[AbrahamParangi]

Something that I think many people really underestimate is how much crime is done by how few people. It’s incredibly concentrated. We may have this image of a normal person perhaps down on their luck and tempted by circumstances and while this is true of most criminals, it is not true of the perpetrators of most crimes.

For example, according to this article in the NYT (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/15/nyregion/shoplifting-arre...) the top 327 shoplifters in NYC last year were arrested more than 6000 times.

The same is true of violent crimes. Most people who commit a violent crime are not actually that likely to do it again. Those who do are extremely likely to do it a third time.

Arguably, enforcement should be substantially more lenient for most people and substantially more aggressive for very few.

[fsckboy]

> top 327 shoplifters in NYC last year were arrested more than 6000 times

so, what they mean is (get it? "the mean is" :) 6000 / 327 = 18+ arrests each

not arguing against the argument being made, but refocusing it with a "broken windows theory" style argument, if so much mayhem can be caused by such a small number of people, I think when the shoplifting problem is allowed to go unchecked, friends of the shoplifters join in for a very small increase in the number of people, but a big increase in the mayhem.

[AbrahamParangi]

Maybe, and I do think that society and culture are sort of inescapable potential confounders, but the concentrated character of antisociality is well documented in a number of places.

For instance here's a study from Swedish prisons https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3969807/. 75% of violent offenders are "one and done" but the remaining 25% are responsible for 63.2% of convictions.

If you do the math that means that 75% of violent offenders will never reoffend, and 25% will reoffend an average of 4 times. And that's an average. The top 10% reoffend an average of 10 or more times.