Criminal dilemmas. Understanding and preventing crime (Q5956952)

The social cost of crime is overwhelming. The price includes the loss, pain, and suffering of the victims; funding for the police, court costs, and the cost of incarceration. To reduce this loss a straight forward and logical policy is needed. The entity of the book is that the tools of economics, game theory, and political science extend an understanding, and thereby the means of contending with criminal dilemmas. The analysis was done in the abstract, with little appeal to emotion. Yet, having scrutinized the competing strategies, the proposals given in this book are the ones which appear theoretically most likely to minimize the total cost of crime. In the first chapter, cost benefit analysis, combined with evaliation of incentives behind criminal activity are used to compare prison sentencing to the use of alternative sentencing for nonviolent criminals. This analysis indicates that a hybrid policy of imprisoning violent criminals and imposing alternative sentences on nonviolent criminals would be superior in terms of fulfilling society's goals. Alternative sentencing could yield an improvement over the current system in terms of retribution, rehabilitation, and deterrence. Importanly, this more positive form of sentencing, involving some form of repayment, reduces the individual and social cost of crime. In the second chapter, similar tools are applied to understand drawbacks to the private prison industry. Private firms and their lobbies are not solving the crime problem as much as maintaining their market shares. Once entrenched, private prisons will be difficult to eliminate without a struggle. All companies who do business with private prisons will lobby and advertise in order to secure the continuation of the private prisons industry. The third and fourth chapters address the difficult issues of prostitution and drugs. These chapters employ a combination of economics, game theory, and political science to explore situations. From the economics point of view prostitution should be legalized. From the political science point of view there is the need for legal enforcement structures. Namely, with legalization prostitutes would be able to use the legal system for protection and for contract enforcement, so pimps would lose some control over them. The legal system would presumably cost the prostitutes less (in taxes and court fees) and would allow the prostitutes more freedom in career choices. Game theory, however, explains why the suggestions of economics are unlikely to be followed. With regards to drugs, the following three recommendations are offered: Legalization: if the cure is worse than the ailment, then it should forgo its use and treat using mean such as rehabilitation. Education: educating the public allows to deter some potential drugs users in a manner which is consistent with the notion of individual responsibility. Regulation: can allow to control for ussues such as quality and age of the consumer. Reasonable controls should aid the goals to protect users and those around them. Chapter 5 explores the strategies, goals and constraints of gangs and of their members. The extortion model deployed by the author, suggests that gangs have an incentive to develop any place where illegal activity takes place. This scenario can explain why organized crime groups, such as gangs and mafia tend to be involved in the provision of illegal goods and services. But legalizing drugs removes part of gang's abilities to recruit members and to earn profits. Drug legalization would not destroy gangs, but it could effectively decrease their sphere of activity and their power. When portrayed as an organization, gangs can lose their aspect of lack of control and unpredictability. The benefit to analysis of this type is that if the framework and tools used by gangs can be identified, then steps can be made to decrease their control. In Chapter 6 the emotional subject of gun control is analyzed. Arguments regarding the potential problems and benefits to open and concealed weapons laws are considered through economic and game theoretic framework. Based on the results of the models, the chapter supports gun control -- i.e. right of law-abiding individuals to own guns, provided they follow certain requirements, including waiting periods, training, and safeguards. The chapter also argues that while guns may certainly serve as a deterrent, other crime deterrent factors must not be overlooked. A careful consideration of all potential factors could help to determine when and where firearms can serve as a deterrent to crime. In this way, the use of theoretical analysis can make a large contribution to a very emotional subject, because it allows the readers to take an abstract look at the situation and to consider compromises which might otherwise be impossible. Chapter 7 presents a bibliography regarding the subject of study.