Privately Enforced and Punished Crime | Hacker News Reader

Privately Enforced and Punished Crime

overcomingbias.com

28 pointsFeynmanThomas69 comments

A lot of the snarky comments are getting downvoted but I must admit that my first reaction to reading even a few paragraphs of this article was essentially revulsion.

I get that the rationalist community is really trying very hard to figure out novel ways to solve difficult problems and I am very supportive of that goal. I love reading Marginal Revolution for one, and I'm highly susceptible to the argument that there are likely to be surprising ways we might shift our thinking about difficult issues.

However private enterprise has so many unpredictable incentives that I simply would never want to subject myself to a system like this unless it had been proven to work for a long time someplace else (color me a private crime fighter NIMBY).

My view is that we need to improve our traditional government run justice and law enforcement systems, not privatize them.

Yeah. I upvoted the story just because I thought the fact that it was such a spectacularly awful idea made it worthy of discussion. But when I saw the snarky comments all downvoted, I upvoted the snarky comments too.

You can only come up with truly innovative solutions to old problems once you've understood the history of the problems and reasons behind the old solutions. Otherwise you're just starting over again on the old problems while adding a few more problems of your own.

> A lot of the snarky comments are getting downvoted but I must admit that my first reaction to reading even a few paragraphs of this article was essentially revulsion.

I'm not sure to what degree describing one's first impressions honestly consists of snark.

> However private enterprise has so many unpredictable incentives that I simply would never want to subject myself to a system like this unless it had been proven to work for a long time someplace else (color me a private crime fighter NIMBY).

And even then, you would have to have a deep understanding, and be able to replicate the exact cultural quirks that allow such a system to "work" in the first place.

If an existing system works badly, one shouldn't be too eager to understand and replicate all of its details.

Public enterprise also has many unpredictabl incentives. And many of the more predictable ones are pretty harmful.

> I propose to instead privatize the detection, prosecution, and punishment of crime.

Yes, because privatization of the prison system worked out so well, didn't it? So let's go the whole hog and privatize the entire justice system.

Isn't it the justice system that fills the prisons?

Many private prison contracts have terms requiring a minimum number of prisoners. The state is thus contractually obligated to convict people.

How is this OK?

Yes. But that is only possible because the justice system allows that.

I totally agree that these contracts should not be legal. But the argument is still correct overall, the prisons don't put people in prison.

And the US had overpopulated prisons before private prisons. In fact, the VERY REASON why private prisons were established was because there were so many prisoners that the government were just not efficient enough to organize it at that scale in some cases.

Fundamentally it is the bad laws and the bad legal system that leads to this.

Ooooor, move people from the public system to the private one, creating inefficiencies. Let's not call conspiracy, this is getting silly.

My initial thought is that this would create a "wild west" type society where bounty hunters go around and have shootouts with criminals, but without police training.

Also, how are cash fines going to work against broke criminals? "Oh, you stole a bunch of money because you have no money. Pay a fine"

Punishments should focus a lot more on the situation of the person involved.

For example, community service if you can’t pay a fine. If you don’t have time due to multiple jobs, kids, etc. then perhaps the state offers services to give you time (day care, food or travel credits, whatever). Sure, the state pays for that but is it really so bad to pay for these things when we pay to run jails anyway? Seems we’d have fewer desperate “criminals” if we just treated them like people.

If you have little money and need to be working multiple jobs, etc. then of course bail, fines, and jail time will completely screw you and you’ll end up even more desperate and likely to (say) steal again. And since people aren’t just leaving stuff around to be stolen, you’d probably accomplish that through property damage (more charges! more jail!) or, unfortunately, weapons (despite best intentions, things go bad and you’re desperate and assault occurs: more charges! more jail!). This is an insane cycle.

As I understood it, the legal liability insurance pays. The criminal then has to deal with whatever repercussions are laid out in their contract with the insurance company.

So you're trading government-run prison for an insurance-run one?

Or increased premiums, or torture, or whatever. I think the idea is if you don't like what the insurance company uses as a threat of punishment you can just sign a contract with a different one.

This assumes that someone has the time to read full-length legal documents and comprehend them. A task that is difficult for a lawyer, someone who is not only trained, but paid to do such things. It also assumes that the market wouldn't stablize around an equilibrium that is good for the market and the companies, but bad for the individual -- something that frequently happens with regards to loan companies.

For that matter, the current legal system assumes that you have time to read the criminal law.

Presumably, the insurance companies will be strongly motivated to teach their clients how to stay out of trouble.

> Presumably, the insurance companies will be strongly motivated to teach their clients how to stay out of trouble.

Why? If your clients don't stay out of trouble, you get free indentured servants. It seems to me there is incentive to make it harder to stay within the confines of your contract.

In the framework proposed in the article, if an insurer's clients don't stay out of trouble, the insurer has to pay fines on their behalf. If they can't pay their insurance premiums, they become indentured servants until they can.

The indentured servants aren't free and probably aren't profitable. These are people who can't make enough money on the open market to pay their premiums, so it seems unlikely that the workhouse will be able to generate more profit per worker than that. Given that insurance companies will lose money for everyone that converts from paying premiums into a workhouse laborer, they'll be highly motivated to get them back into the real world with a job, modulo the risk of them getting into trouble and causing another fine. So I don't see the incentive you mention to get them to break the contract.

> I think the idea is if you don't like what the insurance company uses as a threat of punishment you can just sign a contract with a different one.

It's more than that. The requirement to have such a contract with an insurance company gives people an incentive to not engage in behaviors that will make it more expensive for them to obtain such a contract, just as the requirement to have auto insurance in order to drive gives people an incentive to not engage in behaviors that will make it more expensive for them to obtain such insurance.

At least you have some choice when you choose your insurance! (Unless they outsource it.)

More or less. There are other formulations in which the insurance-function is bundled with other things (membership in an HOA-like structure, other protective services, etc.), but this is a fairly common scheme supported by a lot of anarcho-capitalist types. You can find some academic economic treatment in _The Machinery of Freedom_, by Friedman, and Vernor Vinge (science fiction author) seemed taken with the notion, too. He experimented with it in the _Across Realtime_ stories. Edit: Also Neal Stephenson, sort-of in _Snowcrash_, explicitly in _Diamond Age_.

I strongly dislike the notion because I believe access to justice is a bedrock function of society. But folks who think like me should also think long and hard about how much access "we" (in the US, not speaking for anyone else) have to justice without a big bank account now, and to what extent this would really change much.

As you say "access to justice" costs lots of money today, it isn't obvious that this gives less such access.

Then, presumably, if the criminal doesn't follow the contract the case ends up in civil court.

And if the criminal refuses to submit to the judgement of the civil court, that's contempt of court which needs to somehow be enforceable.

You could make the contempt of civil court a criminal matter, but then the same insurer ends up having to pay restitution to itself and this doesn't seem to end well.

Or if the civil court has its own enforcement arm then we don't seem to have moved enforcement to the place he thinks we have.

I did say explicitly that the one exception to fines as official punishment is failing to arrange for insurance. Your contract with an insurer can specify the court that judges disputes with it, and the forms of punishment available there.

I don't really understand their legal system, but from what i've heard, China has some kind of system like this. Where if you go to the police about something, they just sort of force the two parties to work it out and one of the parties pays the other a fine. If that were the case then this system seems ripe for abuse however, but I don't really know much about it. But seeing the headline and not actually RTFA my limited knowledge of China came to mind.

> but from what i've heard, China has some kind of system like this. Where if you go to the police about something, they just sort of force the two parties to work it out and one of the parties pays the other a fine.

IIRC, if you accidentally run over someone with your car in China, it makes legal and financial sense to back up over them to make sure they're dead. The restitution payment for accidental death is much less than the lifelong restitution payments for the victim's medical care and disability.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2...

> In China the compensation for killing a victim in a traffic accident is relatively small—amounts typically range from $30,000 to $50,000—and once payment is made, the matter is over. By contrast, paying for lifetime care for a disabled survivor can run into the millions. The Chinese press recently described how one disabled man received about $400,000 for the first 23 years of his care. Drivers who decide to hit-and-kill do so because killing is far more economical.

The "wild west" was really not as wild as people think.

A nice book that explores a little how problems were actually solved in the wild west is:

> The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier

> https://www.amazon.com/Not-So-Wild-West-Economics/dp/0804748...

> Also, how are cash fines going to work against broke criminals?

Sounds like a perfect opportunity to bring back debtor's prisons, where the interest on your debt and the fees for your keeping compound at a rate just higher than the rate you're "earning off" that debt...

Et voilà, endless, legal slave labor.

Bounty hunters exist today, avoid shootouts, and are well enough trained when that happens. They would have no special powers, and thus be liable for any damages caused by a shootout.

> My initial thought is that this would create a "wild west" type society where bounty hunters go around and have shootouts with criminals, but without police training.

As I understand it, the western frontier was actually relatively crime free (low rates of murder, robbery, etc.)

With regards to training, it seems like something vocational schools could offer at reasonable rates.

This is about as well thought out as my old professor's idea of "the roads should be illuminated, and there's no need for headlights".

1. Require insurance to live? Do you know how hard it is to even keep the PPACA? And you want everybody insured with criminal liability insurance???

2. Ah, I get it. So rich people can just pay to make it go away.

3. What about poor people? Unless you're subsidizing that "insurance", they ain't gonna get it. Cant afford it. You're just grinding people into more poverty.

4. And you think getting rid of jury trials is a good thing? The other main system is "Judge or Professional Jurors" Nope, nope, and fuck no.

People have to get insurance to drive on roads today; are you outraged at that too?

There is a long history of this kind of thing and many great economists have talked about different version to make the legal system more efficient.

There are different ideas how to innovate and sometimes privatize certain aspects.

Some interesting reads that people might enjoy. David Friedman (son of Milton) has been studying this for quite a while. For example in he had this talk about how criminal law should be abolished in favor of more use of civil law.

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KsMZbuGNj8

He has a whole book about different legal systems of different societies. A lot of his talks are very interesting.

Maybe efficiency shouldn’t be the highest goal of the criminal justice system, and maybe innovation and profit shouldn’t be either. There is plenty of room for reform of the current system without destroying it in favor of some dystopian protostome, eating lives and shitting money. Instead of this insane and inhumane proposition I’d suggest an end to the war on drugs, and fundamentally rethinking matters such as bail, jailing people who are not a danger to society, and mental health issues.

If all of thst is done and we still see a need for greater efficiencies in a much reduced system, then we can talk.

Many of these arguments have been made (and argued) between some of the best and most respected economists and judges over the years. But of course you are just so far above all this people that you can just 'predict a dystopian society' probably without studying any of the related subject at all.

Efficiency is actually a very high goal because in the context of a legal system it means that more people get the service of justice and get it more effectively. Its sort of a meme of modern politics that efficiency can be thrown overboard and as long as everybody can feel good about it we can move on, but that is the wrong attitude to take.

Also, these problem don't vanish if the government does something. Your proposal about ending the war on drugs for example, do you think profit has nothing to do with it continuing. I'm not saying its all about money, but stopping something that consumes billions will be opposed by many people. The same goes for many of these other things, like jailing people and so on.

The economists and judges who look at these things systematically try to understand the intensives faced by different actors in the system and to change the legal system to get a better outcome.

You might not agree with the person in the video, but you would learn something about Law&Economics at least.

> If all of thst is done and we still see a need for greater efficiencies in a much reduced system, then we can talk.

So any conceptual discussion about an ideal system should not be had because the current system is not ideal? Contrary to what you seem to imply the people who are having these arguments don't want to implement a new system tomorrow that changes everything. They are arguing about principles to inform the direction reform should take.

You've crossed repeatedly into incivility and personal swipes. We ban accounts that do this, especially when we've warned them before (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16706226).

Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use this site only as intended? The idea goes like this: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.

Maybe this poster does that elsewhere, but this comment seems pretty mild to me.

Intent is built into the very foundations of US criminal law (very rarely is any crime strict liability, where no intent is required). I’ve never seen a system of insurance that insures willful acts, seems like insurance reform would be step 2 after the proposed criminal reform.

It seems very strange to suspend imprisonment for a system where everyone has to buy insurance for their own potential criminal conduct and allow the insurance companies to resolve the cases based on damages.

I think criminals will be more than happy to buy their right to commit crimes.

The contract with the insurer could specify prison. The official courts no longer require prison, but the insurer that you've agreed to might.

An insurance is a "right to commit crime" as much as an insurance is a "right to crash your car into someone else's". If you have a car and an insurance, you can just try for yourself. The insurance would pay for your liabilities in that case, but they would likely not be happy to do so, and will efficiently communicate their unhappiness to you.

Your next round of insurance will cost significantly more after that, and if they decide that it wasn't an accident but a deliberate act, it might as well cost s much as a new car.

You’re actually reiterating my point. Typical insurance, as you note, is for risks (e.g. your example of an accident). In other words insurance won’t pay out if you willfully intentionally caused the accident. Criminal acts necessarily imply intentional conduct.

The author wants to suspend imprionsment for this insurance based damages system. Between the difference in car insurance and this criminal conduct insurance I think it equals a right to commit crimes. We have a criminal and civil court system (think on OJ case acquitted in the criminal case and liable in the civil case). I think the proposal amounts to mandated “criminal insurance” which suspends then crimaljustice side of things and allows insurance companies resolve the damages from crimal acts.

This is a terrible idea on its own, but I find it particularly unpalatable because the author is deliberately tickling the fancy of all the "My theories are so beautiful and internally consistent" libertarians who wouldn't be able to identify a negative externality if it punched them in the nose.

I've had this discussion a million times in college. It's always a dumpster fire.

I don't recall mentioning anything about consistency or beauty, and I think I'd do pretty well at a test of identifying externalities.

> This is a terrible idea on its own, but I find it particularly unpalatable because the author is deliberately tickling the fancy of all the "My theories are so beautiful and internally consistent" libertarians who wouldn't be able to identify a negative externality if it punched them in the nose.

> I've had this discussion a million times in college. It's always a dumpster fire.

This, a thousand times. Simple theories can be beautiful, compelling, and wrong (both in the sense of correctness and morality). There's an vast minefield of "knowing just enough to be dangerous" between ignorance and wisdom, it seems like many fans of economics and its associated ideologies get stuck there.

The idea that libertarians don't understand negative externalities is simple wrong. Maybe you talked to some people in collage who just don't know a lot of economics.

But in actual economics people who one could describe as libertarian politically have been on the forefront of research on externalizes. In fact the most important work on that was done by Ronald Coase. And since then many people like that have worked in that space.

No, the idea isn't wrong, it simply acknowledges the fact that there are a lot of libertarians who act like this:

http://libertarianpeacenik.blogspot.com/2011/12/big-mouth-li...

You're correct that there are many who are actually reasonable and pragmatic, but it's disingenuous to claim that the other kind of pseudo-intellectual libertarian doesn't exist. They do exist, and they give the reasonable ones else a bad rap.

This reads like the premise of a bad movie. When I hit the part about requiring insurance, I heard the ghost audio of a record screech.

Yes, he's trying to solve a real problem. This ain't the solution.

Requiring insurance for drivers is one thing - being able to afford a car presumes some ability to afford insurance. However, his solution requires insurance just to exist.

That's not workable.

If we've set the fine levels right, someone who can't or won't afford crime insurance is a net liability to the rest of us. The insurance premiums will vary greatly with the conditions one agrees to. Very few people would be unable to afford any such conditions.

Perhaps the author read Terry Pratchett because this whole thing smells a lot like Ankh-Morpork. You pay a certain amount to the Thieve's Guild and you're safe for a year.

> someone who can't or won't afford crime insurance is a net liability to the rest of us. The insurance premiums will vary greatly with the conditions one agrees to. Very few people would be unable to afford any such conditions.

Bypassing the "won't pay" for now - if someone can't pay, they're a liability? Then what? Let them rot?

A very large number of people live in conditions where they are unable to affect the overall crime levels. Sure, they can keep them from going up by one, by not committing a crime themselves, but they don't have any control over externalities.

All that aside, it's very easy step to the idea that if one doesn't have crime insurance, that, in and of itself, is a crime. This already happens with car insurance.

This is a stupid idea that taxes a person just for existing and if they can't pay, could possibly wind up making them a criminal themselves.

It's basically a cheap shot at the poor.

Yet we still suffer from a great deal of police corruption and mistreatment, because government employees can coordinate well to create a blue wall of silence.

So, to fix one minor problem, we're getting rid of equality before law, and paving the way for feudalistic corporations, getting one step closer to Snow Crash?

No, thanks.

Equality before law doesn't exist right now. Being rich carries with it connections and enhanced representation that gets one out of many crimes scot free that would be life-ruining to you or me.

And replacing criminal proceedings with cash fines improves this how?

> And replacing criminal proceedings with cash fines improves this how?

Because apparently the solution for not living in a utopia is to deliberately construct something that will obviously be a dystopia.

Argue how the proposed system would be any better, in this particular aspect you're pointing out, than the current one.

I'm not really sure why you're getting downvoted. You make a perfectly good point that is recognized in most intellectual circles -- anarcho-capitalism (which is basically the core proposal here) is strongly related to feudalism.

I'm pretty libertarian myself. But I got my limits. The HN cynical would rather spout we don't have it today, with no alternative, no proposed solution, and always bowing to the Grand Liberating Corporations of the valley.

This smells of slavery with extra steps

Reminds me of L.P.D.: Libertarian Police Department:

https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertari...

Sad to see this downvoted - very funny.

TLDR: A sufficient amount of ignorance about how insurance works can solve all crime through magic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com