Crime and Punishment

[Birdjaguar]

The London fire thread got me to thinking about crimes and what the appropriate punishment should be. this thread is seeking opinions about making the punishment fit the crime. Each crime has one or more components: perpetrators(s), facilitators, beneficiaries and victims. For now I want to ignore the victim side of things.

Perpetrators: those who do the actual bad deeds. This could include robbing, stealing, changing numbers, writing code, not fixing things, selling faulty items, etc.
Facilitators: those who encourage, or support, or pay for, or provide for or arrange for, etc. a crime to be committed by others (perps). Includes approving or signing off on things that are criminal.
Beneficiaries: those who are not necessarily involved in the crime as perps or facilitators, but who directly benefit from the crimes. These folks often know about the crimes, but turn a blind eye to them.

What types of crimes are we talking about? Any and all from the simple and common to the sophisticated and sublime.

Theft
Murder
Fraud
Terror
Car jacking
Kidnapping
Blackmail
Bombing
Financial swindling

whatever else comes to mind
So should how should perps, facilitators, and beneficiaries be treated when caught? At what dollar level of criminality should harsher penalties come into play?

Spoiler Case Study :

Michael Robert Milken (born July 4, 1946) is an American former financier and philanthropist. He is noted for his role in the development of the market for high-yield bonds ("junk bonds"),[2] for his conviction following a guilty plea on felony charges for violating U.S. securities laws, and for his charitable giving.

Milken was indicted for racketeering and securities fraud in 1989 in an insider trading investigation. As the result of a plea bargain, he pleaded guilty to securities and reporting violations but not to racketeering or insider trading. Milken was sentenced to ten years in prison, fined $600 million, and permanently barred from the securities industry by the Securities and Exchange Commission. His sentence was later reduced to two years for cooperating with testimony against his former colleagues and for good behavior.[3]

His critics cited him as the epitome of Wall Street greed during the 1980s, and nicknamed him the "Junk Bond King".

Supporters, like George Gilder in his book, Telecosm (2000), state that "Milken was a key source of the organizational changes that have impelled economic growth over the last twenty years. Most striking was the productivity surge in capital, as Milken...and others took the vast sums trapped in old-line businesses and put them back into the markets."[4]

Since his release from prison, Milken has funded medical research.[5] He is co-founder of the Milken Family Foundation, chairman of the Milken Institute, and founder of medical philanthropies funding research into melanoma, cancer and other life-threatening diseases. A prostate cancer survivor, Milken has devoted significant resources to research on the disease.[6] In a November 2004 cover article, Fortune magazine called him "The Man Who Changed Medicine" for changes in approach to funding and results that he initiated.[5]

Milken's compensation, while head of the high-yield bond department at Drexel Burnham Lambert in the late 1980s, exceeded $1 billion in a four-year period, a new record for U.S. income at that time.[7] With an estimated net worth of around $2 billion as of 2010, he is ranked by Forbes magazine as the 488th richest person in the world.[8][9]

 

[Borachio]

As far as I can tell, punishing crime seldom has the desired the effect.

Isn't it the case that criminal behaviour is the result of poor socialization in the first place?

So what's the use of punishment?

Mind you, I don't want to derail the thread before it's even started. I'm sure there's an interesting discussion to be had about punishment. Whether it ranges from a bit of a pi-jaw, to complete eviseration.

 

[Flying Pig]

There was an interesting line in one of the news stories on Grenfell Tower - I can't find it now, unfortunately, which went to the effect of 'a preventable tragedy has occurred, and people will feel a huge sense of injustice if nobody is prosecuted for it'.

That got me thinking about how people often see the courts - whether criminal ones or the ones through which they run lawsuits. Something bad has happened, therefore someone must be at fault, and we will find someone and punish them, essentially, to satisfy our own emotional needs. I understand that the reporter probably didn't mean that, but it seems to be quite important to the question, particularly if we're talking about how to make a punishment 'fit' a crime.

 

[Perfection]

The paradox of punishment is that those who are punished are those who the threat of punishment did not deter.

 

[Borachio]

There was an interesting line in one of the news stories on Grenfell Tower - I can't find it now, unfortunately, which went to the effect of 'a preventable tragedy has occurred, and people will feel a huge sense of injustice if nobody is prosecuted for it'.

That got me thinking about how people often see the courts - whether criminal ones or the ones through which they run lawsuits. Something bad has happened, therefore someone must be at fault, and we will find someone and punish them, essentially, to satisfy our own emotional needs. I understand that the reporter probably didn't mean that, but it seems to be quite important to the question, particularly if we're talking about how to make a punishment 'fit' a crime.

Indeed. But I wonder whether a "sense of injustice" i.e. that people simply demand retribution, is sufficient reason for punishment.

Far more important to me is preventing it happening again. And it's not at all clear that punishment by itself does that effectively.

 

[Flying Pig]

Yes, I agree. Ever since 'an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth', the whole point of the legal system has been to stop people hurt by crimes from inflicting the punishment they want.

 

[Lexicus]

That got me thinking about how people often see the courts - whether criminal ones or the ones through which they run lawsuits. Something bad has happened, therefore someone must be at fault, and we will find someone and punish them, essentially, to satisfy our own emotional needs. I understand that the reporter probably didn't mean that, but it seems to be quite important to the question, particularly if we're talking about how to make a punishment 'fit' a crime.

Well, I'm not sure this logic is entirely wrong. There were people who made decisions that led to this fire (or at least, this outcome; perhaps the fire itself couldn't have been prevented, but it seems like a lot of the damage and all the deaths could have been prevented). Those people should be held responsible as far as I'm concerned. The unaccountable corporate culture that exists today is completely intolerable; it strikes me as the same nonsense that has allowed the bankers who crashed the economy to walk away free.

You must put people in jail; no amount of civil settlements with no admission of wrongdoing will ever address these problems. People respond to incentives; when you impose only corporate fines and corporate penalties the incentives are all aligned to induce people to malfeasance.

 

[Flying Pig]

All of that hinges on finding someone who did something culpably wrong, though. It seems dangerous to go at the problem assuming that there must be someone who can be held up, and then trying to get them. What if, for example, they find that the builders followed regulations to the letter, but the regulations were inadequate? Or that mistakes were made, but below the level of gross negligence? I agree totally that there needs to be accountability, but that's not the same thing as saying that someone in the equation must unquestionably bear criminal responsibility.

 

[Lexicus]

All of that hinges on finding someone who did something culpably wrong, though. It seems dangerous to go at the problem assuming that there must be someone who can be held up, and then trying to get them. What if, for example, they find that the builders followed regulations to the letter, but the regulations were inadequate? Or that mistakes were made, but below the level of gross negligence? I agree totally that there needs to be accountability, but that's not the same thing as saying that someone in the equation must unquestionably bear criminal responsibility.

Right, I'm not saying that for sure that this is a situation where my point is even relevant, because I don't know all the facts of this case. I'm just making a point that individual accountability (ie, punishing people) is generally a strong tool to prevent disasters that result from intentional malfeasance.

 

[Borachio]

What constitutes punishment, though?

Clearly, fines and imprisonment do. But do public shaming and/or loss of reputation also count as punishment?

And in any case, what evidence do we have that punishment does deter?

If education and feelings of public solidarity don't work to prevent the worst cases of malfeasance, why would punishment work any better?

I don't know. I'm in two minds about it all.

 

[warpus]

There was an interesting line in one of the news stories on Grenfell Tower - I can't find it now, unfortunately, which went to the effect of 'a preventable tragedy has occurred, and people will feel a huge sense of injustice if nobody is prosecuted for it'.

That got me thinking about how people often see the courts - whether criminal ones or the ones through which they run lawsuits. Something bad has happened, therefore someone must be at fault, and we will find someone and punish them, essentially, to satisfy our own emotional needs. I understand that the reporter probably didn't mean that, but it seems to be quite important to the question, particularly if we're talking about how to make a punishment 'fit' a crime.

It's a cultural difference, I find, between say North American justice and let's say Scandinavian justice. In the former there is more emphasis on punishment and in the latter there is more emphasis in rehabilitation.

 

[Lexicus]

What constitutes punishment, though?

As I said, mandatory jail time in my view. Monetary fines are accepted as a cost of doing business; only if they're actually made greater than the gains from criminal behavior will they be effective in deterring it.

And in any case, what evidence do we have that punishment does deter?

Do you agree with the assumption that people respond to incentives, particularly within the sphere of behavior that is relevant to white collar crime? If you do then there is tremendous evidence that effective punishments deter white collar crime. Balance making more money with the near-certainty of imprisonment and you will deter the vast majority of white-collar crime.

 

[EgonSpengler]

As far as I can tell, punishing crime seldom has the desired the effect.

Isn't it the case that criminal behaviour is the result of poor socialization in the first place?

So what's the use of punishment?

I don't know about other countries, but in the US it's a big, for-profit industry.

Bloomberg, 10 Jan 2017 - "America's Private Prisons Are Back in Business."

Since [Donald Trump] was elected, [for-profit prison contractor] CoreCivic stock has jumped 78 percent. Rival private-prison company Geo Group Inc., is up 53 percent. The reasons are clear. A crackdown like the one Trump has proposed would cost the federal government from $400 billion to $600 billion.

[...]

As part of his “100-Day Plan To Make America Great Again,” Trump said he would work with Congress to build a southern border wall and establish two- and five-year mandatory minimum prison sentences for illegal re-entry into the U.S.

A five-year minimum for the offense would expand the federal prison population by 65,000 prisoners, which would require the government to build more than 20 prisons, according to a 2015 American Bar Association letter to Congress.

Trump’s immigration proposals may provide opportunities for corrections companies to profit twice. After immigrants serve a prison sentence for the criminal offense of illegal re-entry, they’re often transferred to immigration officials who lock them up again, sometimes in facilities run by the same company, until they’re deported.

The New York Times, 23 Aug 2013 - "City's Annual Cost Per Inmate Is $168,000, Study Finds."

The Vera Institute of Justice released a study in 2012 that found the aggregate cost of prisons in 2010 in the 40 states that participated was $39 billion.

The annual average taxpayer cost in these states was $31,286 per inmate.

New York State was the most expensive, with an average cost of $60,000 per prison inmate.

I can't find it now, but some years ago I remember finding that housing an inmate in Massachusetts for a year cost about the same as sending a person to Harvard University, all expenses paid, for a year. I want to say it was around $35,000.

According to The Washington Post, "The entire coal industry employs fewer people than Arby's", 76,572 people in 2014. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 431,600 correctional officers in the US in 2016, and that doesn't include all of the people employed other than as guards in our prisons and jails. [EDIT: Actually, I'm not sure about that. There's a line in the tables down the page, "Facilities support services."]

Anyway, I'm not convinced the US prison system isn't doing exactly what it's intended to do, but what do I know?

 

[Borachio]

Do you agree with the assumption that people respond to incentives, particularly within the sphere of behavior that is relevant to white collar crime? If you do then there is tremendous evidence that effective punishments deter white collar crime. Balance making more money with the near-certainty of imprisonment and you will deter the vast majority of white-collar crime.

Are you saying that we just need more imprisonment?

 

[Lexicus]

You've nicely explained the white collar crime that doesn't happen, but what explains the white collar crime that does happen, then?

Are you talking to me? My position is that we do not have a policy environment that deters white collar crime right now, so why would I need to explain why white collar crime happens?

 

[Borachio]

Yeah. I realized that and edited my post. Sorry about that.

 

[BvBPL]

As far as I can tell, punishing crime seldom has the desired the effect.

It has that effect when people want retribution for the crimes that have been committed. Which people do want.

 

[Lexicus]

Are you saying that we just need more imprisonment?

In general, no- we should imprison fewer people. We should absolutely be imprisoning more white-collar criminals though. I keep emphasizing white-collar crime because there is a whole different set of rules for white-collar criminals, who are far more classically "rational" than most street criminals.

This is a good article about the differences in approach that are required:
https://www.thenation.com/article/how-deter-white-collar-crime/

 

[Borachio]

^ Interesting article.

It has that effect when people want retribution for the crimes that have been committed. Which people do want.

Why do they want it?

 

[BvBPL]

A big part of it comes down to the perception of fairness. People imagine themselves as generally obedient to the rules. When criminals profit by breaking the rules, it feels unfair. People believe that unfairness can be rectified by punishing the criminals.