Re:Forgiveness in a vengeful age
by TeMPOraL on Tuesday November 24, 2015 @10:47PM
(#10625216)
I don't think that most crime will be considered more of a mental illness, unless we're willing to consider selfishness as a mental problem too. Serial murderers may be getting treatment, but a lot of crimes (especially white collar) happen out of plain old willingness to pursue your own interests at the expense of others. There will need to be a form of enforcement that will keep people in line - the will to game the system seems to be far too common to consider it as an abnormality.
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Then if you take into account that with large populations people seem to follow incentives quite strictly. Nobody can recall they didn't buy bottle of jack because of additional 5% tax. But that tax increase shows in alcohol consumption statistics.
But I'm not advocating overly harsh punishments either. At some point you hit diminishing returns.