The colors in repeat offender shoplifting made me first think that 35% of commenters want death for shoplifting, which seemed *quite* unlike being a big softy...
I think that people's general idea of a shoplifter is a 13-year-old kid stealing a candy bar, and even adjusting it for 100$ worth of goods doesn't change it *that* much, which might affect the willingness to let go with a warning.
For what it’s worth — I don’t know how representative I am — although I didn’t pick the softest possible option, I was softer than not, and I did assume that the shoplifter was an adult.
Yeah I think we're talking about the general structure of a system more than the hypothetical of single judge's decision on a single case.
What made you choose death? Would you not expect someone like that to learn their lesson after 1 or 10 years in prison, or what factors into that for you? I'm definitely on the soft side of things, myself, so a death penalty is next-to-incomprehensible for me.
For me, after 10 previous arrests (and presumably 10 convictions with increasingly harsher punishments) they are clearly incorrigible, so that's why I chose death. I was disappointed to learn that I was wrong in thinking that 35.9% were in agreement with me.
10 previous arrests is but the floating of a dandelion seed on the soft summer zephyrs when it comes to the hardcore shoplifters, and drug addiction seems to be behind a good deal of it:
"A Dublin drug addict, with 342 previous convictions, who carried out three shoplifting incidents in Dundalk, has been given a suspended sentence after the local district court heard she is now on a methadone treatment programme."
Yes, that is the future I imagine is the most likely for someone with 10 arrests, that they will continue to victimize members of their community, dozens and hundreds and thousands of times, unless and until they are forcefully stopped from continuing down that path. To me it seems that we as a society (in most Western countries) have chosen that it is more important that we keep our collective hands clean by not punishing criminals too harshly than that we prevent those offences – though I would be happy to be convinced of some more charitable explanation for this strange behaviour on the part of our systems of justice.
I used to be more in favor of the death penalty. What persuaded me to change my mind was an increasing belief in the fallibility of the system on the margins. Life in prison is reversible. Also, carrying out the death penalty often doesn't save money due to the numerous appeals. But having it on the books likely does save money in terms of encouraging people to plea bargain.
I picked 10 years. My logic being that you give someone like a week or two for the first offense and then N-1 years in prison for the Nth offense. Or maybe something exponential rather than linear. But the point being that it ramps up such that after they get out of jail they are either terrified of an even harsher sentence the next time, or they just end up in jail permanently if they can't stop themselves.
People sometimes age out of the criminal lifestyle. It seems unnecessary to execute a 30 year old for being a career criminal when they might be a better person by the time they're 40 or 50. If shoplifting is the worst of their crimes, we can afford a couple of repeat offenses to offer second chances. If it was something harsher then I would agree with you (although ideally they'd be in jail too long to even reach 10 separate convictions in the first place).
Yeah, the age-out issue is why I also picked 10 years rather than life (I'm generally against imposing the death penalty other than as a "you've been sentenced to life without parole; do you want to be executed instead?" or as a "we don't have a prison that can hold him, so this is the only way to prevent reoffence").
One alternative that I find appealing would be to offer assisted suicide on demand to all incarcerated criminals. In many Western countries, the death penalty is politically impossible, while euthanasia is within the Overton window.
My stance for repeat offenders is based on the priors that: 1) The majority of repeat criminals cause far more harm to others both in and out of prison than they generate positive utility, and I’d probably say this is true in expectation for their whole lives; 2) Life is net-negative for the majority of repeat criminals themselves (due to substance abuse/mental health issues etc.) and would get worse in prison - therefore their death is a moral good regardless of whether it disincentivises crime; 3) not exactly sure how to compare gradations of the two, but prison is absurdly inefficient and costly. My sense is that efficient and humane prison has more costs to society than efficient and humane execution.
Keep in mind that the average cost to the Federal government (U.S.) of a death penalty sentence is estimated to be $1M more than the cost of imprisonment for life.
Only because the system is inefficient by design. A lot of those costs could be cut by making the trials shorter and reducing the opportunity for appeals.
But then, the prison system is inefficient by design as well. I'm pretty sure NKVD troikas and a bullet in the head were extremely cheap, but Gulag imprisonment cost was negative.
Yeah. In China it's more efficient - there are two expedited appeals, including one by the Supreme Court. The average time between sentencing and execution is two months.
I always find it interesting how getting a criminal case in front of a judge takes many months, but whenever Trump issues an executive order there's somehow a Federal judge somewhere ruling against it within hours. How does the case pipeline even work?
Although I don't doubt that some people on ACX have toxic, posturing attitudes to crime and punishment, I haven't really noticed any in this thread. People on both sides have responded thoughtfully and respectfully.
Are you respectful to other posters? Sure. Respectful to humanity? Nope. Your vitriolic policy prescriptions show a lack of regard for others is astonishing.
And that's a major weakness in the current system. Most defendants have no idea what's the maximum or typical sentence that applies to their case, or even may delude themselves into thinking that 3-strikes laws will not apply, they'll get community service, etc.
Even if you leave out humanitarian considerations, the fact is that the death penalty removes an incentive gradient. There is this famous story from the Qin dynasty, who had decreed that being late to a job warranted the death penalty. So when two generals were delayed by bad weather, they had no incentive not to start a rebellion.
I think limiting the sentence for habitual shoplifting to a year or so is much better. Someone who makes a living from shoplifting will still be out of circulation mostly, but the incentive gradient still remains. The message is "shoplifting will not be tolerated and you will (eventually) go to prison for it, but turning to robbery will get us really mad at you, and don't even think about starting to murder witnesses".
This is one of the few good counter-arguments - I definitely agree that we need incentive gradients, so this kind of policy couldn't be done in isolation.
My ideal system would be a relatively steep gradient from 1) very short but certain prison/cell time; 2) increasingly severe corporal punishment; 3) death penalty. There should be lots of carrots to go with the sticks, such as rewards for good behaviour, psychological treatment, and educational/work opportunities.
Also, as you mentioned imperial China, they were the masters of incentive gradients compatible with the death penalty.
Perpetrators of lesser crimes were allowed to be executed through simple beheadings, while with more heinous crimes, you could be 腰斩 "decapitated at the waist", 五马分尸 pulled limb from limb by 5 horses, or 灭九族 all of your relatives within nine generations would be killed as well.
Someone convicted of 10 shoplifting offenses should definitely receive a painless execution.
Didn't want to bring in ling chi or, Wikipedia tells me, 凌遲?
Given the risk of rape in jail (and contracting HIV, which can't be cured even if there are drugs for it now), I wonder if the corporal punishment should come first.
I have a hard time with the death penalty for shoplifting, but maybe I haven't lived in San Francisco lately. I think quite a few San Franciscans would be OK with the death penalty for public defecation at this point.
Good catch, I'd forgotten about 凌迟!On the jail point, I agree entirely, my idea was more "a couple of nights alone in a holding cell" rather than prison with other criminals.
I did pick death penalty (assuming ~linear increasing punishment prior to the 10th offense); "10 strikes and you're out (for good)" seems more than fair. 10 charges establishes a pattern of behavior suggesting that the perpetrator is incapable of peacefully existing within the confines of modern society. The means of removal (death penalty, life imprisonment, exile to some uninhabited island where they can live as barbarously as they wish) are not super relevant, the key is identifying when someone belongs to this group ("irredeemably and openly contemptuous of civilization") and doing both them and us a favor by, well, removing them from civilization.
Some are doing it to survive, but when you're seeing "professional life-long thief" and "drug addict with string of convictions" and not "penniless mother needs to feed starving baby", that tilts the balance towards stern measures.
You and the rest of the tough on crime posturers seem totally unwilling or unable to grapple with the truth that addiction is literally a disease. Not just after a matter of speaking.
Even someone suffering a disease has some responsibility to society. If you are infectious with TB and you know it, you have little to no excuse for going out in public and coughing on people.
Professional shoplifters make their 'disease' impact on ordinary people and they are responsible for their actions.
Any sympathy for addicts I have is being rapidly burned through; there was a story in the media here about opening a safe injection site. Very nice, very heartwarming, included an addict talking about how great this was to restore her dignity and how she hated injecting in public in dirty alleyways because of the danger to her health and her safety.
So, if she hated that so much, was she trying to get clean? No, she was going to use the safe site to continue indulging in her addiction (and the heavy implication of "society owes this to me").
No, we don't owe it to you to make it easier to destroy yourself and (more pertinently) have a bad effect on the people and environment around you. She wants to get clean and heal up as much as is possible? She should definitely be supported in that. She wants to remain a junkie but now it is the duty of the state to babysit her while she shoots up, and if she feels she is not getting all her demands and not being treated with dignity, that is the fault of the state and she is owed more free stuff in compensation? I disagree.
If they're doing it to survive then the appropriate thing may be to place non-survival on the other side of the scales too, to persuade them to find a different survival method like the rest of us.
You overestimate the empathy of juries. Juries routinely convict innocents, rarely apply "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard hence why every jury is a crap shoot, and routinely find people guilty knowing full well the Draconian punishment they will receive. Jurors have no skin in the game hence their default is kill them all, let God sort it out.
Sure we get news stories sometimes of juries doing the right thing but that's it, it's news because it's rare. You look at a case like Daniel Penny and there are hundreds just like him with even more favorable circumstances rotting in jail, and even then nearly all the jurors found him guilty, he just got lucky he had two holdouts which is rare. That was a fluke, not a feature.
At least in some trial contexts, knowing about defendant's prior convictions is not allowed, as is talking about the penalties on the table for the current accusation.
I didn't respond to the survey, but I would have chosen community service for a first time shoplifter and the death penalty for the 10x repeat offender
Yeah, that was confusing. And having worked in retail and suffered from shoplifters, I went "okay, death does seem a reasonable choice here" 😀 I'm probably very much biased, though, by the experience of having my purse stolen in a shopping centre years back, leaving me more or less stranded with no money and no way home. So my view of "thieving is a victimless crime" is "boiling in oil is also victimless, I mean nobody ever complained afterwards".
Hmm... If we _did_ want someone to serve as a long term reminder to others, as gibbets once did, are there technologies that could help? "Picowaving" (irradiation via gammas or e-beam) could render a shrink-wrapped condemned felon shelf-stable in the process of dispatching them...
A shoplifter is threatening violence. If you confront him, you might get hurt by him. The state can also hurt a guard who is considered too aggressive (both financially and physically), acting on behalf of the criminal. As you know, many stores now have a policy of never confronting robbers at all.
"A shoplifter is threatening violence." My goodness, this is incredible torturing at the English language. A person is not actually threatening violence until they are, you know, threatening violence.
YOU are not freewheeling. So yes, if you were truly talking about a handbag, that would be pretty good evidence of your gender.
You being British explains a lot. Your country is awash with violent crime; last I checked, the violent crime rate was 42 percent higher in London than in New York City. I imagine living in such an environment might traumatize a person and make them unable to really address this subject objectively. I feel the same way about Americans that had to live through the lead addled, crime heavy 70s as adults.
By the gods, sirrah, those are fighting words! Naught but blood can wipe out the stain of such a foul imputation, and so prepare to betake yourself to the field of honour! Pistols for two, breakfast for one!
I think you and Banana should meet up, at least on here; you both seem to have very certain opinions in my regard 😁
For what it's worth I felt like the gaps between the options were very large, especially at the relevant level- one month is not enough, a full year seems like too much.
Not sure I thought "adult", but information I missed was: a) how often in the last year (was it 2 thefts per years of less value than one night in prison will cost ...) b) how high the risk of conviction per theft in the location. If you can assume only three shopliftings before you get caught AND "convicted" - that is different from ten or 40 thefts per one conviction.
Finally, it depends - that's why we have judges. I know a mentally disturbed elder bag-lady who does something foolish every few months - and gets caught almost every time. Last time she took tools from the library, worth 150$. Fine: Library shut her out for the next 8 months. Lady kept the tools, too. What the point of putting her into any expensive prison?! - "Death penalty for asocial elements" we did that in Germany 1933-45. Somehow derailed.
I was one of the death pickers but I was equally coaching it in an actual just system, i.e. where the person is actually guilty of it having both genuine rens mea and genuine actus reus as opposed to some judge or jury just felt so. Would I support it in the current US system, no, I wouldn't make it a crime at all beyond a private tort.
I feel there is no crime more heinous than intentional physical theft, kill them all.
Based on my wife's experiences working retail, the standard concern is teenagers lifting cosmetics and costume jewelry rather than candy bars but I think your description of our snap perception is broadly correct.
I like the idea of community service as the penalty for petty offenses. There's a poetic justice to it, providing value and partially mending the "social fabric" damage around the offender because their community sees them making good (willingly or not). Broadly it seems like a more pro-social punishment for petty crime than prison or state violence.
My vague impression is that our current justice system doesn't escalate punishment very smoothly for pretty crime. I have a similarly fuzzy idea that there is a community service element to being in prison but broadly it's just intensely bored prisoners knocking around a small area, under constant stress from rival gangs, and buddying up with more hardened guys. I agree with the conventional wisdom that this send more like a strategy for criminal hardening than rehabilitation.
Given that, my intuition is to fill out the punishment curve; insert more forced community labor + smaller reductions in freedoms e.g. house arrest into the escalation stack for pretty crime before getting to jail time. I'd also offer labor sentences as an alternative to fines for people who can't afford them. Maybe the community service programs could hire out work teams and the funds of those teams go into a pool for reimbursing victims of petty crimes.
Major violent crimes should still probably get the stick. Forced community service seems unlikely to deter e.g. gang violence.
The "age" and "state" responses are poorly displayed in google forms (understandable as a limit of the form, but maybe there's a way to get it to show it in... graph form? Or at least a %?)
I was one of those who entered yea to having shoplifted and guessed 25%. My thinking is that probably most ever-have-shoplifters are like me - I was a 10 year old who saw something shiny and put it in my pocket (a cool-looking glass paperweight) and have never done anything illegal since, except maybe privately partaking of some substances - and that the majority aren't pathological thieves or particularly harmful to society. "One in four people steals something at any point in time, most learn their lesson, and a much smaller number of them keep doing it and need the justice system to step in and punish them in lieu of their parents" just generally... jives with my understanding of the world.
I wonder how much overlap there actually is between sexual orientation and relationship style preference (i.e. I doubt it's true that actually every bi person is the same as every poly person, it's just funny the numbers work out that way.)
The 22 people who said they want 8 children: I hope you find each other.
The self-rating physical attractiveness sure looks like people here might be more deluded than we'd like to think. Not me, though, obviously I'm perfectly objective about myself in every way /s.
Some of the write-in responses to Religious Denomination are a bit worrisome. Same with the responses to "what is your height in centimeters". I mean, what unit are the people saying 20-30 even using?
"Madokaist (I swear this is serious and not a joke)" - I just wanted to say to whomever wrote that in... watching that entire show while on LSD is the closest I have ever come to feeling religious epiphany, so I relate.
The even steps up in "school choice" results make me wonder about the reasoning for people for picking what they did. I don't remember exactly how the question was phrased but it's rare to see a response graph like that, isn't it?
I was fairly disappointed by this one. There were zero actually hot people of either gender, and it basically just clusters in the middle, with a positive bias for both genders, and men "reaching" a little more in self evaluation over their outside-rated hotness.
I took the female-rating-male survey when Aella posted it. There were some "extremely hot" examples in the original dataset, but they were AI-generated images. Even the ones who were exactly my type were in the uncanny AI valley, so I rated them worse than if they had been real.
Also, the real images were pictures that Aella solicited from her twitter followers. This was explicitly framed as "hey, are you self-conscious about your looks? Let's find out if your feelings are well-founded!" No guy who is genuinely hot probably wanted to participate.
Could be. My visual estimation of myself as a 3 from looking at Aella's pics roughly corresponded with the number I got when you were briefly able to get your actual rating out of OKCupid about 10 years ago.
(They had a 'search by looks' feature, and you could see the extra code appended to the web search in the search bar...there was a variable that went from 0 to 10000. So if you put a weird language in as one of your languages and then created a second account, you could search for that language as well as the code that only searched people of given attractiveness levels...then move the attractiveness levels up and down until you figured out where you showed up. They're a lot more sophisticated now.)
I think the physical attractiveness thing doesn't necessarily imply any self-deception.
1) ACX survey takers are fairly young, slim, wealthy and intelligent, which are associated with physical attractiveness. I wouldn't assume that the median ACX survey respondent is near the societal median, just as I wouldn’t assume this for income or intelligence.
2) Even if 1) doesn't cover it, the question doesn't necessarily imply a normal distribution. People could interpret "very attractive" and "very unattractive" as unevenly distributed in society generally. Someone at the societal median could correctly class themselves as 6-7, (using something like the 4chan attractiveness chart), because the lower-end has more variation.
When my daughter was around age 4 or 5, she stole something shiny from a store. My wife took her back to the store and made her apologize and pay for it (like $2 or something). I think this had a good effect on my daughter, and was quite harmless to the store. The clerk at the store didn't want to take the money, said it was okay. We obviously disagreed, and felt that it was more important for our daughter to do what was right than learn that you can occasionally steal stuff and nobody cares.
I think children imbibe this pretty quickly. I used to work in a library, and a number of times when parents who had not been library users as adults (which was most people) got a card for the first time, their little children were often quite astonished and concerned that they could take things away "without paying".
The survey shoplifting question perplexed me. I answered yes, because I am pretty sure I shoplifted on one occasion only, when about nine or ten, alongside a friend, when I didn't yet know the term. We used to ride our bikes up to the drugstore, whose one cash register was at the back, to buy candy. It's hard for me to imagine that we discussed this in advance, as I think even our feeble little brains would have balked at baldly countenancing theft. And it wasn't that we didn't have enough money in our pockets for bubble gum. Instead, the scenario must have wordlessly presented itself to us as a little thrilling game - getting out of the store undetected, with the gum in hand, because the proprietor was at the back.
I'm sure he or she was quite aware of the possibility that this was being entertained.
In any case, the thrill, once accomplished, was not so great that I ever tried it again; and I expect that I probably suppressed the thought of it, because of course on reflection even I could perceive that it was stealing, which was one of the commandments.
But yet I find or want to find this distinct from "shoplifting" as generally practiced.
I'm pretty sure that the people answering 20-30 for "what is your height in centimeters" are Americans who accidentally divided their height in inches by 2.54, instead of correctly multiplying it by 2.54. So to get useful data from those, you gotta multiply their number by 2.54^2 = 6.45
I wonder if the big softie vs maximum punishment is mostly a bravery debate over what people think is the current state - you read the results as softie, I actually read them as pro-more punishment, which makes me suspect we have different views on what the current level of punishment is (with the pro-maximal punishment people mostly just going "turn the punishment dial up without worrying about it going too far").
Hm, so I think the dynamic is that a small group of people who actually are maximally harsh (the tail in the pie chart) speak out, and then a lot of the more moderate people express directional support (because they think we should go in that direction even if not all the way), so it comes off like a consensus for maximum punishment
Imagine if people <i>actually got</i> 20 hours of community service for first-time shoplifting! So harsh. It might even dissuade enough shoplifters that stores could stop banning backpacks, and people who don't own cars could get groceries more easily.
I've never had a store in NYC give me trouble for coming in with a backpack (maybe because most people there don't have cars? Or because despite stereotypes it's relatively low crime for an American city?)
Maybe this is more of a problem outside of larger cities. Both stores I've seen with this policy are in towns of about 10,000. In which case, yeah, most people do have a car and I happen to be an oddball for shopping without one.
If you're PKU I'll say that in hayward (and now you know who I am) I have been basically told every time I enter a store that I can't bring my backpack, so I end up putting it in like a cubby and then pick it up at the end to store my groceries.
I have been called a shoplifter 3 times (even though I've shoplifted 0 times) because I was wearing a backpack out the store.
This is exactly correct. If you think ten time shoplifters do a month or more in jail in any large blue jurisdiction, you are simply wrong. The punishment for shoplifting caps out at a few days in jail no matter how big of a dirtbag you are. Even though 60% of the (very liberal) ACX readership wants a month or more in jail.
I think a lot of liberals have been told that weed smokers and shoplifters get slammed in federal prison for years or something, and seriously believe it.
It would be interesting to explore the stark difference between the average ACX commenter and the average ACX survey respondent.
Could it be that people who are more extreme in the punishments they want to see doled out are way more likely to share that stance? Maybe because they feel angry at the world for being so lenient? Or because they know they're in the minority, and thus want to increase their ranks among the masses?
Could it be that there is an incentive to be controversial or to take overly strong stances on such matters when someone already has it in mind to post a comment on an ACX post? Then, their anonymized answer to the survey does not involve the same incentive so they revert back to a more "middle ground" approach?
I was surprised to see the 25% shoplifting figure, both real and expected by respondents. I'd be interested in seeing a country/continent breakdown here, because as a European I feel like we might have a different view on both the probability and the severity of the punishment.
I expect the survey to be much more representative than the comments section. People filling out the survey don't need a particularly strong motivation to input their position, while people in the comments probably do. The other factors you mention probably move the needle, too, though I wouldn't put too much weight in the middle-ground-reversion idea.
What is your take on the shoplifting stuff that surprised you? I'm German, but I don't feel too surprised by the results (though hindsight and all that). In particular, 25% for ever-shoplifting seems quite expected to me, if we include kids. Would you have expected a higher or a lower rate?
I guess I answered the shoplifting question from the point of view of adults or teenagers doing it. If I had thought about kids too, I probably would have gone to 25-35% myself. I have lived in a few large European cities over the past ten years and I've talked to people from all walks of life, and I just get a feeling that shoplifting is exceedingly rare nowadays from a teenagers-and-adult perspective. I've never been to the US so I was wondering if there's a different moral (perception on shoplifting) and actual (shoplifting rates) framework at play.
Based on this alone, it doesn't look like there's a major difference in the amount of shoplifting between the UK and the US. I'm fairly happy generalizing this to the rest of Europe - my gut feeling was wrong!
I see. I mean we don't really know whether people tended to include kids or not in their model (@Scott something to better clarify in the form in the future). Thanks for clarifying
The fact that generalising the UK with Europe (different cultures, different languages), and not with the US (same language, same cultural origin) is seen as such a natural thing to do is a symbol of so many things wrong with the current world.
I would guess that people who have emotions about a topic are very strongly overrepresented, and those people hold more extreme views. Not just on ACX, but on any social media, and to slightly less extent also in traditional news. You get the same effect if you compare any representative survey with any online survey. On most questions, the average opinion in representative surveys is quite moderate and boring. It happens rarely to me that I find the majority opinion of such a survey outrageous or even remarkable. Whereas I find the majority opinions in online surveys or social media often crazy.
By the way, this already drove me crazy in Scott's post: IN WHICH DIRECTION were you surprised? Sorry for screaming, but I honestly don't know, and it's itching me.
This probably applies across most topics. I mentioned this in a thread one time already I think, but the pro/anti Trump comments before the election seemed pretty close to 50/50, which is way out of step with the political demographics from the surveys.
I think this is kind of everything everywhere though, which is why Twitter is so horrible.
>Could it be that there is an incentive to be controversial or to take overly strong stances on such matters when someone already has it in mind to post a comment on an ACX post?
Wrong way around. Normally, the motivation for making a comment is that you disagree strongly with something; people with unpopular views disagree strongly more often.
As one of the softies — though not the softest of the softies — I just don’t have any interest in arguing about it in the comments section of a well-trafficked blog.
Perhaps the same thing that makes someone inclined to be very tough on crime makes them more likely to talk about it -- extremists of every stripe are louder than moderates, yeah?
Sounds reasonable. Where are the extremists on the other extreme of the spectrum? Or are there really none/so few they don't get much attention? Could be.
I mean, there are certainly extremists who talk about abolishing police etc. They may not be in this blog post but they do exist and they are loud. Those would read as the opposite side to me. I want to say... "zizians"?
I would like to abolish policing in its current form as it exists in certain polities. People think of it as an eternal and necessary, but it was only invented 200 years ago. There's no intrinsic reason that the institution responsible for investigating murders should also be the institution who control riots. The penetentiary model of prison-as-punishment is also about the same age and should also be abolished.
It's next to impossible to have a productive conversation about this in a blog comment section, however.
The idea that the riot police be different from the detective police is interesting but that is the case within police forces already.
I find the whole “we’ve only been locking people up for 200” years a bit disingenuous. It’s true that prisons arise with the enlightenment, more or less, but punishment doesn’t start then. It was harsher beforehand, Prior to prisons, there were multiple punishments like corporal punishment, flogging, whipping, branding, mutilation, stockades, pillories, ducking stools, capital punishment (beheading, hanging, crucifixion, burning at the stake), breaking on the wheel, banishment, exile, outlawry, transportation to colonies , restitution, wergild, debt slavery, public fines, forced labor, galley slavery, workhouses, penal colonies, indentured servitude, public shaming, dunking, cucking stools, the brank, tarring and feathering and for religious punishments, ordeals, trial by fire, trial by water, trial by combat, penance, pilgrimage, excommunication and death.
Part of being tough on crime is making everyone know that we're going to be tough on crime. If 4% of shoplifters were randomly and quietly disappeared, it would only reduce shoplifting by 4%.
...But we already know that harsher punishments don't have a noticable effect on disincentivizing crime. The point is to increase the percentage of shoplifters that disappear.
It’s a lot easier to get excited about, “we can make society meaningfully better with this one weird trick: Actually locking up criminals,” than it is to get excited about commonly-held default opinion #2596.
Many who espouse the more extreme positions (on most topics) tend to be incapable of nuance (possibly just unwilling). It often makes for a rather unrewarding discussion.
My honest guess is that they have less natural empathy and that makes it easier for them to argue all day about how human beings should be executed without feeling burned out at the prospect.
Im generally tough on crime because of empathy. Not that I support the death penalty, but largely the system as it is (here in the U.K.) - with some leeway for petty crimes and drug use.
Obviously the US is different.
My empathy is for the victims, who are invariably poor and powerless. Not caring about crime is, consciously or unconsciously, a vicarious display of wealth.
Normal urges for those who partake in this sort of blog + Internet Tough Guy Syndrome.
It's like those dudes who start slicing the pie every time they hear a bird land on their roof; going online and talking about how good it would be to just exterminate all the brutes give you a little thrill right in the amygdala without you actually having to go out and maybe get your ass beat.
Possibly because it gives a modest but addictive adrenaline rush to say something incredibly transgressive online? And since your moderation weeds out many types of extreme transgression, like blatant insults, the tough on crimers and "foreign human life has no inherent value" types are the only extreme transgressors left.
Do you ever worry that reading thousands upon thousands of words from these homicidal types might cause you psychic damage?
The colors in repeat offender shoplifting made me first think that 35% of commenters want death for shoplifting, which seemed *quite* unlike being a big softy...
I think that people's general idea of a shoplifter is a 13-year-old kid stealing a candy bar, and even adjusting it for 100$ worth of goods doesn't change it *that* much, which might affect the willingness to let go with a warning.
For what it’s worth — I don’t know how representative I am — although I didn’t pick the softest possible option, I was softer than not, and I did assume that the shoplifter was an adult.
I think I picked death penalty, but only if they were aware of the punishment beforehand.
It feels a little unfair to spring the death penalty on somebody who was expecting a slap on the wrist.
Yeah I think we're talking about the general structure of a system more than the hypothetical of single judge's decision on a single case.
What made you choose death? Would you not expect someone like that to learn their lesson after 1 or 10 years in prison, or what factors into that for you? I'm definitely on the soft side of things, myself, so a death penalty is next-to-incomprehensible for me.
For me, after 10 previous arrests (and presumably 10 convictions with increasingly harsher punishments) they are clearly incorrigible, so that's why I chose death. I was disappointed to learn that I was wrong in thinking that 35.9% were in agreement with me.
10 previous arrests is but the floating of a dandelion seed on the soft summer zephyrs when it comes to the hardcore shoplifters, and drug addiction seems to be behind a good deal of it:
https://www.dundalkdemocrat.ie/news/crime---court/1708969/suspended-sentence-given-to-woman-who-shoplifted-in-dundalk.html
"A Dublin drug addict, with 342 previous convictions, who carried out three shoplifting incidents in Dundalk, has been given a suspended sentence after the local district court heard she is now on a methadone treatment programme."
Yes, that is the future I imagine is the most likely for someone with 10 arrests, that they will continue to victimize members of their community, dozens and hundreds and thousands of times, unless and until they are forcefully stopped from continuing down that path. To me it seems that we as a society (in most Western countries) have chosen that it is more important that we keep our collective hands clean by not punishing criminals too harshly than that we prevent those offences – though I would be happy to be convinced of some more charitable explanation for this strange behaviour on the part of our systems of justice.
I used to be more in favor of the death penalty. What persuaded me to change my mind was an increasing belief in the fallibility of the system on the margins. Life in prison is reversible. Also, carrying out the death penalty often doesn't save money due to the numerous appeals. But having it on the books likely does save money in terms of encouraging people to plea bargain.
I picked 10 years. My logic being that you give someone like a week or two for the first offense and then N-1 years in prison for the Nth offense. Or maybe something exponential rather than linear. But the point being that it ramps up such that after they get out of jail they are either terrified of an even harsher sentence the next time, or they just end up in jail permanently if they can't stop themselves.
People sometimes age out of the criminal lifestyle. It seems unnecessary to execute a 30 year old for being a career criminal when they might be a better person by the time they're 40 or 50. If shoplifting is the worst of their crimes, we can afford a couple of repeat offenses to offer second chances. If it was something harsher then I would agree with you (although ideally they'd be in jail too long to even reach 10 separate convictions in the first place).
Yeah, the age-out issue is why I also picked 10 years rather than life (I'm generally against imposing the death penalty other than as a "you've been sentenced to life without parole; do you want to be executed instead?" or as a "we don't have a prison that can hold him, so this is the only way to prevent reoffence").
One alternative that I find appealing would be to offer assisted suicide on demand to all incarcerated criminals. In many Western countries, the death penalty is politically impossible, while euthanasia is within the Overton window.
My stance for repeat offenders is based on the priors that: 1) The majority of repeat criminals cause far more harm to others both in and out of prison than they generate positive utility, and I’d probably say this is true in expectation for their whole lives; 2) Life is net-negative for the majority of repeat criminals themselves (due to substance abuse/mental health issues etc.) and would get worse in prison - therefore their death is a moral good regardless of whether it disincentivises crime; 3) not exactly sure how to compare gradations of the two, but prison is absurdly inefficient and costly. My sense is that efficient and humane prison has more costs to society than efficient and humane execution.
Keep in mind that the average cost to the Federal government (U.S.) of a death penalty sentence is estimated to be $1M more than the cost of imprisonment for life.
Only because the system is inefficient by design. A lot of those costs could be cut by making the trials shorter and reducing the opportunity for appeals.
But then, the prison system is inefficient by design as well. I'm pretty sure NKVD troikas and a bullet in the head were extremely cheap, but Gulag imprisonment cost was negative.
Yeah. In China it's more efficient - there are two expedited appeals, including one by the Supreme Court. The average time between sentencing and execution is two months.
I always find it interesting how getting a criminal case in front of a judge takes many months, but whenever Trump issues an executive order there's somehow a Federal judge somewhere ruling against it within hours. How does the case pipeline even work?
It's nice to see Scott Alexander tacitly admitting in this post that this comment section has become a cesspool.
Too bad there's not much one can do about it.
Although I don't doubt that some people on ACX have toxic, posturing attitudes to crime and punishment, I haven't really noticed any in this thread. People on both sides have responded thoughtfully and respectfully.
Are you respectful to other posters? Sure. Respectful to humanity? Nope. Your vitriolic policy prescriptions show a lack of regard for others is astonishing.
And that's a major weakness in the current system. Most defendants have no idea what's the maximum or typical sentence that applies to their case, or even may delude themselves into thinking that 3-strikes laws will not apply, they'll get community service, etc.
The execution method should be "death by slapping on the wrist."
Even if you leave out humanitarian considerations, the fact is that the death penalty removes an incentive gradient. There is this famous story from the Qin dynasty, who had decreed that being late to a job warranted the death penalty. So when two generals were delayed by bad weather, they had no incentive not to start a rebellion.
I think limiting the sentence for habitual shoplifting to a year or so is much better. Someone who makes a living from shoplifting will still be out of circulation mostly, but the incentive gradient still remains. The message is "shoplifting will not be tolerated and you will (eventually) go to prison for it, but turning to robbery will get us really mad at you, and don't even think about starting to murder witnesses".
This is one of the few good counter-arguments - I definitely agree that we need incentive gradients, so this kind of policy couldn't be done in isolation.
The downsides of reduced incentive gradient are pretty well documented (three strike rule increases murder rate): https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/468112
My ideal system would be a relatively steep gradient from 1) very short but certain prison/cell time; 2) increasingly severe corporal punishment; 3) death penalty. There should be lots of carrots to go with the sticks, such as rewards for good behaviour, psychological treatment, and educational/work opportunities.
Also, as you mentioned imperial China, they were the masters of incentive gradients compatible with the death penalty.
Perpetrators of lesser crimes were allowed to be executed through simple beheadings, while with more heinous crimes, you could be 腰斩 "decapitated at the waist", 五马分尸 pulled limb from limb by 5 horses, or 灭九族 all of your relatives within nine generations would be killed as well.
Someone convicted of 10 shoplifting offenses should definitely receive a painless execution.
Didn't want to bring in ling chi or, Wikipedia tells me, 凌遲?
Given the risk of rape in jail (and contracting HIV, which can't be cured even if there are drugs for it now), I wonder if the corporal punishment should come first.
I have a hard time with the death penalty for shoplifting, but maybe I haven't lived in San Francisco lately. I think quite a few San Franciscans would be OK with the death penalty for public defecation at this point.
Good catch, I'd forgotten about 凌迟!On the jail point, I agree entirely, my idea was more "a couple of nights alone in a holding cell" rather than prison with other criminals.
I always figured it was a low Lizardman's Constant (i.e. people making a joke). But you never know.
Thought so as well, but the previous graph didn't have it. So if this is it, more people thought the joke was appropriate with 10 prior offenses.
I went a step beyond, and thought that was a good way to filter the lizardmen, who then didn't vote for life-in-prison or very long sentences.
I did pick death penalty (assuming ~linear increasing punishment prior to the 10th offense); "10 strikes and you're out (for good)" seems more than fair. 10 charges establishes a pattern of behavior suggesting that the perpetrator is incapable of peacefully existing within the confines of modern society. The means of removal (death penalty, life imprisonment, exile to some uninhabited island where they can live as barbarously as they wish) are not super relevant, the key is identifying when someone belongs to this group ("irredeemably and openly contemptuous of civilization") and doing both them and us a favor by, well, removing them from civilization.
Still seems a bit much for shoplifting (they *could* be doing it to survive), but thank you for explaining.
Some are doing it to survive, but when you're seeing "professional life-long thief" and "drug addict with string of convictions" and not "penniless mother needs to feed starving baby", that tilts the balance towards stern measures.
She's a believing Catholic, so I'm so sure she could give you a bullet-pointed refutation from the Catechism.
You and the rest of the tough on crime posturers seem totally unwilling or unable to grapple with the truth that addiction is literally a disease. Not just after a matter of speaking.
Even someone suffering a disease has some responsibility to society. If you are infectious with TB and you know it, you have little to no excuse for going out in public and coughing on people.
Professional shoplifters make their 'disease' impact on ordinary people and they are responsible for their actions.
Any sympathy for addicts I have is being rapidly burned through; there was a story in the media here about opening a safe injection site. Very nice, very heartwarming, included an addict talking about how great this was to restore her dignity and how she hated injecting in public in dirty alleyways because of the danger to her health and her safety.
So, if she hated that so much, was she trying to get clean? No, she was going to use the safe site to continue indulging in her addiction (and the heavy implication of "society owes this to me").
No, we don't owe it to you to make it easier to destroy yourself and (more pertinently) have a bad effect on the people and environment around you. She wants to get clean and heal up as much as is possible? She should definitely be supported in that. She wants to remain a junkie but now it is the duty of the state to babysit her while she shoots up, and if she feels she is not getting all her demands and not being treated with dignity, that is the fault of the state and she is owed more free stuff in compensation? I disagree.
If they're doing it to survive then the appropriate thing may be to place non-survival on the other side of the scales too, to persuade them to find a different survival method like the rest of us.
It would be a highly effective way of ensuring that no jury will ever convict anyone of a tenth offense.
Maybe we need better juries.
You overestimate the empathy of juries. Juries routinely convict innocents, rarely apply "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard hence why every jury is a crap shoot, and routinely find people guilty knowing full well the Draconian punishment they will receive. Jurors have no skin in the game hence their default is kill them all, let God sort it out.
Sure we get news stories sometimes of juries doing the right thing but that's it, it's news because it's rare. You look at a case like Daniel Penny and there are hundreds just like him with even more favorable circumstances rotting in jail, and even then nearly all the jurors found him guilty, he just got lucky he had two holdouts which is rare. That was a fluke, not a feature.
At least in some trial contexts, knowing about defendant's prior convictions is not allowed, as is talking about the penalties on the table for the current accusation.
I didn't respond to the survey, but I would have chosen community service for a first time shoplifter and the death penalty for the 10x repeat offender
Yeah, that was confusing. And having worked in retail and suffered from shoplifters, I went "okay, death does seem a reasonable choice here" 😀 I'm probably very much biased, though, by the experience of having my purse stolen in a shopping centre years back, leaving me more or less stranded with no money and no way home. So my view of "thieving is a victimless crime" is "boiling in oil is also victimless, I mean nobody ever complained afterwards".
They might complain during! Let's split the difference at "electric chair".
Hmm... If we _did_ want someone to serve as a long term reminder to others, as gibbets once did, are there technologies that could help? "Picowaving" (irradiation via gammas or e-beam) could render a shrink-wrapped condemned felon shelf-stable in the process of dispatching them...
A shoplifter is threatening violence. If you confront him, you might get hurt by him. The state can also hurt a guard who is considered too aggressive (both financially and physically), acting on behalf of the criminal. As you know, many stores now have a policy of never confronting robbers at all.
"A shoplifter is threatening violence." My goodness, this is incredible torturing at the English language. A person is not actually threatening violence until they are, you know, threatening violence.
Truly mind boggling to me to learn you are a purse carrier. So much for stereotypes..
Tsk tsk Chance, were you assuming my gender? 😁
I didn't mean "purse" as in the American sense which seems to correlate to "handbag" but the British version (see below):
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/purse
Besides, that doesn't tell you if I'm a boy or a girl or both or neither, in these freewheeling days!
YOU are not freewheeling. So yes, if you were truly talking about a handbag, that would be pretty good evidence of your gender.
You being British explains a lot. Your country is awash with violent crime; last I checked, the violent crime rate was 42 percent higher in London than in New York City. I imagine living in such an environment might traumatize a person and make them unable to really address this subject objectively. I feel the same way about Americans that had to live through the lead addled, crime heavy 70s as adults.
"You being British explains a lot."
By the gods, sirrah, those are fighting words! Naught but blood can wipe out the stain of such a foul imputation, and so prepare to betake yourself to the field of honour! Pistols for two, breakfast for one!
I think you and Banana should meet up, at least on here; you both seem to have very certain opinions in my regard 😁
Oh yes, I have very strong opinions about you. You and anomie both, with your grimly Teutonic commentary style.
For what it's worth I felt like the gaps between the options were very large, especially at the relevant level- one month is not enough, a full year seems like too much.
Not sure I thought "adult", but information I missed was: a) how often in the last year (was it 2 thefts per years of less value than one night in prison will cost ...) b) how high the risk of conviction per theft in the location. If you can assume only three shopliftings before you get caught AND "convicted" - that is different from ten or 40 thefts per one conviction.
Finally, it depends - that's why we have judges. I know a mentally disturbed elder bag-lady who does something foolish every few months - and gets caught almost every time. Last time she took tools from the library, worth 150$. Fine: Library shut her out for the next 8 months. Lady kept the tools, too. What the point of putting her into any expensive prison?! - "Death penalty for asocial elements" we did that in Germany 1933-45. Somehow derailed.
I was one of the death pickers but I was equally coaching it in an actual just system, i.e. where the person is actually guilty of it having both genuine rens mea and genuine actus reus as opposed to some judge or jury just felt so. Would I support it in the current US system, no, I wouldn't make it a crime at all beyond a private tort.
I feel there is no crime more heinous than intentional physical theft, kill them all.
Based on my wife's experiences working retail, the standard concern is teenagers lifting cosmetics and costume jewelry rather than candy bars but I think your description of our snap perception is broadly correct.
I like the idea of community service as the penalty for petty offenses. There's a poetic justice to it, providing value and partially mending the "social fabric" damage around the offender because their community sees them making good (willingly or not). Broadly it seems like a more pro-social punishment for petty crime than prison or state violence.
My vague impression is that our current justice system doesn't escalate punishment very smoothly for pretty crime. I have a similarly fuzzy idea that there is a community service element to being in prison but broadly it's just intensely bored prisoners knocking around a small area, under constant stress from rival gangs, and buddying up with more hardened guys. I agree with the conventional wisdom that this send more like a strategy for criminal hardening than rehabilitation.
Given that, my intuition is to fill out the punishment curve; insert more forced community labor + smaller reductions in freedoms e.g. house arrest into the escalation stack for pretty crime before getting to jail time. I'd also offer labor sentences as an alternative to fines for people who can't afford them. Maybe the community service programs could hire out work teams and the funds of those teams go into a pool for reimbursing victims of petty crimes.
Major violent crimes should still probably get the stick. Forced community service seems unlikely to deter e.g. gang violence.
Hmm... "Warning" can cover a fairly wide range of penalties. "Receives a note in the mail" != "Has a policeman scream in their face for an hour."
The "person shoplifts by accident" issue is why I said "warning" for first offence.
The "age" and "state" responses are poorly displayed in google forms (understandable as a limit of the form, but maybe there's a way to get it to show it in... graph form? Or at least a %?)
I was one of those who entered yea to having shoplifted and guessed 25%. My thinking is that probably most ever-have-shoplifters are like me - I was a 10 year old who saw something shiny and put it in my pocket (a cool-looking glass paperweight) and have never done anything illegal since, except maybe privately partaking of some substances - and that the majority aren't pathological thieves or particularly harmful to society. "One in four people steals something at any point in time, most learn their lesson, and a much smaller number of them keep doing it and need the justice system to step in and punish them in lieu of their parents" just generally... jives with my understanding of the world.
I wonder how much overlap there actually is between sexual orientation and relationship style preference (i.e. I doubt it's true that actually every bi person is the same as every poly person, it's just funny the numbers work out that way.)
The 22 people who said they want 8 children: I hope you find each other.
The self-rating physical attractiveness sure looks like people here might be more deluded than we'd like to think. Not me, though, obviously I'm perfectly objective about myself in every way /s.
Some of the write-in responses to Religious Denomination are a bit worrisome. Same with the responses to "what is your height in centimeters". I mean, what unit are the people saying 20-30 even using?
"Madokaist (I swear this is serious and not a joke)" - I just wanted to say to whomever wrote that in... watching that entire show while on LSD is the closest I have ever come to feeling religious epiphany, so I relate.
The even steps up in "school choice" results make me wonder about the reasoning for people for picking what they did. I don't remember exactly how the question was phrased but it's rare to see a response graph like that, isn't it?
https://substack.com/@aella/p-155127275 "People Are Delusional About How Hot They Are"
I was fairly disappointed by this one. There were zero actually hot people of either gender, and it basically just clusters in the middle, with a positive bias for both genders, and men "reaching" a little more in self evaluation over their outside-rated hotness.
I took the female-rating-male survey when Aella posted it. There were some "extremely hot" examples in the original dataset, but they were AI-generated images. Even the ones who were exactly my type were in the uncanny AI valley, so I rated them worse than if they had been real.
Also, the real images were pictures that Aella solicited from her twitter followers. This was explicitly framed as "hey, are you self-conscious about your looks? Let's find out if your feelings are well-founded!" No guy who is genuinely hot probably wanted to participate.
Could be. My visual estimation of myself as a 3 from looking at Aella's pics roughly corresponded with the number I got when you were briefly able to get your actual rating out of OKCupid about 10 years ago.
(They had a 'search by looks' feature, and you could see the extra code appended to the web search in the search bar...there was a variable that went from 0 to 10000. So if you put a weird language in as one of your languages and then created a second account, you could search for that language as well as the code that only searched people of given attractiveness levels...then move the attractiveness levels up and down until you figured out where you showed up. They're a lot more sophisticated now.)
I think the physical attractiveness thing doesn't necessarily imply any self-deception.
1) ACX survey takers are fairly young, slim, wealthy and intelligent, which are associated with physical attractiveness. I wouldn't assume that the median ACX survey respondent is near the societal median, just as I wouldn’t assume this for income or intelligence.
2) Even if 1) doesn't cover it, the question doesn't necessarily imply a normal distribution. People could interpret "very attractive" and "very unattractive" as unevenly distributed in society generally. Someone at the societal median could correctly class themselves as 6-7, (using something like the 4chan attractiveness chart), because the lower-end has more variation.
When my daughter was around age 4 or 5, she stole something shiny from a store. My wife took her back to the store and made her apologize and pay for it (like $2 or something). I think this had a good effect on my daughter, and was quite harmless to the store. The clerk at the store didn't want to take the money, said it was okay. We obviously disagreed, and felt that it was more important for our daughter to do what was right than learn that you can occasionally steal stuff and nobody cares.
I think children imbibe this pretty quickly. I used to work in a library, and a number of times when parents who had not been library users as adults (which was most people) got a card for the first time, their little children were often quite astonished and concerned that they could take things away "without paying".
The survey shoplifting question perplexed me. I answered yes, because I am pretty sure I shoplifted on one occasion only, when about nine or ten, alongside a friend, when I didn't yet know the term. We used to ride our bikes up to the drugstore, whose one cash register was at the back, to buy candy. It's hard for me to imagine that we discussed this in advance, as I think even our feeble little brains would have balked at baldly countenancing theft. And it wasn't that we didn't have enough money in our pockets for bubble gum. Instead, the scenario must have wordlessly presented itself to us as a little thrilling game - getting out of the store undetected, with the gum in hand, because the proprietor was at the back.
I'm sure he or she was quite aware of the possibility that this was being entertained.
In any case, the thrill, once accomplished, was not so great that I ever tried it again; and I expect that I probably suppressed the thought of it, because of course on reflection even I could perceive that it was stealing, which was one of the commandments.
But yet I find or want to find this distinct from "shoplifting" as generally practiced.
0- 9 ( 0.0%)
10-19 ( 0.1%)
20-29 (11.7%) █████
30-39 (37.5%) ██████████████████
40-49 (30.1%) ███████████████
50-59 (10.3%) █████
60-69 ( 5.8%) ██
70-79 ( 3.6%) █
80-89 ( 0.9%)
90-99 ( 0.1%)
Some basic awk-foo should do the trick.
Thank you.
I'm pretty sure that the people answering 20-30 for "what is your height in centimeters" are Americans who accidentally divided their height in inches by 2.54, instead of correctly multiplying it by 2.54. So to get useful data from those, you gotta multiply their number by 2.54^2 = 6.45
Ain't sanitizing data fun?
> The "age" and "state" responses are poorly displayed in google forms
I made plots at https://imgur.com/a/Shp6Ez6
This is after removing many "lizardmen".
Fun that the number of Washington State respondents is 206 (area code for Seattle).
I wonder if the big softie vs maximum punishment is mostly a bravery debate over what people think is the current state - you read the results as softie, I actually read them as pro-more punishment, which makes me suspect we have different views on what the current level of punishment is (with the pro-maximal punishment people mostly just going "turn the punishment dial up without worrying about it going too far").
I think Scott's baseline was relative to comment section geist rather than current laws of particular policy.
Hm, so I think the dynamic is that a small group of people who actually are maximally harsh (the tail in the pie chart) speak out, and then a lot of the more moderate people express directional support (because they think we should go in that direction even if not all the way), so it comes off like a consensus for maximum punishment
Imagine if people <i>actually got</i> 20 hours of community service for first-time shoplifting! So harsh. It might even dissuade enough shoplifters that stores could stop banning backpacks, and people who don't own cars could get groceries more easily.
I've never had a store in NYC give me trouble for coming in with a backpack (maybe because most people there don't have cars? Or because despite stereotypes it's relatively low crime for an American city?)
Maybe this is more of a problem outside of larger cities. Both stores I've seen with this policy are in towns of about 10,000. In which case, yeah, most people do have a car and I happen to be an oddball for shopping without one.
If you're PKU I'll say that in hayward (and now you know who I am) I have been basically told every time I enter a store that I can't bring my backpack, so I end up putting it in like a cubby and then pick it up at the end to store my groceries.
I have been called a shoplifter 3 times (even though I've shoplifted 0 times) because I was wearing a backpack out the store.
This is exactly correct. If you think ten time shoplifters do a month or more in jail in any large blue jurisdiction, you are simply wrong. The punishment for shoplifting caps out at a few days in jail no matter how big of a dirtbag you are. Even though 60% of the (very liberal) ACX readership wants a month or more in jail.
I think a lot of liberals have been told that weed smokers and shoplifters get slammed in federal prison for years or something, and seriously believe it.
Scott - check notion forms out, it might help you better organize data for this
It would be interesting to explore the stark difference between the average ACX commenter and the average ACX survey respondent.
Could it be that people who are more extreme in the punishments they want to see doled out are way more likely to share that stance? Maybe because they feel angry at the world for being so lenient? Or because they know they're in the minority, and thus want to increase their ranks among the masses?
Could it be that there is an incentive to be controversial or to take overly strong stances on such matters when someone already has it in mind to post a comment on an ACX post? Then, their anonymized answer to the survey does not involve the same incentive so they revert back to a more "middle ground" approach?
I was surprised to see the 25% shoplifting figure, both real and expected by respondents. I'd be interested in seeing a country/continent breakdown here, because as a European I feel like we might have a different view on both the probability and the severity of the punishment.
I expect the survey to be much more representative than the comments section. People filling out the survey don't need a particularly strong motivation to input their position, while people in the comments probably do. The other factors you mention probably move the needle, too, though I wouldn't put too much weight in the middle-ground-reversion idea.
What is your take on the shoplifting stuff that surprised you? I'm German, but I don't feel too surprised by the results (though hindsight and all that). In particular, 25% for ever-shoplifting seems quite expected to me, if we include kids. Would you have expected a higher or a lower rate?
I guess I answered the shoplifting question from the point of view of adults or teenagers doing it. If I had thought about kids too, I probably would have gone to 25-35% myself. I have lived in a few large European cities over the past ten years and I've talked to people from all walks of life, and I just get a feeling that shoplifting is exceedingly rare nowadays from a teenagers-and-adult perspective. I've never been to the US so I was wondering if there's a different moral (perception on shoplifting) and actual (shoplifting rates) framework at play.
US retail shrink, which includes shoplifting but isn't limited to it, cost about $113B (1.6% of retail sales) in 2022 (https://www.grocerydive.com/news/retail-shrink-theft-changed-little-in-2022-nrf/694979/).
Deloitte says £7.9bn were lost to stock theft for UK retailers in 2023 (https://www.deloitte.com/uk/en/Industries/consumer/blogs/the-future-of-shrink-the-increase-of-shoplifting.html), and that's on £517bn of revenues (https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN06186/SN06186.pdf) implying 1.5% of shrink.
Based on this alone, it doesn't look like there's a major difference in the amount of shoplifting between the UK and the US. I'm fairly happy generalizing this to the rest of Europe - my gut feeling was wrong!
I see. I mean we don't really know whether people tended to include kids or not in their model (@Scott something to better clarify in the form in the future). Thanks for clarifying
The fact that generalising the UK with Europe (different cultures, different languages), and not with the US (same language, same cultural origin) is seen as such a natural thing to do is a symbol of so many things wrong with the current world.
I guessed 10%, and thought I was being suitably pessimistic.
I would guess that people who have emotions about a topic are very strongly overrepresented, and those people hold more extreme views. Not just on ACX, but on any social media, and to slightly less extent also in traditional news. You get the same effect if you compare any representative survey with any online survey. On most questions, the average opinion in representative surveys is quite moderate and boring. It happens rarely to me that I find the majority opinion of such a survey outrageous or even remarkable. Whereas I find the majority opinions in online surveys or social media often crazy.
By the way, this already drove me crazy in Scott's post: IN WHICH DIRECTION were you surprised? Sorry for screaming, but I honestly don't know, and it's itching me.
This probably applies across most topics. I mentioned this in a thread one time already I think, but the pro/anti Trump comments before the election seemed pretty close to 50/50, which is way out of step with the political demographics from the surveys.
I think this is kind of everything everywhere though, which is why Twitter is so horrible.
>Could it be that there is an incentive to be controversial or to take overly strong stances on such matters when someone already has it in mind to post a comment on an ACX post?
Wrong way around. Normally, the motivation for making a comment is that you disagree strongly with something; people with unpopular views disagree strongly more often.
As one of the softies — though not the softest of the softies — I just don’t have any interest in arguing about it in the comments section of a well-trafficked blog.
That makes sense, but how come the toughies *do*?
Perhaps the same thing that makes someone inclined to be very tough on crime makes them more likely to talk about it -- extremists of every stripe are louder than moderates, yeah?
Sounds reasonable. Where are the extremists on the other extreme of the spectrum? Or are there really none/so few they don't get much attention? Could be.
I mean, there are certainly extremists who talk about abolishing police etc. They may not be in this blog post but they do exist and they are loud. Those would read as the opposite side to me. I want to say... "zizians"?
I would like to abolish policing in its current form as it exists in certain polities. People think of it as an eternal and necessary, but it was only invented 200 years ago. There's no intrinsic reason that the institution responsible for investigating murders should also be the institution who control riots. The penetentiary model of prison-as-punishment is also about the same age and should also be abolished.
It's next to impossible to have a productive conversation about this in a blog comment section, however.
Why not open to debate?
The idea that the riot police be different from the detective police is interesting but that is the case within police forces already.
I find the whole “we’ve only been locking people up for 200” years a bit disingenuous. It’s true that prisons arise with the enlightenment, more or less, but punishment doesn’t start then. It was harsher beforehand, Prior to prisons, there were multiple punishments like corporal punishment, flogging, whipping, branding, mutilation, stockades, pillories, ducking stools, capital punishment (beheading, hanging, crucifixion, burning at the stake), breaking on the wheel, banishment, exile, outlawry, transportation to colonies , restitution, wergild, debt slavery, public fines, forced labor, galley slavery, workhouses, penal colonies, indentured servitude, public shaming, dunking, cucking stools, the brank, tarring and feathering and for religious punishments, ordeals, trial by fire, trial by water, trial by combat, penance, pilgrimage, excommunication and death.
Part of being tough on crime is making everyone know that we're going to be tough on crime. If 4% of shoplifters were randomly and quietly disappeared, it would only reduce shoplifting by 4%.
...But we already know that harsher punishments don't have a noticable effect on disincentivizing crime. The point is to increase the percentage of shoplifters that disappear.
They do have such an effect. There are limits to this, but deterrence does scale somewhat.
> If 4% of shoplifters were randomly and quietly disappeared, it would only reduce shoplifting by 4%.
This would only appear to be true if you assume that all shoplifters have nobody else in their lives.
It’s a lot easier to get excited about, “we can make society meaningfully better with this one weird trick: Actually locking up criminals,” than it is to get excited about commonly-held default opinion #2596.
Sounds a lot like an old Scott chestnut: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9kcTNWopvXFncXgPy/intellectual-hipsters-and-meta-contrarianism
Many who espouse the more extreme positions (on most topics) tend to be incapable of nuance (possibly just unwilling). It often makes for a rather unrewarding discussion.
My honest guess is that they have less natural empathy and that makes it easier for them to argue all day about how human beings should be executed without feeling burned out at the prospect.
Im generally tough on crime because of empathy. Not that I support the death penalty, but largely the system as it is (here in the U.K.) - with some leeway for petty crimes and drug use.
Obviously the US is different.
My empathy is for the victims, who are invariably poor and powerless. Not caring about crime is, consciously or unconsciously, a vicarious display of wealth.
By the standards of this comment section and survey, that makes you soft on crime.
Because they're unhappy with the status quo. Current policy is soft so softies have no reason to pipe up.
For the same reason that toughies are generally not arguing about it on the EA forum.
Normal urges for those who partake in this sort of blog + Internet Tough Guy Syndrome.
It's like those dudes who start slicing the pie every time they hear a bird land on their roof; going online and talking about how good it would be to just exterminate all the brutes give you a little thrill right in the amygdala without you actually having to go out and maybe get your ass beat.
Possibly because it gives a modest but addictive adrenaline rush to say something incredibly transgressive online? And since your moderation weeds out many types of extreme transgression, like blatant insults, the tough on crimers and "foreign human life has no inherent value" types are the only extreme transgressors left.
Do you ever worry that reading thousands upon thousands of words from these homicidal types might cause you psychic damage?
I would hope that reading not garbage ideas along with those garbage ones helps to lessen the psychic damage overall