re: #364 Obdicut

This is not a true claim, no.

This is either a false statement or a terrible idea, I can’t tell which.

First you have to get people to actually think about the risk and reward. Then you have to actually catch and prosecute the people. Both of those, especially the latter, is far more important than the actual sentence length.

Please don’t act as though that is a proved concept. Crime rates fell all over the country not just where the ‘broken window’ theories were in effect.

Absolutely untrue. The recidivism rate, and the correlation between juvie convictions and later convictions, shows that the opposite is true. I have no idea why you think otherwise.

Oh puhleeze. Of COURSE a juvenile conviction is predictive of adult crime. The question is whether a series of juvenile offenses, at a given severity, that go unpunished, is more likely to lead to adult crime, than a couple of juvenile offenses that do trigger punishment. That argument, that a juvenile conviction is predictive of adult crime, rests on an elementary misunderstanding of conditional probability.

Crime rates fell particularly sharply in NYC. Please don’t act as though this is an unproved concept. The idea was taken as a model and implemented in many other cities. It worked there too.