, though research suggests you have to lock up an awful lot of people to achieve a relatively modest reduction in crime. ======== Research also shows that a relatively small number of people commit a huge number of crimes. It follows a power law distribution. So I don’t believe that research that says incarcertation doesn’t work. It gives us a break.
What is needed is something like 3 strikes. Now I disagree with the 3 strikes. Instead what should happen is every time you are convicted, the judge gives you a sentence for that crime. Then completely separately, your record is looked up. First offence, sentence stands. Second offence its doubled. Third, tripled etc. However if you are crime free for a decade, then the multiplier is reduced one level.
it’s then the criminal’s choice, and it adjusts so the most prolific are kept away from us
It’s a great idea, but it depends on there being enough prison capacity to follow through with the doubling and tripling. Our prisons are so overcrowded that we have to let crims out early just to make space to put some more away. We can’t run your scheme without lots more prisons, and that would need money and land, which are both short.
‘Criminals off the streets does have some effect, though research suggests you have to lock up an awful lot of people to achieve a relatively modest reduction in crime.’
I think most people would dispute this. The majority of crime is committed by a small number of people. (Well, small relative to the population – the UK is home to a remarkably high number of criminals due to our demented and dystopian systems of education, welfare, justice and immigration). Anyway, if those people were to be given much longer sentences we would achieve a significant reduction in crime. Moreover, longer sentences might make if possible to educate and ‘reform’ them. I am all for doing this in properly funded, Scandinavian type jails, but we will need a lot of them.
The majority of crime is committed by a small number of people
So, if 20% of the criminals commit 80% of the crime, you may have to lock up 5 people to reduce crime at all. The problem, is that for every career criminal, there are dozens of non-career criminals, doing something bad and stupid once. I’ve known a few. Sometimes you lock up one burglar and burglaries in the area drop by 50%. Sometimes you lock up a guy who refused to wear a mask in a shop, and burglaries don’t drop at all.
I think you are assuming more randomness than is justified. It’s pretty obvious who the career criminals are. Most of them are (happily) pretty stupid and have limited self-control and understanding of risk, so they get caught a lot and build up a criminal record. At the moment, there are rather pathetic attempts at rehabilitation, then these people are released, with generally predictable results.
Prisons are not effective at rehabilitation, but I’ve not seen much evidence that anything else is any better – this whole area is crying out for some properly conducted, randomised trials. So I think a lot of people would rather pay to lock up the career criminals.
History shows that even the hardened lawbreakers tend to become more law abiding past the age of forty or so. We just need to adjust the sentencing so that any 3rd conviction gets a sentence that runs at least to that age.
David Barnett
3 years ago
Far more attention needs to be paid to restitution fro the victims. This is especially true as more and more modern crime is in the form of fraud.
Adrian
3 years ago
We need to roughly double prison capacity anyway.
The gender jail gap is something like 87000 women. We are going to have to lock up a lot of extra women in order to make the system fair.
Well, all that prison building would be good news for the construction industry. Pity about the poor bloody taxpayer having to fund it all, not forgetting the subsequent running costs. Better ignore that gender gap though……
Aden Wellsmith
3 years ago
The real reason for Lawyer’s behaviour is money. It’s how they make their cash
Rubbish. I know a completely broke criminal lawyer who kept on taking beaten women cases, for the, literally, less than minimum wage amounts he made from the legal aid.
Corporate litigation in civil cases is the way to make money, not the criminal justice system.
Ralph Windsor
3 years ago
Thirty odd years ago the prison population was just north of 40,000. Today it’s more than double, despite significantly lower rates of detection, prosecution and conviction. That tells you a lot about how, law enforcement, criminal justice and, indeed, society, has changed over those three decades. Back then, in the late 1980s, Douglas Hurd was the Home Secretary. Concerned, even then, about rising levels of crime – and the costs of crime, not least that of prisons – he made crime prevention the centre of criminal justice strategy. This strategy was starting to work when Hurd was moved to become Foreign Secretary and was replaced by the long (and justifiably) forgotten David Waddington. Waddington effectively abandoned the Hurd strategy and, to cut a long and depressing story short, it has been downhill at the Home Office – and the DoJ, which inherited the prisons in one of the subsequent ‘reforms’- ever since. There is still a vacancy, unfilled for thirty years, for an effective Home Secretary.
jeremy.laird
3 years ago
“But even if we go full Sam Harris on Free Will and accept that every choice we make literally could not have been made any differently, we are still left with a lot of rapists and murderers that need locking up. So, what to do?”
Actually, we’re not. There aren’t a huge number of rapists, even fewer murderers. The prison population isn’t mostly rapists and murderers, as the author well knows. But thus betrays his reactionary tendencies with simplistic nonsense.
In fact this whole article can essentially be boiled down to, “I’m not a reactionary crime and punishment hawk, but…(here’s some lazy, half-arsed analysis that strongly suggests I’m a reactionary a reactionary crime and punishment hawk).”
The author never truly engages with the idea at the core of this piece…should criminals be locked up? This article doesn’t deserve to be on a website that the claims to “push back against the herd mentality with new and bold thinking.” The author’s thinking is plainly reactionary and entirely conventional. It’s the ideas very superficially presented in this piece and not actually addressed that entail new thinking. Should we lock most criminals up? That is a very interesting question that deserves far more thoughtful consideration than that afforded by this frankly piss poor piece.
Garth Buckner
3 years ago
Those found guilty and sentenced to prison go there for three reasons; first, as punishment, and, secondly, to keep them safe.
Most people understand the first concept, the idea of “punishing” the guilty, and there is great debate, as there should be, about balance and the punishment fitting the crime.
Few people today consider the safety of the convicted. We are too used to regarding victims as weak. Many are. But not all. In the absence of a system of punishment that the victim is willing to accept as bing proportional many victims will seek their own brand of justice. This invites the Wild West with lynch mobs out to get justice. Putting the guilty in prison ensures they are not strung up in a tree.
The third reason is you would find that the strongest of all work within a civic order provided it protects them. As soon as it stops protecting them they will seek another social order and in the absence of that option will impose their own.
We put criminals in prison so that the strong do not take power for themselves.
Eugene Norman
3 years ago
Locking people in their own homes for a decade isn’t much of a punishment for the very rich in huge houses.
What kind of moral justice system would lock people in their houses indefinitely without weekends, or vacation time off? Not very woke.
Jon Luisada
3 years ago
If there is one thing that has come to prominence during this recent malarkey is the shear stupidity and corruption (moral and fiscal) of much of those that inhabit positions of responsibility in our various institutions. Also, just possibly, we live in hope, that it will be noticed that there is a marked similarity between a virus in the biological sense and the virus in the ‘acquired skill ‘ sense , and indeed the subset of that, the ‘faith systems’. I have never understood why if you come back from , currently, Spain, you have to isolate yourself in case you transfer that set of procedures to someone else but….will dump a first time offender with limited and ill formed sets of criminal procedures into a pool of infected ‘old timers’ who have lots of new and more effective criminal procedures and networks that allow them to also become ‘infected’! It isn’t as though this is a new idea, I did see a judgement from around 1902 where the judge recommended that the young offender was jailed in isolation so he couldn’t be taught and inducted by the old lags. Now, there seems to be two possibilities here , either I am some ‘out there’ genius and that most average people find this hard to understand or…I’m just an ordinary Joe and the ‘establishment , including the author, are just mind numbingly bloody stupid….
Jon Luisada
3 years ago
….and another thing…the economics of all this… I have noticed that non habitual offenders are usually much more heavily sanctioned than habitual ones. The latter suffering lower and diminishing sanctions in order to recycle them back on the streets asap so they can generate some more fees, more justification for ‘departments’ that ‘rehabilitate’ and ‘help’… Which, in a ‘graft’ economics sense , makes sense. The quicker you can get them back out, the quicker you can run some overtime, lawyer fees, brown envelopes to the people that transport them to the courts…ad nausium.. These individuals that there is going to be a protest about on Saturday are a very good case in point…mass rape ‘punished’ by a (very) few years in jail, let out half way for ‘good behaviour’ , stripped of their UK passports ..but still here, still generating cash for ‘the machine’……
Aden Wellsmith
3 years ago
Criminals off the streets does have some effect, though research suggests you have to lock up an awful lot of people to achieve a relatively modest reduction in crime. ============ Your link is broken
William Cameron
1 year ago
Does Prison work ?
For a great many of the 80,000 in prison it is probably very expensive and fairly pointless. It would be far better to find a way for criminals to repay society for their crimes.
Some folk need to be locked up for public safety . But I suspect thats quite a small proportion.
Prison is only a deterrent if you think you will get caught. As only 6% of crimes end up with a charge the odds of not getting caught are very high.
, though research suggests you have to lock up an awful lot of people to achieve a relatively modest reduction in crime.
========
Research also shows that a relatively small number of people commit a huge number of crimes. It follows a power law distribution.
So I don’t believe that research that says incarcertation doesn’t work. It gives us a break.
What is needed is something like 3 strikes. Now I disagree with the 3 strikes. Instead what should happen is every time you are convicted, the judge gives you a sentence for that crime. Then completely separately, your record is looked up. First offence, sentence stands. Second offence its doubled. Third, tripled etc. However if you are crime free for a decade, then the multiplier is reduced one level.
it’s then the criminal’s choice, and it adjusts so the most prolific are kept away from us
It’s a great idea, but it depends on there being enough prison capacity to follow through with the doubling and tripling.
Our prisons are so overcrowded that we have to let crims out early just to make space to put some more away.
We can’t run your scheme without lots more prisons, and that would need money and land, which are both short.
.
‘Criminals off the streets does have some effect, though research suggests you have to lock up an awful lot of people to achieve a relatively modest reduction in crime.’
I think most people would dispute this. The majority of crime is committed by a small number of people. (Well, small relative to the population – the UK is home to a remarkably high number of criminals due to our demented and dystopian systems of education, welfare, justice and immigration). Anyway, if those people were to be given much longer sentences we would achieve a significant reduction in crime. Moreover, longer sentences might make if possible to educate and ‘reform’ them. I am all for doing this in properly funded, Scandinavian type jails, but we will need a lot of them.
So, if 20% of the criminals commit 80% of the crime, you may have to lock up 5 people to reduce crime at all.
The problem, is that for every career criminal, there are dozens of non-career criminals, doing something bad and stupid once. I’ve known a few.
Sometimes you lock up one burglar and burglaries in the area drop by 50%. Sometimes you lock up a guy who refused to wear a mask in a shop, and burglaries don’t drop at all.
I think you are assuming more randomness than is justified. It’s pretty obvious who the career criminals are. Most of them are (happily) pretty stupid and have limited self-control and understanding of risk, so they get caught a lot and build up a criminal record. At the moment, there are rather pathetic attempts at rehabilitation, then these people are released, with generally predictable results.
Prisons are not effective at rehabilitation, but I’ve not seen much evidence that anything else is any better – this whole area is crying out for some properly conducted, randomised trials. So I think a lot of people would rather pay to lock up the career criminals.
History shows that even the hardened lawbreakers tend to become more law abiding past the age of forty or so. We just need to adjust the sentencing so that any 3rd conviction gets a sentence that runs at least to that age.
Far more attention needs to be paid to restitution fro the victims. This is especially true as more and more modern crime is in the form of fraud.
We need to roughly double prison capacity anyway.
The gender jail gap is something like 87000 women. We are going to have to lock up a lot of extra women in order to make the system fair.
Well, all that prison building would be good news for the construction industry. Pity about the poor bloody taxpayer having to fund it all, not forgetting the subsequent running costs. Better ignore that gender gap though……
The real reason for Lawyer’s behaviour is money. It’s how they make their cash
Rubbish. I know a completely broke criminal lawyer who kept on taking beaten women cases, for the, literally, less than minimum wage amounts he made from the legal aid.
Corporate litigation in civil cases is the way to make money, not the criminal justice system.
Thirty odd years ago the prison population was just north of 40,000. Today it’s more than double, despite significantly lower rates of detection, prosecution and conviction. That tells you a lot about how, law enforcement, criminal justice and, indeed, society, has changed over those three decades. Back then, in the late 1980s, Douglas Hurd was the Home Secretary. Concerned, even then, about rising levels of crime – and the costs of crime, not least that of prisons – he made crime prevention the centre of criminal justice strategy. This strategy was starting to work when Hurd was moved to become Foreign Secretary and was replaced by the long (and justifiably) forgotten David Waddington. Waddington effectively abandoned the Hurd strategy and, to cut a long and depressing story short, it has been downhill at the Home Office – and the DoJ, which inherited the prisons in one of the subsequent ‘reforms’- ever since. There is still a vacancy, unfilled for thirty years, for an effective Home Secretary.
“But even if we go full Sam Harris on Free Will and accept that every choice we make literally could not have been made any differently, we are still left with a lot of rapists and murderers that need locking up. So, what to do?”
Actually, we’re not. There aren’t a huge number of rapists, even fewer murderers. The prison population isn’t mostly rapists and murderers, as the author well knows. But thus betrays his reactionary tendencies with simplistic nonsense.
In fact this whole article can essentially be boiled down to, “I’m not a reactionary crime and punishment hawk, but…(here’s some lazy, half-arsed analysis that strongly suggests I’m a reactionary a reactionary crime and punishment hawk).”
The author never truly engages with the idea at the core of this piece…should criminals be locked up? This article doesn’t deserve to be on a website that the claims to “push back against the herd mentality with new and bold thinking.” The author’s thinking is plainly reactionary and entirely conventional. It’s the ideas very superficially presented in this piece and not actually addressed that entail new thinking. Should we lock most criminals up? That is a very interesting question that deserves far more thoughtful consideration than that afforded by this frankly piss poor piece.
Those found guilty and sentenced to prison go there for three reasons; first, as punishment, and, secondly, to keep them safe.
Most people understand the first concept, the idea of “punishing” the guilty, and there is great debate, as there should be, about balance and the punishment fitting the crime.
Few people today consider the safety of the convicted. We are too used to regarding victims as weak. Many are. But not all. In the absence of a system of punishment that the victim is willing to accept as bing proportional many victims will seek their own brand of justice. This invites the Wild West with lynch mobs out to get justice. Putting the guilty in prison ensures they are not strung up in a tree.
The third reason is you would find that the strongest of all work within a civic order provided it protects them. As soon as it stops protecting them they will seek another social order and in the absence of that option will impose their own.
We put criminals in prison so that the strong do not take power for themselves.
Locking people in their own homes for a decade isn’t much of a punishment for the very rich in huge houses.
…with access to encrypted communications.
Yeah, but how would YOU feel if you weren’t allowed to use your yacht, OR your helicopter?
What kind of moral justice system would lock people in their houses indefinitely without weekends, or vacation time off? Not very woke.
If there is one thing that has come to prominence during this recent malarkey is the shear stupidity and corruption (moral and fiscal) of much of those that inhabit positions of responsibility in our various institutions.
Also, just possibly, we live in hope, that it will be noticed that there is a marked similarity between a virus in the biological sense and the virus in the ‘acquired skill ‘ sense , and indeed the subset of that, the ‘faith systems’.
I have never understood why if you come back from , currently, Spain, you have to isolate yourself in case you transfer that set of procedures to someone else but….will dump a first time offender with limited and ill formed sets of criminal procedures into a pool of infected ‘old timers’ who have lots of new and more effective criminal procedures and networks that allow them to also become ‘infected’!
It isn’t as though this is a new idea, I did see a judgement from around 1902 where the judge recommended that the young offender was jailed in isolation so he couldn’t be taught and inducted by the old lags.
Now, there seems to be two possibilities here , either I am some ‘out there’ genius and that most average people find this hard to understand or…I’m just an ordinary Joe and the ‘establishment , including the author, are just mind numbingly bloody stupid….
….and another thing…the economics of all this…
I have noticed that non habitual offenders are usually much more heavily sanctioned than habitual ones.
The latter suffering lower and diminishing sanctions in order to recycle them back on the streets asap so they can generate some more fees, more justification for ‘departments’ that ‘rehabilitate’ and ‘help’…
Which, in a ‘graft’ economics sense , makes sense.
The quicker you can get them back out, the quicker you can run some overtime, lawyer fees, brown envelopes to the people that transport them to the courts…ad nausium..
These individuals that there is going to be a protest about on Saturday are a very good case in point…mass rape ‘punished’ by a (very) few years in jail, let out half way for ‘good behaviour’ , stripped of their UK passports ..but still here, still generating cash for ‘the machine’……
Criminals off the streets does have some effect, though research suggests you have to lock up an awful lot of people to achieve a relatively modest reduction in crime.
============
Your link is broken
Does Prison work ?
For a great many of the 80,000 in prison it is probably very expensive and fairly pointless. It would be far better to find a way for criminals to repay society for their crimes.
Some folk need to be locked up for public safety . But I suspect thats quite a small proportion.
Prison is only a deterrent if you think you will get caught. As only 6% of crimes end up with a charge the odds of not getting caught are very high.