Stumbling and Mumbling

We're all criminals

Almost everyone would be a criminal, in the right circumstances. This is the message of this new paper (pdf) by Naci Mocan (of Ugly Criminals (pdf) fame) and colleagues.
They conducted experiments with high school students, giving them cash and then offering the opportunity to steal from a random other person, with varying amounts of cash up for grabs, but also varying probabilities of getting caught and varying fines.
They found that 96% of people chose to steal at some time. Even small incentives to rob - a few dollars - beats "Thou shalt not steal."
The choice of committing crime is, then, a (roughly) rational one - it depends upon costs and benefits, more than upon moral rules.
Of course, there's a big caveat here. The laboratory setting - and the fact that they were stealing the experimenters' cash rather than others'  hard-earned money - will have reduced people's inhibition against stealing.
But even so, the message  - which corroborates the infamous Milgram experiment - is that people's moral codes are very brittle.

For corporal punishment

Why not bring back corporal punishment? That's a question raised by Blair's macho talk about overhauling the criminal justice system.
Corporal punishment has obvious advantages. It's cheap. And it would satisfy the public's desire to see criminals punished.
Sure, it wouldn't take criminals off the streets, so it's an alternative to non-custodial sentences rather than to jail.
Would it be an effective deterrent? This is an empirical question which could be tested in pilot studies in different areas: how would the stocks, flogging or the pillory fare against tagging or community service? If the government is serious about evidence-based policy-making, it would want to find out.
There are two objections to corporal punishment that aren't good enough.
One is that it's illiberal. I just don't see this. Are a few public floggings really a lesser exercise of state power than a full therapeutic-managerialist approach to trying to change criminals' characters? And remember - corporal punishment is consistent with the due legal process that Blair is trying to undermine. Who's being anti-liberal?
Another misplaced objection is that corporal punishment is barbaric.
New Labour cannot use this objection - not when it wants to spend billions on the means of burning millions of innocent people to death.
What's more, good deterrents are necessarily barbaric. If criminals are over-confident of getting away with their crimes, and have high time-discount rates (so they attach little importance to future costs), only really nasty punishments will deter them.
I suspect the refusal to contemplate corporal punishment is based on not rational empirical considerations, but simply on the "yuk factor."
Or is there something else at work? Could it be that the refusal to countenance it is based on an Enlightenment prejudice, that only "modern" policies can possibly be acceptable? How else can you explain why we tolerate nuclear weapons but flinch at much smaller pains the state might inflict?

Nonce-sense

According to the Times, Blair's not keen on the tabloids' demand for "Megan's Law", which would let parents know where child sex offenders live. Why might this be?
Simple. It's bad for house prices. Here's the summary of recent US research:

When a sex offender moves into a neighborhood, houses within a one-tenth mile area around the sex offender's home fall by 4 percent on average...while those further away show no decline in value. "These results suggest that individuals have a significant distaste for living in close proximity to a known sex offender," the authors conclude.

Full paper here (pdf).
Blair knows there's one thing the mob is more hysterical about than paedos - and that's house prices.

What to do with Moussaoui?

In a post glib even by the standards of Harry's Place, David T reckons it's good that Zacarias Moussaoui is spared the death penalty. I don't see this at all.
Life in solitary imprisonment is not obviously a more humane punishment than death. Given the choice between the two, I think I'd prefer the death penalty. The Groan's claim that the sentence "was far more merciful than many expected"  doesn't make sense to me.
Indeed, this was precisely John Stuart Mill's unjustly neglected argument. Capital punishment, he said, is "the least cruel mode in which it is possible adequately to deter from the crime":

What comparison can there really be, in point of severity, between consigning a man to the short pang of a rapid death, and immuring him in a living tomb, there to linger out what may be a long life in the hardest and most monotonous toil, without any of its alleviations or rewards--debarred from all pleasant sights and sounds, and cut off from all earthly hope, except a slight mitigation of bodily restraint, or a small improvement of diet?

Second, there's the argument that, if we are to affirm the importance of life, we must sometimes kill those who murder. Peggy Noonan puts it well:

[The death penalty] says the deliberate and planned taking of a human life is so serious, such a wound to justice, such a tearing at the human fabric, that there is only one price that is justly paid for it, and that is the forfeiting of the life of the perpetrator. It is society's way of saying that murder is serious, dreadfully serious, the most serious of all human transgressions.
It is not a matter of vengeance. Murder can never be avenged, it can only be answered.

Nor is it obvious to me that keeping Moussaoui alive stops him being a martyr, except in the narrowest literal sense.  Men in prison can be a more powerful rallying  point for supporters than the martyr'd dead. In the anti-apartheid movement, "Free Nelson Mandela" was a more powerful slogan than "Remember Steve Biko."
I can only think of two reasons to want to keep Moussaoui alive, given that his guilt is beyond doubt. One is vengeance - life in solitary is a crueller punishment than death. The other is that the state just shouldn't take people's lives. But the guys at Harry's Place can't believe the latter, can they?

Clarke's managerialism

At risk of sounding obsessive, Clarke’s statement on the release of foreign prisoners reveals several aspects of managerialist ideology.

1. Partial and misleading statistics.

A thorough search of police, prison and probation records has to date revealed five cases where an individual has been convicted of a further offence.

This is 5 of the 79 imprisoned for more serious offences. He makes no reference to the other 944 released prisoners (pdf). If we assume these have the same recidivism rate as the 79, released prisoners committed another 60 offences. If we assume they have the same recidivism rate as prisoners generally – 70% re-offend in the following two years, then the 1024 prisoners would, without intervention, commit over 700 offences.

Six have been detained pending deportation or removal

Which means (as of now) that 73 haven’t been, even though many should have been subject to probationary supervision.

2. A faith in technology.

Seventy-nine offenders were originally imprisoned for more serious offences…All of these 79 were and are on the Police National Computer.

So what? I’ve got decent-looking women on my computer.

3. The belief that change is the solution, not the problem.

The Home Office is in the process of dramatic change to enable us to meet the challenges of the modern world effectively.

This is an aspect of the New Labour myth - that the world is new and requires new institutions to control it.

There’s no awareness of the possibility that change can weaken organizations. We know from company management that big changes (such as happen after takeovers) often reduce efficiency, because they destroy tacit knowledge, weaken employee morale, encourage office politicking as staff protect their interests, and cause managers to focus on managing change rather than their core competences.

Real and profound change does take time and often reveals matters that have been hidden or lain dormant in an organisation.

What this omits is the possibility that profound change causes “matters.”

4. A belief that intentions matter.

We are focusing ruthlessly…I am committed…

No-one cares how hard you’re trying. What matters are results, not intent.

Clarke’s doing two managerialist tricks here. First, he’s trying to deflect attention away from hard, quantifiable evidence towards untestable things – how hard he’s working.

Second, he’s claiming that personality – commitment, effort – matters more than organizational issues. Richard Sennett hit this nail on the head:

We see society itself as ‘meaningful’ only by converting it into a grand psychic system. We may understand that a politician’s job is to draft or execute legislation, but that work does not interest us until we perceive the play of personality in political struggle. A political leader running for office is spoken of as ‘credible’ or legitimate’ in terms of what kind of man he is, rather than in terms of the actions or progammes he espouses. The obsession with persons at the expense of more impersonal social relations is like a filter which discolours our rational understanding of society. (The Fall of Public Man, p4)

5. The leadership illusion.

In each area we are making profound changes with new leadership to meet the challenges we face.

Here we have it – the presumption that all an organization needs is the right people at the top of the hierarchy. This presumption is, of course, widespread, but no less wrong for that.

The question that hasn’t occurred to Clarke is: how exactly does leadership matter? As I’ve said, hierarchy can have a precise economic function. And he utterly failed to exercise this.

But then New Labour’s managerialism is about a faith in leadership, not an analysis of it.

Chirac - criminal?

This paper is well-timed, in light of Chirac's decision to scrap the proposed CPE:

Youth unemployment has a clear positive effect on most economic crimes: robberies, burglaries, car thefts, thefts from cars, pick-pocketing, drug offences, damage to vehicles. The effects are often extremely large and significant.

A percentage point rise in the youth unemployment rate in a departement causes, ceteris paribus, a rise in the burglary rate of 274 per 100,000 - though this rate falls if unemployment rises among older workers.
This is entirely consistent with neoclassical economics. When opportunities to make money legally are poor, some people will turn to property crime. But if everyone's poor - unemployment is universally high - crime falls because there's nothing worth stealing.
This, of course, increases the importance of trying to reduce youth unemployment, because its social costs are so high.
And if you believe the CPE would have reduced youth unemployment, it means you have yet more reason to accuse Jacques Chirac of adding to the crime rate.

Merging police forces: lessons from companies

Is it a good idea to merge police forces? There's a lot of lessons Charles Clarke could learn from company mergers. Here are six:
1. Many mergers are disappointing. Folk wisdom used to be that most mergers fail. This great paper (pdf) by Robert Bruner shows that this is too pessimistic, but even he says:

Most transactions are associated with results that are hardly consistent with optimistic expectations. Synergies, efficiencies and value-creating growth seem hard to obtain.

2. Mergers can be undertaken for bad motives - to flatter the CEO's ego or boost his pay. Richard Roll famously pointed out (pdf) that they can also be motivated by over-confidence; bosses over-estimate their ability to manage bigger companies and reap economies of scale.
3. Cost savings are easier to achieve than revenue growth. Some of the biggest M&A failures - AOL-Time Warner is the standard example - came because CEOs saw them as a way to boost sales. A more likely way to succeed is just to cut out overheads or improve efficiency. This shouldn't be too hard. As the man says, "80% of my time is wasted."
This suggests police mergers are more likely to work if they concentrate on doing existing functions cheaper, rather than more functions better. It's worrying, then, that Clarke seems to think otherwise.
4. Watch for diseconomies of scale. Staffan Canback discusses them well here (pdf). These include: staff being alienated by not understanding the goals of a large organization; bosses becoming more insulated from reality; and simple communication failures. Maybe the first of these doesn't apply to police mergers - constables should know their jobs - but the last might.
5. Asset complementarities are crucial. Oliver Hart shows why in this great book. If two assets work well together, they should come under the same ownership; it makes sense for, say, BP to own oil rigs, pielines and refineries. But if assets aren't complements, mergers are a bad idea. A classic failure here was Marks & Spencer's takeover of Brooks Bros. There just weren't enough asset complementarities between a UK retailer and a US one.
This raises the question: what exactly are the asset complementarities between, say, Gwent police and South Wales police? Are they sufficient to offset increased diseconomies of scale?
6. Incentives matter. A merger creates fantastic opportunities - for rent-seeking, office politics, and general buggering about. It's important, therefore, to ensure that key employees have an incentive to act in shareholders' interests rather than their own. As Bruner says:

When managers have more at stake, more value is created. Studies suggest that returns to buyer firm shareholders are associated with larger equity interests by managers and employees.

Now, these considerations don't mean police mergers are a bad idea. But they do suggest plenty of reasons for scepticism.

Violence against women: some econometrics

Women in the North East, Wales and in poor areas are more likely to be victims of violence than other women. That's the finding of this paper (pdf) by Kent Matthews and colleagues. They estimate that, in the North East, 519 women per 100,000 are admitted to A&E as a result of violent injuries. In Wales, the figure is 460 per 100,000. But it's only 134 in East Anglia and 222 in London.
They also found that violence-related injuries among men and women are significantly higher in summer than winter. Violence is also negatively related to incomes and house prices.
More intriguingly, higher beer prices are associated with less violence, because they mean less drunkenness. They say:

A rise in the real price of alcoholic drink would have a significant downward effect on the rate of violence-related injury.

However, male injuries are three times as sensitive to beer prices as female injuries.

Guns and crime

Wider gun ownership does not cause more gun-related crime, according to this new paper from the CEPR.
In a study of US counties, the authors found that there was a positive correlation between the prevalence of gun ownership and gun homicide rates. However, this is due to reverse causality, they claim; where crime rates are high, law-abiding people buy guns for self-protection. Controlling for this, they found, there's no link:

Our findings provide no support for the more guns, more homicide thesis. The appearance of such an effect in past research appears to be the product of methodological flaws, especially the failure to properly account for the possible effect of crime rates on gun ownership levels...Guns among criminals may increase homicide while guns among non-criminals decrease it, with the two opposite-sign effects canceling each other out. The most straightforward policy implication of such a combination of effects would be that gun control measures should focus on reducing gun prevalence among criminals while avoiding reducing it among non-criminals.

Creating cultures versus economics

If you want (another) illustration of the vast gulf between managerialist ideology and economic rationality, just consider Blair's promise to create a "culture of respect."
This is pure managerialism -  an over-ambitious effort to manipulate every nook and cranny of civil life.
Contrast this with the economic approach to crime. David Friedman gives a fantastic description of this approach here.
This starts from a simple premise - that criminals are rational. A mugger mugs people because the expected benefits to him outweigh the expected costs. It follows that the state can control crime by raising the expected costs. You don't need to change cultures or characters to stop muggers - you only have to make mugging unprofitable.
This perspective is entirely consistent with the "liberal" view that criminals are victims of circumstances. If you're illiterate - as vast numbers of prisoners are - you can earn often more from burglary than from legitimate employment. And the costs to you of imprisonment - part of which are wages foregone - are lower. For some people, therefore, crime is rational, given who they are. But even a rational crime is costly to others. And efficiency (let alone justice) requires that external costs be internalized. 
The economists' approach - unlike promises to create some vague and unmeasurable culture - suggests, at least, a clear framework for thinking about law and order policy:
1. A case for tougher sentences. These are necessary partly for deterrent purposes - they raise the expected cost of crime. Also, they are necessary to internalize the costs of crime. So-called "petty" crime - vandalism and suchlike - is in fact very expensive, because it reduces house prices. Big punishments are necessary to deter those big costs.
2. A case against imprisonment. It costs the tax-payer big money - around £40,000 a year. This is good value, as the cost of allowing a criminal to be free for a year is often greater than  £40,000. But is prison really the cheapest way of reducing crime? What's its deterrent effect relative to community service or even corporal punishment?
3. Increasing the certainty of detection. Many criminals - especially but not only drug addicts - have huge time discount rates. This means the present cost of a future punishment is very low, and so crime pays. There are two possible solutions to this - more severe punishments or a greater certainty of punishment.
These are of course only vague sketches. But they should show the point. Economics suggests practical ways of reducing crime, whilst being realistic about human nature. Isn't this better than high-falutin' waffle about changing cultures? Isn't it easier and more rational to accept peoples' characters as they are, and to change incentives, rather than to aim to change human nature?
But then, managerialism isn't about being rational or realistic, is it?