fast
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That's exactly what the fuck I'm saying.
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Disproportionate punishment
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Kharakov
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lol... I don't think the majority believe that sacrificing others for your own greed counts as a sacrifice.fast
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Oh, now y'all tell me.
whichphilosophy
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The cost of assessing the person's income may exceed the fine.
fromderinside
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Increase the fine.
ronburgundy
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This is a widespread meme, but completely false. Punishment altering behavior is among the most proven facts in all of behavioral science.
Political factions that are understandably trying to curtail child abuse and other authoritarian abuses of punishment have polluted the public discourse with bogus assertions that punishment in general is ineffective in reducing unwanted behaviors.
This makes sense theoretically, just not very practical for the legal system to expend the needed resources to determine how each specific person would be most or least impacted by various forms of punishment.
Kharakov
Quantum Hot Dog
IRS data. Make having a fine have the potential to trigger an audit. Have fines in place to discourage accidental misrepresentation of wealth/income.
Yeah. That way of thinking would work very well in healthcare too: a standard punishment for getting sick would save mony and make people healthier.
fast
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They were talking about behavior. Getting sick is like falling; it's not something we do; it's something that happens to us.
As is behavior.
Tigers!
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If you have done the same crime why not have the same fine?
Use parking fines as an example - If you overstay your welcome the amount of time you overstay is the same regardless of your wealth/income. The inconvenience to the next person is the same too.
fromderinside
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Summarizing:
Here is an article which I can post, but, from which I cannot extract pieces so you have to read it yourself to find what I said above applies.
Does Criminal Law deter: A behavioral Science Investigation. http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1030&context=faculty_scholarship
You'll find a summary in the abstract and a at the end of discussion.
The point is unless punishment meets focus points of the criminal in planning and executing of the crime. It is no better than hitting a puppy on the nose or sticking her nose in the pee right after wetting the floor. She whines, she cowers, then she pees on the floor again.
Thorndike and Skinner were wrong on a lot, but, on this they were dead on. Yes. There is a big difference between punishment and contingent negative reinforcement.
As for the rest, removing lead and declining birth rates account for almost all the decline in recidivism post 1985.
Kharakov
Quantum Hot Dog
If fines are designed to discourage people from behaving badly in public, they should be scaled appropriately to encourage proper behaviors.
If fines are to designed to specifically target poor people and force them to behave, while rich people get to flaunt their wealth? I don't see how this is just- it is abusive of the poor from my perspective.
If fines are to designed to specifically target poor people and force them to behave, while rich people get to flaunt their wealth? I don't see how this is just- it is abusive of the poor from my perspective.
Kharakov
Quantum Hot Dog
That reads like complete bullshit to me. Sometimes people don't consider consequences. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they feel forced into situations they cannot avoid. Certain people just don't consider consequences no matter what the possible punishment, and these people might need to be locked up until we figure out what to do with them, but this hardly applies to everyone.
That said, if rich people felt they'd receive proportional punishment, instead of what to them is a slap on the wrist, they'd probably restrain themselves a bit more.
If priests thought they'd get in trouble for molesting little children, instead of being able to hide behind the church, would they still do it?
fromderinside
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I wonder how many of these transfers and assignments were due to 'behavioral' problems?
Priest Transfers in Lancing Diocese effective July 2016: http://www.dioceseoflansing.org/2016-priest-assignments
IOW it's ongoing with about half of American Diocese having been sued over the past 20 years.
Think about being alive in this way. If there isn't enough on the table one makes food a priority, if one is beaten one makes finding safety a priority, if one has access to that which one is officially denied one makes getting it a priority. Ya duz what is important to you regardless.
ronburgundy
Contributor
Your interpretation of that research is wrong. Here is the first sentence of the article you cite:
[P]"Having a criminal justice system that imposes sanctions no doubt does deter criminal conduct."[/P]
What the article is about is a more nuanced point that changes to the law designed to increase the punishment for particular crimes do not reliably alter rates for those particular crimes. The main reason the article cites for this is simply that potential offenders don't know the details of the criminal law and thus of changes in the law, so their is no way such changes would reliably be factored into their behavioral choices. The article is quite correct on this point, but that point does nothing to undermine the fact (one the article affirms) that punishment in general does reduce crime in general.
As for Skinner, his biggest error was in under-estimating the role of human cognitive processes that come in between the S and the R in his experiments.
Unlike his animal subjects, humans constantly engage in inferential reasoning, abstraction, transfer of knowledge, analogize, and have theory of mind that allows them to understand and predict other's intentions, goals, and motives for their actions. All this allows people to very easily and rather automatically connect a punishment to their own behavior and anticipate future punishment for a behavior, without the need for any direct learned association between an exact punishment and an exact behavior that just occurred.
Take 1000 people who have never been punished for shitting on the floor. Ask them shit on the floor at their friends house. 100% of them will not want to do it, because they accurately know the negative reaction of their friend, and when their friend yells at them, even days later, 100% will know exactly why.
Punishments on humans do not require anywhere near the direct contingencies they require for other animals that lack our inferential capacities.
fromderinside
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So much for science then.
The first sentence states a presumption based on casual observation not on effect. Its a mechanism to set the minds of law enforcement types at ease with their pursuit of 'justice' ferch***ts sake.
As for you 1000 persons example if it were true there would be no crime. Reliably a fraction, somewhere between 3 and 20 percent, of individuals will transgress for advantage or from personality. So expect up to two hundred individuals to do some pooping on the floor.
As for punishment, a person punished is suppressed from whatever behavior they were doing just before the punishment is well established. Unfortunately, as the article points out, time and many other contingencies need be in place for punishment to be apt.
Furthermore humans don't operate rationally most of the time. We behave emotionally at base. There is really no other way to explain the Trump phenomenon for instance unless that were so. People want to be selfish, to be superior, to be better. We are among the best discriminating animals in the world. Inclusion, being part of something is much more difficult, but, it is what works without excessive biological costs, loss of life, demand for replacement, etc., in large groups. After all we are social animals.
What we are talking about is the push pull between individual preservation and group continuation. One demands instinctive, emotive based, actions whilst the other depends on learned and patterned, thought out, activity. The latter is much more difficult to sustain, but, it is the only one that permits us to exist without playing Cain and Abel tragedies all the time.
ronburgundy
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No, the first sentence is acknowledging what all relevant science and data support about the general relationship between punishment and deterrence (i.e., it works).
Nothing in the rest of the article speaks to that question at all. Rather it addresses a completely different question as to whether minor changes in specific punishments for specific crimes are readily known by all people well enough that they would have an impact upon rates for those specific crimes. It has nothing to do with you actual claim that punishment does not work as a deterrent, but only whether most people have expert level knowledge of what the exact punishments are at any given moment.
Wow. You really know nothing at all about human psychology or behavior. You sincerely believe that if you randomly asked 1000 people to shit on their friends floor that 200 would do so? Not only would almost none do so, but any that did would do so with full knowledge that their friends would get angry about it, and 100% of their friends would get angry about it. IOW, contrary to your theory of human psychology, they would not be just randomly guessing about their friends reaction, they would all have very accurate predictive knowledge of the reaction, despite never once experiencing their friend react to them shitting on the floor. IOW, they need no specific S-R contingencies to know exactly what the negative reaction will be. The few that do it anyway, will tell you that they wanted to elicit the reaction because they thought it would be funny and thus the reaction is not punishment in their view.
No. What is well established is that animals lacking most higher cognition functions that human's possess require far greater contingencies because they are incapable of recognizing any relationships except co-occurrences in time. Also, well established is that human's draw inferential connections automatically and constantly via semantic/conceptual overlap of the abstract concepts activated by the concrete properties of objects/events. This leads them to form complex networks of associations and infer cause-effect relationships that have virtually no bearing on the superficial contingencies, such as what was the most immediately preceding event.
Imagine that you force all 1000 adults to shit on their friends floor, then force them to wash their friends dishes right before their friends walk in the door. when their friend comes home. Then, have their friend walk in and yell "What the fuck did you do!!!!????"
You theory predicts that near all 1000 people will assume their friend is yelling at them for washing dishes without having the slightest clue that they are yelling about them shitting on the floor.
That absolute absurdity of that prediction should tell you that your theory of human psychology is completely wrong. Truly, as wrong as any theory of human thought and behavior could possibly be.
Emotions and rationality are not opposites. We behave to avoid things that cause us unwanted emotions and to increase positive emotions. Punishments are, by definition, things that cause us unwanted emotions. Thus, we behave to optimize the net effect of various punishments and rewards.
It doesn't matter whether people are perfect at estimating the outcomes of their actions. As long as they are merely better than chance at predicting which actions are punishes and which are rewarded, a punishment will reduce the probability of an action.
Great. All of this speaks to why the punishment of prison would deter crime. Selfish motives are very well served by avoiding having oneself imprisoned, having all one's social ties severed, one's ability to control one's body taken away, one's safety put in constant danger, etc..
Punishment operates heavily on the most base emotional and selfish level. That is why it works so well. Of course, it doesn't always prevent the action it is intended to. But it reduces its prevalence. If every single crime was a pure knee jerk reflex that no one can do anything to avoid, then you'd be right. But they aren't, so you're wrong.
A huge % of crimes involved steps in which deliberate choices and decisions are made that enable or directly cause to future criminal behavior. Plus, even at the non-conscious level, knowledge of punishments creates automatic emotional reactions linked to the idea of and/or the features associated with the crime that make the person less likely to engage in the action, even if they are just reacting to their emotions without deliberative thought.
A person that engages in a crime, despite knowing the punishment, is someone for whom the punishment was not strong enough to outweigh all the forces that favored the action. But for each such person, there are many more for whom that same punishment was sufficient to deter the action, and without that deterrent they would also have committed the crime. Every actions we want to deter in others in multiply determined. For some, the factors favoring it are too great for any potential punishment to deter them. For others, they gain so little by the action that they wouldn't engage in it, even without any criminal punishment. For all others, there is a continuum of punishment levels that would be sufficient under various circumstances to deter the action. There are many people whose potential criminal actions are reduced because the existent punishment they associate with the action are sufficient to override any incentive to engage in them.
fromderinside
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PunishmentThe following basically covers my objections to punishment:
These points are mainly made in the name of some cause usually later found to be contrary to actual 'good'.
that's for the side of those giving punishment.
On the other side of the punishment coin is the behavioral paradigm, specifically the sociobiological concept of moralistic/retaliatory aggression or reciprocal altruism which is hardly recognizable as punishment. This is the form seen as universally applicable across species as an evolutionarily stable strategy.
This latter is a tortured interpretation of punishment used to explain cooperation among social species. In my view a decision model would be more apt rather than treating it as punishment. Punishment as described as doing harm for moral good doesn't transfer well to most species unless we include verbal torture to adjust paradigm. It is pretty certain that lions don't punish their children with expectation of some other behavior in the future in some universal lion social morality play. Momma learned it from her momma and now she uses it on junior. Not other principle need be invented to make it work.
ronburgundy
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The following basically covers my objections to punishment:
These points are mainly made in the name of some cause usually later found to be contrary to actual 'good'.
that's for the side of those giving punishment.
Just to be clear, the above has no relevance to the discussion or what you posted in this thread about punishment being ineffective. You above quote is about whether the behaviors we are punishing are always morally worthy of punishment, which is a purely moral, unscientific question having nothing to do with the efficacy of punishment to deter behaviors. BTW, note that you cited the "Criticism" in the Wiki on "punishment", and it is telling that nothing in that section indicates there is any critique that punishment is ineffective (the issue under discussion). The only critique is from a Philosopher of law (i.e., someone who no knowledge of the science related to punishment) stating her personal feelings about whether allowing punishment is moral, given the ways she feels its been abused by authorities.
On the other side of the punishment coin is the behavioral paradigm, specifically the sociobiological concept of moralistic/retaliatory aggression or reciprocal altruism which is hardly recognizable as punishment. This is the form seen as universally applicable across species as an evolutionarily stable strategy.
This latter is a tortured interpretation of punishment used to explain cooperation among social species. In my view a decision model would be more apt rather than treating it as punishment. Punishment as described as doing harm for moral good doesn't transfer well to most species unless we include verbal torture to adjust paradigm. It is pretty certain that lions don't punish their children with expectation of some other behavior in the future in some universal lion social morality play. Momma learned it from her momma and now she uses it on junior. Not other principle need be invented to make it work.
Fear of future punishments are not themselves punishments, but rather a consequence of punishments among organisms capable of thinking about the future. Punishments themselves are those that apply across species. However, the impact of punishments is far from consistent across species, because some, like humans, are capable of and inherently prone toward predicting the future and transfering knowledge of past punishments to future possible scenarios that are similar only at an a level of abstraction.