6 ms·

It's the adequate follow-through prosecution that's the problem. Fines? Can't get blood from a stone. Jailtime? The cost-benefit analysis doesn't support that,

by nikanj 8y ago

It's the adequate follow-through prosecution that's the problem. Fines? Can't get blood from a stone. Jailtime? The cost-benefit analysis doesn't support that, prison time is expensive and petty theft doesn't really cause that much damage. I have no solution to offer here.

fladrif 8y ago
Community service, pays back the community, hopefully break-even cost in terms of administration and enforcement to labor productivity gained, at least won't be as bad as a prison sentence. At best can be a form of rehabilitation.
- eloisius 8y ago
  And when you don't do your community service because there's no consequences (because jails are already full and because you can't squeeze water from a stone), what happens?
  - stickfigure 8y ago
    Why isn't caning a reasonable solution? Serious question.
    - gojomo 8y ago
      There's a strong cultural bias against corporal punishment in the US, but it should probably be studied, perhaps as an option a mature defendant can choose in lieu of another fine/imprisonment, but is never forced to take. If the practice actually deterred crime, without leaving any lasting physical or psychological damage – other than an aversion to re-offending – it deserves unemotional consideration.
      - mantale 8y ago
        Corporal punishments don't even work on children, what make you think it will work on adults?
        dpark 8y ago
        I don’t know why people make this claim. I don’t spank my kids, but the idea that spanking doesn’t work seems utterly absurd to me. It’s the classic “positive punishment”. Is it the best way to get a kid to behave? No, not according to the research. Is it going to turn generally shitty parenting into good parenting? Obviously not. Can it be an effective discipline strategy? Yes.
        Trill-I-Am 8y ago
        https://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/04/spanking.aspx https://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/04/spanking.aspx
        dpark 8y ago
        There’s no real scientific data captured there, but my criticism is summed up well: > As in many areas of science, some researchers disagree about the validity of the studies on physical punishment. Robert Larzelere, PhD, an Oklahoma State University professor who studies parental discipline, was a member of the APA task force who issued his own minority report because he disagreed with the scientific basis of the task force recommendations. While he agrees that parents should reduce their use of physical punishment, he says most of the cited studies are correlational and don’t show a causal link between physical punishment and long-term negative effects for children. > “The studies do not discriminate well between non-abusive and overly severe types of corporal punishment,” Larzelere says. “You get worse outcomes from corporal punishment than from alternative disciplinary techniques only when it is used more severely or as the primary discipline tactic.” > In a meta-analysis of 26 studies, Larzelere and a colleague found that an approach they described as “conditional spanking” led to greater reductions in child defiance or anti-social behavior than 10 of 13 alternative discipline techniques, including reasoning, removal of privileges and time out (Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, 2005). Larzelere defines conditional spanking as a disciplinary technique for 2- to 6-year-old children in which parents use two open-handed swats on the buttocks only after the child has defied milder discipline such as time out. The studies that exist largely seem unable or unwilling to distinguish between mild spanking and physical abuse. Those in the spanking-is-evil camp are fine with this and will assert that there is no difference because they’ve already decided and are happy to argue circularly. So they’ll argue that because some physical punishment has clear negative outcomes, all physical punishment must have negative outcomes despite support for that belief being minimal to nonexistent. This is akin to asserting that brief Time Out as punishment is harmful because locking a child in a closet for hours as punishment is harmful. I feel like there should be more compelling proof that spanking (not a rollup category of “physical punishment”) is harmful. There seems to be little to no evidence for this, which makes the belief pretty suspect.
      - onemoresoop 8y ago
        What do you mean, lashes for theft? How about if they were public? I hope I won't live to see that in the western world.
        gojomo 8y ago
        You can read about how it works in Singapore at the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_in_Singapore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_in_Singapore The description of scarring and motion difficulties for up to a month afterwards are more severe than I'd expected. The lashes are not delivered in public. There are some ways in which Singapore is "the western world", by language/culture/legal-system, though not geography. As the article notes, their practice of caning was inherited from the British. I share some of the visceral discomfort with the idea, but also know lots of things we allow because they work, or are within someone else's preferences, also cause many people visceral discomfort: organ (or fecal!) transplants; non-majority sexual practices; legalization of drugs or prostitution (some western world jurisdictions). Disgust is often a hint, but not reliably dispositive, about what should be allowable. We also allow solitary confinement and the death penalty, despite evidence these have weak deterrent effects, sometimes causing grave psychological damage or the death of innocents. What if we studied the matter, and found evidence that corporal punishment of adults better deterred crime, with less follow-own damage, than these traditional practices. We should probably then ban those familiar barbarisms, but still consider as possible the far milder action – lashes – that seems like a barbarism from unfamiliarity and gut reactions.
  - baroffoos 8y ago
    You also have to pay someone to constantly supervise them which is just as expensive as just paying someone to do the job.
- onetimemanytime 8y ago
  Community service, pays back the community, Probably just a gimmick. Court costs and overhead time checking the crooks doing mandatory good deeds might be more. But then we have to punish them somewhow
  - onemoresoop 8y ago
    I'm not sure if this has been tried before, but how about a time consuming (multiple choice) test for deterring crimes where an offender, in order to cut prison time, has to study hard and be mentally in involved with like 1000 questions for a few hours. Fail the test? You're given a week to study and take the test again. The type of test that is so annoying that once you pass you don't want to take it again.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 8y ago
      So, you're saying that to avoid jail, all the offender has to do is sit in a room for a few hours every week?
CamperBob2 8y ago
The cost-benefit analysis doesn't support that, prison time is expensive and petty theft doesn't really cause that much damage. That's the rationale that makes car theft such a huge problem around here in the Seattle area, or did until the laws were tightened up a bit. Prosecutors and judges either didn't consider it worthwhile to punish offenders heavily or didn't have the legal tools to to do, so we ended up with people who had literally dozens of prior arrests being set free to steal more cars. Not everything is supposed to be a profit center, and that includes law enforcement. I pay taxes to keep criminals away from my home and out of my life, and I expect to get what I pay for. Whether it's inconvenient or unprofitable to do so is not my concern.
- dpark 8y ago
  > Whether it's inconvenient or unprofitable to do so is not my concern. It should be if you’re paying taxes. I personally don’t want my taxes to skyrocket to cover expanded law enforcement if it doesn’t provide a meaningful benefit. For the record, (almost) no one thinks law enforcement should be profitable. That doesn’t mean that cost/benefit analysis shouldn’t factor in.
briandear 8y ago
> petty theft doesn't really cause that much damage Sure it does. Insurance rates. Compare rates for San Francisco vs. Houston for comprehensive coverage. Or San Francisco vs. Cupertino for that matter. Every smash and grab costs everyone more money. Prop 47 is a big culprit. These thieves can cause $1000 in damage to a car, but their prosecution is pretty much pointless. If we want to talk cost benefit analysis, prosecuting armed robbery with no injuries doesn’t make sense either: if the robber gets $100, and it costs $100,000 to imprison them, then that’s a bad cost benefit return right? If you want to operate under a cost benefit analysis, jail time should only be required if whatever damage is done exceeds the cost of incarceration. That’s absurd, but that’s what a cost benefit analysis would reveal, assuming costs are measured in dollars. Broken windows policing works [1]. https://cebcp.org/evidence-based-policing/the-matrix/micro-places/micro-places-braga-et-al-1999/ https://cebcp.org/evidence-based-policing/the-matrix/micro-p...
- callalex 8y ago
  Why is this comment, which is sourced and well argued, greyed out without a single response?
  - mantas 8y ago
    Because many people wants no people in jails. Can't stop people from committing crime? Well, don't put them in a jail and bam, you have no people in jails! Who cares about what someone feels after they get robbed. Public feeling safe does not register on RoI report.
- michaelt 8y ago
  if the robber gets $100, and it costs $100,000 to imprison them, then that’s a bad cost benefit return right? Depends if it deters him and 9 other robbers, who would otherwise have committed 100 such crimes each. I mean, if a criminal is operating under rational choice theory [1] and they know their crime will go unpunished even if it is detected, why wouldn't they steal packages? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_choice_theory_(criminology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_choice_theory_(crimin...
austhrow743 8y ago
Public shaming.
- nikanj 8y ago
  That stopped working when homeless people became invisible to us.
- onemoresoop 8y ago
  It would work for some but a certain subset of people don't empathize and really don't care.
setquk 8y ago
Social credit score system in China takes this role I understand. People seem not to like that idea however.
- alpaca128 8y ago
  Such systems have many problems, one of them being that they're fully automated, and mistakes WILL be made. One day you wake up with a ruined social score because someone who looked a bit like you was witnessed by a camera selling drugs or something. Have fun trying to correct that before someone decides to look up your score. Not to mention all the potential for abuse.
speedplane 8y ago
> Jailtime? The cost-benefit analysis doesn't support that, prison time is expensive and petty theft doesn't really cause that much damage. You're not considering deterrence. Sure, the cost/benefit of an individual does not support jailing a small-time thief. However, other potential thiefs may be deterred from committing the crime in the first place. This aggregate level of crime reduction often does justify itself in a cost/benefit analysis.
- build_products 8y ago
  Is deterrence really a thing? Multiple studies show that more severe punishments don't actually deter because the people committing the xrime almost never think of them. See https://nij.gov/five-things/Pages/deterrence.aspx https://nij.gov/five-things/Pages/deterrence.aspx
  - dpark 8y ago
    #3 on that list is all about deterrence. “Police deter crime by increasing the perception that criminals will be caught and punished.” If criminals believe that the cost/benefit analysis will leave their crimes uninvestigated and unpunished, then yes, they are more likely to commit crimes.
  - gojomo 8y ago
    #1 on the list you forwarded is: "The certainty of being caught is a vastly more powerful deterrent than the punishment." #3 is "Police deter crime by increasing the perception that criminals will be caught and punished." Stings run by police, generating stories of caught-criminals, and making it so that repeat offenders face a rapidly-escalating likelihood of being caught, would seem to deter, by the evidence at your link.
  - foxyv 8y ago
    Usually the major deterrent to crime is the likelihood of being caught. A lot of research has shown that longer sentences don't deter, however getting caught more often does. https://nij.gov/five-things/pages/deterrence.aspx https://nij.gov/five-things/pages/deterrence.aspx
tfolbrecht 8y ago
Could the police, after being baiting a thief have enough evidence to support an investigation into the individual, and get them for a felony?

by nikanj 8y ago

fladrif 8y ago

Community service, pays back the community, hopefully break-even cost in terms of administration and enforcement to labor productivity gained, at least won't be as bad as a prison sentence. At best can be a form of rehabilitation.

eloisius 8y ago
And when you don't do your community service because there's no consequences (because jails are already full and because you can't squeeze water from a stone), what happens?
- stickfigure 8y ago
  Why isn't caning a reasonable solution? Serious question.
  - gojomo 8y ago
    There's a strong cultural bias against corporal punishment in the US, but it should probably be studied, perhaps as an option a mature defendant can choose in lieu of another fine/imprisonment, but is never forced to take. If the practice actually deterred crime, without leaving any lasting physical or psychological damage – other than an aversion to re-offending – it deserves unemotional consideration.
    - mantale 8y ago
      Corporal punishments don't even work on children, what make you think it will work on adults?
      - dpark 8y ago
        I don’t know why people make this claim. I don’t spank my kids, but the idea that spanking doesn’t work seems utterly absurd to me. It’s the classic “positive punishment”. Is it the best way to get a kid to behave? No, not according to the research. Is it going to turn generally shitty parenting into good parenting? Obviously not. Can it be an effective discipline strategy? Yes.
        Trill-I-Am 8y ago
        https://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/04/spanking.aspx https://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/04/spanking.aspx
        dpark 8y ago
        There’s no real scientific data captured there, but my criticism is summed up well: > As in many areas of science, some researchers disagree about the validity of the studies on physical punishment. Robert Larzelere, PhD, an Oklahoma State University professor who studies parental discipline, was a member of the APA task force who issued his own minority report because he disagreed with the scientific basis of the task force recommendations. While he agrees that parents should reduce their use of physical punishment, he says most of the cited studies are correlational and don’t show a causal link between physical punishment and long-term negative effects for children. > “The studies do not discriminate well between non-abusive and overly severe types of corporal punishment,” Larzelere says. “You get worse outcomes from corporal punishment than from alternative disciplinary techniques only when it is used more severely or as the primary discipline tactic.” > In a meta-analysis of 26 studies, Larzelere and a colleague found that an approach they described as “conditional spanking” led to greater reductions in child defiance or anti-social behavior than 10 of 13 alternative discipline techniques, including reasoning, removal of privileges and time out (Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, 2005). Larzelere defines conditional spanking as a disciplinary technique for 2- to 6-year-old children in which parents use two open-handed swats on the buttocks only after the child has defied milder discipline such as time out. The studies that exist largely seem unable or unwilling to distinguish between mild spanking and physical abuse. Those in the spanking-is-evil camp are fine with this and will assert that there is no difference because they’ve already decided and are happy to argue circularly. So they’ll argue that because some physical punishment has clear negative outcomes, all physical punishment must have negative outcomes despite support for that belief being minimal to nonexistent. This is akin to asserting that brief Time Out as punishment is harmful because locking a child in a closet for hours as punishment is harmful. I feel like there should be more compelling proof that spanking (not a rollup category of “physical punishment”) is harmful. There seems to be little to no evidence for this, which makes the belief pretty suspect.
    - onemoresoop 8y ago
      What do you mean, lashes for theft? How about if they were public? I hope I won't live to see that in the western world.
      - gojomo 8y ago
        You can read about how it works in Singapore at the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_in_Singapore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_in_Singapore The description of scarring and motion difficulties for up to a month afterwards are more severe than I'd expected. The lashes are not delivered in public. There are some ways in which Singapore is "the western world", by language/culture/legal-system, though not geography. As the article notes, their practice of caning was inherited from the British. I share some of the visceral discomfort with the idea, but also know lots of things we allow because they work, or are within someone else's preferences, also cause many people visceral discomfort: organ (or fecal!) transplants; non-majority sexual practices; legalization of drugs or prostitution (some western world jurisdictions). Disgust is often a hint, but not reliably dispositive, about what should be allowable. We also allow solitary confinement and the death penalty, despite evidence these have weak deterrent effects, sometimes causing grave psychological damage or the death of innocents. What if we studied the matter, and found evidence that corporal punishment of adults better deterred crime, with less follow-own damage, than these traditional practices. We should probably then ban those familiar barbarisms, but still consider as possible the far milder action – lashes – that seems like a barbarism from unfamiliarity and gut reactions.
- baroffoos 8y ago
  You also have to pay someone to constantly supervise them which is just as expensive as just paying someone to do the job.
onetimemanytime 8y ago
Community service, pays back the community, Probably just a gimmick. Court costs and overhead time checking the crooks doing mandatory good deeds might be more. But then we have to punish them somewhow
- onemoresoop 8y ago
  I'm not sure if this has been tried before, but how about a time consuming (multiple choice) test for deterring crimes where an offender, in order to cut prison time, has to study hard and be mentally in involved with like 1000 questions for a few hours. Fail the test? You're given a week to study and take the test again. The type of test that is so annoying that once you pass you don't want to take it again.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 8y ago
    So, you're saying that to avoid jail, all the offender has to do is sit in a room for a few hours every week?

CamperBob2 8y ago

The cost-benefit analysis doesn't support that, prison time is expensive and petty theft doesn't really cause that much damage. That's the rationale that makes car theft such a huge problem around here in the Seattle area, or did until the laws were tightened up a bit. Prosecutors and judges either didn't consider it worthwhile to punish offenders heavily or didn't have the legal tools to to do, so we ended up with people who had literally dozens of prior arrests being set free to steal more cars. Not everything is supposed to be a profit center, and that includes law enforcement. I pay taxes to keep criminals away from my home and out of my life, and I expect to get what I pay for. Whether it's inconvenient or unprofitable to do so is not my concern.

dpark 8y ago
> Whether it's inconvenient or unprofitable to do so is not my concern. It should be if you’re paying taxes. I personally don’t want my taxes to skyrocket to cover expanded law enforcement if it doesn’t provide a meaningful benefit. For the record, (almost) no one thinks law enforcement should be profitable. That doesn’t mean that cost/benefit analysis shouldn’t factor in.

briandear 8y ago

> petty theft doesn't really cause that much damage Sure it does. Insurance rates. Compare rates for San Francisco vs. Houston for comprehensive coverage. Or San Francisco vs. Cupertino for that matter. Every smash and grab costs everyone more money. Prop 47 is a big culprit. These thieves can cause $1000 in damage to a car, but their prosecution is pretty much pointless. If we want to talk cost benefit analysis, prosecuting armed robbery with no injuries doesn’t make sense either: if the robber gets $100, and it costs $100,000 to imprison them, then that’s a bad cost benefit return right? If you want to operate under a cost benefit analysis, jail time should only be required if whatever damage is done exceeds the cost of incarceration. That’s absurd, but that’s what a cost benefit analysis would reveal, assuming costs are measured in dollars. Broken windows policing works [1]. https://cebcp.org/evidence-based-policing/the-matrix/micro-places/micro-places-braga-et-al-1999/ https://cebcp.org/evidence-based-policing/the-matrix/micro-p...

callalex 8y ago
Why is this comment, which is sourced and well argued, greyed out without a single response?
- mantas 8y ago
  Because many people wants no people in jails. Can't stop people from committing crime? Well, don't put them in a jail and bam, you have no people in jails! Who cares about what someone feels after they get robbed. Public feeling safe does not register on RoI report.
michaelt 8y ago
if the robber gets $100, and it costs $100,000 to imprison them, then that’s a bad cost benefit return right? Depends if it deters him and 9 other robbers, who would otherwise have committed 100 such crimes each. I mean, if a criminal is operating under rational choice theory [1] and they know their crime will go unpunished even if it is detected, why wouldn't they steal packages? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_choice_theory_(criminology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_choice_theory_(crimin...

austhrow743 8y ago

Public shaming.

nikanj 8y ago
That stopped working when homeless people became invisible to us.
onemoresoop 8y ago
It would work for some but a certain subset of people don't empathize and really don't care.

setquk 8y ago

Social credit score system in China takes this role I understand. People seem not to like that idea however.

alpaca128 8y ago
Such systems have many problems, one of them being that they're fully automated, and mistakes WILL be made. One day you wake up with a ruined social score because someone who looked a bit like you was witnessed by a camera selling drugs or something. Have fun trying to correct that before someone decides to look up your score. Not to mention all the potential for abuse.

speedplane 8y ago

> Jailtime? The cost-benefit analysis doesn't support that, prison time is expensive and petty theft doesn't really cause that much damage. You're not considering deterrence. Sure, the cost/benefit of an individual does not support jailing a small-time thief. However, other potential thiefs may be deterred from committing the crime in the first place. This aggregate level of crime reduction often does justify itself in a cost/benefit analysis.

build_products 8y ago
Is deterrence really a thing? Multiple studies show that more severe punishments don't actually deter because the people committing the xrime almost never think of them. See https://nij.gov/five-things/Pages/deterrence.aspx https://nij.gov/five-things/Pages/deterrence.aspx
- dpark 8y ago
  #3 on that list is all about deterrence. “Police deter crime by increasing the perception that criminals will be caught and punished.” If criminals believe that the cost/benefit analysis will leave their crimes uninvestigated and unpunished, then yes, they are more likely to commit crimes.
- gojomo 8y ago
  #1 on the list you forwarded is: "The certainty of being caught is a vastly more powerful deterrent than the punishment." #3 is "Police deter crime by increasing the perception that criminals will be caught and punished." Stings run by police, generating stories of caught-criminals, and making it so that repeat offenders face a rapidly-escalating likelihood of being caught, would seem to deter, by the evidence at your link.
- foxyv 8y ago
  Usually the major deterrent to crime is the likelihood of being caught. A lot of research has shown that longer sentences don't deter, however getting caught more often does. https://nij.gov/five-things/pages/deterrence.aspx https://nij.gov/five-things/pages/deterrence.aspx

tfolbrecht 8y ago

Could the police, after being baiting a thief have enough evidence to support an investigation into the individual, and get them for a felony?