« A loyal MR reader asks... | Main | Guatemala fact of the day »
Banishment
Today I am in Florida giving a seminar to a group of Federal judges on the law and economics of Federalism and Crime. One of the surprising things that I discovered in my research is that cities, counties, and even most states can legally banish criminals from their borders. I say most states because, for example, the Georgia state constitution makes banishment illegal. Georgia judges, however, have found a way around the law they have imposed "158-county" banishment. (If you guessed that Georgia has 159 counties give yourself two points.)
Banishment is a particulary noteworthy example of a negative spillover - banishment benefits the state doing the banishing but only at the expense of other states. I will suggest to the Federal judges, therefore, that state banishment should be illegal.
There are some arguments for banishment from a city or county. Banishment, for example, can remove a criminal from negative peer influences. Whether the advantages outweigh the spillovers is an open question but city and county banishment should be left to the states because the state government can internalize the city/county spillover.
Posted by Alex Tabarrok on November 6, 2006 at 07:21 AM in Economics, Law | Permalink
Comments
"...but city and county banishment should be left to the states because the state government can internalize the city/county spillover."
How is that different from the states doing the banishing and the federal government internalizing the spillover? It seems likely that neither level of government is going to adequetely take into account the negative spillover and that the localities getting spilled on are going to get stuck with some extra criminals.
Posted by: Tim at Nov 6, 2006 9:16:12 AM
Very interesting post. Thanks.
Posted by: Daniel Klein at Nov 6, 2006 9:53:23 AM
I think there is a law on the books in Calgary along those lines. Except the government must provide the banished with a gun and a horse.
Posted by: Josh at Nov 6, 2006 10:12:17 AM
Why not set up a market for the banished? Maybe an auction. The locality in which the individual currently resides could post a "reservation price" (in this case a MAXIMUM price that they would be willing to pay to be rid of the criminal), with the localities willing to accept the criminal submitting bids. The locality with the lowest bid (subject to its bid being lower than the reservation price of the criminal's current locality) receives both the criminal and a payment of its bid (or whatever auction process you want to use if you don't like first-price sealed bid).
Of course, we could end up with a locality full of criminals (wasn't there a Steve Martin movie, My Blue Heaven, where all of the witnesses that testified against the Mafia were relocated to the same place?). And this certainly restricts the criminal's freedom to move from one place to another. And if the criminal can't get a job, and isn't able to move to take a job, then that's not good. But the auction should remove the negative externality.
I'm sure there are other reasons not to do this, or perhaps some modifications to the rules that would make this more palatable.
Posted by: AZ at Nov 6, 2006 10:49:58 AM
Prof. AT,
Deportation is a form of banishment practiced by countries. Do you approve of this? Aren’t states/courts being consistent by permitting banishment if it is approved in principle by the federal government?
Posted by: Chairman Mao at Nov 6, 2006 11:34:53 AM
1) So which poor county in Georgia gets stuck with all the undesirables?
2) I suspect that banishment is rarely used and usually only for offenses that are technically trivial but symbolically offensive. I'm thinking here of Ozzy Osbourne's permanent banishment from San Antonio for urinating on the Alamo. Is this assumption on my part true, Alex?
Posted by: Thelonious_Nick at Nov 6, 2006 11:54:11 AM
There are lots of crimes for which radically peaceful folk would find incarceration way too severe, but banishment appropriate. After all, if someone behaves very badly in your home, or at your football stadium ... you ask them to leave, don't you? Does that mean you have no concern for how they behave after they leave? Well, that all depends.
We have enough crime in most US cities that women don't feel safe to walk alone at night, and yet somehow banishment of predators is seldom taken seriously. In some neighborhoods and in some families, returning from prison makes you "the man" to lots of kids. Returning from banishment might not seem quite as macho.
Sophisticated banishments might involve limited duration, parole provisions, specific penalties for unauthorized re-entry, and payments to jurisdictions willing to accept (and suitably maintain?) those banished. Judges should have a range of options to shop amongst. Do judges even know the recidivism rates of the various options they tend towards now? Or the rates at which prisoners are brutalized by other prisoners?
Posted by: Dave Meleney at Nov 6, 2006 12:07:13 PM
The spillover may be more or less than one-for-one (in units of ne'er-do-wells). A banished criminal may improve his morals because of separation from a
social network of negative influences or become more hardened in his ways because of separation from a countervailing positive social network. This should
be netted against the effect of network in which he finds himself in the new community. On this basis, impirics might indicate that banishment is optimal
for urban dwellers but not rural residents or gang members but not church members. If the "market for banishment" were thicker perhaps these hypothesis
would be testable.
Posted by: Matthew Petersen at Nov 6, 2006 2:08:20 PM
...Of course, we could end up with a locality full of criminals...
As I recall Robert Heinlein wrote a short story along these lines - criminals were banished to Coventry, where they had to live with other criminals (and had a rough time of it, generally).
Banishment worked better when communities were separate enough that you really didn't have
to give a damn whether people in the next state cared about a murderer showing up on their doorstep. Nowadays I think the perception of this kind of offloading would be very negative.
Posted by: bbartlog at Nov 6, 2006 4:40:10 PM
Banishment would be a good punishment for stalkers.
Posted by: Phil at Nov 6, 2006 5:42:31 PM
It worked for England and Australia. Move the criminals to a totally different environment, give them a fresh start, break up the gangs and disfunctional social networks...
Posted by: Patrick at Nov 6, 2006 6:03:03 PM
Sure banishment creates negative externalities for receiving communities due to high recidivism and prevention costs. But these costs seem small compared to the costs of “relocation” borne convict. This seems like a simple method of imposing costs on criminal behavior, particularly when compared to costly incarceration. Thus, I can envision a two country world in which banishment of criminals to the other country is an efficient outcome preferred by both.
Posted by: blink at Nov 6, 2006 9:44:35 PM
If costs imposed on other states are significant wouldn't you expect mutual banishment agreements? Are there any between states?
Posted by: Mike Linksvayer at Nov 6, 2006 11:17:12 PM
For some reason I am reminded that DC police officers once marched a group of prostitutes across the 14th street bridge and dumped them in Virginia.
Posted by: evm at Nov 7, 2006 10:52:08 AM
"England and Australia": we only started using Australia because we couldn't use the 13 colonies any more.
Posted by: dearieme at Nov 7, 2006 2:10:09 PM
Would you say that the US and Australia are fairly market-oriented, at least relative to the rest of the countries in the world? What then does this say about criminals and the organization of their societies if they allow markets to dictate who gets what? I could be really far off on all premises, but just wondering aloud (or in print) if criminals might be more apt to organize in markets.
Also, I just started teaching a section on Game Theory and was going to give my PhD students a simple prisoner's dilemma game to play with (the same one I would give a principles class to start with), when I recalled what might be one of the great 6 words or less stories of all time by one of my principles students some years ago (has it really been 6-7 years? Wow.). At any rate, they were supposed to write either Confess or Not Confess. One student wrote:
"Not confess, I'm Italian".
Now that tells a story ... Chris T., wherever he is, gets all the credit for that one.
Posted by: AZ at Nov 8, 2006 10:42:10 AM
hmmm.... very interesting subject, because one could argue both ways. In our current day i think that banishment would not work. In our world were one can move from state to state, email, and everything is easy to acces banishment would not stop a criminal from doing what they want to do. When a criminal is wanted in a certain state they often run away into another state, so banishing them from one state does not change their mentallity, they are a criminal whether they are in LA, NY, or Maine.
Posted by: Franchize501 at Nov 8, 2006 12:36:36 PM
Perhaps a banishment for certain crimes committed would be a better alternative. Taking away banishment would allow criminals to once more live in areas that they once committed crimes in. While I don't want to live next to a person convicted of rape and such, I also don't feel it is necessary to force that person to live in another state. While one person may not want a person convicted of petty crimes such as small burglary living next to them, another person may not have a problem with it. We already regulate where certain convicts go and cannot go, so perhaps why shouldn't we regulate where they can and cannot live?
Posted by: TimMacior at Nov 8, 2006 10:55:54 PM
What happens to a criminal when they are banished and relocated to another location? Would the people in the community that the criminal was relocated to be informed that a criminal had been sent to their community? Would there be some sort of registration program like their is for sex offenders? If there was something like that what is to stop people from harassing the criminal or making life miserable for him. If the person was convicted of a violent crime and banished and the community he was sent too treated him terribly he might be driven to commit another violent crime. And what about the people who live in the communities that these criminals are relocated too? Might having registered criminals in your community lower things like property value or make businesses decide they don't want to move to that area?
Posted by: Robert S at Nov 8, 2006 11:52:12 PM
I think Patrick has an excellent point which has gone undiscussed here; to what extent are criminal behaviors a function of the individual's social environment? Could banishment be an effective means of severing those negative social ties (gangs, organized crime, etc.)? Could it give them a chance to start a more constructive live, free from the former negative social pressure which provided incentive for their criminal behavior?
Posted by: Ironside at Nov 22, 2006 2:00:56 PM
Ah, but banishment also cuts the accused off from their existing community (aka their Social Capital). So now you have someone who was (heopefully) struggling to reform, cut them off from their support base, and dropped them somewhere where they are anonymous. They now have very little incentive to reform and are facing serious short term costs while they build up new Social Capital.
Any rational person might re-turn to crime 'just for a bit'.
Posted by: judd at Nov 22, 2006 3:43:36 PM
Does anyone know how I can have a banishment lifted or the county changed in GA? I plan to return to marry the woman I love and I am restricted from a criminal case. She must stay in GA for a peiod and we desperatly would to be together. Can it be done? Is it difficult? Where to start?
Posted by: Scot at Nov 24, 2006 11:55:27 AM
Meant to write..."for a period" - my apologies.
Posted by: Scot at Nov 24, 2006 12:01:07 PM
My brother is on a 156 county banishment here in georgia.He is 3 years past his tenative parole date because they won't allow him to parole out of state unless it's to a family member.I am the only family member left and I live in cherokee county,ga. Thi is getting to be very frustrating.Any suggestions???
Posted by: Vonna at Jun 14, 2008 6:49:56 PM
How Can I Get A Certain Kind Of Geportation 1 That Allows Me To eave Planet Earth And Never Return
Posted by: David Hickle at Aug 16, 2008 12:22:07 AM
