I suspect this is case with many things, that punishment is ineffective. Punishment ultimately assumes people are acting rationally, and they often do not.
The result is that the only way to impress upon people that crime "doesn't pay", is to make the rate of solving crimes in general much higher. That's... REALLY hard, expensive, it's nuanced and it takes time. Making punishments more draconian is easy, stroke of the pen easy, and it makes angry people feel good. They can't imagine that harsh punishments don't send some kind of message, because to them it does.
Sadly...
There's actually two sides to it: you can lower the upside to crime, or raise the upside to non-crime. Things like better education, job creation, better social security benefits, etc. all contribute to lowering people's need/desire to commit crimes.
Which it doesn't.
> The result is that the only way to impress upon people that crime "doesn't pay", is to make the rate of solving crimes in general much higher.
If you're trying to impress upon people that crime doesn't pay, doesn't it also make sense to focus on creating the impression that the rate of solving crimes is higher?
You don't have to catch more bike thieves, you just have to make them believe that they're going to get caught.
To be blunt, this is one of the most fundamental differences between the most successful ethnic groups, and the least.
Not to mention that if any of those inmates had children, the irrationally violent gene would live on anyway.
You're right, it isn't nearly enough. I am talking about the effect from the past when execution was an immediate and extremely common punishment, not an ordeal that costs millions of dollars and years of retrials and appeals.
I was not necessarily advocating for eugenic programs today; I think the problem is better solved for most countries by stricter boarder controls and ending the insane policies of unrestricted immigration of violent unassimilable men. But if I were, the death penalty is not the only way to go about it; mandatory sterilization for violent criminals would have the same effect, given time and the willingness to use it consistently.
>Not to mention that if any of those inmates had children, the irrationally violent gene would live on anyway.
Yes, but you will get many of the irrationally violent before they can sire any children. Over generations this compounds and you end up with Swedes instead of Somalians.
I cut this out from my original post, but I'll add it now. Every people came from nothing. Every people had their times of feast and their times of famine. Social capital does not come from wealth, wealth comes from social capital. From being able to trust that your neighbor is probably not going to murder you and your family in your sleep.
And so you see that some groups bounce back from crippling poverty and brutal wars. And others have merely found more advanced ways to kill their neighbors.
Peoples who have created anything remotely resembling a functioning society don't act with this brutality and frequency towards their own kin and tribes, no matter the circumstance. Either the Papua New Guineans and others like them have gone "backwards" from a common ancestor (insert pedantic comment about how there is no such thing as devolution), or the kin-killing irrationally violent genes were always there and the rest of us eliminated most of the people that carried them because they were preventing us from operating even the most primitive of villages.
So not rational.
Casinos don't care that they ruin some people, just like big tobacco doesn't care if most of their customers eventually die from their product, so long as the money changes hands first.
Little old bag ladies carrying $100K's of cash around NYC for drug lords are untouched, because anyone who might be tempted to rob them knows that within a few hours they'd be dead.
Swift, widely-known "justice" (punishment) can be a good deterrent.
So harsh punishments can be effective. If people see that breaking a law usually results in bad outcomes then they'll often adjust their behaviour.