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I tend to agree with the conclusion in general, but this blog post is egregious. This math is bogus. The "do X damage pay X penalty" framework is a poor one, for several reasons: 1. At a bare minimum, you have to scale the penalty with the probability of getting caught. If you can do $1500 worth of damage with only a 10% chance of being caught, the criminal has the advantage, because they can expect to do $15,000 worth of damage before being forced to pay the $1500 penalty. 2. On top of that, you need to scale up your punishment to allow for a safety margin, to avoid actively incentivizing your criminal act as long as the criminal believes they have a slight edge over your expected efficacy at enforcement. 3. On top of that, the direct damages to a victim from a crime are not the only damages that are created by criminality. Criminality undermines trust, social cohesion, and general societal good will, carrying both hard to quantify, soft costs, (how do you put a price value on the marginal effect of people feeling less secure in their protected speech) and hard costs (if we didn't have criminals, we wouldn't need a justice system, or large parts of the legal system. Those costs can be amortized over every criminal convicted). 4. Worst of all, with ideologically motivated crimes (like the one the blogger brought up), the act is propaganda in of itself, promoting not only the ideology in question, but also the concept of committing criminal acts in the name of the ideology. The shameful excuse for a man who vandalized this religious display effectively told everyone receptive to it that "This activity is okay, there are others out there that support you". There is a cost to civilization writ large, that scales based on the publicity of the crime. Personally, I think we underestimate the damaging effect of incarceration. There are far more humane, less damaging approaches to justice that still maintain good social order. But trying to justify a hate crime as "only doing a couple thousand dollars worth of damage, thus demands only a couple thousand dollars in punishment" is over correction. Give the guy a couple lashes and send him on his way. |
The "do X damage pay X penalty" framework is a simplification for the purpose of convenience. To try calculating all the ephemerals would be tedious, provide little additional illumination, and lose the thread. It's meant to illustrate, NOT be writ into law.
The propaganda element is particularly interesting in light of the effect on mass shooters. It's been established that sensationalizing mass shooters encourages new ones, hence why some media outlets have stopped. I'd question the reach and efficacy of the propaganda, in this case.
You could surely find another person who would spend the proposed 11 days in prison to make the statement, "I also hate satanists enough to break their stuff." Hence, and as you said, we would need to fine tune the punishment to maximize deterrence while minimizing cruelty.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on the responsibility of media and society as a whole. If you can punish an offender for propagandizing criminality, as you propose, could we not also punish a news organization for broadcasting their act nationally? Purely hypothetical and ignores all the obvious reasons you can't (e.g. freedom of speech). I'd really like to understand your mental model for the "cost to civilization writ large" and how you determine responsibility.