In DC, it was reported that one of the children who murdered the Uber driver had recently also been caught committing another carjacking. I haven't done the statistical analysis on this, but that's something I see a fair amount in violent crimes here - that the perpetrator has recently been caught for illegal gun possession, assault, etc., and they're out on the streets again quickly (in some cases, immediately and while awaiting trial, in some cases after getting a deal involving no or very little jail time.) I don't know to what extent that's a national or merely local phenomenon. That seems bad. Like, extremely bad, both because murder is terrible but also because the government seems to me to be more responsible for a murder committed by someone they just saw for another violent crime and decided to let go. As for doing monitoring instead, that requires a level of competence that may not exist.
I have been intrigued by several recent popular press articles about detectives settling murder cold-cases via DNA, sometimes through reconstructing family trees in order to reduce the number of leads to a manageable size.
I think that's a great way to clear cases. Here's an even better one:
Put a few billion dollars into testing and banking every rape kit in the country. There are thousands of them lying around, untested. That right there is a fast clearance-method, lying to hand.
"But rapes are hard to prosecute and convict!" you say. And so they are, which is a topic for another post (it's a toxic stew of misogyny and patriarchy, and the fault lies with jurors as much as prosecutors).
But serial rapes are relatively easy to get convictions on. And I am not alone in suspecting that serial rape is fairly common, and would be revealed to be so by a national inventory of the DNA from rape kits.
This would be an excellent use of time and money by the Biden administration. Making people less likely to get raped makes them less afraid to work and travel freely. Looks like smart infrastructure spending to me.
This is one of Matt's best posts to date. I seem to recall a previous one he did which touched on criminal justice but did not acknowledge many important issues such as the typically high time preference and below average IQ of criminals.
Actually his post today touches on some points I made in response to that post, in particular re the importance of a short time frame between crime and punishment - this is v. important when dealing with such people.
My proposals were a good deal more controversial than Matt's are though - I proposed a return to the use of corporal punishment.
It's probably true that short but certain prison sentences are a more effective deterrent than long but unlikely ones.
However I believe, that, particularly for the types of people who commit street crimes, corporal punishment would be more effective yet.
Ideally it should be performed as soon as possible after the crime was committed, and the criminal's memory of the crime should be "refreshed" immediately beforehand, for instance by being made to watch CCTV footage of the crime if available.
Corporal punishment is in many ways genuinely kinder than imprisonment too - ask yourself, how many months / years in prison would you willingly spend in order to avoid, say, 10 lashes?
It seems like we are recycling old ideas. One of Tocqueville's points about the success of the rule of law in America circa 1830 was "when justice is more certain and more mild, it is at the same time more efficacious." It is too bad that we forgot this lesson in the intervening 200 years, but thanks Matt for reminding us.
As one of your readers with past contact with the criminal justice system, I share your revulsion for long prison terms, but I think you're dodging one element: Regarding deterrence, you're spot-on. But don't you avoid/evade the issue that indeed there are some really bad-news violent criminals? I don't think the issue for them is deterrence nor some imagined moral equity, but protecting society. I don't know the statistics, but I'd guess that the large majority of seriously violent crime is committed by young men between the ages of roughly 16-28; locking such people up for 5-10 years would likely reduce violent crime in the community aside from any deterrence or (very unlikely) rehabilitation.
I think one problem is that we suck on supervising people out on parole in bail. In the Bay Area, Troy Ramon McAlister was let out of parole in last April for armed robbery. He was arrested six times prior to January where he ran over and killed two bikers during a car jacking. Despite being a parolee, he was caught and released for each of his arrests.
Similary, quite a few of the recent assaults against Asians are people on parole or bail. A few of them even had ankle monitors on which seemed to have little effect on their behavior. So I guess you're next article should be about the parole/ bail system.
I don't think this holds on the west coast anymore, where major city prosecutors have essentially legalized misdemeanors. I was caught in the middle of a mass shooting a couple of years back, which turned it to be three drug dealers having a shootout in the middle of downtown. They were all in their early to mid twenties and between them had been arrested literally over 100 times. These guys were getting caught constantly, but nothing ever happened to them so eight innocent bystanders got shot.
The ceiling on punishments is probably too high but we've also got to bring the floor back above zero.
As usual a thought provoking piece. And as usual, I have comments.
RE: Gary Becker. He presented a seminar at my institution while I was in grad school. The topic was "A Theory of Rational Addiction.". It would be fair to say the attendees were not impressed. The department was moderately liberal but no Berkely. As was usual for Chicago, the basis of the model was rational maximizing behavior. Perhaps, the decision to experiment with drugs can be framed that way. However, once one has a physiological dependence on a substance, rationality as the presumed basis of decision-making seems a weak reed.
RE: criminal Justice. I feel you left out an important element in the manner in which our current system operates. I'm referring to plea-bargaining. When police "catch" the alleged perpetrator of a crime, they systematically charge them under multiple statutes. This increases the leverage of prosecutors in negotiating plea-bargains. This reduces the costs of the judicial system. It is also particularly unfair to poor defendants who are typically represented by young, inexperienced, poorly compensated attorneys. A root and branch reform of the entire criminal justice system is indicated. Policing, judicial process, and incarceration ought to be modified to reduce the racism and class bias of the current system.
Really interesting analysis, and the idea of increasing use of ankle monitors is appealing to me. Two thoughts:
1. I think you gave short shrift to the "incapacitation" argument. The way I see it - a small number of people commit the vast majority of violent crime. Something like 60% of violent crimes are committed by repeat offenders. The idea of putting those people in a box to keep them away from society (perhaps until they're dulled by the effects of age, per your chart) is very rational.
2. It's not clear that your proposal of catching more criminals (but having shorter average sentences) will reduce the prison population. A lot of that hinges on the ability of our irrational criminals to respond much better to short-term incentives than long-term ones, as well as on the likelihood that they don't just commit more crimes and earn longer sentences subsequently. Regardless, I'm fully behind catching and successfully prosecuting more criminals. If the result of keeping our streets safe from predatory criminals was more people in prison, I'd make that trade every day of the week.
"If you want to solve more crimes, you need to make a point of investing in and rewarding that activity."
If police are rewarded for "solving" cases, it seems like an incentive to make sure someone goes to jail for each crime, but not necessarily the person who committed the crime.
The many cops and assistant DA's in my acquaintance all agree that society survives because of the impulsivity and shortsightedness of the criminal class. Only in the movies do you find crooks who case the joint or even plan a good way of getting away from the scene. In many ways, this comes down to the fact that robbery, mugging, and burglary are pretty much a high-risk waste of time.
One thing that is definitely needed if you want to catch and convict more criminals is a big investment in criminal justice.
There is a desperate shortage of public defenders, but there are also nothing like enough judges, juries are used amazingly inefficiently (ask anyone who did jury service how long they actually spent in the jury box), and there aren't even enough prosecutors, the one bit of the system that does get invested in.
There are also problems with jails (where people are held prior to conviction), though more efficient courts might resolve the overcrowding there.
And bringing conviction closer to the commission of the offence also helps with the short-termism of criminals. Anyone who has ever trained a pet knows that you have to punish quickly or they forget what they are being punished for. Humans have longer-term thinking than the average cat or dog, but not indefinitely long.
It will take a better mind than I currently possess to make rational counter-arguments to this analysis. I don't think there are any. But I would note that in the aftermath of the Wall St meltdown the endless cries for the incarceration of just about everyone on Wall st managed to ignore the fact that not that many committed actual crimes. Torts are not crimes and a complete lack of regulation of whole classes of investment instruments like derivatives made a lot of prosecutions of any sort impossible. Nor did I think much of the idea of imposing crippling fines on financial institutions that the government via TARP had to rescue just to to avert a massive liquidity crisis. That would have been very stupid. As would have been the idea that a saved Wall St should be compelled to lend money to people to save Main st when the problem was they lent money where they should never have done so.
Where is VP Harris on this? Seems like something she should know a lot about. Didn't she write a book called Smart on Crime? I seem to recall she proposed shorter sentences, increased police presence, programs to reduce recidivism, etc.
In DC, it was reported that one of the children who murdered the Uber driver had recently also been caught committing another carjacking. I haven't done the statistical analysis on this, but that's something I see a fair amount in violent crimes here - that the perpetrator has recently been caught for illegal gun possession, assault, etc., and they're out on the streets again quickly (in some cases, immediately and while awaiting trial, in some cases after getting a deal involving no or very little jail time.) I don't know to what extent that's a national or merely local phenomenon. That seems bad. Like, extremely bad, both because murder is terrible but also because the government seems to me to be more responsible for a murder committed by someone they just saw for another violent crime and decided to let go. As for doing monitoring instead, that requires a level of competence that may not exist.
I have been intrigued by several recent popular press articles about detectives settling murder cold-cases via DNA, sometimes through reconstructing family trees in order to reduce the number of leads to a manageable size.
I think that's a great way to clear cases. Here's an even better one:
Put a few billion dollars into testing and banking every rape kit in the country. There are thousands of them lying around, untested. That right there is a fast clearance-method, lying to hand.
"But rapes are hard to prosecute and convict!" you say. And so they are, which is a topic for another post (it's a toxic stew of misogyny and patriarchy, and the fault lies with jurors as much as prosecutors).
But serial rapes are relatively easy to get convictions on. And I am not alone in suspecting that serial rape is fairly common, and would be revealed to be so by a national inventory of the DNA from rape kits.
This would be an excellent use of time and money by the Biden administration. Making people less likely to get raped makes them less afraid to work and travel freely. Looks like smart infrastructure spending to me.
This is one of Matt's best posts to date. I seem to recall a previous one he did which touched on criminal justice but did not acknowledge many important issues such as the typically high time preference and below average IQ of criminals.
Actually his post today touches on some points I made in response to that post, in particular re the importance of a short time frame between crime and punishment - this is v. important when dealing with such people.
My proposals were a good deal more controversial than Matt's are though - I proposed a return to the use of corporal punishment.
It's probably true that short but certain prison sentences are a more effective deterrent than long but unlikely ones.
However I believe, that, particularly for the types of people who commit street crimes, corporal punishment would be more effective yet.
Ideally it should be performed as soon as possible after the crime was committed, and the criminal's memory of the crime should be "refreshed" immediately beforehand, for instance by being made to watch CCTV footage of the crime if available.
Corporal punishment is in many ways genuinely kinder than imprisonment too - ask yourself, how many months / years in prison would you willingly spend in order to avoid, say, 10 lashes?
Boy, that graph of arrest rates by age really speaks to me.
Since I turned 60, I hardly ever get arrested for robbery anymore.
It seems like we are recycling old ideas. One of Tocqueville's points about the success of the rule of law in America circa 1830 was "when justice is more certain and more mild, it is at the same time more efficacious." It is too bad that we forgot this lesson in the intervening 200 years, but thanks Matt for reminding us.
As one of your readers with past contact with the criminal justice system, I share your revulsion for long prison terms, but I think you're dodging one element: Regarding deterrence, you're spot-on. But don't you avoid/evade the issue that indeed there are some really bad-news violent criminals? I don't think the issue for them is deterrence nor some imagined moral equity, but protecting society. I don't know the statistics, but I'd guess that the large majority of seriously violent crime is committed by young men between the ages of roughly 16-28; locking such people up for 5-10 years would likely reduce violent crime in the community aside from any deterrence or (very unlikely) rehabilitation.
I think one problem is that we suck on supervising people out on parole in bail. In the Bay Area, Troy Ramon McAlister was let out of parole in last April for armed robbery. He was arrested six times prior to January where he ran over and killed two bikers during a car jacking. Despite being a parolee, he was caught and released for each of his arrests.
Similary, quite a few of the recent assaults against Asians are people on parole or bail. A few of them even had ankle monitors on which seemed to have little effect on their behavior. So I guess you're next article should be about the parole/ bail system.
I don't think this holds on the west coast anymore, where major city prosecutors have essentially legalized misdemeanors. I was caught in the middle of a mass shooting a couple of years back, which turned it to be three drug dealers having a shootout in the middle of downtown. They were all in their early to mid twenties and between them had been arrested literally over 100 times. These guys were getting caught constantly, but nothing ever happened to them so eight innocent bystanders got shot.
The ceiling on punishments is probably too high but we've also got to bring the floor back above zero.
As usual a thought provoking piece. And as usual, I have comments.
RE: Gary Becker. He presented a seminar at my institution while I was in grad school. The topic was "A Theory of Rational Addiction.". It would be fair to say the attendees were not impressed. The department was moderately liberal but no Berkely. As was usual for Chicago, the basis of the model was rational maximizing behavior. Perhaps, the decision to experiment with drugs can be framed that way. However, once one has a physiological dependence on a substance, rationality as the presumed basis of decision-making seems a weak reed.
RE: criminal Justice. I feel you left out an important element in the manner in which our current system operates. I'm referring to plea-bargaining. When police "catch" the alleged perpetrator of a crime, they systematically charge them under multiple statutes. This increases the leverage of prosecutors in negotiating plea-bargains. This reduces the costs of the judicial system. It is also particularly unfair to poor defendants who are typically represented by young, inexperienced, poorly compensated attorneys. A root and branch reform of the entire criminal justice system is indicated. Policing, judicial process, and incarceration ought to be modified to reduce the racism and class bias of the current system.
Really interesting analysis, and the idea of increasing use of ankle monitors is appealing to me. Two thoughts:
1. I think you gave short shrift to the "incapacitation" argument. The way I see it - a small number of people commit the vast majority of violent crime. Something like 60% of violent crimes are committed by repeat offenders. The idea of putting those people in a box to keep them away from society (perhaps until they're dulled by the effects of age, per your chart) is very rational.
2. It's not clear that your proposal of catching more criminals (but having shorter average sentences) will reduce the prison population. A lot of that hinges on the ability of our irrational criminals to respond much better to short-term incentives than long-term ones, as well as on the likelihood that they don't just commit more crimes and earn longer sentences subsequently. Regardless, I'm fully behind catching and successfully prosecuting more criminals. If the result of keeping our streets safe from predatory criminals was more people in prison, I'd make that trade every day of the week.
Your title slightly misrepresents your thesis, I think. You want
"More incarcerations, not more incarceration,"
i.e. more individuals caught and punished, for shorter periods of time.
(That old count-noun/mass-noun problem.)
"If you want to solve more crimes, you need to make a point of investing in and rewarding that activity."
If police are rewarded for "solving" cases, it seems like an incentive to make sure someone goes to jail for each crime, but not necessarily the person who committed the crime.
The many cops and assistant DA's in my acquaintance all agree that society survives because of the impulsivity and shortsightedness of the criminal class. Only in the movies do you find crooks who case the joint or even plan a good way of getting away from the scene. In many ways, this comes down to the fact that robbery, mugging, and burglary are pretty much a high-risk waste of time.
One thing that is definitely needed if you want to catch and convict more criminals is a big investment in criminal justice.
There is a desperate shortage of public defenders, but there are also nothing like enough judges, juries are used amazingly inefficiently (ask anyone who did jury service how long they actually spent in the jury box), and there aren't even enough prosecutors, the one bit of the system that does get invested in.
There are also problems with jails (where people are held prior to conviction), though more efficient courts might resolve the overcrowding there.
And bringing conviction closer to the commission of the offence also helps with the short-termism of criminals. Anyone who has ever trained a pet knows that you have to punish quickly or they forget what they are being punished for. Humans have longer-term thinking than the average cat or dog, but not indefinitely long.
It will take a better mind than I currently possess to make rational counter-arguments to this analysis. I don't think there are any. But I would note that in the aftermath of the Wall St meltdown the endless cries for the incarceration of just about everyone on Wall st managed to ignore the fact that not that many committed actual crimes. Torts are not crimes and a complete lack of regulation of whole classes of investment instruments like derivatives made a lot of prosecutions of any sort impossible. Nor did I think much of the idea of imposing crippling fines on financial institutions that the government via TARP had to rescue just to to avert a massive liquidity crisis. That would have been very stupid. As would have been the idea that a saved Wall St should be compelled to lend money to people to save Main st when the problem was they lent money where they should never have done so.
Where is VP Harris on this? Seems like something she should know a lot about. Didn't she write a book called Smart on Crime? I seem to recall she proposed shorter sentences, increased police presence, programs to reduce recidivism, etc.