How's that strategy working out for deterring murderers and drug dealers?
How many deterred murderers do you think need to exist for it to be worth prosecuting and harshly punishing murder?
Though even after knowing your answer to that question... I'm not eager to live in your experiment's "murder is fine" group...
Drug dealers on the other hand will never go away no matter how many you arrest. There will always be more people willing to buy drugs and a new dealer ready to step up and make a profit.
Singapore and Saudi Arabia might object. Punishments always have some marginal effect; the question is how severe they need to be to achieve the desired effect magnitude, and whether the direct and indirect costs are acceptable.
My understanding is that lack of wild and controlled burns can be attributed to two factors:
1) Emotion driven environmentalism trumping environmental scientists
2) Political deferral due to the risk of blowback from out of control burns.
3) The urban public likes purty forests to go vacation in.
EDIT: I also feel like you're (believe it or not) politicizing this as conservatives and libertarians in favor of controlled burns and arson (yes, that is exactly what you sound like), and hippie dippie out of touch leftist urbanites being the real root cause of all this because of their supposed intolerance of controlled burns.
Afterwards everybody could get together, drink a cold beer, tell stories, bitch about how hard it is to be an arsonist and the lousy pay, and argue about who is the best arsonist!
Heck, CA needs so many controlled burns that they could create jobs for arsonists, thus preventing them from initiating disasters b/c of their failed "theatre arts" attempts. "Hello, Thompson, Department of Arson. Burn, Baby, Burn! How can I help you?"
This would also alleviate other states' problems as most arsonists would move to CA to get a steady job.