> if interpretted literally the results above imply that only murderers would optimally to prison as very few crimes even have costs of the minimum $500,000 modelled, let alone the near $10,000,000 required for prison sentences to be better than the alternative.
I am not sure this follows directly. You could have a case where:
- A crime costs $5k
- Imprisoning the criminal costs $500k
- If you didn't imprison the criminal, more crimes would happen.
The problem here is that you don't really see the crimes that don't happen. Yeah there are a few natural experiments, but they look at short-term changes, whereass on the whole I expect long-term incentives around how viable a life-strategy is to basicaly dominate.
You also give a few pointers to the academic literature on this topic. I have the nagging doubt that I probably can't trust it, that it's politically biased, that it contradicts some of my strong priors, and that it neglects long-term effects (as in the previous comment). I've never really engaged critically with that nagging doubt, but I thought I'd put it out there.
> if interpretted literally the results above imply that only murderers would optimally to prison as very few crimes even have costs of the minimum $500,000 modelled, let alone the near $10,000,000 required for prison sentences to be better than the alternative.
I am not sure this follows directly. You could have a case where:
- A crime costs $5k
- Imprisoning the criminal costs $500k
- If you didn't imprison the criminal, more crimes would happen.
The problem here is that you don't really see the crimes that don't happen. Yeah there are a few natural experiments, but they look at short-term changes, whereass on the whole I expect long-term incentives around how viable a life-strategy is to basicaly dominate.
You also give a few pointers to the academic literature on this topic. I have the nagging doubt that I probably can't trust it, that it's politically biased, that it contradicts some of my strong priors, and that it neglects long-term effects (as in the previous comment). I've never really engaged critically with that nagging doubt, but I thought I'd put it out there.
According to the top results of Google, prisons cost $80B a year. If that's off just correct me.
I've seen credible estimates that crime costs over 10% of GDP, or $2+ Trillion.
Prisons are a huge ROI for society.
I support corporal punishment as an alternative to prisons but understand that its a non-starter in the west.