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I think it's fantastic to be addressing crime with instant prevention rather than deterrence. Many people don't have enough impulse control to follow the law re

I think it's fantastic to be addressing crime with instant prevention rather than deterrence. Many people don't have enough impulse control to follow the law regardless of how harsh the penalties are. What they need is some kind of full time supervisor like a breath interlock to stop them before they break the law. Actually, the whole justice system is based on a faulty idea that all humans rationally evaluate the risk of getting caught. Some people will follow the law regardless, some will decide what crime to commit by evaluating the risk, and some will break the law regardless of the risk. That last category needs a different system.

perl4ever 7y ago
I question what "rationally evaluating the risk of getting caught" means for an individual. If I'm an insurance company, or other entity dealing with large numbers of "getting caught", then indeed, I can rationally determine that it will happen x% of the time and plan accordingly. But if I'm an individual, and I don't have a way of significantly changing the risk, then all I can do is make a binary decision - do the risky thing, or don't. If the risk is small, then I'm probably going to do it. How is a person "rationally" supposed to react to, say, a risk going from 0.1% to 1%, when the choice is only do or do not do?
- lopmotr 7y ago
  I'd guess a lot of those decisions are probably fairly insensitive to small changes in the risk. But if, say, the sentence duration for murder was gradually reduced towards 0 years, there'd have to be some kind of increase in offending. Maybe not linear, but at some point, people are going to be angry enough at their enemies to take the 1 year jail when they wouldn't take the 30 years. But for drink driving, you typically do it many times without getting caught, so you could respond to changed risk by changing how often you do it.

perl4ever 7y ago

I question what "rationally evaluating the risk of getting caught" means for an individual. If I'm an insurance company, or other entity dealing with large numbers of "getting caught", then indeed, I can rationally determine that it will happen x% of the time and plan accordingly. But if I'm an individual, and I don't have a way of significantly changing the risk, then all I can do is make a binary decision - do the risky thing, or don't. If the risk is small, then I'm probably going to do it. How is a person "rationally" supposed to react to, say, a risk going from 0.1% to 1%, when the choice is only do or do not do?

lopmotr 7y ago
I'd guess a lot of those decisions are probably fairly insensitive to small changes in the risk. But if, say, the sentence duration for murder was gradually reduced towards 0 years, there'd have to be some kind of increase in offending. Maybe not linear, but at some point, people are going to be angry enough at their enemies to take the 1 year jail when they wouldn't take the 30 years. But for drink driving, you typically do it many times without getting caught, so you could respond to changed risk by changing how often you do it.