Thursday, Jan. 29, 2004

this is what happens when i spend too much time learning

After reading economics for like the last 5 hours and then proceeding directly to my prison reading, I, singlehandedly, have devised a solution to stop crime. You see, from an economic perspective (I can’t believe I’m saying that) it makes perfect sense that a person would turn to a life of crime, taken into consideration that for most criminals, the opportunity cost for committing crimes, i.e. being a moral working citizen, is pretty dismal, I mean most criminals come from poverty and the alternative would be working at a grocery store for minimum wage or something. And when you do a cost-benefit analysis, the cost of potentially getting caught and put in jail (a possibility which seems remote for uneducated people I guess) is definitely outweighed by the benefit of making easy money selling cocaine or robbing a bank. And any rational person – which is all people according to economists – would choose to do something, anything, where the perceived benefits outweigh the costs. It is just purely logical. The solution, therefore, lies in incentive. And obviously, the “deterrent” of a prison sentence is not really incentive; the answer, I believe, is to pay repeat offenders and people at-risk for crime to not commit crime and to work minimum wage in a grocery store or something. Then the benefit of not being a criminal would exceed the cost. Okay, this does have some minor flaws, but I know it will work because it has worked before. For example in my PCR dialogue group, we were discussing how you can achieve world peace (such a dumb question I know) and we decided that, instead of punishing people for disobeying international protocol, we should reward them for obeying it. This one girl suggested it, she said “Like, in my sorority, we had problems with girls not going to programs! So we were punishing them for not going, and then they just ended up dropping out of the sorority! So we devised a new system where we would instead reward people for going to the programs, and we solved the problem of too many people not attending and dropping out!” And I said, “yeah, that is just like the programs the federal government has where they withhold funding to states who have a drinking age lower than 21! They can’t force them to have the drinking age of 21, but they can reward them for having that law! And it works!” And everyone in the group was like, “yeah! It totally works!” So we solved that problem. And I am confident that it can also work for our imprisonment binge. I mean, I’m sure it makes perfect economic sense too: we spend $40 billion a year on incarceration costs alone, 50% of which are for petty crimes like possession of marijuana or stealing a $10 item from a store. I’m sure it would save money in the long run to give out money as an incentive for staying out of a life of crime, rather than putting them in prison. I can’t believe no one ever thought of this before!