Coping With Street Crime

Murray Rothbard reports:

the political scientist Edward C. Banfield—in his delightfully cool, bitter, and hardheaded The Unheavenly City (1970), and the later edition, The Unheavenly City Revisited (1974)—put his finger on a key to the nature of the street criminal: a very high rate of time preference for the present over the future; in other words, a very short time horizon. The street criminal places a high value on present, instant gratification: whether it be from money stolen, from rape, or from the sheer “kicks” of beating or killing another human being. He commits these acts not because punishment is uncertain, but because punishment is sometime in the future, and he simply doesn’t care about the future. In a later article applying his analysis to street crime. Professor Banfield put the case well: “The threat of punishment at the hands of the law is unlikely to deter the present-oriented person. The gains that he expects from his illegal act are very near to the present, whereas the punishment that he would suffer—in the unlikely event of his being both caught and punished—lies in a future too distant for him to take into account.” Banfield goes on to add that “for the normal person” there are other stronger deterrents to crime than the legal penalty, such as disgrace, loss of job, hardship for wife and children if he goes to prison. These deterrents do not exist, however, for the present-oriented person. Everyone in his circle naturally gets “in trouble” with the police from time to time. He has no steady job anyway, and he contributes little or nothing to the support of his wife and kids, who, Banfield adds, “may well be better off without him.” Banfield makes it clear that the high-time preference person’s lack of a steady job is not due to lack of “employment opportunities,” but because this sort of person has no intention of subjecting himself to the discipline of engaging in full-time steady work.

An article well worth your time.