Barring any massive mental illness, humans are great optimizers. Crime is basically the optimal policy within environmentm where illegal activites with their added risk have a potential much greater reward than leading your life normally and doing things by the book.
Its not hard to inject money in the right places to either decrease the reward, or increase the risk.
>Crime is basically the optimal policy within environmentm where illegal activites with their added risk have a potential much greater reward than
An interesting theory. But there exists a class of criminals who commit crimes not because the tradeoffs come out with the crime ahead of the lawfulness, but because they are impulsive, malicious, bored, and apathetic. Some of them continue to commit crime even after they are well out of poverty, even when the tradeoffs have shifted in the other direction. And this isn't some tiny fraction of crime, I suspect it is the majority of it. Crime has become their culture, and no one casually gives up culture and adopts a new one. More importantly, while one single person might do that, an entire group does not do this because they reinforce each other's continuation of that culture.
This makes it difficult or impossible to inject money anywhere and have measurable results. It makes it difficult or impossible to do anything at all about it. And for that reason, I'd prefer we not pursue a trillion dollar boondoggle.
>And this isn't some tiny fraction of crime, I suspect it is the majority of it.
Nope.
Lets take the famous example of low income area gang activity. They have examples of everything from local powerful people in charge having enough money to buy nice cars, to things like famous rappers with origins in same gangs. The reason why they commit crime is because the alternative actually sucks - you have to put up with boredom, lack of money, poverty, lack of any social support, all into a system that is going to discriminate against you even if you do everything right. This is where proper money injection with adequate policing can easily fix the problem.
As for people continuing to do crime after being financially off, this is still just a matter of tradeoff still favoring the crime side. The crime that most of these people commit is stuff like illegal firearms, drugs, and/or financial fraud - i.e stuff that is really not that relevant to society, with potentially a big payoff instead of investment. At the worst, some people get scammed. Meanwhile, the perpetrator gets usually punished financially or minimal jailing.
There are always going to be mentally unwell people who end up being serial killers, but the risk to society from those people is minuscule.
>Lets take the famous example of low income area gang activity.
That's the perfect example! Street drug dealers make less than minimum wage. Why bother with the risk of prison, death, and on top of it get paid the equivalent of $4/hour when you could go make $14/hour at a fast food job?
Because you actually like the sheer hell of what you're doing.
>you have to put up with boredom, l
And how the fuck are we supposed to solve that problem for them with welfare? You'll notice you even list that first, poverty and lack of social support come, in your mind, second to boredom. I think we're actually in agreement here on the problem, just you want to pretend that there is a solution to this problem.
Its not hard to inject money in the right places to either decrease the reward, or increase the risk.