The chance of getting away with murder is now a coin flip. This isn't due to a single issue but a confluence of factors: witnesses won't cooperate, crime has shifted from domestic to random, digital evidence overwhelms investigators, and the most experienced detectives have retired, creating a massive skills gap.

When cities stop prosecuting crimes like shoplifting under the assumption it's driven by poverty, they inadvertently create a lucrative market for organized crime. Sophisticated gangs exploit this leniency to run large-scale theft operations, harming the community more than the original policy intended to help.

Instead of focusing on confrontational deportations, the most effective way to curb illegal immigration is to eliminate the job opportunities that attract people. By aggressively fining and jailing business owners who hire undocumented workers, the primary motivation for crossing the border would be removed, solving the problem at its source.

Risk assessment tools used in courts are often trained on old data and fail to account for societal shifts in crime and policing, creating "cohort bias." This leads to massive overpredictions of an individual's likelihood to commit a crime, resulting in harsher, unjust sentences.

While ubiquitous surveillance seems like a deterrent, meticulous predators can circumvent it. Israel Keyes operated post-9/11 by carefully managing his digital footprint. Other criminals evade detection by targeting marginalized victims who receive less law enforcement attention, or by physically removing surveillance equipment from crime scenes.

Contrary to popular belief, law enforcement in the U.S. fails to solve the majority of homicides. The national average clearance rate is only 40%. The situation is even worse for non-violent crimes like car theft, where offenders have an 85% chance of getting away with it entirely.

Instead of a moral failing, corruption is a predictable outcome of game theory. If a system contains an exploit, a subset of people will maximize it. The solution is not appealing to morality but designing radically transparent systems that remove the opportunity to exploit.

Most crimes are committed by people under 35, and recidivism rates for those over 50 are near zero. Despite this, the fastest-growing demographic in U.S. prisons is people over 55. This highlights a costly misalignment between sentencing policies and the reality of criminal behavior over a lifespan.

The idea of a stable "criminal character" is a trap. Societal conditions can completely override individual traits like self-control. A person with high self-control in a high-crime era was just as likely to be arrested as a person with low self-control in a later, lower-crime era.