Via Brian Weatherson at Crooked Timber, I learn that Singapore plans to execute (by hanging) an Australian citizen who was transporting drugs from Cambodia to Australia – and traveled through a Singaporean airport en route.
Weatherson asks the natural questions about (a) why this ought to be considered a crime against Singapore and (b) whether the punishment fits the crime. One might also wonder (c) why this ought to be considered a crime at all. But what sprang to my mind was David D. Friedman’s argument in Law’s Order: if you impose your legal system’s harshest punishment for a particular crime, you cannot impose any additional punishment to deter related crimes committed by the same person.
Say you’re trafficking drugs in Singapore, and a witness observes you making a sale. What is your incentive not to shoot the witness? Or suppose the police have the goods on you, and they’ve just arrived at your door to make an arrest. What is your incentive not to go down in a hail of bullets? What are they gonna do – hang you twice?
Sunday, November 27, 2005
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5 comments:
What is your incentive not to go down in a hail of bullets?
If you even have to ask, you are so not the action hero I thought you were.
CF -- It's logically impossible, of course, not to impose your legal system's harshest punishment for any crime (because then it wouldn't be the harshest punishment). So at some point, the problem Friedman points out cannot be avoided. The lesson is that you don't want to impose your harshest punishment for too small a crime.
And yes, the probability of punishment can certainly make a difference. But when you consider, for instance, the shooting-the-witness scenario, the important point becomes clear: when the harshest punishment is imposed for Crime A, there is no legal incentive to forgo some Crime B that will *reduce* your probability of conviction for Crime A.
It's logically impossible, of course, not to impose your legal system's harshest punishment for any crime (because then it wouldn't be the harshest punishment).
Technically, that's not true. There could be no upper bound on the harshness of punishment. For instance, punishment could be ten minutes of torture per murder committed (with each lesser crime earning smaller amounts of additional torture for the perpetrator). Or, there could be an upper bound that serves as a limit but is never reached. Say that punishments never exceed an hour of torture. Then the first murder could net the murderer 30 minutes of torture, the second 15 additional minutes, the third 7.5 minutes more, etc. (with lesser crimes again earning smaller amounts of additional torture). This punishment scheme would produce diminishing marginal deterrence, but it would never reach the zero level that Friedman warns of.
In practice, with capital punishment and long prison sentences as the main serious punishment options, it would be unlikely for punishment to lack an upper bound, and instituting a punishment scheme that approaches a limit without reaching it would probably not be worth the trouble. But they're not logically impossible.
It's logically impossible in a nation with a finite list of punishments that doesn't change quickly on the time scale of deterrence.
Blar -- The two punishment schemes you imagine don't have a harshest punishment, in which case my claim that it's impossible not to impose your legal system's harshest punishment is simply not applicable.
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