2023 PSF annual impact report

Posted May 12, 2024 17:52 UTC (Sun) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: 2023 PSF annual impact report by mb
Parent article: 2023 PSF annual impact report

Punishment gets us nowhere. Does it reduce the effects of the attack? No. Does it ensure such crimes happen less? No. There is no deterrence for crimes above a certain steal-bubblegum-threshold.

That last line is contradictory to what I know of criminology; increasing the punishment does increase deterrent effect, as long as the chances of getting caught are high enough. The problem comes in when you're not increasing the chances of getting caught, and attempting to deter purely by high penalties if caught.

First, you have people who, for some reason, do not have the ability to engage in causal reasoning. These people are rare, but they do exist.

More significantly, the punishment's effect on deterrence scales with the perceived chance of getting caught to begin with. If you consider your chances of getting caught to be near-zero, no amount of punishment will have a deterrent effect; what's the difference between a loud "NO!" and life in prison if you don't think either will happen?

To put it differently, when they're considering breaking the rules, people multiply their perceived cost of punishment by the perceived chance of being caught; if the resulting number is small enough compared to the perceived benefit of breaking the rules, then they'll break the rules. And there's a mental "clamp" on the range for everything "perceived", so you can't just increase the punishment further to get a bigger deterrent; the only option once the cost of punishment reaches people's "basically too big to get bigger" is to increase the chance of being caught, or reduce the benefit of breaking the rules.

2023 PSF annual impact report

Posted May 12, 2024 23:17 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> First, you have people who, for some reason, do not have the ability to engage in causal reasoning. These people are rare, but they do exist.

You've clearly not watched all these programs about the police :-)

I think what you say is true of the older generation, but so many kids these days seem to have brains addled by drugs (or drink) that they don't have a clue what they're doing ...

And for big crimes, people don't seem to think about the consequences of getting caught at all. Many crimes are "spur of the moment" things - and the bigger ones are often fuelled by anger (as I said, driven by drink or drugs ...).

Cheers,
Wol