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Here's a little bit of incomplete thinking about the classic "13/53" number, which is a ballpark figure (varying year to year) that represents the fact that black people are overrepresented by a factor of about 5x in crime. I see a lot of people tend to interpret this number as "black people are 5x more likely to commit crimes", but that might not actually be the case.
Concretely, there's two ways this stat could come about:
a. There are 5x as many black criminals per capita and each black criminal commits crimes at 1x the rate of white criminals.
b. There are 1x as many black criminals per capita and each black criminal commits crimes at 5x the rate of white criminals.
There is of course a continuum between them, but I think it's useful to focus on the two endpoints because the endpoints have totally different policy responses and also suggest totally different causes.
For example, the policy response to (a) is that we need more police to catch a lot more black criminals. The policy response to (b) is that we need longer prison sentences for the criminals we have in order to prevent the same guy from doing 4 more crimes.
They also suggest different causes. Scenario (a) suggests something (HBD, special kinds of poverty not reflected in census stats) causes blacks to have a higher criminal propensity, whereas (b) suggests police might just be extra lenient towards black criminals thereby giving them more time on the street in which they commit more crimes.
Interestingly, while the theory of police abandonment will get you cancelled today, it was very much the theory pushed by black community leaders in the 90's. It was one of the things leading to "3 strikes" laws (long prison sentences for the 3'rd crime in order to get rid of the very worst criminals).
I have recently discovered some weak evidence in favor of theory (b) while going down an internet rabbithole on a totally different topic. Specifically, look at the first graph in this analysis:
https://github.com/propublica/compas-analysis/blob/master/Compas%20Analysis.ipynb
The "decile score" of the x-axis is a reasonably predictive index of a convicted criminal committing new crimes. The dominant features in the model generating the index are things like "# of previous crimes", "was the current crime violent", etc. As can be seen from the graph, white criminals are overrepresented on the left tail (little repeat crime risk) of the graph, whereas black criminals are spread evenly. Of course, this evidence is very weak - it's only about criminals up for parole in a certain region of Florida.
Does anyone know of more data on this?
Two thoughts
Someone mentioned below of 35 being a big age where people just become less criminal and lose their young male behavior
Tabarrok has done a lot of work on America having far more people in prison and less policing than the developed world. And higher crime rates. More policeman= higher chance of getting caught versus locking career criminals up long term. Theoretically what works elsewhere would seem to be shorter jail sentences but vastly increasing the chance of being caught
That matches my recollection of both being a young man and relevant psych studies. People, in particular young men, tend to be intuitively bad at expected value considerations in risk assessment. A 1 in 500 chance of going to jail for 50 years is more favorable from their perspective than a 1 in 100 chance of going to jail for 5 years. So increasing the probability of penalty, even with a reduced severity, would be a greater deterrence.
Is it not actually more favorable? When we’re talking about ‘low probability of very bad outcome’, the way most sensible people make decisions is to disregard differences in badness and focus on actual probabilities of suffering them.
Assuming the potential payoff is the same, then no, the 1 in 500 scenario is worse. .002 * 50 = .1 years of lost freedom. .01 * 5 = .05 years of lost freedom. Twice the expected negative value.
Mathematically, going from 1 in 100 chance of 5 years to 1 in 20 chance of 2 years, the first one is a better risk. But I suspect most people would hesitate more at the 2nd one. What's sensible, I guess that depends on how you like to structure your risk, how many times you plan to take said risk, expected positive value, lots of factors really. But from a public policy perspective, it's more important to understand how criminals (mostly young men) structure their risk. Probably not utilizing game theory, so increasing enforcement rather than penalties makes sense.
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