I don’t think people think through the “deterrence” angle very well though. In order to make deterrence effective you need to have people who really stand to lose something, but like I was just listening to C.R.E.A.M last night (funny enough while playing chess) and Method Man raises an interesting point: “life in the world no different from a cell”. For someone facing seriously abject poverty, the potential rewards of crime may outweigh the costs. You can make prison progressively more horrible, but you can also make life outside of prison progressively better with IMO a similar effect. In the US we rarely discuss the anti-crime effects of social welfare policies, but they’re quite real. In a world without the kind of serious poverty we accept all over the US even 5 year prison sentence is a massive loss, because life outside is so much better. In a world where people are living in $10 a day then maybe 5 years in prison isn’t such a huge price if the upside risk appears big enoug