Making Crime Pay Less

If morality wasn’t an issue, what do you think would be the best way to stop crime while maintaining freedom for non-criminals?

Breaking arms for breaking windows?
Death for every crime?
Handouts to everyone?
Public ridicule?

(That’s three sticks and one carrot.)

I’m planning to do write about bad guys at NANOWRIMO this year and would like to steal some ideas.

7 Responses to Making Crime Pay Less

  1. Kevin October 11, 2007 at 1:26 pm #

    I think by morality you mean moral constraints on the treatment of the guilty, right?

    If so, then I think where no moral constraints existed you would seek utility instead. Historically that’s what has happened, anyway. All useful criminals would be consigned to penal colonies and slave labor for a sentence or for life, depending on the crime. The unable or unruly would be given over to organ donation or research, I imagine.

  2. weeklyrob October 11, 2007 at 7:25 pm #

    Exactly the kind of thing I meant. Thanks!

    And I wonder whether that would work. I mean, there was plenty of crime in Victorian England, even while convicts went to Australia.

    Of course, there was no research on the other convicts.

  3. JB October 12, 2007 at 9:27 am #

    What is freedom? If the government knows everything you do, but you only get penalized if you break the law, is that freedom? Or must freedom include the lack of observation by authority?

    If the former, then some system that tracks EVERYTHING you do and which objectively parsed actions as legal/nonlegal and meted punishment accordingly would be the best for stopping crime but not punishing law-abiding citizens. As long as those law-abiding citizens were OK with the government watching them masturbate. And this is assuming the laws are “fair”.

    David Drake wrote some stories about a society like that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacey_and_his_Friends

  4. weeklyrob October 13, 2007 at 12:04 am #

    Wow, that would certainly work, though obviously that’s beyond the means of current governments even if they were able to do it politically.

    Hmmm….

  5. Kevin October 15, 2007 at 12:18 pm #

    Aer you sure? I thought that was current policy in England.

  6. MM October 17, 2007 at 6:53 pm #

    What if for every crime you committed the same thing would happen to someone you love. So, it’s definitely not happening to you, but happens to someone you love deeply and you have to choose the person.

  7. weeklyrob October 17, 2007 at 10:11 pm #

    MMM, you are one tough cookie. By the way, I added an extra M to represent your title.

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