Economists and bounty hunters would appear to have little in common.
Duane “Dog” Chapman is a tattooed ex-convict with his own reality
television show, currently threatened with extradition to Mexico for
apprehending a US rapist there. Alex Tabarrok wears Gap khaki shorts
and is interested in tort reform. Only one of them is an economist.
That’s Tim Harford writing in the Financial Times.
I wonder if I can get an endorsement deal out of this?
The last line of TH’s article is: “So why not introduce performance pay for private rehabilitation specialists too?” Why indeed? Don’t we want to see Alex and his khaki shorts doing their market-incentives magic down at Folsom prison whenever possible?
The incarceration/rehabilitation is the remarkably expensive and amazingly ineffective part of the process. And the men who dominate this process have very little personal sense of how much less safe their wives and daughters are….in a thousand different times and places….than they themselves.
Do you know of any jurisdictions where judges do effective shopping in this regard, or even know what the recidivism rates are for various sentencing alternatives?
Does the bail have to be paid by criminals themselves?
Who pay for rehabilitation service? the government?
Weight loss is easier than you think!
Adipex
Phentermine
Comments on this entry are closed.