The Increasingly Inadequate Police Force

I’ve been frustrated for a while now with how this country is policed. Obviously the police policies are driven by lawmakers – and there’s a lot that they get right. But at the extremes of both ends, there is a lot I think they are getting wrong. At one end of the spectrum, there are some ridiculously dubious so-called crimes (or non-crimes), especially to do with offence, speech and online conduct, that involve the police when it really should not. Yet at the other end of the spectrum, the lawmakers and the police are utterly feeble when it comes to behaviour that really should be dealt with more comprehensively. It’s madness that people can burgle your house, or cause deaths and suffering through the mile-long tailbacks created by blocking the major roads, and not go to prison. Too much of the law has become weak and woke, and its lack of sufficient power and authority has created a culture where too many people doing too much harm to others fail to receive proper punishment, and the victims fail to receive proper justice.

It’s well known that from the early 1990s crime rates have been falling all around the Western world (for a multitude of reasons), while at the same time, more and more laws have been created, and many more possible crimes have been introduced by making more things illegal.

What you have to remember is that it is always in politicians and the civil servants’ interests to keep growing their departments, keep the public convinced their services are more and more important to the running of society, and keep lobbying for more money to achieve this. Just as it’s in a plumber’s interest that people need leaks fixed, pipes mended and products installed, so too it’s in politicians and the civil services’ interests that they remain needed and relevant, and that there are problems in society for which we turn to them to fix. In economic terms, they are incentivised to keep demand high so they can keep the supply coming, and justify the funding for it. The way politicians and the civil services keep demand for policing high is by making more things illegal, and involving themselves in more and more of our daily business.

In the free market, we pay businesses to provide the things we want, and when a lot of people want those goods or services, businesses become mega-successful. Political industries do not have the same model or the same kind of demand curves, so in a sense they have to act against those same natural interests in order to survive. In other words, politics purports to be about making things better and bringing an end to problems, but yet the existence of politics depends on those problems (plus newly created ones) continuing to exist in some form. 

Because of this mechanism, the police are becoming less and less of a good institution - reflecting a society as a whole that's gone down the same path, whereby actions that never should be crimes are being criminalised left, right and centre; and actions that should be more heavily penalised are being treated too lightly for fear of being too unsympathetic to the perpetrator's feelings, hardships or causes for grievance.  

 

Crime, Gambling, Risk & Deterrence

There was a lawyer on Sunday Morning TV this weekend talking about criminals and victims of crimes. His contention was that the penalty system would be better if victims of crime directly receive the financial spoils of fines rather than it going to the establishment. I'd wager that if he was an economist he would be less keen on the idea, because I think it would be an unwise move. Remember one of the near-ineluctable laws of economics: people respond to incentives. Remember another: everything is a trade-off.

Fines impose costs on criminals, thereby discouraging them from committing crimes. But financial restitution bestows direct benefits on victims of crimes, thereby minimising the incentives to avoid being victims of crime. By the way, if your reaction to that is one of incredulity, and you’re ready to assert that that can’t be right, I’d suggest you need to brush up on your economics (especially the Coase theorem). Some compensation for victims is perfectly just, but if it lessens the cost of being a victim of crime to the extent that many more people become victims of crime with better financial restitution then it would fail an efficiency test hands down.

The criminal has an entirely different set of incentives, which I'll explain by talking about gambling and risk-taking. A man who will break the law by answering his mobile phone whilst driving is a man who will willingly risk a possible fine (and points on his licence) rather than the certain inconvenience of having to pull over and delay his journey. To a much different extent, a man who burgles your house probably just needs the money (often for drugs), so his risk-analysis is often not the same as the first man. 

To get another perspective on risks we can look at how people gamble. As a former professional gambler (I use that term for simplicity’s sake – that’s not really what I was), I can tell you that the majority of people that spend their days making small bets in the bookmakers, and those that pump money into fruit machines for hours on end, are not really gamblers. If you do either of those things for a sustained period of time you will be at a financial loss at a fairly predictable rate. That is the opposite of gambling – because gambling doesn’t involve predictable rates – it involves risk and uncertainty (and there is a key distinction between those two things as well).  A man who drives and uses his mobile phone whenever he feels like it is taking a risk – but just like a gambler his risk may pay off if the net cost of his fines is less than the net benefits of the calls and the time saved in making them on the road. 

Although people are criminals for a number of reasons (I’ve already alluded to drugs as one example), the rational criminal is someone who has chosen a life of crime because he prefers risks, and perceives a better pay-off than if he wasn’t taking risks. If rational gamblers weren’t like this, they’d be shopkeepers, dentists, factory workers, waiters or mechanics instead. Someone who plays the lottery likes low stakes, long odds and big pay-offs. If lottery players weren’t like this they’d be buying scratch cards or in betting shops instead. 

If you want to understand the government’s ethos regarding crime, you have to understand what attracts people to committing crimes – so it helps to understand what attracts people to gambling and to playing the lottery. Surveys I’ve seen show that given the choice between twenty prizes of £500,000 or one prize of £10 million, most lottery players prefer the latter, because they prefer a small chance of a huge win rather than a better chance of a smaller win. If you want to make the lottery more attrctive to consumers (and sell more lottery tickets) then increase the size of the jackpot, because the kind of people who prefer a better chance of £500,000 aren’t playing the lottery to anything like as great an extent as those who prefer a small chance of £10 million. 

Lottery players don’t usually risk big stakes, which means lottery players are not like rational criminals - because rational criminals like risks, but they also think those risks enable them to beat the odds. So while increasing the jackpot will attract lottery players, increasing the size of the prison sentence won’t have as much of an effect on criminals as increasing the conviction rate, because increasing the conviction rate will reduce their chances of beating the odds in a risky environment. In other words, double the length of the prison sentences attached to every crime and crime will fall; double the conviction rate attached to every crime and crime will fall a lot further. 

In dog racing the kind of person who will be most attracted to a tri-cast (trifecta) bet of, say, 33/1 (predicting the first three dogs) is much more likely to be the kind of person who will quit when he gets that one big pay-off. The kind of person who will be most attracted to betting £20 on a 6/4 dog is much more likely to be the kind of person who will place those winnings on the next race, and eventually come home at a loss. Bookmakers have an interesting trade-off between these two kinds of customers; a big pay-off maximises the profit on the present race, while lots of small prizes maximise the action on the races to come. 

Lottery players are like tri-cast players - they prefer a small chance of a huge win. They are like the rational criminals that prefer a small chance of a lengthy jail sentence - so if by reducing the one big jackpot on the lottery to twenty smaller jackpots you're going to deter people from playing the lottery, then by analogy to crime deterrence if the state increases the conviction rate by a significant degree it is going to deter a lot of rational criminals from committing crimes. 

Of course, increasing the conviction rate is not entirely straightforward – the state has to prudently channel its resources into areas that will engender the highest conviction rates (police strategies, personnel, research, surveillance, etc). As well as that it will have to assess the social costs of each crime and the relationship between that cost and number of occurrences; it will have to match the sentence to the crime; and it will have to calibrate whether enforcing a law is costlier than not enforcing it. If I made the decisions, I’d increase the sentences of the costliest crimes and add resources into increasing the conviction rates, because that is probably where the most good would be done.

How's This For A Great Piece Of Ingenuity?

There's a Mumbai suburban railway system that carries more than 6 million commuters a day, meaning the task for the authorities to check for tickets is extremely difficult. The system to discourage ticketless travel relies on random ticket checking - but with more than 6 million commuters a day, the chances are that if you travel without a ticket you will escape getting caught more often than not.

However, with everyone aware of this low probability of getting caught, this will likely increase the number of people travelling without a ticket, which then increases the number of people that will get caught in a random check.

So, the story goes, someone in Mumbai came up with a clever money-making insurance idea that seems to benefit all parties involved. It works like this - if you are a daily traveller, then you sign up to become a member of this organisation of local train travellers. You pay 500 rupees (which is about £6) to join this organisation of fellow ticketless travellers. Then, if you do get caught travelling without a ticket, you pay the fine to the authorities and then hand over your receipt to the organisation which refunds you all the money.

It's a neat little idea - however, I cannot help thinking that somewhere in Mumbai there is a ticket-collecting company in the making, to whom the train operators could outsource this work, and both parties could clean up.

Why Can't More People See The Obvious Distinction Between Banning & Disapproving?

There was mass outrage yesterday in response to a London jazz bar whose job advert specified they wanted 'extremely attractive staff' who 'must be comfortable wearing heels'. Now personally this doesn't seem like a very great place to either work or visit - it seems quite superficially minded, and will probably have a client base that reflects this. Hopefully, if enough people act with their feet, then this jazz club will be hit with lower profits, and may then look to advertise more prudently (because the point is, it's easy to hire good looking females if you want to without having to state that's what you're looking for on the job advert).  

Notice what I did in the above paragraph - I told you about my personal feelings towards the advert and the jazz bar. What I would not do, and nor should anyone else, is say that this advert should be taken down or banned from existing. Because one of the basic principles of being free citizens who enjoy personal liberty is that if you happen to run your own business you should be able to hire whoever you like. 

If you make bad decisions you may suffer loss of profits, and develop a bad reputation - sometimes you may even go out of business - but a society that thinks it can tell you who you can and cannot employ is an oppressive wolf, even if it appears to be dressed in the clothing of protective sheep. C.S Lewis put it well:

The example I've given above pretty well summarises why I write as I do on a broader level. That is to say, people know how to run their lives better than any state, monarchy or government. That's not a blanket truism for every single individual in the world, but it's true for the vast majority of people, and it's true in the majority of ways that relate to how we live our lives by making cost/benefit analyses and exercise freedom of choice.

Governments are always going on about the welfare of its citizens - but the irony they miss is that a lot of what they do compromises the welfare those citizens would otherwise enjoy. Take an obvious and frequent example - the price of alcohol. Every government policy is based on the notion that alcohol is bad for its users. It is, but it is also good for its users, because the people who drink alcohol wilfully choose the pleasures and accept the costs. 

Alcohol drinkers are people for whom the pleasure of social drinking outweighs the risk of death, liver damage, addiction and a shorter life. If they valued better health and longer lives they'd drink less or not at all. If you're in the first group then drinking lots of alcohol delivers a net gain; if you’re in the second group then drinking lots of alcohol delivers a net loss.

Because it is impossible for the state to know how much every individual values health, exercise, weight training, smoking, alcohol, casual sex, and so forth, it is impossible for the government to know better than its citizens what is good for them. A good government would understand this, and seek to minimise its involvement in our lives to enhance our welfare and liberty.

But: and here's the important but - there is one important caveat – people’s decisions are affected by the information they have. A lot of people are informed enough to make rational choices about whether they want to drink alcohol. But some people are not. If they’ve lived in a house in which drunkenness was the norm, or in which information about healthy living was scarce, they may not properly understand the benefits or costs. Misinformation increases the likelihood that you’ll either underestimate the costs or underestimate the benefits.

Light regulation is fine

So clearly, for this reason, being a libertarian doesn't mean adopting a 100% erosion of regulatory influence. Many regulatory laws are superfluous, but not all of them are. We need laws that protect factory employees from working in dangerous conditions unbeknown to them. If two people know the details and engage in a mutually beneficial transaction, then state involvement is mostly superfluous. But if Jack is employing Jill and putting her life at risk due to faulty equipment or dodgy wiring, I don't want Jill to be devoid of protection through the law.

Where the law works for me is when it guards people against harms that live outside of anything that could be defined as a mutually beneficial transaction with transparency. But there are lots of ways the government harms mutually beneficial transactions and makes the nation worse off. Here are three examples off the top of my head.

1) A government will impose import tariffs on consumers at prices they wanted to pay, and tell them it's for their own good because they are only better off if they doing more exporting than importing (which even a simpleton ought to know isn't true).

2) A government will use taxpayers' money to bail out or subsidise a failing industry that has simply been outcompeted by other industries abroad or has lost its relevance by ever-changing technology. In doing so they will make their citizens believe they are doing good thing, even though there is a huge net loss, and that a lot of that loss is felt by British consumers and by other British industries that trade with these foreign companies two, three, four or five steps down the line.

3) A government will distort the natural and important information-carrying signal of value by imposing price floors and price ceilings because it follows the lead of the majority of its citizens who are almost wholly ignorant on these matters.

Those are just three examples that first spring to mind - as regular readers of my blog will know, there are dozens of other examples.

I've always said, I'm fine with light government regulation for health and safety standards, protection against nefarious use of asymmetry of information, a stable rule of law, property rights, etc - but the moment the state interferes in the natural mechanism of prices, supply and demand, I want them to relinquish their control.

Pondering our freedoms

All that said, here's where things get a little knottier. Being a libertarian I don't want the state to interfere much in our freedoms - therefore, I don't want them banning things related to what we do to our bodies, like abortion, prostitution and drug-taking. But being a Christian, I do disapprove of those things - not in the sense of being sententious or judgemental against partakers in those activities, but simply in thinking that they are bad for us and harmful to the people involved, and therefore undesirable.  

But quite why so many people think that that means we ought to call for their criminalisation is peculiar to me. There is nothing terribly inconsistent about believing things to be socially undesirable yet still not wanting them criminalised. After all, infidelity is one of the most socially hurtful things, so is unkindness, but no one thinks they should be illegal.

Just because some of us don't want the state telling us how to behave when it comes to abortion, prostitution and drugs, it doesn't mean we need to proclaim those things as wonderful - it is easy to simultaneously value the liberty to do these things and the prudence to advise against them. And this is perhaps the key take home lesson - we must be wise of the difference between banning and disapproving: they are not always natural bedfellows.

Some personal thoughts
I have to confess, while (hopefully) most balanced minds can agree that making abortion illegal would be a terrible thing, I'm not actually very comfortable with the idea of making prostitution legal (by which I mean brothels, as technically it is not illegal to pay someone for sex - what is illegal is soliciting in a public place, kerb crawling, owning or managing a brothel, pimping and pandering), and I'm still very torn on the issue of drug legality.

The main issue I have with laws against prostitution and drugs is that it creates an underground sub-culture, which in itself brings additional criminality. On the one hand, making it legal would eradicate much of the underground sub-culture that puts young women at risk (although not all of it), but on the other hand keeping some things illegal has positive societal influence in that it tries to avoid normalising things that are possibly social undesirable.

It would seem, then, that people who disagree about the (il)legality of activities may disagree on whether an activity is desirable, or they may simply disagree about to what extent the state should interfere in our liberties. For example, I think brothels are socially undesirable from a Christian perspective, but from the libertarian perspective that doesn't necessarily mean I want them to be illegal. I perhaps could argue that the costs of prohibition (underground sub-culture, state suppressing our liberties, home office costs) are not a worthy price to pay, and that allowing this socially undesirable act is the lesser of two costs. Someone else, on the other hand, may disagree that it is socially undesirable, and call for its legality on grounds of social approval as well.

For me, whether an act is socially (un)desirable or not, and whether it should be illegal or not are perhaps two parts of the same question about whether the act harms anyone else in a way that's socially undesirable. I say 'socially undesirable' because almost all acts cause some social inconvenience to others, even buying the last newspaper on the rack, or joining a queue on a busy road, but no one seriously thinks these acts should be illegal.

Is it socially undesirable to have an abortion to the extent that it should be illegal? I'd argue definitely not, because the rights of a woman over her own body always trump the right of the state to force her to keep a baby. But do the rights of a woman over her own body extend to selling her body for sex in a brothel and taking drugs? One could possibly argue a case for selling sex in a brothel - it's her body and if she wants to use it to sell sex she is perfectly entitled to do so. The social harms would be that this kind of transaction becomes more normalised, and it may encourage more married men to pay for sex. But as we've said, affairs harm relationships and the children, but no one is saying they should be illegal. As long as the profession was well regulated to guard against exploitation and, rather like it is in the ordinary workplace, I think I could argue for its legalisation, and for people's freedom to engage in sex for money if they fancied.

Drugs is the most difficult issue for me

This just leaves drugs, and I'm afraid that even as a libertarian, of the three, I find drugs the most difficult, for reasons I'll explain. I was challenged by a friend, who said something along the lines of "I find it odd that you claim to be a libertarian and yet support legislation restricting access to currently illegal drugs. Care to elaborate why this isn't oxymoronic?"

As I indicated, I'm still not 100% sure how I feel about the issue of drugs like cannabis and their legality. I said earlier that where the law works for me is when it guards people against harms that live outside of anything that could be defined as a mutually beneficial transaction with transparency. And I understand the liberalising argument that if Jack wants to smoke weed, and Jill wants to take LSD, and Geoff wants to get drunk, and Mary wants to ride a horse, and so on, that they should be free to do as they wish provided it doesn't harm others.

But heroin does harm to more than just the user - its addiction is behind so much crime - and that wouldn't change if it was legalised, because as far as I can see, for the addict demand for the drug exceeds affordability, so they turn to crime, or in the case of young girls, they get sold into prostitution against their will to feed their habit.

So although small state works well for me in areas in which people have lucid self-determination, I think there are quite a lot of people that do require a strong state that can legislate of their behalf. Maybe that's not an argument against legalising cannabis, but I feel it is an argument against legalising heroin.

I was challenged though by a friend to read some Douglas Husak on this. He makes the point that heroin, and opiates in general, are still lower harm than even alcohol, according to ISCD. And we now know that diamorphine can effectively be "brewed" - very cheaply - the lab that discovered it has put it on hold until someone in government can tell them how to handle it, but the upshot of it is that some sugar water and GM yeast can create it by the vat load like beer.

He also made the challenging point that it is perfectly possible in the right circumstances to maintain a heroin habit. Like alcohol, it will catch up with your good health eventually, but it does not require crime to fund it except that it is controlled so heavily. The illegal supply chain makes it many hundreds of times more expensive than it need be. And some of the worst effects are because people who are desperate for it in that market are lured into other things - the man in the white BMW doesn't care whether he sells you rubbish diamorphine, or crack, and you don't care what you get so long as it does something.

It's also worth mentioning that diamorphine (heroin) is the world’s most powerful painkiller. It and the less powerful morphine are used currently in UK hospitals. So the question is whether various chemical compounds should be classified into 1) freely available, 2) licensed over-the-counter, 3) prescription, 4) hospital controlled and 5) illegal. It’s a big and complex debate.

I think at the moment I'm concerned about legalising heroin outside of the medical profession because it does so much harm to people's lives, and to the countless victims of crime, exploited girls, etc. If we got to a situation where it could be intelligently bought and sold without the criminal/exploitation factor, rather like alcohol is now, I'd be more up for it. I just think that we are not at that stage yet, for all sorts of complex reasons. Take countries like Mexico and Colombia - they certainly don't seem ready yet.

I suppose, finally, there is a quite interesting subtext for me regarding the drugs issue - a kind of meta-analysis - in that I'm quite torn about the legalisation of some of these drugs, but am also not entirely sure why I'm so torn or what it would take to make me adopt a more convinced viewpoint. Would more information change my mind? Is it that the wider issues are too intractable to formulate a solid but philosophically justifiable conviction? Or is it that there is no easy answer and that being able to see merit and demerit from each side means a somewhere-in-between position is the most intellectually tenable? I'm not entirely sure.  

Gambler's Crime

There was an article in the Express yesterday talking about how absurd it is that criminals are receiving up to 10 suspended sentences before they are finally locked up. Yes, well, most of us know that you have to be a hardened career criminal to go to prison for any length of time these days.

The article writer asks what kind of message this sends out, if a potential offender is almost certain that he or she will not end up behind bars, there isn't much of an initial deterrent to stop them from going into crime. The key word here is 'incentives', and economics is very interested in the word. 

I remember as a child being told a neat piece of wisdom on incentives. How do you ensure that two brothers have an equal piece of a chocolate bar given to them by their mother? Get one brother to break it and then allow the second one to choose which piece he wants. That’s a sure fire way to encourage the first brother to break it as evenly as he can. The incentive is that he has self-interest in the equitable division of the chocolate bar. 

Incentives have the strongest influence when there is a tangible focal point. So, for example, in a national lottery, people will be more attracted to buying a ticket with one very sizeable jackpot (say £1 million) than with 10 smaller jackpots (say 10 x £100,000). Lottery gamblers prefer a reduced chance of a huge win over an increased chance of a less-huge win. 

The enquiring article writer would be pleased to know that this kind of psychology applies in ethics and jurisprudence too. Criminals generally prefer a reduced chance of a lengthy sentence over an increased chance of a shorter sentence.

So if you want the optimal deterrence for criminals it is better to focus on improving the rate of successful convictions more than increasing the jail sentences (although the latter may be prudent too if incarceration were to provide stronger steps towards rehabilitation and the bringing about of greater human worth, purpose and self-esteem).

Consequently, then, psychology says that a system in which an offender receives several suspended sentences before they are finally locked up would be improved greatly if there was an increased chance of being convicted and an increased chance of a prison sentence with unfavourable conditions.

It is clearly a problem that, for many, prison isn't much of a worse lifestyle than being free, particularly when offenders' feelings of self-worth make them fairly indifferent to either scenario. Therefore, I'd suggest a good balance would be to increase the chance of an offender being convicted, increase the chance of a prison sentence with not-too-comfy conditions, and ensure that rehabilitation transforms offenders' lives in a way that makes them positively not want to come back to prison.

The Economics Of Terrorism, And Why Islamic State Will Eventually Crumble

A recent poll revealed that just over 70% of people in the UK think that immigration increases the likelihood of terrorism. They are right, but not in any way that should cast aspersions over the merits of immigration, because immigration increases the likelihood of terrorism only in the same way that having roads increases the likelihood of speeding. The cause of an increased likelihood of terrorism is down to something else.

Terrorism, like fruit, vegetables, cars and holidays has a supply and demand curve. Consider terrorism as a good with a demand curve - by which I mean that terrorism is an activity that currently some people wish to engage in to achieve a religious or political goal. The price of engaging in terrorism is paid in the form of the risk of death, injury or imprisonment.

Similarly, there is a demand curve for burglary, speeding, and fraud, and the price paid to do these things comes in the cost of a fine or a prison sentence. To put it in formal terms, we could in theory draw a demand curve for all of these crimes and then plot the likelihood of punishment on the vertical axis, and the number of crimes committed for each on the horizontal axis.

Ascertaining the steepness of the demand curve is like asking whether an increase in the probability of punishment will amount to reduced instances in crimes committed. Measuring the slope of the demand curve for, say, burglary is equivalent to measuring the deterrent effect of the punishment for burglary. Crimes like burglary, which are often committed to feed a drug habit, are likely to have steep demand curves because drug demand is usually fairly inelastic for an addict, which is why recidivism rates for drug addicts are so high. With speeding, on the other hand, the demand curve seems to be pretty flat. In other words, the single appearance of a speeding sign or a camera leads to a huge decrease in the incidences of speeding.

Now when it comes to terrorism and the sort of people who are likely to commit terrorist acts in the name of ISIS, the demand curve is about as far from flat as it is possible to be, because most of the causes with which the terrorists identify are causes bigger than the crime deterrents (including even death). In other words, many terrorists are perfectly willing to die for their cause, believing that in doing so they are offering a noble service to Allah, meaning in most cases there is no deterrent to flatten down the demand curve for terrorism.

If terrorists have no care for the consequences in terms of punishment for the crime, and if Islamic State continues with the same momentum in recruiting willing participants to fight for their cause, then terrorism is going to continue to be a problem, and immigration only changes where the incidences of terrorism take place - be it Britain, France, Germany, Holland or Belgium.

Regarding the aims of Islamic terrorism, and the fact that those aims even seem able to subvert the moral compass of the perpetrators, I see no signs of incidences of terrorism decreasing. The wide scope of this evil regime is that Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi wants to establish the Caliphate of all Caliphates, unleashing terror everywhere he can, and ruling Islamic State nations under the thrall of their terror-inducing domination.

There is, though, perhaps one fly in the ointment - if only he was a bit more familiar with the works of Plato and Aristotle, or even a bit more cognisant of historical antecedents, he and his fellow Jihadi thugs would see that their aspirations are probably unrealistic in the longer run.

Here's why. A general pattern throughout the history of military or political coups is that even when they are brutal and catastrophic for the citizens, they soon reach a point of relative stability, not least because it's nigh-on impossible to rule a country under continual internal strife. In other words, good conquerors, even Caliphs, totalitarian as they were, still allowed at least a semblance of autonomy and harassment-free administration of people. That's why, even though it is likely that these horrible terrorist incidents will continue to occur, and Islamic thuggery will continue to pop up, the idea of ruling nations consistent with the backward, brutalised, oppressive, freedom denying methods of Islamic State is wholly unrealistic in the long run.

Can You Think Of A Victimless, Rational, Morally Good Crime?

After reading the recent news bulletin about how in Italy it may now be legal in the eyes of the courts to steal food if you're poor and hungry, I was reminded of a debate I had a few years ago. On a cafe forum for debating I once posed the following question; Can anyone think of a victimless crime, where 'victimless crime' means a crime committed whereby in the general sense there is realistically no possibility of anyone other than the agent in question being a victim or coming to harm?

Just to be clear; you can’t say something like “I could make a call on my mobile phone whilst driving (which is illegal), and then hang up with no one harmed” – because although in the specific instance no one was harmed, in the general sense someone could easily be harmed (if you lost control and had a crash).

Despite lots of evidently faulty suggestions (see below), one that came close was “smoking weed on your own in your own house”. I felt compelled to add the caveat; if you are growing the drugs yourself, then fine, that's a candidate for a victimless crime. But if you are buying the drugs from a drug dealer, then there are costs (you are aiding someone else in committing a crime).

But even the growing of the drugs yourself and smoking them on your own still does not really qualify for there being "realistically no possibility of anyone other than the agent in question being a victim or coming to harm", because if the effects of weed smoking in excess are true, then eventually for some people there will be negative externalities - if, for example, you end up imposing an excessive burden on the health service, or addicted to harder drugs, or becoming dangerously paranoid and volatile. If any or all of those things happen then others will feel the effects of your drug-taking. Here are some of the other suggestions I got (with my comments included):

1) Downloading music or films from pirate internet sites

My Comment: No, the victims are the artists/companies that are losing money through loss of revenue. Of course, there's no guarantee that they always incur a loss, if, for example, sales increase due to dissemination of information - but some will.

2) Jaywalking

My Comment: No, this has every potential to cause harm to others. One car swerves to avoid the jaywalker, hits another, and *biff*.

3) Suicide

My Comment: What a bizarre choice, as this manifestly doesn’t qualify. Suicide destroys entire families left behind.

4) Speeding on an empty highway

My Comment: I think that's stretching it a bit, and I don't think I can allow it, because the crime is 'speeding', which won't generally qualify as "a crime committed whereby in the general sense there is *realistically no possibility* of anyone other than the agent in question being a victim or coming to harm". Moreover, I don't think we can grant omniscience to a driver and give him or her any kind of certainty that the highway is empty.

5) Bigamy

My Comment: Again, no, bigamy potentially imposes costs on one of the wives, and one other prospective husband.

6) Polygamy

My Comment: No, polygamy imposes costs on other men and other women. Some people asked the question; what if all people involved in bigamy or polygamy are aware of the costs and the arrangement is entirely mutual between all parties? Even then it is not enough because the cost is still incurred on those whose chances of finding a partner are minimised by the practice. Technically that is true of marriage as well - when John marries the girl you love he imposes a cost on you because your sweetheart is no longer free to marry you. But in marriage the social benefits outweigh the social costs, which is why we don't opt for a world full of unmarried people, which would then reverse the cost-benefit situation.

7) Walking nude in the street

My Comment: No, that's not an argument with much economic utility - a practice becomes prudent if the social benefits outweigh the social costs. Evidently, the costs of allowing public nudity far outweigh the benefits as it imposes costs on anyone that doesn't want to see nude people walking around the streets.

As you can see, it proved very difficult to find a suggestion for a crime committed whereby in the general sense there is realistically no possibility of anyone other than the agent in question being a victim or coming to harm. 

The only good one was, ironically, related to marriage. One contributor proposed the following; “A victimless crime is finding a way to gain the legal benefits of being married to a person of the same sex in a place where same sex marriages are illegal”. That's a good one; there I can see no reasonable grounds to call anyone else a victim. Cleary, as well, I think it is also ironic that the one valid suggestion put forward is one that most pressingly involves the need for a law change. This shows that laws are predominantly about protecting potential victims as well as potential felons.

(Note: If you have any other suggestions to proffer, you're quite welcome to email me)

Now we’ve considered that, I want to consider three corollary questions in terms of economic analysis; one, concerning a crime with an unaware victim; two, concerning whether there is such a thing as a rational crime; and three, whether there such a thing as a morally good crime. 

What about a crime situation whereby the victim has no awareness that a crime has taken place?

Suppose Frank sees that Jack has a wallet full of money. Feeling confident that Jack won't notice a missing £40, Frank steals it while Jack is asleep, spends £39 on junk food, and then bets the last £1 on a 40/1 winning horse, enabling him to surreptitiously return Jack's £40 before he wakes up. Being completely unaware of any crime, it could be argued that it's hard to call Jack a victim of crime. In fact, suppose that with the last £1 Frank bets on a 60/1 winning horse and returns all the money to Jack's wallet while he sleeps. Here we have a crime in which both Frank and Jack have benefitted (Frank with free food and Jack with an extra £20). Yet even then I wouldn't feel happy with the events that took place because theft is theft. That's a good example of a situation in which everyone benefits yet still there are things of which we disapprove.

Or suppose an admin clerk in a large Pension fund organisation with 1 million clients hacks into the computer system and takes one penny from each account, and then donates the £10,000 to charity - is that a victimless crime, or is it a crime with one million victims that did not notice they'd been the victims of an astronomically small theft? Technically I suppose the latter is true - and either way, it still doesn't make stealing right, even if the net gains surely exceeded the net costs.

Is there such a thing as rational crime? 

From an economic perspective, yes. A man who illegally parks on a single yellow line might find benefits of the crime over the year outweigh the annual costs. Suppose Bob works 250 days per year, and the only car-park within walking distance charges £4 per day - that's £1000 per year. If the road on which Bob parks illegally only generates a £30 parking fine every 4 weeks due to a feckless traffic warden, then it could be argued that Bob is committing a rational crime, as his total fine expenditure throughout the year amounts to £390 (13 x 4 weeks x £30) leaving him £610 ahead against the annual car-parking expenditure of £1000. That’s not to say that we should endorse a crime even if it is rational, but it is rational by any standard definition in economics (see Gary Becker’s Rational Choice Theory* for more on this).  

Is there such a thing as a morally good crime?

It depends on your perspective, but at an individual ‘singular’ level, quite possibly. If you, like many of us, place a higher premium on helping the people most in need in the world (people desperate for drinking water and food) over the people with not such urgent needs (like having smoother tarmac on the road, or searching for alien life) then it could be argued that any singular crime that involved you withholding income tax money from the government and giving it to much more desperate people in Africa is actually a morally good crime. I say ‘singular crime’ because clearly if everyone in the country tried this then many of the nation’s vital services would be severely impaired. 

But the man who is fed up with the government's profligacy in relation to injudicious foreign policies, expenses scandals and excessive wage bill, and decides that he will take it upon himself to give the money directly to those for whom it will do the most good, must in some way be more mindful than most.  Here is a situation in which the law is being put up against a man's conscience, with the conscience coming out victorious.  Although we may be right to disapprove, it should be said that in terms of net good, the man's act is positive and has improved the well-being of the planet overall. 

As you may have noticed, the underlying commonality that runs through the above considerations is that irrespective of whether there is a victim (or victims) in those scenarios the agent committing any bad acts or having bad intentions is the one that bears the costs of the outrage on his or her conscience.

Which leads us full circle back to the person who steals food legally because he (or she) is poor and hungry. Intrinsically the theft may well be rational - at least in that it is rational to steal food and risk punishment rather than risk starvation. But where there is not even any punishment, there is a great incentive for many to steal who are not all that poor in the hope that they can get away with it on grounds that they are poor. In other words, what the lifting of this law does is create an incentive of increased theft, which passes the main bulk of the costs/risks onto shopkeepers, and will therefore probably have more negative unintended consequences than is ideally desired.

* Gary Becker's famous rational crime theory involved weighing up the costs and benefits of crime, and trying to ascertain whether some instances of criminal behaviour are rational. For example, Becker considered whether parking in an illegal but convenient spot was a rational thing to do once the probability of getting caught is measured against the benefits of a convenient parking spot. Becker famously spoke of goals in the sense of our being rational actors engaged in a diligent cost-benefit analysis of whether crime pays. Some criminal activities involve reasonable goals if the benefit from the act is perceived to be greater than the probability adjusted weight of being caught and paying a penalty. Developing this David Friedman has argued that "The amount of the punishment should equal the damage done by the crime". The point being, that if crimes are committed when the value to the criminal is greater than the societal harm, only efficient crimes will be committed.

What Nobody Is Talking About In This Beheading Tragedy

Nicholas Salvador detained over woman's beheading

This case is terribly sad, and at the same time it also presents us with an intriguing consideration of the human mind and the nature of mental illness.

Nicholas Salvador beheaded an elderly lady, believing her to be the human incarnation of a malevolent demon figure. He has now been declared insane on grounds of suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, and obviously we all agree he was mistaken about the old lady's demon status. But if you think about it, the mistake is predominantly in the projection of demonic forces, not in the morality of the act.

That is to say, the reason we recoil in horror at what happened is not because we think a malevolent demon figure is benign and undeserving of death, it is because we are upset at her death and because we don't actually think the old lady was demonic. If any of us thought we were face to face with a demonic figure capable of wreaking havoc on men, women and children, we'd be the first to call for its execution (a practice not uncommon in several American States, lest we forget).

So while Nicholas Salvador's mental illness led him to the tragic mistake of killing what he thought was a malevolent demon, thinking he is actually killing a malevolent demon does demonstrate that an element of cogent sanity is very much present in his act - which, as I said at the start, presents us with an interesting consideration of the nature of sanity and insanity.

Cameron's Counter-Extremism Plan Is Not A Good One

In the papers today we read about David Cameron's new plans for counter-extremism:

"The Prime minister will announce a counter-terrorism bill including plans to restrict harmful actions of those seeking to radicalise young people. The policies include disruption orders to prevent extremists airing their views in public or radicalising young people, new powers to close premises such as mosques where extremists are seeking to build influence, and extra immigration restrictions for those thought to be preaching extremist views."

No no no, this is a terrible idea. While I'm all for coming down hard on Islamic extremism, this legislation will unleash an unwanted genie from the bottle - not just because it encroaches on people's free speech, but primarily because it involves backward reasoning that will probably make the problem it is trying to solve even worse.

Here's why. Generally speaking, you’re likely to reduce speeding by introducing speed cameras; you’re likely to reduce street crime by introducing CCTV; and you’re likely to reduce the chances of being burgled by getting a burglar alarm. What you are not likely to reduce by legislating against Islamic radicalisation is Islamic radicalisation - you are only likely to take it into even more secretive, private and harder to detect places.

The most dangerous Muslim fundamentalists are obsessed with the total and unchallengeable absoluteness of Islam - they are not going to let something comparably trivial like British legislation curb their ambitions - they will only be more likely to attempt to propagate their dangerous and fanatical influence from the subtle underbelly of society, underneath the radar of the authorities.

It's not that the idea of restricting pernicious radicalisation and dangerous extremism is an unworthy one, it's simply that it will make things worse - it will make many more young Muslims feel averse to the British establishment and increase their chances of being ripe for extremism, and it will remove many fundamentalist activities from where they can be observably checked.

The law is an effective deterrent only by preventing easily preventable activities. Islamic fundamentalism is not an easily preventable activity because its exponents consider it to be more valid than human laws. The best way to reduce the damaging effects of radical Islamic fundamentalism is not to prevent extremists from airing their views in public or repudiate the 'passive tolerance' we've come to enjoy - it is to leave untouched the liberty of free expression, and lock up those who end up committing criminal activities in the name of religious extremism.

Even that doesn't wholly get to the crux of the issue though - which is that words like 'extremism' and 'radicalisation' are nigh-on impossible to legislate against in any sense of hoping for pre-emption, because they are not objectively measurable states - they are subjective and part of a broad spectrum of viewpoint and behaviour. That simple truth gives us another reason why it's much better to afford people the freedom to believe and express whatever they want, and enforce the law when their freedom of belief and expression turns into a criminal activity that harms individuals in the society in which they live.

It's Not The Getting Caught, It's The Speed

I was interested to read about our politicians' recent predilection for dystopian nanny-state policies in this Telegraph article - Stealth cameras to be installed on motorways. Basically, these camouflage cameras (clearly just a way of making lots of money through increased speeding fines) will catch drivers unawares, and once these devices become ubiquitous they will all but enforce a 70mph speed limit for every driver on every motorway in the country.

While this is annoying and most unwelcome, what struck me as strange is that from what I've seen the general objections to this seem to be focused on the fact that these cameras are stealth cameras, when the real issue is not whether the cameras are hidden or not but whether the speed limit is right. For what it's worth I think the 30mph and 40mph speed limits in built up areas are about right, but motorways (and the major A roads) should be higher. But whether it's right or not is surely the only real issue here.

I should imagine the situation is roughly like this. If you think the speed limit is wrong then you're going to object to stealth cameras as an exacerbation of a current wrongness. On the other hand, if you think the speed limit is right then logically you should have no objection to whatever tactics are used to catch people speeding, any more than you would object to devices that catch theft, vandalism and graffiti.  Yes, I grant you, theft, vandalism and graffiti are different crimes to speeding, but that doesn't invalidate the point - the rationale works for all cases; that the annoyance is not annoyance at stealth tactics to catch offenders, it's annoyance at the speed limits being too low.

Put it this way, suppose a new stealth camera was introduced, but only for vehicles exceeding 140mph - there would be far fewer objections, because almost no one has any trouble with the notion that 140mph is a crazy and dangerous speed to drive. Given the foregoing, the vast majority of complaints about stealth cameras seem to me to really be complaints about the speed limits - because if the following applied in that you a) agreed with the speed limits, b) considered the speed limit levels to be contributing to safer driving and fewer injuries and deaths on the road, and c) supported laws that prosecuted people for breaking the speed limit - then you should have no objection to devices like stealth cameras being used to catch offenders and make the roads safer.

I'm not in favour of them because I'm not in favour of the current speed limits. If, for example, I thought the motorway speed limit should be 95mph, then rationally speaking I could have no objection to stealth cameras that caught out any driver doing 96mph or more, any more than if I thought theft, vandalism and graffiti should be outlawed I'd have no rational objection to any stealth devices the police wanted to use locate incidences of theft, vandalism and graffiti, so long as those devices didn't encroach on the freedoms of ordinary citizens, of course. As much as I enjoy fast driving, it's hard to deny that if the speed limit was as high as I wanted it to be, say 95mph*, then stealth cameras that penalised 96mph or more would only infringe on the liberties of drivers breaking the law.

 

*Adjust the variable according to your own preference

On Addiction: The Philosophical Muser vs. Peter Hitchens

I sometimes have the odd email exchange with Peter Hitchens, and did so again a couple of days ago, this time about the so-called war on drugs. I've blogged about his drug views before (see here), but in our exchange I ended up challenging his peculiar views about addiction by sending him this blog post of mine, on which he wrote the following in the comments section:

(PH) You're going to have to decide whether you accept the concept of 'addiction' or not. You can't simultaneously refer to 'addicts' and say that addiction is a 'life choice'. The key to this is realising that the advocates of this fiction use it to mean different things at different times, an unsustainable inconsistency which would not survive ten minutes, if 'addiction' weren't so valuable to moral revolutionaries who wish to destroy the idea that we have free will.

So in his wisdom Peter Hitchens wants to deny that addiction exists at all, calling it a fiction that can’t survive a moment’s serious analysis. Here's what I responded with:

(JK) I actually can refer to 'addicts' and in the same blog say that addiction is a 'life choice' - the two aren't mutually exclusive, but you must phrase it aright, because I didn't say that addiction is a life choice, I said that humans can make life choices that lead to addiction. It's a big difference.

Most don't choose the addiction, they choose activities that can lead to addiction. That's why I used the sun-tan analogy in the article. Going to the tanning shop is a life choice. The mutations that increase your chances of skin cancer are not a life choice, but they are the results of a life choice to visit the tanning shop. If you want to avoid this risk of skin cancer, don't go to tanning shops or partake in excessive sunbathing.

Similarly, taking drugs like heroin is a free choice. However, the physiological dependencies that occur as a result of this are not a life choice - they are the body's involuntary reaction to the need for more of heroin's constituencies. If you want to avoid the risk of being a heroin addict, don't take heroin. If you choose to take heroin you may become an addict - meaning that you are an 'addict' who made life choices that led to your addiction state, so no inconsistency.

In addition to that, it's often in a very weighted sense that we talk about a life choice to indulge in substances that lead to addiction. That is to say, there is some indication that most drug addicts are addicts for socio-economic and bad personal background reasons weighted against them, more than they are for reasons intrinsically about the drugs. For that reason alone, it's not just the fact that Peter Hitchens is wrong empirically that is his problem (and he is wrong empirically - for example, there is quite good evidence that addictive behaviour is a lot do to with genetic predisposition - as studies exhibit higher rates of addiction among monozygotic [identical] twins rather than dizygotic [fraternal] twins, which clearly suggests genetic factors) - it's that he lacks so much sympathy for people who've ended up on different paths to him - that's got to be the main reason so many people respond in such a negative way to him.

My theory about addiction

I have a theory about addiction; it's that addictive behaviour falls along a similar line to a law know as the principle of least effort, which is that things in nature will, in terms of effort, naturally choose the path of least resistance. Not only are we all potential addicts in any number of areas of life, with our background and experiences being key driving forces; on closer inspection almost all of us are at the extreme end of the addictive spectrum at given times, and are probably periodically addicted to things through genetic weakness and temporary diminution of willpower.

Perhaps the reason so many of us are below the radar is that the principle of least effort is, for many, so transitory that it rarely registers in our social circles. But whether it's not being able to stop eating those chocolate biscuits we started, or curb our enthusiasm for the final two or three glasses of Jack Daniels when we're on a pub night out, or even finding it difficult to resist putting a new song we really love on repeat, our propensity for addiction is there (albeit often unconsciously) in small doses as well as in those extreme cases that stand out more. 

That would also suggest to me that the age-old chicken and egg question - whether they take drugs because they are addictive, or whether they are addictive because they take drugs - is probably based on antecedents that were laid down long before. As a Christian it would be good if Peter Hitchens exemplified a bit more of Christ's character in his appraisal of other people's weaknesses. Then again, he is not alone - too often we could all the same about ourselves.

 

* Photos courtesy of www.rehab.com and dailymail.co.uk

 

What Really Motivates Our Lawfulness Isn't The Law

In my last Blog post I pointed out a Home Office error of reasoning about prison deterrence. I wanted to say something else about deterrence, but felt it would be better in a separate Blog post. Despite what I said about prison being mainly a deterrent against first time offences, it's also the case that the law is not the strong motivational, incentivising device many think it is - human rationality is the real motivational, incentivising device that enables us to have the relatively peaceable co-existence we have in places like the UK.

Imagine a man in the ancient Assyrian empire living in 1200 BC - a time of sieges, cross-border invasions, sanguinary conflicts and relative lawlessness. Suppose he gets transported to modern day Britain. As well as marvelling at the technological advances, the thing that will strike him most would probably be how peaceful, tolerant and stable it is.

Anyone who has studied history knows that peace and good order are far from the natural condition of human beings. The freedom, liberty, stability and security we have in the UK would probably strike our Assyrian man as being as marvellous as all the modern day technology (of course, if you transported him to present day Syria, or Ukraine, or Burma - or London during the 2011 riots - he'd soon feel more at home).

How have we become so ordered? Clearly not just by authority. If the majority of UK citizens decided to seize control over the authorities, they would have more than enough numbers to do so. Suppose you were asked to form an allegiance with an ever-expanding majority group who wanted to take control of the UK, and had the power to do so. Under this power you could join them in running riot - stealing from banks and shops, raping whomever you fancied, commandeering rich people's houses, swim in their pools, drive their Aston Martins around, and generally take advantage of being able to do what you wanted. I think you know straight away that you'd be prohibitively reluctant to join - in fact, you'd probably be on your knees praying that they don't go through with it.

The reason is obvious - despite some possible temporary gains, the losses are greater, as no one wants to live in such a society. Clearly, then, we are ordered not primarily out of fear of the law, but because we want to be ordered and want to live in a stable and safe society. Some moral philosophers will tell you that we are ordered because we all share the same views about what is right and wrong.  One careful look at society shows that this is moonshine - we differ greatly on all kinds of moral views. Therefore I would suggest that the moral philosophers who postulate this view have got their reasoning backwards - it is precisely because we have little chance of agreeing if all left to our own devices that we leave it to the devices of an elected government instead, and volunteer our active part in ensuring that those State-run devices are used as little as possible.

In all likelihood, until the past few decades a great many people had been brought up on a diet of people like Thomas Hobbes' and his portents in the Leviathan, according to which the benefit of the State is that it helps engender the kind of order of which we'd be devoid without a heavy authority in place. Without it life would be "nasty, brutish and short" according to Hobbes - which, as we know from history and from present day places without a stable State and rule of law, can be the case.

What Hobbes underestimated is the extent to which people have an incentive to adhere to the law if it is consistently enforced and that the State has an easier time policing a nation whose citizens adhere to the law, as well as an incentive to create laws that best incentivise. Hobbes got this part wrong - he believed that our natural brutishness necessitated a strict authoritarian State that could keep us in good order. He failed to appreciate the true strength of the symbiosis between willing citizens and willing State to work together to constrain us only to the extent to which our willingness to be co-operative was realised.

* Photo courtesy of hurstpublishers.com

The Prison Deterrence Fallacy

Now it's fairly obvious that there are a number of factors behind this difference between Sweden and the USA; things like number of laws, population size, levels of diversity, and varying levels of cultural tolerance on things like social behaviour, drugs, and so forth. On the last one, which is a big determiner of crime, apparently - "The drug policy of Sweden is based on zero tolerance focusing on prevention, treatment, and control, aiming to reduce both the supply of and demand for illegal drugs".

 

I won't comment any further on the prison situation in Sweden or the USA, because I'm not extensively researched on either. But I do have something to say on UK prisons, as there seems to be a fundamental error of understanding that I can hardly believe is uttered by our Home Office representatives. Here's what led me to witness this strange piece of logical foolishness.

 

Apparently, the story goes like this: after Vicky Pryce emerged from her period of incarceration and publicly claimed that prison is 'not fit for purpose', our Home Office team have been working hard to address the reasons why. Guess what their conclusion was? They concluded that it is primarily due to the high re-offending rate that prison is not fit for purpose as a deterrent against crime.

They base this on the fact that, according to Home Office statistics, 3/4 of criminals are recidivists. What that means is that 75 out of every 100 criminals released from prison re-offend. Actually, that's how many are convicted - and given that not all crimes result in a conviction, it's a fairly safe bet that more than 3/4 of criminals end up reoffending.

 

But saying that prison isn't fit for purpose because of high re-offending rates is an absurd complaint, and a peculiar error of reasoning. It's a bit like complaining that sea defences aren't fit for purpose because occasionally there are extreme coastal conditions that break those barriers. It would be good if the sea defences prevented all flooding, but their primary job is to protect the land from the ordinary thrust of the sea on a daily basis. Similarly, prison's primary function is to reduce offending (by deterrence and by keeping criminals out of society), not re-offending. If it reduces re-offending then all well and good, but that is not its primary function.

It's preposterous to consider whether prison is fit for purpose by only considering the recidivism rates. It's as preposterous as considering how many men in the UK take steroids by only interviewing weight-trainers in gymnasiums. Such a biased research method would drastically skew the overall figures, and this is what is going on with the Home Office's consideration of prison's success rate. Recidivists are people who've already been convicted of a crime, so they are people for whom the threat of prison was no real deterrent first time out. Therefore they are the biased sample of the population for whom prison is the least likely to be a deterrent second time around.

The only proper way to enquire whether prison is fit for purpose is to ask how much of a deterrent it is for the vast majority of people in the UK - those who haven't found themselves outside of the orbit of the law. As far as we can gather, the threat of prison, loss of liberty, loss of employment, and so forth has been a very successful deterrent for a majority of the population.

 

This is compounded by the fact that when it comes to the change in social status from being an ordinary citizen to a convicted criminal, the first cut really is the deepest. That is to say, the first time a recidivist became a criminal was the worst time for him (or her). It was on that first occasion that he became incarcerated, when up until then he had only been used to freedom, and it was then that he first experienced the change in status that would give him a social stigma and make him harder to employ. If that wasn't a sufficient deterrent, we shouldn't be too surprised that criminals are even less likely to be deterred second time around.

 

Now, it's here that we must mention perhaps the most important word - 'rehabilitation'. A prison system works if it successfully rehabilitates offenders. And, alas, high re-offending rates in the UK shows that prison is not working as well as it could in its quest for rehabilitation. I think that's a better argument for prison 'not being fit for purpose' than saying it's failing as a deterrent - but there is a caveat.

 

I fully support the notion that rehabilitation is a primary goal in the judicial system, but unless deterrence and incapacitation are part of that process, a strong rehabilitation ethos might by itself actually increase crime instead of reduce it. Here's why. If rehabilitation is made a primacy at the cost of diminishing deterrence and incapacitation, would-be criminals will see the cost of committing crimes diminish, and this would likely increase their desire to take risks and commit crimes. Yet equally, I don't actually like the notion of punishment for punishment's sake at all - I don't think it has the desired effect on the individual, even if it does stop would-be criminals trivialising the risks by seeing rehabilitation as a too softly-softly measure. If there is to be punishment, let it be part of the overall effect of incapacitation and a strong focus on rehabilitation.

* Picture courtesy of Facebook