Chris Blattman

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If group liability works for lending, maybe it works for crime?

The police officer explained that while conventional deterrence hadn’t worked, he had begun to persuade gangs to behave by issuing a credible threat: namely, that when a gang attracted attention with notorious acts of violence, the entire gang — all of whose members likely had outstanding warrants or probation, parole or traffic violations — would be rounded up.

New techniques in crime deterrence, in the NYT Sunday Magazine.

One of the other techniques said to be important: that criminals consider the punishments fair, equitable and transparent.

5 Responses

  1. Group liability in this case is about picking up all members of the gang with outstanding warrants and violations. It isn’t group liability in the sense of going after the families of gang members or something similar. It could easily go too far, but going after an entire group for relatively minor, but real violations, seems reasonable and keeping with rule of law.

    One thing I liked about this article was the point that it is the certainty of punishment and not the severity that is important. Right now our justice system is a total crap shoot in terms of who gets nailed and who gets off free. This needs to change.

  2. I agree this would be a good deterrent, but spillover effects concern me. Firstly, how can we be sure that the the police have properly identified all the gang members? Secondly, a gang leader might tell one of their members to play the part of a rival gang member, commit a crime that I wanted perpetrated, and then the police would arrest the rival gang. Thirdly, the resources put into bringing in all those member could be substantially more than the actual cost of having them out in society.

    Anyways, didn’t Gine and Karlan (2006) observe better lender (MFI) performance in the Philippines when group liability was removed?

    I think the jury might still be out on the effectiveness of group liability.

  3. “Recent work in behavioral economics has helped to explain this phenomenon: people are more sensitive to the immediate than the slightly deferred future and focus more on how likely an outcome is than how bad it is.”

    Did we really need recent work in behavioral econ to know this? It’s the kind of thing I would’ve expected psychologists to have discovered 50 years ago.

  4. Chris, what’s the line between collective “liability” and collective sanctions? Stathis has work on the effectiveness of the Nazi policy of collective sanctions as a counter-insurgency technique, there may be analyses of the effectiveness of such in other countries as well. As I recall, Israel used collective punishment during the intifada: a family would lose its house if any of the members were involved in the intifada.

    Of course, I haven’t seen a randomized evaluation of collective vs. individual sanctions yet, so I suppose the jury is still out.

    (More seriously, I think the issue is whether the other people being sanctioned have some influence on the behavior of the people the government is trying to control. Often those sanctioned are hostages, chosen for their vulnerability and ease of sanctioning, but those same characteristics mean that they have little influence. A secondary consideration is whether this violates norms of fairness in a way that backfires, leading to more stubborn resistance to the state. As you know, insurgents often court collective punishment in the belief that this will drive more people to join.)

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