Law and Order

 

A dispositive index of the health of a society is the percentage of its population incarcerated. A fundamental purpose of society is to nurture citizens who support lawful order.  Each incarceration is a failure of that purpose.

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Perhaps more police and more jails is not the solution to our crime problem. 

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The annual cost of the current US criminal justice system is estimated to be of the order of  $200B.

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A child growing up in poverty has 5x higher probability of committing a crime and being incarcerated than a child growing up in economic security. If we postulate that this association

is causal then we have a tool to reduce sociopathic behavior. 

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If we move all the poor children out of poverty, assuming the above causation,  we would reduce the crime and incarceration cost by more than 80%. a saving of 160B in the incarceration cost alone. 

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There are 11 million children living in poverty in the US. So applying the cost of the saving to the poor children would yield about $15,000 per child per year.  A single mother with 3 children would recieve $45,000 per year, surely enough to move to a safer neighborhood with better schools, thus escaping the conditions which I believe make criminal behavior more likely. 

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A most serious problem with this program is that it would take at least a generation to become effective. So the society would have to front the cost for about 15 years. 

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On the other side, I have considered only the cost of trying and incarcerating offenders.  I have omitted the cost of the crime itself. There is both the direct cost, lost property and lost earning years to injury and death. Consider the benefit to a society of reducing crime by 80%. 

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The most heinous of criminals was born an innocent baby. 

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