(urth) This Week in Google Alerts: Home Fires

[Gwern Branwen]

On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 8:38 PM, Marc Aramini <marcaramini at yahoo.com> wrote:
> It seems very clear to me that if a person is prone to kill for some reason, that circumstance may come up more than once in their life.  You have already deterred future crime by either incarcerating them or killing them.  Incarceration costs money, money which we would bedgrudge the homeless who have not committed crimes.

What 'may' happen is irrelevant; what matters is what does happen,
since you are criticizing status quos.

As has been pointed out many times because it's apparently so
counterintuitive to people, especially in niches like child abuse,
crimes are generally committed by people one knows. This is true for
murder:

> In 1990, there were 2,245 homicides in New York City. In 2010, there were 536, only 123 of which involved people who didn’t already know each other. The fear, once common, that walking around city parks late at night could get you mugged or murdered has been relegated to grandmothers; random murders, with few exceptions, simply don’t happen anymore.

http://nplusonemag.com/raise-the-crime-rate

(Isn't that shocking? If I had asked you to estimate that, would you
have said 'yes, in one of the largest cities in the world with a
still-notorious reputation, only 1/5th of the murderers killed a
stranger'?)

Knowing someone implies that multiple murders may not be very common
since how many relatives could possibly irritate one that much and how
would one not learn from the first time (or the *others* learn from
the first time)?

The above article covers some of the standard material on how ever
going to prison cripples post-prison life and contributes to
additional crime; yet, homicides have relatively low recividism rates
compared to other crimes (especially property or drug convictions).
You can find a lot of this stuff just by googling the obvious terms,
but here's one:
http://www.thecrimereport.org/archive/low-recidivism-rate-reported-for-paroled-ny-murderers/

> Of 368 convicted murderers granted parole in New York between 1999 and 2003, six, or 1.6 percent,were returned to prison within three years for a new felony conviction — none of them a violent offense, says a state Parole Board study reported by the Journal News in White Plains, N.Y. The board reported that of 1,190 convicted murderers released from 1985 to 2003 in New York state, 35, or just under 3 percent, returned to prison for a new felony conviction within three years.
>
> "Individuals who are released on parole after serving sentences for murder consistently have the lowest recidivism rate of any offenders," said John Caher, a spokesman for the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services. A 2002 study by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics tracking 272,000 inmates released in New York and 14 other states found that 1.2 percent of those freed after serving a murder sentence were rearrested on homicide charges within three years — the lowest rate among all reported crimes by released prisoners.

Well, you didn't specify what kind of recividism rate justified
pre-emptive death penalties, so perhaps this is irrelevant to you.
Interpretation of these rates can get hairy since you're trying to
compare shifting groups over time which can lead to bizarre little
things like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox

-- 
gwern
http://www.gwern.net