Can Leniency Create a New Category of Criminal?

Those who are already committing negative EV crimes are not likely to increase their output much if the EV turns positive due to the fact that the punishments, or the probability of getting caught, are diminished. However, there is no way of knowing how many immoral people are waiting in the wings for plus EV opportunities. Unfortunately, my personal experience tells me that there are more of these people than most realize. Eliminating changes toward leniency would be one way to fix this. A better solution would be to somehow identify the newly created calculating criminals and find ways to thwart them.

Theoretically one way to partially avoid the problem of plus EV crimes would be to increase the punishment for crimes that are easy to get away with. But that would often be unconstitutional since we don’t allow “cruel and unusual punishment”.