Crime and Punishment

[warpus]

You shouldn't say "people". You should say "some people"

Like I said earlier, a lot of this stuff is culture specific. In North America there is a far larger element of "Justice" and "retribution". Probably because of the Wild west and all that. But that is a guess.

 

[Broken_Erika]

Why do they want it?

Because vengeance is one of humanity's favorite past-times?

 

[GoodEnoughForMe]

I agree with borachio. Asking what the punishment should be is asking the wrong question. We should be focusing on social capital/good. To that end; what is the best way to prevent future crimes (such as Greenfell) is the most pertinent question. There might still be a punishment aspect to it. There might not. I don't have an easy answer. But viewing the justice system primarily through the lens of punishment is just a recipe for egregious sentencing. I was reading a study by an economist that just came out that made a suggestion that instead of throwing someone in prison, we could instead GPS track them and garnish wages towards a charity or fund setup to help victims of whatever crime was committed. Obviously, this has its own set of thorny baggage (any punishment in the US is, given the incredibly racist institution of the justice system), but in terms of social capital, it sure beats throwing someone in prison for 10 years and screwing over their future life with no tangible benefit to society.

 

[Borachio]

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.

I think there's something in that.

But can unfairness really be rectified by punishment?

Suppose that a relative of mine is murdered. Can punishment of the murderer actually help me in any tangible way?

It certainly can't bring my relative back. Which is what I would want to happen.

And anything else just seems trivial.

Now, I don't say nothing should be done. A murderer should certainly not be left free to commit as many murders as they like. But that's a different issue from punishment.

 

[BvBPL]

But can unfairness really be rectified by punishment?

People feel it can be. That perception can be more important than whether or not punishing another actually resolves the unfairness.

Taking as an example the survivor of a murder victim, look at the stages of grief. Those stages can demonstrate why people want wrongdoers punished. It isn’t too difficult to understand why someone who is feeling angry as a result of loss might direct that anger towards the malefactor and other wrongdoers. Similarly, the bargaining stage is a point when people feel out of control. Having someone be punished for doing something wrong is a way of asserting control, albeit by the proxy of the criminal justice system.

 

[Akka]

But can unfairness really be rectified by punishment?

Suppose that a relative of mine is murdered. Can punishment of the murderer actually help me in any tangible way?

It certainly can't bring my relative back. Which is what I would want to happen.

And anything else just seems trivial.

Now, I don't say nothing should be done. A murderer should certainly not be left free to commit as many murders as they like. But that's a different issue from punishment.

Punishment is about fairness and not letting people who commit crimes ending up better than those who don't.
It's both about conceptual fairness, that most people have a "gut instinct" about, and about the practical fairness of lawful punishment which is a justification for people not doing justice themselves.

There is also obviously the deterrence aspect, the neutralization of dangerous people aspect and the rehabilitation aspect.

 

[warpus]

I thought that punishment as a deterrence measure doesn't work.

Or was that only in some specific cases like the death sentence?

 

[Akka]

I thought that punishment as a deterrence measure doesn't work.

That's just completely laughable.
I mean, seriously ?
Like, really ?

 

[warpus]

That's just completely laughable.
I mean, seriously ?
Like, really ?

Is it? Feel free to laugh if you want, I guess

I couldn't remember the details so I did some digging:

Economists have long suspected that those who commit crimes place less value on the future than law-abiding citizens. But they have mostly struggled to find hard evidence that criminals think about sentence lengths at all.
...
Harsher sentences work as a deterrent, but only up to a point.

Source

Seems like it sort of works, but only up to a point.

The implication seems to be that it doesn't really work well at all when it comes to serious crimes and long jail sentences.

 

[Akka]

Is it? Feel free to laugh if you want, I guess

Would you argue that if crimes weren't punished and the police would just catch you and then release you immediately, no hard feelings, it would have no effect on criminality ?

Source

Seems like it sort of works, but only up to a point.

The implication seems to be that it doesn't really work well at all when it comes to serious crimes and long jail sentences.

- It's a self-selected sample. Obviously, caught criminals are already people who commit crimes despite deterrence. As such, again obviously, all the people who might have commited the crime but were deterred, aren't part of it.

- Except for a small minority, people don't just harm themselves. It means that people who commit crime, do it because they think they will get away with it (or don't think at all). It means that the severity of the punishment count, but only insofar as the criminal think he's going to be caught. Being caught without punishment would obviously deter no one, but punishment is meaningless if you aren't caught to endure it.

- Related to above and agreeing with your last statement : you can be deterred through the feeling of "too big a risk" if the sentence is harsh, but psychologically it's about very broad categories. Like "I'll pirate, because even if I'm caught, it's just a fine" - if piracy was punished by being dismembered, probably that the gain wouldn't outweight the risks. But once we are in "pretty big risks" (like 15 years in jail), the only way one will do a crime is if he already think he's a good chance of evading justice, and the gains are big enough to take the risk. At this point, yeah, harsher penalties are likely to have little effects.

 

[warpus]

Would you argue that if crimes weren't punished and the police would just catch you and then release you immediately, no hard feelings, it would have no effect on criminality ?

No. Obviously I couldn't remember the details of the phenomenon, which is why I posed a question in my initial post.

There does appear to be a phenomenon which makes punishment not a great deterrent in some cases, and a good deterrent in others. Surely we shouldn't ignore this just because "it doesn't feel right".

 

[EgonSpengler]

I would guess that the deterrent effect of laws and punishments is some kind of bell curve. In laws, getting too draconian simply renders illegal a behavior that people aren't willing to stop. Our "Prohibition Era" is an example. Liquor was outlawed, and so everybody who drank became a criminal overnight. I'm not sure there's much evidence that drinking actually declined, and serious crime centered on the production and distribution of alcohol went through the roof. Some argue that outlawing alcohol not only failed to deter its consumption, it encouraged it. In terms of punishment, I seem to remember that there is no correlation between whether a US state has capital punishment or merely long prison sentences for murder and murder rates.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Would you argue that if crimes weren't punished and the police would just catch you and then release you immediately, no hard feelings, it would have no effect on criminality ?

- It's a self-selected sample. Obviously, caught criminals are already people who commit crimes despite deterrence. As such, again obviously, all the people who might have commited the crime but were deterred, aren't part of it.

- Except for a small minority, people don't just harm themselves. It means that people who commit crime, do it because they think they will get away with it (or don't think at all). It means that the severity of the punishment count, but only insofar as the criminal think he's going to be caught. Being caught without punishment would obviously deter no one, but punishment is meaningless if you aren't caught to endure it.

- Related to above and agreeing with your last statement : you can be deterred through the feeling of "too big a risk" if the sentence is harsh, but psychologically it's about very broad categories. Like "I'll pirate, because even if I'm caught, it's just a fine" - if piracy was punished by being dismembered, probably that the gain wouldn't outweight the risks. But once we are in "pretty big risks" (like 15 years in jail), the only way one will do a crime is if he already think he's a good chance of evading justice, and the gains are big enough to take the risk. At this point, yeah, harsher penalties are likely to have little effects.

Punishment is only effective if the impacts the punished in a way that they think is significant and how likely it is that they will be caught. If it could be done, the most effective way to punish those who download pirated material would be to prevent their future access to the internet.

Jail is not always a deterrent to crime; fines are not always a deterrent. To be effective, those dispensing justice need to identify what is important to those who do particular crimes and use that to punish offenders. Those may be different in different cultures. In addition, increasing the perceived catch rate is an important part of the equation.

Smaller, lesser crimes are harder to deter than larger more costly ones and yet we tend to spend a lot more effort on punishing those criminals than the bigger fish. Perhaps we need a system that treats low level criminals differently that high level criminals since the causes are likely different.

 

[uppi]

In my opinion, punishment is necessary to make the expected reward for a criminal action to be negative. If that is the case, it is a deterrent to anybody making rational decisions about it. However, there will be people making irrational decisions and increasing the punishment is unlikely to deter them, because they do not factor in the punishment anyway. So you need other prevention measures for these people. But you have to keep the punishment for those that do act rationally.

 

[warpus]

I seem to remember that there is no correlation between whether a US state has capital punishment or merely long prison sentences for murder and murder rates.

Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking of initially, thank you.

Going back to your example of prohibition, it's interesting that in a lot of places where marijuana and other drugs were legalized, usage actually went down. So punishments actually seemed to do the exact opposite of deterring people from using drugs in those cases.

 

[BvBPL]

Going back to your example of prohibition, it's interesting that in a lot of places where marijuana and other drugs were legalized, usage actually went down.

Where? That hasn't been the case among adults in the United States.

 

[Hrothbern]

Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking of initially, thank you.

Going back to your example of prohibition, it's interesting that in a lot of places where marijuana and other drugs were legalized, usage actually went down. So punishments actually seemed to do the exact opposite of deterring people from using drugs in those cases.

In the Netherlands the use of soft drugs, marijuana etc is complety free
and guess what ?

Only 16% of medium aged, 28 year old people has ever smoked marijuana.

A substantial amount of money is spend on extended and preventive health care, social programs etc.
But I guess those cost are much lower than the direct incarceration cost of for example the US, not to mention the follow up cost and other social, education and human damage.

With my own two daughters (we live in Amsterdam) I made the deal: if you ever want to smoke it to try out.... fine, but then we do it together the first time

Here a link to the Amsterdam strategy on drugs: http://www.amsterdam.info/drugs/

 

[EgonSpengler]

The Washington Post, 30 Apr 2014 - "There's still no evidence that executions deter criminals."

However, I don't think we know the difference between a lesser punishment - a long prison sentence - and a very minor punishment, or none at all. I suppose by definition we do not have good data on criminal behavior in areas that are literally or functionally lawless. This is one reason the extreme crime of murder just isn't a good yardstick. I can't think of any societies that have laws, but murder isn't illegal.

Business Insider, 26 Apr 2016 - "6 incredible things that happened when Portugal decriminalized all drugs."

[...]Rather than getting arrested for a small amount [of drugs], you get sent to a "dissuasion commission," where a doctor, lawyer, and social worker prescribe treatment or give you a fine.

Mic's Zeeshan Aleem reports that people walk away without a penalty most of the time.

1. Drug-related HIV infections have plummeted by over 90% since 2001, according to the drug-policy think tank Transform.
2. Drug-related deaths in Portugal are the second-lowest in the European Union. Just three in a million people die of overdoses there, compared with the EU average of 17.3 per million.
3. The number of adults who have done drugs in the past year has decreased steadily since 2001.
4. Compared to rest of the EU, young people in Portugal now use the least amount of "legal high" drugs like synthetic marijuana, which are especially dangerous.
5. The percentage of drug-related offenders in Portuguese prisons fell from 44% in 1999 to 21% in 2012.
6. The number of people in drug-treatment increased 60% from 1998 to 2011 from 23,600 to 38,000.

It seems clear by now that any punishment of drug (ab)use is not only useless, it's frequently counter-productive (assuming of course that reducing damaging drug abuse is actually the goal - I don't think it is the goal for many people in the U.S. government, for example). I heard a radio story recently that asserted that the (in)famous "Just Say No" campaign of the 1980s was not merely ineffectual, it made our drug problem worse, and I'm inclined to agree.

 

[Birdjaguar]

In my opinion, punishment is necessary to make the expected reward for a criminal action to be negative. If that is the case, it is a deterrent to anybody making rational decisions about it. However, there will be people making irrational decisions and increasing the punishment is unlikely to deter them, because they do not factor in the punishment anyway. So you need other prevention measures for these people. But you have to keep the punishment for those that do act rationally.

So how do we separate out those who break laws irrationally from those who do so based on a more rational process?

 

[uppi]

So how do we separate out those who break laws irrationally from those who do so based on a more rational process?

We don't. The punishment should be harsh enough, that almost all criminals are acting irrationally. But not much harsher, since you are unlikely to deter the rest and these diminishing costs are not offset by the increasing costs.