The Myth of severe punishment

[Zor]

I am sorry if this offends or runs contrary to your beleifs, this is just something i feel concerned about. This is here because i am concerned about how people think about deturence by harsh punishment, seeing it as a dangerous concept.

It is a phrase that is thrown around time and time again, "hard on crime". The idea is that if you make the law more severe in terms of punishment, you will lower the rate of crime as potential criminals will fear the consequences of breaking the law. The problem behind this way of thinking is that in any levels even aproaching the standards of modern civilization, it does not work.

For this reason, we shall look at England around 1800. At this time, people who vandalized bridges can and were loaded up onto cramped ships and sent off to Australia for a few years of Physical Labour and execution was applied to crimes that would get someone in a modern democracy a fine or a few weeks of community service. Never-the-less, crime was common in the slums and lower class areas of England. If you go back even further to the middle ages, things only get more extreame in the severity of punishments and crime rates. If the 'Deterrence' factor was as great as conservatives say it is, criminals back then would have cringed at the idea of commuting crimes, lest they face an horrific agonizing death on an impalement spike or being broken at the wheel or torture. In a more modern context, compare nations like the Australia, Germany, the UK and France in which the death penalty has been done away with, with the United States in terms of Murder rates.

However, it is unfair to say that there is not a way of preventing criminal behavior through this sort of thinking of severity, but for it to work one needs to dedicate himself to the mindset of Qin Shi Huangdi, Maximilien Robespierre and Joseph Stalin. Create an enviroment of Terror via heavily enforced and brutal laws with massed executions and forced labour in which guilt is assumed more than proven. However, in such a case the cure obviously is far worse than the sickness.

The proper way to prevent crime lies not in brutal punishments, but in preventing crime before it happens via social programs and in the enforcement of the law. Police, not punishments is the real deturent as even the most severe punishment is useless at deturening criminals if people think they can get away with it. Some level of punishment is nessisary, but in a modern society said punishment can very adequately be delivered by community service, fines, rehabilitation and jail time.

Zor

[Justforfun000]

Police, not punishments is the real deturent as even the most severe punishment is useless at deturening criminals if people think they can get away with it. Some level of punishment is nessisary, but in a modern society said punishment can very adequately be delivered by community service, fines, rehabilitation and jail time.

I agree with you in the main. People have to really WANT to walk the straight and narrow as their general desire. If someone wants to commit a crime, they will do so and rationalize it in some way that is a justification.

[MKSheppard]

Nah. I like murderous scum ridin' the lightning (or the juice as it is now)

[Master of Ossus]

All of the Econ studies I've read on the subject indicate that the elasticity of the number of offenses committed with respect to punishment is about -.1 in modern societies. That's not that high, but it's not zero, either.

[Lord of the Abyss]

Police, not punishments is the real deturent as even the most severe punishment is useless at deturening criminals if people think they can get away with it. Some level of punishment is nessisary, but in a modern society said punishment can very adequately be delivered by community service, fines, rehabilitation and jail time.

I agree with you in the main. People have to really WANT to walk the straight and narrow as their general desire. If someone wants to commit a crime, they will do so and rationalize it in some way that is a justification.

The justice system also needs to be regarded as a system of at least law, and preferably justice. If people think that they are going to be punished for being black/poor/whatever regardless of whether or not they obey the law, then a good number will just say "might as well commit a crime anyway, if I'm gonna be treated like a criminal no matter what."

[Sturmfalke]

All of the Econ studies I've read on the subject indicate that the elasticity of the number of offenses committed with respect to punishment is about -.1 in modern societies. That's not that high, but it's not zero, either.

Could you supply me with a link to one (or some) of these studies?
I would really like to know how they measure their elasticities... for jail time is it one percent increase in jail time leads to a 0.1 percent decrease in the corresponding crime? It will be interesting to see how they handle capital punishment.

[Master of Ossus]

All of the Econ studies I've read on the subject indicate that the elasticity of the number of offenses committed with respect to punishment is about -.1 in modern societies. That's not that high, but it's not zero, either.

Could you supply me with a link to one (or some) of these studies?
I would really like to know how they measure their elasticities... for jail time is it one percent increase in jail time leads to a 0.1 percent decrease in the corresponding crime? It will be interesting to see how they handle capital punishment.

It's obviously hard to do elasticities with capital punishment, but there have been some other studies. If you have access to JSTOR, Bar-Ilan and Sacerdote are doing current research on felonies in various jurisdictions (esp. US states and Israel), and voluminously cite to prior work.

[PeZook]

The problem with medieval-style punishment is that detection was neglible before the introduction of forensic science and professional police forces. Yes, you literally couldn't tell who comitted a crime if there were no witnesses. And guess what? If highway robbery carried a death sentence, and murder carried a death sentence, too, then why should a highway robber be deterred from murdering his latest victim, to remove a witness? He'd get away with it easily if he murdered the poor sap, and get killed horribly if he didn't. Gee, tough choice.

In the medieval age, crime was absolutely rampant. Huge bands of robbers (many times composed of people who were supposed to uphold the law) ran around the countryside, doing whatever the fuck they wanted. Even as far as the XVIIth century, bandits could carve out their own little kingdoms in the middle of a country and get away with it for a long time.

It was better in the cities, but still not very good. Today, crime is really quite tame, we just got softer. And, miraculously, even totalitarian state-sponsored terror using modern technology does not prevent all crime. There were plenty of criminals in Stalinist Russia - many of them in the government, doing the terrorizing

All in all, the idea that ultra-tough punishment prevents crime had been proven wrong time and time and time again. Sure, the correlation isn't nonexistent, it's just very weak and quickly reaches the point of diminishing returns - or outright counterproductivity, when the punishment for everything is so horrible, that people don't care anyway.

[ArcturusMengsk]

I think a great deal of capital punishment which does not take the life of the individual subjected to it (e.g. castration for sexual offenders) stems from a misapplication of a medical mindset to a fundamentally sociological issue, as well as a mistaken belief that the cause of crime stems from the organ responsible for it (the thief whose hand is removed to prevent him from committing theft in a third-world nation, for instance). There's no possible way I could back this up with empirical data other than general observations of the way people react to the subject, however.

[Elaro]

I think the desire to be "tough on crime" stems more from a sadistic desire for vengeance rather than a drive for an actual reduction of crime. I mean, criminals rarely think "oh dear I'm going to go to jail for ten years instead of five oh no!". If they do think ahead (which is not always the case) they usually take measures to prevent detection or make incarceration not matter.

So I agree with the OP.

[ArcturusMengsk]

I think the desire to be "tough on crime" stems more from a sadistic desire for vengeance rather than a drive for an actual reduction of crime. I mean, criminals rarely think "oh dear I'm going to go to jail for ten years instead of five oh no!". If they do think ahead (which is not always the case) they usually take measures to prevent detection or make incarceration not matter.

So I agree with the OP.

That, too. We are accustomed to saying that criminality represents a 'weakness of character', when we (quite subconsciously) know that precisely the opposite of true: the criminal is very often the stronger type. All justification for punishment is therefore simply a myth in every sense of the word - psychological justification for what is essentially an act of reciprocal violence (just as guilt is self-inflicted reciprocal violence, a sort of weapon devised by weaker types to protect them from the strong).

A great deal of it also comes from the very liberal - very Christian - assumption that man is but a piece of clay waiting to be molded, and that the criminal, though he might have a flaw in his mold, can still be shaped by the penal apparatus (or through the removal of the offending limb). But this is necessarily hogwash, the ideological descendant of a belief in spiritual matter: man is too anarchic to be malleable. It is not the hand which causes the thief to steal and which can therefore be punished; the desire to steal is, to borrow a phrase in a very general sense from Freud, overdetermined. Punishment is the desire for revenge justified, nothing more. And, if we ever get around to transvaluating our Judeo-Christian ideas of revenge, we'll find that that's not necessarily a bad thing.