Did you see that study about how children whose criminal fathers who randomly ended up spending more time in prison ended up doing better?
If less than 1% of the population is in prison then presumably those people are close to being the top 1% in terms of being dysfunctional in an antisocial way. Likely a net negative to people around them, whether at home or at work.
"a big reduction in crime would make all that much difference in their lives. I’ve read some people who say they think it would create a utopia! That’s crazy."
In some places it would be the difference between kids playing the streets and families in parks versus being afraid to go outdoors. What do you think about places with rampant public disorder, are they over-incarcerating people? Maybe they just need more policing, but you don't seem to be making that argument.
Besides urban density, if we're being utilitarian perhaps other things to consider is how crime affects people's politics(making progressives look insane?), fertility(too unsafe for kids?) and long-term thinking in general(world seems too unpredictable with random crime?).
People's subjective feeling of safety doesn't seem to be that sensitive to changes in the crime rate. https://news.gallup.com/poll/1603/crime.aspx Most years, the crime rate goes down and people think it's gone up, which seems like it must be a media thing. If we decreased crime by 63% by incarcerating all repeat offenders (not that I think that would be the effect size), there might be just as many headlines about the remaining 37%, plus more headlines about danger from police/wrongful conviction.
On the walking alone at night question there's been a significant decline from the disorderly post 60s era. I'd be more interested in revealed preferences than whatever people say though. If crime is bad enough to cause drastic actions like urban flight then surely it's bad enough to change people's urban behavior.
I think on the civil disorder point, you really should re-read Scott's conclusion. If you want a rule to not be broken, whether it's a tiny civil infraction like littering, or a more serious crime, the critical thing is that punishment must be swift and certain -- not necessarily severe. You want potential offenders to believe they will be caught, and that the consequences will be unpleasant. But they don't have to be _that_ unpleasant! You don't have to lock people up for a year for smoking on the subway. But an agent should be able to initially issue a warning and take down their ID, or impose a slightly higher consequence like booting them out of the subway so they have to pay a new fare, if they're being uncooperative.
The question of whether we should enforce civil order is _almost entirely separate_ from the question of whether we should, at the margin, incarcerate a few more people or release a few people, and from the question of whether sentences should be longer or shorter.
And spending less money on prisons would free up resources to spend more on police, station agents who just have eyes on things, etc. As trains get automated, we could also move money from employing people to sit at the front of the train, to instead patrol up and down the train suppressing petty disorderly conduct.
My basic conclusion is that at our current margins, we should probably be _imposing consequences_ a lot more often, and that it would cost a lot of money to hire and train people who could do that. But that the _vast majority of those consequences_ should not involve prison, and even for actual crimes for which we currently imprison people, we probably could get a lot of the benefits with surveillance, which would cost less both to the public and to the people being punished. At a very back-of-the-envelope level, my suspicion looking at the kinds of numbers the studies in Scott's piece are coming up with is that the money saved by not incarcerating people, and instead having them still in their communities being at least marginally productive citizens, would fund at least _much_, if not all, of the salaries for additional police and other order-enforcement staff.
(I also generally endorse David Brin's argument in The Transparent Society that we should basically just accept that surveillance technology exists, and maximally employ it through the state, with strong oversight and FOIA style ability for citizens to check up on how it's been used. Refusing to use it within the state simply cedes control of it to private actors who will apply it to _worse_ goals than the state would.)
With regards to civil disorder I was primarily thinking about places that also have high rates of serious crime like Detroit, south side of Chicago etc. Are fines going to stop the low-level criminals that eventually end up committing serious crimes like homicide? And if you don't bring down homicide, are these places ever going to be ok except through demographic change(which moves the problem somewhere else)? People are certainly willing to spend a lot of time and money to avoid living in these places, so clearly people value low criminality a lot.
"having them still in their communities being at least marginally productive citizens"
You know that stat that 20% of the people do 80% of the work? I'm guessing 20% of the people cause 80% of the problems at work too.
You seem to be missing the point. Again: the question is, _at the present margin_, should we be moving the least-bad person in prison out of prison? And note that you don't have to just, like, let them go and forget about them. You can make them wear an ankle bracelet and check in with parole officers periodically. (Though we probably should reform things so that it's easier for people in this scenario to move to wear jobs are, while still being subject to intrusive surveillance.) And then, if we do that, what can we do with the money that's freed up by _not_ paying for that person to be in a highly-profitable private prison bed? Maybe we hire two more beat cops.
The evidence seems to indicate quite strongly that taking a marginal dollar and moving it from spending on time in prison, to the salary of another beat cop or another detective, would deter more crimes and/or result in truly worst criminals getting caught faster. (Or, for that matter, the salaries of the people who manage and monitor people who are under supervision -- parole officers, drug treatment therapists, etc.)
As far as your last point, is your position that the 20% who are poor contributors should be treated as completely unemployable? Leaving them destitute and desperate, so they resort to crime, and then end up in prison for life? That seems like an awfully high percentage of the population, and it seems to ignore the concepts of comparative advantage, specialization, and gains from trade, which apply just as much at the level of individuals as at the level of nations. It _can_ be the case that the owner of the factory is brilliant and hard-working, and would do basically every job in the factory better and faster than any of the workers. But it will still make sense to pay minimum wage to a janitor, who's kind of lazy, and takes twice as long to do an adequate-if-not-great job, because the factory owner's time is better spent on other things.
There are workers whose presence _decreases_ the value of the enterprise. (Like, they steal, or whatever.) But they're _relatively_ rare, I very much doubt it's anywhere near 20%. The vast majority of "low skill" workers are still adding more value to the business than they're paid in wages. (If that weren't the case, the businesses employing them would eventually go under, or get bought out and re-structured.)
I do worry that the push for higher minimum wages in high-cost-of-living areas is at risk of dragging the minwage up too high in nearby lower-cost-of-living exurbs (i.e. making the fully loaded cost of employment too high for it to be worth employing marginal workers another hour). Given the option I'd probably abolish minimum wage in favor of a UBI that's high enough to subsist on (nobody should face a choice between tolerating an abusive boss, or ending up on the streets with iffy access to food and healthcare) and then do an extremely generous negative income tax on early dollars of wages so that "menial" jobs will still make sense. If your presence is only adding $4/hr of enterprise value, the owner should be able to pay you that, and then we can top it up with the expanded EITC to make it worthwhile to show up.
"should we be moving the least-bad person in prison out of prison?"
We don't know who the least bad person is, but should we release the person with the lightest crime that resulted in a prison sentence? How about we apply a statistical model to predict their future criminal behavior? I suspect that young criminals from the crime prone areas I talked about, often heavily policed already, will be more prone to become serious criminals, and so releasing them won't pass a cost-benefit analysis. It's possible that the US is over-incarcerating people in low-crime places while at the same time under-incarcerating people in high-crime places. On the other hand crimes in already crime-ridden areas may have a lower social cost.
"As far as your last point, is your position that the 20% who are poor contributors should be treated as completely unemployable?"
I'm talking negative contributors, not poor contributors. Businesses presumably try to avoid hiring net negative people already, through criminal background checks for example. Neighborhoods and apartment buildings probably also try to keep out felons if they're allowed to.
"an extremely generous negative income tax on early dollars of wages so that "menial" jobs will still make sense. If your presence is only adding $4/hr of enterprise value, the owner should be able to pay you that, and then we can top it up with the expanded EITC to make it worthwhile to show up."
Is the EITC a negative income tax? My understanding is that a negative income tax is like a UBI that fades out.
I'm not sure how necessary it is to subsidize low-wage jobs unless your welfare system is excessively generous, but maybe a good idea.
Yes, the Earned Income Tax Credit is, effectively, a negative income tax. It applies a percentage bonus to earned income. But currently there are fairly strict limitations on who qualifies for it at all. And the IRS also has been directed by Congress to direct a lot of resources at looking for EITC fraud. Much of which isn't even really "fraud", exactly, but rather people being mixed up about whether they qualify. In any case, the money recovered by these efforts to look for EITC fraud is not even enough to pay for the IRS's investigation costs, so it's all pretty dumb. Really we should just make the negative rate universal (which IIRC is an idea that Milton Friedman advocated), pay for it by raising rates on the side where positive rates kick in, and then spend all the money we were spending investigating people who claimed EITC on instead investigating a few more people at the high end of the scale, where on average $1 of spending on investigation returns somewhere between $1.50 and $4.50 of taxes and fines collected from people who were intentionally concealing or mischaracterizing income. (Presumably there would eventually be decreasing marginal returns on this, but it's very unlikely we're anywhere close to hitting that right now.)
As far as your other statement, at least now we're getting somewhere -- your theory of the case is something that could actually be investigated. Maybe you're right! I think you're not, and that we'd end up still moving some low-end criminals to supervised release, and that this would cost taxpayers less while also being good for those communities. But we should at least be pushing for further research to quantify this stuff.
An area that seems like it might be particularly tractable is reductions in very long/life sentances - in the USA "life without parole" really does mean "you will be in prison until you die". I am unsure exactly how you'd go about changing this but I think you might be able to make progress on shortening these sentances via pardons/commutions.
Older people are unlikely to reoffend so from a cost benefit analysis this is not a good use of money. I realize people care more about "justice" than utilitarian calculations like that, but I think the average person would feel uneasy about sentancing a man to serve 40 years for a crime he committed 30 years ago. It won't be uncontroversial but I don't think you'd get quite the same opposition as you would for more immediate crimes - perhaps there's something to be said for the UK approach of sentancing murderers to "life" and then letting them out in 15 years time conditional on good behaviour, although there are still "whole life" terms that really do mean exactly that.
Maybe there are some people who "need" to be locked up for the rest of their life for pragmatic or moral reasons, but I feel like the typical case is someone who murdered another person while young and impulsive and is now very aware that that was both immoral and stupid, and I think the average person (read: voter in a democracy) is willing to be forgiving in that situation.
I've argued recently that we can assume crime rates are not that important, based on the fact that urban/dense areas have lower death rates, lower injury rates, equal rates of PTSD diagnosis, and higher crime than rural areas. Whatever the second-order negative effects of crime are, they're smaller than the positive effects of high density.
Put another way, crime and leukemia kill about the same number each year. If you argue, like some neo-reactionaries do, that focusing on murder understates the amount of crime by a factor of 5, that promotes the comparison from leukemia to lung cancer. Since we spend significantly more on incarceration than on cancer research, we can a priori expect a marginal increase in incarceration to be less effective than a new research grant.
Seemingly your cost-benefit analysis still omits other significant effects that make prison look better? For example: it only takes one report of a rape in an area for large numbers of women to be afraid to go out alone. Instead they may choose different activities - GDP may stay the same, or even rise if they take Uber rather than walking - but their subjective feeling of well-being is significantly impacted.
In addition to everything outlined, I think it’s possible to bring an argument equal and opposite to that “crime drives people out of cities, cities advance science, therefore any missed opportunity to prevent a crime has indefinite opportunity cost” idea — the existence of cheap (effectively free) prison labor rewards and entrenches industry titans which rely on them to drive down their own costs.
Even in the cold calculus of macroeconomic planning, I don’t see how anybody can view that sort of system as anything but dysfunctional addiction. Prison labor makes things “affordable” only so long as prison labor continues. Therefore, there are perverse incentives on not just those directly profiting, but all of us to whom the savings are passed, to forever expand definitions of criminality, lengthen sentences, and even to punish the innocent; and not only for profit, but for the sake of keeping what we have. The mechanisms for efficiently producing goods atrophy, or are out-competed by these false sources of productivity. (False because, even if it’s “only” 2%, some amount of that productivity should not actually be there, and yet its removal would be difficult to afford.)
Did you see that study about how children whose criminal fathers who randomly ended up spending more time in prison ended up doing better?
If less than 1% of the population is in prison then presumably those people are close to being the top 1% in terms of being dysfunctional in an antisocial way. Likely a net negative to people around them, whether at home or at work.
"a big reduction in crime would make all that much difference in their lives. I’ve read some people who say they think it would create a utopia! That’s crazy."
In some places it would be the difference between kids playing the streets and families in parks versus being afraid to go outdoors. What do you think about places with rampant public disorder, are they over-incarcerating people? Maybe they just need more policing, but you don't seem to be making that argument.
Besides urban density, if we're being utilitarian perhaps other things to consider is how crime affects people's politics(making progressives look insane?), fertility(too unsafe for kids?) and long-term thinking in general(world seems too unpredictable with random crime?).
People's subjective feeling of safety doesn't seem to be that sensitive to changes in the crime rate. https://news.gallup.com/poll/1603/crime.aspx Most years, the crime rate goes down and people think it's gone up, which seems like it must be a media thing. If we decreased crime by 63% by incarcerating all repeat offenders (not that I think that would be the effect size), there might be just as many headlines about the remaining 37%, plus more headlines about danger from police/wrongful conviction.
On the walking alone at night question there's been a significant decline from the disorderly post 60s era. I'd be more interested in revealed preferences than whatever people say though. If crime is bad enough to cause drastic actions like urban flight then surely it's bad enough to change people's urban behavior.
I think on the civil disorder point, you really should re-read Scott's conclusion. If you want a rule to not be broken, whether it's a tiny civil infraction like littering, or a more serious crime, the critical thing is that punishment must be swift and certain -- not necessarily severe. You want potential offenders to believe they will be caught, and that the consequences will be unpleasant. But they don't have to be _that_ unpleasant! You don't have to lock people up for a year for smoking on the subway. But an agent should be able to initially issue a warning and take down their ID, or impose a slightly higher consequence like booting them out of the subway so they have to pay a new fare, if they're being uncooperative.
The question of whether we should enforce civil order is _almost entirely separate_ from the question of whether we should, at the margin, incarcerate a few more people or release a few people, and from the question of whether sentences should be longer or shorter.
And spending less money on prisons would free up resources to spend more on police, station agents who just have eyes on things, etc. As trains get automated, we could also move money from employing people to sit at the front of the train, to instead patrol up and down the train suppressing petty disorderly conduct.
My basic conclusion is that at our current margins, we should probably be _imposing consequences_ a lot more often, and that it would cost a lot of money to hire and train people who could do that. But that the _vast majority of those consequences_ should not involve prison, and even for actual crimes for which we currently imprison people, we probably could get a lot of the benefits with surveillance, which would cost less both to the public and to the people being punished. At a very back-of-the-envelope level, my suspicion looking at the kinds of numbers the studies in Scott's piece are coming up with is that the money saved by not incarcerating people, and instead having them still in their communities being at least marginally productive citizens, would fund at least _much_, if not all, of the salaries for additional police and other order-enforcement staff.
(I also generally endorse David Brin's argument in The Transparent Society that we should basically just accept that surveillance technology exists, and maximally employ it through the state, with strong oversight and FOIA style ability for citizens to check up on how it's been used. Refusing to use it within the state simply cedes control of it to private actors who will apply it to _worse_ goals than the state would.)
With regards to civil disorder I was primarily thinking about places that also have high rates of serious crime like Detroit, south side of Chicago etc. Are fines going to stop the low-level criminals that eventually end up committing serious crimes like homicide? And if you don't bring down homicide, are these places ever going to be ok except through demographic change(which moves the problem somewhere else)? People are certainly willing to spend a lot of time and money to avoid living in these places, so clearly people value low criminality a lot.
"having them still in their communities being at least marginally productive citizens"
You know that stat that 20% of the people do 80% of the work? I'm guessing 20% of the people cause 80% of the problems at work too.
You seem to be missing the point. Again: the question is, _at the present margin_, should we be moving the least-bad person in prison out of prison? And note that you don't have to just, like, let them go and forget about them. You can make them wear an ankle bracelet and check in with parole officers periodically. (Though we probably should reform things so that it's easier for people in this scenario to move to wear jobs are, while still being subject to intrusive surveillance.) And then, if we do that, what can we do with the money that's freed up by _not_ paying for that person to be in a highly-profitable private prison bed? Maybe we hire two more beat cops.
The evidence seems to indicate quite strongly that taking a marginal dollar and moving it from spending on time in prison, to the salary of another beat cop or another detective, would deter more crimes and/or result in truly worst criminals getting caught faster. (Or, for that matter, the salaries of the people who manage and monitor people who are under supervision -- parole officers, drug treatment therapists, etc.)
As far as your last point, is your position that the 20% who are poor contributors should be treated as completely unemployable? Leaving them destitute and desperate, so they resort to crime, and then end up in prison for life? That seems like an awfully high percentage of the population, and it seems to ignore the concepts of comparative advantage, specialization, and gains from trade, which apply just as much at the level of individuals as at the level of nations. It _can_ be the case that the owner of the factory is brilliant and hard-working, and would do basically every job in the factory better and faster than any of the workers. But it will still make sense to pay minimum wage to a janitor, who's kind of lazy, and takes twice as long to do an adequate-if-not-great job, because the factory owner's time is better spent on other things.
There are workers whose presence _decreases_ the value of the enterprise. (Like, they steal, or whatever.) But they're _relatively_ rare, I very much doubt it's anywhere near 20%. The vast majority of "low skill" workers are still adding more value to the business than they're paid in wages. (If that weren't the case, the businesses employing them would eventually go under, or get bought out and re-structured.)
I do worry that the push for higher minimum wages in high-cost-of-living areas is at risk of dragging the minwage up too high in nearby lower-cost-of-living exurbs (i.e. making the fully loaded cost of employment too high for it to be worth employing marginal workers another hour). Given the option I'd probably abolish minimum wage in favor of a UBI that's high enough to subsist on (nobody should face a choice between tolerating an abusive boss, or ending up on the streets with iffy access to food and healthcare) and then do an extremely generous negative income tax on early dollars of wages so that "menial" jobs will still make sense. If your presence is only adding $4/hr of enterprise value, the owner should be able to pay you that, and then we can top it up with the expanded EITC to make it worthwhile to show up.
"should we be moving the least-bad person in prison out of prison?"
We don't know who the least bad person is, but should we release the person with the lightest crime that resulted in a prison sentence? How about we apply a statistical model to predict their future criminal behavior? I suspect that young criminals from the crime prone areas I talked about, often heavily policed already, will be more prone to become serious criminals, and so releasing them won't pass a cost-benefit analysis. It's possible that the US is over-incarcerating people in low-crime places while at the same time under-incarcerating people in high-crime places. On the other hand crimes in already crime-ridden areas may have a lower social cost.
"As far as your last point, is your position that the 20% who are poor contributors should be treated as completely unemployable?"
I'm talking negative contributors, not poor contributors. Businesses presumably try to avoid hiring net negative people already, through criminal background checks for example. Neighborhoods and apartment buildings probably also try to keep out felons if they're allowed to.
"an extremely generous negative income tax on early dollars of wages so that "menial" jobs will still make sense. If your presence is only adding $4/hr of enterprise value, the owner should be able to pay you that, and then we can top it up with the expanded EITC to make it worthwhile to show up."
Is the EITC a negative income tax? My understanding is that a negative income tax is like a UBI that fades out.
I'm not sure how necessary it is to subsidize low-wage jobs unless your welfare system is excessively generous, but maybe a good idea.
Yes, the Earned Income Tax Credit is, effectively, a negative income tax. It applies a percentage bonus to earned income. But currently there are fairly strict limitations on who qualifies for it at all. And the IRS also has been directed by Congress to direct a lot of resources at looking for EITC fraud. Much of which isn't even really "fraud", exactly, but rather people being mixed up about whether they qualify. In any case, the money recovered by these efforts to look for EITC fraud is not even enough to pay for the IRS's investigation costs, so it's all pretty dumb. Really we should just make the negative rate universal (which IIRC is an idea that Milton Friedman advocated), pay for it by raising rates on the side where positive rates kick in, and then spend all the money we were spending investigating people who claimed EITC on instead investigating a few more people at the high end of the scale, where on average $1 of spending on investigation returns somewhere between $1.50 and $4.50 of taxes and fines collected from people who were intentionally concealing or mischaracterizing income. (Presumably there would eventually be decreasing marginal returns on this, but it's very unlikely we're anywhere close to hitting that right now.)
As far as your other statement, at least now we're getting somewhere -- your theory of the case is something that could actually be investigated. Maybe you're right! I think you're not, and that we'd end up still moving some low-end criminals to supervised release, and that this would cost taxpayers less while also being good for those communities. But we should at least be pushing for further research to quantify this stuff.
An area that seems like it might be particularly tractable is reductions in very long/life sentances - in the USA "life without parole" really does mean "you will be in prison until you die". I am unsure exactly how you'd go about changing this but I think you might be able to make progress on shortening these sentances via pardons/commutions.
Older people are unlikely to reoffend so from a cost benefit analysis this is not a good use of money. I realize people care more about "justice" than utilitarian calculations like that, but I think the average person would feel uneasy about sentancing a man to serve 40 years for a crime he committed 30 years ago. It won't be uncontroversial but I don't think you'd get quite the same opposition as you would for more immediate crimes - perhaps there's something to be said for the UK approach of sentancing murderers to "life" and then letting them out in 15 years time conditional on good behaviour, although there are still "whole life" terms that really do mean exactly that.
Maybe there are some people who "need" to be locked up for the rest of their life for pragmatic or moral reasons, but I feel like the typical case is someone who murdered another person while young and impulsive and is now very aware that that was both immoral and stupid, and I think the average person (read: voter in a democracy) is willing to be forgiving in that situation.
Thanks for the rigorous analysis!
I've argued recently that we can assume crime rates are not that important, based on the fact that urban/dense areas have lower death rates, lower injury rates, equal rates of PTSD diagnosis, and higher crime than rural areas. Whatever the second-order negative effects of crime are, they're smaller than the positive effects of high density.
Put another way, crime and leukemia kill about the same number each year. If you argue, like some neo-reactionaries do, that focusing on murder understates the amount of crime by a factor of 5, that promotes the comparison from leukemia to lung cancer. Since we spend significantly more on incarceration than on cancer research, we can a priori expect a marginal increase in incarceration to be less effective than a new research grant.
Seemingly your cost-benefit analysis still omits other significant effects that make prison look better? For example: it only takes one report of a rape in an area for large numbers of women to be afraid to go out alone. Instead they may choose different activities - GDP may stay the same, or even rise if they take Uber rather than walking - but their subjective feeling of well-being is significantly impacted.
In addition to everything outlined, I think it’s possible to bring an argument equal and opposite to that “crime drives people out of cities, cities advance science, therefore any missed opportunity to prevent a crime has indefinite opportunity cost” idea — the existence of cheap (effectively free) prison labor rewards and entrenches industry titans which rely on them to drive down their own costs.
Even in the cold calculus of macroeconomic planning, I don’t see how anybody can view that sort of system as anything but dysfunctional addiction. Prison labor makes things “affordable” only so long as prison labor continues. Therefore, there are perverse incentives on not just those directly profiting, but all of us to whom the savings are passed, to forever expand definitions of criminality, lengthen sentences, and even to punish the innocent; and not only for profit, but for the sake of keeping what we have. The mechanisms for efficiently producing goods atrophy, or are out-competed by these false sources of productivity. (False because, even if it’s “only” 2%, some amount of that productivity should not actually be there, and yet its removal would be difficult to afford.)