Could $30,000 a year prevent one crime?

Great Debates
21

There are other options than just handing out a cheque for $30,000 to people that “look like criminals.” And most of them focus on the most at-risk areas and individuals, here are a few off the top of my head, listed by the criminal’s age:

  1. Provide birth-control for highschool girls in high risk areas.

  2. Providing high quality day care, allowing single mothers the ability to earn better pay. With the added benefit of providing early education for children that need in the most.

  3. Provide after school programs in high risk areas to at least lessen the ideal time teens have to get into trouble.

  4. Something as simple as providing breakfast for students that would otherwise not eat. Encourages them to get to school early, and gives them the energy and nutrition to function well at school.

  5. I remember hearing about a program that provided lights for basketball courts so kids could continue to play in the evening that had a dramatic affect on crime in the area.

  6. Summer programs that keep kids involved in education. Malcolm Gladwell talked about a study showing how a white kid’s reading ability went up over the summer while a black kid’s went down. The reason was that the african-american child wasn’t involved in the type of summer programs that encouraged reading and development.

  7. Skill training in highschool to help gain meaningful employment. Even something as basic as making sure highschool students are literate. But also basic computer skills and people skills.

  8. Programs that provide summer employment for highschool students. Early access to the job market allows for a better understanding of what’s available and what their interests are.

  9. Scholarships and bursaries for tradeschools.

  10. Government grants for paid internships. this would provide local businesses with an incentive and the opportunity to hire someone they both couldn’t afford, and might not normally consider hiring. But gives a kid a chance to get his foot in the door and build skills towards something better.

At the end of the day, we’re going to have to pay that $30,000 whether we like it or not. And more most of us on this board there are incentives in our daily lives that prevent us from being criminals. I just think it’s time we got a bit more creative and started looking and more productive ways to spend that same pool of money.

22

Incarcerated people are not commiting crimes while incarcerated (or at least they are not victimising the general population when they do commit crimes).

Therefore Incarceration prevents crime.

Recidivism, by it’s existence, shows that criminals will often commit crime again. By keeping them incarcerated, we prevent those crimes from occuring.

23

I see your general point, but I think looking at it from a monetary perspective is only going to make matters worse. As others have pointed out, money is often not the primary motivation behind a crime. Moreover, I’m not sure that, if this concept were feasible, it would have anywhere near the affect you imply.

For a moment, let’s ignore impulsive crimes and consider only premeditated ones. Most individuals who commit these kinds of crimes will likely be doing it under the assumption that they aren’t going to get caught, or that the chances of getting caught are extremely remote. Of course, we know that in many cases they overestimate their own cleverness, but that’s not really relevant. If I’m going to rob a bank now, thinking I’ll get away with it with $100,000 and not go to jail, it would seem I’d have even less incentive against doing it when I’d get less pay out.

Now consider crimes of passion. In many of these sorts of cases, the consequences simply aren’t part of the equation at all. A man doesn’t murder his cheating wife thinking he’ll get away with it; any reasonable person would know that the spouse is the prime suspect in that sort of case. If someone is upset enough to kill someone without considering the possibility of life imprisonment, how could any sort of monetary reward have a greater impact on reducing his incentive to commit the crime?

If anything, I think this sort of system would have a negative impact because it would essentially change from punishing people for commiting a crime to bribing them to not do it. In essence, we’d be rewarding people for wanting to do bad things which would seem to me to lead more people to want to do bad things more often which probably means more bad things happening.

That said, I do think there’s better ways to spend the money on prisoners rather than just locking them up and letting them be drains on society. I do think that many prisoners probably have the ability to produce some kind of work, whether it’s printing license plates or sewing school uniforms or whatever. Given the choice, I would prefer to see public funds go to programs that prevent crime through better education and rehabilitation programs rather than punishing it.

24

I tell you what. I make an illegal U-turn almost every day to save myself a minute or two crossing the median that blocks me from turning into my apartment complex’s parking lot. Give me the $30k a year and I promise I won’t do it anymore… meaning you will have not just prevented one crime, but several hundred crimes a year. What better value can you hope for?

25

I have often thought many of the criminals I know would not be what they are if they had the opportunity to go to college or a good trade school.

26

This always goes over so well with the religious right.

We already subsidize day care to this end.

We do this too - as long as we have the money to afford it. The problem is we already spend this money on the people currently incarcerated. We let people out of prison early because we can’t afford to keep them in. Random preventative expenditure, however, is the first to be cut.

Most public schools have this program too. The problem is that being in the program shows you as needy so kids won’t always go. Again this program is frequently cut when the budget runs dry.

Basically its the same answer for all your other ideas too. They’re already in place. But we don’t have the money to support them all and while its a great idea to use the money we’d spend to incarcerate them to preventatively help them instead, the problem is we’re already spending that money incarcerating the last genertation of potential criminals.

27

Community College is pretty much universally less money than the gov’t will give you for free in the form of a Pell Grant.

28

Do you really think you’ll be imprisoned for a year if caught making that illegal U-turn?

But for stupidity’s sake, let’s say that you would.

ONE option might be to give you the $30,000 a year and hope that you stop. Another solution, and bare with me here as this gets a bit wiggy, another solution would be to hire a cop for $30,000 to make sure people don’t make illegal U-turns at that site. You make that illegal U-turn because you don’t think you’ll get caught, having a cop sitting there every day would probably deter you, that and the possibility of spending a year in jail, but that’s beyond the scope of this discussion.

And just off the top of my head, perhaps for $30,000 the city could improve that area/intersection so that people don’t feel they NEED to make an illegal U-turn.

Or perhaps the $30,000 could go towards improving driver’s education, so that there are fewer idiots on the road, and that drivers know what a no u-turn sign looks like, what it means, why it’s there, and why they should obey it.

So other than that just handing out cash, we could look a little closer at the reality of the situation. We’re already going to spend that $30,000, but from my perspective it’s a waste to have a kid sitting in jail for a year. By looking at the root of the crime, the socioeconomic factors involved, the level of education, and the ability for enforcement/prevention, I think that $30k could be better spent.

And I will fully admit that we can’t stop ALL crime, particularly the crimes of passion mentioned above, and the true sociopaths. But wouldn’t it be better if we could focus our energy on those sorts of criminals?

29

Purely from an economists stand point.

Spending $30k in 3-5 years is less expensive than spending $30k today.

30

All good ideas, but I really prefer the one where you just hand me the cash.

31

Unless it encourages people to become criminals. By, for example, producing the feeling among the more frequently imprisoned sections of the populace that they’ll be tossed into prison whether they commit a crime or not.

If prison prevents crime, why are we such a high crime society, despite our enormous rate of imprisonment?

32

Can you explain to me how that addresses rehabilitation?

33

Incaration is not the cause of the effects of society on the underpriveledged.
Who says we have a high crime society?
We just have the resources to police/enforce our laws. Countries with lower crime rates are generally poorer and ignore minor crimes completlely to focus their efforts on crimes with victims. Otherwise they are countries with such strict restrictions on personal freedoms, the opportunity to commit crime doesn’t arise as often.

34

It doesn’t. It does however produce a supply of slave labor in all but name, drive down wages and encourage crime & imprisonment. Both by making people desperate due to low wages and a lack of work, and by producing a profit driven reason to imprison as many people as possible.

35

Really. Having a major chunk of a group’s population in prison doesn’t affect that group?

Pretty much everyone?

None of that is true.

36

The myth that none of what I said is true leads to the myth that we live in a high crime society.

Spend a few days in border town in Mexico and come back and talk to me about high crime. (We’re #8 on the list, Mexico is #39 per capita crime rate)

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_tot_cri_percap-crime-total-crimes-per-capita

37

I think the OP has a point of sorts (and for that matter, why the hell does it cost THAT much per person to keep a person in prison?).

However, at a fundamental level, there is at least a math/logic problem. Its my impression that criminals commit more crimes than they actually get caught or convicted for.

So, at the very least, it aint 30k per crime, its probably more like a few K per crime and maybe even a good bit less than that.

38

I would say it’s no better than government-sanctioned extortion. Besides, it does nothing to stop them committing futher crimes after they get their payoff.

39

True, but the real problem is many of the kids from the really poor families, the ones raised on TANF, food banks, etc., don’t know what a Pell Grant is, let out how to apply for one. There’s a real, information desert is how I’ve always thought about it, that the really poor have to somehow get across to find out about the programs that might be useful to them. I think social workers are often simply too overworked to help them research all the options. As a result, the poor, but bright grows up thinking the only way out is something illegal.

40

I have doubts about the veracity of a site that promotes its own stats by calling them “factoids”.