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Comment by djoldman | Hacker News Reader

On the subject of deterrence:

If someone commits a premeditated crime carrying a guideline sentence of {20 years in State A, vs 30 years in State B} do we really think that they're more likely to commit the crime in State A?

It's my intuition that for the most part, people committing crimes aren't thinking about potential repercussions, much less measuring them.

I mean is someone thinking "Oh, only 10 years? I'll do it. But not if it's 15."?

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What I learned from Criminology 101 in college was this:

By far, the largest factor of deterrence was the likelihood of getting caught.

So, people, do in fact rationalize "I'm definitely going to get caught and the consequences are bad, I won't do it".

So, to your point, the punishment itself is largely a deterrence. I think because a rational human being simply cannot grok the differences in long term effects. This is already essentially proven in how people behave with money - i.e. people suck at long term saving without external forces nudging them to do so.

>By far, the largest factor of deterrence was the likelihood of getting caught.

Does that mean it prevents people capable (mentally and morally) from committing a planned crime or is it in general? Because everything I've seen says most people who for instance attack others almost never consider the consequences.

I don't know for sure but the general problem is that while certainty is almost nearly more effective it's also way less enforceable, meaning, it's much more difficult to enact laws that create more certainty of punishment:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterrence_(penology)#Certaint...

The death penalty should not be abolished because to some criminals in society the threat of force is the only thing they respect.

They don't fear prison at all? It's not like the options are limited to killing them or letting them go.

For some people prison is 3 meals a day and a place to sleep, paid with your tax dollars.

Life in prison is already a threat of force. The force is that they're forced to stay in prison.

I think most people who commit crimes do not believe they will be caught. Most data shows sentencing shows no deterrence. Alternatively sometimes fines do more to deter than other penalties. A theory I remember from a college class on the topic were that sentences are so unevenly applied that many people reason that they won't actually get the max sentence.

Most people who commit crimes aren't caught. Around 38% of murders remain unsolved.

Most of those who are caught aren't brought to trial. For obvious reasons, prosecutors strongly prefer cases supported by very strong evidence.

The corollary is there are a lot of murderers walking around unremarked and free - either caught and released for lack of evidence, or not caught at all.

So it's unlikely the death penalty has much a deterrent effect. There would be a much stronger deterrent effect if there was some magic way to increase the catch rate which didn't also intrude on privacy or civil liberties.

The data I've seen agrees with you, but it's subject to survivor-ship bias, and I've never seen someone correct for that bias in a convincing way.

The data agrees with you, as far as I'm aware.

It's my belief that the sentence length affects crime rate indirectly by affecting the collective unconscious. For instance if you see someone who did his time talk about his life in retrospect on the telly that affects you. When you see the (lack of) wrinkles on his face, that affects you. When you uncle Joey misses your birthday bash because he is still in jail, that affects you etc.

There's no effect to the best of my knowledge. Long sentences appear to be a tool for gaining votes and wasting taxpayer resources rather than correcting behaviour.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180514-do-long-prison-s...

Go to the article they cite and you will see two things. 1. They claim that longer sentences do in fact work (but are subject to diminishing returns). 2. The evidence is weak and full of caveats. Like it's not like we have RCT running for generations. We have observational studies rife with problems. They understandably try to make the best of what they have, but frankly it's just not good enough.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1745-9133...

Yes, it's possible incarceration itself is a sham treatment for criminal behaviour.

> One of the major justifications for the rise of mass incarceration in the United States is that placing offenders behind bars reduces recidivism by teaching them that “crime does not pay.” This rationale is based on the view that custodial sanctions are uniquely painful and thus exact a higher cost than noncustodial sanctions. An alternative position, developed mainly by criminologists, is that imprisonment is not simply a “cost” but also a social experience that deepens illegal involvement. Using an evidence-based approach, we conclude that there is little evidence that prisons reduce recidivism and at least some evidence to suggest that they have a criminogenic effect. The policy implications of this finding are significant, for it means that beyond crime saved through incapacitation, the use of custodial sanctions may have the unanticipated consequence of making society less safe.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/003288551141522...

It's a sensible belief, I have it too.

It's not backed by the evidence, though.

Harsher sentences do not decrease crime rates.

They don't seem to decrease crime rates in others, but how about crime rates for the people actually sentenced?

Sentencing Alice to 20 years for some crime might not discourage Bob from doing the same crime, but it is at least going to stop Alice from doing that crime again for the next 20 years (assuming we are talking about a crime that Alice cannot do in prison).

It's very difficult to calculate the sum of externalities introduced by long-term imprisonment. Crimes will be reduced at the public level as could _potentially_ be engaged in by the convicted, however:

1) The criminal is free to commit crimes against others in prison, which may further criminality in those individuals when they are released.

2) There is a burden on families, especially children of those incarcerated. The fostering system seems to result in a lot of future criminals.

3) The economic cost of a 20 year incarceration is probably about $50-100k per annum per prisoner in most first world countries. It's possible that this money being spent on programs to enable to impoverished to escape poverty or investment into programs or drugs to treat criminals would result in greater net reductions in crime to the public as compared to incarcerating a single individual.

A shorter sentence may be more effective if the subject is rehabilitated and able to integrate back into society. Coming back after 20 or 30 years would make it very hard to integrate into being a contributing member. We'd have to look at the whole picture.

And, of course, the death penalty makes it impossible for them to offend again if that is the main argument. Though perhaps they wouldn't have anyway.

Well by that logic, if you pre-emptively lock up both alice and bob you can avoid crime altogether.

But we don't lock people up because we suspect they will commit a crime, we lock them up as a punishment for the crimes we can show beyond a reasonable doubt that they did commit.

no, our brains are overwhelmingly biased toward smallness (i.e., 1, 2, 3, 5) and the short-term (which is just a special case of the smallness bias)--a consequence of the evolutionary advantage of inferring potential danger from tiny sample sizes. once a phenomenon gets beyond our ability to relativistically comprehend, as in 10 or 30 years (i.e., thousands of days), our brains can't effectively differentiate the consequences and treat them as essentially equal.

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