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Originally Posted by unsunghero
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How do we measure the people who were deterred by the penalty from attempting in the first place. How do they report this on surveys? They go fill out some survey saying they were thinking about x crime but changed their mind because of the penalty?
Looks like your studies are cherry picking re-offenders.
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The same way they study pretty much anything involving human health or behavior; by looking at recidivism rates between jurisdictions and controlling for variables to isolate cause and effect to a meaningful p value and effect size.
We know crime rates in the 80's went bananas before declining again but we don't really know why. Some jurisdictions went 'tough on crime', others didn't, even within the same city (overlapping sheriff and PD jurisdictions for example, or Los Angeles vs. Long Beach, Dallas vs. Fort Worth). They collated all this data and controlled for things like demographics, poverty, national and local overall crime trends, and looked at recidivism rates for different policies. They compared to similar jurisdictions to control for naturally changing crime rates. Jurisdictions with longer sentences either saw no significant change or an increase in crime, overall.
Quote:
Originally Posted by unsunghero
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Longer sentences also deter offending by keeping the person away from the public for longer, do they not?
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They absolutely do, this is called incapacitation (vs. deterrence) and it does reduce crime in the short term, but is counteracted to an extent by increased crime from the long sentences in criminal academy.
You're keeping people off the streets where they can't commit crimes against the public, but you're also taking someone who maybe could have been redirected and fucking them up, as well as putting a bunch of other criminals in their lives. Then think of the determinism of your life and consider how things might have been different for you if you spent your late teens and early 20's hanging out with a bunch of drug dealers, burglars, and muggers for literally years on end day after day. Also you probably already feel like you fucked up your life. Then compare this to moving somebody out of the situation they were in when they committed the crime, but getting them back out before their life is completely fucked and they grew up in prison.
Tony Soprano isn't like "oh shit they're RICOing us bedda stop mobbin'"