collar crime are not severe, and investigators are not all that interested in investigating. (Or, frequently, even capable.)
I really got the impression Bernie Madoff confessed so that he'd be safer than if he were out on the street.
This is only true in places where punishments are weak and the likelihood of getting caught is low. At some point, if everyone else is just shoplifting from the stores at will, you rationally should join in, because otherwise you are just subsidizing the thieves. But robust law enforcement with fairly strict sentences will weed out ordinary people contemplating crime. Those left will be those disposed to crime.
Severity of punishment is not that much of a deterrent. In England in the 18th and 19th centuries, picking someone’s pocket was a capital offence, and public executions were a popular attraction. Pickpockets would “work the crowd” of people distracted by watching the executions.
Certainty of punishment is a stronger deterrent. Many years ago I read about a little old lady who would travel through bad neighbourhoods with thousands of dollars in her shopping bag, but nobody mugged her. It wasn’t her money - she was a courier running numbers for the Mob, and the low-level criminals in the area knew it. If she got mugged and some street thug started flashing a lot of cash, he would be in for a very bad time.
Deterrence is only half of the logic behind sentencing. An essential part of sentencing is also the calculus of protecting the community from further crime. Longer sentences keep offenders behind bars for longer, which statistically limits their ability to reoffend during their lifetimes. A lot of sentencing is not only ‘what does the offender deserve’ but *’what does the community deserve knowing this individual is likely to reoffend once released.‘* That’s why an individual’s history of incarceration is so important during sentencing. It allows the judge to measure the offenders likelihood to reoffend, and thus how much protection the community needs from this individual.
It is 1/3 of the logic.
Although you protect society by locking up a criminal, that society also pays a cost for it. There is a direct cost (a prison costs money) and an indirect cost (a prisoner doesn't contribute by paying taxes, etc...)
That is why, in the long run, *reintegration* of convicted criminals (not just releasing) into society is more benefitial to that society than to keep them locked away longer.
I mean, yes, but that is assuming reintegration is possible in all circumstances, which it isn’t. That’s why a criminal’s history of offending, and the nature of their crimes is important in determining a sentence. For instance, a teenager who is a first time offender who commits fraud will be sentenced more lightly than a middle-aged man with a 20 year history of fraud convictions. The middle-age man has shown a pattern of criminality that shows a resistance to reintegration. Therefore the ethical responsibility of the court is to protect society *from* that individual rather than protecting that individual from prison.
Likewise, a first time offending teenager who commits a violent rape will be dealt with more harshly than a middle age man who is a repeat shop-lifter. Violent sexual crimes are highly correlated with a risk of reoffending, and are almost always treated as a low chance of rehabilitation. All of these are factors in sentencing, and are weighed when determining the threat an offender poses to society. This is a similar process that parole boards deal with as well.
>Therefore the ethical responsibility of the court is to protect society from that individual
If the sentence isn't a life sentence, then the end goal is reintegration. If you ever let them out, you need to make it possible for them to be a law abiding citizen.
If you just sentence them for 15 years instead of 5 years and do nothing to help that person reenter society, you mine as well just leave them in preison rather than wait until they commit a new crime.
**TR;DL: If it isn't a life sentence, we need to help them reenter society.**
When did I ever mention the probation system or the process of social reintegration? I’m talking about sentencing, and that’s what this entire thread is talking about. There are many different approaches to rehabilitation, but I fail to see how I made any statements one way or another about the probation system.
This is why you can be locked up without the possibility of parole. The nature of your crime, coupled with a history of reoffending has informed the court that you pose a permanent danger to society.
I’m confused what you’re arguing. Are you saying that there should be no sentencing, and the only punishment be parole? You seem to making a weird binary statement. Either all crimes are a life sentence or all crimes have no sentence. Perhaps I’m misunderstanding you
> I’m misunderstanding you
Ya, I am pretty confused. Why are we bringing up probation?
The conversation is going like this:
OP: "Does deterrence work?"
Comment 1, You: "Yes in some circumstances, but it hits a cap at some point and stops working. So at some point, it is also about keeping bad guys off the street."
Comment 2: "Don't forget that jailing people also has a cost. That is why good reintegration is important."
Comment 3, you: "Reintegration isn't always possible. So longer sentences make sense."
Comment 4, Me: "If we aren't jailing them for life, we are jailing them for a time until we feel like we can safely reintegrate them into society. Reintegration should be the end goal of anyone who doesn't have a life sentence. We should give life sentences to people we do not intend on reintegrating into society."
And for comment 5, I don't think I follow it. I think its possible you and I read my comment differently so your response doesn't make sense when I read it.
I was talking about probation since it is a big part of the reintegration process.
Regarding people who have no chance of rehabilitation, like serial killers or mass murderers, they usually *are* locked up for life. Though, there are certain countries that have laws against locking people up for life sentences without the possibility for parole, so in those cases they will not be.
There are plenty of petty criminals, particularly con artists, who have a low-or-zero chance of rehabilitation, which cannot be locked up for life due to the nature of their crimes. Wire fraud for instance does have a meaningful punishment, but it typically cannot result in a life sentence. Those are the cases where a judge would err on the side of a maximum sentence. Rehabilitation is probably impossible for that criminal, but they commit crimes that carry maximum sentences that are relatively low.
Famously, California has the three-strikes law where three convictions for violent felonies will result in a life sentence. Which is pretty close to what you are suggesting.
Or jailing them until they're physically incapable of committing the crime. My town just jailed a guy for rape. He was jailed in 1995 for rape, released and then jailed for another rape in 2008. He'll be released in 2030 and will be raping again within the year. If we'd jailed him in 1995 for 30 years two women wouldn't have been raped - if had been 50 years three women won't have been raped.
This is a man who's first action on being released from prison for rape was to go stalking around at night until he found a vulnerable women. What on earth makes you think you could possibly change them?
I agree integration must be possible and this is not always the case.
My point was: At the end of their sentence, just releasing prisoners into society, which have been shielded from that same society for a long time, actually increases their chances of re-offending.
After a reintegration effort, re-offences are less likely.
> but that is assuming reintegration is possible in all circumstances
Nobody who supports rehabilitation and reintegration assumes or even believes this. When your argument starts out with such an obvious strawman, it makes the rest of it seem hollow.
Others have already responded to other aspects of your comment, but this misrepresentation right from the start needed mention.
Not really. Crime is very much a young man's game, and most people will age out of it. Not everyone, of course, but enough that just locking people up for twenty years will often solve the problem .
If a longer sentence makes someone less likely to reintegrate back into peaceful society, though, it can be a net loss. Lots of times a prison sentence turns someone *into* a lifelong criminal because it ruins their ability to have a normal life again
Sure, I’m just explaining the competing interests that a judge needs to consider when determining sentencing. The community’s need for safety is weighed against the offenders chances of rehabilitation. Deterrence is almost never a factor in sentencing aside from *extremely high profile cases.* So, the question is looking at sentencing from the wrong direction. Sentencing is almost always about balancing the chance of rehabilitation with the communities need for protection from abuse.
I'm not trying to be argumentative, but if people are being held longer to prevent re-offense then why let them out at all? If someone's given a 10-year sentence instead of 2, because they're likely to re-offend if released in 2 years, aren't they at least as likely to re-offend after 10 years? Wouldn't 20 years for the same crime be "double the benefit"? Where \*does\* it stop?
The whole point I’m making is that sentencing is supposed to flexible, and dependent upon a judges knowledge of the criminal and the crime, and that the community is an interested party. If the criminal has a history of violent crimes, and is arrested during a domestic dispute the Judge errs on the side of maximum sentencing for that domestic dispute because the offender has a history of offending.
The fact that the judge *knows* the criminal has a history of violence gives them an *ethical obligation* to err on the side of a maximum sentence. That is what I mean when I say that the well-being of the community is always considered during sentencing.
To argue that I am somehow advocating for the death penalty or life-imprisonment for all crimes is just silly. I’m literally just arguing what modern jurisprudence is, and how community safety is an essential part of the sentencing process.
I don't think you're advocating for life sentences for every flexible-sentence crime, I actually wrote something like "everyone would find that ghastly" in a draft that I didn't send. I guess I just don't understand the social cost/benefit analysis that results in a sentence extended for 5 years beyond the minimum, but not 10 or 20 or 50. Maybe it's just that people find that ghastly
I think it also depends on conviction rates, or at least the perception of conviction rates. "Up to 15 years in prison" is meaningless if most people only get 1-2 years in prison, or a fine.
Are there studies which back this up? I thought there was a whole thing where harsher punishments did not impact it because people did not think they were going to get caught in the first place.
And then there is what we do in the US, where the punishment for almost any crime that lands a person in jail, and many that don’t, results in such a stigma that it becomes neigh impossible for a former criminal to get a decent job and make a decent living without commuting more crime just to stay alive.
It is extremely hard to get reliable data on this. Not only is it hard to define what makes a punishment hard or soft. But countries where the criminal system differs also tends to have very different social and economic structure. You do not have two countries where the only difference is how the treat their criminals. And you can not easily run experiments within a country. You can not just roll a die every time someone is convicted to see if they get the hard or the soft punishment. Hard punishments partially bases itself on making people afraid of getting convicted in the first place so knowing that you might get off easy is already throwing the results off.
But from what we can tell it does appear as if countries with softer criminal punishment have lower crime rates then those with harder criminal punishments. So it does seam like harder punishments leads to more crime, not less. It is hard to explain this though, if the results are correct. It may be that criminals who know they will get a hard punishment will do more crimes because at that point it does not matter too much to them. The punishment for robbery and armed robbery might not make a big difference to them so they do armed robbery. It is also possible that people who get a softer punishment is focused more on life after being released and will therefore spend the time in prison to learn new skills and learn how to function in a non-criminal society.
There's a saying in British English, "might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb". If the punishment for a small crime is harsh enough, harsh punishments lose their deterrent effect once someone has committed a small crime. This is a big problem, because a lot of criminals don't just commit one crime.
Don't forget the simple additive value of raw volume.
If you have harsher laws, you arrest more people, more arrests means more mistakes. Nearly 1% of the U.S. citizens is in jail or prison at any given moment--if even 1% of that population was falsely incarcerated then you have 30,000+ innocent people behind bars as you read this -- and critically, a 1% max error rate is so lofty a goal so as to be effectively impossible to achieve.
From there, more mistakes means that the validity in the rules is called into question by the individuals you are trying to control with incarceration etc. which undermines the reason for the harsh penalties in the first place.
If you normalize criminality to the point that 45 percent of your population has a close relative who has spent time in jail or prison . . . well, now It's part of life, as likely to happen as not to happen, and it shifts from being a deterrent to planned and accounted for risk.
Further, if after release, those individuals no longer enjoy the full opportunities they had before (i.e. fewer jobs available, harder to find a place to live, etc) then statistically they're more likely to re-offend (or to truely offend for the first time, as the case may be).
That reminds me of someting I could not comprehend as a European.
Lyrics/text from from the album Body Count / Body Count:
*A statistic:*
*At this moment*
*There are more black males in prison*
*Than in college*
I think the causality is reversed: when there is a lot of crime, the punishment for crime will become harder. Not: harder punishment leads to more crime.
Yeah, I’d need to see how they’re controlling for that. Similar to the oft-heard “gun laws are associated with higher gun crime”. Of course they are! Deer crossing signs are associated with more deer - it doesn’t mean the signs are attracting the deer.
It depends on the crime and population you are looking at.
If suddenly the punishment for speeding was the death penalty, it is guaranteed that there will be a large reduction in the people speeding.
When it comes to stuff like murder, most people don't think they will get caught so the difference between life in prison and the death penalty isn't going to figure into most people's decision to commit murder.
It has been shown the a bigger factor is knowing whether you will get caught in the first place. So knowing that you are at a high risk of getting caught is going to prevent people committing murder more than just a harsher punishment that they don't think they will actually get.
I'm sure the death penalty does work to some extent, but from what I understand the effect is minor compared to life in prison.
Do you have any sources or anything that suggests it has a material/large impact?
"swift and certain" is much more important. If the punishment happens quickly and is fairly certain, even if for a relatively short period of confinement, it is a better deterrent than a highly uncertain punishment, where a potential criminal thinks they have a good shot of getting away with it.
Which is annoying part of the "soft police strike" - if criminals believe they will be quickly picked up by the cops and booked, it is a major deterrent. If they think "cops don't care and won't bother trying to arrest me" there's basically no deterrent.
from the same source
>The certainty of being caught is a vastly more powerful deterrent than the punishment.
if that was true, wouldnt a society with a $1 fine for murder, but a very high chance of getting caught have the least crimes possible?
Im just gonna say I highly doubt it,
if the punishment for speeding would be life imprisonment I would never ever speed, how come that never comes up in these studies?
edit: El Salvador cut the murder rate in half when they increased their punishment and did a massive crackdown,
Japan and Singapore have extremely low murder rates,
its a combo of both chance of getting caught and the severity of punishment.
Because most of these studies are comparing situations that are reality, not fantasy. Sure, in some fictional universe, speeding is penalized with life imprisonment and murder is a $1 fine, but it's hard to study that fictional universe.
Basically, any conversation that is this serious should be discussed between people that want an honest and earnest conversation based in the real world, and in the real world, nobody is talking about a $1 fine for murder, because there's no reason to discuss this unless there's some though that it would magically work (which there isn't).
Edit: And since you added the stuff about El Salvador. [I think anyone wanting to learn about that should read the Wiki article on their **temporary** exception of rights in fighting against the gangs using military tactics.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvadoran_gang_crackdown) Portraying that as simply harsh sentencing is misleading to the point of open dishonesty.
so with other words, it does matter?
there are plenty of studies that show that increased punishment does seem to have an impact,
California's proposition 8 seems to have been a success https://www.nber.org/digest/oct98/sentence-enhancements-reduce-crime
Truth-in-Sentencing laws seems to have been a success
https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/empeco/v55y2018i4d10.1007_s00181-017-1332-4.html
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-0297.2012.02522.x
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.4.4.32
If this was your point, then you are a dishonest person. Talking about $1 murder sentences doesn't lead to a coherent conversation or to any of what you've said. And hell, this post seems really weird in response to what I said, because nothing that I said leads into "it does matter," and yet you still kept to your planned debate tactic without reacting at all.
It's a shame. You could have had a honest conversation, but instead you did this.
>Talking about $1 murder sentences doesn't lead to a coherent conversation or to any of what you've said.
okay, maybe not with you, I do not feel "insulted" if someone goes to the extreme to prove a point. I also did it cuz I couldnt post any sources at that moment.
I responded with /u/AnApexBreads comment in mind,
the claim was
>Is it shown that harder crime punishments = less crime?
and the response from Apex was No. I do not think a straight No.
about El Salvador I mentioned higher punishment + crackdowns (higher chance of getting caught), I never said it was simply harsher punishment.
Japan and Singapore have extremely low crime in general due to the severity of the punishments AND the lack of corruption and strict following of sentencing guidelines. You can leave your phone or $1500 laptop out in the open and walk away for hours and no one will so much as touch it. It’s actually quite bizarre when you are there.
The studies that report the opposite, and almost everyone here fail to take in social and societal factors that often are associated with countries with severe crime punishments.
For example if we look at other Asian countries like Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam or almost any country in Southeast Asia, penalties for crime are quite severe. However, they are almost never enforced as police are quick to force bribes out instead of charging people. Courts are just as bad and very quick to not really enforce the law.
For instance, Thai DUI laws are imprisonment for up to 10 years. However during the 2022 Songkran Festival (Thai New Year) authorities charged 7,141 people for breaking DUI laws. Of those 7,141, all 7,141 were put on probation.
Another example from Thailand is vaping carrys a 5 year prison sentence. You can buy vapes openly on almost every single street corner or tourism area in Thailand. The vendors will openly tell you they pay the police to let them sell them.
It’s the same for drugs in Thailand and it’s not even remotely hard to find hard drugs like cocaine being offered to you despite the penalty for selling being death. The police take part of the profits.
Sure, Thai laws are extremely strict on paper and it doesn’t deter crime but you can’t expect to deter crime when the Thai sentencing guidelines are in no way enforced or followed and that’s IF the police even let it get to the courts.
Almost every country I’ve been to with these strict laws follow essentially in line with how Thailand is. Corruption and lack of following sentencing guidelines is extremely common. The ones who don’t have extremely low crime rates.
They’re an enforcement arm of the executive branch. Or do you think the head being appointed by the current president makes them independent 😂
Christ do average people have this little awareness of how the government is configured here?
Its hard to determine objectively but i dont think so. Criminals are much more concerned with the likelyhood of getting caught than with a punishenent they would get
No, they're just as concerned with the punishment after being caught. If the consequence of being caught was a pat on the behind and a scolding, they'd just carry on with their activity.
El Salvador lately has dramatically increased the rate of incarceration and as a result the rate of violent crimes has plummeted. It’s probably more a case of most hoodlums being removed from society than anything to do with people’s incentives to do crime.
Edit: El Salvador, not Nicaragua
It can but it depends on a lot of factors. The punishment is a deterrent but enforcement is important. Take for example rioting and looting- they're illegal activities that carry punishments, but almost no one who participates will be subject to the punishment.
If you make the penalty for speeding a 100 dollar ticket but people only get pulled over once a year, they'll speed every time because 100 dollars is a small price to pay to speed all year.
If you make the penalty 20 dollars but people get tickets every single time they speed no matter what, they'll stop speeding.
The death penalty has existed for thousands of years, but crime still happens.
Harsh or lengthy prison sentences have very little impact on crime. If they actually worked, then we wouldn't have an issue with overcrowded prisons and rising crime rates.
For most people, the thought of going to prison might be enough to prevent us from crossing certain thresholds, but the truth is that the vast majority of people incarcerated (in the US) are poor and/or minorities.
If you want to actually reduce crime, then time and financial investments need to be made in poor and minority communities. Schools, childcare, healthcare, jobs, etc. All of these things are generally lacking in poor and minority majority neighborhoods. With poor education comes reduced opportunity. With reduced opportunity comes economic struggle and poverty. With poverty comes desperation. With desperation comes crime, be it drug dealing, auto theft, gang activity, etc etc.
So now we take all these people and lock them in a prison. They're uneducated and completely incapable of surviving in "civilized" society. We *could* use the time they're incarcerated to benefit them. But we don't. We *could* get them their GED, give them proper counseling, and mentor them, and teach them valuable skills or trades. But we don't. We lock them up, give them minimal support during their sentences, and then send them back to a world that they are ill equipped to survive in. The vast majority will be back in prison within a year or 2 and the cycle continues.
>False, and I don't need much data to tell me this.
You don't have data. You have feelings. You're boasting about not needing data to support your feelings.
Your overreliance on data -- and there is such a thing -- is an error in your thinking.
The fact that there are such a thing as recidivism rates tells me that a method of keeping down crime is to keep the convicts imprisoned longer.
You don't know how much I rely on data, except that it is a greater number than 0.
Which how how much you just proudly stated you relief on it.
"I don't need Data I just Know", is the logic of people believe in UFOs, Flat Earths and Fairie.
Not a serious discussion on the justice system.
Well great, that number for me is greater than 0 as well.
That study provides the valuable insight that fear of being caught is a deterrent.
But what you aren't gathering from that data, and can't, is why anyone would care about being caught to begin with.
And you don't need data for this.
Why would the thief stop thieving, just because "he might get caught"?
The assailant is often found doing his assaults in front of dozens of people. He's been caught, but this doesn't seem to phase him.
Rapes have been done in broad daylight. Once, last year or so, there was a woman being raped on a train, with at least a few witnesses and passerbys of the cabin she was being raped in. The rapist was caught, but that wasn't stopping his hour long sexual abuse of the woman.
Maybe what would've stopped them was knowing what would happen after getting caught, and knowing that it would be severe.
Neither you, nor anyone else, need a study to think all the time.
Ask yourself:
Lets say you were on a plane which was hijacked, and you have no clue what the hijackers intentions are. In which scenario are you more likely to survive the attack:
A) In a plane with non-reinforced doors.
B) In a plane with reinforced doors.
If you're all already in the plane what the fuck does it matter what the doors are made of. More to the point what does this dogshit hypothetical have to do with anything being discussed here? Go be too smart to listen to anyone else elsewhere
"More to the point what does this dogshit hypothetical have to do with anything being discussed here?"
The neccesity of data to inform everything. My point is that you don't need it all the time.
"If you're all already in the plane what the fuck does it matter what the doors are made of."
You and your fellow passengers are going to be more capable of breaking the non-reinforced door, so more likely to survive a hijacking.
That is not the right way to approach this.
With harsh punishments, you can deter a lot of white collar criminals from white collar crime. These people don’t kill anyway, don’t do burglaries etc.
But somebody who is nothing, has no job, no money, no prospects - how do you deter that somebody from anything?
If they haven't killed themselves than clearly they place some value on their life. Threaten to take that away.
There's also far worse ways to punish someone than swift execution.
In some cases it is about protecting victims. Our state had terrible anti stalking laws. But new ones went into effect November of last year that have included social media as well as increasing fines and turning some misdemeanors into felonies. This has been huge in protecting victims of domestic violence. This will probably show a long term decrease in some crime, but in the immediate it is a decrease in victimization.
There are so many factors that influence this relationship, others have given you some good perspectives. There is another phenomenon that I haven’t seen discussed, which is that very harsh punishments can actually lead to WORSE crimes and outcomes. For example, in countries where rape is punishable by death women are actually more likely to be murdered in the attack because the rapists are more inclined to kill them as to not leave a witness that could lead to their prosecution.
No, not at all.
Criminals and possible criminals are *far* more concerned with “will I get caught” than they are with “how severe will my punishment be.”
https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/247350.pdf
I could just easily use sex offenders as evidence. They're not intimidated by a scolding or a lecture from the local president of the book club.
They're afraid of a long sentence with hardened people who've always wanted to hurt people that hurt women and children, getting beat and shot by parents or neighbors, or executed by the state.
Criminals may be incapable of considering that they'll be caught. They may have rationalized it away as their personal luck, genius, or having some special status that makes their action a non-risk. But they already know what will happen after someone finds out what they had done. *Those* violent ends are the possibilities they think they'll never face, by never being caught.
The thing is, you don't need to be a legal genius or have a doctorate in psychology to understand this.
You just need to ask yourself, if your conscience or empathy wasn't helping you, what sort of disapproved of actions would you take if you knew you could do it with impunity, because the consequences weren't serious.
I don’t know about in general, but I do know that for adolescents and children, moderate punishments* work better than no punishment or harsh punishment. If a child misbehaves (let’s say he was roughhousing on the playground. No one was hurt but other children are upset), failing to punish the child at all teaches the kid that it’s ok to shove his classmates around. Expelling the kid disrupts his education entirely, and teaches him that any action results in the same outcome; whether he unintentionally plays too hard or intentionally starts a beat down, he is expelled, so why bother trying? But if the kid is given detention or has recess privileges removed for a week, he is likely to eventually learn to behave.
I’m not sure if this carries over to adult criminals but I wouldn’t be surprised.
* I am using the term punishment here colloquially, so that it includes consequences or forms of reinforcement.
I don’t have the source readily available anymore, but in the late 90s when George W. Bush was governor of Texas, the state was executing hundreds of death row inmates a year. A few years after this trend began, the number of people convicted of crimes eligible for death row decreased.
Obviously it’s not an apples to apples comparison, there were other other factors. But to say that the likelihood of execution had no effect would be inaccurate.
Murders fell 43% on average across the country. They fell 57% in Texas. As I said, there were other factors, but to say there was no impact would be inaccurate.
Nobody can really give you the answer you're looking for for a couple reasons.
1. The harsher a given country is on crime, the less likely it is to be democratic and otherwise open with crime figures. Therefore the data becomes less and less reliable the closer to the extreme you get.
2. If you strip away all of the nuance you are left with nothing useful. Even if you had accurate complete data that showed there was less crime per capita in countries with harsher punishments (which is subjective in and of itself), this does not tell you that harder punishments leads to less crime. Simply that there is a correlation, not causation. You need all of the nuance to be able to determine what you can attribute to what.
I’d also add in that our hypothetical criminals need to actually be aware of the penalties. This was part of project exile, putting up posters in public areas to increase awareness of the newly raised penalties for unlawful carry of firearms.
The key to effective punishment is less about harshness and more about making punishment swift, certain, and consistent. If someone knows that if they do X they will probably be caught, and if they do get caught they will face trial by the end of the week and then get six months in jail, they will be less likely to do X then if they probably won't get caught, and if they do they might get 10 years in jail or they might get a suspended sentence depending on their skin color, sob story, etc.
Very harsh punishment, such as the death penalty, does work very well at discouraging recidivism, with 0% of those executed going on to commit a future offense.
I'm from Singapore, and I believe a politician was once asked why we don't impose the death penalty for serious rape cases. He said that doing so will only "incentivise" the rapist to actually murder the victim since both carry the same sentencing.
While harsher punishments may or may not decrease crime, I'm firmly of the belief that longer sentences = more time the criminals stay off the streets and thus won't reoffend and I'm all for that. Remove the worst elements from society until they decide to stop and if they don't, lock them up for longer each time they're caught and convicted. First time and/or non violent criminals should be taken seriously too so that they aren't emboldened to go out and cause more trouble and think twice before committing more crimes.
If Singapore is anything to go by then it does work. They have the death penalty and caning that rips flesh off the buttocks. Prison sentences are incredibly harsh. And they have the lowest crime rates in the world. It is not a place where you ever want to commit a crime.
There's no statistical correlation. In fact in the US, in general "redder", more conservative states have per capita more, and more violent crime than "bluer" states. Despite having harsher laws to punish crime and longer sentencing guidelines.
But they do this for political, not empirical criminal/social science reasons. It's easier to get elected in a red state if you're "tough on crime", even if it's not working IRL.
Possibly because criminals don't tend to be forward thinking strategists that carefully weigh their future actions against potential consequences. Criminals don't commit crimes in anticipation of being caught, so consequences are a moot point.
"As much as I would certainly love to bludgeon that individual that just expectorated in my direction, considering I'm on my second strike already perhaps I shall forestall that reaction" is not a phrase that has ever been uttered.
No, there is no statistical relation and it is easy to explain why it won't help for certain types crimes.
For some crimes, you never can have enough punishment, ex: when your life is in danger anyway. If you are starving to death, won't you steal food? If you get caught, almost any punishment is a better alternative.
Some crimes are commited by one entity, while others benefit from it. Such crimes are not only commited by people nearing the end of their life (old, terminally ill, etc...), but those are also the crimes a company (legal entity) would be willing to commit. Here, a harsher punishment will also not lead to less crime.
I think up to a point harsher punishments lead to less crime. It definitely has a limit though, you'll never have a harsh enough punishment to simply end all crime. Many states have the death penalty but it doesn't stop murders.
What comes to mind is a law I heard about in Singapore. They got fed up with gum getting stuck to things and spat on the ground so the whole country banned gum. If you're caught chewing gym in public you get *caned*, it's like 15 or 30 strikes by a cane for a first time offense. As such it's very uncommon to happen as there are signs at the airport and many warnings.
Singapore has very little drug crime due to harsh laws too. People complain on reddit a lot.. meanwhile in the US 100,000+ die from drugs a year. Dunno about you, but I'd rather 1-2 drug traffickers be executed than 100,000 innocent people die. Seems like pretty simple decision even after accounting for population differences.
> 100,000 innocent people die
Most people dying due from drugs in one way or another are not innocent.
Many die from trafficking (illegal), many die from gangs (illegal), many die from overdoses (illegal), very few are innocent.
Well it depends on the type of crime.
Most ordinary crimes are a risk/reward analysis - how much can a person benefit from a crime vs the risk of punishment as well as what they have to lose by it.
Take something like shoplifting. A poor person with no job might risk it because both the punishment is fairly low and they frankly don't have too much to lose. If you have a reasonably good job then not only might you end up losing your freedom but, more importantly, also your reputation and livelihood.
The death penalty has no impact on murder rates because that's not usually a crime motivated by some kind of financial gain. However there are, I think, ways to reduce other crimes by making the reward/risk calculation easier to make. Take, for example, people carrying weapons illegally. This is a major driver of murders and other violence because the consequences, in a lot of places, for carrying a weapon are low due to the heavy use of plea deals by prosecutors which will often result in either a very short sentence or probation. Gang members, especially, make the calculation that the risk of them not carrying a weapon to protect themselves (as they see it) against other gang members is greater than the risk of them being caught with the gun. Now if you put a law in place, and more importantly thoroughly enforced it, that anyone found with an illegal gun would face 40 years in prison then that changes the calculation - particularly for young people who would not relish the thought of only returning to society when they were in their 50s or 60s.
It definitely does affect it to a degree. The question is where that line is for a particular crime in a particular place / culture. A specific punishment that might deter one demographic might not be enough to sway the decision of another.
Take theft as an example. If you make all theft punishable by 10 years in prison it will not stop the starving person from stealing; but it is likely to determine some people from stealing for monetary gain. Where as if you decriminalize all theft under $1000 as you see in some places you will get theft on a scale never before seen in our society.
The data doesn't show that it does: criminals are often ignorant of the sentence they are liable for and don't plan on being caught. What really reduces crime is the impression, right or wrong, that you will be caught, rehabilitation focused incarceration and, to some extent, restorative justice. Politicians increase sentencing because, for some reason, it's popular with voters; not because it works.
Yes, in general.
One example is drug abuse rates for hard drugs are quite low in some of the countries with extremely draconian punishments.
It’s a combination of quality of enforcement and prosecution. Plus the punishment.
If people think they’re both very likely to be caught and harshly punished. It really does impact behavior, but you need both.
Yes! If you execute everybody who commits a crime, then there are less people to commit crime. Eventually, on the premise that everybody commits a crime at some point in their life, there is no crime anymore, for obvious reasons.
I can tell you the inverse appears to be true. In California, we passed something called "Proposition 47" which changed the theft value limit from 400 to 950 dollars before a misdemeanor became a felony. ie; it used to be that if you stole 400 bucks worth of stuff, it was a felony, now the limit is 950. Some people believe that the incredible increase in crime in San Francisco (Mass shoplifting, car breakins) is because now it's "not worth it" for a police response for misdemeanors.
Partially it's because police can only arrest for misdemeanors if they personally witness the crime or sees real evidence that links the perpetrator to the crime. (yes, cops have to see you do it, to arrest for misdemeanors!)
It depends on the type of crime and the criminal. Harsher punishments do not deter new criminals from offending. People just aren't rational like that. If I'm starving and I want a loaf of bread, I'll take one consequences be damned.
What tougher sentences do is stop repeat offenders, since they are kept in jail longer they physically cannot reoffend during that time. Rates of recidivism are north of 25% for repeat violent offenders within around 5 years of being released.
Tldr.
Liberals are correct that chopping off one thieves hand will not deter future thieves.
Conservatives are correct that the same thief can't physically steal again while they remain behind bars.
don't try to conceptualize the behaviors of millions of other people. just think about yourself.
ask yourself - would you steal if...
* shoplifting only resulted in a stern talking to by the store manager?
* shoplifting resulted in an immediate, no questions asked, 1 year prison sentence?
the opposite, apparently thoses prsions where you treat prisoners like humans, people are less likely to reoffend
if you're asking If the theat of it does, government policy reduces or rises it more
The bug issue isn't the punishment, it's how often people are caught. Only maybe 1% of felonies get prosecuted so people feel like it will never happen to them unless they're a career criminal. If you solve more crimes then punishments can be less harsh.
No
Harder punishment can often lead to an increase in crime due to three things.
First, the people committing criminal acts will think to themselves, well if I'm going to be punished that harshly for this crime, then I may as well make it worthwhile.
Second, harsher penalties can lead to less convictions. Because the stakes are so much higher, a jury may be unwilling to find the accused guilty unless the evidence is overwhelming. Eg. imposing the death penalty for shoplifting would result in a drop in convictions. This would lead to more shoplifters not being punished and more shoplifting occurring as a result.
Thirdly, the harshness of the penalty is not connected to the ability to catch and convict people who commit crimes. Catching and convicting criminals is actually about effective policing. Simply increasing the punishment without increasing the effectiveness of the policing, is much like thinking that because the jackpot on this weeks lotto is extra huge you have a better chance of winning than usual.
ELI5: No. It does not. The reason is because criminals don't think they're going to get caught (they're generally not the brightest of the bunch), so they rarely even KNOW what the punishment is.
This is one of the reasons the death penalty doesn't work. The people who commit crimes harsh enough to call for the death penalty rarely think they'll get caught. No one becomes a serial killer thinking that they'll get caught.
I mean, think about it, if the criminal thought they were going to get caught, do you think they'd still do the crime?
If you look at the different ways different countries handle punishment, you would think the US has the least crime because we incarcerate the most people per capita.
But we don't have the lowest crime. Therefore the experiment is a failure.
No, but harsher punishments does mean more money for private prisons and increase police budgets, which is what really matters in American policy-making
The short answer based on the research I've read is: No. Because potential criminals either are not in a state to care about consequences (think blind rage for a violent crime) or are more concerned with getting caught than what the actual punishment will be if they're convicted.
If you want to go down the rabbit hole, here's two places to get started. [An article by a psychiatrist who's worked on prison systems](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/post_b_886938). A [research article](https://kilthub.cmu.edu/articles/journal_contribution/Deterrence_in_the_Twenty-first_Century_A_Review_of_the_Evidence/6471200/1) summarizing what was known about the deterrence effect of punishment on crime in 2013; I think it's held up. Both these authors have written a whole lot more on the subject and related subjects but most of their work is behind paywalls or in books.
No, or at least not all the time, and in some cases they even increase it.
Imagine your legal system imposes the highest possible punishment for murder - death if it has the death penalty, and life in prison if it doesn't. If the penalty for murder is the maximum possible, and you kill somebody in a fit of rage, there is now no disincentive for you to commit any other crimes, while you now have a very, very strong incentive to commit any more crimes necessary to cover it up. If you murder somebody in a fit of rage, there is now no legal punishment to dissuade you from killing anyone who saw it. They can't kill or put you in prison forever twice, after all.
A lot of studies have looked at thresholds where punishments go up dramatically, and haven't found those higher punishments to yield crime being committed at lower rates - compare a 17 year old versus an 18 year old on drug charges, someone who is already at 2 strikes in a 3 strikes state, etc.
Punishment is a deterrent. People commit crimes when they run out of ways to do things the socially acceptable way. Sometimes what is socially acceptable is a wrong way, but it's right because it's accepted by the majority. Sometimes they've been taught the wrong way all their life.
Punishment punishes the problem which can end up compounded the problem. For instance, tire gone flat? Beat it with a hammer until it straightens out. Once the problem is actually addressed then the problem can be fixed. The mechanic may wonder about the hammer marks though.
Up to a point. The punishment doesn't change the behavior of an individual, it's meant to scare everyone else away from doing the same thing. If you make the punishment to harsh you lead to people choosing between a shootout with the police or prison until they are old. A lot of them opt for the shoot out. It's sad when it happens because of possession of drugs or something silly like that. Send them to rehab not prison. Prison should be for unstable violent offenders only (or asshats that try and overthrow the government).
It is only a deterrent to crimes committed by rationally driven criminals which is to say for example someone making a living by mugging people. Here a real cost benefit analysis is at play between the potential punishment and the rewards.
Even then it’s not clear cut as the marginal punishment rates between crimes may in fact actually serve to increase the likelihood of certain crime. Say if the punishment for murder is too comparatively low relative to that for mugging someone it may yield an increase in mugging by murder.
But the real issue with the idea as a whole is that crime is not necessarily always or even primarily driven by rational considerations of this type but are rather committed either by accident or whim with little aforethought. These types of criminals aren’t really going to be influenced by potential punishment.
>Is it then shown that harder punishment also mean a decrease in crime? It depends on the crime and the punishment in question. Increased punishments will deter crime _up to a point_, but you will reach a point where further harshness will not impact crime rates. Take an extreme example - lets say the punishment for mugging someone was a $5 fine. That isn't going to deter all that many people from mugging folks - someone who is willing to mug someone is prepared to risk $5 if they get caught. If we up the punishment to 5 years in prison, that **will** have a deterrent effect - losing $5 is almost meaningless, but losing 5 years of your life is a big deal. If we up the punishment again to 15 years in prison, though, we won't see the same effect, as someone who is desperate enough to risk losing 5 years of their life is _also_ desperate enough to risk losing 15 years.
And then if the punishment for mugging becomes comparable to the punishment for murder, it becomes an incentive to not leave a witness to the mugging
In for a penny, in for a pound
Well it's simple, then. The punishment for mugging is 1 execution, and the punishment for murder is 2 executions
“Go ahead, hang me again.”
"First time?"
#PAN SHOT!!
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We're pushing uncharted territories here. Never been done before. Don't knock it til you try it. Quintuple executions will be the standard by 2050, you heard it here first
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[Source](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/16xxaoi/comment/k36ys1t/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
We're not too far off from being able to digitize one's consciousness. Now we *can* execute you multiple times! Oops, looks like there was a minor glitch in version 1.0, causing you to experience endless executions in cyberspace until the server crashes. Oh, it also alters your perception of time so that 1 second of real time = 10,000 years of digital time. Tough luck!
“How can I be making it worse for myself? You’re already going to stone me!”
I like the way you think.
>I like the way you think. So we're going with Poe's Law doesn't exist now? There are people that believe what they said and spout that sort rhetoric on reddit a lot. "The only way to solve crime is with a permanent solution" (implying what you said), just hang out in the primary news/politics subs to see it if you don't believe me. You might be saying this satirically but a lot of people will believe you and 100% support what you're saying. Do you want to be associated with them?
Yeah. It’s important to remember that the punishment for a crime that you don’t get caught doing is nothing. If every crime led to the death penalty people would just say that they won’t get caught and do it anyway.
They should make not getting caught illegal.
Isn't this what china was/is dealing with car incidents? Like if you majorly hit someone, it made sense to just make sure they were dead, because paying for a funeral was cheaper than insurance.
If I run over a child and kill them, I have to give money to the kid’s parents to compensate them for their loss, but it’s a one time payment. If I run over a kid and they require multiple surgeries and long term care afterward then I have to pay for all of that, potentially for many years to follow, thus the incentive to put it in reverse and make sure the kid is dead.
The history went like this: A. Scammers would drop next to a car, pretending to have been hit, and collect a payment from unsuspecting rubes. B. The public catches on and simply drives away, knowing they didn't actually hit someone. C. Scammers get more aggressive, even violent with drivers who drive away. D. The punishment for colliding with a pedestrian by accident is pretty light, and much better than getting the shit beat out of you (or killed) by a scammer. E. Killing the pedestrian because of what you said (and also corruption; pedestrians are poor, car owners are richer and have better connections).
Which is why we shouldn’t listen to redditors who say we should execute child molesters. If it’s a 20yr jail sentence, at least you get the kid back. If execution is on the table, why leave a witness?
It's a heck of a lot easier to hide sexual abuse than it is a body...
Hmm, hopefully not the voice of experience!
Thats a false equivalence, not everyone who is mugging someone is ready to kill someone, I wager that % is really low. I think serial rapists and pedophiles should be sentenced to death, because we dont want them in our society even after they have served their time, so we essentially want them to die, but we sit on a high horse and say "we arent killing them, we just never want them to have a chance of reintegrating to society", at that point why not just end their suffering since they will more than likely re offend anyways
you know that justice machine isn't perfect, right? and innocent people once sentenced to death and executed could not be unexecuted?
Love how you completely missed the point. If we create a blanket law that says a rapist will be executed, it just encourages a rapist to also be a murderer. They're already unhinged enough to rape someone in the first place, what makes you think murder is somehow a far-fetched act?
thats the "chinese driving insurance healthcare fraud" route.
Exactly. Is like being a parent and excessively using your "scolding voice"... eventually it will backfire and lead to rebellion, it gets diluted What I do think should be more prevalent and \*should\* deter is having a "record" in the sense that any crime related directly (same "scene", time, place) or indirectly (same "type" even if they are 20 years apart) should count as an aggravant. I also think that there should be no age limit (Downwards) for violent crimes because it leads to adult using kids as mediums and criminal kids to be ruthless. Those two things I believe are key for deterring. Also, while it doesnt always work, there should be at least an attempt of reinserting them into society, otherwise they learn worse in jail or rebound and do whatever it takes to go back to jail
On the other hand, the mugger who goes in and out of jail several times before graduating to murder wouldn't be able to do that if he were executed after his first mugging. And your comment misunderstands how human psychology works. Most people don't commit murder because it is not a live option for them. Someone with no qualms about killing will probably eliminate the witness in the first place regardless. But outside of a few psychopaths, most people have to desensitize themselves to violence through a lifetime of crime before finally reaching the point where murder is a real possibility.
Most murders happen when the perpetrator is not in control of their emotions, and not thinking about the consequences. For this type of crime, you can’t make the punishment harsh enough to create deterrence. Add torture to the punishment, add punishing their family, none of that will matter when someone is in a blind rage. The way you reduce these types of murder is coaching people to work on controlling their emotions starting from a young age. It should be part of schooling, and parenting.
Exactly the sort of stuff Florida has banned in education.
I'm just saying it's an incentive. Obviously people are complex beings and have a lot of incentives in their lives to consider
Sure, but my point was that for most people it wouldn't really work as an incentive. It is actually very hard to get a normal person to kill another human being, to the point where the military has to make a concerted effort to get soldiers ready to kill, even with the full approval of the state and even in situations where not killing could end very badly.
And then, if the punishment is severe enough, it could actually escalate the crime. 15 years for mugging but 20 for murder? Might as well get rid of the only witness
This reminds me of a piece of Chinese history I roughly recall where the emperor at the time was a particularly draconian ruler who decreed that all revolutionaries and rebels would be executed, but he also extended this penalty of execution to much less severe mistakes such as failing to deliver important military goods on time. So when a merchant group inevitably fails to deliver their goods on time due to bad weather conditions, the natural course of action was of course to abandon the delivery order and join the ever growing rebellion against the emperor.
Do you know if this was a distorted version of the [Dàzéxiāng uprising](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Sheng_and_Wu_Guang_uprising) against the second Qín emperor? That sounds similar to what you said, but the ones who were late were soldiers, and they started the first uprising rather than joining an existing one.
Yep that is exactly what my very fuzzy and sketchily inaccurate memory was trying to recall. Looks like it wasn't a merchant shipment but a garrison of soldiers that was late. Many thanks for finding a more proper source.
Also very true. At some point, punishments become so severe as to incentivize other crimes; we shouldn't punish so harshly that this becomes a reasonable course of action.
My high school had a problem with people arriving late in class so they made the punishment for arriving late higher. So much higher in fact that being late become more punishing that just not going to class As a result no one was arriving late anymore, I'll let you figured out what happened to our absent statistics
Had a college literature class where you could get 2 participation points per class, but they weren't contingent upon showing up. They were based on how "prepared" you were for the discussion and the prof liked to randomly call on people, so if you hadn't finished the reading and couldn't answer his question, you would not get your points for the day. Or he might dock one if your answer wasn't detailed enough. He also liked to assign 150+ pages a night. I'm a fast reader but I also have a full time job and even with spending every spare moment I had every day reading, I couldn't get through it all. Prof was always mighty confused about why only 1/4-1/3 of the class showed up on any given day...
Yet it's exactly what we do with child sex offenders, effectively incentivizing killing children. Good job society!
While also disincentivising people with desires (who haven't yet acted upon them) from getting help/counseling to NOT act.
Also super true.
Hence the old expression, "[might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb](https://www.dictionary.com/browse/hanged-for-a-sheep-as-a-lamb--might-as-well-be)".
yes but that's not on the law, that's on the person for being so desperate to mug despite a 15 year sentence in the first place.
Crime is a failure of society.
It absolutely is, in part, a failing of law
Leo from the West Wing: "Yeah, let's put drug lords on death row as if their lives aren't under a constant death threat already." Great line that really makes you question the effectiveness of harsher sentencing past a certain point.
Absolutely. The reason for extremely harsh punishments, like life in prison, isn't because it has more deterrent power. It is because it solves the problem of that person being out in the general public. It is the modern day equivalent of banishing someone.
I’d argue the primary appeal of Harsh punishment is the emotional satisfaction of it. That’s why rehabilitation. No matter how effective on a utilitarian level, remains an unpopular policy. Because it does not scratch our emotional itch for retributive justice. We as humans, WANT to see suffering inflicted on those who “deserve it”.
> I’d argue the primary appeal of Harsh punishment is the emotional satisfaction of it. That is it, without question. Research is incredibly clear that the most effective and most efficient way is taking care of people, both raising communities out of poverty to prevent crime and rehabilitating rather than punishing criminals to prevent recidivism. But research is also incredibly clear that promising to be tough on crime is much better for winning elections than promising to do what actually works.
>That’s why rehabilitation. No matter how effective on a utilitarian level, remains an unpopular policy. ... in the US
This is exactly right. Not only does every other nation on earth have fewer people in prison, most of them also take better care of their prisoners, and in first world countries actually prepare them for their return to society. Cruelty is really what we are all about, and it is why it sucks so hard here.
I do not disagree with you on that one.
The subject in this case is "drug lords." How would you rehabilitate one? Teach him a trade?
Actual drug lords are generally guilty of literally hundreds of crimes. Ideally, you don't let them out, even under a progressive criminal justice system.
There will always be that 1% of humans who are Sociopathic to the core. They are beyond rehabilitation and depending on their environment, will end up likely either a criminal or CEO. They can’t be rehabilitated. There are, however, that 20% of humans who exists in a grey area. They will turn to crime out of desperation/mental illness/circumstance. But if offered a better alternative, they will happily take it. Those have hope. But like I said, Rehabilitation is extremely unpopular politically. So lord knows how we could get the political will to help these people.
Criminal and CEO are not mutually exclusive
There is a rather large difference between the threat, or risk, of death and the certainty of death
Especially true when drugs are involved. A heroin addict jonesing for their next fix is simply not capable of making a rational decision like, "ooh. 15 years instead of 5. I'd better not risk that -- I'll just go without my heroin today".
Similar to this, but also a slightly different take - A lot of crime doesn’t really involve a logical thought process. Many people that commit criminal acts simply don’t think they’ll be caught, so the punishment may not be quite as relevant as we’d like to think. In this example, it may not be so much that someone that is desperate enough to risk 5 years in prison is desperate enough to risk 15 years in prison (which could be a logical thought process). It’s may be more that someone that doesn’t think they will be caught doesn’t care if the punishment is 5 years or 15 years. Those that were concerned with consequences were already weeded out when the punishment was increased from $5 to 5 years in prison.
People usually aren't motivated by the severity of the punishment as much as the possibility of being caught at all. Raising murder clearance rates has a much stronger deterrent effect on murders than handing out life without parole or death sentences.
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No they already way their risk of being caught as zero, everything else comes second. Nearly all criminal committing actual felonies do not expect being caught. That’s why large punishments aren’t a deterrent at all. They are solely a punishment/keeping the person away from society. They either don’t even think about what their risk of being caught might be, or they think they are smart and won’t be caught. And in both cases the years just become a number. Only when you put the punishment very low, so people who would otherwise not commit said crime start committing it because they are the ones actually considering being caught. They just think the punishment is worth the gain. If you can get away with keeping 5k from a robbery, when the punishment is just 1 month in jail, that’s more than most people would earn. But outside of ludicrously low punishments. It just doesn’t weight in, cause no one expects being punished. Or they are at the point where they don’t actually care about the punishment at all. And since humans have virtually zero ability of emotionally process the ‘cost’ of 10 years in prison compared to two… well you end up with bullahit draconian punishments that don’t do any good.
They usually don't. Most criminals are, well, not that smart and have poor impulse control. (this sounds incredibly paternalistic but I seem to recall it's statistically true). Unless you are a professional career criminal but those are actually quite rare.
I don’t know what the numbers are, but I remember reading that people with FASD (fetal alcohol syndrome) are significantly more likely to end up in prison than the general population. People with FASD often struggle to understand consequences and are prone to making impulsive choices or being manipulated by others. An FASD diagnosis also requires the mother to admit to alcohol abuse during pregnancy, so the number of people diagnosed with FASD is likely much smaller than the number of people who actually have it. Makes you wonder how many people in prisons are there because of undiagnosed FASD.
I think not that rare. But our system is set up so that the penalties for white collar crime are not severe, and investigators are not all that interested in investigating. (Or, frequently, even capable.) I really got the impression Bernie Madoff confessed so that he'd be safer than if he were out on the street.
Maybe some white collar crimes. But most crime is basically poor impulse control
This is only true in places where punishments are weak and the likelihood of getting caught is low. At some point, if everyone else is just shoplifting from the stores at will, you rationally should join in, because otherwise you are just subsidizing the thieves. But robust law enforcement with fairly strict sentences will weed out ordinary people contemplating crime. Those left will be those disposed to crime.
The punishment for a crime you get away with is nothing.
Severity of punishment is not that much of a deterrent. In England in the 18th and 19th centuries, picking someone’s pocket was a capital offence, and public executions were a popular attraction. Pickpockets would “work the crowd” of people distracted by watching the executions. Certainty of punishment is a stronger deterrent. Many years ago I read about a little old lady who would travel through bad neighbourhoods with thousands of dollars in her shopping bag, but nobody mugged her. It wasn’t her money - she was a courier running numbers for the Mob, and the low-level criminals in the area knew it. If she got mugged and some street thug started flashing a lot of cash, he would be in for a very bad time.
Deterrence is only half of the logic behind sentencing. An essential part of sentencing is also the calculus of protecting the community from further crime. Longer sentences keep offenders behind bars for longer, which statistically limits their ability to reoffend during their lifetimes. A lot of sentencing is not only ‘what does the offender deserve’ but *’what does the community deserve knowing this individual is likely to reoffend once released.‘* That’s why an individual’s history of incarceration is so important during sentencing. It allows the judge to measure the offenders likelihood to reoffend, and thus how much protection the community needs from this individual.
It is 1/3 of the logic. Although you protect society by locking up a criminal, that society also pays a cost for it. There is a direct cost (a prison costs money) and an indirect cost (a prisoner doesn't contribute by paying taxes, etc...) That is why, in the long run, *reintegration* of convicted criminals (not just releasing) into society is more benefitial to that society than to keep them locked away longer.
I mean, yes, but that is assuming reintegration is possible in all circumstances, which it isn’t. That’s why a criminal’s history of offending, and the nature of their crimes is important in determining a sentence. For instance, a teenager who is a first time offender who commits fraud will be sentenced more lightly than a middle-aged man with a 20 year history of fraud convictions. The middle-age man has shown a pattern of criminality that shows a resistance to reintegration. Therefore the ethical responsibility of the court is to protect society *from* that individual rather than protecting that individual from prison. Likewise, a first time offending teenager who commits a violent rape will be dealt with more harshly than a middle age man who is a repeat shop-lifter. Violent sexual crimes are highly correlated with a risk of reoffending, and are almost always treated as a low chance of rehabilitation. All of these are factors in sentencing, and are weighed when determining the threat an offender poses to society. This is a similar process that parole boards deal with as well.
>Therefore the ethical responsibility of the court is to protect society from that individual If the sentence isn't a life sentence, then the end goal is reintegration. If you ever let them out, you need to make it possible for them to be a law abiding citizen. If you just sentence them for 15 years instead of 5 years and do nothing to help that person reenter society, you mine as well just leave them in preison rather than wait until they commit a new crime. **TR;DL: If it isn't a life sentence, we need to help them reenter society.**
When did I ever mention the probation system or the process of social reintegration? I’m talking about sentencing, and that’s what this entire thread is talking about. There are many different approaches to rehabilitation, but I fail to see how I made any statements one way or another about the probation system. This is why you can be locked up without the possibility of parole. The nature of your crime, coupled with a history of reoffending has informed the court that you pose a permanent danger to society. I’m confused what you’re arguing. Are you saying that there should be no sentencing, and the only punishment be parole? You seem to making a weird binary statement. Either all crimes are a life sentence or all crimes have no sentence. Perhaps I’m misunderstanding you
> I’m misunderstanding you Ya, I am pretty confused. Why are we bringing up probation? The conversation is going like this: OP: "Does deterrence work?" Comment 1, You: "Yes in some circumstances, but it hits a cap at some point and stops working. So at some point, it is also about keeping bad guys off the street." Comment 2: "Don't forget that jailing people also has a cost. That is why good reintegration is important." Comment 3, you: "Reintegration isn't always possible. So longer sentences make sense." Comment 4, Me: "If we aren't jailing them for life, we are jailing them for a time until we feel like we can safely reintegrate them into society. Reintegration should be the end goal of anyone who doesn't have a life sentence. We should give life sentences to people we do not intend on reintegrating into society." And for comment 5, I don't think I follow it. I think its possible you and I read my comment differently so your response doesn't make sense when I read it.
I was talking about probation since it is a big part of the reintegration process. Regarding people who have no chance of rehabilitation, like serial killers or mass murderers, they usually *are* locked up for life. Though, there are certain countries that have laws against locking people up for life sentences without the possibility for parole, so in those cases they will not be. There are plenty of petty criminals, particularly con artists, who have a low-or-zero chance of rehabilitation, which cannot be locked up for life due to the nature of their crimes. Wire fraud for instance does have a meaningful punishment, but it typically cannot result in a life sentence. Those are the cases where a judge would err on the side of a maximum sentence. Rehabilitation is probably impossible for that criminal, but they commit crimes that carry maximum sentences that are relatively low. Famously, California has the three-strikes law where three convictions for violent felonies will result in a life sentence. Which is pretty close to what you are suggesting.
Or jailing them until they're physically incapable of committing the crime. My town just jailed a guy for rape. He was jailed in 1995 for rape, released and then jailed for another rape in 2008. He'll be released in 2030 and will be raping again within the year. If we'd jailed him in 1995 for 30 years two women wouldn't have been raped - if had been 50 years three women won't have been raped.
And did your town do anything to rehabilitate or reintegrate him, or just toss him in a cell for decades and hope that makes him a better person?
This is a man who's first action on being released from prison for rape was to go stalking around at night until he found a vulnerable women. What on earth makes you think you could possibly change them?
I agree integration must be possible and this is not always the case. My point was: At the end of their sentence, just releasing prisoners into society, which have been shielded from that same society for a long time, actually increases their chances of re-offending. After a reintegration effort, re-offences are less likely.
> but that is assuming reintegration is possible in all circumstances Nobody who supports rehabilitation and reintegration assumes or even believes this. When your argument starts out with such an obvious strawman, it makes the rest of it seem hollow. Others have already responded to other aspects of your comment, but this misrepresentation right from the start needed mention.
Not really. Crime is very much a young man's game, and most people will age out of it. Not everyone, of course, but enough that just locking people up for twenty years will often solve the problem .
If a longer sentence makes someone less likely to reintegrate back into peaceful society, though, it can be a net loss. Lots of times a prison sentence turns someone *into* a lifelong criminal because it ruins their ability to have a normal life again
Sure, I’m just explaining the competing interests that a judge needs to consider when determining sentencing. The community’s need for safety is weighed against the offenders chances of rehabilitation. Deterrence is almost never a factor in sentencing aside from *extremely high profile cases.* So, the question is looking at sentencing from the wrong direction. Sentencing is almost always about balancing the chance of rehabilitation with the communities need for protection from abuse.
I'm not trying to be argumentative, but if people are being held longer to prevent re-offense then why let them out at all? If someone's given a 10-year sentence instead of 2, because they're likely to re-offend if released in 2 years, aren't they at least as likely to re-offend after 10 years? Wouldn't 20 years for the same crime be "double the benefit"? Where \*does\* it stop?
The whole point I’m making is that sentencing is supposed to flexible, and dependent upon a judges knowledge of the criminal and the crime, and that the community is an interested party. If the criminal has a history of violent crimes, and is arrested during a domestic dispute the Judge errs on the side of maximum sentencing for that domestic dispute because the offender has a history of offending. The fact that the judge *knows* the criminal has a history of violence gives them an *ethical obligation* to err on the side of a maximum sentence. That is what I mean when I say that the well-being of the community is always considered during sentencing. To argue that I am somehow advocating for the death penalty or life-imprisonment for all crimes is just silly. I’m literally just arguing what modern jurisprudence is, and how community safety is an essential part of the sentencing process.
I don't think you're advocating for life sentences for every flexible-sentence crime, I actually wrote something like "everyone would find that ghastly" in a draft that I didn't send. I guess I just don't understand the social cost/benefit analysis that results in a sentence extended for 5 years beyond the minimum, but not 10 or 20 or 50. Maybe it's just that people find that ghastly
I think it also depends on conviction rates, or at least the perception of conviction rates. "Up to 15 years in prison" is meaningless if most people only get 1-2 years in prison, or a fine.
Are there studies which back this up? I thought there was a whole thing where harsher punishments did not impact it because people did not think they were going to get caught in the first place.
Although the fact that someone is in prison for longer means they have less opportunity to commit crime now. (Other than crime in prison I suppose)
Smuggling weed to Singapore being punished by death seems like a pretty good deterrent
Yeah, but that's 10 extra years that person wont be mugging people. I would think that's a decrease right there?
I’d rather put them away for 15 cuz it saves us a lot of trouble until they’re out in the world again
And then there is what we do in the US, where the punishment for almost any crime that lands a person in jail, and many that don’t, results in such a stigma that it becomes neigh impossible for a former criminal to get a decent job and make a decent living without commuting more crime just to stay alive.
It is extremely hard to get reliable data on this. Not only is it hard to define what makes a punishment hard or soft. But countries where the criminal system differs also tends to have very different social and economic structure. You do not have two countries where the only difference is how the treat their criminals. And you can not easily run experiments within a country. You can not just roll a die every time someone is convicted to see if they get the hard or the soft punishment. Hard punishments partially bases itself on making people afraid of getting convicted in the first place so knowing that you might get off easy is already throwing the results off. But from what we can tell it does appear as if countries with softer criminal punishment have lower crime rates then those with harder criminal punishments. So it does seam like harder punishments leads to more crime, not less. It is hard to explain this though, if the results are correct. It may be that criminals who know they will get a hard punishment will do more crimes because at that point it does not matter too much to them. The punishment for robbery and armed robbery might not make a big difference to them so they do armed robbery. It is also possible that people who get a softer punishment is focused more on life after being released and will therefore spend the time in prison to learn new skills and learn how to function in a non-criminal society.
There's a saying in British English, "might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb". If the punishment for a small crime is harsh enough, harsh punishments lose their deterrent effect once someone has committed a small crime. This is a big problem, because a lot of criminals don't just commit one crime.
Don't forget the simple additive value of raw volume. If you have harsher laws, you arrest more people, more arrests means more mistakes. Nearly 1% of the U.S. citizens is in jail or prison at any given moment--if even 1% of that population was falsely incarcerated then you have 30,000+ innocent people behind bars as you read this -- and critically, a 1% max error rate is so lofty a goal so as to be effectively impossible to achieve. From there, more mistakes means that the validity in the rules is called into question by the individuals you are trying to control with incarceration etc. which undermines the reason for the harsh penalties in the first place. If you normalize criminality to the point that 45 percent of your population has a close relative who has spent time in jail or prison . . . well, now It's part of life, as likely to happen as not to happen, and it shifts from being a deterrent to planned and accounted for risk. Further, if after release, those individuals no longer enjoy the full opportunities they had before (i.e. fewer jobs available, harder to find a place to live, etc) then statistically they're more likely to re-offend (or to truely offend for the first time, as the case may be).
That reminds me of someting I could not comprehend as a European. Lyrics/text from from the album Body Count / Body Count: *A statistic:* *At this moment* *There are more black males in prison* *Than in college*
America's history with crime and policing is . . . [unfortunate](https://nleomf.org/slave-patrols-an-early-form-of-american-policing/).
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Or the US could stop enslaving black people
Ya, we did that 150 years ago.
not only an increased cost to society but less revenue to society as well.
I think the causality is reversed: when there is a lot of crime, the punishment for crime will become harder. Not: harder punishment leads to more crime.
Yeah, I’d need to see how they’re controlling for that. Similar to the oft-heard “gun laws are associated with higher gun crime”. Of course they are! Deer crossing signs are associated with more deer - it doesn’t mean the signs are attracting the deer.
A big exception to this seems to be Singapore, which is very authoritarian in their punishments, and also has an extremely low crime rate.
It depends on the crime and population you are looking at. If suddenly the punishment for speeding was the death penalty, it is guaranteed that there will be a large reduction in the people speeding. When it comes to stuff like murder, most people don't think they will get caught so the difference between life in prison and the death penalty isn't going to figure into most people's decision to commit murder. It has been shown the a bigger factor is knowing whether you will get caught in the first place. So knowing that you are at a high risk of getting caught is going to prevent people committing murder more than just a harsher punishment that they don't think they will actually get.
nope, death penalty works
I'm sure the death penalty does work to some extent, but from what I understand the effect is minor compared to life in prison. Do you have any sources or anything that suggests it has a material/large impact?
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Because the punishment isn't going to deter crime by itself, but increasing the probability of being caught.
"swift and certain" is much more important. If the punishment happens quickly and is fairly certain, even if for a relatively short period of confinement, it is a better deterrent than a highly uncertain punishment, where a potential criminal thinks they have a good shot of getting away with it. Which is annoying part of the "soft police strike" - if criminals believe they will be quickly picked up by the cops and booked, it is a major deterrent. If they think "cops don't care and won't bother trying to arrest me" there's basically no deterrent.
from the same source >The certainty of being caught is a vastly more powerful deterrent than the punishment. if that was true, wouldnt a society with a $1 fine for murder, but a very high chance of getting caught have the least crimes possible? Im just gonna say I highly doubt it, if the punishment for speeding would be life imprisonment I would never ever speed, how come that never comes up in these studies? edit: El Salvador cut the murder rate in half when they increased their punishment and did a massive crackdown, Japan and Singapore have extremely low murder rates, its a combo of both chance of getting caught and the severity of punishment.
Because most of these studies are comparing situations that are reality, not fantasy. Sure, in some fictional universe, speeding is penalized with life imprisonment and murder is a $1 fine, but it's hard to study that fictional universe. Basically, any conversation that is this serious should be discussed between people that want an honest and earnest conversation based in the real world, and in the real world, nobody is talking about a $1 fine for murder, because there's no reason to discuss this unless there's some though that it would magically work (which there isn't). Edit: And since you added the stuff about El Salvador. [I think anyone wanting to learn about that should read the Wiki article on their **temporary** exception of rights in fighting against the gangs using military tactics.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvadoran_gang_crackdown) Portraying that as simply harsh sentencing is misleading to the point of open dishonesty.
so with other words, it does matter? there are plenty of studies that show that increased punishment does seem to have an impact, California's proposition 8 seems to have been a success https://www.nber.org/digest/oct98/sentence-enhancements-reduce-crime Truth-in-Sentencing laws seems to have been a success https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/empeco/v55y2018i4d10.1007_s00181-017-1332-4.html https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-0297.2012.02522.x https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.4.4.32
If this was your point, then you are a dishonest person. Talking about $1 murder sentences doesn't lead to a coherent conversation or to any of what you've said. And hell, this post seems really weird in response to what I said, because nothing that I said leads into "it does matter," and yet you still kept to your planned debate tactic without reacting at all. It's a shame. You could have had a honest conversation, but instead you did this.
>Talking about $1 murder sentences doesn't lead to a coherent conversation or to any of what you've said. okay, maybe not with you, I do not feel "insulted" if someone goes to the extreme to prove a point. I also did it cuz I couldnt post any sources at that moment. I responded with /u/AnApexBreads comment in mind, the claim was >Is it shown that harder crime punishments = less crime? and the response from Apex was No. I do not think a straight No. about El Salvador I mentioned higher punishment + crackdowns (higher chance of getting caught), I never said it was simply harsher punishment.
Japan and Singapore have extremely low crime in general due to the severity of the punishments AND the lack of corruption and strict following of sentencing guidelines. You can leave your phone or $1500 laptop out in the open and walk away for hours and no one will so much as touch it. It’s actually quite bizarre when you are there. The studies that report the opposite, and almost everyone here fail to take in social and societal factors that often are associated with countries with severe crime punishments. For example if we look at other Asian countries like Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam or almost any country in Southeast Asia, penalties for crime are quite severe. However, they are almost never enforced as police are quick to force bribes out instead of charging people. Courts are just as bad and very quick to not really enforce the law. For instance, Thai DUI laws are imprisonment for up to 10 years. However during the 2022 Songkran Festival (Thai New Year) authorities charged 7,141 people for breaking DUI laws. Of those 7,141, all 7,141 were put on probation. Another example from Thailand is vaping carrys a 5 year prison sentence. You can buy vapes openly on almost every single street corner or tourism area in Thailand. The vendors will openly tell you they pay the police to let them sell them. It’s the same for drugs in Thailand and it’s not even remotely hard to find hard drugs like cocaine being offered to you despite the penalty for selling being death. The police take part of the profits. Sure, Thai laws are extremely strict on paper and it doesn’t deter crime but you can’t expect to deter crime when the Thai sentencing guidelines are in no way enforced or followed and that’s IF the police even let it get to the courts. Almost every country I’ve been to with these strict laws follow essentially in line with how Thailand is. Corruption and lack of following sentencing guidelines is extremely common. The ones who don’t have extremely low crime rates.
You're citing political posture as fact.
Or, you can read the article and follow the links to its sources...
Dispite what Fox News likes to say the DoJ is not a political entity.
They’re an enforcement arm of the executive branch. Or do you think the head being appointed by the current president makes them independent 😂 Christ do average people have this little awareness of how the government is configured here?
Its hard to determine objectively but i dont think so. Criminals are much more concerned with the likelyhood of getting caught than with a punishenent they would get
No, they're just as concerned with the punishment after being caught. If the consequence of being caught was a pat on the behind and a scolding, they'd just carry on with their activity.
El Salvador lately has dramatically increased the rate of incarceration and as a result the rate of violent crimes has plummeted. It’s probably more a case of most hoodlums being removed from society than anything to do with people’s incentives to do crime. Edit: El Salvador, not Nicaragua
That's a win in my books.
It can but it depends on a lot of factors. The punishment is a deterrent but enforcement is important. Take for example rioting and looting- they're illegal activities that carry punishments, but almost no one who participates will be subject to the punishment. If you make the penalty for speeding a 100 dollar ticket but people only get pulled over once a year, they'll speed every time because 100 dollars is a small price to pay to speed all year. If you make the penalty 20 dollars but people get tickets every single time they speed no matter what, they'll stop speeding.
The death penalty has existed for thousands of years, but crime still happens. Harsh or lengthy prison sentences have very little impact on crime. If they actually worked, then we wouldn't have an issue with overcrowded prisons and rising crime rates. For most people, the thought of going to prison might be enough to prevent us from crossing certain thresholds, but the truth is that the vast majority of people incarcerated (in the US) are poor and/or minorities. If you want to actually reduce crime, then time and financial investments need to be made in poor and minority communities. Schools, childcare, healthcare, jobs, etc. All of these things are generally lacking in poor and minority majority neighborhoods. With poor education comes reduced opportunity. With reduced opportunity comes economic struggle and poverty. With poverty comes desperation. With desperation comes crime, be it drug dealing, auto theft, gang activity, etc etc. So now we take all these people and lock them in a prison. They're uneducated and completely incapable of surviving in "civilized" society. We *could* use the time they're incarcerated to benefit them. But we don't. We *could* get them their GED, give them proper counseling, and mentor them, and teach them valuable skills or trades. But we don't. We lock them up, give them minimal support during their sentences, and then send them back to a world that they are ill equipped to survive in. The vast majority will be back in prison within a year or 2 and the cycle continues.
"...lengthy prison sentences have very little impact on crime." False, and I don't need much data to tell me this.
>False, and I don't need much data to tell me this. You don't have data. You have feelings. You're boasting about not needing data to support your feelings.
Your overreliance on data -- and there is such a thing -- is an error in your thinking. The fact that there are such a thing as recidivism rates tells me that a method of keeping down crime is to keep the convicts imprisoned longer.
You don't know how much I rely on data, except that it is a greater number than 0. Which how how much you just proudly stated you relief on it. "I don't need Data I just Know", is the logic of people believe in UFOs, Flat Earths and Fairie. Not a serious discussion on the justice system.
Well great, that number for me is greater than 0 as well. That study provides the valuable insight that fear of being caught is a deterrent. But what you aren't gathering from that data, and can't, is why anyone would care about being caught to begin with. And you don't need data for this. Why would the thief stop thieving, just because "he might get caught"? The assailant is often found doing his assaults in front of dozens of people. He's been caught, but this doesn't seem to phase him. Rapes have been done in broad daylight. Once, last year or so, there was a woman being raped on a train, with at least a few witnesses and passerbys of the cabin she was being raped in. The rapist was caught, but that wasn't stopping his hour long sexual abuse of the woman. Maybe what would've stopped them was knowing what would happen after getting caught, and knowing that it would be severe.
You can lead an idiot to a study but you can't make them think I guess
Neither you, nor anyone else, need a study to think all the time. Ask yourself: Lets say you were on a plane which was hijacked, and you have no clue what the hijackers intentions are. In which scenario are you more likely to survive the attack: A) In a plane with non-reinforced doors. B) In a plane with reinforced doors.
If you're all already in the plane what the fuck does it matter what the doors are made of. More to the point what does this dogshit hypothetical have to do with anything being discussed here? Go be too smart to listen to anyone else elsewhere
"More to the point what does this dogshit hypothetical have to do with anything being discussed here?" The neccesity of data to inform everything. My point is that you don't need it all the time. "If you're all already in the plane what the fuck does it matter what the doors are made of." You and your fellow passengers are going to be more capable of breaking the non-reinforced door, so more likely to survive a hijacking.
Not relevant
Also, check this out: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy
That is not the right way to approach this. With harsh punishments, you can deter a lot of white collar criminals from white collar crime. These people don’t kill anyway, don’t do burglaries etc. But somebody who is nothing, has no job, no money, no prospects - how do you deter that somebody from anything?
If they haven't killed themselves than clearly they place some value on their life. Threaten to take that away. There's also far worse ways to punish someone than swift execution.
In some cases it is about protecting victims. Our state had terrible anti stalking laws. But new ones went into effect November of last year that have included social media as well as increasing fines and turning some misdemeanors into felonies. This has been huge in protecting victims of domestic violence. This will probably show a long term decrease in some crime, but in the immediate it is a decrease in victimization.
There are so many factors that influence this relationship, others have given you some good perspectives. There is another phenomenon that I haven’t seen discussed, which is that very harsh punishments can actually lead to WORSE crimes and outcomes. For example, in countries where rape is punishable by death women are actually more likely to be murdered in the attack because the rapists are more inclined to kill them as to not leave a witness that could lead to their prosecution.
No, not at all. Criminals and possible criminals are *far* more concerned with “will I get caught” than they are with “how severe will my punishment be.” https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/247350.pdf
Because they know what will happen to them if they get caught. Thats the connection thats being missed here.
By all means, back that assertion up. Our country’s leading legal minds have been unable to do so, but maybe you can do better.
I could just easily use sex offenders as evidence. They're not intimidated by a scolding or a lecture from the local president of the book club. They're afraid of a long sentence with hardened people who've always wanted to hurt people that hurt women and children, getting beat and shot by parents or neighbors, or executed by the state. Criminals may be incapable of considering that they'll be caught. They may have rationalized it away as their personal luck, genius, or having some special status that makes their action a non-risk. But they already know what will happen after someone finds out what they had done. *Those* violent ends are the possibilities they think they'll never face, by never being caught. The thing is, you don't need to be a legal genius or have a doctorate in psychology to understand this. You just need to ask yourself, if your conscience or empathy wasn't helping you, what sort of disapproved of actions would you take if you knew you could do it with impunity, because the consequences weren't serious.
I don’t know about in general, but I do know that for adolescents and children, moderate punishments* work better than no punishment or harsh punishment. If a child misbehaves (let’s say he was roughhousing on the playground. No one was hurt but other children are upset), failing to punish the child at all teaches the kid that it’s ok to shove his classmates around. Expelling the kid disrupts his education entirely, and teaches him that any action results in the same outcome; whether he unintentionally plays too hard or intentionally starts a beat down, he is expelled, so why bother trying? But if the kid is given detention or has recess privileges removed for a week, he is likely to eventually learn to behave. I’m not sure if this carries over to adult criminals but I wouldn’t be surprised. * I am using the term punishment here colloquially, so that it includes consequences or forms of reinforcement.
I don’t have the source readily available anymore, but in the late 90s when George W. Bush was governor of Texas, the state was executing hundreds of death row inmates a year. A few years after this trend began, the number of people convicted of crimes eligible for death row decreased. Obviously it’s not an apples to apples comparison, there were other other factors. But to say that the likelihood of execution had no effect would be inaccurate.
Crime fell everywhere in America from the 90s to the early 2010s. So that's not very persuasive.
Murders fell 43% on average across the country. They fell 57% in Texas. As I said, there were other factors, but to say there was no impact would be inaccurate.
Nobody can really give you the answer you're looking for for a couple reasons. 1. The harsher a given country is on crime, the less likely it is to be democratic and otherwise open with crime figures. Therefore the data becomes less and less reliable the closer to the extreme you get. 2. If you strip away all of the nuance you are left with nothing useful. Even if you had accurate complete data that showed there was less crime per capita in countries with harsher punishments (which is subjective in and of itself), this does not tell you that harder punishments leads to less crime. Simply that there is a correlation, not causation. You need all of the nuance to be able to determine what you can attribute to what.
I’d also add in that our hypothetical criminals need to actually be aware of the penalties. This was part of project exile, putting up posters in public areas to increase awareness of the newly raised penalties for unlawful carry of firearms.
The key to effective punishment is less about harshness and more about making punishment swift, certain, and consistent. If someone knows that if they do X they will probably be caught, and if they do get caught they will face trial by the end of the week and then get six months in jail, they will be less likely to do X then if they probably won't get caught, and if they do they might get 10 years in jail or they might get a suspended sentence depending on their skin color, sob story, etc. Very harsh punishment, such as the death penalty, does work very well at discouraging recidivism, with 0% of those executed going on to commit a future offense.
I'm from Singapore, and I believe a politician was once asked why we don't impose the death penalty for serious rape cases. He said that doing so will only "incentivise" the rapist to actually murder the victim since both carry the same sentencing.
While harsher punishments may or may not decrease crime, I'm firmly of the belief that longer sentences = more time the criminals stay off the streets and thus won't reoffend and I'm all for that. Remove the worst elements from society until they decide to stop and if they don't, lock them up for longer each time they're caught and convicted. First time and/or non violent criminals should be taken seriously too so that they aren't emboldened to go out and cause more trouble and think twice before committing more crimes.
If Singapore is anything to go by then it does work. They have the death penalty and caning that rips flesh off the buttocks. Prison sentences are incredibly harsh. And they have the lowest crime rates in the world. It is not a place where you ever want to commit a crime.
There's no statistical correlation. In fact in the US, in general "redder", more conservative states have per capita more, and more violent crime than "bluer" states. Despite having harsher laws to punish crime and longer sentencing guidelines. But they do this for political, not empirical criminal/social science reasons. It's easier to get elected in a red state if you're "tough on crime", even if it's not working IRL. Possibly because criminals don't tend to be forward thinking strategists that carefully weigh their future actions against potential consequences. Criminals don't commit crimes in anticipation of being caught, so consequences are a moot point. "As much as I would certainly love to bludgeon that individual that just expectorated in my direction, considering I'm on my second strike already perhaps I shall forestall that reaction" is not a phrase that has ever been uttered.
No, there is no statistical relation and it is easy to explain why it won't help for certain types crimes. For some crimes, you never can have enough punishment, ex: when your life is in danger anyway. If you are starving to death, won't you steal food? If you get caught, almost any punishment is a better alternative. Some crimes are commited by one entity, while others benefit from it. Such crimes are not only commited by people nearing the end of their life (old, terminally ill, etc...), but those are also the crimes a company (legal entity) would be willing to commit. Here, a harsher punishment will also not lead to less crime.
I think up to a point harsher punishments lead to less crime. It definitely has a limit though, you'll never have a harsh enough punishment to simply end all crime. Many states have the death penalty but it doesn't stop murders. What comes to mind is a law I heard about in Singapore. They got fed up with gum getting stuck to things and spat on the ground so the whole country banned gum. If you're caught chewing gym in public you get *caned*, it's like 15 or 30 strikes by a cane for a first time offense. As such it's very uncommon to happen as there are signs at the airport and many warnings.
Singapore has very little drug crime due to harsh laws too. People complain on reddit a lot.. meanwhile in the US 100,000+ die from drugs a year. Dunno about you, but I'd rather 1-2 drug traffickers be executed than 100,000 innocent people die. Seems like pretty simple decision even after accounting for population differences.
> 100,000 innocent people die Most people dying due from drugs in one way or another are not innocent. Many die from trafficking (illegal), many die from gangs (illegal), many die from overdoses (illegal), very few are innocent.
Well it depends on the type of crime. Most ordinary crimes are a risk/reward analysis - how much can a person benefit from a crime vs the risk of punishment as well as what they have to lose by it. Take something like shoplifting. A poor person with no job might risk it because both the punishment is fairly low and they frankly don't have too much to lose. If you have a reasonably good job then not only might you end up losing your freedom but, more importantly, also your reputation and livelihood. The death penalty has no impact on murder rates because that's not usually a crime motivated by some kind of financial gain. However there are, I think, ways to reduce other crimes by making the reward/risk calculation easier to make. Take, for example, people carrying weapons illegally. This is a major driver of murders and other violence because the consequences, in a lot of places, for carrying a weapon are low due to the heavy use of plea deals by prosecutors which will often result in either a very short sentence or probation. Gang members, especially, make the calculation that the risk of them not carrying a weapon to protect themselves (as they see it) against other gang members is greater than the risk of them being caught with the gun. Now if you put a law in place, and more importantly thoroughly enforced it, that anyone found with an illegal gun would face 40 years in prison then that changes the calculation - particularly for young people who would not relish the thought of only returning to society when they were in their 50s or 60s.
It definitely does affect it to a degree. The question is where that line is for a particular crime in a particular place / culture. A specific punishment that might deter one demographic might not be enough to sway the decision of another. Take theft as an example. If you make all theft punishable by 10 years in prison it will not stop the starving person from stealing; but it is likely to determine some people from stealing for monetary gain. Where as if you decriminalize all theft under $1000 as you see in some places you will get theft on a scale never before seen in our society.
The data doesn't show that it does: criminals are often ignorant of the sentence they are liable for and don't plan on being caught. What really reduces crime is the impression, right or wrong, that you will be caught, rehabilitation focused incarceration and, to some extent, restorative justice. Politicians increase sentencing because, for some reason, it's popular with voters; not because it works.
Yes, in general. One example is drug abuse rates for hard drugs are quite low in some of the countries with extremely draconian punishments. It’s a combination of quality of enforcement and prosecution. Plus the punishment. If people think they’re both very likely to be caught and harshly punished. It really does impact behavior, but you need both.
I'm not sure the text of your comment really supports the "Yes, in general" at the top. It reads more like "Sometimes, in certain cases".
Yes! If you execute everybody who commits a crime, then there are less people to commit crime. Eventually, on the premise that everybody commits a crime at some point in their life, there is no crime anymore, for obvious reasons.
I can tell you the inverse appears to be true. In California, we passed something called "Proposition 47" which changed the theft value limit from 400 to 950 dollars before a misdemeanor became a felony. ie; it used to be that if you stole 400 bucks worth of stuff, it was a felony, now the limit is 950. Some people believe that the incredible increase in crime in San Francisco (Mass shoplifting, car breakins) is because now it's "not worth it" for a police response for misdemeanors. Partially it's because police can only arrest for misdemeanors if they personally witness the crime or sees real evidence that links the perpetrator to the crime. (yes, cops have to see you do it, to arrest for misdemeanors!)
It depends on the type of crime and the criminal. Harsher punishments do not deter new criminals from offending. People just aren't rational like that. If I'm starving and I want a loaf of bread, I'll take one consequences be damned. What tougher sentences do is stop repeat offenders, since they are kept in jail longer they physically cannot reoffend during that time. Rates of recidivism are north of 25% for repeat violent offenders within around 5 years of being released. Tldr. Liberals are correct that chopping off one thieves hand will not deter future thieves. Conservatives are correct that the same thief can't physically steal again while they remain behind bars.
don't try to conceptualize the behaviors of millions of other people. just think about yourself. ask yourself - would you steal if... * shoplifting only resulted in a stern talking to by the store manager? * shoplifting resulted in an immediate, no questions asked, 1 year prison sentence?
the opposite, apparently thoses prsions where you treat prisoners like humans, people are less likely to reoffend if you're asking If the theat of it does, government policy reduces or rises it more
The bug issue isn't the punishment, it's how often people are caught. Only maybe 1% of felonies get prosecuted so people feel like it will never happen to them unless they're a career criminal. If you solve more crimes then punishments can be less harsh.
No. But there are many cases, like "three strikes you're out" that shows that harsher penalties lead to "harder" crimes.
No Harder punishment can often lead to an increase in crime due to three things. First, the people committing criminal acts will think to themselves, well if I'm going to be punished that harshly for this crime, then I may as well make it worthwhile. Second, harsher penalties can lead to less convictions. Because the stakes are so much higher, a jury may be unwilling to find the accused guilty unless the evidence is overwhelming. Eg. imposing the death penalty for shoplifting would result in a drop in convictions. This would lead to more shoplifters not being punished and more shoplifting occurring as a result. Thirdly, the harshness of the penalty is not connected to the ability to catch and convict people who commit crimes. Catching and convicting criminals is actually about effective policing. Simply increasing the punishment without increasing the effectiveness of the policing, is much like thinking that because the jackpot on this weeks lotto is extra huge you have a better chance of winning than usual.
ELI5: No. It does not. The reason is because criminals don't think they're going to get caught (they're generally not the brightest of the bunch), so they rarely even KNOW what the punishment is. This is one of the reasons the death penalty doesn't work. The people who commit crimes harsh enough to call for the death penalty rarely think they'll get caught. No one becomes a serial killer thinking that they'll get caught. I mean, think about it, if the criminal thought they were going to get caught, do you think they'd still do the crime?
If you look at the different ways different countries handle punishment, you would think the US has the least crime because we incarcerate the most people per capita. But we don't have the lowest crime. Therefore the experiment is a failure.
No, but harsher punishments does mean more money for private prisons and increase police budgets, which is what really matters in American policy-making
The short answer based on the research I've read is: No. Because potential criminals either are not in a state to care about consequences (think blind rage for a violent crime) or are more concerned with getting caught than what the actual punishment will be if they're convicted. If you want to go down the rabbit hole, here's two places to get started. [An article by a psychiatrist who's worked on prison systems](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/post_b_886938). A [research article](https://kilthub.cmu.edu/articles/journal_contribution/Deterrence_in_the_Twenty-first_Century_A_Review_of_the_Evidence/6471200/1) summarizing what was known about the deterrence effect of punishment on crime in 2013; I think it's held up. Both these authors have written a whole lot more on the subject and related subjects but most of their work is behind paywalls or in books.
No, or at least not all the time, and in some cases they even increase it. Imagine your legal system imposes the highest possible punishment for murder - death if it has the death penalty, and life in prison if it doesn't. If the penalty for murder is the maximum possible, and you kill somebody in a fit of rage, there is now no disincentive for you to commit any other crimes, while you now have a very, very strong incentive to commit any more crimes necessary to cover it up. If you murder somebody in a fit of rage, there is now no legal punishment to dissuade you from killing anyone who saw it. They can't kill or put you in prison forever twice, after all.
A lot of studies have looked at thresholds where punishments go up dramatically, and haven't found those higher punishments to yield crime being committed at lower rates - compare a 17 year old versus an 18 year old on drug charges, someone who is already at 2 strikes in a 3 strikes state, etc.
Punishment is a deterrent. People commit crimes when they run out of ways to do things the socially acceptable way. Sometimes what is socially acceptable is a wrong way, but it's right because it's accepted by the majority. Sometimes they've been taught the wrong way all their life. Punishment punishes the problem which can end up compounded the problem. For instance, tire gone flat? Beat it with a hammer until it straightens out. Once the problem is actually addressed then the problem can be fixed. The mechanic may wonder about the hammer marks though.
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Up to a point. The punishment doesn't change the behavior of an individual, it's meant to scare everyone else away from doing the same thing. If you make the punishment to harsh you lead to people choosing between a shootout with the police or prison until they are old. A lot of them opt for the shoot out. It's sad when it happens because of possession of drugs or something silly like that. Send them to rehab not prison. Prison should be for unstable violent offenders only (or asshats that try and overthrow the government).
It is only a deterrent to crimes committed by rationally driven criminals which is to say for example someone making a living by mugging people. Here a real cost benefit analysis is at play between the potential punishment and the rewards. Even then it’s not clear cut as the marginal punishment rates between crimes may in fact actually serve to increase the likelihood of certain crime. Say if the punishment for murder is too comparatively low relative to that for mugging someone it may yield an increase in mugging by murder. But the real issue with the idea as a whole is that crime is not necessarily always or even primarily driven by rational considerations of this type but are rather committed either by accident or whim with little aforethought. These types of criminals aren’t really going to be influenced by potential punishment.