Oh hey I wrote this ages ago and then forgot about it:

Introduction

After steeping myself in a bunch of conservative writing about social dysfunction, I thought I might branch out a bit. I picked Mark Kleiman’s When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment. Kleiman is at UCLA with a part-time gig at the Center for American Progress, and blogs at samefacts.org. If Kleiman’s positions aren’t representative of the contemporary American left’s stance on crime, they should be: I found the book quite insightful and fair. It also made me more optimistic for further reductions in the crime rate through politically feasible means. Protecting the population from crime is a basic function of the state, and the costs of the state’s failures to do so fall heaviest upon those who are least able to bear them.

Before we get on to the book’s claims, let me note that it’s just conspicuously well-written. Kleiman’s acknowledgments section stretches on for twenty pages, thanking several middle- and high-school English teachers by name. I have found that the graciousness of an acknowledgements section correlates with the quality of the chapters to come, and Kleiman exemplifies this trend well. And any book with offhand remarks like “a prison isn’t Hilbert’s Hotel” already has me halfway to agreement.

So what’s it about?

Talking to people who do not live in cities whose wheels have fallen off the civic wagon, one rarely gets the sense that crime is a pressing concern. Crime, they say, has been falling for two decades now. And that is perfectly true. What’s the big deal, then?

For one thing, falling crime levels can still be too high. Kleiman goes through a bunch of records and order of magnitude estimates in order to ballpark the total welfare cost of crime. Some of these data are interesting in their own right, like “willingness-to-accept” surveys that ask people how much cash they’d have to accept in order to take on a higher risk of burglary or mugging, neatly avoiding the problems with “willingness-to-pay”. Ultimately Kleiman obtains a figure of about 1 billion USD/yr, or about $750 per household per month, in total welfare lost to crime. Still a pretty big deal, I’d say.

The second and more concerning reply is that we are quantifiably worse at dealing with crime than we were fifty years ago, even though the modern criminal justice system enjoys considerable technological advantages over its mid-century counterpart.

The single most important figure in the book is this one:

The graph shows two curves, and two puzzles. The first is the crime rate. The puzzle is why crime shot up in the 1960s, leaving us with an excess that we are still working to reverse 50 years later.

The other curve is the punishment rate. After an initial period of leniency, we collectively realized that crime had gotten out of hand and reversed course, applying more and more punishment. The crime rate responded partially to this correction, peaking in the early nineties, but still has not returned to its previous level. Together, these two curves pose a second puzzle: in the early 1960’s we had half as much crime, with less punishment. How do we make sense of this? And how do we get back to where we were, let alone where we could have been without the Great Decivilization of the 60’s?

The thrust of Kleiman’s answer is that criminal justice admits of multiple equilibria.

There is a low-crime, low-punishment equilibrium where crime is low because the social order is on top of it, therefore punishment is low because it is a credible threat that rarely needs to be carried out.

There is also a high-crime, high-punishment equilibrium where crime is high because the social order is not on top of it, therefore punishment is high because it is, on average, an uncredible threat that must be carried out often and in vain.

Presumably you have already formed a preference between these two options.

(Interestingly, the condition Kleiman describes here is exactly what Athrelon is talking about in this post on anarcho-tyranny. Kleiman wants more good stuff and less bad stuff.)

Once we realize that we’re stuck in a bad equilibrium, what do we do about it? Most of Kleiman’s policy recommendations for getting back on top of crime and dysfunction follow broadly from two ideas. The first is to employ “dynamic deterrence”, a borrowing from game theory. The second is to tailor the criminal justice system to our best current understanding of human psychology, maximizing the deterrence value of crime control rather than its severity per se. Kleiman urges us to treat punishment as a bug of the criminal justice system, rather than a feature, minimizing some function of the suffering from crime and the suffering from punishment. If this sounds too much like hippy squish for you, not much is lost by thinking of punishment instead as a finite resource to be spent on crime control. Which, of course, it is.

Dynamic deterrence

Suppose Alice and Bob are tempted to commit a crime. If they commit the crime they receive S utils independently of the other player’s choice or outcome. Otherwise they receive the satisfaction of an honest life, i.e. nothing. Walter The Warden wishes to deter both Alice and Bob, but he only has a single unit of punishment worth -P utils to inflict on one criminal. If either Alice or Bob offends alone, then Walter can punish the lone offender. But what if Alice and Bob both offend?

Suppose Walter announces a policy of inflicting the punishment on one of them at random. If one player offends, the expected value of offending is S - P. If both players offend, the expectation rises to S - P/2. If P/2 < S < P (i.e. if the crime is not worth the time, but is worth half the time), then (Offend,Offend) and (Abstain,Abstain) are both Nash equilibria. If Alice and Bob can manage to cooperate once in the first round they can enjoy the advantages of crime ever after, even as Walter continues to deal out the maximum quantity of punishment. (Attentive readers will recognize this game as the Stag Hunt.)

But suppose Walter decides that henceforth justice will be dispensed in strictly alphabetical order: if he must choose whom to punish, he will always punish Alice. Suppose this is common knowledge. Now the expected utility of crime for Alice is S - P < 0, so her dominant strategy is to abstain. But if Alice’s dominant strategy is to abstain, then Bob cannot rely on Alice to help take the heat, and he faces an expectation of S-P too! He must abstain as well. Thus are Alice and Bob dynamically deterred, and no one even had to get punished. Notice that unlike the first scenario, there is no point in trying to cooperate because (Offend, Offend) is no longer Nash-stable.

Kleiman sees crime as a massively multiplayer Stag Hunt and recommends dynamic deterrence to deal with it. Drawing on a bunch of examples from anti-drug and -gang policing, Kleiman notes that with an initial targeted surge that promises credible deterrence for a small group of offenders, police can achieve lower levels of crime with lower levels of punishment. More good stuff and less bad stuff.

Whether the cited studies actually hold up is another matter I haven’t followed up on, but it’s an interesting idea all the same.

As an aside, one of the OGs of the Unix culture (I want to say Ken Thompson?) had some early work arguing that systems that have to make arbitrary decisions become more robust when those decisions are made randomly. Dynamic deterrence is an interesting counter-example where randomized decisions make things worse. Arbitrary decisions work in this context precisely because they predictable.

The details of dynamic deterrence can be found in this paper.

The psychology of punishment

The second big idea in Kleiman’s book is to adapt criminal corrections to what we now know about the psychology of motivation, in order to spend correctional resources most efficiently. Kleiman observes that in the last few decades, the expected value of prison time for most crimes has actually gone up. But people have low self-control and discount hyperbolically, and criminals tend to be the worst at this of all. From the criminal’s point of view, then, the modern criminal justice system is capricious and mean: it alternates long periods of relative neglect and inaction with sudden, harsh sentences. If we cannot count on such a regimen to train a puppy—which has a better natural disposition than the average armed robber—why should we expect any better outcomes in criminal justice?

Gilbert and Sullivan praised the value of a “short, sharp, shock”. Kleiman wants less sharp, and more swift and sure.

Kleiman concedes that he is just following Beccaria here, who wrote in the 18th century that certainty and speed in punishent were more important than severity. But since it is easier and more satisfying to punish criminals harder, rather than sooner or more surely, we have mostly focused on longer sentences and expected the criminals to do the expected value calculations in their heads. The tradeoffs, however, are considerable. A ten year sentence for one offender funges against six month sentences for twenty offenders. Moreover, longer sentences are fought harder by defense lawyers, and the court system is already straining. A weekend in jail seems like a lesser curtailment of a client’s freedom than a 1% chance of six months in prison, even though they are about equivalent in expectation.

Kleiman also cites work suggesting that the subjective unpleasantness of an event more strongly determined by its onset and its conclusion than by its duration. Here have we empirical confirmation of Avon Barksdale’s dictum that “you only do two days: the day you go in and the day you come out.” The fact that prison sentences are psychologically book-ended in this way, with high fixed but low marginal unpleasantness, makes a policy of many short sentences even more attractive. Kleiman pauses here to note that even the process of being arrested, though it carries no formal sanction of punishment, is pound-for-pound more unpleasant than prison and necessarily comes more quickly after the commission of the crime. He concludes that it probably does some good even when the charges are later dropped. On the other hand, one can see how such a policy, when appreciated as a policy, might invite abuse.

Reading this section, I mused that we might achieve higher deterrence at lower total expense simply by making the first and last days of a prison sentence as unpleasant as constitutionally possible. Later in the book I was pleased to see that Kleiman considers this possibility. He concludes that although a prison-wide regimen of solitary confinement on bread and water would be struck down as unconstitutional, it might fly for the last two weeks of a sentence where it would do the most good.

Kleiman is also concerned about the shape prisons are in. Briefly, they are cesspools of violence, sexual abuse, drugs and disease. A bit more darkly, though, he observes that many of the structural conditions that foment these disorders also tend to make prisons more intriguing and hospitable to the inmates themselves. Prisons are environments characterized by idleness, noise and violence, he notes, and they are overwhelmingly populated by people whose home environments are characterized by idleness, noise and violence. I wonder if there is a typical-mind issue here, where prison conditions are considered appalling by the sort of person who tends to have opinions about prison reform, but not by the sort of person who could stand to benefit from it. Although a prison run like a Benedictine monastery would strike us as an improvement upon the status quo, Kleiman writes, it might actually have greater deterrence value for most of the prison population.

A related issue is the social milieu produced by higher incarceration rates. Many prisons are overfull, encouraging the formation of gangs whose organization is then recapitulated on the outside. And in many communities, half of the male population has been incarcerated by age 30, so that prisons and juvenile detention centers lose their stigma or even become a badge of honor. The task is to establish to juveniles that prison is not sexy before they have a chance to get locked up for real. Kleiman recommends “48 hour timeouts” in solitary confinement without TV or radio as basically the most unpleasant and least glamorous thing a court would allow you to do to a juvenile.

One thing Kleiman mentions only in passing about the normalization of the carceral state is that locking a lot of men up creates gender imbalances, and small imbalances in the marriage market can produce very large imbalances in bargaining power. In fact, in many communities with high incarceration rates it is not much exaggeration to say that the marriage market has collapsed entirely, to the benefit of unincarcerated men. The resulting instability does not bode well for the crime rate. Kleiman discusses this only indirectly:

…Of course, children have fathers as well as mothers, and the correlation between absent fathers and criminal activity by the children, especially but not only the boys, is remarkably strong. (Alas, having a male other than the biological father living in the home seems to confer little if any benefit.)

This is potentially confounded by the fact that people with high time preference are more likely to (a) ditch their kids, and (b) have kids with high time preference, the genetic architecture of personality being what it is. The proper thing to do here is to restrict to kids whose dads have “excused absences”. If you did this, you’d probably find the effect attenuated somewhat, though not necessarily gone.

Implementation

Throughout the book, Kleiman keeps an eye towards actually getting stuff done. To get results, you have to recommend programs that could (a) get passed and (b) scale well when staffed with actual people working with actual offenders.

Many of his proposals have the flavor of “pulling sideways on policy ropes”, crafting policies around topics people don’t already have strong political opinions about. (This has at least a little to do with the book’s popularity among basically everyone.) People have opinions about the average length of a prison sentence, for example. But do they have opinions about the variance?

Kleiman also reminds us of a lot of liberal hopes pinned on wildly successful pilot programs (bilingual education, the new math, Perry Preschool and Head Start (under certain metrics), &c.) that couldn’t scale once staffed with actual people. Any program that requires month-long training sessions, 100% compliance, or 1-1 ratios of crackerjack psychologists to offenders is going to tank, along with the career of the damned soul who proposed it.

A third problem Kleiman sees is a pervasive sort of anti-Goodhartian effect, whereby institutional actors who are not incentivized to perform some common-sense action with a good outcome feel that they cannot afford to perform it, even when they would otherwise be inclined to do so. Wardens, for example, could take some measures which would probably reduce recidivism a bit. But recidivism is mostly dominated by factors that wardens have no little control over, and it seems rather unfair to peg their job performance to something that is mostly out of their hands. Conversely, incentivizing recidivism too strongly might push us back into the original Goodhartian regime, tempting wardens to experiment with “unsound methods” for keeping serial offenders from coming back. Kleiman offers us no magic bullets here, but it is probably worth keeping in mind how much low-hanging fruit there might be, were institutions somehow properly encouraged to pick it.

The root causes

So far Kleiman has basically just presumed that the decision to commit a crime is a straightforward cost-benefit calculation, modulo well-known limitations of human rationality. But Kleiman, you ask, what about The Root Causes? What about poverty, unemployment, social disadvantage, racism, capitalism, colonialism, ableism, classism, islamophobia, multinational corporations, the subaltern, intersectionality, logocentrism, watery eyes, runny nose, fatigue, sleeplessness, irritability, weight gain, erections that last longer than four hours and speaking of which the patriarchy? What about all the stuff that pretty much every college student is now required to take multiple classes in, where they dutifully learn that such factors are the true causes of every Bad Social Thing?

I’m glad you asked!

Kleiman classifies “root causes” arguments into two forms, “weak” and “strong”. It is hard to tell exactly what he has in mind by the weak form, but it seems to be something like “some factors can marginally influence the crime rate, so it often pays off to spend some money on those factors”. Lead abatement would probably be an example of a weak-form root causes policy. And lead abatement is an excellent idea. I would gladly pay my share for more lead abatement in my home town.

He is much harsher on the strong form:

It is sometimes said that bad social conditions make crime inevitable and render punitive crime-control efforts futile and perverse. Crime, it is said, cannot be addressed without addressing its “root causes.” That stronger claim has surface plausibility and some remaining political resonance, but lacks for anything resembling evidence.

The first reason to be skeptical of “root causes” arguments is that the relationship between the root causes and most categories crime is non-existent. Bulk crime in the US increased by a factor of four from roughly 1962 to 1992 as the country got richer, quantifiably less racist and generally more sympathetic in theory and practice to the basket of ideas bundled together under the heading of ‘social justice’. In 1992, it began to decrease again despite not much change in any of those indicators.

Or take a look at this chart from John Roman:

If you were a silly goose, you’d say that the data proves a weak but positive relationship between GDP and crime. The more sober conclusion is that crime is driven by other factors entirely. (The FBI also did a sadly ungoogleable study a few years ago comparing better- and worse-off cities at a single point in time, to control for secular change. IIRC it found a weak positive relationship between economic hardship and property crime, but no relationship for violent crime.)

The second cause for moderation of enthusiasm for “root causes” policies is a simple order of magnitude argument. Eliminating the police department in a typical major city and shoveling the funds over to, say, schools would increase the education budget by 10%. Whether that additional 10% would do anything for crime reduction is debatable, but no one contends that it would yield more than we’re currently getting out of having a police force at all. The education system is large and broadly targeted, whereas the criminal justice system is smaller and narrowly targeted. Hence, the marginal dollar from the “crime prevention budget” shifted from corrections to the education system would mostly go to children who didn’t need them in the first place. Specifically targeting “at-risk youth” would require good predictive models for identifying such youth, and good interventions for dealing with them. Neither are much in evidence, especially if you restrict the model inputs to politically feasible variables.

Interestingly, Kleiman notes here that the one social program that really works well for reducing the crime rate is Job Corps, which seems to function principally by taking crime-prone participants to remote camps where they can’t commit crimes. So there are social programs that reduce crime by addressing the root causes, but that specific root cause is “criminals being around other people”, which is probably not what folks were hoping to hear.

Conclusion

I found When Brute Force Fails to be an insightful and humane look at the criminal justice system, and how it might be improved. Ultimately, though, insight and humanity are secondary to the real cash value of the book: workable suggestions for reducing crime. Ultimately, Kleiman asks, what if we do everything he says and nothing works out:

Imagine that it is ten years from now; a number of the ideas in this book have been tried, with results somewhere between disappointing and disastrous. What went wrong? I can think of several possibilities; others, of course, I have not yet thought of.

Among the failure modes he considers, the most troubling is the possibility that the populations targeted by dynamic deterrence strategies might be too checked out of the basic social order to be deterred at all by the sorts of punishments we are currently willing to impose:

Some offenders will turn out to be more refractory, even to swift and consistent punishment and direct warnings, than this analysis assumes will be typical. Perhaps they are mentally ill. Perhaps they do not find occupying a cell for a while especially aversive, which is likelier to be true if their alternative to a cell is sleeping under a highway overpass. Or perhaps they simply resent the system’s attempts to control them enough to continue to violate, as if in protest.

This paragraph seems to speak to a lot of hours spent riding in the backseats of Crown Vics and interviewing people in prison. Sure, H.O.P.E.-style programs, with their promises of immediate arrest, might suffice for the modal drug user in Honolulu or Lansing. But how would they work out in L.A. or D.C.? [This is Kleiman here, not me.] Would it suffice for Corner Man? (Would anything suffice for Corner Man?)

I read Kleiman as skirting around something bigger here. Namely, the fact that social policies, and especially policies designed to cope with bad social outcomes, are overwhelmingly designed by people who will not find themselves on the business end of the programs they craft. I can’t help but see many policy problems as consequences of this phenomenon, and it is strange to hear it reflected back to me from so many corners.