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The concept however is clearly spelled out: "...we need longer prison sentences for the criminals we have in order to prevent the same guy from doing 4 more crimes."
"Suppose the average criminal commits crimes at a rate of 3/year between age 20 and 35, meaning that in the absence of policing his career will consist of 45 crimes."
I suppose it was slightly badly phrased, I should have described it as a "representative criminal" instead of "average criminal". But yes - my napkin math shows that in the regime of high #s of crimes/criminal, locking them up forever is a very effective strategy.
The question of distribution of crimes/criminal is how much crime actually comes from that regime. You previously said you think it's a lot:
Interesting - it looks like my 33% is not too far off from the actual number of 41% for violent crime. The "high" numbers you're providing are only for murder, which is a red herring - most crime isn't murder.
You're the one making the claim deterrence is the best. Kind of strange how you haven't actually provided any estimates of elasticity here.
Not in this thread, because I don't see any reason you wouldn't ignore what I say and misrepresent me as you've already done repeatedly.
Among many other things, yes. You might have been thinking primarily about incapacitation, but your post covers a wide range of points, including speculation on the cause of the long tail and the difference between black and white crime rates (which isn't explained by the mere existence of a long tail). You need to chill out with the accusations of misrepresentation until your writing improves.
Is 3 a year that high? My impression was that the "long tail" included people with hundreds of crimes in their career but for some reason I can't find good data.
By raw numbers, most crimes are never going to get a sentence of "lock them up forever" anyway so it's not a very good hypothetical. (Although, you aren't really locking them up forever-your math for total prison time only counts the time they spend in prison before turning 35; if we could know exactly what age each person stops being a criminal, our job would already be much easier!).
Yes, but the numbers actually matter.
It's not wildly off for violent crime, but I think it's pretty high for property crime (at least in the US). Of course it's true that most crime isn't murder, but murder generally has the best data (lots of other crimes aren't reported to the police). Anyway, the point was not that 1/3 and 2/3 are individually wildly wrong--the point is that the difference could easily be much more extreme, which would have obvious implications for your napkin math. Hence why I asked, 3 times now, for any discussion at all of how your estimates change based on parameters.
Murder also gets a lot of attention for being so bad. You've mostly been discussing "crimes" as a monolithic entity, but is 1 person with 50 misdmeanor charges for public intoxication, loitering, and petty theft as important as 1 murderer?
Again, you are the one who made an argument and said that it supports your hypothesis. I think there are a lot of very large gaps in this argument. One of those gaps is that you acted like the number you got for what deterrence would have to be is unreasonable, but didn't provide any evidence.
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