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But you don't want people who currently aren't committing crimes to begin doing so. Who's to say that the current deterred subset of the population won't begin
by Anon1096 9y ago
But you don't want people who currently aren't committing crimes to begin doing so. Who's to say that the current deterred subset of the population won't begin to commit crimes if our style of punishment is changed?
- anigbrowl 9y agoThat seems to start from the assumption that everyone would commit crime if they could.
- oddlyaromatic 9y agoThey specifically referred to the "deterred subset" ... which is much smaller then "everyone". In any case, the parent's point seemed pretty empty. > Who's to say that the current deterred subset of the population won't begin to commit crimes if our style of punishment is changed? This is what research is for. We may never know what is optimal in an absolute sense, but we can figure out some relative costs/benefits of different approaches to problems and choose our tradeoffs appropriately.