> if interpretted literally the results above imply that only murderers would optimally to prison as very few crimes even have costs of the minimum $500,000 modelled, let alone the near $10,000,000 required for prison sentences to be better than the alternative.
I am not sure this follows directly. You could have a case where:
- A crime costs $5k
- Imprisoning the criminal costs $500k
- If you didn't imprison the criminal, more crimes would happen.
The problem here is that you don't really see the crimes that don't happen. Yeah there are a few natural experiments, but they look at short-term changes, whereass on the whole I expect long-term incentives around how viable a life-strategy is to basicaly dominate.
I agree: it doesn't necessarily follow because the model only allows an individual to have the potential to commit one type of crime in their lifetime, so unsurprisingly finds that individuals only assigned the ability to commit low-cost crimes shouldn't be imprisoned. What it does seem to show though is that there does need to be a perceived very high probability an individual will commit at least one murder in the future to justify such imprisonment compared to a system with equal deterrent capabilities without the criminogenic effects.
I agree in the long run viability will dominate, but as economic lifestyle viability will be determined by probability of being able to complete crimes successfully not by harshness of (non-financial) punishment in the event of capture and crime does appear to have roughly unitary elasticity with law enforcement expenditure this would still imply cutting prison expenditure and raising funding for law enforcement agencies on the margin if the goal was crime minimisation?
You also give a few pointers to the academic literature on this topic. I have the nagging doubt that I probably can't trust it, that it's politically biased, that it contradicts some of my strong priors, and that it neglects long-term effects (as in the previous comment). I've never really engaged critically with that nagging doubt, but I thought I'd put it out there.
These concerns are understandable, but if my net criminogenic effect of +8.7% assumption above is weakened to a 0% assumption prison still shouldn't be used for crimes with a cost below $6 million at cost costs of imprisonment (and this is ignoring other losses from these individuals not working). Ratios: https://rpubs.com/Test509/1002245 Net benefit: https://rpubs.com/Test509/1002246 - so current prison being excessive appears robust to very strong biases in the literature. If you have an effect size you believe to be the case I'm happy to provide the corresponding graphs.
> if interpretted literally the results above imply that only murderers would optimally to prison as very few crimes even have costs of the minimum $500,000 modelled, let alone the near $10,000,000 required for prison sentences to be better than the alternative.
I am not sure this follows directly. You could have a case where:
- A crime costs $5k
- Imprisoning the criminal costs $500k
- If you didn't imprison the criminal, more crimes would happen.
The problem here is that you don't really see the crimes that don't happen. Yeah there are a few natural experiments, but they look at short-term changes, whereass on the whole I expect long-term incentives around how viable a life-strategy is to basicaly dominate.
I agree: it doesn't necessarily follow because the model only allows an individual to have the potential to commit one type of crime in their lifetime, so unsurprisingly finds that individuals only assigned the ability to commit low-cost crimes shouldn't be imprisoned. What it does seem to show though is that there does need to be a perceived very high probability an individual will commit at least one murder in the future to justify such imprisonment compared to a system with equal deterrent capabilities without the criminogenic effects.
I agree in the long run viability will dominate, but as economic lifestyle viability will be determined by probability of being able to complete crimes successfully not by harshness of (non-financial) punishment in the event of capture and crime does appear to have roughly unitary elasticity with law enforcement expenditure this would still imply cutting prison expenditure and raising funding for law enforcement agencies on the margin if the goal was crime minimisation?
You also give a few pointers to the academic literature on this topic. I have the nagging doubt that I probably can't trust it, that it's politically biased, that it contradicts some of my strong priors, and that it neglects long-term effects (as in the previous comment). I've never really engaged critically with that nagging doubt, but I thought I'd put it out there.
These concerns are understandable, but if my net criminogenic effect of +8.7% assumption above is weakened to a 0% assumption prison still shouldn't be used for crimes with a cost below $6 million at cost costs of imprisonment (and this is ignoring other losses from these individuals not working). Ratios: https://rpubs.com/Test509/1002245 Net benefit: https://rpubs.com/Test509/1002246 - so current prison being excessive appears robust to very strong biases in the literature. If you have an effect size you believe to be the case I'm happy to provide the corresponding graphs.
According to the top results of Google, prisons cost $80B a year. If that's off just correct me.
I've seen credible estimates that crime costs over 10% of GDP, or $2+ Trillion.
Prisons are a huge ROI for society.
I support corporal punishment as an alternative to prisons but understand that its a non-starter in the west.