I realized now that I hadn’t made a sufficient argument for execution specifically. I left out quite a few things, but It’s such a monolith I’m not sure where to add things in.
There’s a few competing options. A non-exhaustive list includes imprisonment (status quo), execution, legalization, rehabilitation, and fines/labor.
Imprisonment is bad and because it’s the status quo I focused on it entirely. I consider it the worst of all options except fines/labor. Execution is a terrible option but, as I argue above, better than imprisonment. Fines/labor is the worst because it could incentivize people to increase the number of people who commit crimes in order to get free money/labor, as is already happening with red light cameras causing accidents just to generate more money. Legalization or setting them free is the best option for several classes of crime, but as I mentioned murder isn’t one of them.
Rehabilitation / Clockwork Orange’s system seems interesting depending on the data. Not the torture part; torture is something I don’t condone since it would be expensive and ineffectual. However, ignoring Clockwork Orange’s implementation, the idea of perfect rehabilitation is a powerful one. I know of an experiment with Norway’s Halden Prison. It seems promising for a wide variety of criminals, though I’m curious about how they would deal with people who cannot be rehabilitated (eg, brain damaged). This approach is IIRC fairly new and I’m interested in what time will make of it.
I could very well see myself becoming an advocate of a pure rehabilitation system if it turns out to be successful.
One traditional punishment that I don’t see being explicitly discussed much is exile.
I.e., we don’t want you here. You have a month to find somewhere else to go, then we shoot you on sight.
It’s got quite a few good points for it:
The convict is responsible for his maintenance, so it’s him/her that must put a price on his/her life;
Even if we pay for his/her air fare it’s cheaper than permanent incarceration;
It’s not permanent (if the convict picks exile), so it can be reversed if new evidence comes up in a decade;
With modern communications the family can interact the convict without leaving the country, or they can choose to leave at the same time if they wish;
If no other country (or abandoned island) can be found to admit the exiled, that’s a pretty good justification for not accepting the cost of their upkeep;
If it so happens that Norway takes them in and rehabilitates them, so much the better; if it happens enough we might copy the experiment, or at least put in place a procedure to “parole” rehabilitated exiles;
Noncompliance is handled quite differently from things like illegal immigration and escape from prison: Next time you’re found (and we can confirm identity pretty well these days if we have the person before and after) you get executed within a couple of days, without the years of appeals and waiting in death row, and a much lesser chance to escape;
It’s pretty clear that people prefer it to prison, death row, and even persecution, given how many self-exile (e.g., run to Mexico) and claim political asylum; wouldn’t it be much simpler to just let someone go wherever someone’ll take them (remember, they get shot if they try to get back) than chase them all across the country just to drag them back, put them in prison, and pay for their upkeep for decades?
red light cameras causing accidents just to generate more money
Could you describe the mechanism by which this happens? The link seems to include statistical studies showing correlation between cameras and accidents, but I can’t imagine how this works causally.
Well, there is the government’s FHWA study. There are a couple mechanisms.
The first is that sometimes running a red light is safer. People normally don’t think about red light cameras and thus their impact on behavior only comes into play when after the driver is already in a position to get caught. This leads to people making unsafe stops when it would be otherwise more advisable to just go through the light. The link above shows an increase in rear-end collisions.
More relevant to the original point is how the city reacts. The city council enjoys money and shortens yellow light timings or blocks lengthening of yellow light timings, causing more crashes.
Looking briefly, they’re all before-after correlational studies (longitudinal). These are not as good as randomized experiments, but they’re still much better than a cross-sectional correlation (eg. “we looked at all traffic lights; ones with cameras have higher accident rates p=0.xyz”).
For example, given a cross-sectional correlation result like that, there’s a very easy retort: “people only install cameras at dangerous intersections!” The longitudinal design deals with that: “but they weren’t so dangerous before the cameras were installed!”
Now a critic must look to less likely explanations: “maybe there has been a traffic-crime wave whose early phases caused both the installation and later increased traffic rates” (or something like that, I don’t know much about the issue). It is to deal with all these more exotic variants that one wants to step up a level and add randomization.
I agree about fines (though that could in principle be fixed by specifying beforehand a very narrow range of things fine money can be spent on); but as for forced labour, your point only applies if the value produced by the prisoners substantially exceeds the cost to house them; if the cost to house them exceeds the value produced by them, your point about regular imprisonment applies instead, and if the two are about the same you deter people without either of those drawbacks. (But yeah, an idea requiring fine tuning is probably not a very good idea.)
I realized now that I hadn’t made a sufficient argument for execution specifically. I left out quite a few things, but It’s such a monolith I’m not sure where to add things in.
There’s a few competing options. A non-exhaustive list includes imprisonment (status quo), execution, legalization, rehabilitation, and fines/labor.
Imprisonment is bad and because it’s the status quo I focused on it entirely. I consider it the worst of all options except fines/labor. Execution is a terrible option but, as I argue above, better than imprisonment. Fines/labor is the worst because it could incentivize people to increase the number of people who commit crimes in order to get free money/labor, as is already happening with red light cameras causing accidents just to generate more money. Legalization or setting them free is the best option for several classes of crime, but as I mentioned murder isn’t one of them.
Rehabilitation / Clockwork Orange’s system seems interesting depending on the data. Not the torture part; torture is something I don’t condone since it would be expensive and ineffectual. However, ignoring Clockwork Orange’s implementation, the idea of perfect rehabilitation is a powerful one. I know of an experiment with Norway’s Halden Prison. It seems promising for a wide variety of criminals, though I’m curious about how they would deal with people who cannot be rehabilitated (eg, brain damaged). This approach is IIRC fairly new and I’m interested in what time will make of it.
I could very well see myself becoming an advocate of a pure rehabilitation system if it turns out to be successful.
One traditional punishment that I don’t see being explicitly discussed much is exile.
I.e., we don’t want you here. You have a month to find somewhere else to go, then we shoot you on sight.
It’s got quite a few good points for it:
The convict is responsible for his maintenance, so it’s him/her that must put a price on his/her life;
Even if we pay for his/her air fare it’s cheaper than permanent incarceration;
It’s not permanent (if the convict picks exile), so it can be reversed if new evidence comes up in a decade;
With modern communications the family can interact the convict without leaving the country, or they can choose to leave at the same time if they wish;
If no other country (or abandoned island) can be found to admit the exiled, that’s a pretty good justification for not accepting the cost of their upkeep;
If it so happens that Norway takes them in and rehabilitates them, so much the better; if it happens enough we might copy the experiment, or at least put in place a procedure to “parole” rehabilitated exiles;
Noncompliance is handled quite differently from things like illegal immigration and escape from prison: Next time you’re found (and we can confirm identity pretty well these days if we have the person before and after) you get executed within a couple of days, without the years of appeals and waiting in death row, and a much lesser chance to escape;
It’s pretty clear that people prefer it to prison, death row, and even persecution, given how many self-exile (e.g., run to Mexico) and claim political asylum; wouldn’t it be much simpler to just let someone go wherever someone’ll take them (remember, they get shot if they try to get back) than chase them all across the country just to drag them back, put them in prison, and pay for their upkeep for decades?
Could you describe the mechanism by which this happens? The link seems to include statistical studies showing correlation between cameras and accidents, but I can’t imagine how this works causally.
Well, there is the government’s FHWA study. There are a couple mechanisms.
The first is that sometimes running a red light is safer. People normally don’t think about red light cameras and thus their impact on behavior only comes into play when after the driver is already in a position to get caught. This leads to people making unsafe stops when it would be otherwise more advisable to just go through the light. The link above shows an increase in rear-end collisions.
More relevant to the original point is how the city reacts. The city council enjoys money and shortens yellow light timings or blocks lengthening of yellow light timings, causing more crashes.
Looking briefly, they’re all before-after correlational studies (longitudinal). These are not as good as randomized experiments, but they’re still much better than a cross-sectional correlation (eg. “we looked at all traffic lights; ones with cameras have higher accident rates p=0.xyz”).
For example, given a cross-sectional correlation result like that, there’s a very easy retort: “people only install cameras at dangerous intersections!” The longitudinal design deals with that: “but they weren’t so dangerous before the cameras were installed!”
Now a critic must look to less likely explanations: “maybe there has been a traffic-crime wave whose early phases caused both the installation and later increased traffic rates” (or something like that, I don’t know much about the issue). It is to deal with all these more exotic variants that one wants to step up a level and add randomization.
The critic’s default should probably be “publication bias” or something related.
I agree about fines (though that could in principle be fixed by specifying beforehand a very narrow range of things fine money can be spent on); but as for forced labour, your point only applies if the value produced by the prisoners substantially exceeds the cost to house them; if the cost to house them exceeds the value produced by them, your point about regular imprisonment applies instead, and if the two are about the same you deter people without either of those drawbacks. (But yeah, an idea requiring fine tuning is probably not a very good idea.)
Anyway, maybe the best possible solution is something that neither of us could imagine.