> The extreme punishments for breaking the law might have something to do with it.

Historically speaking, this is almost never true. People constantly think the solution is crueler punishments and we have hundreds of years of records of what happens.

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hamdingers 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

People who commit crimes generally do not think they will be caught and therefore the punishment is of no concern to them. The better way to deter crime[1] is to convince more of the public that people who commit crimes are usually caught. Preferably by actually catching people who commit crimes.

1. aside from the obviously effective but difficult to implement deterrent of meeting everyone's physical needs

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cortesoft 4 hours ago | parent [-]

A lot of crimes are also committed by people who genuinely don't think about the consequences when they are acting. It doesn't matter how bad or how certain the consequence is, because they aren't thinking about it at all.

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akoboldfrying 3 hours ago | parent [-]

But apparently there are far fewer such people in Singapore. How would you explain this?

I think the explanation is that growing up in an environment where even small infringements are consistently punished makes people think about the consequences more.

	▲	rmunn 40 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		This is exactly right. People who get away with some rule-breaking, whether it's large or small, once will start to think maybe they can get away with it a second time. Get away with it a dozen times and you start to think you can get away with it every time, leading to the "people who genuinely don't think about the consequences when they are acting" that cortesoft mentioned. That sort of behavior isn't just a facet of personality, it's trained (or it might be more accurate to say, it wasn't trained out of them — all children act on impulse, it's the nature of children, but if their parents consistently punish them for sneaking cookies out of the cookie jar and they never get away with it, they eventually learn not to do it in the first place and to think about the consequences before they act). So when a lot of people grow up in an environment where small rulebreakings are consistently caught and punished (the former is more important, can't punish what isn't detected), they learn from an early age that rulebreaking carries consequences nearly every time, and you end up with far fewer people willing to break the rules.
	▲	decremental 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
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broken-kebab 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"Hundreds of years of records" sounds like a big exaggeration. I don't think we can reliable talk about more than 150 years, and even that would be sparse, covering only some lucky countries. And this data is hard to evaluate as adjusting it to culture shifts, economy changes, and even to what constitutes "cruel" in different periods isn't easy.

I think, it's reasonable to suspect that demonstrative cruelty in crime punishment may have bad side-effects in the long run, but there are just a few cases in recent history where at least short-term outcomes seem to support the claim that it may reduce crime levels.

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Camus134 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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