Further to the subject of “consensual crimes,” one thing that concerns me about legalizing drugs & prostitution is the subject of a thought experiment I’ve been thinking about.
Let’s say we legalize drugs, users can get them safely from a clinic rather than a dealer, yada yada yada. OK, so then what will armed street gangs turn to in order to profit? Prostitution, what else? So we legalize prostitution. Now what?
Here we have a situation where once-powerful street gangs have lost two major sources of income, and they’re going to be desperate. So I figure there’s either going to be an increase in property crime, kidnappings, stuff like that, in order for the gangs to generate revenue. That or they’ll turn to even more insidious contraband, like human trafficking.
Prohibition was not an utterly abysmal failure: it was generally a success. it was repealed because it was succeeding. Most Americans didn’t want prohibition: it got though in a lucky moment: they didn’t mind as long as it wasn’t working, but when it started to work, that sufficiently motivated them to push through repeal.
One of the effects of repeal was that the institutional machinery of prohibition needed a new role, and it found it in drug repression.
Most violent crime is committed by young men. Who don’t think in terms of getting caught. So
(1) Long prison terms have no effect on prevention: they don’t think about getting caught.
(2) There’s no point keeping them in prison after they’ve grown out of it, unless they’ve been so institutionalized by imprisonment that they have no other options.
(3) Locking young men early would prevent a lot of crime – at equal or greater cost to society, with corresponding long term damage.
I don’t think that the criminal punishment system is the primary determinant of crime. Both of the OP suggestions would have some effect, probably different from the effect hoped or feared: people are like that.