I wrote part 1 because I feel that it requires a bit of thinking before I can actually write something that even remotely resembles analysis.
I had previously written a post about the death penalty, and the effectiveness of the punishments in the legal system. Somehow, this morning, I found myself thinking back to it, and since I was eating chicken at the time, a spark suddenly ignited the locomotive of my train of thought (yes, I'm bad at metaphors, I know, but at least I try).
Every Indonesian knows what happens to maling ayam, or chicken thieves, when the local villagers catch them. What occurs is vigilante justice at its finest, with the thieves usually being beaten to a pulp, or in some cases even burned alive.
One of the main shortcomings of the legal system, especially in developing countries, which characteristically lack discipline and structure in their governmental support systems, is that it is slow and generally incompetent, because it works under presumption of innocence, where it is the burden of the prosecutor to prove, without leaving a reasonable doubt, that the crime was indeed committed by the defendant. This requires the culprit to be caught (which is by no means a 100% certainty), the evidence to be collected (which is also not 100% successful), and the jury to be convinced (which is probably the hardest part). This leaves a lot of room for the culprits to escape the long arms of the law, and thus the deterrent effect that the legal system has on crime is very limited, especially considering all the other factors (for more detail, read my death penalty post which I linked to in the beginning of this post).
How, then, does the vigilante mentality of "beat first, ask questions later" which, more often than not, results in "kill first, ask questions later" affect crime? It would be an interesting subject to analyze, and would answer a lot of questions and provide a lot of insight into the incentives and disincentives governing crime.
Friday, March 14, 2008
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11 comments:
it's a pretty interesting research question.
Just a friendly suggestion: don't talk about your ideas in public until after you actually have a paper finished. Somebody may decide to steal your idea and take credit for it. Don't let that happen. :P
You're probably right. Thanks for that.
I went to Bali last month and the people there told me that there is no crime (the kind that affect tourist, I am not talking about corruption and other white collar crime) in Bali.
Why? Because all the would be thieves and robbers know that they will be burned alive if caught doing so. IT has been done before and will be done again. In game theoretic lexicon, it is a credible threat.
I am not proposing such measure to be legalized. But criminal is also a calculating cost and benefit individual. What's needed is to built our criminal justice system so would be criminals are deter from become one.
Exactly, our criminal justice system needs to be improved, and I believe that we may actually learn some lessons from occurrences like that.
i wonder to what extent adaptation plays a role here. imagine a world where the punishment for every single criminal act is death. would there be no criminals?
one possibility is that you would have a world free of criminals only for a while. because when the psychological adaptation mechanisms kick in, death would not be as frightening as it was when you have other kinds of less threatening punishment.
The question is: does death really need lesser punishments as a frame of reference for people to be frightened?
good question. i'm not sure. but how would you value the cost of death if there's no other cost to compare it with?
The case in question would be very close to medieval Japan where the punishment for lightly-than-smallest crime is death.
I wrote a post in Kafe Depok that touch this subject, just click here
wouldn't this be just a "choice under uncertainty" kind of thing? You have a certain probability of getting caught, in which you'd die (zero utility). If you didn't do it, by the way, your utility would also be zero.
So, the poorest people would still commit crime, even if the punishment is death. Or, people would only do the worst of crimes, because the payoff would be big enough.
daniel: are you saying that not stealing (and thus not getting what you want) has the same utility with being dead (and still not getting what you want because it means you're caught by the authority)?
i'd say, in any case, the utility of being caught and dead would be much lower than that of staying at home and not stealing -- and this depends on how much you value your life in the beginning.
yeah, i was assuming that the choice was either death thru stealing or death thru hunger.
I guess it depends on our assumptions. I admit that mine is a bit dodgy :P
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