How would that work? Assume that I'm willing to bribe the underclass with welfare to prevent crime (hell, assume I'm only worried about the worst types of crime)... how much bribery for how much reduction?
Knowing this, wouldn't you prefer that we spend the money on crime prevention programs that "bribes" the underclass, instead of in a system that won't prevent crime at all but will rob all of us of privacy?
The single best way to reduce poverty is to pay (bribe) the poor to stop having children, which ends the cycle of poverty (which is extraordinarily difficult to break and tends to trap generations). That should go hand-in-hand with free birth control, free day-after pills, free abortions, comprehensive sexual education, etc.
A large share of the bottom 1/3 in the US will never step foot outside of poverty, most of them will never hold a job on a sustained basis. Pay them to not have children, which simultaneously benefits their lives in the here and now, while preventing the mistake of bringing children into poverty. It's one of the most humane things the US could do as a society. It would very rapidly improve poverty (and reduce crime) in the US.
Its not hard to inject money in the right places to either decrease the reward, or increase the risk.
An interesting theory. But there exists a class of criminals who commit crimes not because the tradeoffs come out with the crime ahead of the lawfulness, but because they are impulsive, malicious, bored, and apathetic. Some of them continue to commit crime even after they are well out of poverty, even when the tradeoffs have shifted in the other direction. And this isn't some tiny fraction of crime, I suspect it is the majority of it. Crime has become their culture, and no one casually gives up culture and adopts a new one. More importantly, while one single person might do that, an entire group does not do this because they reinforce each other's continuation of that culture.
This makes it difficult or impossible to inject money anywhere and have measurable results. It makes it difficult or impossible to do anything at all about it. And for that reason, I'd prefer we not pursue a trillion dollar boondoggle.
Nope.
Lets take the famous example of low income area gang activity. They have examples of everything from local powerful people in charge having enough money to buy nice cars, to things like famous rappers with origins in same gangs. The reason why they commit crime is because the alternative actually sucks - you have to put up with boredom, lack of money, poverty, lack of any social support, all into a system that is going to discriminate against you even if you do everything right. This is where proper money injection with adequate policing can easily fix the problem.
As for people continuing to do crime after being financially off, this is still just a matter of tradeoff still favoring the crime side. The crime that most of these people commit is stuff like illegal firearms, drugs, and/or financial fraud - i.e stuff that is really not that relevant to society, with potentially a big payoff instead of investment. At the worst, some people get scammed. Meanwhile, the perpetrator gets usually punished financially or minimal jailing.
There are always going to be mentally unwell people who end up being serial killers, but the risk to society from those people is minuscule.
That's the perfect example! Street drug dealers make less than minimum wage. Why bother with the risk of prison, death, and on top of it get paid the equivalent of $4/hour when you could go make $14/hour at a fast food job?
Because you actually like the sheer hell of what you're doing.
>you have to put up with boredom, l
And how the fuck are we supposed to solve that problem for them with welfare? You'll notice you even list that first, poverty and lack of social support come, in your mind, second to boredom. I think we're actually in agreement here on the problem, just you want to pretend that there is a solution to this problem.