Today I am in Florida giving a seminar to a group of Federal judges on the law and economics of Federalism and Crime. One of the surprising things that I discovered in my research is that cities, counties, and even most states can legally banish criminals from their borders. I say most states because, for example, the Georgia state constitution makes banishment illegal. Georgia judges, however, have found a way around the law they have imposed "158-county" banishment. (If you guessed that Georgia has 159 counties give yourself two points.)
Banishment is a particulary noteworthy example of a negative spillover – banishment benefits the state doing the banishing but only at the expense of other states. I will suggest to the Federal judges, therefore, that state banishment should be illegal.
There are some arguments for banishment from a city or county. Banishment, for example, can remove a criminal from negative peer influences. Whether the advantages outweigh the spillovers is an open question but city and county banishment should be left to the states because the state government can internalize the city/county spillover.
“…but city and county banishment should be left to the states because the state government can internalize the city/county spillover.”
How is that different from the states doing the banishing and the federal government internalizing the spillover? It seems likely that neither level of government is going to adequetely take into account the negative spillover and that the localities getting spilled on are going to get stuck with some extra criminals.
I think there is a law on the books in Calgary along those lines. Except the government must provide the banished with a gun and a horse.
Prof. AT,
Deportation is a form of banishment practiced by countries. Do you approve of this? Aren’t states/courts being consistent by permitting banishment if it is approved in principle by the federal government?
There are lots of crimes for which radically peaceful folk would find incarceration way too severe, but banishment appropriate. After all, if someone behaves very badly in your home, or at your football stadium … you ask them to leave, don’t you? Does that mean you have no concern for how they behave after they leave? Well, that all depends.
We have enough crime in most US cities that women don’t feel safe to walk alone at night, and yet somehow banishment of predators is seldom taken seriously. In some neighborhoods and in some families, returning from prison makes you “the man” to lots of kids. Returning from banishment might not seem quite as macho.
Sophisticated banishments might involve limited duration, parole provisions, specific penalties for unauthorized re-entry, and payments to jurisdictions willing to accept (and suitably maintain?) those banished. Judges should have a range of options to shop amongst. Do judges even know the recidivism rates of the various options they tend towards now? Or the rates at which prisoners are brutalized by other prisoners?
…Of course, we could end up with a locality full of criminals…
As I recall Robert Heinlein wrote a short story along these lines – criminals were banished to Coventry, where they had to live with other criminals (and had a rough time of it, generally).
Banishment worked better when communities were separate enough that you really didn’t have
to give a damn whether people in the next state cared about a murderer showing up on their doorstep. Nowadays I think the perception of this kind of offloading would be very negative.
It worked for England and Australia. Move the criminals to a totally different environment, give them a fresh start, break up the gangs and disfunctional social networks…
If costs imposed on other states are significant wouldn’t you expect mutual banishment agreements? Are there any between states?
“England and Australia”: we only started using Australia because we couldn’t use the 13 colonies any more.
hmmm…. very interesting subject, because one could argue both ways. In our current day i think that banishment would not work. In our world were one can move from state to state, email, and everything is easy to acces banishment would not stop a criminal from doing what they want to do. When a criminal is wanted in a certain state they often run away into another state, so banishing them from one state does not change their mentallity, they are a criminal whether they are in LA, NY, or Maine.
What happens to a criminal when they are banished and relocated to another location? Would the people in the community that the criminal was relocated to be informed that a criminal had been sent to their community? Would there be some sort of registration program like their is for sex offenders? If there was something like that what is to stop people from harassing the criminal or making life miserable for him. If the person was convicted of a violent crime and banished and the community he was sent too treated him terribly he might be driven to commit another violent crime. And what about the people who live in the communities that these criminals are relocated too? Might having registered criminals in your community lower things like property value or make businesses decide they don’t want to move to that area?
Ah, but banishment also cuts the accused off from their existing community (aka their Social Capital). So now you have someone who was (heopefully) struggling to reform, cut them off from their support base, and dropped them somewhere where they are anonymous. They now have very little incentive to reform and are facing serious short term costs while they build up new Social Capital.
Any rational person might re-turn to crime ‘just for a bit’.
Meant to write…”for a period” – my apologies.
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