Smoke weed.

aite.

I didn’t touch on this in my post but what we should be spending more time/effort/money on is education. Kids should be educated about crime, the effects of crime and the criminal system from an early age.

To ensure this remains effective we should also be spending money on police training rather than more police. If we had an effective police force criminals would be more afraid of getting caught, as Darian states: "…criminals are more likely to put a higher weighting on the cost of an increased likelihood of getting caught than an increase in the sentence." The key to an effective police force is not merely numbers. A public (including would-be-criminals) will resent its police force to some extent if it deems its police force to be too large.

Putting more cops on the streets/in the offices is a burden on the tax payer. Tax dollars would be better spent training the officers that we have now. These officers will become three things:
1) Better at preventing crime
2) Better at dealing with criminals
3) Better respected by the public due to their performance in 1) and 2).
By building more respect with the proper application of their advanced training, a police force will be looked on more favourably by a community. This means that criminals will be more inclined to deal with the police. If a cop put his sirens on behind me and I knew I was over the limit I would be less inclined to try to speed away if I knew that the police force were good, professional people.

If longer jail timez were wats gonna happen I wud NEVER meet mah dad out sidez da wallz of jail.

Yeahz jus wah I had 2 say.

TuPz 4 EVA
Eastz SiDeZ 4 LIFE
443

Yes, I was looking a bit broader than the narrow scope of simply longer sentences. However I just don’t think Zach’s conjecture "people that commit crimes aren’t scared of the sentence… don’t think they’ll get caught don’t care about the consequences or have no idea that what they are doing is really bad at all."
I may have misinterpreted it, but this seems to be a fatalistic approach to crime rates. ~criminals don’t care about punishment so why bother punishing~. I’ve read before that criminals are more likely to put a higher weighting on the cost of an increased likelihood of getting caught than an increase in the sentence. Which is what your article hints at, saying that longer sentences are ineffective ‘due to a variety of criminal justice realities such as low punishment rates’.

Many highly respected, (including Nobel-prize-winning) economists are involved in studying criminal law. The pretext being, ‘the willful engagement in even the most reprehensible violations of legal and moral codes does not preclude an ability to make self-serving choices, and this has been the justification for applying economic analysis to all illegal activities, from speeding and tax evasion to murder.’ (Ehrlich, 1996)

So what I’m saying is that, yes, it is not very good to start re-writing laws for emotive and vengeful reasons–BUT, to rule out that criminals respond to incentives doesn’t get you very far towards working out society’s best response to violent criminals.

Reading the abstract of the first article you linked to I am unsure how this is relevant, as it seems to be about arrest rates (not longer/harsher sentences). Also it was written over ten years ago, by an economist.

I browsed around the site and found an article that seems to be more applicable to the situation; it’s more recent, more relevent and is written by a criminal law expert.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3…

http://www3.interscience.wi…

there seems to be a reasonable amount of empirical evidence suggesting that deterrence measures like longer sentences and more police does actually reduce crime.

http://www3.interscience.wi…

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3…

… & even if it doesn’t stop someone from assaulting somebody in the public in the first instance, it’s kinda hard for them to do it again when they’re in prison.

see you,

darian