How Do You Reduce Crime?

A post by PaulL, probably the first in a new series.

This series will cover a fair bit of ground, and discuss somewhat the causes of crime and what we might do to avoid it. That, however, is a long term project. I suspect Bill English was at least partly on the right track with his investment approach, unfortunately the incoming Labour government dismantled that.

Having said that, our crime rates have changed quite substantially in the last 5-6 years. I find it hard to believe that the social determinants of crime have changed that much in that time. I suspect more proximate causes may be identifiable.

I’ll start with jail time.

The purposes of prison have long been understood to be fourfold. Punishment, prevention, rehabilitation and deterrence.

• Punishment is pretty simple – it’s the old testament “an eye for an eye”. The punishment needs to fit the crime, and society has an expectation of punishment. A later post may cover this territory
• Prevention is also reasonably simple in theory. A prisoner in jail cannot commit more crimes (other than against other prisoners or staff). There is a question about whether prison can turn someone to a life of crime, and that again may be the topic of another post
• Rehabilitation is interesting. In theory a good idea, not a lot of evidence that I’ve seen for it working at scale. There is data I believe for things like prisoner literacy, and again, another post may beckon
• Deterrence is the concept that a potential criminal, knowing the consequences of their actions, will be deterred from committing crime. That is the topic of today’s post.

There is a school of thought that says that criminals don’t think about consequences. This may be true for “crimes of passion”, but there’s a reasonable body of work that suggests that criminals act as if they were carefully weighing the consequences. It doesn’t really matter if they actually do, what matters is that their behaviour is as if they did.

The evidence suggests that a combination of certainty of getting caught, speed of conviction, and severity of punishment all lead to a reduction in offending. The mechanism by which this works is not nailed down, but I figure you don’t have to be able to do maths to notice that your three mates all got nicked and are in jail. If you’re so inclined, a starting point would be papers on rational choice theory.

In recent times there’s been a fair amount of attention given to the sentences handed down to criminals. And many of those sentences do seem to be, well, criminal. However, I’ve often been of the belief that if 1 year in jail doesn’t deter someone, then 5 years probably won’t either.

If we turn to the theory, what seems very important to me is the first two. If you don’t think you’ll get caught, then length of sentence has no effect. And if you don’t think you’ll get caught/convicted for 3-4 years, that’s a long way in the future, who cares?

I think that the parties of the right are missing a big opportunity to articulate a reasonable short term way to reduce crime. Simply put, we need to resource and manage our Police and Justice systems such that those committing crimes would expect to get caught quickly, and convicted quickly. A crime committed today may have consequences as soon as tomorrow.

If, as a burglar, you could reasonably expect that if you commit a crime today, tomorrow the Police will be knocking on your door to question you about it, and in 6-8 weeks you’ll be in Court for it, it’s going to slow down your offending. If you know that the solve rate for burglaries is 60%, your maths is that you’ll probably get caught after 2-3, not after 50-100.

This is an expensive commitment. Probably almost as expensive as locking people up for longer periods. But it has some substantial advantages:

1. It is more likely to work
2. It doesn’t require getting judges to change their sentencing behaviour (and there’s some possibility that with some sentences judges actually have it right)
3. It also makes society a lot safer, and feel a lot safer, for the rest of us. More police, faster justice is the kind of thing voters like

It’s not clear to me why parties of the right are missing this opportunity space. People don’t actually love locking criminals up (notwithstanding the desire for retribution), unless they’re in the few who are genuine bad bastards. They do like more Police, and would like to know that court cases occur quickly.

What would this take? A combination of things. More funding of course, into Courts and into Police. Some changes to terms and conditions (maybe more pay) to attract more people. Some people are still rabbiting on about AI stealing all our jobs, so there’ll be plenty of people available.

Most importantly, setting targets and expectations. Expectations that Police will actually go out to a burglary and try to solve it, not just give you a case number so you can lodge your insurance claim. Expectations that Police will turn up, quickly, to shoplifting and instances where members of the public have apprehended a criminal.

I’ll cover some other territory in later posts, but this I think is the biggest opportunity in short term crime action. Changing the maths for criminals.