I like all the considerations you point out, but based on that reasoning alone, you could also argue that a con man who ran a lying scheme for 1 year and stole only like $20,000 should get life in prison—after all, con men are pathological liars and that phenotype rarely changes all the way. And that seems too harsh?
I’m in two minds about it: On the one hand, I totally see the utilitarian argument of just locking up people who “lack a conscience” forever the first time they get caught for any serious crime. On the other hand, they didn’t choose how they were born, and some people without prosocial system-1 emotions do in fact learn how to become a decent citizen.
It seems worth mentioning that punishments for financial crime often include measures like “person gets banned from their industry” or them getting banned from participating in all kinds of financial schemes. In reality, the rules there are probably too lax and people who got banned in finance or pharma just transition to running crypto scams or sell predatory online courses on how to be successful (lol). But in theory, I like the idea of adding things to the sentencing that make re-offending less likely. This way, you can maybe justify giving people second chances.
It seems worth mentioning that punishments for financial crime often include measures like “person gets banned from their industry” or them getting banned from participating in all kinds of financial schemes… But in theory, I like the idea of adding things to the sentencing that make re-offending less likely. This way, you can maybe justify giving people second chances.
Good point. I can imagine things like “permanent parole” (note that probation and parole are meaningfully different) or being under house arrest or having constraints on your professional responsibilities or finances or something, being far better than literal incarceration.
One of the missing considerations is that crime is done mostly by young people, and the rate of crimes goes down the older you get.
A lot of this IMO is that the impulsiveness/risk-taking behavior of crimes decreases a lot with age, but the empirical fact of crime going down with age, especially reoffending is a big reason why locking people up for life is less good than Ben Pace said, because the reoffending rate goes down with age.
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 like all the considerations you point out, but based on that reasoning alone, you could also argue that a con man who ran a lying scheme for 1 year and stole only like $20,000 should get life in prison—after all, con men are pathological liars and that phenotype rarely changes all the way. And that seems too harsh?
I’m in two minds about it: On the one hand, I totally see the utilitarian argument of just locking up people who “lack a conscience” forever the first time they get caught for any serious crime. On the other hand, they didn’t choose how they were born, and some people without prosocial system-1 emotions do in fact learn how to become a decent citizen.
It seems worth mentioning that punishments for financial crime often include measures like “person gets banned from their industry” or them getting banned from participating in all kinds of financial schemes. In reality, the rules there are probably too lax and people who got banned in finance or pharma just transition to running crypto scams or sell predatory online courses on how to be successful (lol). But in theory, I like the idea of adding things to the sentencing that make re-offending less likely. This way, you can maybe justify giving people second chances.
Good point. I can imagine things like “permanent parole” (note that probation and parole are meaningfully different) or being under house arrest or having constraints on your professional responsibilities or finances or something, being far better than literal incarceration.
One of the missing considerations is that crime is done mostly by young people, and the rate of crimes goes down the older you get.
A lot of this IMO is that the impulsiveness/risk-taking behavior of crimes decreases a lot with age, but the empirical fact of crime going down with age, especially reoffending is a big reason why locking people up for life is less good than Ben Pace said, because the reoffending rate goes down with age.
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.)