Becker (1968) began the investigation into the economics of crime by modeling criminal behavior as rational. Criminals respond to incentives in much the same way consumers respond to price. Raise the costs to crime and criminals will commit less crime. At first it seemed that the length of a prison sentence and the harshness of a penalty were the most accessible forms of control that state planners had to influence the way criminals perceived crime.
In recent years scholars seem more interested in the probabilities of punishment instead of its degree. In other words, if a criminal is unlikely to get captured, unlikely to get prosecuted, unlikely to get convicted, and unlikely to serve a full jail sentence, then even the longest prison sentence seems insignificant compared to a big criminal score. In the probability model of crime fixing inefficiencies in the criminal justice system can do better to deter crime than raising punishments.
But OJ’s recent arrest has me baffled. Did he really think he would get away with anything? His probability of success has to be near zero. And the value of the stuff he was stealing wasn’t very high.
Is OJ rational? Maybe he’s just calling the justice system’s bluff, after all they’ve demonstrated an unwillingness to apply harsh penalties to him. Maybe he’s being compelled. His actions would appear rational if he was trying to avoid some imposed cost. Maybe he’s just nuts?

In my previous post where I described terrorism as modern guerrilla warfare, I argued that the technique of terrorism is in part induced by disparity between the technological availabilities of the two parties involved. In other words, pitting David against Goliath means that David uses the sling and jumps about rather than going head to head with the big brute.
Is there a similar influence on the technology selected by victims of crime when they are pitted against criminal attackers? It seems obvious that guns grant a sensation of power and control to their users. Is that to say that those who buy, own and wield them are those who feel most powerless — those who face the greatest power disparity between their own accessible security and the power of a criminal to inflict harm upon them or take their property? This may explain concealed carry permits, a sound administration of justice does little to help the real pain felt from being the victim of a violent attack. So citizens still want to deter getting attacked, or hurt during an attack. The more someone feels likely to be the victim of a violent attack, the more likely they are to invest in weaponry rather than locks as a security precaution.
What about the technology of punishment? The greater the difference between the likelihood of a victim to regain his wealth and property through the criminal justice system, the less likely he is to invest in security devices that track the specific identity of the aggressor. Why invest the extra dollars to install a video camera as part of your security system if the criminal justice system has no means of restoring what’s yours to you? If yous still don’t get your property back even after the criminal has been caught and prosecuted you have little incentive to make investments in devices that explicitly detect the identity of a criminal. Instead, if victims still feel helpless that their security purchases don’t suffice to deter against crime, they are likely to support harsh punitive measures that specifically inflict loss and suffering upon a criminal. Such is the case in the philosophical justifications of deontological and retributive punishment systems. Punishments are much rehabilitations compared to times of the past, and they are certainly not debt-based sentences, punishment is the response to crime because it is unpleasant because the criminal is said to deserve to be punished.
To sum up, it seems that Dog the bounty hunter gets more business in a retributive justice system, while Sherlock Holmes does more business in a restitution-based criminal justice system. I’m not trying to make an explicit claim that we should move from one to the other, though I think it’s worth discussing. I am willing to say that there is significant innovation and discovery in the technological discoveries of peaceful security strategies that gets inhibited, and a significant degree of relatively violent techniques that get subsidized because of the incentives promoted in the current justice system.

With less than an hour remaining in this anniversary occasion I thought I’d put up a relevant post.
I want to write an economic history paper of innovative yet technologically inferior military tactics. Do you remember your history books from elementary school? Usually you would read a chapter about a key moment in history and important words, names, and places would be in bold print. Mesopotamia was always near the front and Eli Whitney and the cotton gin were somewhere in the middle.
In the chapters on the early American wars especially the French and Indian war, I remember guerrilla warfare always being in bold. When the Europeans came with advanced guns and faced off against the Native Americans with arrows and spears they expected an easy victory. But it wasn’t so easy, the Native Americans didn’t form ranks like the Europeans did. Instead of standing in a line and marching to battle, they hid in the forests behind trees and rocks and strategically launched inferior firepower with reasonable effect.
Can we generalize this phenomenon? Are innovations in the techniques of warfare sparked by large disparities in accessible technologies across competing forces? As a combatant in war you can excel on one of two margins, brute force or strategic cunning. When you stand no hope in terms of force you specialize on the only remaining margin.
Now call me a Ron Paulite if you will, but this sounds remarkably similar to “blowback” with an added twist — the form that blowback will come in. Not that it’s a good piece of empirical evidence but the movie Jarhead brings up this point. Technologically speaking, Dessert Storm was nothing like Vietnam. Vietnam was thousands of Marines and Army soldiers schlepping through the jungle combating face to face with enemy soldiers. What causes angst for the Marine soldiers in Jarhead is that they never really get to kill anyone anymore, they just call in the air strikes.
Now imagine your a Middle Eastern soldier, and an enemy of the United States. You don’t have fighter planes. Seems to me like you’d hide behind the rock like the Native Americans until the time was right, then strike back with cunning. Does this give us a unique perspective on foreign policy if our aim is to specifically avoiding terrorism? What is the effect of the marginal dollar spent on American military arms. Doesn’t each dollar widen the gap between our technological superiority and their military ineptitude. Does it make sense that the wider that gap gets the more desperate our opponents will become to make a dent however they can?
Food for thought. I wish nothing but the best for all the friends and families of those who died on 9-11.

As a continuation to my previous post on John Lott’s work I found the image below.

The upward trends appear to be well in place before the policies take hold, but the duration and drop off with policy repeal seems to fit pretty well.

Watch any murder mystery, any reality court case, or any murder case on the news, the prime suspects are always the family, friends, and acquaintances of the deceased. While this may be true for murder mysteries (cases where no identifiable motive can be detected by the killing) generalizations from the “known aggressor theory” have been wrongly applied to murder as a whole. Now certain arguments in the crime prevention policy arena are standing on some shaky foundations.
Using stricter punishment policies to influence crime is a two sided debate. First, there’s the rational choice advocates who argue that increases in the degree and probabilities of punishment raises the costs to crime in the minds of calculating criminals. The other side of the argument claims that the majority of murders and violent crimes are performed by people who know the victim, they are crimes of passion or momentary intense emotions, the criminals themselves often quickly regret it. To the second group, raising the punitive level of law enforcement is not going to have a significant influence on these criminals, and it is often expensive.
While doing some reading today John Lott in More Guns Less Crime takes the second group to task on the empirics of their claim.

In interpreting the numbers, one must understand how these classifications are made. In this case, “murderers who know their victims” is a very broad category. A huge but not clearly determined portion of this category includes rival gang members who know each other. In larger urban areas, where most murders occur, the majority of murders are due to gang-related turf wars over drugs… While I do not wish to downplay domestic violence, most people do not envision gang members or drug buyers and pushers killing each other when they hear that 58 percent of murder victims were either relatives or acquaintances of their murderers.

While this insight does not tell us whether changes in the harshness or probability of punishment is more of a deterrent against crime, it certainly does insist that crime levels are influenced by sound policy and the institutional context created by legal policies rather than psychological or sociological factors.

If family members are included, 17 percent of all murders in Chicago for 1990-95 involved family members, friends, neighbors, or roommates remained virtually unchanged. What has grown is the number of murders by non-friend acquaintances, strangers, identified gangs, and persons unknown.

Ever look at your favorite economists CV, your own, or make a list of several papers that you want to write? Well I do this all the time, and the one thing that jumps out are the clumps of papers that all look like they’re on the same topic. For example, I’ve been reading a lot of books on the history of Ancient Greece as I am trying to fill out a case study on the rise of prisons as a tool of law enforcement (the Greeks seem to be the first). Now when I make a list of the papers that I want to write I notice that there are several papers on ancient Greece cluttering it up.
At first I was concerned. “Geez! I don’t want to look like some nutcase who only thinks about ancient Greece,” I said to myself. “Not to worry,” said my inner economist, “it’s the rational thing to do.”
When you’re doing qualitative research, you have to read a lot of books and sometime sniff out leads on information that may turn up useless for the focused topic at hand. It’s only natural that you’re going to find a few of those tangential topics to be worthy of their own attention and should be turned into another independent paper. So after you finish what you’re working on, what comes next on the list? In terms of effort writing one of the extra related papers before a whole new research project seems cheaper. What could make them more expensive? If you’re burned out at looking at the same old topic, then the cost of writing yet another paper in the same old area may seem too costly compared to starting fresh somewhere else.
Research that requires investigating topics or fields of study that you don’t know a lot about are likely to spark more extra papers than research areas that you have been hanging around in for a while. These relatively newer areas are going to give off more of those holy cow! moments that keep you wanting to write more and more papers.
Academic CVs might signal more specific things amongst academics than just what a scholar happens to be interested in. Someone with clearly defined chunks of research that fit loosely together under broader methodologies or schools of thought are going to signal that they find a research path and plow through pumping ideas out wherever they go. CVs that have an apparently unrelated hodge podge are going to signal that their author’s have relatively short attention spans or don’t get those holy cow moments very often.