Violent Offense Under Bounties & Vouchers
I recently talked to some smart high school students about the voucher and bounty crime reform scenario. They imagined bounty hunters spending most of their time in chases and gun fights, as in cowboy or Star Wars movies. So they were against the scenario, preferring such violence roles to be filled by government employees.
But in fact bounty hunters today spend almost no time in chases or fights. And that was true throughout history; bounty hunters have been widely used in Rome and England for thousands of years. (I’ll discuss that history more below.) Movies emphasize rare scenarios to create conflict and drama. The main job of most bounty hunters was to collect evidence, and then to sue in a court trial. As lawyers have always done to prepare for and engage in lawsuits.
Okay, you might ask, but in a world of vouchers and bounty hunters, sometimes there would be gun fight or car chases, right? So who would be authorized to participate in such activities, and what powers would they have or need? That is, who would do violence in this scenario?
First, many parties, maybe even everyone, could be allowed to stand ready to defend themselves violently. Okay, you might say, but won’t offensive violence also be needed sometimes? If so, who is authorized to do that?
Well, note that a person found to lack a voucher would need to be assigned one immediately. Perhaps a “public option” voucher who keeps clients temporarily in a detention center. And offensive force might be needed to move such a newly found client to such a detention center.
Actually, this isn’t a special case, as in general vouchers and their representatives would be the main parties authorized to use offensive force. After all, vouchers would often be authorized by their client contracts to physically punish their clients. And if a client seems to be about to hurt others, perhaps via force, their voucher is usually the party with the strongest interest in stopping them. As they have to pay for any resulting damages.
Thus voucher-client contracts will pretty much always authorize the voucher to use offensive force against their client, both to punish them, and to prevent clients from causing harm. And the rest of us don’t need to decide what kinds of force should be allowed there, if those two are the only parties effected by their choice.
However, what if a third party ends up getting hurt when a voucher uses offensive force on their client? In this case, either the voucher or their client is likely guilty of a crime, and the voucher is on the hook either way to pay damages. To avoid these losses, vouchers would likely make deals to help each other in such situations, and have their clients agree to such behavior in their voucher-client contracts. Thus in the general bounty-voucher scenario, most offensive violence would happen between parties who had agreed by contract beforehand on how violence is to be handled.
Vouchers who have made such voucher-voucher deals also seem well-placed to handle people discovered to be without a voucher. Thus a simple solution for this case might be to hold a fast auction to see which nearby voucher is willing to take on this person as a client at the lowest price. This voucher would then have the job of transferring this client to a public option detention center, after which that detention center would become the client’s official voucher. At least until that client could arrange for a new voucher.
Note that under this voucher-bounty system, as long as everyone has a voucher then there is no need for any other party besides a voucher to forcibly detain anyone, either to ensure that they appear in court or to ensure that they can be punished. As vouchers are fully liable for such failures, such tasks can be delegated to them.
As I said above, fights and chases have not actually been the main complaints about bounty hunters in history. The main complaint in the last few centuries, which led to cuts in their usage, seems to be that bounty hunters were typically for-profit agents, whereas many thought government employees could be better trusted to promote the general welfare.
Here are the other main complaints about bounty hunters that I find in this article on the history of their usage (called “qui tam”) in England. Bounty hunters have at times made false accusations, committed perjury, coerced witnesses, faked evidence, tempted people to commit crimes, threatened jurors who ruled against them, and enforced the letter of laws against the spirit of the law.
Bounty hunters have also at times filed their claims in distant expensive-to-travel-to courts, and detained the accused before delayed trials, and used the treat of such treatments to extort concessions. They have accepted private settlements (i.e., plea bargains and bribes) instead of going to court. And they have accepted payments from guilty folks to do a bad job at trial, when such efforts prevent future trials from being held on the same accusations.
However, the government employee police who replaced bounty hunters have also done all these things. Some assume that such employees will do such things less often than would bounty hunters. But I don’t know of evidence that supports this claim. And remember that government police can much more effectively maintain a “blue wall of silence” that prevents the reporting and prosecution of such things. Whereas bounty hunters will happily turn on each other, just as one can easily hire a lawyer today to sue another lawyer, or a P.I. to investigate another P.I.
Note that we can greatly cut the harm of private settlements via keeping the bounty and fine levels close to each other. And no one besides vouchers need to detain anyone.
Another thing that occurred to me is, what if the voucher sets in the contract that binding arbitration must be used for disputes, and the client must waive their right to sue? Then the arbitrator has incentives to be heavily biased in favor of the voucher, similar to the National Arbitration Forum, which ruled in favor of the consumer 0.2% of the time.
I think you would want to prevent mandatory binding arbitration - I think there are a lot of contract terms between voucher and client that would have to be banned for the whole system to be a net benefit to the clients. But would these terms actually be banned, given the political pressures by the vouchers not to ban them, and the fact that contract terms like that (mandatory binding arbitration) are currently common practice?
It's not the fact that cartels are concentrated that makes them treat people in their territory poorly; small street gangs behave the same way. What makes them act poorly is a lack of external accountability for mistreating people, and a profit motive for mistreating people.
So I think you're saying that the voucher is only authorized to use force against its own clients as specified in the contract, not clients of other vouchers. Who is actually enforcing this contract? It's not enough to say that the client can sue. What if the voucher physically prevents the client from being able to sue, or prevents them from collecting any evidence with which to sue? What if the client is too poor or too dumb to successfully sue?
Modern corporations tend to put terms very unfavorable to the customer in their contracts. These contracts tend to be extremely long, and do little but grant rights to the corporation: they aren't liable for anything, they get to do whatever they want with your data, you can't do anything they don't want with their software. Legally the individual is supposed to have read and understood the entire contract, but no one does.
Unless prevented by law, we would expect the voucher to do the same thing with their client contracts: have extremely difficult to understand, enormous contracts that no one reads, and that grant the voucher very favorable terms. This could be much more dangerous than a software click-through, considering the amount of power you are proposing these vouchers would have.