[mikeash]

Not really. In terms of “this has completely ruined my life,” 15 years in a Chinese prison would rate about 9.8 out of 10 for me, while death is 10 out of 10. In terms of balancing the benefits of travel versus the risk of law enforcement misconduct, that additional 0.2 out of 10 makes no noticeable difference.

[scrumper]

That seems a little glib. They're not going to scoop out your brain in prison and you have _a_ future, even if it's not the one you were planning for.

Invert it: if faced with the death penalty, how much effort would you expend to get it commuted to 15 years?

[mikeash]

I don’t think the inversion is a useful way to look at it.

Here’s the right way to look at it: what do you consider to be the acceptable odds of being imprisoned for 15 years while traveling to a foreign country? And what are the acceptable odds for being killed?

I don’t have a concrete number for either one, but they wouldn’t be much different.

Consider also that your odds of dying in a traffic accident are much higher than your odds of being executed on false pretenses by the state in most places (especially China, where they’ve only recently decided that wearing seat belts is something you should actually do, and the annual per-vehicle fatality rate is almost 10x that of the US), so the added risk from executions is hard to even detect.

[scrumper]

I'm not rational enough to really get behind your "right way" to look at it - it's a bit too homo economicus for me!

Sure, the acceptable odds for both are similar and very low, but the outcomes are vastly different. Once my dice roll has bought me into contact either one of those possibilities, I am passionately invested in making sure it's 15 years in prison.

(Edit: such thinking is of course why plea bargains work and are used so often by prosecutors in the US.)

[mikeash]

Yes, once you’re looking at one of those two possibilities, you really want the prison. But before that point, almost your entire focus is going to be on not getting either one.

My point isn’t that they’re basically the same in all aspects, it’s that they’re basically the same in terms of their input to the decision of whether to travel to a given place.

[Erlich_Bachman]

That is a very uncommon opinion.

[mikeash]

Is it really? It seems pretty widely accepted that the death penalty doesn’t deter crime, for example, which indicates that people (well, potential criminals, anyway) don’t see it as substantially worse than a lengthy prison term.

[simonh]

It's not about which is worse either though. The implicit calculation is: If I get caught, will the punishment deter me.

But (approximately) nobody commits a crime on the assumption they will get caught, so it pretty much doesn't matter what the punishment is. The way to move the needle is to change the assumption about getting caught. The closer that tends towards guaranteed, the less chance people will even make above calculation in the first place.

[mikeash]

Yes, exactly. And my thinking for travel is much the same. I’m not traveling on the assumption that I will be falsely convicted of a crime while I’m there. The way to move the needle on my decision to travel is to change the assumption about being falsely convicted, not what will happen to me if I am. Thus, a man already in prison for years suddenly being sentenced to death doesn’t change my travel plans at all.

[rebuilder]

Or that risk evaluation doesn't generally play a big part in decisionmaking that leads to crimes punishable by death.

[adventured]

It's a fascinating point that the pro death penalty crowd universally ignores.

US violent crime has plunged over the last 40 years, and the murder rate has been chopped in half since 1980, all the while death sentences have declined to ~45-50 year lows (there has been roughly a 90% reduction in new death sentences since 1999). The dramatic plunge in new death sentences over two decades hasn't coincided with any uptick in the murder rate or violent crime.

[magduf]

The people who commit heinous crimes usually have psychological problems that cause them to have very low impulse control. They don't think their actions through very well, which is why they're in their position instead of some better and more legal lifestyle/career. So harsher punishments really don't deter them; they don't expect to get caught and aren't thinking about that when they commit the crime.

There's a theory that violent crime has plunged over the last 40 years because of leaded gasoline being phased out: the lead was in the air and environment and giving everyone low-level lead poisoning.