While I am fascinated by the Finnish system for traffic fines that considers the severity of the offense as well as the ability of the offender to pay, I received the following in a newsletter by Florence Gaub (visit https://www.futurate.institute to subscribe to the newsletter). I hope Florence will not mind me posting it here:
The future of jail time
More than 11 million people in the world are currently serving time in prison, which has become the standard form of punishment with the end of public flogging and the decline of the death penalty. The problem is, it is a flawed concept. In the best case, it should have a deterrent effect, i.e. knowing that one will end up in jail should stop a person from committing a crime. In reality, this applies - if at all - only to crimes that carry low or medium-term sentences. The worse a crime, such as murder, the less jail time will deter it. In the worst case, prison is supposed to prevent future crime as criminals are off the street, but here, too, research paints a different picture: serving jail time actually increases the probability of committing crimes in the future: depending on country, relapse rates are consistently between 30 and 50% in the three years following time in prison. (Relapse rates for sex offenders and terrorists are generally on the lower end with 2 - 20%) The reason for that is perhaps less a genetic predisposition for crime, and more that prison makes reintegration into society very hard.
Halden Prison in Norway has set out to make this its objective rather than punishment per se. Its focus on mentoring and role models seems to work as it has a relapse rate of 25% after 5 years. While crime prevention is a whole-of--government task, preventing convicts from relapsing works better with probation sentences than jail time. In more than half countries of the world (53%), prison populations are below 150 per 100,000 - in Europe, this number has dropped to 73 in the last ten years, being the world region with the lowest number.
But in many other parts of the world, prison populations are growing. In the United States, over 2 million people are incarcerated (629 per 100,000), with Rwanda (580 per 100,000), Turkmenistan (576), El Salvador (564) and Cuba (510) not far behind. In southern African countries, this stands at 248, in central America, at 278. So while prison time is not doing a good job at being an effective punishment, is unlikely to disappear.
Precrime = pre-punishment
Will we ever be able to apprehend criminals before they commit their acts? The 1956 Philip K. **** novella Minority Report imagined exactly that: its Precrime police department arrests individuals before the act. While we might not have the mutants that saw these acts coming in the book, we do have surveillance technology and Big Data analysis, which has led some to declaring that the book is already a reality. Since 2019 the number of surveillance cameras has grown by 30% worldwide – now a billion surveillance cameras are in use. One AI algorithm, for instance, claims to predict crimes one week in advance with 90% accuracy in eight American cities - but it does not say who will commit these crimes, only where they are likely to occur. This way, police presence can be increased in these locations well ahead of time – in what is called predictive policing. We are therefore not yet at Minority Report levels, but China is moving into exactly this direction. Its elaborate surveillance system - it has 372 cameras per 1,000 people, compared to London's 13.35 - strives to eradicate threats before they can happen, by alerting police to the movements of people of interest. The effectiveness of this system is hard to gauge: Chinese statistics suggest there is essentially no crime in the country.
The future of the death penalty
Until the 18th century, most criminals did not serve time in jail, simply because it was not considered a way of effectively preventing or punishing crime. Instead, convicts were either physically punished - often in public - or executed. Both forms of punishment are on their way out: the last floggings in the United States were carried out in the state of Delaware in 1952, and Saudi Arabia, one of the last to use it, ruled it out in 2020. Meanwhile, the death penalty is slowly in decline, too: 142 countries have either banned or suspended it. While Europe led the way - France's last execution occurred in 1977 -, all of Latin America and 4-in-5 African countries have banned it, too. (The outlier is Belarus, the only European country to still carrying out executions.) But this does not mean that it does not have its supporters. When European states began to abolish it, most citizens were still in favour. In the United Kingdom, 75% of the population were in favour in 1983 - today, it stands at 53%. In the United States, 60% of adults support the death penalty, 45% favour it in France, 35% in Germany, 31% in Italy and 28% in Spain. The highest levels are in Japan with 80% in in favour. China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Vietnam and Iraq together make up the vast majority of global executions - in all of these states, social support for the measure is still strong.
