David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

business. The human psyche follows the course of least resistance. The course of least resistance is what’s easy, and it’s a hell of a lot easier to go out and rob and steal and suck drugs than it is to go out and bust your ass forty hours a week and punch in on a job and take a lot of shit off customers. Who needs that? I can go out there and wave a gun around and make as much as I want as fast as I want, and if I get caught, ninety-five percent of all cases get plea-bargained down. They charge me with this, I’ll admit to that, and so let’s make a deal. And then third, I’m going to only serve half the time. Weigh all three, the odds are you’re going to do one hell of a lot of crime before you ever in fact get caught and prosecuted.”
    Reynolds was making a version of the argument that Leites and Wolf made in their classic work on deterrence: Fundamental to our analysis is the assumption that the population, as individuals or groups, behaves “rationally,” that it calculates costs and benefits to the extent that they can be related to different courses of action, and makes choices accordingly. In Reynolds’s view, criminals found the benefits of committing a crime in California much greater than the risks. The answer, he felt, was to raise the costs of committing a crime so high that it was no longer easier to rob and steal than to work an honest job. And for those who continued to break the law—even in the face of those altered odds—Three Strikes said, Lock them up for the rest of their lives, so they never have a chance to commit another crime again. When it came to law and order, Reynolds and the voters of California believed, “more” was always better.
    But is it? Here’s where the inverted-U theorist steps in. Let’s start with the first assumption—that criminals respond to increases in the cost of crime by committing fewer crimes. This is clearly true when the penalties for breaking the law are really low. One of the best known case studies in criminology is about what happened in the fall of 1969 when the Montreal police went on strike for sixteen hours. Montreal was—and still is—a world-class city in a country that is considered one of the most law-abiding and stable in the world. So, what happened? Chaos. There were so many bank robberies that day—in broad daylight—that virtually every bank in the city had to close. Looters descended on downtown Montreal, smashing windows. Most shocking of all, a long-standing dispute between the city’s taxi drivers and a local car service called Murray Hill Limousine Service over the right to pick up passengers from the airport exploded into violence, as if the two sides were warring principalities in medieval Europe. The taxi drivers descended on Murray Hill with gasoline bombs. Murray Hill’s security guards opened fire. The taxi drivers then set a bus on fire and sent it crashing through the locked doors of the Murray Hill garage. This is Canada we’re talking about. As soon as the police returned to work, however, order was restored. The threat of arrest and punishment worked.
    Clearly, then, there’s a big difference between having no penalties for breaking the law and having some penalties—just as there’s a big difference between a class of forty students and a class of twenty-five. On the left side of the inverted-U curve, interventions make a difference.
    But remember, the logic of the inverted-U curve is that the same strategies that work really well at first stop working past a certain point, and that’s exactly what many criminologists argue happens with punishment.
    Some years ago, for example, the criminologists Richard Wright and Scott Decker interviewed eighty-six convicted armed robbers. Most of what they heard were comments like this:
    I put forth an effort to try not to think about [getting caught.…It’s] too much of a distraction. You can’t concentrate on doing anything if you are thinking, “What’s gonna happen if it doesn’t go right?” As time went on, if I had made up my mind to do a robbery, [I decided] to be totally focused on that and nothing else.
    Or this:
    That’s why [my partners and I] get high so much. [We] get high and get stupid, then we don’t trip off of [the threat of getting caught]. Whatever happens, happens.…You just don’t care at the time.
    Even when pressed, the criminals interviewed by Decker and Wright “remained indifferent to threatened sanctions.” They just