I'll support my case with Paraguay, one of the countries listed as being high inequality/high crime in a list in a recent comment. In Paraguay you can easily buy a stolen car for relatively little (thus participating in a crime). At the same time, your car is likely to get stolen.
So, what do people rationally do in this situation? There is, first of all, an incentive against owning any car at all because of the likelihood that it will be stolen. But this is especially strong as an incentive against paying full price to legally own a car. Because stolen cars are significantly cheaper, this gives you a strong incentive to favor buying a stolen car over a legally owned car.
I do not see any significant status element specifically tied to owning a stolen car in Paraguay. There is of course always a status element tied to owning a car, but it is not tied specifically to the crime. On the contrary, the rich in Paraguay, who are able to afford gated, protected areas to keep their cars, presumably tend to legally own cars (I infer that this is the case from personal observation, because the cars of the rich that I've seen look new; the stolen cars that my non-rich acquaintances own look pretty beat up and old). That being the case, it is presumably high status to own a car legally and low status to own a car illegally. I don't pry, but this is what I gather.
So the widespread corruption of Paraguayan society on this matter has to do with practical realities, not with status, on my analysis. Your argument is that only a tiny minority benefit from engaging in crime. But it seems to me that the ordinary Paraguayan benefits from buying a stolen car, thus participating in the crime. So there seems to be a serious gap in your argument somewhere.
Paraguay is a country in which the government is utterly corrupt. That being the case, the people are not protected - they are essentially on their own. The government is kleptocratic. I was told the sad story of someone whose business was simply seized by a member of the government. In this country, many of the rich are rich because of their connections with the government. And many of the poor are poor because they are completely unprotected from predation and therefore have little incentive to stand out.
In Paraguay, I heard that Korean grocers (who run by far the best small groceries) are filthy because they allegedly sleep in the store. If they do (which, from the one case I know, a Korean grocer who is a friend of a cousin, they do not, though as I recall they sleep in the same building just above the store) it may be because it is the only way to protect their property. Here, by the way, I have an example of a sub-population (Koreans) which is disproportionately successful and which is resented by the larger population.
You're right -- my above comment was too specifically concerned with the U.S. and other developed nations. In places that are poorer and where law enforcement is much less strong and reliable, financial incentives for crime may well be at the forefront even for low-level crooks.
On the other hand, it's also important to note that when some laws are enforced very weakly or not at all, the very notion of "crime" becomes blurry, and what would clearly be crimes under decent law enforcement may effectively become just regular customary behavior expec...
Why do those words go together?
Society - and for once, I'm using this term universally - teaches that, if you committed a crime, you should be punished.
But in some societies, we have an insanity defense. If you had a brain condition so that you had no - here it's a little vague - consciousness, or moral sense, or free will, or, well, something - then it would be cruel to punish you for your crime. Instead of going to prison, you should be placed somewhere where you can't hurt anybody, where professional physicians and counselors can study your case and try to reform you so that you can rejoin society.
Wait - so that isn't what prison is for?
No. Prison is to punish people. Is it any wonder that prison doesn't reform people, when we don't want it to reform them? Most people would be upset if prisoners could go in on Friday, and emerge, rehabilitated, on Sunday. When people say, "It would be cruel to punish people who aren't responsible for their actions", they are implicitly saying, "Prison is necessarily cruel; and that's good, because we should be cruel to criminals who are responsible for their actions."
But the more we learn about psychology and neuroscience, the further responsibility recedes into the distance.
Outcome-based justice argues that we should give up playing the blame game, because neuroscience keeps finding more and more proofs that things are "not our fault". Instead, we should write laws that deter crime.
You might think this is what we already try to do. But it isn't! Witness this confused article from the Brookings Institute, Cognitive Neuroscience and the Future of Punishment by O. Carter Snead. Snead objects to outcome-based justice. He summarized all of the arguments for it, yet managed to completely miss their point, concluding where he started from, saying that outcome-based justice is obviously bad because it could lead to being cruel to people who didn't deserve it. (Instead of only being cruel to the people who do deserve it, which is obviously what we want to do.)
Snead understands that outcome-based justice deters crime:
You might expect that Snead goes on to explain why these laws are bad things. But he doesn't! He assumes we can all see that these are obviously bad things.
The Wrath of Kahneman describes a study which asked whether people punish others in order to deter crime, and concluded, No. People are doing something else.
One theory is that people are trying to be fair. Everyone should get the same chances; everyone should get the same punishment for the same crime. John Rawls argues this explicitly in Justice as Fairness: Justice should not be utilitarian, but should instead be fair.
I believe Rawls' view is also the popular view of what "justice" means. And, I will argue in a later post, it is part of a pattern showing a deep divide between two different ways of using the word "ethics".
ADDED: Constant made the point that, while one part of outcome-based justice is preventing future harm from the criminal on the dock, another part is deterring harm by other criminals. This latter part does not benefit from punishing criminals who cannot be deterred. Thus, to optimally punish both criminals who can and cannot be deterred, the law requires a concept of moral culpability, and should punish criminals who can't be deterred more lightly. This is a better origin story for the linking together of morality and free will than the just-so story I'd come up with, so I plan on stealing it for my next post. (SilasBarta may have been trying to make the same point, but I found his comments impenetrable.)
(This post is laying groundwork for two other posts that will go in different directions, neither of which concerns justice.)