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Comment by valianteffort | Hacker News Reader

The notion that a thief would have to pay for their crimes with their life, either because anyone could be armed and its legal to protect your property with lethal force, or the government would punish repeated theft with death, I think would be enough to deter most people from doing so. It's the fact that a jail/prison sentence is meaningless to most criminals (if they're even sent there), that we have such rampant crime.

Just look at any country that has strict laws, and serious punishment like Singapore, Japan, South Korea. They enjoy unparalleled safety in their cities.

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I agree that the immediate risk of death would probably influence it a bit. On the other hand, it's pretty clear that there is not a strong negative correlation between "risk of death" and "crime rate" in the world, just think about south America (high death risk and high crime) and the Nordic countries (low death risk low crime).

I also strongly disagree with the statement "It's the fact that a jail/prison sentence is meaningless to most criminals (if they're even sent there), that we have such rampant crime.". Again, compare prison sentences in the USA with e.g Norway, then compare their recidivism rates. There are many many factors that play into crime rate (poverty, education, and recidivism being important ones), reducing it to 'our prisons are too nice' is way too simple.

> (low death risk low crime).

If you look at lower level crime (theft etc.) Western Europe and especially the Nordic countries are not doing that well. Sweden for instance has the highest levels of theft and burglary in the whole Europe by quite a margin. Not saying "too nice" prisons are too blame for this, there are certainly some more important factors (hint: recent immigration and failure to integrate second/third generation "immigrants" (couldn't find a better word to describe this group)).

I don't really think so. In the middle ages, punishments for all sorts of crimes were pretty severe--but partly because the vast majority of crime would go unsolved. If you're a peasant in the middle ages and some valuables go missing, who's going to track that down for you? It's not happening unless you know for sure it was your neighbor or something.

So yeah, when they would catch a thief they would receive some pretty harsh punishment. But it didn't stop much. Theft in the middle ages was rampant.

Humans are pretty bad at making calculations involving a really bad outcome at a 5% chance of happening, or those sorts of things. Theft persists today as it did then, just because it's really hard to investigate and so generally goes unpunished.

Another point is that inequality also drives petty theft, especially in the Middle Ages. People don’t tend to commit petty theft because they want to. For a modern example, see https://jacobin.com/2022/02/mainstream-media-news-shopliftin...

> They enjoy unparalleled safety in their cities.

Plenty of countries/cities which don't are pretty safe too (e.g. Eastern Europe these days)

I'm not gonna pretend homogeneity isn't a factor.

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