Aww. (speaking of guillotines...)
I missed the debate about crime. I was gonna point out that severity of punishment, past a certain level, has approximately zero impact on crime incidence. How likely criminals think they are to get caught, on the other hand, has a rather massive impact on crime incidence.
This obviously means we should both improve our police force's competence (both in finding guilty parties and not punishing innocent ones), and slowly and subtly change publicly published statistics as to crime while keeping secret ones that seriously never show anyone, and make it appear in all cases whenever possible that when a crime is committed, the perpetrator is always caught. Punishing severely helps, but 'five years in prison' is fairly severe. Hell, 'six months in prison' seems severe to me. Ten strikes with a cane seems like a good option between 'fines' or alongside fines for those who can afford it, and 'prison'. Though really, the choice between paying a fine, or a certain number of strikes, for misdemeanors and the like, would be interesting. I mean, it would kinda suck, but one or two strikes from a cane instead of paying two hundred dollars, or the like, would be an amazing boon for someone just scraping by, as far as I know. Shouldn't disable you, to boot, even if it would hurt, and hurt for a while.
Obviously the old, infirm, and fragile would need a different type of punishment. Perhaps a stern talking-to?