I agree there are people who do small amounts of damage to society, are caught, and do not reoffend. Then there are other people whose criminal activities will be most of their effect on society, will reliably reoffend, and for whom the incapacitation strongly works out positive in consequentialist terms. My aim would be to have some way of distinguishing between them.
The amount of evidence we have about Bankman-Fried’s character is quite different than that of most con men, including from childhood and from his personal diary, so I hope we can have more confidence based on that. But a different solution is to not do any psychologizing, and just judge based on reoffending. See this section from the ACX post:
In 2001, the Dutch government passed a law allowing longer sentences for criminals with at least ten previous offense who were not good targets for rehabilitation (eg rejected or had already failed drug treatment). The law allowed judges to increase the typical sentence for petty theft (2 months) to a longer sentence (2 years). A quasi-experimental study found that property crime, though not violent crime, decreased by 25%. It’s not surprising that violent crime didn’t go down since the law was almost entirely deployed against thieves.
Vollaard found that the population affected was extremely criminal; they had an average of 31 past offenses, and on surveys they admitted to committing an average of 256 crimes per year (mostly shoplifting). Before the law was passed, they spent an average of four months per year in jail (probably 2 x 2 month sentences); afterwards, they spent two years in jail per crime.
I should add that Scott has lots of concerns about doing this in the US, and argues that properly doing this in the US would massively increase the incarcerated population. I didn’t quite follow his concerns, but I was not convinced that something like this would be a bad idea on consequentialist grounds, even if the incarcerated population were to massively increase. (Note that I would support improving the quality of prisons to being broadly as nice as outside of prisons.)
I agree there are people who do small amounts of damage to society, are caught, and do not reoffend. Then there are other people whose criminal activities will be most of their effect on society, will reliably reoffend, and for whom the incapacitation strongly works out positive in consequentialist terms. My aim would be to have some way of distinguishing between them.
The amount of evidence we have about Bankman-Fried’s character is quite different than that of most con men, including from childhood and from his personal diary, so I hope we can have more confidence based on that. But a different solution is to not do any psychologizing, and just judge based on reoffending. See this section from the ACX post:
I should add that Scott has lots of concerns about doing this in the US, and argues that properly doing this in the US would massively increase the incarcerated population. I didn’t quite follow his concerns, but I was not convinced that something like this would be a bad idea on consequentialist grounds, even if the incarcerated population were to massively increase. (Note that I would support improving the quality of prisons to being broadly as nice as outside of prisons.)