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Optimal Penalties for Concealment of Crime

 
Paper:ewp-le/9507001
From:    
Date: Fri, 7 Jul 95 06:53:53 CDT
Date (revised): Wed, 27 Dec 95 04:16:06 CST

Abstract:
Society should give criminals incentives not to conceal their criminal activity. The concealment costs themselves are a social waste, as are other costs the concealment may impose on society, such as additional harm or increased law enforcement expenditures. I show that for any set of sanctions that lead to positive concealment on behalf of the criminal, that society can modify the sanctions to give the criminal an incentive not to conceal and unambiguously improve social welfare. A similar conclusion will apply to increasing the costs of concealment devices to improve social welfare. Society can deter concealment of crime by raising the sanction or raising the cost of concealing the crime. Which policy is chosen should depend upon the concealment device involved. If it is easy to detect the use of a concealment device when a person is caught, then penalties should be imposed on the criminal for using such a concealment device. If the device is of the type that has no legitimate purpose other than being used for concealment, then the device should be heavily taxed or be outlawed. For situations where we are unable to determine whether the device has been used to conceal and the device has legitimate purpose, society should set one penalty for the crime, and possibly a generalized additional sanction for any concealment of the crime that can be determined.

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EconWPA began as a conversation between Bob Parks and Larry Blume on January 28, 1993. I located Paul Ginsparg's archive (then xxx.lanl.gov) and he graciously installed his software on a Sun Sparc system which was supporting the department of economics email and computation. EconWPA began accepting papers July 1, 1993 and had ftp, email, gopher and web interfaces. The web interface for submissions was engineered into existence in July 1995. A complete and catastrophic machine failure in 1999 caused the loss of EconWPA's email new paper announcment service at which time there were over 15,000 subscriptions with over 8,000 unique email addresses.

In 2005, Arts and Sciences commandeered the computing services that I had provided to the Department of Economics since 1987. Some might say that the department was sold out, others would (erroneously) claim that centralization is efficient, and still others would claim that I have few marketing skills.

I was told that I could keep operating EconWPA (as well as many other services including rfe.wustl.edu, barnett.wustl.edu, and three RePEc servers) but I would receive no support (hardware, software, or anthing else) and (as had been the case) no compensation. At that point, given the apparent low valuation of my activities by the department, and university, it made no sense for me to continue operating EconWPA or other services.

Thanks to all who have supported EconWPA in the past.

A Chinese curse states May you live in intersting times. I have. Bob Parks - Jan 2006