One way of choosing among different forms of punishment is by how much it costs to impose a given cost on the criminal. Consider first execution. The cost to the criminal is one life. That is also, if we ignore the salary of the hangman or the electric bill for the electric chair, both trivial in comparison, the total cost, so the ratio of total cost to amount of deterrence is about one. The same would be true for a corporal punishment such as a flogging. Next consider imprisonment, one of the two common forms of criminal punishment in modern societies. The cost to the criminal of a five year sentence is five years spent in prison. The cost to the rest of us is the cost of running the prison. Total cost, ours plus his, is the sum of the two, so the ratio of total cost to amount of deterrence is substantially more than one. Imprisonment is a more inefficient punishment than execution or corporal punishment, since it costs more to produce the same amount of deterrence. The other...
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