Weird Canadian Criminologists think that punishing criminals doesn't deter crime

This response from Canadian Criminologists is just too funny.

Great politics, lousy policy.

That's how criminologists and critics are summing up the Conservative push for more penalties after a spate of 18 shootings in British Columbia blamed on gang warfare.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper heads to Vancouver on Thursday to talk up a new bill that, if passed, is expected to deem any gang-related killing a case of first-degree murder.

The Conservatives also promised in the last election to create a new criminal offence, with a mandatory prison term, for drive-by shootings.

It's the government's latest flex of legislative muscle as it renews a crime-fighting agenda that partly died when Harper forced an early election last fall. . . . .

Few robberies solved in UK through CCTVs

If only three percent of the robberies are solved as a result of CCTV, it isn't particularly surprising that they had no impact on the number of crimes. It doesn't seem that this satisfies the cost-benefit test. The billions spent on this could have put a lot of police officers on the street. The Guardian has the story here:

Massive investment in CCTV cameras to prevent crime in the UK has failed to have a significant impact, despite billions of pounds spent on the new technology, a senior police officer piloting a new database has warned. Only 3% of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV images, despite the fact that Britain has more security cameras than any other country in Europe. . . . .

THe problem is apparently even worse than this. Not only are few crimes solved, but the shots from the cameras are apparently not very useful in court.

Use of CCTV images for court evidence has so far been very poor, according to Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville, the officer in charge of the Metropolitan police unit. "CCTV was originally seen as a preventative measure," Neville told the Security Document World Conference in London. "Billions of pounds has been spent on kit, but no thought has gone into how the police are going to use the images and how they will be used in court. It's been an utter fiasco: only 3% of crimes were solved by CCTV. There's no fear of CCTV. Why don't people fear it? [They think] the cameras are not working."

Does Imprisonment Deter Crime?: James Q. Wilson sure thinks so

His piece in the LA Times is here:

Do we have too many people in prison?

If you read a recent report by the Pew Center on the States, you would think so. As its title proclaimed, more than one in 100 American adults is in jail or prison. For young black males, the number is one in nine.

The report's authors contend that the incarceration rate represents a problem because the number of felons serving time does not have a "clear impact" on crime rates -- and that all those inmates are costing taxpayers too much money to house. But nowhere in the report is there any discussion of the effect of prison on crime, and the argument about costs seems based on the false assumption that we are locking people up at high rates for the wrong reasons.

In the last 10 years, the effect of prison on crime rates has been studied by many scholars. The Pew report doesn't mention any of them. Among them is Steven Levitt, coauthor of "Freakonomics." He and others have shown that states that sent a higher fraction of convicts to prison had lower rates of crime, even after controlling for all of the other ways (poverty, urbanization and the proportion of young men in the population) that the states differed. A high risk of punishment reduces crime. Deterrence works.

But so does putting people in prison. The typical criminal commits from 12 to 16 crimes a year (not counting drug offenses). Locking him up spares society those crimes. Several scholars have separately estimated that the increase in the size of our prison population has driven down crime rates by 25%. .. . .

Here was my take a few months ago.

Northern Iowa University Faculty Senate Votes Against Letting Campus Police Carry Guns

At a special meeting on Friday, the University of Northern Iowa Faculty Senate voted overwhelmingly against arming campus police.

The senate debated the issue for nearly an hour late in the afternoon as the campus emptied for the long holiday weekend. Ultimately, it decided the university would be safer if campus police did not carry guns. The final vote was 11 in favor of a motion to oppose arming campus police, with three voting against and one abstention. . . .

Professor Jerry Smith makes a strong point about police not being able to respond to an attack. Yet, I think that there is a further point. Not only will unarmed police be unable to respond, but if one believes in deterrence, unarmed police will actually make the attack more likely. The killers engaged in these multiple victim public killings have the warped objective to try to kill or wound as many people as possible and how successful they are is related to the amount of time that elapses between when the attack starts and when someone else with a gun is able to arrive on the scene. To the extent to which one can reduce these killers return to harming others, you can deter some attacks from occurring. Basically, some simple economics.

I find it amazing that even professors really believe that campus police, with the same training as other officers, carrying guns will make the campus less safe. The discussion about officers shooting African-Americans as a reason not to arm campus police is truly remarkable.

Thanks to Richard Featherstone for sending me this link.

Defending Oneself in England can lead to fines or prison

This ought to really dissuade criminals from attacking people. Here is a guy who gets in trouble even though he was already being physically attacked. Even more bizarre is that he apparently faced prison if he hadn't pleaded guilty.

A shopkeeper has been fined £250 and given a criminal record because he fought back when he was attacked by shoplifters.

Jacob Smyth chased three youths out of his hardware shop in Penzance, Cornwall, when he was set upon. When he was kicked in the groin by one of the hooded youths who had stolen cans of spray paint Mr Smyth hit back.

Police issued fixed penalty tickets to the shoplifters but charged Mr Smyth and a colleague with assault.

Yesterday he pleaded guilty to assault at Truro Magistrates’ Court. He claimed after the hearing that he had been advised to plead guilty because otherwise he could have faced a six month prison sentence.

The court was told that Mr Smyth, a father of three, caught the youths stealing the spray cans in October last year. Two of them turned on him and he was kicked in his groin just weeks after a vasectomy operation. He retaliated and punched 18-year-old Craig Spiller to the ground.

Paul Gallagher, defending, said: “The court can only imagine what they intended to do with that spray paint. He could see the cans poking out of their pockets. He leant forward to get them and at that stage he was set upon.

“He did punch one of them to get him off. In the heat of the moment he kicked him once or twice. Initially he was acting in self defence. Frustration at the situation took over. The lads were interviewed and given fixed penalty notices by police but unfortunately for Mr Smyth ended up in court today.

“He was the one who was trying to do the right thing and get his stolen property back.”

Julian Herbert, prosecuting, said the “aggravating factor” of the case was shop staff “taking the law into their own hands”. Fining Mr Smyth £250 and ordering him to pay £43 costs, Angy Haslam, chairman of the magistrates, said: “The act was aggravated by the fact you kicked the victim on the ground. We feel it has been mitigated because you acted in self defence.”

Speaking outside court, Mr Smyth said: “I did nothing wrong. I was getting a good beating from this lad. I had no choice but to defend myself. . . . .

Who says that criminals don't care about getting the death penalty

Texas Teen Has to Be Restrained After Being Sentenced to Death