A tragedy down in Rock County poses an economic question for the county attorney, one examined at length by at least one Nobel laureate: To what extent are decisions to commit crimes driven by rational calculations?
In cases where a reasoned weighing of expected costs and benefits predominates, increasing the penalties for those found guilty should decrease how frequently such crimes are committed. However, in cases where crime results from irrational choices, or spur-of-the-moment “passion,” the deterrent effects of harsher sentences may be disappointing.
The Rock County case is a sad one. A 25-year-old man was making banking transactions using a smartphone while driving on a rural state highway. He hit a young mother on a bike pulling her daughters, ages 1 and 4, in a bike trailer. The woman was killed and the infant seriously injured. The man tacitly admitted what he was doing, and there were witnesses to the crash. Described as an intelligent and otherwise responsible person, a sergeant in the National Guard, he now faces up to 13 years in prison.
That may seem harsh, but both justice and economic efficiency may best be served by giving him as long a sentence as possible. The arguments for doing so were made by two scholars centuries apart.
In 1750, George Savile, an English politician, asserted that, “Men are not hang’d for stealing Horses, but that Horses may not be stolen.” This is a classic argument for harsh punishment as a deterrence to premeditated crime.
Two centuries later, University of Chicago economist Gary Becker agreed with Savile by arguing that criminals were rational decision-makers who balanced the benefit to themselves from committing a crime against the expected probability of being caught and punished, together with the severity of that punishment.
Crime could thus be reduced by increasing the probability of being caught or the severity of punishment or both. This was the core of Savile’s argument. If potential horse thieves must fear being hanged, they will be less likely to commit the crime than if execution is off the table.
This seems common sense to most people. But not all psychologists and criminologists agree. And the degree to which it is true is an empirical question that has been the subject of statistical analysis for years.
There is no question that fear of punishment deters some crime just as it deters some naughtiness by children.
But the degree of deterrence varies greatly by the type of crime. And some individuals seem much more deterred by harsh punishment than others.
In general, “white collar” crimes are often quite rational, with the culprit weighing the benefits, the penalty and the expectation of getting caught.
Padding deductions on an income tax return seems easy if the chances of getting audited are extremely small.
But even financial crimes are often driven by irrational emotion. Embezzlements stemming from gambling addictions are an example.
Moreover, many crimes against people remain ones of “passion.” Abusive husbands killing their wives or drunken scuffles turning into mayhem remain familiar facets of human life.
And thousands of people are killed each year by drunk drivers whose decisions while intoxicated and whose addictive urges to drink don’t stem from rational calculations.
So Becker’s theory of rational crime never got much traction in criminology as an overall explanation of behavior. But that does not mean that deterrent effects of harsh punishment have no impact on any crime.
Deterrence is strongest for those acts that are most rational and weakest for those that are most irrational.
On this scale, using a smartphone to do banking while driving is well toward the rational end. It may be careless, but it is not driven by passion or by physiological addiction. And the intent to commit a crime was not in the calculation.
Behavioral economists would note that impairing one’s driving by using a phone may stem from a “cognitive bias,” one of which is an irrational belief that something bad “won’t happen to me.”
Or it may just be an “information problem,” in that people generally underestimate how dangerous the practice is.
In both situations, where there is a significant degree of rationality in the decision to commit a crime, and where misinformation is widespread among the public, “making an example” of someone who commits a crime may be economically efficient.
The man who killed the young mother reportedly is remorseful. This has changed his life forever, and he is not likely to re-offend, regardless of what punishment he gets.
He seems to be an otherwise model person, on the cusp of a productive life. Throw him in jail for a decade, and you lose the value of what he could produce for society. And the budgetary costs of prisons are great.
That logic leads one to argue for an easy sentence. You cannot bring back the dead, the perpetrator is sorry and will not re-offend, and society should not indulge in costly “vengeance.”
But what about a stiff sentence, to paraphrase Savile, “not for driving while impaired by smartphone use but that others may not drive while so impaired?”
The news that someone got a decade of hard time for hitting and killing a young mother because he did not pull over to make a call may increase the knowledge and attention of other people who habitually get distracted by phone use while driving.
Everyone knows, at some cognitive level, that using a smartphone while driving can be dangerous.
But a well-publicized prison sentence can make the consequences more concrete, more operational for people, particularly young ones who may be most likely to text and drive.If the benefits to society of fewer deaths, injuries and ruined lives and less property damage from driving while phone-impaired outweigh the costs to society of imprisoning a repentant person who is otherwise a model citizen, then society is made better off economically with a harsh sentence.
There is a final consideration. Deep and universal societal disapproval of some harmful act is a far greater limit on people than what degree of crime it is.
We are in a period in which smartphones are still a new technology, and social mores are not yet well established. Countries where drunk driving is not only illegal, but also subject to deep social scorn, have lower rates of death from this cause than those countries where it is more socially acceptable, even if the second country has equally harsh laws.
But harsh legal punishments in this early formative phase of cultural adaptation to smartphone technology may shape social norms.
Exemplary harsh sentences may impress in our collective minds how harmful driving while phone-impaired can be, and that collective awareness may make it also a shameful thing for people to do. The result might be fewer deaths and less pain in the future.