Shorter and lighter but also more *frequent *and certain.?
That is the claim made by Mark Kleiman and I think his argument is worth considering and debating. To see one of his talks look here:
The topic of crime and punishment is pretty damn interesting. What effects do our punishments have? Is the intent to be punitive for its own sake, or to reduce the likelihood of repeat offense?
For those who do not want to listen to the entire argument in the video the basic idea is that severe but uncertain punishments (like a probation officer who might or might not give an offender another chance before putting them away for a LONG TIME) actually makes it more likely they will offend again vs making every violation more certain. With that last component intact, the severity of the punishments can be ramped down dramatically.
If this holds up beyond the HOPE program in Hawaii, we could essentially cut the prison population down by perhaps 80% while also reducing crime and drug issues (including alcohol issues). It would save budgets and improve lives. It sounds like a goldilocks solution.
One section of the video was particularly relevant about the psychology of mankind and how they respond to delaying gratification, part of what undergirds the social problems of so many.
I’ve heard of the marshmallow experiment as most of us have, but the twist at the end when another group was preprepped by having a reward not followed through on was telling.
If the rewards for delaying gratification are uncertain or seen as less likely, you may as well eat your desert NOW rather than hope that it might come later. That psychology is what needs to be trained out of people, and apparently it can even in adults. This could be one of the greatest hopes of all mankind.
So what do you all think of it? Promising? Skeptical?
Most recreational drugs should be legalized. Keeping them illegal produces gang warfare, and keeps the price of drugs so high that addicts often turn to theft as a way to support their habit.
Well, the concept I remember learning in a government class was that in order to be effective, punishment needs to be swift, severe and sure, meaning that you have to punish:
relatively close to the time that the offense was committed
appropriately severely with respect to the crime
without doubt; as in, if you commit the crime, you have to have a solid expectation of being punished rapidly and severely.
It’s basically housebreaking a dog writ large. So in light of that, the frequency and certainty parts of the proposed scheme are dead-on. Severity is up for debate; if the theory is that someone will get caught 90% of the time they buy a dime bag, and that they’ll definitely get slapped with a $500 fine every time payable immediately, then yes, I can see that being a much greater deterrent than a potential prison term… IF you get caught, and IF everything falls into place against you.
Look at it this way- I’m rather lackadaisical about getting my car safety inspections, because I know that I can literally go years without being pulled over for it, and when I do, if I get it inspected and prove it within 2 weeks, it’s a $20 fine. However, if there were inspection sticker cameras all over that sent me a $15 fine in the mail every time I drove by one, you’d better believe I’d keep my car inspected rather than repeatedly and consistenly paying fines for being out of inspection. It would be even more effective if it escalated ($15 the first time, $25 the second, $45 the third, etc… )
Or those of you with kids; does it work to threaten your kids with dire punishments, only catch them half the time, and when you do catch them, not levy the full dire punishment? No, it doesn’t. You look capricious and inconsistent, and the kids don’t really fear your punishment.
It would be difficult to increase the incarceration rate without revising our standards of evidence required to prosecute someone, and that would be nearly impossible to change due to the weight of all decisions to-date around the 4th to 8th Amendments and consequently built into the legal system.
I’m sure that if “beyond a reasonable doubt” was changed to “reasonably likely”, there would be significant results in the crime rate. Though it would also have significant results on the number of innocents in jail (though still a far minority).
A danger to opening up recreational drugs is that, really, there’s no difference between a recreational drug and a medicinal drug. It’s bizarre to have restrictions on prescription-only medications and then go ahead and tell people that they can pop any toxic substance they want, so long as it’s just for the lulz.
Any pharmaceutical company would basically be free to stop meeting FDA standards and just issue any drug they came up with as a recreational drug.
I don’t think it would help. I know this is just anecdotal, but whenever I watch the nightly news about someone being arrested for an armed robbery or assault, it seems the story is always that the suspect has been arrested 15 or 20 times in the past, and was out on parole for a similar crime committed a few months ago.
One potential downside to swift but limited penalties is the temptation to “spend” a penalty if you believe that you will come out ahead. E.g. perhaps you stand to make $200 a day working as a delivery driver but you know that if you do it without a valid driver’s license, you will be fined $50. You don’t have a driver’s license. Since $200 (the benefit) is greater than $50 (the cost), you stand to come out $150 a day ahead by driving on suspended. So you do it.
I think it will drop the number of people incarcerated on probation/parole violations (and will save money just by doing that) - but it won’t work for every sort of crime and it won’t drop the prison population by 80%. I’ve been reading about a lot of new probation/parole programs lately as my state is preparing to start one and there are different parts to most of them.
One of the pieces is almost always “swift and certain” - when the only real sanction for a parole or probation violation is prison, a lot of minor violations tend to accumulate before anything happens. And along with “swift and certain” comes less severe sanctions- a day or two or three in jail for every positive drug test rather than months or years for a parole/probation violation that only happened after multiple drug tests and program failures. Another piece is “graduated sanctions” (and sometimes rewards). This means for the first curfew violation , there might be an overnight stay in jail , the second might be three days , and the third might be a trip through whatever the violation process is. There are multiple possible sanctions and different sanctions are used for different behaviors- a night in jail wouldn’t be an option for someone who beat up his girlfriend.
The part that has me the most excited is the ability to target drug rehab and other services to those who actually need them, rather than sending every parolee who ever used cocaine to treatment. One program (I think Hawaii) ended up with only 20% getting to the third positive urine test. The other 80% either never had a positive test or stopped using after one or two short-term jail stays. Which suggests that they didn't have a substance abuse problem that actually requires treatment and we can spend that money on the 20% who do.
**robert_columbia ** is correct that the sanctions must be appropriately chosen. The example I give is of parking on a particular street near my office. Parking is not permitted before 10 am and after 4 pm , but people leave their cars there all the time. They do so because although the ticket is $165, they might get one or two tickets per year. If they received a $5 ticket every time they were parked illegally, they would still park there because the public garages cost $6. How long do you think they would park there if it was a $10 ticket they got every single time?
On the pushback against the argument to drop the severity of punishments, Mark actually touches on that here.
2 weeks, 2 days, same effective result in dropping return offenses. This suggests that the learning is less affected by the severity than it is by the certainty of punishment. He goes on to say they don’t yet know what the minimum effective dose of punishment would be. There likely is such a punishment threshold but it needs more study.
I have yet to hear anyone challenge his results, he claims that the methods he is describing when tried are far more effective than the alternatives, but there seems to be resistance to expanding this policy. Why I do not know. Conservatives want to save money, if they could reduce the money spent on prisons that would seem to be a good thing. Liberals want fewer minorities in jail, if this type of program was more effective at keeping people out of trouble by training them off of bad behaviors, why not expand it?
Perhaps because it does not fit either left/right dogma. The right wants severe punishment, throw them into a pit types and keep them away from the “decent” folk attitude. The left wants to preserve the idea that society needs to change and become utopian to get better results (i.e. need to end racism/poverty/inequality etc).
Training people out of destructive habits through the probation system does not prop up either one of those dogmas.
Antibiotics are kind of an exception to this. If somebody wants to sit at home and get high, they are only effecting themselves. If people are taking antibiotics willy-nilly then it creates more antibiotic resistant bacteria, which are already becoming a public health hazard.
