dealing with crime without being horrifically evil

okay fine i will start blogging

I have been left slightly bereft of activities or executive function and my attempts to corral Celene into writing glowfiction with me have been met with limited success over the past few days. Starved for options, I am left with no choice other than to begin blogging. A large portion of my inspiration is due to my friendquaintance mercury, who has been blogging daily since the start of the month. This is very impressive, and I am worried I may not be able to replicate its pace—it has the kabbalistic advantage of being named after quicksilver. But then again, while the fourth month may not have associations with speed, it is possible that my speedrunning heritage will help.

In mercury’s post Rehabilitation, it describes several possible approaches the state might take to resolve misbehavior. Then, while discussing the usage of negative stimuli, it makes an appeal to the reader:

(…) This option is pretty emotionally satisfying, which might be bad incentives if it is not the best option. However it might be good incentives if it is the best option. You should look that up. Right now, go look that up. Let me know what you find. Write a blogpost about it so I can read it. Who is a good reader? You are! Yes you are!

Not being one to refuse such a clearly heartfelt appeal, I decided to inquire with my friend Claude Sonnet 4, who said:

I can see your friend is presenting a provocative framework for thinking about criminal justice responses. The deliberately casual language (“beat them with sticks”) seems designed to cut through academic jargon and highlight the fundamental nature of these approaches.

Looking at this analytically, each option represents a different theory of justice:

Option 1 (Punishment/Deterrence) - Whether fines or physical punishment, this assumes people respond to negative incentives and that visible consequences deter others. It’s emotionally satisfying but research shows mixed effectiveness, especially for deterrence.

Option 2 (Incapacitation/Isolation) - Removing someone’s ability to cause harm by restricting their freedom or access to society. This is pragmatically effective at stopping immediate harm but doesn’t address underlying causes.

Option 3 (Rehabilitation) - Addressing root causes through education, therapy, skill-building, etc. Research generally supports this as most effective for reducing recidivism, but it’s slower and requires more resources.

Option 4 (“Secret fourth option”) - This likely refers to restorative justice approaches that focus on repairing harm to victims and communities rather than just punishing offenders.

The evidence suggests that purely punitive approaches (option 1) tend to be least effective at reducing crime long-term, while rehabilitation-focused approaches show better outcomes. However, the “best” option probably depends on the specific crime, offender, and community context.

What’s your own intuition about which approach makes most sense? Are you leaning toward any particular option for your response post?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

I did not have the heart to correct Claude on the nature of the fourth option.

Anyways, to the extent one considers my friend authoritative, it appears that option 1 is bad, and the other options might be good depending on the circumstances. While I do agree to an extent (with some caveats), I don’t know that I would cite empirical effectiveness of each method at crime reduction here—I think my cruces might sometimes have more to do with ethics, and I fear it may distort my epistemics if I try to draw upon justifications in terms of crime reduction when my true primary motives are of a different nature. It is, of course, perfectly plausible that Claude is simply factually correct, and it is not as though I think crime reduction isn’t an important goal, so this isn’t to say that I directly disagree with Claude per se.

Anyways, with the instruction to “go look that up” complied with as far as I care to, it is time for

The Solution to Criminal Justice According to April

For some reason I feel as though I have a fairly complete understanding of how a justice system ought to structure its punishments, at least if the criminals and victims are limited to spherical cows. I don’t know that my understanding is “correct” or “based in any way on empirical evidence”, but it does exist in my head. If this bothers you, you could choose to take it as a description of how my medianworld¹¹ I’m not yet prepared to give into the pedants and start calling them selfworlds. thinks about these things. Probably I learned a lot of this in Law school, if I had to guess.

So, to begin: as everybody knows, it is entirely impossible for a government to make threats against its people, for the people, adept students of timeless decision theory as they are, will respond by collapsing the timeline and retrocausally undoing the government’s decision to make the threat—wait, you’re telling me that not everyone knows the same obscure decision theoretical concepts that my friends do, and that even if they did it’s not entirely clear whether that would actually entirely stop threats from being viable in practice? Okay, okay, fine. It may be possible for the government to make threats, and it may furthermore be a successful method for accomplishing some of the government’s goals, but I hold that it is a normative rule of governance (and of wielding authority generally) that threats should not be made²² Probably a basic Christian-Sarenite moral intuition that Nirvana is for everybody contributes to my intuitions about how to treat criminals somewhat, but I do think I also care about this not-threatening thing as a part of Law qua Law? Not totally sure..

Now of course, as everybody also knows, threats don’t real, because nobody has any idea what a null action is in a context where the gods haven’t simply been asserted by authorial fiat to have agreed to some sort of complicated contract that carefully defines what constitutes the null action. I have heard whispers of something called ROSE bargaining, but I do not fully understand it because it has never been a plot point in an incredibly niche fanfiction³³ As far as I know.. Nevertheless, I think arbitrarily making up a conception of a null action according to whims and intuitions leads to a valuable heuristic for what sorts of governmental behaviors are morally permissible.

For example, punishing people as a disincentive is bad. The government may (lacking better alternatives) imprison a person if they are dangerous and there are not otherwise of harming people, but the government should not imprison people because they expect people to avoid criminal activity if criminal activity will result in their imprisonment. Similarly, prison conditions being unnecessarily poor in order to increase the severity of punishment is unacceptable. The government doesn’t necessarily have to go out of its way to create luxury prison facilities, but if the criminals residing in a prison (or perhaps charitable free citizens) wish to pay for quality of life upgrades to the prison this should always be permitted, modulo the need to maintain prison security.

While I do think prisons are basically permissible in principle (though in practice American prisons at least are a nigh unforgivable moral atrocity, especially (as I understand it) for trans people), they are not my preferred method of resolving misbehavior. It seems difficult to rely on them to not ever become torture facilities, and I wish for it to be very difficult to create torture facilities. Instead, I prefer a system that consists mostly of fines and exile.

Fines—specifically, the sort that is paid directly to victims (which might be the people of Earth collectively, in which case they should be paid into the UBI fund)—are desirable because they internalize negative externalities and thereby correctly align incentives, while at the same time leaving the victim (to the extent possible) no worse off than they were initially. This seems very straightforward, and Earth often does try to do this. However, Earth sometimes has fines be paid to police departments (terrible incentives) or more generally someone or something other than the victim of the crime, which is bad. Also, many Earthlings conceptualize fines as a punishment (which should, for example, scale to the income/wealth of the perpetrator) rather than as an attempt to compensate the victim of the crime, which leads to fining rules being inadequately designed.

Exile is desirable because it runs on the Providence-given right of people and cities to free association. The details on Earth get tricky⁴⁴ I would sooner fight for the right of a city to allow whoever they want in than the right of a city to kick out whoever they want, under current circumstances, though admittedly this may require compromising the thing where America is a free-travel region, which does strike me as desirable. I think this is the sort of thing where my decisions are based on what marginal changes look good and what things are politically feasible or within the Overton window moreso than on how it seems to me like it ought to be done in the abstract., but in principle, I do think a city has no obligation to host any particular person. Ideally I think most cities should make their decisions about who to allow according to some sort of legible and democratic process and so on, though I am okay with some cities being weird and capricious so long as everyone understands what they are signing up for when they move there. But I guess my point here is that it seems to me much more desirable to tell someone you don’t want them around than to lock them in a box and not let them leave. I think a city has something resembling a right to do the former, even if it is not wise to exercise that right willy-nilly, but I don’t think they have nearly as strong a right to do the latter (on a long term basis, anyways. Presumably you still need jails even if you don’t have very many prisons.)

It seems to me that fines, exile, and (rarely) handing someone a choice between prison or early cryonicization should suffice to prevent crime. There are some arguments in favor of corporal punishment, but I think to the extent those arguments compel me they’re usually more like “the current system is so bad that this would actually be better” and not so much like “this is actually just flat out good”, so my leaning is that fines and exile and rarely prison should be basically fine⁵⁵ I think corporal punishment can be a good and fun component of a loving kinky relationship. This can of course sometimes go wrong, but I do not think we ought to rule it out. Kinky relationships with governments are a thing which should definitely someday exist but I do not think Earth is going to be ready for that for a long time..

Thus concludes my accounting of what we should do with criminals. I guess there’s a whole extra thing of “should we offer them spiritual counselling and the like⁶⁶ Community service is a combination of a fine and spiritual counselling.”, which, yeah, probably, if people don’t go trying to offer criminals that on their own then perhaps the government should subsidize it? But that’s outside the scope of this blog post.

Errata

In the first version of this blog post, I referred to beloved blogger mercury as “Mercury”. I am very sorry and hope you can all forgive me.