I would imagine that many people who commit criminal acts are victims of abusive caregiving, awful environments, or at least genetically-influenced traits that facilitate criminal behavior (e.g., impulsiveness, mental illness, substance abuse, cognitive impairments). As victims, should these offenders get special treatment in the criminal justice system?  Specifically, should they be able to avoid incarceration, or at the very least receive much reduced sentences?

The answer depends on what we’re trying to achieve through incarceration. Glad you asked:

1. Deter criminal behavior
2. Protect society through temporary incapacitation of criminal offenders
3. Discourage recidivism

It’s well established that the certainty of being caught is a much bigger crime deterrent than the severity of punishment.  Crime rates do go down when incarceration rates go up, but that’s because fewer criminals are on the street, not because would-be criminals are afraid of lengthy sentences.  Across numerous studies, there has been no correlation found between crime rates and median time served.

This isn’t to say that incarceration has no value as deterrence –being caught would lose its sting if it weren’t accompanied by some sort of punishment. While the stigma of imprisonment varies across groups and individuals, and some criminals are just “incorrigible” (repeat offenders inattentive to legal threats), removal from society for a while may persuade others to reconsider a life of crime.   And since most criminals do not reoffend after release from prison (at least within 3 years), it does appear that incarceration discourages recidivism to some extent.

Whether some groups of offenders should be treated leniently depends on how this special treatment would influence crime and recidivism rates in general and how it would affect the behavior of the individuals in question.  If leniency for “criminal victims” encourages more crime, then no.

Of course, there will be cases where leniency is called for – but that would mainly be for individuals who are at low-risk for reoffending anyway and whose extenuating circumstances are sufficiently extreme or unusual that others are unlikely to consider them relevant to their own decisions whether or not to break the law.

References

Daniel Nagin, “Deterrence in the 21st Century,” in Crime and Justice in America: 1975-2025 (ed. Michael Tonry, University of Chicago Press, 2013).

Impact of Prison Experience on Recidivism http://www.nij.gov/topics/corrections/recidivism/pages/prison-experience.aspx Accessed 9/10/2016

National Institute of Justice: Five Things about Deterrence; July 2014.

In several posts I have supported a modest Basic Income Guarantee (BIG), with the proviso that it be sufficiently miserly not to disincentivize work or add to the federal budget.  My thought was that a BIG of about $700/mo would do the trick.

But we all know that a guaranteed income of $700 a month would provide an incentive for some people to work less or not at all. Especially young people with no children or with children but other sources of income. So it would be inevitable that labor market participation would decrease to some extent, even with a modest BIG.  And as with labor market participation, so with tax receipts.

But the issue isn’t just with declining tax receipts. The longer you’re out of the job market, the harder it is to get back in. Skills get rusty. Employers get doubtful. The law of inertia sets in.

Self-efficacy predicts goal setting and goal persistence. Mastery experiences feed self-efficacy. The most important source of mastery experiences is successful performance.  Lack of successful experiences – opportunities to perform –  zaps self-efficacy.

Bottom line: the longer you’re out of it, the harder it is to get back in.

Many European countries had generous  long-term unemployment benefits  in the late 20th century.  Just about all have tightened conditions and shortened these benefits because they  led to decreased labor market participation. These benefits,  in which people had expectations of being able to collect benefits for several years,  are a better proxy for if BIG were a real thing, country-wide, than the example of the few small scale BIG experiments in developed countries, where participants know they’re in a study and have no such expectations).

So,  I’m no longer in favor of even a modest BIG.Instead, I’d focus on benefits for targeted groups: single parents,  limited English speakers, the poorly educated and low-skilled.  lunches, etc.).

For starters,  I’d eliminate all the federal grants and student loans and  provide a stipend (roughly $1000/mo) for up to 6 years total for all US adults enrolled at least half-time in post-high school education and training (including ESL, basic skills, pre-vocational, vocational, and college). The standard state grants and loans and fee waivers would still be available.  The stipend would not be means tested, so recipients could continue to work (part-time work not being a risk factor for school completion).