Cruxing on crime

My views on crime and justice are fairly unusual for my class. I tend to believe that:

• crime is a largely solvable problem with massive low hanging policy fruit. Basically, we could be pretty similar to Singapore if we just chose a slightly different policy mix
• the solution to criminality is longish prison sentences for most crimes, especially for repeat offenders or serious crimes
• this solution has massively positive EV for society generally but especially for those who are lower down the social-econ spectrum and thus suffer more from crime in various ways (victimization risk, risk of being seen as a criminal, etc…)

I spent some time a week ago debating criminal justice with a few friends. I think one things I lacked before then was a clear idea of what the cruxes of my beliefs are. After some discussion and thought, I think the core cruxes are as follows

• The distribution of criminality follows a power law
• Criminals are largely irredeemable (at least using current tools) other than through aging-out effects

The reason I believe criminals are hard to reform is that successive governments have tried and yet reoffending rates remain extremely high. The UK’s known reoffending rate within 1 year of release is like 30%. Considering how low the UK’s detection and prosecution rate for most crimes is, that implies a sky-high true reoffending rate let along the rate of crimes per released prisoner.

The reason I believe that crime has a power law distribution is mostly just reading about it. Most of the stats show it. My personal experience with it in school/my estate growing up is similar. Most of the problems seemed to come from a tiny % of people who consistently made life hell for everyone else.

What would I need to learn to change my mind? I guess one of a number of things could change my mind here:

• Evidence of scaleable, cost-effective non-prison ways to stop criminals doing crime. This could be rehabilitation but could also be other things like home-arrest, electronic monitoring etc…
• Evidence of a replacement effect. AKA, would criminals who are locked up just get replaced by the next best criminals from the population? If individual propensity to offend fairly fixed or are there large pools os plausible substitutes available?
• Evidence that the cost of imprisoning criminals is higher than the social cost of the damage their actions cause. (AKA: if the cost of crime to society/people is low, then maybe prison is overkil as a solution)