The title is intended to be provocative.
I know that the definition of crime is always in flux at the margins. I know that killing people for minor crimes only makes sense to those people who are the victims. It would be nice to live in a society without crime or with very little.
That is the subject of this blog. Japan is a society with virtually no crime. While Japan is less than half the size of the United States there are more murders per year in Oakland, a single American town, than in the entire country of Japan.
When I'm in Japan I never have any sense of crime or the potential for crime.
How did that happen? The answer must be that criminals or criminal behavior has been bred out of the society. I don't think that criminal behavior is genetic. Therefore it is bred out by making sure that the individuals who pass on criminal behaviors are unable to reproduce and raise children.
In the United States we have an incredibly dramatic drop in crime after 1991 and it was shown by Donohue and Levitt that this was the result of legalized abortions widely available 20 years earlier.(Please don't argue against this, the data is overwhelming and the research is top-flight.) This is again not evidence of criminal behavior being genetic, it is evidence that potential criminals didn't have parents or a parent to raise them. The criminal strain in the culture was terminated when the potential criminal wasn't born.
To me this suggests some very harsh considerations. I do think that some juvenile criminals and young people in prison should be paid to be sterilized. Considering the cost of incarceration, they could be paid large sums of money in the range of $100,000 each.
While I see the moral problems, I also see the benefits of a low crime society.