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TheOtherDave comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 16, chapter 85 - Less Wrong
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Agreed that if prisons were extremely nice, their deterrent effect due to the threat of punishment would be lower than it is now.
That said... when the mechanism that results in my being punished for an act is perceived as unreliable and capricious (including, but not limited to, cases where it is unreliable and capricious), the correlation between the severity of the punishment and the intensity of the deterrent effect is much, much lower than when the mechanism is perceived as fair and reliable.
So if law enforcement and courts were perceived as fair and reliable (that is, reliably assigning punishment to criminals and not assigning punishment to noncriminals), I expect making prisons equally unpleasant would create a much greater deterrent effect (to being a criminal) than it does now.
If my goal is to maximize deterrent effect, then, I expect that I would do better to invest my efforts in increasing the perception of law enforcement and courts as fair and reliable than to invest them in increasing the perception of prisons as unpleasant.
But, as I say, I don't think many people involved in setting prison policies are primarily motivated by maximizing deterrent effect.
Depending on what you mean by "unreliable and capricious", I find this dubious. At the very least it seems to me that brutal dictatorships are much better at reducing crime (at least the crimes they care about) than democracies. For example, Mussolini's successful campaign against the Sicilian mafia.
What I mean by enforcement being unreliable and capricious is, roughly. that agents believe that their performing the act is not well-correlated with their being punished.
It sounds from that wiki article like Mussolini created an environment where people believed that being a mafioso would reliably result in being punished.
I suspect they also believed that not being a mafioso stood a good chance of being punished, which has other consequences; when punishment occurs in the absence of a reliable and controllable cue, the result is learned helplessness. But if we care about deterring criminals and we don't care about the effect on noncriminals, punishing 90% of criminals and 5% of noncriminals can work OK, even if only 5% of the people we punish are criminals.
Of course, if we care about things in addition to deterrence, that may not be a great policy, but that's another conversation.
So what you're saying is that in modern developed states committing crimes is not well-correlated with being punished? I find this highly dubious.
At the very least, I'm saying that that's the perception: most crimes go unpunished.
But yes, I also suspect that perception is true. I haven't done any research on the matter, though, and attempts to find statistics via cursory Googling failed.
If you have any cites handy, I'm happy to be corrected.
Eugine said:
TheOtherDave said:
These aren't actually in contradiction. If a criminal committing a "mid-size" offense has a 25% chance of being caught for each crime, then being a career criminal is likely to end you in jail, but most crimes will still be unpunished.
My sense is that most crimes (and most dollar-loss to crime) are small/midsize thefts; hundreds or thousands of dollars, not more. Thefts big enough to set you up for a lifetime are freakishly rare compared to the number of criminals. And that means to have a tolerable lifestyle as a criminal, you have to commit lots of offenses -- so even a small chance of being caught for each mugging or burglary starts to add up.
Yeah, I agree with this. I'd be surprised if the chance was as high as .25, but the principle is the same; career criminals can count on eventually being arrested.
That said, the original context of this discussion was the behavior-modification effects of prison policy on the not-yet-arrested population, and from a behavior modification point of view a punishment that usually fails to kick in for the first several crimes doesn't do much to deter those first few crimes.
And making the punishment more and more severe doesn't help the deterrence factor all that much in that situation, which was my original point.
Disagree. It deters the first crime. It's deterrent power will decrease for subsequent crimes (until caught) unless the criminal has friends who have been caught.
Can you say more about the mechanism whereby increasing the severity of a punishment I am confident won't apply to my first crime deters my first crime? That seems pretty implausible to me.
If committing a crime required playing Russian Roulette, a gun with a bullet in it would be more of a deterrent than a gun with a paintball in it. Yes?
In that case, why aren't you stealing money and donating to SIAI? ;)
But seriously, there are countries where your comment is actually true. You can tell the difference pretty easily.
To be honest, I'm not convinced that it isn't true even in first-world countries. Solve rates for murders in the US appear to be around 66% as of 2007. I haven't directly been able to dig up solve rates for crimes in general, but clearance rates (the rate of crimes prosecuted to crimes reported) are available, and are well under 50% for pretty much everything except murder. Most prosecuted crimes appear to result in convictions, but this still says to me that TheOtherDave's got it right, at least in a US context and assuming that most reports aren't frivolous.
YMMV for other nations.
ETA: Looking over these statistics again, I strongly suspect that the "solve" figures you find in various places are in fact identical to the clearance rates I refer to. So the reports-to-convictions ratio would be significantly lower -- compare conviction rates for cases brought to court.
I infer that your intuitions differ from mine but you don't have any cites handy either.
Fair enough.
Updated, to a degree proportional to my confidence in the reliability of your intuition on this matter, in your direction.