One way or another, criminals must be required or forced, if necessary, to pay off all costs associated with their crimes.

Suspect’s Assets Frozen Until Determination of Guilt or Innocence

When a suspect is arrested, a restriction should be placed on the transfer of ownership of all significant assets to any other person, unless approved by a judge. This is to preserve any assets that may be potentially needed in order to pay for this crime for which society has not yet determined his guilt.

Criminals Negotiate Payment Plan With Government

As soon as a criminal is convicted, the government would enter into negotiations with the criminal and try to develop a payment plan that would pay off all these bills in a timely manner, but without kicking the criminal into homelessness or unsustainable poverty and still retaining the criminals’ rehabilitative desire and prospects.

A criminal having sufficient assets could fulfill their obligations immediately. Or if a criminal has a decent job that the government feels will suffice to pay off these criminal expenses in a timely manner, and if the government ‘trusts’ the criminal to honor his debts, then the government should let the criminal go free on the condition that timely payments be submitted.

Trusted Criminals Are Set Free; Others Are Supervised to Various Degrees

If the government doesn’t ‘trust’ the criminal enough (i.e., thinks the criminal is a public safety risk or might somehow escape from his obligations), then the government could impose any of various levels of supervision on the criminal, ranging from remote supervision, like requiring them to call a monitoring office every day or wear a tracking device, to 24-hour imprisonment.

Though negotiations between the government and criminals would determine the actual repayment plan, the following could serve as general guidelines. Within a month of conviction, the government would have the right to immediately confiscate some or all ‘luxury’ items (luxury boats, jet skis, collectibles, cable TV subscriptions, etc.) as the first step to paying off these debts, unless the criminal can prove that he could pay off these debts within one year. If a significant portion of the debt still remains or is very likely to remain, after one year, the government would have the right to confiscate all non-critical assets (those which are not needed to preserve the criminal’s most basic living conditions) in order to pay off these debts.

If the criminal has been sentenced to prison for a long time (such as for over 5 years), the government would be entitled to liquidate all of the criminal’s assets to pay off their criminal debts. Even if full payment (including paying-forward) for all costs associated with a crime has been made by the criminal, the full prison sentence should still be served.

Every criminal in prison would be provided with job opportunities to help them pay off their debts. Because government is the social institution responsible for both creating and enforcing the laws that the criminals have broken, governments should have priority over the utilization and employment of prison labor and the labor of others under government detention or supervision programs while private and non-governmental interests should be second. The commission of every crime represents an offense to the government, thus entitling it to some form of compensation. Perhaps one of the main employment opportunities for prison labor should be the sorting and preparation of wastes for recycling. Such sorting could take place on or adjacent to prison grounds or at any adequately supervised location. These jobs could provide the prisoners with at least a minimum wage job and the government with low-wage labor. Criminals could also search through a government database listing jobs dealing with aesthetic pollution or other small non-critical jobs aimed at making civilian infrastructures more pleasant to look at and use. However, there are perhaps hundreds of other possible jobs that prisoners could perform.

Anybody (such as family, friends, even strangers) could feel free to come and perform work on a criminal’s behalf, in order to help that criminal pay off his debt faster. Such people could also either donate directly towards payment of the criminal’s debt, could join the prisoner (if the prisoner approves) and work along side him or could just do some other similar government-offered job in any other location but must contribute the earning towards the prisoner’s account.

Convicted criminals also have the option of using any of their possible criminal talents to augment the effectiveness of law enforcement, and be paid to do so. By using their talents and connections with other possible criminal friends, such convicted criminals could both inform the government of more effective methods of enforcement against particular criminal behaviors and provide law enforcement with information that could be used to apprehend other suspected criminal friends.

They could also possibly be compensated for helping prevent possible future crimes from occurring. As part of their work, convicted criminals who have been placed in prison could possibly be released back into their communities for purposes of gathering information on other criminal activities. These convicted criminals would be compensated just as would regular informants who would turn over similar information to law enforcement.

For criminals whose sentences included a certain amount of torture, a reduction in that amount of torture may also be used as an incentive to participate with police to help reduce or solve crimes.

All criminals, including those sentenced to death, should be allowed and encouraged to sell themselves (bodies and/or minds), at market prices, for medical experimentation (non-life threatening and non-debilitating), vaccine testing, experimental drug testing, long-term carcinogenic chemical testing, psychological testing, organ selling, nuclear radiation exposure (possible clean-up operations), etc. In some cases, to attain information that may not be attainable through other, more conventional means, individuals sentenced to death (and any other criminal volunteers) could be required to undergo a short period of torture for a maximum of half an hour, provided the individual is not in extreme pain for over 5 minutes. Death penalty convicts could also be trained as bomb disposal or defusing technicians or other life threatening tasks. They would be compensated generously and would be able to make large progress towards paying off their debts. If they die in the process, that would be the risk they have chosen to take. Each activity would pay the criminal a different amount for his services as a human test platform. In return, the criminal would earn more money which he must use to pay off his direct, indirect, and punitive debts.

Often times, a criminal or criminal entity (such as a business) will not be able to pay for the total direct, indirect, and punitive costs of their crimes, even if they are forced to work their entire lives, in which cases they still must be forced to work their entire lives. In these cases, the government, who has already paid these costs to the victim, will then need to absorb this loss. Since the government is ultimately responsible for creating a safe society, the commission of a crime represents the government’s failure to perform its purpose. Therefore, it should be the government, rather than the victim, who should bear a loss when it comes to paying for crime.

In cases where a criminal dies before his financial obligations are fulfilled, such criminals would have all of their assets pass to the control of the government and liquidated in order to fulfill their financial obligations. Any remaining assets (or special items which the government deems more proper to pass on to the criminal’s spouse or other willed party) would be distributed according to a will or other legal document or convention, as usual.

The government should have the right to prevent any dead criminal’s assets from being distributed to any willed party for a maximum of 5 years if an investigation is still ongoing or if there is enough suspicion of possible other crimes committed by the criminal which have yet to be solved.

A criminal who has unjustly or deceitfully transferred assets to any other party whether before or after his conviction or death, would subject those parties to potential government confiscation of those assets to pay off criminal liabilities. Liabilities could be potentially partially reduced if the parties into which the assets have been transferred would be critically or catastrophically impacted by the seizure of their total liability amount. The courts would determine what a critical or catastrophic impact would be and such thresholds should be progressively more conservative as the years go by, until, after 10 years, the assets would be virtually untouchable by the government.

If a victim dies before being completely compensated for a crime committed against him/her, the criminal would still be required to fully pay his obligations (direct costs of the crime and punitive penalties) to either the next of kin to the victim, close friends (either at the time of the crime or at the time of death), or to whomever parties the victim has willed his/her property. Blood relationships may be superseded by relationships held between the deceased victim and his friends, caretakers, etc., if it could be shown that these people were more close friends than family members. (Perhaps a standard question in will documents could address this eventuality.)

If nobody can be found that is sufficiently ‘close’ to the deceased victim to receive part or all of the awarded amount, then the award or remaining portion thereof would be evenly divided and placed into the general funds of each level of government (city, county, state, federal) in which the crime took place (unless members within that level of government were involved in committing, aiding, covering up or protecting the perpetrators of the crime).

If both the victim and criminal have died more than 5 years before a link is established between the two, the criminal’s estate would owe nothing and the victim would not be entitled to a punitive award. However, the victim’s spouse, relatives, or close friends perhaps may be entitled to some compensation of the direct costs of the crime depending upon the particulars of such a crime, specifically how much such people may have suffered as a result of the victim’s suffering.

Example:
The following example may help illustrate how this kind of criminal justice system would work. If a criminal steals a $200 bicycle parked on the sidewalk, the government should be required to compensate the victim within a reasonable period of time (like within 3 months of the occurrence of the crime) with $200 times a multiple of perhaps 2, making the total compensation amount $400. If the criminal is caught, tried and found guilty, the criminal would be required to repay the government the $400 it gave the victim. In addition, the criminal would have to pay all court, investigative, detention, and possibly other costs associated with processing the crime and the criminal through the criminal justice system. (Let’s assume such charges add up to $2,000.) If the criminal confronted and threatened the bicycle owner with harm during the theft, a multiple of 5 could be applied bringing the net crime bill to $1,000 ($200 x 5 = $1,000 net crime bill, plus $2,000 court costs = $3,000 total crime bill).

If it is revealed that a person lied about his $200 bicycle being stolen after he parked it outside a store, and after the courts awarded him compensation for the bike plus a multiple of 2, then that person would be charged with the theft of $400 ($200 x multiple of 2 = $400). His penalty would then be $400 plus a multiple of this amount, which would depend on the particulars of the case, and any additional administrative, court or other costs. Assuming the courts settle on a multiple of 3, this fraudulent ‘victim’s’ bill would come out to $1,200 plus any additional administrative costs. If these additional costs add up to $2,000, then the ‘victim’ would have a bill for $3,200.