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Comment by nikanj | Hacker News Reader

It's the adequate follow-through prosecution that's the problem.

Fines? Can't get blood from a stone. Jailtime? The cost-benefit analysis doesn't support that, prison time is expensive and petty theft doesn't really cause that much damage.

I have no solution to offer here.

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The cost-benefit analysis doesn't support that, prison time is expensive and petty theft doesn't really cause that much damage.

That's the rationale that makes car theft such a huge problem around here in the Seattle area, or did until the laws were tightened up a bit. Prosecutors and judges either didn't consider it worthwhile to punish offenders heavily or didn't have the legal tools to to do, so we ended up with people who had literally dozens of prior arrests being set free to steal more cars.

Not everything is supposed to be a profit center, and that includes law enforcement. I pay taxes to keep criminals away from my home and out of my life, and I expect to get what I pay for. Whether it's inconvenient or unprofitable to do so is not my concern.

> Whether it's inconvenient or unprofitable to do so is not my concern.

It should be if you’re paying taxes. I personally don’t want my taxes to skyrocket to cover expanded law enforcement if it doesn’t provide a meaningful benefit.

For the record, (almost) no one thinks law enforcement should be profitable. That doesn’t mean that cost/benefit analysis shouldn’t factor in.

> Jailtime? The cost-benefit analysis doesn't support that, prison time is expensive and petty theft doesn't really cause that much damage.

You're not considering deterrence. Sure, the cost/benefit of an individual does not support jailing a small-time thief. However, other potential thiefs may be deterred from committing the crime in the first place. This aggregate level of crime reduction often does justify itself in a cost/benefit analysis.

Is deterrence really a thing? Multiple studies show that more severe punishments don't actually deter because the people committing the xrime almost never think of them.

See https://nij.gov/five-things/Pages/deterrence.aspx

#3 on that list is all about deterrence. “Police deter crime by increasing the perception that criminals will be caught and punished.”

If criminals believe that the cost/benefit analysis will leave their crimes uninvestigated and unpunished, then yes, they are more likely to commit crimes.

#1 on the list you forwarded is: "The certainty of being caught is a vastly more powerful deterrent than the punishment." #3 is "Police deter crime by increasing the perception that criminals will be caught and punished."

Stings run by police, generating stories of caught-criminals, and making it so that repeat offenders face a rapidly-escalating likelihood of being caught, would seem to deter, by the evidence at your link.

Usually the major deterrent to crime is the likelihood of being caught. A lot of research has shown that longer sentences don't deter, however getting caught more often does.

https://nij.gov/five-things/pages/deterrence.aspx

Community service, pays back the community, hopefully break-even cost in terms of administration and enforcement to labor productivity gained, at least won't be as bad as a prison sentence. At best can be a form of rehabilitation.

And when you don't do your community service because there's no consequences (because jails are already full and because you can't squeeze water from a stone), what happens?

You also have to pay someone to constantly supervise them which is just as expensive as just paying someone to do the job.

Community service, pays back the community,

Probably just a gimmick. Court costs and overhead time checking the crooks doing mandatory good deeds might be more. But then we have to punish them somewhow

I'm not sure if this has been tried before, but how about a time consuming (multiple choice) test for deterring crimes where an offender, in order to cut prison time, has to study hard and be mentally in involved with like 1000 questions for a few hours. Fail the test? You're given a week to study and take the test again. The type of test that is so annoying that once you pass you don't want to take it again.

So, you're saying that to avoid jail, all the offender has to do is sit in a room for a few hours every week?

Could the police, after being baiting a thief have enough evidence to support an investigation into the individual, and get them for a felony?

Social credit score system in China takes this role I understand. People seem not to like that idea however.

Such systems have many problems, one of them being that they're fully automated, and mistakes WILL be made. One day you wake up with a ruined social score because someone who looked a bit like you was witnessed by a camera selling drugs or something. Have fun trying to correct that before someone decides to look up your score. Not to mention all the potential for abuse.

Public shaming.

That stopped working when homeless people became invisible to us.

It would work for some but a certain subset of people don't empathize and really don't care.

> petty theft doesn't really cause that much damage

Sure it does. Insurance rates. Compare rates for San Francisco vs. Houston for comprehensive coverage. Or San Francisco vs. Cupertino for that matter. Every smash and grab costs everyone more money.

Prop 47 is a big culprit. These thieves can cause $1000 in damage to a car, but their prosecution is pretty much pointless.

If we want to talk cost benefit analysis, prosecuting armed robbery with no injuries doesn’t make sense either: if the robber gets $100, and it costs $100,000 to imprison them, then that’s a bad cost benefit return right? If you want to operate under a cost benefit analysis, jail time should only be required if whatever damage is done exceeds the cost of incarceration. That’s absurd, but that’s what a cost benefit analysis would reveal, assuming costs are measured in dollars.

Broken windows policing works [1].

https://cebcp.org/evidence-based-policing/the-matrix/micro-p...

Why is this comment, which is sourced and well argued, greyed out without a single response?

Because many people wants no people in jails. Can't stop people from committing crime? Well, don't put them in a jail and bam, you have no people in jails!

Who cares about what someone feels after they get robbed. Public feeling safe does not register on RoI report.

  if the robber gets $100, and it costs $100,000 to
  imprison them, then that’s a bad cost benefit
  return right?

Depends if it deters him and 9 other robbers, who would otherwise have committed 100 such crimes each.

I mean, if a criminal is operating under rational choice theory [1] and they know their crime will go unpunished even if it is detected, why wouldn't they steal packages?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_choice_theory_(crimin...

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