Easy. Find one example of someone who stole something three times, then later murdered someone. Scare people with this fact. Make up a theory about how larceny is a gateway to violence.
This is, exactly, how the immigration debate is being held in DC. One undocumented shot and killed a citizen by accident, and now we're supposed to kick all immigrants out. Visceral emotion is a great tool to optimize society for corner cases.
One possible hack you could try is defining three categories:
1. Definitely violent crimes, like stabbing someone and taking his wallet.
2. Definitely non-violent crimes, like selling illegal drugs.
3. Crimes we're not entirely sure about. If you imprison people whose crimes fall in this category, they should only go to prisons with other people in this category.
Of course nothing is a perfect solution here, but I think this might be a helpful way of thinking about it.
A lot of people feel uncomfortable standing up for criminals, so it's easy to prey on them. The problem is when we put them in a position where their only way out is to commit more crimes.
It seems bonkers, until you realize that that person who gets 5 years in prison for his 4th petty shoplifting offense is generating hundreds of thousands of dollars of checks being written to people who work within and who are contractors for the justice system. And on the streets, fighting crime is another place where massive checks are written in order to protect the public from small-time street and property crime.
If people are robbing other people for $100, especially in 2023 dollars, that's too stupid to be a failure of society, that has to be because small-time crime is a resource for a lot of justice system-connected industries, and as long as maintaining the level of it doesn't pit those industries against real estate interests, they can lobby for crime.
I think there are really three kinds of crime:
1) Crimes of need, where people need to feed themselves or their loved ones, so resort to crime because they're willing to risk their lives and their freedom,
2) Crimes of stupidity, where people just don't understand how unlikely they are to get away with something, or how bad the punishment could be, so they undervalue the cost of undertaking those crimes for the benefit they stand to gain, and
3) Crimes of compulsion, where people have enough, and mostly understand the costs and the benefits, yet risk their lives and freedom for more for some irrational reason; degenerate gamblers.
We can prevent all crimes of need immediately and easily. It's more difficult to prevent crimes of stupidity, but pouring education into everyone is the answer. It's idiopathic crimes of compulsion that are hard to deal with, because people have wildly different reasons for their compulsions.
As a society, we pour all of our efforts into crimes of compulsion, the only kind of crime that we're virtually guaranteed to be ineffective at stopping, and bad at controlling. Where the discussions between political factions are about whether we should kill them, give them therapy, drug them, corral them far away from people, let you look them up on a website after they're free, refuse them work, let them vote, etc., in the context of assuming that the vast majority of crime has unique causes and solutions. To assume that, we have to ignore that people are still sticking other people up for $100.
Exactly there is the huge problem that if you look at how humans learn, you will quickly come to the conclusion that 99.9% of human behavior is copying others' behavior.
That means it is very responsible to:
1) partly cloud or obscure methods/reasons for suicice
2) partly cloud or obscure motives for serious crimes
This does NOT mean to lie about the events. Or even make that information to truly not be available. Just hide it ... just a bit so it doesn't pass through everyone's mind who just reads some news.
There have been incidents in the past where news messages lead to copycats in both cases.
The fact of the matter is that crime is not illogical or "evil". Crimes are committed for a specific purpose. Making people realize that "hey you can do this", or making people think about what a crime would accomplish vs what not doing a crime would accomplish will inevitably lead some to conclude the crime is the preferable option, and thus damage others.
Your buddy has a rather simplistic view of crime. Much crime is done without thinking through the consequences. They are acts of impulse. Fear of punishment does not help in deterring such crimes. No matter what the punishment is crimes of impulse will be done. Other factors need to be addressed at a societal level to combat impulse crimes.
It's funny that you suggest to fix the reasons leading to people committing crimes and then advocate for some of the reasons leading to people committing crimes: growing up with parents in jail or unable to hold steady work because of having been in jail.
It's a cycle. Throwing your hands up and saying, "well, stop going to jail!" isn't going to break the cycle.
Hell, why even bother criminalizing murder or theft when murder and theft have happened in every culture in the history of time? It's only human nature, after all.
If you let criminals get away with breaking into someone's house and stealing things, it sends a message to other people that crime is allowed. Crime rates start to rise because no one is doing anything about it. People who were not criminals before are now comfortable being criminals because they know they won't be caught.
If you don't prosecute the small crimes, it often leads to bigger crimes.
That can be difficult to do depending on the context. Mexico comes to mind. Criminals can use both fear and loyalty to make it harder to prove crimes and if politicians are involved, they can easily threaten other politicians or even the legal system itself. This isn’t to say that the approach won’t work, long-term de-escalating violence, increasing controls in arms trade, and asserting the rule of law above any individual are all viable. It’s getting the existing gangs and political systems to change their ways that is harder. It’s also worth pointing out that a justice system based on evidence can still serve unjust sentences, make mistakes. And politicians write the laws the system enforces. And many places don’t have free speech and human rights upheld to such an extent that laws can’t easily be written to curb it. So it’s a complicated problem... I’d even start by saying Panama Papers highlights a problem that you can have anonymous “persons” making transactions that are untraceable, etc. And countries and businesses can profit off this, and there isn’t agreement as to when privacy is worth more or less than free speech or when profit is valued more or less than security.
This is, exactly, how the immigration debate is being held in DC. One undocumented shot and killed a citizen by accident, and now we're supposed to kick all immigrants out. Visceral emotion is a great tool to optimize society for corner cases.
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