Dec. 20, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
32:08
How to Deal with Criminals!
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All right, interesting, puzzling, deep and detailed problem, which we're going to earn back, see your back over the next little while, next few minutes, and that is incentives in a free market justice system.
Very, very, very interesting.
So let's first of all look at the ideal and then look at how incentives might work to sort those out.
So the ideal, of course, is prevention, to not have criminals in the first place.
I understand it's completely utopian to say there will be no criminality.
You know, we can get there probably over time as a species, but there will be certainly in the transition period or, you know, when you've got people coming and going to a free society from more primitive societies or more stated societies, there could in fact be criminality and so on.
And let's just say, for the sake of argument, that randomly people are just born to be bad.
So here's the challenge.
We want to prevent, and that's sort of taken into account with the stuff I've talked about before, that parents who are raising children would have to submit those children to brain scans that would track the development of empathy or the presence of trauma patterns in the brain to have early intervention prevent sociopathy, psychopathy, cold, callous, evil, whatever, from developing.
So the prevention is key.
But let's just say that there's a certain amount of criminality.
So what you want to do if prevention has failed is you want to provide the minimum punishment with the maximum chance of curing the criminal.
I mean, you don't want to provide no negative feedback because that doesn't work, but you want to provide the minimum punishment that has the highest chance of fixing the criminal, of curing the criminal, or at least of curing the person of crime.
So to take an extreme example that would be immoral, if you were to lock up, you know, was it criminal law with Kevin Bacon and so on, where he played a guy unjustly imprisoned in solitude for years.
So if you were to, you know, blindfold and randomly torture a man and keep him in solitary confinement and barely allow him to sleep for 20 years, he would emerge a completely insane and dangerous wreck of a human being, right?
So that would be excessive punishment.
Also, it would be immoral, but that would be excessive punishment that would have a negative effect.
If you don't punish at all, then the person clearly does not process negative consequences to others, right?
So if you go and steal, you don't process negative consequences to others.
It's just kind of a game of what you can get away with.
It's like a dog trying to sneak a treat.
Or, you know, if you leave Some bacon on the countertop, and the dog makes his way up.
He'll just eat it because, and he may hide it or whatever, but he doesn't really process the consequences too well.
So he's just going to eat the bacon, and he doesn't really consider it theft.
And there's no moral reasoning that you can have with him.
And when moral reasoning is not working, then negative consequences are the only chance for the person to learn better.
Now, of course, somebody, we're going to just say they've been raised in a free society.
So somehow they got past all the scans that show the development of sociopathy and somehow they get past all of the moral reasoning that would go on in the education of children in a free society, the teaching of UPB and empathy and the value of the deferral of gratification and blah, So they've gotten past all of that.
So in a free society, if someone is a criminal, it means that they are not responding to moral reasoning.
And again, as far as people coming in from outside the society, I mean, that would be interesting, right?
You wouldn't need anyone to come in from outside the society in particular.
So who knows what the borders would be like.
But I imagine it would all be very strict, right?
So moral reasoning doesn't work with criminals.
And so the only thing that is going to deter them is punishment.
In the same way that if a dog does something you don't like, you might punish the dog with like a stern tone or I don't know.
I don't know how you punish them.
I'm not a dog expert by any means, but I assume that there's negative consequences if you're going to train a dog.
Well, positive consequences, I suppose.
It's how you train dolphins or whatever, right?
You just give them some herring when they do something that you want, right?
So you want the minimum punishment with the greatest chance of deterrence.
You don't want to punish too little, which isn't going to cure the criminal.
You don't want to punish too much, because not only does that make apprehending the criminal difficult, but you then, if you have an excess of punishment, the criminal becomes kind of psychotic and embittered and full of anger and dysfunction and so on, and really can't do much good in society.
So there's a sweet spot.
It's an Aristotelian mean.
Too little punishment is bad.
Too much punishment is bad.
I mean, if you had the death penalty for shoplifting, then all that would happen is the shoplifter would fight to the death to resist being apprehended, right?
And so it wouldn't really work very well.
I mean, I guess there'd be a deterrence there, but I think most people would consider that too harsh.
The other thing, too, of course, is that it is certainly possible for people to commit crimes and then become productive members of their society.
Whatever you think of Marky Mark or Mark Wahlberg's career as an actor and a rapper, I guess, right?
Whatever you think of that, he was involved in criminal activity when he was younger.
I think he put a guy's eye out or something in some sort of street brawl or something like that.
So he was involved.
Gerard Depadure, I think, was involved in criminal activity when he was younger.
Don't quote me on this, but it's something like he stole cars or he was part of some sort of crime ring.
You know, a lot of teenagers will experiment with shoplifting.
I did a little bit too.
So there are people who commit crimes from minor to major, who then do end up being productive members of society as a whole.
So you don't want to lock those people up forever.
Mark Wahlberg, who's generated, I don't know, hundreds of millions of dollars of value in his movies, if he had been locked up when he was violent as a youte, as a youth, then I guess society would have missed out on foul-mouthed talking bear comedies.
Again, whatever you think of his movie career, obviously some people like it, so I'm not a huge fan, but whatever, right?
So you don't want to punish too little, you don't want to punish too much.
So then the question is, how do you find that sweet spot?
You want to give someone a chance, right?
So somebody is a thief, they steal a couple of cars, you put them in prison, or whatever the equivalent would be in a free society, you put them in prison, and then what?
Well, if you release them and they go back to their lives of crime or their life of crime, then you've done a bad thing because it's cheaper to keep someone in prison if releasing them simply has them go back to a life of crime.
It's cheaper to keep a man in prison than it is to have a bunch of people have their car stolen forever and ever, amen.
So you could probably keep someone in prison in a free society for sort of the equivalent of 20 to 30,000 a year.
If that person goes out and steals a $40,000 car, that's more than a year's worth of value, or could be two years, 18 months to two years' worth of value that they have just destroyed.
So it's cheaper to keep them in, unless if they just steal one car, right?
If they steal two cars, you get it, right?
Now, how do you keep people in prison cheaply?
So one of the problems I've had with modern government prisons is that, first of all, you give the inmates a whole bunch of weights.
I'm not sure about that.
Honestly, I'm not sure about turning out the super muscle tanks of human beings from prisons.
I'm not saying, I mean, maybe give them some cardio, although even that could be a problem, but turning them into big physical dangerous specimens is probably not ideal.
But one of the issues that I have, of course, is that they don't learn, they don't get a resume in prison.
They don't get skills that are going to translate as much as humanly possible into outside productive work.
They can to some degree, of course, right?
But it's not sort of a central part of it.
So one of the challenges having people in prison is if you have them performing labor at below market rates, then you're throwing other people out of work.
Right.
So if they're fixing potholes, then you're throwing the people who fix potholes out of work.
So that's a challenge.
So it's hard to know exactly how you should deal with people and getting them good economic skills going forward.
And of course, a lot of people who commit crime are IQ 85, which doesn't give them a whole lot of options when it comes to an advanced economy, get a job and making money and so on.
That doesn't give them a lot of options.
So somehow you have to find a way to give them practical skills and have them perform labor that at least has them pay for some part of their own incarceration.
Obviously, the prisoners should cook their own food.
It would be great if the prisoners could grow their own food.
It would be great if the prison could be more of a self-sufficient island of economic activity so that they're not taking jobs away from anyone else.
They clean, they maintain, they repair, they grow their own food, they cook, they, you know, all of that.
They can, you know, fashion their own plates and implements and whatever.
So whatever they can do, you want to try and aim them to be as self-sufficient as possible so that they're not a drain on the general economy.
And you also want to give them as many useful skills as possible so that when they leave the prison, they can have jobs.
They have a resume of some kind.
They have some productive skills that provide value.
But at the same time, you don't want them taking away jobs or lowering the wages of economically productive and honest people.
So again, trying to make it as self-sufficient as possible.
Asteroid mining.
Yeah, that's it.
Actually, once you get into space, it's pretty hard to escape.
So space prisons would be pretty cool.
So you need to get the right balance of incentives to punish just enough to impress the negatives of the bad behavior on the mind of the prisoner since moral reasoning hasn't worked, but not destroy their capacity to be productive in society as a whole and give them as many economic skills as possible when they get out.
And that's a very tough challenge.
And, you know, it's easy to say, balance these things and get the sweet spot.
But the question is, of course, and this is just theoretical, right?
But how would you design a system?
So you would want to reward the police.
And I'm just going to use general status terms here.
It would be somewhat different in a free society, but we'll just use the general status terms.
So you'd want to pay the police per conviction, not per arrest.
If you pay them per arrest, they'll just arrest a bunch of people and make money that way and so on.
And again, you know, they'll be good people, but we always want to have the incentive to match the morals because in general, in conflicts between money and morals, well, it's pretty easy for money to win out, it seems.
I mean, just look at COVID, right?
So you would want to pay or at least give bonuses to the police per conviction, not just per arrest.
How do you deal with the judges?
Well, with the judges, you can't pay them per conviction, right?
You can pay the police per conviction because the police aren't in charge of the convictions, but you can't pay the judges per conviction, obviously.
Everybody knows this.
You can't pay the judges per conviction because then you'll just have judges convict people in order to get their bonuses.
So how do you judge the judges?
How do you incentivize the judges?
So we have a jury system.
So the judge does not determine.
Again, we're going to go with a jury system rather than a judge system, at least just for the time being.
So with the jury system, the judge cannot determine the guilt or innocence, can only give instructions and maintain the rules of evidence and the chain of custody and all of that sort of stuff.
So the judge, though, sentences.
So how do we incentivize the judge to not sentence too short and not sentence too long?
I mean, you can have all these guidelines, and it is actually kind of wild how complicated the guidelines are for sentencing in America and other places.
It's almost like a computer algorithm that you figure out where the sentencing goes.
The judge usually has some discretion, but there are definitely guidelines.
So how do you do that?
Well, the ideal for society is for somebody to go to prison for as little time as it takes for them to become productive members of society.
If a car thief can go to prison for six months and emerge with good skills and maybe some counseling and maybe some whatever, right?
A lot of people are criminals because they're angry at a society that failed to protect them.
I mean, I'm not that I was any kind of big criminal, but a couple of times I shoplifted, it wasn't sort of a conscious thought, but I had no respect for society's rules because society had done absolutely nothing to protect me at all from the violence and abuse.
And so I had no particular respect.
So one of the ways in which criminals are helped is, let's say that they're criminals as the result of child abuse.
And let's say there's some proof, right?
Then arresting those who abused them would go a long way towards reducing their anger against society.
So if a guy was a car thief at the age of 19 because his father beat the hell out of him until the age of 17, then arresting the father for child abuse would go a long way towards restoring the credibility of society in moral matters to the young man.
So let's say that the sweet spot is about six months, six months of punishment, and he comes out any more than that, you risk him being embittered, any less than that, there's not enough negative consequences, and maybe it isn't enough time to have some kind of therapy to make him into a better person or have him become better or something like that.
So maybe six months is about right, but it changes per individual.
It changes, you know, the first time, second time, or whatever it is, right?
And I think the third time, they're just gone.
Like the third time, they're just away forever, right?
But how do you incentivize?
So some of the thoughts that run through my mind is that the bonus, the monetary bonus for the judge is that the judge gets, say, two percentage points of the man's income for a couple of years after he leaves the prison.
That, of course, would require for the judge to have it go well enough that he's economically productive and is able to get a job.
And of course, the commitment to get a job would certainly be one of the requirements of being released.
So maybe the judge would get two percentage points for a couple of years of the guy's gross income as if he held and kept a job.
And that would give the judge a great incentive to release him at the sweet spot where it was worth him getting a job, but he wasn't so traumatized by prison or his loss of freedom that he would become economically less productive.
Because the purpose of the judicial system is to have the man turn from a life of crime into a life of economic productivity.
And if the judge shares in that economic productivity to a small degree, then the judge has an incentive to release him at such time as he has the maximum chance to get and keep a job.
Now, look, obviously there's ways in which this might not work.
Everything's open to corruption.
I'm just sort of spitballing here about possible ways that this could work.
So what we want to do is we want to pay people for the optimum optimal outcomes.
The best possible outcomes is what we want to pay for people.
So if the judge gets a bonus based upon the productivity in the free market of the criminal or the ex, like the ex-inmate of the prison, if the judge gets incentivized, that's good because you're paying the judge in part based upon the most positive outcome, which is the criminal who's released from prison getting and keeping a job for a long period of time.
So that's good.
What about the negatives, right?
If you release the man too soon, maybe you get a little bit extra in terms of work.
Maybe he's supposed to be in prison for two years, but you leave him out, you get him out a year early, you get an extra 2% of his income, whatever it is, right?
So $2,000 per $100,000, whatever it is, right?
So what then you have to have a balancing incentive in case the judge lets the guy out too soon.
So one of the ways that you know you've let the guy out too soon is he goes back to his life of crime.
So what happens?
Well, I initially had sort of talked about if the judge lets a murderer out and the murderer kills someone, that the judge should be charged with murder or at least be charged as an accessory to the crime, like the getaway driver in a bank robbery or something like that, right?
But of course, what that would mean is that judges would never let murderers out because it would be just too risky, right?
Even at the potential 2% of the murderer's job income, that's not enough of an incentive.
So that probably would be too harsh.
And I don't know whether, you know, the recidivism rate in most places in, say, America is like 80%, right?
So four out of five people released from prison end up back in prison.
And that means that the recidivism rate is higher because they could be committing crimes.
The remaining 20%, probably at least 10% of them, if not more, are committing crimes but aren't getting caught or doing something shady but not getting caught.
And I assume that's the higher IQ people who got caught sort of by accident.
So how do you incentivize the judges to keep the prisoners, to keep the criminals in prison long enough that the negative consequence is most likely to change their action, but again, not so long that they become embittered and can't function in society anymore.
So what I would say is that if the judge lets a criminal out of prison and the criminal commits another crime, then the judge is penalized in some financial manner for the length of the sentence that results in the new crime.
So let's say somebody steals a car, they go to jail for six months, they steal another car, they go to jail for three years, then the judge would be responsible for some percentage of the economic cost and damage of the person who recommitted a crime.
So now you have balanced incentives, right?
The judge has an incentive to release the prisoner so that he can gain some portion of the prisoner's earnings, but not so soon because if the criminal commits another crime, then the judge is responsible for some of the financial costs of the commission of committing the crime.
So let's say it's 2% that the judge gets.
So if the guy makes $50,000 a year, the judge gets $1,000 a year.
Let's say the guy steals a $50,000 car, then the judge has to pay 2% of that, maybe as part restitution to the owner of the car.
And of course, if the guy steals $100,000, then the judge has to pay $2,000 or something like that, right?
So you want to balance these incentives.
And of course, this would probably be quite a, or at least a somewhat sophisticated or complicated algorithm, but you would need to balance things out.
Because if the judge has to pay the costs of crimes that are recommitted, he has an incentive to keep the person in prison.
But of course, if he makes money from somebody who leaves prison and gets a productive job, he has an incentive to let go of the prisoner.
So he has benefits from release if the criminal becomes productive member of society, and he has penalties if the person recommits a crime.
Now, let's say somebody's got an IQ of 85, they're a murderer.
What would the incentives be?
Well, the incentive would be, let's just say at 2%.
So the incentive would be if the prisoner gets released after a certain amount of time, I imagine it would be quite a bit of time because it's murder.
So the prisoner gets released and goes to get a productive job, but he's not very smart.
So maybe he doesn't earn very much, right?
So maybe he earns $20,000 a year or $30,000 a year, right?
So at $30,000 a year, the judge is really not making very much, right?
He's making like $600 a year.
On the other hand, if the guy goes and kills someone, and let's say that a life is worth a million dollars, then the judge has to pay 2% of that, right?
Judge has to pay $20,000.
And I apologize, I don't have my calculator.
I think we're pretty much on the money, but I think that's...
So you look at the incentives, right?
They're not very well balanced, or to put it in another way, they're balanced towards caution.
The judge would have to be, and you could actually do the math for this to figure out the probabilities, but the judge would have to be virtually certain, given the disparity of incentives, right?
$300, a couple of hundred bucks a year of income versus $20,000 if he kills someone, he'd have to be pretty certain that the murderer was cured.
And of course, from a societal standpoint, there is an economics to this as well.
And the economics is, let's say somebody's not particularly smart, so they can't add much economic value, but let's say along with that unintelligence and the sweet spot for criminality, as we know, is sort of around IQ 85.
Less than that, you can't plan.
More than that, you can defer gratification and get a job.
But around 85, so somebody with an IQ of 85, you know, can't produce much of value in society.
And if they also have a violent temper and hurt, maim, brutalize, paralyze, or kill people, then the negatives far outweigh the positives of having people in society, having those sorts of people in society.
And again, I'm not talking prevention.
Like, I'm not talking like, well, somebody has an IQ of 85, so let's lock them up, because that would be unjust because they haven't committed a crime.
But once somebody has committed a crime, and it would be interesting to view these statistics, although I'm sure they're not kept for a variety of politically correct reasons, but it would be interesting to run the numbers.
And certainly there would be probabilities.
Now, of course, the judge could take out insurance, blah, blah, blah, but then the insurance companies would simply be charging the judge based upon the risk of letting somebody out of prison.
But if somebody is not smart and a murderer, the odds of them being a productive member of society to the point where taking the risk of additional murders is worth it is probably quite low.
Again, I'm just saying this off the seat of my pants kind of mental calculations.
But if you look at it, that the upside is only a couple of hundred bucks for the judge, but the downside would be $20,000, it's pretty hard to justify.
And whether or not you would want a murderer with a very high chance of recommitting crime, whether you would really want someone like that out in society again, I mean, it's pretty questionable.
I mean, one of the reasons why people want to come to the West is we spent a lot of years, centuries, in fact, killing off or disabling reproductively through prison or expulsion, transportation to Australia.
We took the most violent out of our society.
Then, unfortunately, those with the capacity for violence, but with high moral standards, got killed off in the World Wars, and it's hard to sort of say exactly who's left, but not much.
That's really, I mean, really, the West died in 1914.
The rest has just been after Twitches.
So trying to find the right balance of incentives is really important.
It would be interesting to know, and there would be lots of reports on this.
And I assume that the punishments and rewards would have to be set by a conglomeration of insurance companies of DROs.
But how many murderers are safe to release?
I would argue very few.
I mean, sort of two points come to mind.
One is the Shawshank Redemption, that there's that old guy who's bagging groceries who kills himself.
And we're supposed to be real sorry for the criminal who spent many, many, many years in prison.
Supposed to feel sorry for him.
It's like, nope, no, because it's easy to feel sorry for old murderers when they're too feeble to do much.
But yeah, it's only age that took them out, not any kind of moral reform.
And the other is, oh, gosh, what was that movie with Tim Burton and Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon about a guy who was a, he had this crazy hair and it was really horrible because you're supposed to have sympathy for this guy because he's going to the to the he's going to get electrocuted or whatever.
He was some capital punishment thing.
And he's being dragged and he's crying and he's sad.
But at the same time, you're seeing flashbacks of his sexual assault.
And it's, you know, it's just all kinds of terrible stuff.
Or there was a sort of lengthy, in Boston Legal, there was a lengthy, there was a black guy being strapped down and you're supposed to have all kinds of sympathy for the guy who was a murderer or something because he's now getting a lethal injection and you're supposed to feel really sad and it's all very manipulative and all of that.
And anyway, I mean, I don't, if a murderer, I mean, imagine it wasn't human intervention, like some guy who wiped out an entire family, right?
Some, you know, horrible family annihilator.
If he had a heart attack in prison, who would really feel any loss?
Well, nobody.
In cold blood, or Truman Capote, right?
Somebody who just kills an entire family.
Well, that's pretty bad.
And I don't care.
Like, I don't really care.
I don't have this, oh, the tender potential human soul of redemption.
The female urge to see everyone as redeemable is very toxic.
And the only reason that that urge developed was because they were kept far away from judgment and punishment, right?
The women were kept far away from the legal system, which allowed them to develop all of this sentimentality, which is applied to taking care of the elderly.
Oh, he's going to reform.
He's going to change.
And it also is applied to babies and toddlers and little kids, which is fine and healthy and good.
We need it.
But it's just, you know, with regards to criminals and predators, you know, women will look at lion cubs and say, oh, so cute.
And all men see are lions that are easy to kill now, but hard to kill later, right?
That's that's generally how men see things.
Women look at if you've got some mortal enemy and they're, oh, these little kids, it's like, well, just going to grow up to be people who want to kill us.
So they don't have a huge amount of value to me, right?
That's the difference as a whole between the male and female.
And female sympathy for the underdog is great, but not when it takes complete control over the legal system and the punishment system, because then you get all of this anarcho-tyranny nonsense where the only crime is self-defense.
So of course, you know, this is not any kind of final.
So of course, this isn't any kind of final answer to this challenging problem.
It's just a sort of potential mental framework for dealing with this kind of stuff.
You want to balance the incentives to try and hit that sweet spot as often as possible.
You can't do it perfectly, of course, because there's still free will.
But the amount of criminality that will be around after peaceful parenting becomes widespread is so small that it is almost impossible for us to conceive of because we live in a world full of the products of coercive and violent parenting.
So I hope this helps.
I hope they find this of interest.
I'd love to hear your thoughts about how best to try and balance these incentives.
And so freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show.
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And I hope you guys are having a wonderful day and lots of love from up here.