I used to have the opinion that prison sentencing should be a disincentive proportional to the upside of the crime. The question I’d ask was “How much of a prison sentence would make the crime not worth it to people?” I tried to estimate the upside to the criminal, and what length of sentence would make the expected utility reliably turn out negative. I would sometimes discuss with people how long of a prison sentence they’d risk in order to get the upside of a crime, and use this as an input into how long I thought sentencing should be. However, I now think this was an error, for two reasons:
Many criminals or norm-breakers are not doing something as clear-headed as an explicit expected-value calculation, they are often thinking with part of their mind that is relatively uncivilized (and perhaps desperate or hidden from much of their conscious mind). For instance, it is done impulsively, or it is a crime of passion.
Instead of sentencing, the better returns on investment are increasing the reliability of being caught. This ties in well with my standard refrain that there needs to be more reliable investigations of potential bad behavior or accusations of bad behavior.
I update that the primary reason to exile someone from a scene is when you expect the person to reoffend, not as a punishment.
I update that the type of punishment for bad behavior matters less than I thought – e.g. a monetary fine, incarceration, physical pain, community service, restitution, being fired, mandated training programs, shaming, etc – as long as the punishment is worse than the upside (which it can easily be at low amounts), and the punishment is quite likely.
Speculative idea: To more effectively disincentivize bad behavior in a professional or social scene I participate in, it would be more effective to list a couple of behaviors that I would actively invest resources to investigate concerns about, plus the bars that would be sufficient for me to investigate them, and also gather buy-in for a set of specific punishments that were proportionate, than it would be to loudly condemn the behaviors after they came to light.
I recall it heard claimed that a reason why financial crimes sometimes seem to have disproportionately harsh punishments relative to violent crimes is that financial crimes are more likely to actually be the result of a cost-benefit analysis.
As a concrete example, I previously thought that Sam Bankman-Fried should be sentenced to 20-40 years in prison for his fraud, because this was the sort of time that I think most people would no longer be willing to trade for an even shot at getting $10Bs (e.g. when I asked my personal trainer, he said he would accept 15 years in prison for an even shot at $10B; I think many would take more, and also the true upside was higher).
From the above I’ve updated that the diff between expecting 5 years or 50 years in prison wasn’t a primary input into SBF’s repeated decisions to do fraud.
However, I do think he is sufficiently sociopathic that I never expect him to not be a danger to society, so my new position is that life in-prison is probably best for him. (This is not meant as punishment, I would not mind him going to those pleasant Swedish prisons I’ve heard about, I just otherwise expect him to continue to competently do horrendous things with zero moral compunction.)
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.)
This is in part the reasoning used by Judge Kaplan:
Kaplan himself said on Thursday that he decided on his sentence in part to make sure that Bankman-Fried cannot harm other people going forward. “There is a risk that this man will be in a position to do something very bad in the future,” he said. “In part, my sentence will be for the purpose of disabling him, to the extent that can appropriately be done, for a significant period of time.”
I want to try out the newly updated claims feature! Here are some related claims, I invite you to vote your probabilities.
Suppose Sam Bankman-Fried is imprisoned for 25 years. After that time, he will be a decent, law-abiding member of society, who is safe to release from prison.Had the prison sentence for Bankman-Fried been life in prison, in this counterfactual world he would not have committed the crimes in the first place.
(This can be for whatever reason you think, such as because his expected value calculations would’ve changed, or because he would’ve taken more care around these particular behaviors, or any other reason you please.)
I can easily imagine an argument that: SBF would be safe to release in 25 years, or for that matter tomorrow, not because he’d be decent and law-abiding, but because no one would trust him and the only crimes he’s likely to (or did) commit depend on people trusting him. I’m sure this isn’t entirely true, but it does seem like being world-infamous would have to mitigate his danger quite a bit.
More generally — and bringing it back closer to the OP — I feel interested in when, and to what extent, future harms by criminals or norm-breakers can be prevented just by making sure that everyone knows their track record and can decide not to trust them.
I think having an easily-findable reputation makes it harder to do crimes, but being famous makes it easier. Many people are naive & gullible, or are themselves willing to do crime, and would like to work with him. I expect him to get opportunities for new ventures on leaving prison, with unsavory sorts.
I definitely support track-records being more findable publicly. Of course there’s some balance in that the person who publishes it has a lot of power over the person being written about, and if they exaggerate it or write it hyperbolically then they can impose a lot of inappropriate costs on the person that they’re in a bad position to push back on.
Suppose Sam Bankman-Fried is imprisoned for 25 years. After that time, he will be a decent, law-abiding member of society, who is safe to release from prison.
I voted 75% because taken literally I think in 25 years AI will be so advanced that he won’t have much of an ability to impact the world at all 🤓
I’ve been mad about the inefficiencies of the criminal justice system for many years. It does wasteful harm to perpetrators while also not doing a great job at prevention or helping victims.
One possible reform I’m excited about the possibility of is having more AI monitoring of public spaces. For instance, if a woman could wear a sign saying “monitored by live camera” she might feel safer walking at night. Or a store might post a sign about AI security cameras.
Another possible innovation is AI parole officers (perhaps house in a cell-service neckband with a camera), and a reformed parole system intended to be a long-term nanny rather than an excuse to jail the parolee. If you had to wear your AI nanny anytime you were out of the house, and it would scold you if it looked like you were about to commit a crime… This might substitute entirely for prison for the majority of crimes.
I agree with the view that punishment is not really a great deterrent as many crimes are not committed from a calculated cost-benefit perspective. I do think we need to apply that type of thinking towards what we might do with that insight/fact of things.
On that point, would like to see more on your claim that we would get better bang for the buck as it were from more investment in preventing crimes. In this regard I’m thinking about the contrast between western legal views and places like China as well as the estimates on the marginal pecuniary costs of prevention to the marginal pecuniary savings from reduced punishment. Clearly two (among many) difference margins along which trade-offs will need to be made.
Another aspect that seems worth exploring (and I’m sure it has been but not sure where the literature stands on the question) is how, at least in my understanding of USA criminal law, victims of crimes are not often compensated (white collar, fraud, financial crimes are something of an exception) but the victims, as a part of society, are then paying costs to punish the criminal. Full prevention is not a reasonable assumption (not sure what level is a reasonable assumption) but we might find a better solution even at the current rate of prevention if more of those harmed by crimes were actually compensated for the harms rather than just imposing the punishment of the criminal actor. A primary reason for preventing the event of a crime is the prevention of the harm. But if the harm can be largely mitigated after the fact there is a degree of equivalent between it never having occurred and it’s compensation (perhaps here we might think of law and punishment as a type of insurance).
I also think there is something to look at in terms of prevention of incidence of crimes due to incarceration—a type of exile. There might be scope for approaches there that maintain that type of prevention for repeat offenders (those demonstrating a propensity for some bad behavior for whatever reason) that may be possible at a lower cost than prison incarceration. And what might the marginal gain in prevention be related to the cost of the solution. This is a somewhat different approach than the ex anti prevention approach applied to the general society but may be nearly as effective but substantially lower cost.
For “prison sentencing” here, do you mean some time in prison, but not life sentencing? Also instead of prison sentencing, after increasing “reliability of being caught”, would you propose alternative form of sentencing?
Some parts of 1) and most of 2) made me feel educating people on the clear consequences of the crime is important.
For people who frequently go in and out of prison—I would guess most legal systems already make it more severe than previous offenses typically, but for small crimes they may not be.
I do think other types of punishments that you have listed there (physical pain, training programs, etc) would be interesting depending on the crime.
I Changed My Mind on Prison Sentencing.
I used to have the opinion that prison sentencing should be a disincentive proportional to the upside of the crime. The question I’d ask was “How much of a prison sentence would make the crime not worth it to people?” I tried to estimate the upside to the criminal, and what length of sentence would make the expected utility reliably turn out negative. I would sometimes discuss with people how long of a prison sentence they’d risk in order to get the upside of a crime, and use this as an input into how long I thought sentencing should be. However, I now think this was an error, for two reasons:
Many criminals or norm-breakers are not doing something as clear-headed as an explicit expected-value calculation, they are often thinking with part of their mind that is relatively uncivilized (and perhaps desperate or hidden from much of their conscious mind). For instance, it is done impulsively, or it is a crime of passion.
An Astral Codex Ten blogpost reiterated the common wisdom that length of sentencing has little effect on crime rate, and instead reliability of punishment has a much larger effect. The conclusion reads “Deterrence effects are so weak that we might as well round them off to zero”, and raised a point that struck me as quite relevant that most criminals have little idea about what the likely sentencing range is.
This has led me to believe the following things.
Instead of sentencing, the better returns on investment are increasing the reliability of being caught. This ties in well with my standard refrain that there needs to be more reliable investigations of potential bad behavior or accusations of bad behavior.
The primary upside of sentencing is in fact incapacitation effects, which are the crimes prevented because the criminal is in prison. The conclusion to the ACX blogpost states: “Incapacitation effects are strong. The exact strength depends on how many people are already in prison, but a reasonable estimate at the current margin is that each prisoner-year prevents one violent crime and six property crimes.”
I update that the primary reason to exile someone from a scene is when you expect the person to reoffend, not as a punishment.
I update that the type of punishment for bad behavior matters less than I thought – e.g. a monetary fine, incarceration, physical pain, community service, restitution, being fired, mandated training programs, shaming, etc – as long as the punishment is worse than the upside (which it can easily be at low amounts), and the punishment is quite likely.
Speculative idea: To more effectively disincentivize bad behavior in a professional or social scene I participate in, it would be more effective to list a couple of behaviors that I would actively invest resources to investigate concerns about, plus the bars that would be sufficient for me to investigate them, and also gather buy-in for a set of specific punishments that were proportionate, than it would be to loudly condemn the behaviors after they came to light.
I recall it heard claimed that a reason why financial crimes sometimes seem to have disproportionately harsh punishments relative to violent crimes is that financial crimes are more likely to actually be the result of a cost-benefit analysis.
As a concrete example, I previously thought that Sam Bankman-Fried should be sentenced to 20-40 years in prison for his fraud, because this was the sort of time that I think most people would no longer be willing to trade for an even shot at getting $10Bs (e.g. when I asked my personal trainer, he said he would accept 15 years in prison for an even shot at $10B; I think many would take more, and also the true upside was higher).
From the above I’ve updated that the diff between expecting 5 years or 50 years in prison wasn’t a primary input into SBF’s repeated decisions to do fraud.
However, I do think he is sufficiently sociopathic that I never expect him to not be a danger to society, so my new position is that life in-prison is probably best for him. (This is not meant as punishment, I would not mind him going to those pleasant Swedish prisons I’ve heard about, I just otherwise expect him to continue to competently do horrendous things with zero moral compunction.)
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.)
This is in part the reasoning used by Judge Kaplan:
from https://time.com/6961068/sam-bankman-fried-prison-sentence/
I want to try out the newly updated claims feature! Here are some related claims, I invite you to vote your probabilities.
(This can be for whatever reason you think, such as because his expected value calculations would’ve changed, or because he would’ve taken more care around these particular behaviors, or any other reason you please.)
I can easily imagine an argument that: SBF would be safe to release in 25 years, or for that matter tomorrow, not because he’d be decent and law-abiding, but because no one would trust him and the only crimes he’s likely to (or did) commit depend on people trusting him. I’m sure this isn’t entirely true, but it does seem like being world-infamous would have to mitigate his danger quite a bit.
More generally — and bringing it back closer to the OP — I feel interested in when, and to what extent, future harms by criminals or norm-breakers can be prevented just by making sure that everyone knows their track record and can decide not to trust them.
I think having an easily-findable reputation makes it harder to do crimes, but being famous makes it easier. Many people are naive & gullible, or are themselves willing to do crime, and would like to work with him. I expect him to get opportunities for new ventures on leaving prison, with unsavory sorts.
I definitely support track-records being more findable publicly. Of course there’s some balance in that the person who publishes it has a lot of power over the person being written about, and if they exaggerate it or write it hyperbolically then they can impose a lot of inappropriate costs on the person that they’re in a bad position to push back on.
I voted 75% because taken literally I think in 25 years AI will be so advanced that he won’t have much of an ability to impact the world at all 🤓
(Otherwise 40%)
I’ve been mad about the inefficiencies of the criminal justice system for many years. It does wasteful harm to perpetrators while also not doing a great job at prevention or helping victims.
One possible reform I’m excited about the possibility of is having more AI monitoring of public spaces. For instance, if a woman could wear a sign saying “monitored by live camera” she might feel safer walking at night. Or a store might post a sign about AI security cameras.
Another possible innovation is AI parole officers (perhaps house in a cell-service neckband with a camera), and a reformed parole system intended to be a long-term nanny rather than an excuse to jail the parolee. If you had to wear your AI nanny anytime you were out of the house, and it would scold you if it looked like you were about to commit a crime… This might substitute entirely for prison for the majority of crimes.
I agree with the view that punishment is not really a great deterrent as many crimes are not committed from a calculated cost-benefit perspective. I do think we need to apply that type of thinking towards what we might do with that insight/fact of things.
On that point, would like to see more on your claim that we would get better bang for the buck as it were from more investment in preventing crimes. In this regard I’m thinking about the contrast between western legal views and places like China as well as the estimates on the marginal pecuniary costs of prevention to the marginal pecuniary savings from reduced punishment. Clearly two (among many) difference margins along which trade-offs will need to be made.
Another aspect that seems worth exploring (and I’m sure it has been but not sure where the literature stands on the question) is how, at least in my understanding of USA criminal law, victims of crimes are not often compensated (white collar, fraud, financial crimes are something of an exception) but the victims, as a part of society, are then paying costs to punish the criminal. Full prevention is not a reasonable assumption (not sure what level is a reasonable assumption) but we might find a better solution even at the current rate of prevention if more of those harmed by crimes were actually compensated for the harms rather than just imposing the punishment of the criminal actor. A primary reason for preventing the event of a crime is the prevention of the harm. But if the harm can be largely mitigated after the fact there is a degree of equivalent between it never having occurred and it’s compensation (perhaps here we might think of law and punishment as a type of insurance).
I also think there is something to look at in terms of prevention of incidence of crimes due to incarceration—a type of exile. There might be scope for approaches there that maintain that type of prevention for repeat offenders (those demonstrating a propensity for some bad behavior for whatever reason) that may be possible at a lower cost than prison incarceration. And what might the marginal gain in prevention be related to the cost of the solution. This is a somewhat different approach than the ex anti prevention approach applied to the general society but may be nearly as effective but substantially lower cost.
For “prison sentencing” here, do you mean some time in prison, but not life sentencing? Also instead of prison sentencing, after increasing “reliability of being caught”, would you propose alternative form of sentencing?
Some parts of 1) and most of 2) made me feel educating people on the clear consequences of the crime is important.
For people who frequently go in and out of prison—I would guess most legal systems already make it more severe than previous offenses typically, but for small crimes they may not be.
I do think other types of punishments that you have listed there (physical pain, training programs, etc) would be interesting depending on the crime.