Stigma as a Penalty for Crime; Sex Offender Registries
Dr. Faulkner of Terra Haute has a good website collecting links to all state and city sex offender registries and registry laws. You can look up the names of all the convicted sex offenders in your town, if your state has such a law.
What amazes me is that we don’t have such lists for all crimes, and nationally instead of by state. Even arrest data is public– it just is so decentralized that you need to hire a detective to find out about someone’s background. It surprises me, too, that no private company has compiled such a database for profit. Maybe it could not succeed without lots of cooperation from government units who have the information now.
I’m also surprised that so many people– well, lawyers, at least– object to sex offender registries. After all, it is just letting people know the truth about other people, instead of remaining deceived about their background in thinking they are normal. I blogged on this yesterday, and will repeat:
Should companies that sell shoddy goods have the right to block magazines from publicizing that fact, on the grounds of privacy?
Should people who have pasts that make them unattractive to insurance companies or employers have the right to block a computer database from publicizing that fact, on the grounds of privacy?
One problem is people tend to think from the point of view of the criminal. If people know someone was a child molester, that really hurts his life. But even aside from the fact that he deserves it– even if we take a morally neutral stance and don’t even say that someone should have thought about the penalty before he committed the crime– there is the matter of the benefit to the people who are hurting the criminal’s life. To be sure, he can’t get a job in a day care center anymore, or as a school janitor perhaps, or maybe even as your lawyer. But that is because other people would not benefit from employing him. He might be happy to work for me for $20,000, and I might be happy to employ him if I am deceived into thinking he is not a child molester, valuing his services at $21,000. But if I discover he is a child molester, I would value his services at only $17,000, and I would employ someone else instead, at that $21,000 salary. The result: he is worse off, I and the person who did get the job are better off, and our value gain is greater than his value loss.
To think otherwise is to fall into the same bias as those who think that insurance companies should, out of fairness, have to offer life insurance policies at normal rates to people who are terminally ill, because it is just those people who need life insurance. True, those people benefit– but everybody else loses.
A great thing about stigma is that unlike jail, which is costly to the economy, and fines, which are neutral, stigma actually increases value. Moreover, it is self-limiting. The government does not need to know how severe the effect is on a particular criminal; people out in the world will react appropriately. Moreover, we do not have to worry about the government having bad incentives. The government has too much incentive to collect fines, because they help government revenue. It has too little incentive to impose jail terms, because it uses up government revenue. Releasing information has little effect on government revenue, so the officials’ incentives are not warped.
Stigma is also good because it reflects the will of the people better than fines or jail. That is because stigma is so decentralized. Each person chooses for himself how he will treat the criminal. Smith may treat him harshly, and think Jones, who treats him leniently, is wrong to be lenient. Jones is free to think Smith too harsh. A jail term, on the other hand, must be a compromise– too short in Smith’s view, too long in Jones’s, and with all the possibilities of government failure along the way.
For more, see “Norms in Law and Economics” and Stigma and Self-Fulfilling Expectations of Criminality, Journal of Law and Economics 39: 519-544 (October 1996).[ In modelling crime, economists have focussed on the expected cost of government sanctions to the criminal, but private sanctions— notably economic or social stigma— may be just as important. In the model here, workers decide whether to commit crimes and employers decide how much to pay ex-convicts. In one equilibrium, individuals refrain from crime and economic stigma— the wage loss from conviction— is high. In a second, pareto- inferior equilibrium, individuals commit crimes and stigma is low, because employers realize that nonconviction does not imply noncriminality. The model may help to explain large shifts in crime, such as that between 1960 and 1980, in which decreases and increases in government sanctions seem to have asymmetric effects. ]
May 14th, 2005 at 10:27 am
You actually want a national list of past traffic offenses so that
we can all stigmatize people for the rest of their life based on what
could have been a one time indiscretion or even a FALSE ARREST. What
do you feel would be the appropriate level of stigma to apply to someone
like say… George Bush for his past drunk driving problems? Or did you
forgive him like Jesus says?
You need to take a serious look at the work of the Innocence project
before putting that kind of faith in the accuracy of the criminal justice
system.
The problem with using stigma to punish crimes is obvious to anyone
with an ounce of empathy. People are vindictive, they form lynch mobs.
Without those “compromises” you disparage, the most extremist vigilantes
will be able to do irreparable harm. Your vain attempt to economically sanction Smith for lynching Washington because you think that was maybe too harsh doesn’t bring Washington’s life back.