Crime is a behaviour which society frowns upon and which results in someone being made a victim of suffering. Crime destroys society. Apart from its terrible direct suffering, crime undermines trust and cooperation, imposes large financial costs and diverts resources away from productive enterprises toward protection.
Crime is also a brake on national development. Decades ago, I conducted a search for factors underlying long-term economic growth (since replicated by several others). I identified low crime and the rule of law as an independent factor crucial to growth. That relationship still holds. If crime is such a big issue, every country should be doing whatever it can to contain it, including doing research to identify effective and efficient anti-crime measures. This article is about what we have discovered so far.
Every society uses punishment and imprisonment as anti-crime tools. There are four basic justifications for their use. An obvious one is retribution. Victims usually hate the perpetrators and want revenge. An ‘eye-for-an-eye’ has always and everywhere been part of receiving justice. It is part of human nature and our closest relative, chimpanzees, exhibit the same tendencies. However, many victims (or their families) do find compensation being paid by the perpetrator an acceptable alternative.
Compensation is better for lesser crimes for many reasons. It leaves the victim less of a victim, it serves as a deterrent, and the perpetrator remains part of society with a chance to redeem himself.
A second justification of punishment is that it deters future crimes. Research shows that onerous consequences do deter criminal behaviour, but there is some nuance involved. It is obviously unethical for scientists to do controlled experiments on deterrence, but the natural variation in the severity of sentences passed down by judges creates what we call a natural experiment. The court randomly assigns criminals to judges, which enables researchers to attribute what follows to differences in the severity of sentence passed down. We can then determine how severe or lenient sentences influence things like recidivism rates or violent behaviour in prison.
Clear incentives
We know that it is important to impose some consequence on crime. Refusing to prosecute crimes below a certain level, such as, for example, shoplifting below $1000, results in a guaranteed increase in those crimes. Such rules are clear incentives to do the crime.
On the other hand, the punishment should be lenient for first offences. In particular the punishment – a criminal record – should not jeopardise the person’s future chances of making a non-criminal living. A mild punishment serves as a sufficient wakeup call and leaves open the chance of a decent life ahead if one stays clean. It also caters for ‘bad luck crimes’ such as a traffic or parking violation due to being tired or unavoidably detained.
Researchers found that lenient sentences reduce recidivism in first-time offenders by more than half compared to severe sentences. Very sever sentences also backfire whenever apprehension is a rare event. Perpetrators then come to think police are not targeting crime but them personally, and experience resentment toward society and the justice system.
By far the most important and effective deterrent is a high probability of being caught for committing a crime. The severity of the punishment is secondary.
The third justification for some sort of intervention following a crime is that it serves to rehabilitate the criminal. Criminal propensities are highly heritable, and rehabilitation does not have a good record. Like losing weight and giving up smoking the success rate is dismal.
However, also much like weight loss and smoking, for many it may just be that those attempting to intervene have not found the right approach for the criminals. High heritability implies less flexibility in reacting to environmental conditions. It does not mean zero response or adaption to any conditions. For example, apartment-like cells (with their own mini kitchen) are associated with less violence and delinquency in prison and lower recidivism rates upon release. Guards much prefer to work in such environments too. Getting a good education can only reduce the odds of a criminal looking to return to crime because they cannot get a decent job.
Incapacitating them
The final justification for punishment, especially imprisonment, is that it removes criminals from the streets – incapacitating them. There is a type, the mercifully rare psychopathic person, for which that is appropriate. The psychopathic type is prone to repeat crimes, and to committing extreme crimes, and does not respond positively to rehabilitation. This small group commits the overwhelming majority of all crime.
Incarceration is an expensive measure too, so we should seek to keep prison numbers down. It makes sense to focus on removing the small number of psychopathic types from society. The number and severity of crimes is an effective way to identify them, so courts should reserve more sever sentences, that is, long prison terms, for criminals with that kind of history.
Why do people commit crimes? Mostly it is poor impulse-control and thrills rather than economic need. There is an argument that a toxic and uncertain environment plays a role in making poor impulse-control a rational choice. A kid from such an environment may consider it irrational to take the chance on an additional marshmallow when one is immediately available. The research however shows that is not much of a factor. For example, the authors of The Bell Curve showed that high socio-economic status is associated with increased rates of self-reported crime when they controlled for IQ. Crime is mostly a young male thing, fuelled by delayed pre-frontal lobe development and a surge of testosterone. Those factors age out quite soon. Deterrence works best on these impulsive young men when they still have a big incentive to change course.
At this point, the important question is how do the police increase their odds of catching those committing crimes? It helps a great deal to make it clear criminal behaviour is unacceptable and then actually do some policing. The mere presence of police reduces crime. Unfortunately, South Africa’s police often prefer to put up roadblocks, often in order to collect bribes. We need to change the incentives under which our police operate.
Recent technological advances have the potential to increase the crime solution rate. A comprehensive DNA database of everyone who has sinned in some way, even a minor misdemeanour, would serve as a strong deterrent.
In the US, knowing your DNA is on a database reduces your chance of offending by 40%. Surveillance cameras have a similar effect. If it became mandatory for police to collect a cheek swab sample at every encounter with wrongdoing, no matter how mild, crime would drop considerably.
Links to unsolved cases
Furthermore, the information may provide links to unsolved cases. The perpetrator may turn out to be a close relative of someone whose DNA police collected at a traffic violation. Police have identified serial killers via that sort of connection.
Another technology, AI, has the potential to improve detective performance immensely. An AI crime App on a policeman’s phone could put world-class detective skills at the fingertips of thousands of policemen or detectives. That has to improve performance and the morale of the police.
Why not put this knowledge to good use? The potential benefits are enormous.
[Image: David von Diemar on Unsplash]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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