Long sentences are far less effective than reliable enforcement. Something that seems to be very true in practice. If you steal or vandalise something in China, there is an extremely high chance you will get caught, you won't get a massive penalty, but it will be enough to cover the damages + some.

If you for example knew that stealing had a penalty of 100% of the item value + 10% fine, with a 100% chance of getting caught, you'd never steal anything again even though the penalty is so much smaller than what it is currently in most countries. And then if you make a dumb decision as a teenager or in a lapse of judgement, it won't ruin your life.

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ACCount37 a day ago | parent | next [-]

Long sentences and reliable enforcement are complimentary.

If you can reliably prosecute the repeat offenders you catch, and put them behind bars for a long time? You stop them from committing more crimes. The crime rate falls, and the amount of enforcement manpower you have available per crime rises. Making it easier to catch and prosecute the remaining offenders.

Most of the low level crime isn't done by "a dumb decision as a teenager or in a lapse of judgement". It's done by someone who has done it 5 times before and will do it again. Unless jailed, that is. The jail doesn't fix whatever's wrong with them, but it is hard to keep doing crimes while behind bars.

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Gigachad a day ago | parent [-]

For violent crime sure. But for theft if you can just consistently recover the loss + a penalty it will do so much more to discourage it than simply raising the penalty.

	▲	ACCount37 a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		That's for theft specifically. Most thefts are committed by repeat offenders. You are making a very common mistake of assuming that criminals are prone to making good decisions. If they were, they probably wouldn't offend the first time. And almost certainly wouldn't reoffend - once the costs of getting caught are clear to them. "Consistently" is not very realistic without a way of making repeat offenders stop reoffending. You need the level of law enforcement to completely overpower the crime rate - and that means either getting better funded, better staffed, better equipped, more professional enforcement, or lowering crime rates. "We need to overfund the police" is expensive and unpopular, "we need to give the police more surveillance powers" is extremely unpopular, and there are very few ways of getting lower crime rates. Jail bars, however, are a proven one.
	▲	pandaman 16 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		How do you recover the loss from a druggie who has no assets and does not work?

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defen a day ago | parent | prev [-]

How does that work when you don't have enough assets to cover the cost of the thing you broke or stole?

	▲	Gigachad a day ago \| parent [-]
		Of course you could still rack up a large penalty / jail time if you cause an incredible amount of damage quickly, but in general you'd catch people before they get that far. Catching a bike thief after the first 1-2 bikes rather than when they have stolen 100.