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If you read this article and have a halfway decent model of the world in your head, you will realize that police entrapment was the proximate cause of this real
by its_so_on 14y ago
If you read this article and have a halfway decent model of the world in your head, you will realize that police entrapment was the proximate cause of this real, talented artist low on his money becoming a counterfeiter: i.e. they made him do it, and he wouldn't have done it without them, and a judge released him early on probation for this reason (from the article).
But the damage was done. Still without any money, this genuine artist (who had "refused to do two Warhol copies, including forged signatures", always signing his own name instead on homage pieces) now had a criminal skill that had no other applications.
The fact is most people here have had a time in their life when they had unhoned skills (e.g. software/hardware hacking) that, if they only landed the right internship, would become very valuable. When the police are the proximate cause to creating this "lucky" internship (lucky in that the guy had 0 experience with it, or even interest for that matter) to create skills that have only a criminal market [1], something is very wrong.
It would be great if Freakonomics covered entrapment some time, as it's very insidious - on the surface it seeems that if you do it you "would have done it anyway", but this example shows pretty obviously that this isn't true in any form whatsoever.
[1] EDIT: or not even a criminal market, as the case may be:
"The problem was, Kuhl and his partners couldn’t make a deal with anyone. It wasn’t for lack of trying—a sale brokered by a criminal-minded former cop fell through, and another transaction with a supposed buyer in Majorca fizzled. That was when Becker and his colleagues decided to help things along by providing an attractive buyer themselves."
- mmcconnell1618 14y agoI disagree. In the article Kuhl had a legitimate buyer who backed out. The bills where printed and Kuhl needed a buyer. The police decided to become the buyer but the counterfeit bills had already been created and the artist would have found a buyer eventually.
- its_so_on 14y agoThe reason I added that EDIT is because I actually hadn't read that far down yet - I was just referring to his first counterfeiting gig when I first posted the comment: inline search the article for "Kuhl’s counterfeiting career had begun a decade earlier" and read from there. Of course you have no basis for your claim that he would have eventually found a buyer. This is a "manufactured criminal" and the police certainly got fed up with waiting for an actual market for his work to materialize. Entrapment is so insidious because when you turn a good guy, maybe there's no market for "good guy's evil works" anyway. (Who knows why, maybe he looks like an informant/plant/mole because he's a real artist and normal, genuine, good guy, who only got into 1 single crime - and no corresponding culture or connections, no other crimes, nothing - through an entrapment operation.) Please read the article more carefully and you'll see exactly what I mean.
- lifeisstillgood 14y agoThis is a very good point - because the costs of trusting the wrong person are so high (Jail, them stealing your money) then the most important thing for criminals is a solid understanding of the background of the other person. This is why families and old school friends frequently figure together. And why jail makes for furure partners. Perhaps we should start oldjailbuddy.com - networking for criminals
- its_so_on 14y agoIt's actually just one example of my point - we don't really need to speculate on whether there's a market or if not, why not. It's like if entrapment convinces your performance-oriented daughter who's short on cash (to make this an analogy with the artist in this article) to have sex for money as a kind of performance (same convoluted logic as the artist's in the article). If afterwards she tries again, there's no proof there's actually a criminal market for her and her criminal soliciting skills learned for the entrapment. But she may or may not know that. One entrapment operation can ruin your daughter's life, who perhaps had literally never given a single thought to prostitution, just as you and I have never thought of armed robbery. It's like a fucked-up internship offered by the government, only instead of setting you up for life with your newfound skills, it fucks you up for life, as in the case we've just read about.
- tptacek 14y agoNerd brain recoiling in attempt to square first sentence of this comment with last one.