I keep reading "the criminals make bad choices and then bad things happen to them that they aren't predicting" and I keep thinking "society actually literally locks them up and curtails their freedom for some amount after they're convicted" - why not just force them to make better choices? Is it just that sounds authoritarian?
I'm an insane freedom loving libertarian but you're already locking them up! As a non-criminal, I am happy they aren't committing crimes but I would also like them to not commit crimes after they get out. Why not use that time to put them on a more productive path? Yes, some people make bad choices! If they are out and about in society, it is indeed hard to stop them. But we're already talking a group of people we're sending to jail!
I certainly don't have a magic recipe, but naively I would guess it would be something like:
- have good police that usually catch you when you commit crimes
- while you're imprisoned for those crimes, be forced - yes, biting that bullet - to do productive non-crimes in whatever methods pointy-headed criminal rehabilitation researchers determine is best associated with continuing to do non-crimes after
- maybe have some kind of post-release quasi-parole where you are yes, forced to test clear from drugs, (I think of that HOPE (?) program from Hawaii that I feel like I read about in maybe Megan McArdle's book a few years back?) forced to report to a job, forced to pay child support, or perhaps even forced to go to boot camp or some kind of *hand waves* rehab type thing?
You are right, "Forcing people to not commit crimes" is pretty hard, in the "proving a negative sort of way." But I feel like we can do a decent (certainly not even close to perfect) job of forcing people to commit productive non-crimes. School and boot camp are historically pretty successful at reducing the amount of crime that the historically criminal "young dude" demographic commits.
I feel like this is pretty close to a lot of historic scenarios in this and other countries, so not too outlandish? Again, as a libertarian, I don't like it in myself that I keep using the word "force" but once you've locked someone in jail and have taken the "force" step of curtailing their freedom so heavily, I think maybe adding a little extra force to make the experience more productive both for society AND the criminals (who we have committed to releasing at a future date) when they get out... is okay?
Yes, at a high level, but... how effectively? I agree that I am essentially advocating for "rehabilitation and parole" but I am arguing for "a lot more of it" and "make it more effective."
You may be interested to know that Minnesota is hoping to go all-in on this approach in the coming years, offering years off one’s sentence for people that voluntarily engage in intense rehabilitation.
There are a lot of obstacles, including finding enough therapists who want to work with felons and even having to remodel prisons to find enough space for treatment.
My guess, judging from the correctional people I work with, is that if they get the funding to make it work (they’re hoping to make it up on the back end with less recidivism and shorter sentences, but there’s quite the up-front cost), it’ll have positive effects on the margin, but that we haven’t figured out the secret sauce yet to have real broad success. Nor do we yet have the kind of system on the outside that can provide the support they need.
But I’m a big believer in hope, and I am hopeful here.
Presumably it would look like the Nordic prison system, which I believe works better than the American system with any possible marginal improvement available including those outside the Overton window (although I don't think Nordics have solved criminal justice either and the same kind of considerations apply in regards to what to do with 300-time shoplifters and the like).
But how to get from A to B is the big question: it's a lot easier to have social workers available and set up rehabilitating work for the inmates when the incarceration rate is tenth of that of the US. You'd basically have to start from scratch, beginning with abandoning all extant prisons and replacing them with nicer ones, re-training all of the prison guards (and paying them a lot more because it's no longer untrained work), hiring more councilors and psychiatrists than there's available in the workforce, etc, etc, and ultimately all of this probably also comes with a bundle of tacit knowledge that you can't get simply by "doing what Norway does".
"But you can still try to be more like the Nordics"
That's true of course, but if you refer to the fitness landscape idea, there's no assurance that any movement to that direction is a marginal improvement - there may well be a valley in between that you would have to cross until things start getting better. Probably the first practical step would be to increase policing, and rehabilitating the image of the police (by increasing training, hiring requirements, etc, so it's no longer unskilled labor).
Maybe I misspoke then, I don't necessarily want "more rehab/parole, but in ways just like what we have now, and require massive investments." Definitely I think the on the ground facts of Nordic countries means that a system that works there isn't going to work in the US.
I want a qualitatively different plan. Basically instead of all that stuff traditionally labeled rehab/probation/parole, just ... force convicted criminals (in the non-violent, we-are-going-to-release-some-day category) to do productive work. Forced convict labor as terrible as it sounds, preferably in something that produces genuine value, and perhaps even gives skills/discipline.
Then when they get out, (and perhaps they get out earlier if they do a great job!) not wimpy parole stuff. Like, you are forced to go to work/school/bootcamp. You are forced to test clean for drugs. If the people in your life who you need to cooperate and work with and support report that you don't, you go back to prison-work.
None of the silly counter-productive probation requirements (driving 80mph in Texas) in the post above. But all of the productive requirements, (you need to show up to work) enforced more harshly. The entire point of "crime" is that people are doing things that are bad for society and the entire point of "the criminal justice system" is to force them to do things that are good for society (and almost certainly better for them too!). I think we should do that latter part more.
If you try and make rehabilitation work in the US you're up against the fact that once you're in prison you're in an environment surrounded by a) the sorts of people who choose to commit crimes and b) the sorts of people who choose to become prison guards in the utterly pathological US system, and that's a deeply debilitating environment.
I think that to make it work, you'd need to change the prison culture enough that you could attract more people whose motivation was to help prisoners rather than just (at best) to protect other people from them and (at worst) sadism, and that may be a vicious circle.
I definitely think a big part of it would be yes, removing potentially rehabbable people from the current prison environment, especially away from non-rehabbable people. My preference would be moving them somewhere they could do a productive job/work.
"Make it more effective". We as humans *don't know how to do that*.
We do know how to make many humans, the vast majority, behave in ways that we want, almost all the time. If we didn't, then society would fall apart almost immediately. Much (almost all) of this occurs in early childhood, with the help of occasional reinforcement as one gets older.
But for those humans where this behavior modification doesn't take, or was not done well in the first place, we don't know how to change that.
At most we know how to make those humans sort of behave some of the time, while they're under direct supervision, with the threat of intolerable levels of violence if they don't.
Occasionally, this will cause a few of those humans to want to change their innate behavior patterns. This is seen as a great victory, and it is.
But it's quite rare. Which is not surprising.
It usually involves the person in question basically re-inventing their entire life. New friends, new work, new place to live (far away from the old one), etc. Since if they don't do it that way, most fail and fall back on the old patterns.
Note I am talking here about *habitual* criminals, not people who were pushed into doing something due to unique circumstances. Those people will do their time, and go back to their original life, or as much as they can scrape back together. And you won't see them back in prison again.
I agree with this. I think this part of the wider "tailored responses to different categories of person, as categorized by their actions."
"We do know how to make many humans, the vast majority, behave in ways that we want, almost all the time. "
Absolutely. That category is the "good citizen" and the societal tailored response is "you got good parents/education, this resulted in you being a normal peaceful citizen and therefore you get to be free!"
"But for those humans where this behavior modification doesn't take, or was not done well in the first place, we don't know how to change that."
So now we move on to other categories. This is "citizen whose education/parents didn't work to prevent bad behavior" and the tailored repsonse is "we set up cops to accurately arrest them and then render punishments designed to prevent costs to society."
"At most we know how to make those humans sort of behave some of the time, while they're under direct supervision, with the threat of intolerable levels of violence if they don't."
This is a 3rd category: "people who need [some amount of direct supervision] to be peaceful and productive." I think our society's reaction to that should be "apply that level of direct supervision."
"Occasionally, this will cause a few of those humans to want to change their innate behavior patterns. This is seen as a great victory, and it is."
4th category: people who messed up, but respond to the incentives and voluntarily return to peacefulness. You're right: this is a win! Tailored response: We should set up incentives to, errr, incentivize this as much as possible, with the understanding that it won't work for everyone.
"Note I am talking here about *habitual* criminals,"
5th category: habitual non-peaceful/productive people. Tailored response: longer incapacitation, and (I am suggeseting) that we force them into (monitored to the appropriate level) productive tasks. Maybe that will work and move them back into category 4, maybe not.
Last category: people who've committed sufficiently bad crimes that we think you can't ever trust them. Tailored response: life/long sentences, for maximum "incapacitation"
>- have good police that usually catch you when you commit crimes
That's...deeply unhelpful. They're already trying, all over the world, in a variety of ways, and mostly failing. Barring a high-tech totalitarian surveillance state, criminals are free to pick the time & place where they can commit their crime safely.
Preventing crime and catching criminals isn't a single-player optimization problem, the criminals have a hand to play too.
There’s a whole discussion to be had there, but one of the key things in the original post here is that a lot of crime is committed by a small number of people who literally have - despite your comments - been caught and arrested (and linked to their many crimes) multiple times. It is absolutely not a binary choice between a “totalitarian surveillance state” and “criminals get to do anything they want.”
“the criminals have a hand to play too.”
Totally agree, which is why the other steps from the comment you quoted address that.
I think we’re close to being able to technologically prevent people from committing crimes without imprisoning them. They could be forced to wear a device that not only tracks their location but uses AI to perceive what they’re doing and bring any likely criminal acts to the attention of remote monitoring staff. It could even tase and then sedate them if they’re about to assault somebody — basically a crude version of the “slap drone” of science fiction. In practice, the device would also serve as a brand, allowing others to act with appropriate caution around the criminal.
This is draconian, but much less so than prison, even if it involves an implanted device that can incapacitate. It seems not very far away, indeed much easier than a self-driving car, if we wanted to develop the technology. The only question is whether society would accept it, since it is ugly and flawed in a new, more visible way compared with the accepted status quo of prison.
Well I have to hope that works better than the GPS tracking devices. Which usually work, but you hear stories about devices that can't place you within a hundred yards with any accuracy.
Which if you're under house arrest means you're "outside" half the time.
Iain Banks' slap drones are a great thought experiment. We don't have that tech yet, but we do have decent GPS tracking bands, AND .... you could just do human slap drones. Imprisoning people costs 100k a year, that's not radically different than hiring a ton more probation officers and literally monitoring non-violent released ex-criminals. How much easier could they reintegratre into society if their potential employers knew they had a human slap drone making them go to work, making sure they don't commit more crimes?
This is draconian, full stop. Where you have perfect enforcement you MUST have perfect law, and the law is never perfect. Not to mention, if everyone submitted to wearing this sort of devices, that would automatically make it as easy as pushing a button for anyone to enslave the country. Literally just go "ok the new law says I am the God-King, anyone disrespecting me is violating it". Let's not discuss as serious scenarios that would sound cartoonishly evil even in some YA novel about a plucky teenager fighting an oppressive dystopia.
I should clarify that this wouldn’t be for everyone, for all the reasons you pointed out and more. It would be an alternative for people that we are currently locking in prison, a fate about as draconian and indeed cartoonishly evil as could be imagined. Our byword for a depraved lunatic is someone who abducts people and keeps them locked in their basement — yet this is exactly what the government does today. This is the level of wanton cruelty that we are trying to replace when we contemplate new means of incapacitating dangerous criminals.
Under the AI monitoring scenario, these people get to enjoy the daylight and maintain relationships with the family instead of being locked in a dungeon.
I still think the technical challenges would be a lot harder than you seem to assume (if we had AI that good at making sense of human behavior... let's just say crime recidivism would not be even close to my main concern). But point taken. I do think we've taken Beccaria's old lessons a bit the wrong way. For example most people would recoil in horror at the sheer barbarism of corporal punishment. But apparently jail is fine. It's not even a matter of degree or quality - jail is just *fine*, by default, unlike just about anything else. Me, if I was given a choice between one hour of medically supervised, no-long-term-damage guaranteed amount of extreme physical pain, and even just three months in jails as they exist today in most western countries (barring maybe the Nordics), I know what I would pick as the obviously more humane choice.
You can't force them, unless we do something like brain surgery or lobotomies. There's a point where character and preferences are formed, and I think that happens at an early age, as well as your basic character via genetics/heredity. Stick environment on top of that as well.
You end up with someone who doesn't care about others, doesn't care about consequences, and will always pick option B when option A is the better (but harder) choice. Unless you intend to put a shock collar on them, or have a guard following them around 24/7 with a big stick to hit them if they so much as look like they intend to do the wrong thing, there's no real means of "forcing" them to make better choices.
Now, not everybody, because some people will get fed-up of "in and out of Wandsworth with the numbers on their names" and turn their lives around, but there are others who won't, short of a personality transplant, and we can't do those yet.
I think that is true for some criminals, and if you can't actually force someone to not commit crimes, then yes you probably do need to lock them up for ever.
But there's a lot of other kinds of (potential) criminals, that you *can* force to not commit crimes. We do it ever day! Every day there's some kid we've legally forced to sit in class, where he can't commit crimes. Or boot camp.
For the category of person you're talking about, yes, nothing will work. But we don't know who those people are ahead of time. So, take criminals, do your best to force them to do productive non crimes while in prison, and do your best to set them on the path to do so after too. The status quo is, you were gonna release them anyway.
If it works, great! If it doesn't, say, on your hardened criminal that you can't fix, and they commit more crimes and reveal to us that they aren't going to stop... then yeah, imprison them for as long as it takes.
"or have a guard following them around 24/7 with a big stick to hit them if they so much as look like they intend to do the wrong thing"
I know you're saying this rhetorically, but in all seriousness, what would be the per-year cost ratio between hiring 2 shifts of guards for your "24/7 Big Stick Program" compared to the current costs of imprisoning someone?
"We do it ever day! Every day there's some kid we've legally forced to sit in class, where he can't commit crimes. Or boot camp."
And truancy never occurs.
For boot camp? You're in a training facility generally in the middle of nowhere, with no transportation. You don't have any clothing other than a highly distinctive uniform. You're marched from place to place, generally in formation (so if you're missing it's obvious) with other trainees. And you have very little free time, deliberately so.
And you volunteered to be there, at least if you're American. I don't know what they do in the conscript countries, but I suspect there's a lot more guards etc.
Nothing is ever perfect, but I am confident that Hours Spent In School is negatively correlated (causatively) with Hours Spent Doing Crime.
"You're marched from place to place, generally in formation (so if you're missing it's obvious) with other trainees. And you have very little free time, deliberately so."
Yep! No time for crimes! Success!
"I don't know what they do in the conscript countries, but I suspect there's a lot more guards etc."
I mean, they got MPs for a reason. :) A lot of MP's job, even in fully volunteer armies, is.... well.... let's say, very similar to prison guard duty.
Independently of whether it is ethical or not, castration would probably help for some crimes. Probably for most violent crimes. Perhaps for others as well.
Not to pick on Brian, but this is a pretty good summation of my point about "smart people can't understand how dumb people live, and thus can't come up with policy solutions to fix them."
Because the magic recipe that would fix this is "we find a way to raise IQ by an SD or more, and hope that there are commensurate gains in sociability and executive planning functions to boot". There is no way to do this right now.
I do think our system actually does *prevent* lots of people from becoming criminals, but I also think that these people tend to be prosocial enough that they aren't very likely to ever become criminals.
"smart people can't understand how dumb people live, and thus can't come up with policy solutions to fix them."
I was absolutely thinking of that when I wrote it. I agree that "if criminals just had better planning skills" is just a magic fix that wouldn't work, so my thought is "how did societies in the past get people with bad planning skills to do the pro-social things?" and the answer was "they forced them to." I don't like how it sounds, but... obviously?
"I do think our system actually does *prevent* lots of people from becoming criminals"
Definitely. And even lots of them probably are potentially anti-social people, but something in our system worked to prevent it. So let's replicate that as much as possible. It certainly will not be perfect.
> how did societies in the past get people with bad planning skills to do the pro-social things?" and the answer was "they forced them to." I don't like how it sounds, but... obviously?
Perhaps what is really needed is a more reasonable path-of-least-resistance. A baseline life plan that ensures that no matter how badly you've screwed up all your previous decisions, you can always just move to California and pick cabbages for five cents a piece and a bed in a dormitory. Then that, instead of drug addiction and vagrancy, becomes the default plan for everyone who fucks everything else up.
Because last time they got high, a police bus rolled up, tested them, put them in a cell overnight, and dropped them off outside Salinas with a sunhat and a brochure detailing the benefits of cabbage picking and tips on the best method for doing it.
Sure, they don't _have_ to pick cabbages, but to someone with no other plan it starts to seem like a pretty good option.
"how did societies in the past get people with bad planning skills to do the pro-social things?""
Graham (the cop whose comment appeared in the top of a recent Open Thread) had a post review policing in medieval Bologna; he parenthetically notes that for someone committing a felony (which would start around burglary), the lightest punishment they could hope for was public torture.
Now, if we got a middle school class together to watch one of their classmates who had been caught stealing get fingers cut off and his face branded, would this inspire them to not become criminals? Maybe, I'm genuinely not sure. I just don't really think it's an option in general (and I don't think we could can go back to that mindset where that is even an option).
I am of the opinion that a large amount of our problem over the last 60 years come from a belief in "equal systems" that attempt to be "fair" to everyone by treating everyone the same, but much of our breakdown comes from the simple fact that not everyone is equal. Maybe the answer here is a system that isn't fair because it's pretty brutal to the proto-criminal class (understood as a class of people who, for various reasons, are highly susceptible to the egregore of antisocial behaviors) but that keeps them in line, while the non-proto criminal class (those who for various reasons are not immune to this egregore) gets to have various liberties and be hypocrites about it.
The widespread proliferation of sports gambling is giving as an interesting peak at this process, IMHO: it was fine for sports gambling to exist when there were only a few places you could do it and it wasn't easy to do; but when access is made more "fair", it's a disaster for a subset.
Thanks for the recommendation, I requested to subscribe to Graham's.
I think you make a good point: responses to criminals (or things like gambling) should not be equal for everyone. They should be tailored to provide the best outcomes for society, (and where appropriate, better outcomes for the criminals). Some of those tailored responses are going to involve some pretty harsh restrictions on their freedoms, unfortunately.
Some criminals (first degree murder) have demonstrated that they can't be allowed freedom of action - okay, life sentence.
Others have only committed one minor crime, and respond well to being put on a "here is this pro-social path" - so let's do that.
Others might commit one minor crime and then be released, and continue to commit many more crimes. Some combination of "incapacitation" for a time plus more stringent "no really, here is the pro-social thing you HAVE to do now" seems like the right idea.
I think in medieval Bologna it looks like they made the same choice, contingent on different levels of resources and beliefs.
For gambling I feel the same way! We should tailor the response to the "crime." Gambling with no bad effects? Ok. Gambling (abuse) that ruins your life? I am fine prohibiting "ruining your life."
If you gamble and lose 50 bucks but you make 50k a year, I say: totally legal. Does this mean I am fine with rich people being allowed the Privilege to gamble more? Yes, I am a terrible inequality-promoting bastard, except for the part where rich people being able to gamble more means inequality will go down.
If you gamble and lose 25k and you make 40k a year, I think we should cap how much you're allowed to wager to something smaller.
If you gamble and lose tons and can't feed your kids and lose your job, I am fine convicting you of Reckless Gambling (like a DUI) and outlawing gambling (For you).
How about state-issued Gambler's Licenses, like a driver's license but the test is mostly statistical fallacies and household budgeting, serves as clearinghouse for incremental records of troubling trends, and any bankruptcy involving significant gambling debts gets it revoked? Extra ID card check wouldn't put unreasonable burden on any establishment which already has security appropriate for handling lots of cash.
Sure there’s all kinds of good ideas there. I might just make it even more simple. All gambling places have to report winnings above a certain amount for taxes. Just expand that reporting to include losses and cross reference with your latest tax return and prohibit gambling after losses exceeding 20% of that or whatever. To bring it back to the crime question, it’s part of the wider “how to promote pro social behavior without limiting freedom, including for people with bad planning skills” across all of society.
Require some form of Known Your Customer law that requires income reporting and monitoring for addictive behavior and restrict the allowed amount of losses, or amount to be to set for a month, and restricted thereafter. Or maybe only allow a floor of a small aggregate bet size unless the user opts in for the enhanced KYC and monitoring.
And that system worked in its day, and was explicitly predicated on the idea that the criminal was potentially still a valuable, productive member of society that you'd want to continue producing things or being conscripted for battle.
I'm fine with criminal fines, too.... nowadays though, like Jeff Goldblum, I'm not a big fan of the s-word, so maybe we could brand it as prisoners-with-jobs... and also ex-prisoners-continuing-to-have-jobs.
Hey I remember reading that! I thought it was a good idea , especially since it was explicitly an attempt to address a wider topic of social trust than just crime.
They were rather less effective at catching criminals, so when they did catch them punishments were rather harsher.
There was also a lot more room in many areas for what we would consider criminal behavior today. Some of it was even praised. See what soldiers were like.
100%. As noted in the whole original discussion, a huge % of this topic is "we need way more effective police" and that would "fix" a lot of the problems.
And yes, in the past, the number one domestic crime reduction program was "conscripting all the young men and ordering them to commit crimes in the next country over"
Mark Kleiman's argument for restricting convicted criminals was that we already do just that via incarceration, restricting them while letting them out is win-win.
Yes, I like it, except in addition I don't just want to just restrict them from committing crimes, but instead (both in jail and after) also force/nudge/encourage/incentivize (whichever method works in their case) them to do productive things instead.
> why not just force them to make better choices? Is it just that sounds authoritarian?
Because while you can make educated guesses you can't in practice rigorously predict who falls in that general criminal type - some are people who may as well clean their act before doing anything serious. The law allows for forfeiting someone's liberties after they explicitly break the social contract. But introducing some kind of guess (e.g. "this person has low IQ and low impulse control as measured by a psychologist, hence they get less rights") is extremely vulnerable to exploitation and almost guaranteed to turn into some kind of systemically biased process to create a permanent pariah underclass.
"you can't in practice rigorously predict who falls in that general criminal type "
No, but once they've committed one crime (the category of person we're talking about) that is pretty decent info (again, not perfect - just better than 50/50) in one direction (see the "most crimes committed by previous criminals").
"The law allows for forfeiting someone's liberties after they explicitly break the social contract."
Right, and "committing one crime" is a break in that contract that we do indeed curtail liberties for, what I am suggesting is that (for crimes where we accept the offender will be released at some point) we curtail their liberties in a specific way that - I suggest - might be A) less costly to society while it is being imposed, B) more conducive to them not committing as many crimes in the future because it is a smoother transition to Non Jail Productive Life.
"But introducing some kind of guess (e.g. "this person has low IQ and low impulse control as measured by a psychologist, hence they get less rights") is extremely vulnerable to exploitation and almost guaranteed to turn into some kind of systemically biased process to create a permanent pariah underclass."
But the system we have right now does that even more! My whole point is not that we should magically assess who has low impulse control and impose less rights on them - I would argue the current system (ably described above of "infrequent but harsh punishment") is a status quo far more rights-limiting to those people AND to all offenders, because it is applied "equally" to everyone.
I don't think we should "guess" anything. My suggestion is instead equally apply a policy of "if you commit a moderate, non-violent, we-think-you-can-return-to-society-one-day crime, then we will demand that you demonstrate (with funding for monitoring that) that you are returning to productive society , or if you fail to do so (i.e. this is a multiple offense, or you fail monitoring) then the sentence we impose (rather than just "prison") is a forced work program that as closely as possible resembles the productive behavior that society would like you to return to after your sentence." No guessing! Discovering who is in which group and tailoring the Punishment Method to reduce costs for society (and post-sentencing offender) the most.
I think (pathway to return to productive peaceful life) this is HOW you avoid creating a permanent pariah underclass (at least of minor criminals, I am fine with murderers being a permanent pariah class of prisoners-who-can't-murder-anymore). Because right now the people in that group are sentenced (unbiasedly perhaps!) to prison where they hang out with criminals all day, which seems likely to foster that. Because say you are biased against some group and you levy my punishment on them: the whole point is it is designed to avoid them becoming lifelong criminals by instead (yes, forcing them to) doing productive things. No matter if you think it works or not, it certainly works better than the status quo.
If the target of the punishment just made a mistake and would indeed clean up their act, I would like the system to not try to guess that, but require that to be demonstrated, and if so, reward them with freedom and no future rights curtailment.
If the target does turn out to be a "general criminal type" then I also don't want that to be "guessed" I want it to be observed and then I want society to execute the most effective policy we can think of that A) reduces the chances of future harm and B) increases the chances of them returning to productive peaceful life (even if at gunpoint!)
Regarding the amount of police per capita in Europe vs USA, the difference is even more stark when you consider the number of violent crimes per police officer. I remember looking at the numbers at it was around 1:70 for homicides (US vs Germany).
My intuition tells me that this has a significant effect on police brutality. A policeman that has 70x chances of dealing with a violent criminal would almost certainly be much more rough compared to somebody who mostly deals with traffic violations and children who got lost on the way to school.
Yes. As I commented on the original prison post, the US is an extreme outlier in having an extremely low number of police officers, relative to crime. See: https://direct.mit.edu/ajle/article/doi/10.1162/ajle_a_00030/112647 that the US has only one ninth the number of police officers per homicide as the median developed country.
When I lived in Baltimore I had occasion to call the police one night-- and they didn't come. It wasn't an emergency but I called the city complaint line the next day and they did put me through to the police and I found out why: Baltimore is divided into
nine policing districts (the eight compass directions pus a central district) and the southern district where I lived had just three police units available-- and they were already tied up that night (serious car accident; a shooting). My matter did get handled promptly that morning, and to my satisfaction. But having only three units available in a very crime-ridden city strikes me as far too few cops.
Is part of the per capita difference just that Europe is more urbanized, though? What happens if you just compare the top 30 metro areas between the US and Europe?
Too lazy to do a full check here, but only looking at NYC and Paris (they came to mind first):
"As shown in Figure 2, New York City (with 53 police officers per 10,000 residents) is currently second only to Washington among the nation’s 25 most populous cities in terms of police officers per capita, with the average ratio in the other cities at 29 police officers per 10,000 residents." [1]
"there were 117 police officers or gendarmes per 10,000 inhabitants in Paris." [2]
So, even in our (2nd) most policed city, we have half the per capita officers of Paris.
I'm not sure about how all the European countries do it, but from what I have seen "traffic police" tends to be a separate institution with separate people that are not "police-police" even if their full official name include "police" somewhere, and the same is done for various administrative violations (e.g. municipal police) so any actual policeman is handling only criminal acts and would never ever deal with traffic violations unless they indicate a possibility of crime (e.g. a traffic accident with fatalities becoming a potential manslaughter case) - in my city they even don't have any authority at all to address traffic violations, and if they *really* wanted to all they can do is they can document it and notify the road safety department so that they might issue a ticket for that.
But the point I wanted to make is that even accounting for this aspect, a European criminal police officer who will only handle potential crimes (and not traffic violation or lost children) will still usually do their job unarmed.
>I’m pretty sympathetic to laws making it illegal to run over protesters who are deliberately blocking roads. The end result of legal protections for people who prey on the kindness of others is the transformation of decent people into chumps who get exploited harder and harder until they crack and become cruel just to keep up.
Is this meant to read "laws making it legal to run over protesters"?
And also damn, I honestly didn't expect him to say that outright. Well, as I've said before, the next administration can make your dream a reality, and it's not too late to cozy up to them!
I'm surprised he went with "mild sympathy towards maiming people" instead of "outlaw blocking roads and let the police handle it cleanly". Doesn't sound very Scott-like.
I think he meant "legal", and I think it is a horrible take.
Protesters are spending times and money, and even put themselves at risk, to try to improve our society, and they certainly do not deserve random death penalty from frustrated drivers.
They are kind people, and they don't exploit anyone.
> If the protesters were trying to make society worse, would your opinion change?
- I think that mostly nobody do that, even the people I don't like who are protesting for policies I think would be awful. They are still trying to improve things, even if they are confused or have very different values than me.
- Even if they did, I still don't think running over people with your car because they block the road is ok. I think doing it is really extreme.
I don't think protesting falls in the category of preying on the niceness of others.
The question isn't about whether anyone *actually* protests to make society worse, it's about whether your opinion would change if you knew for sure they were trying to make society worse.
The reason this is relevant is that many people do believe protestors for X cause are actively making things worse; when you imagine just protestors for a cause you yourself believe in, it is privileging a certain set of beliefs rather than engaging with the reasoning behind the hypothetical run-them-over law.
E.g., suppose protestors for—I dunno, something you hate; deportation of all minorites? taking the vote away from women? whatever it is—are blocking a major road for an hour, causing a death due to an ambulance being stuck in traffic. Consider also the economic costs—and the wasting a chunk of many people's limited time on Earth (add up the hours stolen, wasted just sitting in traffic, across thousands of people!).
They're taking advantage of the fact that even though anyone in the front lines *could* run them over, they don't and won't do it... all for a terrible cause. How about the law now?
You may still think it's a terrible idea, of course—but in this case, you at least understand the feeling of people who hate what the protestors stand for, and think they're causing harm for not just no reason but a *bad* reason.
In fact, I don't really believe protestors are kind in general, I was obviously wrong about this part, but still, I think they are probably nicer than average.
My opinion about not allowing running over them with your car would not change, this was the second part of my message.
At the very least they internalize costs for political change they generally do not internalize private benefits of. So this will at least limit protest to what the protesters themselves think will benefit society.
I will continue to have opinions even if I ought not to have them, opinions are like beliefs, it is just something you have, that you ought to have them or not.
Personally, I really don't see the point of people protesting over an issue that they're not willing to die for. If the state isn't stopping the protesters by force, the state is effectively sanctioning the protest. That either means the state supports the causes of the protest, or that state feels completely unthreatened by the protest. Either way, that means the protest is largely pointless. If protest is actually meaningful, however... hopefully its participants are prepared to sacrifice everything.
Die for is a bit strong, depending on the cause. But be arrested and face minor jail time and fines. Yes, I think that is reasonable for sufficient convictions for civil disobedience.
There are plenty of lower stakes issues worth a bit of protest. A few years ago there was a protest at a city council meeting in my state about a corrupt property deal. The local indy-weekly newspaper had an article about it that led the protest. The article didn't do anything on its own, but he protest led to TV coverage. Within a few days the council member indicated resigned and the deal didn't make it through in the form proposed. Maybe this requires politicians or bureaucrats to feel shame to work, but it seems to me that this kind of thing can still have an import.
On the other hand, the highly divisive issues of national and international salience that already have widespread awareness probably aren't impacted by the marginal non-violent protest
Protestors blocking traffic are an example of "taking advantage of decency": they count upon you being a decent person that won't just keep going, and in return inflict costs¹ upon you and other ordinary, decent people who are almost never actually involved, in a unambiguously morally culpable way, in whatever they're protesting.
Especially with controversial causes in which it is unclear—or when most people think it IS clear, and that the protestors are wrong—who has the right of it, this is pretty shitty behavior; something like unilaterally enforcing a punishment. Depending on one's purpose in driving (perhaps it is an emergency, or you have an extremely important doctor's appointment, or a job interview, etc.) and how long the road is blocked, the punishment can be much more severe than just "irritation".
Just as with other minor anti-social behaviors, blocking traffic is defecting from the agreements that hold society together. They've chosen for everyone else involved that they and their cause have the right to "detain" the drivers—whereas normally, one would have to ask the city and schedule and etc. to block off a road for an event. Nope! Not in this case; you don't get a choice, now; we've decided for you!
So... I'm sympathetic to Scott's take. Not for "the road was blocked for five minutes", of course, but... a major traffic artery, for an hour or more...? Hmm.
I think you're wrong about what motivates many protestors, btw—I've *met* many of them—but that's a pointless road to go down, if you haven't actually met the median screeching protestor / are yourself this sort of person.
.............
¹(traffic jams & accidents, wasted time, extra pollution, ambulance stuck—these have all happened)
> Protestors blocking traffic are an example of "taking advantage of decency": they count upon you being a decent person that won't just keep going, and in return inflict costs
They are acting in a way where they expect decency, and they are inflicting a cost, but I don't think they are taking advantage.
Also, I am not against the cops making the road not blocked, this is how we ought to deal with this situation.
I'm okay with that—I don't think "make it legal to run over protestors" is actually a *good* idea, just trying to give an intuition for why one might be *sympathetic* to it, heh.
Honestly I can sort of get the logic of it, but given the extreme violence of what it actually means to roll over people with your car, I have absolutely no sympathy with the idea.
I think there's various shades of what it could mean.
I don't think there should be a special law saying "you can run down anyone blocking the street".
But there could be some tweaks to existing self-defence law that make it clear that preventing someone from going where they want to go is a form of assault (which is generally already is) and that the use of reasonable force in order to get past someone who is attempting to block your passage is allowed.
I don't think that it should be entirely open season on anyone who steps in the road for even a moment, but if your only alternatives are pushing someone with your car or being stuck then I think the push is entirely appropriate.
To be clearer, I don't think the correct way to deal with people who are imposing some cost, conditional of people having some decency, is to abandon all decency.
Particularly when this is not a necessary condition, you don't have to block the road with your body, a lot of other things will do. Doing it with your body is just symbolic, and allow the "wall" to be quickly moved if they are an emergency and to not completely block the road.
>They are kind people, and they don't exploit anyone.
They certainly hurt people. When you block a road you are harming everyone who needs to use that road. Mothers are kept from their hungry children who want dinner, employees are fired for getting to work late, ambulances take longer to get people in jeopardy to the hospital, time sensitive deliveries don't make it on time, and everyone involved is harmed.
And why? Because you didn't want to protest on a sidewalk or in a public park like ordinary people? We have many legal mechanisms for protesting in this country, and blocking a road is not one of them. The protesters are putting themselves into danger in order to harm others in order for their message to get on the news. They are exploiting everyone who is delayed or stopped by their protest, exploiting their pain and suffering for the chance a publicity. They are doing a bad thing, and an illegal thing, and we should stop them from doing it.
I think this is a bad way to protest for the reasons you gave.
I agree it is uselessly hurtful, but I think people use this way because they are confused, or because they just follow the group, not really because they have any personal gain from using it.
Protestors who block roads aren't good, confused people. They inconvenience and endanger drivers and passengers because inconveniencing and endangering people makes the protestors feel powerful. They love this feeling of power so much that they continue to block roads even though it makes the general public *much* less sympathetic to their cause.
If the protestors cared about their cause more than they enjoyed the feeling of power which comes from harming others, the protestors would legally *make and spend the money it takes to make change.* They'd work overtime to donate to their causes and they'd legally do the boring work at their legislature.
Saying somebody else is naive, then saying "my political enemies don't do the things they do because they think they are a good idea, it is because they are just evil and malicious, delighting in the most petty, stupid kind of tyranny imaginable" is certainly... a take you can have.
"The results of multiple regression analyses showed that a strong ideological view, according to which a violent revolution against existing societal structures is legitimate (i.e., anti-hierarchical aggression), was associated with antagonistic narcissism (Study 1) and psychopathy (Study 2)."
I wasn't discussing the explicit *intentions* of road-blockers, I was discussing their *motivations,* an important distinction.
The motivation is to feel powerful by taking time and freedom of movement away from others. They will pursue this sense of power even when it's widely known to harm their own cause, even when their victims and the general public tells them that.
They tell the world and themselves that they're doing it for a good reason, but they're picking the worst way to protest because...it's super fun. It's dramatic. It's personal gratification. It might even make them infamous!
Picking up a shift instead of road-blocking and then donating one's pay for those hours to the most powerful lobbyists for that particular cause is the most effective thing a road-blocker can do, but it's boring and won't end up on YouTube.
That's how you can know they obviously care far more about themselves than the cause.
In the Netherlands there are two main groups of protesters that block roads. Climate protesters (mostly students) that block the road with their bodies, and farmers that block the road with their tractors over nitrogen emissions policy. Scott's proposal would interfere with the former while leaving the latter alone. Which is a direct result of the greater wealth that farmers have (in the form of large farm equipment).
I dislike both of these groups, but dislike even more the prospect of creating a law that leaves disruptive protest the exclusive right of the wealthy.
In the US all citizens have the right to protest: they don't have the right to block a road. The farmer who blocks the road with a tractor should have his tractor seized. He has more wealth, so he has more wealth that society can take away from him as punishment. More to lose.
In the Netherlands both are illegal, but both still happen unfortunately. My impression is that the climate protesters meet stricter enforcement as is. But adopting Scott's proposal would create a stark de facto (if not de jure) rights contrast between the two.
Well yes, there are a lot of reasons why running down protestors is bad policy. Ideally we would have police that consistently enforce the laws! For a long while in the US at least, particularly in big cities, the police treated road blocking protestors with kid gloves.
But there's a preexisting asymmetry: using, e.g., a large truck to push a tractor off the road is a very different infraction (if it even is one!) than to use that same truck to push a protestor themselves off the road.
"some are in a gray area where they could potentially go either way depending on things like availability of drugs, availability of drug treatment, someone holding their hand to help them land a job, etc."
I absolutely agree with that, but (and it's a big but, a but big enough to satisfy Sir Mix-a-Lot) some don't and won't, no matter how much hand-holding, shift off the path they're on. That was my point about the early school leaver services, because that's pretty much the last stop before you get on the "school to prison pipeline" or whatever the current term is.
There are kids on that who do take advantage of it to help themselves and access services so they get diverted from the path of "no education, no skills, no job". There are kids on that who treat it as a laugh and free money (there's a payment to attend, it's a small training allowance depending on age, and can be as much as a social welfare payment) and have no intention of doing even the bare minimum (but they make sure to turn up for the weekly payment when it's paid out).
I've been on training/re-skilling courses myself where I'm sitting in the yard at break time listening to a young guy bragging on his phone to a friend about how he came in still hung over from being stoned last night (if that's the correct term, I'm not up on my drugs lingo) and how he had no idea what the class was about and he intended to smoke as soon as he got off class. These weren't academic classes, these were "learn a trade" classes, so it' s not because"oh well he was in the wrong place and should have been placed learning manual skills".
I really do believe in early intervention and in family supports to help people who need the help and want the help. But I also believe, by experience, that there are some people who no amount of help will do any good, who only regard those that provide that help as being the suckers to be taken advantage of, and who game the system as much as they can. They're heading to prison eventually. Might as well be there ten years as six months, because six months is not going to lead to a Damascene conversion about getting out of crime (it might lead them to 'not wanting to go back to prison' but they won't stop crime because they think that next time they won't get caught, they aren't willing or able to break the connection with crime, and they have no other options at that point because they've burned all the bridges).
As for the married/partnered with children, that's another question. A lot of the people who end up in courts have kids, may have spouses but more likely partners (or a succession thereof) and are not working. What appears to be the typical case, at least for female criminals, is the shoplifter who has been given a succession of 'second chances', has been warned that the next conviction will mean jail time, whose legal representative swears up and down that she will be engaging with support services to tackle alcohol/drugs abuse, and who is not really responsible as she has a tragic backstory.
And then after the 36th "second chance", they go out and do it again and this time end up doing time, like this lady - released in October, straight back to robbing from shops, convicted this month:
"A Cork woman was warned she was in last chance saloon in relation to several shoplifting charges when she was released on bail in mid-October but she carried out several more thefts shortly after she got out.
Now at Cork District Court, Maggie Foley has been jailed for eight months for a litany of thefts committed in Cork City — many of them occurring over the last few weeks.
Foley, 37, of Grenville Court, Grenville Place, Cork, was told by a judge at Cork District Court in mid-October she would be released on bail but she was in “last chance saloon”.
At that time, she was accused of burglary at Blue Nile, French Church Street, where she stole a laptop and Nike runners from an office area on June 9.
She was also charged with thefts at Tommy Hilfiger on St Patrick’s Street on June 16, at Dunnes Stores, Merchants Quay, on October 1, and at Tesco Express, South Main Street, Cork, on October 8 stealing €50 worth of alcohol.
She stole a small amount of goods on October 12 at Centra, North Main Street. The following day, she stole three cans of Four Loco at Tesco Express on South Main Street.
And the day after that, she stole €85 worth of clothing at TK Maxx on Cornmarket Street.
Despite the warning given to her about being at risk, Maggie Foley went on to steal €315 worth of clothing from Marks & Spencer on October 23.
As recently as November 9, she stole a €240 jacket from Brown Thomas in Cork.
On the same date, she stole €138 worth of clothing from Dunnes Stores across the street.
Her solicitor, Diarmuid Kelleher, said she had had an awful lot of tragedy in her past when a number of family members died in various circumstances when young.
Mr Kelleher said unusually her difficulty with alcohol did not even commence until she was 25 years old.
“More than incarceration she needs to get into rehabilitation to deal with her alcohol problem,” Mr Kelleher said.
The judge who dealt with Ms Foley on this latest appearance at Cork District Court — Judge Treasa Kelly — imposed a total sentence of eight months on her for all of the offences to which she pleaded guilty."
Prison is by no means an ideal solution, but right now it's the only solution to certain persons that we have.
The fear and trembling before the Rightful Caliph keeps somewhat of a bridle on my tongue here (though even so I've needed to be smacked on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper a time or two), but over on The Motte it was looser and I went faster for heat than light. Too many spats with one particular mod, so I said "goodbye and I'm sticking to that".
I still lurk, and am tempted sometimes to comment, but no! Stern Duty, daughter of the voice of God, refrains me!
Am I the only (retired) juvenile delinquent who's an ACX reader? Just wondering.
Shoplifting, drugs, auto theft - being young and dumb was most of it but getting far away from all the old friends in the old neighborhood (you would be horrified by the number of close friends I've had that didn't make it out of their 20s) was a lot of it.
I think rationalists tend to believe in rules, and so you are going to have much more than your fair share of goody two-shoes. But welcome! I think people here tend to be too naive and having someone with actual experience like this is a valuable corrective.
That's the part about "bad company/bad companions" from the old kind of upbringing rules that we trashed because Liberty! Freedom! Question Authority! You ain't the boss of me!
Instead of sending someone to Australia, we fly them to another part of the country (not all to one spot, just a "different" spot is enough) to break all their old ties, and land them in a community that doesn't encourage that shit.
“Even if you only put one criminal in a small community, they will notice”
I assumed “notice” meant “the locals will know this is a transplanted delinquent and shun them, making it impossible for them to re-integrate into a more positive social group the way Peteski did”.
But also, yes you would spread them around so they can’t form another delinquent subcommunity, that’s basically the point. They need a fresh start away from bad influences for that to work.
Sure, but it's a legit question - what makes that program different?
The adjusted program would help from a psychological perspective (the new community can give them a clean slate) but not if the behavior doesn't change with it. What made them into petty criminals may be left behind, but if they have no reason to change then they often will not. They may see the new community as overly trusting suckers, taking advantage of the goodwill until they destroy their reputation and want the government to move them again.
In witness protection the government is helping them avoid likely painful death, so they have a really strong incentive to play along. I don't think either of us would be happy with a "get along in this new community or we kill you" program.
A criminal exchange program perhaps? We sent a shoplifter from district A in California to district Z and district Z sends a shoplifter to district A. We match crime and severity & keep it within the state whenever possible so that it minimizes bureaucracy. No one place gets an influx of criminals but the old ties get broken.
There’s definitely a risk in breaking a criminals pro-social ties as well — old mothers who aren’t going to move but were a good influence for example.
So did my late mother (born 1930). She used to regale us with stories of when she was a kid, and one story was her and a bunch of her age-mates planning to raid the local orchard. Of course, so were a bunch of other kids. Older boys took their apples, so she and another girl teamed up to attack the leader and push him into the ditch full of water.
A lot of kids shoplift. I remember friends who did that. They may get caught and quit, or just grow out of it.
I do think we need a more severe law to deal with the sort of gang "shoplifting" that basically is open looting of a store. A furtive shoplifter isn't seen as an implied threat to other people as his motive is not b e noticed at all; a loot gang definitely is threatening.
You're not the only one. I never stole cars, but shoplifted A LOT in high school, as did all my friends. Not little things, thousands of dollars, constantly. Drugs and other bad stuff too. I never got caught but almost did once, it scared the crap out of me, and I never did it again. Everyone who engaged in this is now a boring, married, suburban professional, including me...except for some of the boys, who have disappeared, died or gone to jail. I guess the difference is mainly that we never got caught, the girls anyway. I do sometimes wonder if we were actually somewhat sociopaths back then? I would not even steal a tube of ChapStick now, without feeling terrified and guilty. But at 16 I really DNGAF whatsoever and had zero moral qualms.
"I wonder if people ever try GPS tracking (without the rest of probation) as a prison alternative. “You’re getting off with a warning this time, but wear this tracker, and if you commit any other crimes in the future, we’ll know."
Go on the youtubes and start watching court videos. Not the funny Sov Cit ones, not the fancy trials, but the normal everyday court hearings. 50 people in a row on probation/home arrest with tethering. What you'll find is that tethering is expensive, constantly breaks (especially when people are trying to accidentally-done-a-purpose break it to have an excuse to violate it) and a nightmare for judges to monitor constant tiny violations (that might be a faulty system reporting someone left when they didn't!). They're hauling prosecutors in/probation officers in/defendant in to court to argue about "was it a intentional tech problem, a person problem, an unintentional tech problem" or something else all the time.
Maybe some of the crim defense/prosecutors here can speak to this, but from my perspective (lawyer, not in this system) it seems like a technical answer, but the tech is nowhere near cheap/good enough right now.
Also, I went hunting with a GPS this fall and in tree cover with no leaves it consistently couldn't place me within 100 yards. Often the metes/bounds of someone's limits are "their house" + work at certain times. Maybe this is a tech issue we can solve using cell signals, but I'm not sure the real accuracy (not the "your phone uses its best guess of where you are so it looks like the GPS is accurate" accuracy) is actually close enough in city/suburban conditions.
Having done a little defense work - partially a tech problem, partially a social problem. The equipment breaks regularly but the bigger problem is that many of these folks don't have a stable home and are forced to relocate a lot, which requires a hearing to update monitoring conditions. Even if they do, home monitoring often forces them to be in a home with drugs in violation of the probation the monitoring is enforcing.
Reasonable. I think about the amount of times I've lost the good cell charger or something coming back from a trip or had charging issues (had to buy 4 different charges this fall and a pile of cables to get one that would properly charge a new device everytime). Then you imagine the life circumstances... Not exactly like you want to be calling up a probation officer and inviting them in your home to troubleshoot (even if you/they had time).
I know someone that works in a company that sells GPS correction services, trying to correct for errors and inaccuracies in the signals by watching the GPS signals at various known locations and measuring the error.
In rural areas with wide open fields, the big issues are things like distortions in the signal coming from the ionosphere. But that isn’t the biggest problem in GPS overall. Cities are apparently an absolute nightmare.
In cities, a GPS signal can bounce several times off of nearby buildings, meaning that your phone or tracker is getting multiple conflicting signals at once and has to differentiate between them.
This is why phones often end up relying on alternative localization methods to disambiguate, like measuring how far you are from nearby cell towers and wifi networks at known locations. Turns out wifi networks, like your home one, change infrequently enough that with enough data you can get a good sense of where they are, and then use that data to geolocate other phones.
Edit: to be clear I don’t have a strong opinion on how GPS should be used in probation or house arrest, just adding some context on why GPS alone is often inaccurate in cities.
Makes sense. I think a problem here is that, like many things related to the law, the tech is pretty "behind" b/c it's a small market dominated by a few companies AND the evidence has to hold up in court. Raw GPS/Tether data (strength of signal to a defined point in the house for example) is pretty easy to explain to a judge and relatively hard to attack vs "well our algo heuristically learns over time and many measurements where each of these wifi signals is in relation to GPS data/mobile tower data".
How about solving the "small market" problem by adding a new use case? Lighter sentence than probation or house arrest, no pre-defined forbidden locations, just gotta wear it in case the cops need to find you again for some other reason. Larger quantities could allow R&D and manufacturing investments to reduce cost and improve reliability.
I certainly like the idea in the abstract. Sentence someone (or more likely, have them agree as part of a pre-trial agreement) to something like probation, but different:
1. No random check-ins/lower costs.
2. Probably still want right to inspect house by assigned officer.
3. Keep device charged and you don't get hassled much, much more limited drug testing.
4. Fail to keep device charged some set amount and converts to normal probation.
5. Controversially and probably impossible part: additional "minor" crimes of limited importance to continued participation.
One thing large issue that you can see if you check into this stuff is how many people seem to be incapable of not driving without a license, driving without registration, invalid plates, blinkers not working, fare jumping and other stuff. Look, you or I forget out wallet and get stopped probably get a show-up ticket, automatically dismissed if you go to police station with 72 hours showing you had valid license/reg/insurance at time of stop.
A lot of people already struggling with the system end up facing charges (my personal guess is a combination of reduced leniency, screaming at cops, and really annoying judges/probation officers by continuing to use the same stupid excuses (you forgot your wallet? for 4 traffic stops in 4 months?).
I think 1-4 helps, 1-5 probably helps a lot more in terms of keeping people employed/functioning while they get through a series of brushes with the legal system and (hopefully) gets some of the scared straight factor without the life damaging problems of 6months to 1.5 years in jail.
OTOH this is basically what probation was/is supposed to be so maybe we need more probation reform, vs creating a new "good probation" system.
On the other hand, both my fitness watch and bicycle computer work quite well in the city and rural areas. They have problems indoors, but the location accuracy is good enough as long as I go somewhere.
Any device can use the same GPS chip, costing about $6.
I've had GPS on phones (and other devices, when people actually used non-phone devices for GPS) fail all the time in a big city. Jumping to different road, showing at wrong intersection, etc. For me it was a low-cost problem - I would just walk to the closest intersection, read the signs, find it on the map and problem solved. But relying only on this technology (and without the help of Google Maps readjusting it by secondary parameters - which has been getting much better over the years) for decisions that can get a person in jail for years would make me feel very un-easy.
That phenomenon of GPS signals bouncing off buildings is something that I learned about when I was playing Ingress regularly. You can sometimes generate semi-predictable "drift" effects, where if you hug the wall on one side of the street, you predominantly get signals that are bounced off the wall opposite you -- which means the location you get is ~30-40 meters off to the other side of that wall, which was enough to hit targets that otherwise you would've had to walk around the block to reach.
Reposting my late comment from the the original post with a crazy scheme:
Okay so it seems that the optimal policy is:
1. Instead of years in prison, different crimes are assigned different number of crime points. The more severe the crime - the more points are given to a person who commits it.
2. All prisons are closed. The resources are spent on other more effective crime preventing methods. Former-incarcerated people are assgned the number of crime points corresponding to their crimes, with discount for already spent years in prison.
3. Social services try to actively help people convicted of any crime, giving the priority to first time offenders.
4. When people accumulate enough crime points, they are immediately publicly executed by a guillotine or a shot to the head - no bullshit with ridiculously expensive lethal injections or decades of waiting.
That gives us:
No negative aftereffects, maybe even some deterrence and full incapacitation. And public entertainment as a nice bonus.
Now, I think some amount of corporal punishment can also be added after certain amount of crime points is reached.
There are a lot of issues with this proposal, but I will mention two that don't fight the hypothetical.
1) Getting caught is still the primary driver of whether someone has points, not crime.
2) Knowing that you will get away with literally anything (and in fact get additional services and money) before your execution will cause a massive increase in crime from people knowingly getting those points. They may even do it intentionally in a way to get caught if the services are nice.
1) Sure, but I don't think there is any way around it. In any case it's not worse than the status quo. At least now cops will be motivated to catch shoplifters, because, every point counts.
2) Noone said you will get money. Government will be paying social workers to rehabilitate you. This process doesn't have to be particularly pleasant. Of course some amount of crime preventative social services should be available to everyone in order not to create an actual incentive. Which will be easier to do when millions of dollars are not wasted on prisons. Add here corporal punishments and I think we will have less motivation to commit crime than under current system where it's a way to get free food and shelter.
1) Cops will also be motivated to avoid getting people points if they are sympathetic and know that either in the future or especially if it's the final point will lead to death. Nobody wants to be the final arrest for a single point when that's going to be the death point.
2) Okay, so you add in corporal punishment as an in-between and make the process painful. That's an option that may have some merit, but then what's the real difference? Not wasting away for years in expensive prison? If so, that's going against one of Scott's biggest findings, that sequestering criminals may be one of the most important factors of prison.
1) One of us is very wrong about what kind of people become cops, it seems. I expect that an average cop would be glad to finally punish the irredimable asshole who was given every chance to become a productive member of society, got thousands and thousands of dollars spent on them in the attempts to rehabilitate them, and yet still continued their wicked ways. Obviously sympathetic criminals will be getting away with things more, just like under current system, this is not an argument against my proposition in particular. The point is that it's much harder to appear sympathetic when you are a serial criminal than when it's your first mistake.
2) Incapacitation happens due to the execution - this is the most important effect of the prison, but much cheaper, more humane, as it doesn't involve torture, and without negative externalities.
This kind of stuff is why most talk about policy strikes me as absurd.
You know that your proposal makes you sound like a cartoon villain and therefore it has zero chance of ever becoming popular.
You may as well say "the solution to crime is to stop committing crime".
If you can make the population accept such a "crazy scheme", that means you have mind control superpowers, so why not just magically convince the population not to commit crime?
In general, I feel the same towards 90% of talk about how to solve public problems, especially on this site. People imagine themselves as god-kings.
Whenever I read "this is what should be done", I'd like to ask: what would voters think of this policy? what would the current political establishment think? how much money in lobbying, activism and campaign donations would it take to convince them? is it really the best way to spend money? is there anyone who agrees with your crazy proposal and has that money?
If you don't want to ask those question then you may as well say things like "the solution to crime is to stop committing crime", "the solution to the threat posed by aggressive dictators is that dictators have a change of heart and stop being bad", "the solution to disease is that germs have a change of heart and stop infecting people"... it's just as whimsical.
If you can magically control people and get them to accept your proposal, why can't you just magically control criminals, dictators, germs...
The true "optimal policy" is one that is politically viable.
I'm not criticizing you in particular, I'm making a general point.
> You know that your proposal makes you sound like a cartoon villain and therefore it has zero chance of ever becoming popular.
God, people are so pessimistic. Times are changing! People are losing their patience for crime, for disorder, for the stains of society. No longer will they be forced to tolerate the cries of bleeding heart liberals, moaning about "ethics" and "human rights". We are entering a new era, an era of JUSTICE. The blood of the wicked will sate the hearts of the public.
> God, people are so pessimistic. Times are changing! People are losing their patience for crime, for disorder, for the stains of society. No longer will they be forced to tolerate the cries of bleeding heart liberals, moaning about "ethics" and "human rights". We are entering a new era, an era of JUSTICE. The blood of the wicked will sate the hearts of the public.
This particular idea would have no chance to be implemented, and I think it wouldn't even be good.
But I think trying to find alternative policies and trying to see if they can be good or not, before trying to see if they can become popular or not, is not a bad thing.
I don't view these kind of posts as policy proposals but as something akin to brainstorming.
Before you can make a policy proposal you must first know what you would like to propose. Reality is messy and for many problems it's not obvious what a solution would even look like.
So you start by simplifying the problem until it is easy enough to that a solution can be found. Only once you have a solution that might perhaps work in principle you start looking on if or how it could be implemented.
Many of the solutions will be impossible in reality but at least they might give a hint which form possible solutions could take. Also the alternative is generally not coming up with any solution because issues like "how do we stop crime" are just that hard.
In the past, a lot more crimes did result in execution. So it's entirely possible, and the past didn't consist of cartoon characters. Of course, they didn't let people go with "crime marks", they had corporal punishment for lesser crimes.
Solving coordination problems comes after figuring out what to coordinate around. I think it's completely proper to first develop the optimal solution and then care about the PR.
I'm not saying they are independent. I'm saying that there is an order in which we are supposed to solve them. Maybe some aspects of the optimal solution will have to be tweaked later to make it more appealing. Or maybe it would be possible to come up with a perfect pitch for all parts of political spectrum. In any case, it's secondary.
I need a wife. I have determined that the optimal solution to this problem is that I marry Scarlett Johansson. The PR problem of getting her to agree will be solved later. Maybe some aspects of the optimal solution will have to be tweaked.
Well, now when your optimal target is determined, it's time to concentrate on figuring out the PR problem. Maybe you will have to settle down to a woman who isn't literally Scarlett Johansson but shares the qualities with her, that you deem most important. Good thing that you actually did the work of figuring out what are they.
But suppose you were not sure which qualities you want in a perfect wife. Then comming up with a different ideas of what you might or might not like, and looking for possible unexpected effects, is the first step, regardless of how likely is that your perfect woman would have you.
Still, the homicide rate dropped considerably not only after the earlier phases, but after the later phases. The homicide rate in 2018 was 53.1 per 100,000. In 2021, 18.1. In 2022, 7.8. In 2023, 2.4. In Jan-Nov 2024, 1.9.
>This means, unless I'm missing something, that the vast majority of the decrease in the murder rate occurred before Bukele took office
As Cremieux notes, although homicides fell before Bukele's crackdown, they continued to fall even faster after him, and the trend doesn't reflect mere regression to the mean of the lower rate of the past: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1828521194942816375.
> the post-Bukele homicide data is dubious in several ways. The Bukele government stopped counting...
Per the linked article, one change was implemented in May of 2021 and the other in April 2022. But recorded homicides have fallen sharply since then, within the same recording system.
[The comment / article sort of try to get around the implication by suggesting that use of mass graves in increasing, but it's not obvious why that would be.
The article does state:
>“we began to find more unmarked and clandestine graves where the gangs would bury their victims.”
But it doesn't quantify that increase, at all. And the numbers it does provide (68 in 2021, 43 in 2022, and 60 in 2023) don't show any clear upward trend, which both provides a bit more reason to doubt the claim that unmarked graves are increasing and removes that potential objection to post 2021/2022 trends.]
Even the article which insists on lumping criminals killed in shootouts with police together with innocent victims still only estimates a homicide rate of 4.5 in 2023, which still represents a massive decline, contrary to the commenters claim that:
>It’s not that murder has disappeared in El Salvador - it’s more like it’s now de facto legal in many contexts
The commenter also infers from the fact that victims found in mass graves (which often date from the 1990s) aren't included in annual national homicide tallies, that such murders aren't prosecuted at all, which seems both baseless and very unlikely.
Assuming arguendo that El Salvador mass incarceration worked, they had the unusual circumstance that gang members gave themselves a distinctive tattoo. (And I'm guessing it would be dangerous to get that tattoo if you weren't a gang member.)
It may be good evidence that there are some points on the incarceration curve where more incarceration substantially reduces some crimes, but for purposes of cost-benefit analysis, it was also really unusually cheap to identify and incarcerate gang members.
Being a police officer is no longer a "no college" profession. Thr NYPD, for example:
Education: You must have earned 60 college credits with a minimum 2.0 GPA from an accredited institution or 2 years of active military service in the U.S. Armed Forces in order to be appointed to the title of Police Officer.
Yeah, I was about to say the same thing. There's been some heavy proliferation of Criminal Justice degree programs on non-elite college campuses over the last 30 years or so, and graduates of these programs are not going on to become Jay Edgar Hoover; they're just gonna be cops somewhere, 80% of them. Seems like a pernicious example of credentialism, if you ask me, but at the same time, in cities like Philly, you don't need any college credits to join, and they have massive manpower shortages anyway.
As much as I'm pretty anti-credentialism, policing is an area where we need more. If you're going to be charged with the role of bearer of state violence, you should need some certs and testing.
I want educated, sane, and most of all socially conscious people to become those bearers, not the noodniks that couldn't hack a more thinky job because they spent high school willfully ignoring advice and teaching or who couldn't because their guidance counselors failed them.
A big confounding issue here is that if you want people who are well qualified, and you want them to be held responsible for their actions, then you both need to pay them well and give them really strong job protections. A new mayor coming in to office can't fire them without cause, etc.
I agree, they should be paid well if we're going to ask a lot of them. Every job that asks for a credential should pay well. It should be *desirable* to be a police officer.
Our current system hedges so far in the other direction that it's hard to see how we'd get from here to there. Maybe we could start by reappropriating budgets for IFVs and milspec rifles and put that toward educating current police in 2 and 4 year degrees (screw those horseshit warrior programs).
I don't have a core problem with well-educated police, but I think you're missing a lot about how police work in different areas. State Police do tend to be quite qualified, and get paid well. 20 years of service at nice rates, then a pension. Local town police tend to be poorly qualified and poorly paid by comparison, but I think that's okay. You don't need all police officers to do the same job, or have the same qualifications. Traffic cops are not homicide detectives and are not SWAT teams. And that's perfectly fine.
It's fair to want more out of higher police positions with more consequence, but there consequences on both sides of the ledger. Sgt. Cleetus Demeetus in Bumblefud, Kentucky has as much authority to unholster his weapon and take aim as my (former state police) trainer did.
He did exactly what you described. As I remember, he spent 12 years as NJ state police, retired with a pension, and got his CDL-A. As a fellow holder of a CDL-A, I am intimately familiar with how police-public interactions ought to go.
I'm not saying my local beat cop needs a JD. I want him, her, them, or whatever to be as afraid of their sidearm as I am.
Editing because I hit post early by accident. What engenders that kind of healthy respect for state violence is compassion and education.
I don't understand why the US has all these different police forces anyway. A whole different organisation with its own standards and budgets and procedures and uniforms and vehicles for each freaking town?
In Australia we have a police force for each state or territory, and this seems to work better. Resources can be shared and diverted to where they're needed. Training and procedures are consistent across the whole state. Corruption is more difficult because there's higher-level oversight of everything.
Okay, but is a four year college degree the appropriate credential for that? Why not an associate's degree? Why not a trade school? Why not a city operated training program...maybe you could even call it a "police academy?"
Because imparting skills and knowledge is only part of it. We want to enculturate new police into a value system that favors. Rule Of Law over Rule Of Man. That means we need them to spend four years as a minority surrounded by children of the professional class.
There's no way that would instill those values. Making people, especially low-iq people, feel powerless doesn't create an appreciation for pluralism, it creates a thirst for power.
"Maybe we could start by reappropriating budgets for IFVs and milspec rifles and put that toward educating current police in 2 and 4 year degrees (screw those horseshit warrior programs)."
I'm open to both. I'm open to a 10-18 month certification program, like a rigorous academy. I'm unfathomably open to having police from all over a state training at a state police academy so there's less of a federalist-style patchwork and more of a standard/baseline for what's expected and how they're compensated.
That's not going to work for everywhere. But, I want the police, writ large, to be more highly educated and compassionate than they are.
No group is a true monolith. I *like* most of my local police, and every one that's in my age bracket or younger has been a stand-up kinda person. The problem is that I have no expectation that any other department is as functional or compassionate.
I think weeding out sociopaths, sadists, and other people you wouldn't want wielding authority over you is good. Again, I'm not sure education accomplishes that task, though.
It's worth pointing out, though, that not every cop can be Andy Griffith; nor would you probably want them to be. George Orwell's observation that "people sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf" is not with some validity, and frankly, the more compassionate someone is, I suspect the less useful or effective they're going to be at the violence part.
One other thing this comment made me think of: Scott wrote that "I am most willing to discount the suffering of prisoners when I think of this in a game theoretic way. I imagine some sneering criminal robbing me, saying “Sure, you could stop me at any point - but then I would be suffering, so you have to let me continue my crime spree or else you’ll be a bad person, mwahaha!”"
I think it's worth pointing out that if you're a miscreant and want to minimize your chances of being punished for your misdeeds, one other approach besides painting prison as horrific is to paint the police as horrific. Tell everybody that they go around beating and murdering people all the time for no reason. Call them racist, maybe come up with a slogan to delegitimize them, or maybe advocate for their funding to be cut. Invent statistics to back up your rhetoric.
We just lived through an episode where all that stuff happened. The results weren't pretty. I think a lot of people got taken in by irresponsible, emotionally charged rhetoric that was just plain bunk and now privately should have a lot of egg on their faces.
"I think weeding out sociopaths, sadists, and other people you wouldn't want wielding authority over you is good." Agreed.
"I think a lot of people got taken in by irresponsible, emotionally charged rhetoric and now privately should have a lot of egg on their faces." Definitely. Biden's been right: more police, not fewer, with more funding, not less.
"Again, I'm not sure education accomplishes that task, though." Let's go to fundamentals. How do we learn?
Police officers certainly need training, and in some cases I think they need more training, but I can't see that a NYPD style "get half a degree in anything" is a good qualification.
It should either be no degree, or a specialist degree in Policing.
Per William Stuntz, the way Gilded Age northern cities managed to have low crime & incarceration rates was by hiring lots of the exact sorts of crime-prone immigrant types to act as police, and they were frequently quite corrupt.
I think the question is more, does it make sense for this to be a *college degree*, rather than internal training and certification (which should be of course transferable if you want to e.g. go be a cop in a different state)?
Additionally, there's been a push to make police officers more qualified, primarily by people who are already anti-incarceration. Requiring a college education may result in fewer cops doing bad things (highly uncertain), but it will definitely result in less cops.
Some of this is just classism. I remember reading an article by some journalist shocked that someone who *didn't even have a degree* (gasp) could be in a position of power over him.
The military has separate "officer" and "enlisted" career tracks for higher-class college educated people and lower-class uneducated people. Being a high ranked military officer is quite prestigious, while being an experienced enlisted man is prestigious and lucrative enough for someone with limited other prospects.
Maybe the police should do something similar to make its higher ranks more prestigious.
1. There are paths directly to a commission that do not require prior enlistment (although there are ways to earn a commission as an enlisted service member).
2. Officers are accountable for their subordinates behavior.
3. Rotation of duty stations, which serves to keep everyone more aligned with the service as a whole than with the other people in their current unit.
I think it could work, albeit with a lot of political effort (in the US it would likely require folding all city PDs & county SDs into the State police (possibly with the current State police becoming an elite within the larger structure akin to Rangers within the US Army), which would be simultaneously kicking dozens of hornets' nests).
Surely stationary cameras and radars with subsequent electronic fines are much more efficient in this regard, it's no longer the '70s. Or is that too much dystopian anti-freedom for the US of A?
Also, it's clear that traffic tickets generating revenue results in bad incentives (you hear stories in Germany of a city council installing radars at very lucrative positions in order to get more revenue, though not completely sure it's true).
"All fines, forfeitures, penalties, or prison revenues, exacted by any level of government, must go into a separate state or federal fund; ideally, a fund that is annually refunded to all tax-filing residents. No level of government should have a predatory financial incentive to exact more fines from its people and create more ‘criminals’."
This seems so obvious that I'm now mad thinking about it. Just refund all of the fines received to law-abiding tax payers. It's a bonus to not commit crimes, and completely eliminates the incentives to hunt for more crimes. You can do the same thing with civil asset forfeiture.
> you hear stories in Germany of a city council installing radars at very lucrative positions in order to get more revenue, though not completely sure it's true
Having lived in the US where traffic can be a significant part of revenue for some towns, it’s definitely considered true there.
One town near where I grew up had a state-highway running through it, and the local newspaper would publish where the speed traps were going to be ahead of time. They weren't even trying to hide the fact they were extracting money from people commuting through the town.
I remember there being a part of the 101 from SF to LA where the highway was part of a town jurisdiction, but forget the name. The CHP must get a bit pissed off when this happens, if every local jurisdiction did it then they’d be out of a job.
There was a one horse burg near me that had a speed camera hidden around a bend on a downhill on a 65mph state highway right where it dropped to a 45mph limit. Clearly a predatory fine generator.
I think it finally got removed due to a state law banning speed cameras on state highways.
"All fines, forfeitures, penalties, or prison revenues, exacted by any level of government, must go into a separate state or federal fund; _ideally, a fund that is annually refunded to all tax-filing residents_. No level of government should have a predatory financial incentive to exact more fines from its people and create more ‘criminals’."
[Emphasis mine]
Which galaxy brain 4D chess move am I missing where there is not an incentive upon introduction of this scheme to raise the taxes by the exact amount this "separate fund" generates. In a rational world this should create approximately zero backlash since total tax load remains exactly the same, "just with extra steps". Even _very_ generously assuming that people are going to expect _some_ kickback compared to the status quo ante, surely they will happy with less than the full amount being distributed because that still would be an improvement.
>Also, it's clear that traffic tickets generating revenue results in bad incentives (you hear stories in Germany of a city council installing radars at very lucrative positions in order to get more revenue, though not completely sure it's true).
Towns are incentivized to enforce the law in a way that catches the most offenders? Sounds like a benign incentive to me!
Not so benign when they shorten the yellow light's duration from five seconds to three, trying to score more "running a red light" tickets, and thereby trick otherwise well-behaved drivers into deadly side-impact crashes.
Urban traffic lights usually have three seconds of yellow, high speed highways have five seconds of yellow. I don’t know if there’s some good way to universally designate some lights as unchangeable, but it’s reasonable to sometimes have these things change as a location changes its character.
I think the argument is that the police *want* to be doing easier work that is safer. That it also generates revenue keeps their bosses happy.
The bosses want to have cops available for serious issues that come up, but don't really care what they do with their time otherwise (so long as it doesn't generate bad PR and crime isn't going up).
Installing cameras would often be a solution in search of a problem. Some areas would want this, maybe like St. Louis that was using the police force to add a layer of taxation on the people in bad neighborhoods (came up after Michael Brown). But most jurisdictions don't think about fines in quite the "we need to maximize this" kind of way. In fact, doing so may be a good way to get voted out. St. Louis was mainly doing this in a few neighborhoods, rather than across the city.
I'm pretty sure there was a well-publicized case of a woman who ran through a construction area a couple years ago, killing a number of workers, I want to say in the D.C. area - and the public was (briefly) outraged to learn she had hundreds of moving violations and (presumably unpaid) tickets.
Paying fines is part of the orderliness that some take for granted, and that other places have surrendered.
I got a ticket in a construction area in Virginia last year-- but there wasn't any actual construction on the road until miles farther up. They had set out orange barrels on the shoulder but no work of any kind had been done and the road itself was unimpeded. I think it was mainly a way to create a "construction zone" that would qualify for a speeding camera and generate extra revenue.
It's safer for citizens because cops don't have to physically confront them. It's fairer because the camera doesn't care if you drive a Lamborghini or a beat-up Civic, if you're Navajo or Nigerian, man or woman, turban or afro, with or without a criminal record. It only cares if you were speeding or not.
Why the reluctance to adopt this? You'd think at least the left-leaning crowd would be clamoring for this.
Even better would be making navigational GPS into mandatory safety equipment, then adding a billing mechanism to turn every road into a hassle-free toll road. Machine-readable database of traffic laws, defined as a function that takes position and velocity as arguments then outputs cost in dollars per time, plus realtime data on where every other car is, would also make self-driving automation enormously easier. I've never heard libertarian complaints about the requirement for transponders on aircraft, and the FAA seems to do alright at keeping the rate of midair collisions low.
Additionally you don't usually get points on your license and your insurer won't know about those tickets and raise your rates. As the vehicle owner you can be held responsible for the fine, but since the process cannot identify the driver you aren't liable beyond that.
An annoying note however: a friend's car was stolen and the thieves later ran a red light where there was a camera. My friend got the ticket and even though he had already reported the car as stolen, there was an incredible amount of red tape to go through to get out of that ticket, which is ridiculous. The simple existence of a stolen car report in such an event should immediately be grounds for eliminating the owner's responsibility.
Americans are too addicted to breaking traffic laws to allow the police to monitor them with cameras. Leftists and Rightists and Libertarians use different arguments against the traffic cameras (the cameras are racist vs this is big government vs this will secretly cause *more* collisions because people stop too quickly at red lights vs this is all just a cash grab) but it really feels in most cases like it's just that people don't want these laws to actually be enforced.
Yeah, from my benighted perspective having an armed agent of the state arbitrarily choose to have a physical confrontation with you is much worse by any of those lights, and if the real problem is that the rules are broadly unpopular, maybe they should be changed? (uh-huh, dream on, etc...)
It's a pretty open secret that many speed limits are set well below what actually is the maximum safe speed since the authorities assume people will be traveling 5-10 miles above the posted limit.
The fact of the matter is that different people can operate on the same road with the same car at different safe maximum speeds. The law says driving above a certain speed is not allowed, but the real aim is to reduce reckless driving, which is the actual thing not allowed by law or ethics. It's just more subjective than a stated speed limit.
I understand Montana used to have something like a "reasonable and prudent" speed law, which people interpreted to mean as no speed limit. This was, unfortunately, thrown out in 1999, when the state Supreme Court ruled it was unconstitutionally vague.
And cameras don't just measure your speed, they check that:
- the seatbelts are on
- the driver isn't using a phone
- the red light hasn't been run
- the lane markings aren't ignored
- pedestrians have been yielded to
A far older and simpler trick that some countries use is having road police be a separate unit, like Autobahnpolizei in Germany, the RPU in the UK or the DPS in Russia. You can't spend your shift stopping cars for speeding if it's not your job.
“ then I’m not sure how you get away with thinking that X years stuck getting raped in a cage for shoplifting is “proportional” either”
It’s surely easy enough to take rape out of the penal system - most countries have done it. It’s pretty odd that in a litigious country like the US this hasn’t been handled in civil court, even if criminal courts don’t want to apply the same penalties to rape inside, as they do outside.
Scott mentioned revenge in the sense of the existing system, but State retribution is not revenge, which is personal. It’s about replacing the personal revenge with societal retribution. It’s about stopping the hatfields and the mccoys by imposing restrictions on their revenge, and sating their need for it.
Retributive justice is merely a system that applies penalties appropriate to the crime.
It isn't handled in civil court because civil courts awarded damages: that is, the person that caused the harm must pay money to the person that they harmed.
When Prisoner A rapes (or assaults or otherwise harms) Prisoner B, B can sue A, but A has no money to pay any damages awarded. And even if they did, the American justice system takes away basically all money that convicts get from whatever source, so even in the rare case where A wasn't judgement-proof due to poverty, any money B gets is going to be taken from them and used to satisfy B's unpaid fines or provide restitution to whomever B committed crimes against in the past.
Oh I was thinking about the prison having to pay out. This has to be a disregard for the civil rights of prisoners because a hostel that allowed or encouraged rape - by allowing know rapists go stay in a room with potential victims - would see criminal charges against the employees and civil cases against the company.
That's a common misconception, the doctrine applies to ALL government employees including teachers. It's why it's near impossible to reform because it's universally resisted by the entire bureaucracy which who need to make those reforms.
How would that work when the insurer tries to charge a higher premium for covering a hardened criminal, who then turns out not to have that much money?
Under Robin Hanson's proposal, whoever the criminal picks as their insurer would have the legal ability to do anything they deem fit to their client to ensure they don't incur more fines, including anything our justice system does to convicts. If such measures seem intolerable to any client, they have the option of switching to a different insurer. If no insurer is willing to let the client have any freedom, so be it.
Inside a week you'd have claims adjusters handing out icepick lobotomies for problem clients, and then if that worked smoothly, the definition of "problem" would start to expand. I would not want the sort of society which tolerated that kind of cost-cutting to exist on the same planet with me.
Anyone can avoid an icepick lobotomy by switching to an insurer who doesn't do that. If nobody is willing to spare such a client, then they really would appear to be intolerable for the rest of society.
You already live on a planet where genocides have happened, and where the perpetrators of genocide in Darfur are currently being funded by Qatar to fight a civil war in Sudan. You live on a planet where the North Korean regime considers large swathes of its subjects to be hereditary class enemies who belong in prison camps. You don't have much of an option to live on a planet containing things you find intolerable, although which society you live in is another story.
Informally, perhaps. But if you tried to formalize this it would never pass muster.
I'm not personally okay with giving people convicted of stealing from the register a sentence of violent sexual assault and a nasty case of Hep C + genital herpes. Pretty sure there's a Constitutional Amendment that's supposed to protect against that kind of thing, yet for many there is no de facto protection under the law.
Sorry, reading over you comment more carefully I can see that you're calling out the status quo, not endorsing it.
I guess the principle here is that you can get the public to tacitly allow - and eventually support - something they consider extremely immoral and would ever explicitly agree to.
Add to that conversions about increasing incarceration rates for the marginal offender, and it's kind of crazy.
That's correct. This is my personal crusade-- I think rationalists could do with a little cynicism.
I'm actually quite ambivalent about this as I think a lot of the 'progressive DAs' and their soft-on-crime policies have done a lot to increase crime in deep-blue cities. Real life is often quite complicated, unfortunately.
1. In discussions about capital punishment, the argument from the anti side of the debate seems to hinge around the idea that in an imperfect world we know we're going to sentence innocent people to die. This is undeniably true. Personally, I don't come down on either side of the capital punishment debate, because the innocent convicted are going to suffer regardless of the punishment. I don't think the tail should wag the dog here, where we just keep making punishments easier and easier on everyone as a way to reduce the suffering of the innocent convicted. Is it really better to lock an innocent person up in a rape cage for the rest of their lives than to kill them? I guess you could say that because prisoners have a strong preference for the rape cage over the death penalty there's a revealed preference answer. But it doesn't feel like it answers the objection of this anti capital punishment argument to 'only' toss innocent people in the rape cage. Seems like we should worry about punishment of innocents as its own issue. When talking about punishment, it should be a discussion of whether or to what extent we feel the crime merits that punishment, and whether that's a punishment we citizens are willing to inflict on a fellow human being.
2. The Bill of Rights guarantees citizens won't have to worry about "cruel and unusual" punishment, but what about "cruel and totally normalized" punishments? If you were sentenced to prison for the rest of your life, but I offered to replace that sentence with the amputation of your entire dominant arm, would you take it? Your arm or the rest of your life in a cage? What if it's an arm for 25 years? 15 years? 5 years? At what point does the permanent loss of a body part become preferable to being 'temporarily' locked in a cage or vice versa? And what does that say about the cruelty of the 'normal' punishment?
You can't do an Australia anymore but you can definitely do exile. There are, without a doubt, at least 50 countries on earth who would take a one time 100k payment from the USG to host an exilee and make nominal efforts to keep them from crossing the border out.
All you would need from them is a commitment to not harass or extort the exiled population, and to ensure they get nominally fair treatment from their justice system in the event they are ever accused of a crime. This commitment would be no doubt faithfully kept because these countries really need and want the 100k.
Under such a system, we could rid the US of the half a million most dangerous and persistent criminals for only $5 billion.
Their government brings in about $800 in revenue per-person, per-year. $100,000, the price of about 2 1/2 years of incarceration in the US, is roughly what the average Honduran would pay in taxes during two lifetimes and would cover the average police officer's salary for 12 years.
While each additional felon would surely increase crime somewhat, crime there is already high and people are already on alert. Some exilees might even find they are a better fit in another country where they don't have to live under the rule of New England nerds who like to make rules for everything.
Roman Polanski is effectively exiled from the United States for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl. People usually consider this to be an example of justice not having been served.
What TGGP said, also, Polanski got to go to a nice cushy first-world country. What if he was forced to live out his days in Tajikistan? That would feel pretty just
Roman Polanski will presumably never again rape an American in America. From the perspective of crime prevention, this is a success.
From the perspective of deterrence, it is weak because he is rich enough to live a luxury life in France. The average criminal, though, would probably not have a pleasant life if deported to a third world country.
So exile could be an effective punishment in general, even if in the case of Polanski it's not quite what he deserves.
Convicts in Australia were weird for a number of reasons. One of which was the fact that political prisoners (Fenians) were often overrepresented - also, for public support reasons political prisoners were sometimes charged under other non-treason crime, because findings lots of traitors is a bad look (the traitors may think they have strength in numbers!).
But the thing about having groups of Fenians together on a ship doing a multi-month journey is that a lot of them tend to wanna stay in a band and permanently relocate to somewhere that isn't England, because these people wanted independence from the Crown (apparently lots of them chose to settle in America).
There were people who mostly did crimes of desperation, and when they got released they stayed in Australia and often got a little plot of land (often as a reward for helping colonial authorities enact violence on the First Nations people).
Also, convict Australia operated under severe manpower shortages and were first in an uneasy truce with the First Nations inhabitants, then straight up war. Manpower shortages means opportunity for released felons.
I don't know if there's anywhere in the world that has these specific conditions - shipped far from home, but you get to build a life far away from home once you finish your sentence (and authorities don't really wanna extend your sentence because they can't spare the guards and need a freedperson labour force, if you eg steal something as a freed person in Australia, they'd likely to just do a public flogging then call it a day because you're way more useful watching cattle than you are locked up - your years of bush survival and Australia experience cannot be replaced with a fresh convict).
Disclaimer: My Crazy Scheme is obviously a crazy scheme.
I like the idea of paying Haiti to take our prisoners, if not for all the non-criminals already there who would probably suffer more (if that’s possible) from a bunch of criminals being shipped in.
I assume Australia had a system of penal guards at the colony or something like that. There’s probably some minimal level of effort needed to keep food imports from devolving into chaos where every new prisoner is just immediately executed.
> Here’s an even more hare-brained scheme: if this would devolve into Haiti, why not skip the middleman and pay Haiti to take our prisoners directly? It probably couldn’t make them any worse-off, and they could use the money. It would be win-win!
"I have no idea of what comes after. Without the permanent gang war, Haiti would be a nicer place to live. To ensure the gang war doesn’t break out again, the island now has a permanent population of armed El Salvadorans with face tattoos. But beyond establishing some most basic order, I don’t know if there is a way to reform the country.
Still, you can’t make Haiti worse. And a pacification operation against the worst anarchy in the Western Hemisphere is a better use of 60 000 violent young men than just letting them rot for decades.
If Bukele manages to pull that off, he might really be Latin America’s savior he aspires to be."
Regarding policing and crime, I'd like to recommend a podcast interview of Jennifer Doleac by Jerusalem Demsas. Good discussions about the quality of the evidence.
“Being an officer is respectable. Liberals might yell at you, but it confers status in a way that eg retail or construction doesn’t”
I think this take is way off the mark. Maybe this is directionally true in e.g. small town America, but in big cities, where the problems of hiring police are most exacerbated, this is the problem.
American big cities (NY, SF, LA, etc) are what, 70-80% liberal? So if you have 80% of people in your city not only yelling at police, but spitting in their food and refusing them service (many such cases) it should come as no surprise that these departments have a hard time hiring.
And from the looks of things is going to be tough on crime again in the near future.
Liam is still correct, though, that police in big cities are not prestige (or often even acceptable) vocations. You can't whipsaw back and forth between BLM/Defund and hiring large numbers of police in just a few years. People remember. It also often takes more than a few years to get new recruits trained and in place, even if they were interested. If public perception can go back the other way in such a short time, potential recruits would be fools to take the jobs during a window when a city decides they like cops again. Double fools if the city still doesn't really want them.
Also I believe it is a vicious circle, police officers being overworked make police officers worse at their jobs, and make them less liked.
And fewer police officers mean more crimes overall mean a lot more crimes by police officers.
And it makes the jobs in itself worse.
> Why is it so hard to fill these positions? Sure, there’s a lot of bureaucracy and nonsense and dealing with terrible people, but that’s also true of eg teaching, nursing, etc, and those are highly competitive
This is also off the mark, you aren't dealing with criminals when you are a teacher or a nurse.
Also as a liberal, I really dislike when liberals attack all the profession ("acab", things like that), instead of just the bad cops, while congratulating the good ones.
It's just disincentivizing liberals to become cops, while right-wingers are a much more pro-cops, and I don't like the direction of this at all (+ it is really unfair).
Except there are effectively no good cops once you hit a certain mark where nativity burns off, generally that's about five year maximum in any job that attracts good faith ideologues. After that they either burn out and quit or accept the system and become part of the problem. The same rot that affects teachers, doctors, social workers, politicians, judges, lawyers, etc.
A cop looking to arrest criminals in good faith would never make it out the precinct daily given every person commits numerous crimes a day and police on average studies show commit them at an even higher rate; he would spend all day arresting his peers. I live near a police station and I observe dozens of crimes by the police each and every day, the most common would be the petty misdemeanors of blowing the stop sign in front of their station parking garage, parking in a handicap spot at the liquor store across the street, and driving 15' the wrong way down a one way to avoid having to circle the block on their way home. And all in open view of hundreds of cops charged with arresting criminals. But those same cops no problem arresting other people doing that same 15' shortcut. But yeah "good cops" lol.
> After that they either burn out and quit or accept the system and become part of the problem.
I don't think it is this bad everywhere, but I see how it cans be hard to go against some systemic problems in the group you are in.
But then, we should help the one trying, and change something in the system, not just insult them just because they are cops.
And people should still want to be cops for the good reasons.
> given every person commits numerous crimes a day
This can't be right, or there is some problem with the law.
Anyway, I don't think they should arrest anyone breaking the law without knowing it, if it doesn't matter, they should focus on important things.
And if it matters, you should have some information campaign about it first, because arresting every person one by one to tell them it is illegal would be super inefficient.
> police on average studies show commit them at an even higher rate
Cops are just people, but yes this is bad, it should be a lot less.
In my point of view, a bad cop is a corrupted cop, or a cop who are increasing tension in situations of conflict instead of dissipating it, or who doesn't defend people in danger, stuff like that.
Not one that deal with every petty misdemeanors, if it would not really help (they should also not do them, but I still think a lot don't).
Your police station is probably just worse than average.
> This can't be right, or there is some problem with the law.
My guess is most of those crimes are "watched a show or listened to a song in a way that is not properly sanctioned by the Priests of the Holy IP", which is indeed quite a silly business at this point.
> This is also off the mark, you aren't dealing with criminals when you are a teacher or a nurse.
You are, just in lesser ways. I agree it's not as dangerous, but teachers can be stationed in schools in absolutely terrible neighbourhoods in which half their class is budding future criminals. I went to school in a small town in Italy that was comparatively quiet and we had at least one episode of a teacher being stabbed by a student. I imagine it won't be very much better in a crime-ridden gang-infested neighbourhood.
And as nurses go, they may interact with criminals (where do you think they go when they get shot or stabbed? Very often, the hospital), but most importantly, they may interact with dangerously mentally ill patient, which can be just as dangerous.
Still, I don't think either category interacts with those kind of dangerous people at the same rate, which is the determining factor here (of course, cops aren't constantly chasing Pablo Escobar wannabes either).
You're conflating "votes Democratic" [but look at that 2024 red shift, especially in NYC], "is liberal", and "spits in cops' food (etc)". I feel confident [hand-wavingly] that 80% of the NYC population isn't up for that last one.
Yeah. You never hear about people spitting at retail or construction workers, or accosting their families with "All Cashiers Are Bastards" -- and even if it happened, it would be more likely to roll off of them because, unlike good cops, retail workers don't see it as part of their identity, a calling to service.
I don't even have a clue where Scott is coming from with this.
The mayor of NYC is a former policeman and made it a prominent part of his campaign. Although the NYC mayoral race is mostly decided in the democratic primary, it's worth noting that his opponent in the general was the founder of a group that trained civilians in unarmed combat to make citizen's arrests while patrolling the subway. Law enforcement still garners respect, even in big cities.
Or you can look at polls. According to gallup, Americans are more likely to trust the police than most institutions like schools or unions.
Stories about barista writing PIG on coffee cups go viral for a reason. Many people find them offensive because they think disrespecting police officers is inappropriate.
It is not clear this had any effect on clearance rates for other crimes. I would be hesitant before looking to "police are spending all their time on traffic tickets" as an explanation for anything.
I will say this again: exponentially increasing MANDATORY MINIMUM prison sentences will solve >75% of most crimes since most crimes are committed by repeat offenders. This would solve:
- Prosecutor discretion
- Police not wanting to book people because they don't go to jail
It wouldn't solve prosecutor discretion, they can still choose not to charge people at all. What actually solved discretion in the past (per William Stuntz) was having prosecutor pay depend on convicting people.
"Here's what we'd be willing to pay a prosecutor who miraculously delivered a lasting fix for our city's violent crime problem. As you can see, it's quite generous. Your take-home pay in any given year will be that, multiplied by the clearing rate - that is, ratio of homicide-related convictions to homicides reported. Any such conviction that you pushed for which was later overturned on appeal counts as negative ten, for extra encouragement to actually find the right guy. Minimum pay zero, cold cases worth half but could in principle push you over 100%.
"If we ever catch you suppressing homicide reports, you'll be stripped naked and locked in a room with the victims' next of kin, who then get a full pardon afterward, so whatever happens inside won't count toward your successor's performance stats. When there are legitimately no homicides left to prosecute, 100% pay - and we still expect you to keep busy on smaller stuff - but that basically already counts as a win."
I think the negative ten for appeals would discourage anyone from taking the job. Appeals courts don't even have the job of determining whether the defendant was the "right guy". As William Stuntz also emphasized, the current legal system is focused mostly on procedural motions rather than investigating whether people are actually guilty. Negative one would provide an incentive to avoid getting overturned, while also not pushing them away from prosecuting at all. Multiplying by the clearance rate would not make sense for prosecutors, since they can't possibly have a higher rate than the police, and a great many are never "cleared" in the ordinary sense of police determining a suspect. It would result in prosecutors flocking to cities with lower crime rates.
> they can't possibly have a higher rate than the police
But they can probably do all sorts of stuff that's hard to measure formally, which then influences how the police operate (not least in terms of morale), thus impacting that portion of the clearance rate. Cops will be more willing to do the work to nab some violent offender if they're confident it'll result in marginally safer streets, rather than walking back out a revolving door.
Strategic efforts toward prevention would also be incentivized, without locking in any particularly Goodhart-able preconceptions about what might work, since less overall violent crime statistically means fewer reported homicides, thus proportionately better pay for the same or less direct work.
> It would result in prosecutors flocking to cities with lower crime rates.
A city with such troubles can simply keep ramping up the theoretical 100% pay rate, until the marginal reward per case cleared becomes worthwhile.
Could prosecutors have an effect on the margin? Perhaps, but not enough to boost the homicide clearance rate much. Police already exert a lot of effort to clear such cases. The arrests they don't bother to make due to prosecutors are for smaller crimes, like shoplifting.
Increasing that rate would also increase the cost of that negative multiplier.
I feel like Scott wrote stuff relevant to this argument in the "So What Do We Do About Shoplifting In California?" and "Prelude To Incapacitation: Superoffenders" sections. My takeaways:
- Increasing mandatory minimums would greatly increase prison population and therefore prison costs. We could do this and it would probably marginally decrease crime, but it would be a giant waste of money compared to hiring more police and otherwise increasing the likelihood of being caught when committing any given crime.
- Escalating punishments for repeat offenders is probably a good idea, but for a fixed prison size, that's at odds with longer sentences for first time offenders. Multi-time offender laws should also apply to low level offenses like property crime.
- Increasing mandatory minimums for the worst subset of crimes could provide an incentive for criminals to fight their conviction for those crimes harder, making it more likely that they plea down to lesser charges, since one of the primary bottlenecks for the state is the cost of trial. This actually might not be a bad thing, but could work around your goal of decreasing prosecutor discretion. Also, this implies that any prison increases should be coupled with increase funding for courts, and again, probably funding the courts is the low-hanging fruit.
- Police not booking people because they don't want to book people who won't go to jail should probably be solved by discouraging that attitude among police through education, better punishment of superoffenders, hiring better police leadership, or firing lazy officers. It sounds like the evidence shows that "catch and release" does reduce crime, so it seems incredibly problematic if police are just given license to ignore that.
I also think your 75% number is pulled from nowhere.
I think what I would suggest after reading Scott's post is a combination of the following policies:
- Hire more police to the point of seriously raising crime clearance rates. This would also probably involve better priorities/leadership. (I want to note that orthogonal to Scott's research I think we should pay police more but increase police accountability by busting problematic police unions and making it more likely that police are punished for misconduct).
- Get rid of short-length prison sentences. It seems like any prison sentence shorter than 5 years is probably a bad idea. Short prison sentences have low incapacitation effects and high aftereffects, plus high costs per crime reduction due to the court process. Plus, the people committing crimes deserving of short sentences are the most reformable. For first time offenders committing low-level crimes, we should focus on reliably catching them and quickly sentencing them to mild punishments (e.g. community service, suspended sentence, or even no punishment, as long as it comes with a conviction). Serial criminals, even those committing low-level crimes, should have the book thrown at them (but securing the convictions for the initial crimes is a necessary part of that). Probably part of this is reforming the parole system so that it's not just a way to sneakily send people to prison.
- There's not much info on whether this would be marginally effective in Scott's post, but I'd guess increasing funding for the courts would also be helpful.
One point to note is that most prisoners at any given time seem to be in for violent offenses, but the average *release* is for people jailed for just over 1 year.
>the only answer I would really be comfortable giving is that I did it for the greater good of preventing/deterring future crime and protecting the innocent
Well, "seeing red" is the way that evolution implemented enforcement of that desideratum in dumb monkeys that didn't understand game theory. Of course, the notion of "God" inflicting infinite punishments for stuff probably also makes sense in this framework...
"Take a moment to imagine how your own life would change if you spent ten years in prison. Seriously, spend a literal few seconds thinking about your specific, personal life."
"According to BJS and this fact sheet: 60% of prisoners had a job in the 30 days before their crime, and 50% were working full-time. 40% had ever married, and 15% - 25% were currently married (though I can’t tell if that’s at time of crime, or at time of survey in prison). About half had children, and 40% of fathers lived with their children at the time of the crime."
These stats can all be 'true' and Deiseach's point can still be correct that these people are mostly not living a 'normal' life, like the kind your readers live, that is then destroyed when they go to prison. You later claim that most criminals are basically retarded children with an average IQ of 75, which seems much more in line the Deiseach's characterization than the implication from the original post.
How about we imagine what would happen to 'Henry' from Radicalizing the Romanceless if he got a ten year sentence for brutally assaulting one of his ex-wives instead of imagining the average tech worker stumbling into a ten year prison sentence.
> How about we imagine what would happen to 'Henry' from Radicalizing the Romanceless if he got a ten year sentence
Most likely, not much. I have an uncle who's a Henry. He's been to jail. He's come out of it. He's got a... not wife, a partner I guess, I don't think he married her like the previous two. He keeps mooching off people when he can, living of expedients and mixing up with the local criminal crowds when he can't. The thing is that he doesn't even fit the profile of the average criminal outlined here. He's fairly smart, if unruly. And he wasn't born in some shitty hopeless broken family or neighbourhood. He was a small town kid. His dad was a cop, a very serious one. He's one of the strongest pieces of evidence I have for "some people really are fucking doomed from the start, or at least break bad due to completely unfathomable chaotic effects".
He might have done better perhaps with some serious targeted psychological help, but dunno. Maybe he's just a sociopath and that's that.
Re the police supposedly enjoying driving around "nice" areas: a policeman could spend a happy hour going up and down the streets of the neighborhood I grew up in, in the 4th largest metro - but I've literally never seen a city policeman in that neighborhood but for one memorable day a couple years ago when - in a distant part of the city - a perp stopped for speeding or something, bolted and (I can't recall exactly) ran over the foot of a lady cop or injured her in some other way; and some sort of chivalry kicked in and that guy had like 20 LEOs of different stripes chasing him around the city. Somehow he turned into our rather secluded neighborhood at one point in the many-miles chase, which resulted in the curious scene of all these cars going 75 down my parents' quiet narrow street. It was "To Think It Happened on Mulberry Street" come to life.
In fact, the neighborhood like many others in that city - understands that ordinary "beat" police protection is not *theirs* no matter their tax burden; and they pay extra for a security guy to do just that, drive round and round the neighborhood day and night. Those who think immigration doesn't "have anything to do with anyone else's lives" - e.g. lots of NYT commenters - do not grasp that this state of affairs is in great measure part of the bargain of living with an open border, and immigrant enclaves.
Ditto the safe neighborhood I lived in, though it was a more "egalitarian" city and the security guy idea hadn't taken off there. Virtually never a cop; so much so that the moms of the neighborhood would occasionally call and beg one to come work the 3 school zones once in awhile, as a reminder to people. They would generally respond by saying they were too busy, working accidents or else working the greater dysfunction in other parts of town.
I rather think cops like mixing it up with people.
Those who like solitary driving around are going to seek other jobs.
If you live in a safe neighborhood with a low crime rate why would you need extensive police presence-- as opposed to a bad neighborhood where crime is a daily occurence?
Because you lose the benefits of orderliness that were once taken for granted. You get speeding, for instance, on the through street, because everyone's in a hurry. You get your cars stolen in the night. Bikes and such are stolen. But because the thieves came from "outside" - the police don't have much interest in it. And in cities where they've paid to have a large homeless and feral population - which is not every city, as yet - in an increasingly large and even "nice" area, you get homeless people banging on the back door, or walking right in. And the message is that these are First World problems, as they used to say. You didn't get murdered! File a report online.
And there is a wide gulf between not needing much help from the police - which will be the goal of more and more people, leading to a real fragmentation of the civic fabric, a la Latin America - and getting *no* attention whatsoever. A curious thing about my parents' neighborhood, is that they don't even expect *any* city services. They practically forget there is municipal government. They live with the oddest things. like there's been for years a huge hump in the road that you have to navigate around on a blind curve. A worse neighborhood would call about this, ironically. They seem to know the city has bifurcated.
I've never had a homeless person begging at my door, not even in Baltimore. In fact I've never been panhandled on a street where I lived, though that has happened numerous time in high foot traffic areas.
And really, like anything else the police are a limited resource and they should be concentrated where they are most needed, just as medical resources should be used for the more serious conditions, not clogged up with people suffering heartburn or the sniffles
I don't know much about Baltimore. It is an affluent city? Because the homeless are drawn to affluence, of course.
It wouldn't matter if you did have such banging, down here. You needn't worry about the bangers being unfairly harassed lol.
You can be a woman alone in her home and call the police to report this is *happening right now* and unless you are lucky, you will not find there is any urgency to the police responding.
This fascinates me in an era of so much prudery around the fragility of women.
As always, there's a disconnect between ideology and reality.
Here's an example of a poor town: Prairie View, Texas. The google AI helpfully tells me that 44.7% of the population ... live below the poverty line, a number that is higher than the national average of 12.5%." Smart Google!
I expect if you go there, you will see people walking around - as you will in many an East Texas town, many a Texas city, in fact. This is a sign of poverty - no car. At least Prairie View has a college. The deep impoverishment of East Texas is historically ironic, of course, and yet I expect it is a better place to be in certain ways, than Baltimore.
You won't see any homeless people attracted to East Texas from elsewhere. Very probably there are few to no homeless people in those once-prosperous towns. That's how poor it is.
Richard Hanania theorizes that high homicide cities like Chicago (and presumably Baltimore) can't have the homeless problems of a low homicide city like SF. The huge SF encampments would turn into dead bodies much more quickly.
I have had a homeless person come into the foyer of my apartment building in Arlington a decade ago, and a friend had a homeless person sleep in their unlocked van in NY a few years ago.
I don't think anyone was violent but it's not too farfetched that things like this happen.
Was your foyer open in a way that anyone could just wander in? Sounds like it. I've never lived in a place like that. Even way back in the day when I lived in apartments there was no common foyer, just individual doors. And of course that's true of individual houses, even Baltimore row houses. The closest thing I can think of happened to friends in my college days,. They had hosted a big old wild party and the next morning they found some homeless guy in the back yard collecting all the empty beer cans for the ten cent deposit on each (This was in Michigan and empty beverage containers worth 10 cents were something the homeless and other paupers went after)
Yeah it was a small ~9 unit building with a little foyer and stairwell. The door was closed but wasn't locked. They installed a mechanism to lock fork th inside when it shut after that (with a special key that caused me a bunch of annoyance as well).
Rich people, or just net tax payers, don't want cops in their neighborhoods. They'll vote over this. Cops go where they are allowed to go by people who get voted in. I think the example talked about is working traffic and speeding tickets when they could be chasing down career criminals, rather than just hanging out in nice areas. Not sure how accurate that is, but it's a different argument.
Nice neighborhoods want two things from cops. 1) Keep the riffraff and crime away from themselves, and 2) to be readily available if crime does come their way.
They definitely do not want a daily presence unless there's a problem.
The cops are not coming. Maybe they will come in 2 hours.
You are paying for nothing. Or if you want to think of it like that - "keep the riffraff away from themselves" - they are paying in vehicles and bicycles, and in car accidents with uninsured people, and getting T-boned by the red light thrill runner, and the occasional mugging or carjacking, getting shot at a gas station (don't go to that one anymore, though it's but a mile from your "safe" area! - this is an actual topic of discussion among relatives) to have colonies of the criminally-minded and illegible-to-the-state - some distance way from *their homes*.
I'm sensing a real geographic disparity. Federalism really doesn't work.
I'm happy to admit that I live in a good town with nice services and a very low crime rate. I talk to the local police fairly often (work-related) and always get a really quick and friendly response. The few times I've had to talk to the police outside of my job was exactly the same. Very friendly, very responsive.
Thanks! I think that's actually the tale of real estate now, maybe for more than my lifetime. People looking for "good schools" are usually just looking for low-crime neighborhoods and the people who live in them.
Depends on the people. Older people and people with kids prioritize low crime. Young people not as much (I am generalizing of course) which helps explain the gentrification process that turns poor, crime-ridden neighborhoods into spiffy, reasonably safe places. The early gentrifiers are like old time pioneers willing to brave the dangers of the wilderness for as cheap place.
Smart people’s mistakes also happen to affect way more people. And they are better at denying they were really mistakes. At least with dumb people, the mistakes largely affect them and the people around them. Smart people can lead billions down a dark path, whistling the whole time that only the stupid people are complaining. And the other, obviously smart people who say this is a bad idea? Those are just bad guys.
One thing I might have mentioned in the other thread.
When people show statistically that “deterrence doesn’t work” what they mean is that it doesn’t work so well for the existing classes of criminal. If shoplifting were fully legal tomorrow with absolutely no consequences for anybody then the normie who is not a criminal would in many cases start shoplifting. In fact it’s hard to explain why anybody wouldn’t.
The breakdown of society, after a war or whatever, shows that ordinary people engage in general criminality, black marketing and go back to normal non criminal life when that is available.
Almost anybody except the rare saint will engage in crime if driven by sufficient desperation. I'm no saint, and I am adequately provided for. I can't see myself becoming a shoplifter in my current circumstances even if it were legal.
I’ve kept found money before nothing more than £20, but not a found wallet with name and address - I’ve handed that it with the money intact. Both are technically illegal, googling the issue and I find I’m supposed to reasonably try find the owner in both cases.
Presumably the fact that the wallet is easier to return to owner matters, but I’m also pretty much aware that taking the £20 even if reported, even if there were multiple CC cameras proving the issue, would lead to nothing.
The UK police aren’t going to bother finding the owner, no prosecutor is going to try the case, and no court convict. Furthermore in the court of public opinion nobody would be shocked either.
Let’s imagine, though I’m in Singapore or somewhere like that, where for the purposes of this thought experiment this *is* prosecuted. And where there are lots of cc tv cameras so there’s a chance I’m getting caught. If I’m caught there’s a large fine, or some other penalty.
And let’s imagine that all the guide books tell me this. And let’s imagine I’m walking along in Singapore and a nice 30$ (SGD) is floating by.
I’m not taking that.
So at least at some level the law is deterring me.
Right--it's at the margin. Going from 10 to 11 years in prison doesn't seem to have much effect on the lunkheads who commit most crimes. It might work on people considering complex tax fraud or something, but not guys who hold up liquor stores or mug little old ladies.
If we closed all the jails and prisons, I expect we'd see a huge increase in crime because of the lack of any deterrence.
Also, even most people who aren't deterred from burgling someone's house by a longer prison sentence can be deterred from burgling someone's house by realizing the homeowner has a couple of big dogs running around loose in the house. That's a much more immediate kind of deterrence.
In recent years there has been pushback against cops engaging in high-speed chases. Adrenaline operates, of course, so that one still hears about the occasional high-speed chase, of course. But I think on some level, there must have been successfully put a fear of it into the average cop, the fear of injuring others or themselves; and there's a class of people - young men - happy to exploit this gap. Even anti-cop Reddit is full of posts complaining that cops don't seem to even patrol freeways anymore. There is nightly drag racing in every major city in my state, sometimes with added thrills involving ordinary arterials and red lights. Not just at night - some people race, improbably, on the interstate in the middle of the day. I remember once trying to call it in: "So I'm at I10 and ******* eastbound and these guys are weaving in and out of traffic, going about 95 ...." The operator stopped me to ask my name. Spell my name. And give my address .... my home address ... and then finally, where was this incident? I repeated my location. Deep unfamiliarity with the street grid. What was the hundred block? I don't know, I said, but by this time they're ten miles away. Nevermind.
The sound of it carries. It's not something I ever heard my first 40 years. Drag racing if it existed, was done out on rural roads, not on the freeways of the city as if it was a big Hot Wheels track.
Maybe I sound like a killjoy, but this kills people on the regular; and it's no big deal at all. There's not billboards about it. There's not talk about doing something about it. It's just become normalized. It's almost a little embarrassing. Over the weekend a woman was driving to the fast food restaurant to pick up her two teenagers who were both working shifts there. She was killed. She somehow was hit simultaneously by 2 Mustangs. The police said the drivers were not drunk. (Drunk is the worst!) There will be no charges. It was just unfortunate, they said.
They used to make those Fast and Furious movies that glorified street racing. And I used to think "this is dumb, it's going to get people killed". And then the star of the Fast and Furious movies got killed while street racing. And then they just kept making Fast and Furious movies without any introspection on the part of anybody.
(I know they're less about street racing and more about sending Hondas into space these days, but they're still not promoting safe and cautious driving.)
It's funny seeing "Videogame causes violence" crowd actually getting more and more justified these days (just fill in the "entertainment" and "crime" variable in "entertainment cause crime" formula)
Nah. Car chase have been glorified for as long as I can remember and probably before I was born.
Covid did make it possible to speed in places that were normally congested. I saw a lot of that in 2020. There might be all of six cars on a normally gridlocked major road at rush hour-- and they were driving fast.
I tend to be a fan of old school an "eye for an eye" on nuisance crimes. Caught shoplifting $50 worth of stuff? Cool, the state gets to take your shoes. Walk home barefooted, dude. Won't stop panhandling on this corner though we've repeatedly told you to stop? Cool, we are going to take you for a 15 mile ride outside of town and leave you on the side of the road in West Podunk. Etc. Maybe I'm naive, but I feel like this kind of stuff coupled with a high chance of getting caught would render a lot of nuisance crimes very quickly not worth it.
This isn't inflicting ludicrous suffering on criminals (being raped in prison) for being a nuisance. It's making their life inconvenient and irritating back instead.
*Edit* This was the unspoken way of dealing with intractable homeless people since basically forever. You harass homeless people into not congregating in certain places you don't want them to be. Then you let them be in certain places with somewhat less scrutiny like flophouses or shady parts of town. We just stopped doing this because we worried about this making their lives suck more. But them congregating in the park in an otherwise nice area makes everyone else's lives suck more. If we admit that endemic homelessness is a uniquely pernicious problem to solve, what we are really arguing about is who should have to bear the brunt of homeless people's intrinsic obnoxiousness.
I'm frankly more interested in helping relatively normal but poor people escape neighborhoods full of dysfunction than I am letting the dysfunctional elements wander everywhere because they can't help it. Poor, single mom who can hold down a job with some help should be getting the "help people" social resources. Not wandering heroin addled chronic shoplifter who sometimes screams at people and waves a knife. That guy needs to be managed, not helped. He is a lost cause 95%+ of the time. And even if you could help him, he would probably need a ludicrous amount of resources compared to single mom. This equally applies to the IQ 65 guy with no impulse control as it does to the homeless person.
The key point of this is the meaning of that "a lot." You are correct that any number of specific homeless people aren't a big deal. Andy Griffith can in fact be reasonably accommodating to Otis (the town drunk) because there's one of him. But "a lot" of homeless people in any place are an unpleasant nuisance. I can't think of an exception.
>Won't stop panhandling on this corner though we've repeatedly told you to stop? Cool, we are going to take you for a 15 mile ride outside of town and leave you on the side of the road in West Podunk.
I fail to see how this is "eye for an eye." Last time I checked panhandling doesn't involve forcing people into cars and driving them 15 miles away.
Also, if you make a policy of having the police punish people without due process, they're going to abuse that power. It's kinda why due process exists in the first place.
"I’m including this here as a counter to Peter’s story of the guy who got two years in jail for driving the speed limit. I hear so many outrageous stories of extreme strictness and so many outrageous stories of extreme laxity (see also this post) that I’m nervous about turning the dial one way or the other compared to trying to figure out what’s going on."
Note that the two comments aren't talking about the same thing. Peter talks about **probation**, while Charlotte talks about **parole**. In Peter's comment it's also explained how **parole** officers have every incentive to keep people out of prisons, while for **probation** officers it's the exact opposite, they want people moved to prison as much and as soon as possible. Both the probation system and the parole system seem to be utterly broken, but in opposite ways.
Seconded, came to the comments to point this out. Peter makes a huge point of how *probation* is too strict in ways *entirely unlike* parole. I'm hoping this was just an oversight on Scott's part as he was rushing to find a counterexample since this seems uncharacteristically sloppy for him.
"This isn’t very clearly written, but my impression is that Peter is saying that violating probation gives you a longer prison sentence than just accepting prison in the first place, probation is deliberately designed to be near-impossible to keep, and so it’s a con to trick criminals into longer sentences without having to get them through a judge and jury. Criminals know this, so they refuse probation.
This kind of conflicts with the “criminals have high time preference and make terrible decisions” point above, so I’m not sure what to think of it. "
My understanding is, this is because they're mostly not making these decisions independently, they're making them conditioned on the advice of other people they're hearing from while in jail, plus people they've likely associated with to lead them there in the first place.
I've participated in a number of clinical studies, which also filters for a lot of people with poor time discounting and not great decisionmaking overall (a lot of them also casually discuss time spent in prison,) and there are a whole lot of participant practices which are contrary to what the clinics actually want from them which participants openly discuss among each other as things that "everyone knows" you do. I should probably write something up some time about how this sort of thing affects the results of clinical research as well.
I'm still surprised this doesn't translate into better judgment in general - surely there's also a lot of gossip in the criminal underworld about "don't commit crimes because prison is very bad".
I think the problem here is that risk of prison is low. The lesson would have to be "prison is very bad and while my chances of going to prison for any given act are very low, if I lead a life of crime I will likely eventually go there." Which can be difficult if you're bad at risk.
I think if the chances of going to jail for crime were magically 100% for some reason, this would work.
If they feel desperate enough, then the advice they are likely to take is about not getting caught. Advice about not being a criminal probably sounds extremely unhelpful to a guy with no job prospects and a need for immediate money.
Fellow criminals may be acting under a harm reduction mentality. Knowing that your cousin is going to commit crimes no matter what you say, you tell him how not to get caught instead.
This only works when the chances of getting caught are low enough to pass whatever mental clearance rate the person is acting under. Even a 95% catch rate will still see really really high time preference people committing crimes. But a 50% catch rate will see a lot more people doing it no matter how bad prison is.
Considering how much of a disruption having gone to prison even once causes to trying to live a straight and narrow life afterwards, I think the prison system is full of a lot of people talking about how hard that is, and their efforts to explore alternatives.
Publication bias. The people who have a really bad time in prison aren't there to talk. Those who had a pretty bad time don't say much to avoid looking weak. Those who had an ok experience talk some. Those who avoided it entirely enjoy boasting.
So most of the stories a prospective criminal hears are that prison can be avoided, with a few "it's not that bad"s mixed in.
Also, people who are persuaded to stop doing crimes after experiencing how bad prison seem like they'd be somewhat less likely to be part of the criminal underworld.
I'm coming back to this again after thinking about it more, I think there's another factor I failed to address in my first response. With probation cases, we're looking at a one-off decision. People get asked "do you want to take probation?" They're given the opportunity to consider the question, and their answer is taken as binding. But if we offered people a similar choice of "Do you want to commit crimes?" a lot of people who go on to commit crimes would probably say no. They're not resolving in advance to commit crimes as a considered judgment about their best interests, they're responding to daily temptations, frustrations and crises which occasionally push them into crime. If 364 days out of the year, you don't commit any crimes, but on one day you get really angry and assault someone and get arrested, you're a criminal, but it's not because you decided committing crimes was a good direction for your life.
> My understanding is, this is because they're mostly not making these decisions independently, they're making them conditioned on the advice of other people they're hearing from while in jail, plus people they've likely associated with to lead them there in the first place.
There's been research findings for years that certainty of getting caught has far more deterrent effect than the severity of the sentence. This shouldn't be any great revelation as we see it regularly when bringing up children and in domestic animal behavior too.
I suppose the main point of Scott's post is to summarize and broadcast those findings. It may be an obvious point to criminologists, but it's not something that is widely understood in public discourse (and I don't think I valued the point enough before reading this post).
I basically think everyone is right (except the "punishment is a social good in itself" types but of course that's a philosophical difference). I've worked (briefly) as an attorney in both criminal prosecution and defense, and basically:
1) Criminals are generally wildly stupid, in a way it's hard for the educated, high-performing people who run society to understand. They are both impulsive and highly susceptible to peer pressure.
2) They are still people! Many 16-y/o gang members who have literally threatened a gas station attendant's life with a gun to steal $270 are sweet, kind, well-meaning kids who were just trying to help out their friends. ("...okay, but holding someone at gunpoint is still evil." Agreed, and see point one).
3) In a lot of these communities, being arrested is seen as similar to being struck by lightning. Drugs are everywhere, every person in their life is some species of criminal, and for the most part they get away with it. Sometimes you get arrested, and sometimes randomly that means you go to jail for a long time. Lots of people in these communities know better, but they don't get caught and/or they instinctively work the system in a way that keeps them from being struck by lightning.
4) This is only exacerbated by our bail and probation systems. In particular, most prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges view probation as a kindness - no need to lose your job, spend Christmas in jail, etc. But in reality, probationers don't really have the mental faculties to care about their probation. So the typical trajectory of a life of crime in their mind goes: "No consequences, no consequences, no consequences, suddenly and randomly 20 years in prison."
In order to condition good behavior in dumb people (and make no mistake, it would need to be conditioned), you'd need to defeat the pervasive idea that punishment is essentially arbitrary. You'd want bad behavior to be almost certain to have small consequences, increasing in severity with successive offenses. That's exactly opposite of the way our current system works, where almost no behavior is punished, but when punishment comes it's life-shatteringly harsh.
#4 is absolutely right about their mentality. Scott's reading of Peter's comments is off, even if criminals SHOULD negotiate for a lower DOC sentence rather than a probation term with a higher backup sentence, they don't in practice. As a public defender, on numerous occasions I recommended to a guy to accept a 2 yr DOC sentence (parole in a matter of 5-6 months) rather than a 7 yr suspended execution of sentence (5 yrs probation, they do the 7 if they are violated, which is maybe a year or two before parole followed by the remaining several years on parole that they also might violate and get sent back.) Maybe once a guy took my advice, the rest of the time they took probation because it gets them out of jail today, and they overestimate their ability to succeed on probation.
I will say that in my experience probationers were never sent back for violations like the employment requirement. It was always a new laws violation or absconding from probation or some related residency violation. On the rare occasion the record might reflect that somebody got sent to DOC for violating the employment condition, what actually happened is that they agreed to confess to that violation in exchange for having an absconding violation dropped, because absconding violations took away their eligibility for 120-day release whereas employment didn't. In no case would somebody have been sent up for an employment violation alone.
That comment threw me too - Admittedly I have only a very little bit of criminal experience, but in the two or so years I was doing that work, I have never seen a suspect say "oh no, I don't want probation, give me the jail time" even in cases where it was like 6 months vs. 10 years suspended time.
Also agree that people aren't often violated for minor infractions in my jurisdiction, though I suspect this depends a lot on the culture of your prosecutor's office.
Aside, the first case I ever tried was a minor probation violation case where the defendant had shoplifted. I read out the terms of his probation, to which he got frustrated and said that he knew them. I asked if he understood that his sentence could be revoked if he violated those terms. He said that he did but that he thought his probation ran from the date of his original crime, not the date of his sentencing. His exact words were "so I thought my probation had ended and didn't know that I couldn't do that <shoplift from Target>." I asked, "You didn't know you couldn't break the law?" to which he took a deep breath, looked the judge in the eye, and said "No sir I did not know I wasn't allowed to break the law."
While admittedly very funny, both this person and society at large would have been better served if he'd been subject to a simpler punishment scheme.
So would you say that to these people law is like a thunderhead which they are vaguely aware of as floating somewhere high overhead and which sometimes discharges lightnings, but which they ignore in practice and just do whatever they want?
Yes and no. I didn't want to get into the politics of policing in my comment so I left out a lot of relevant details. Essentially these people are screwed whatever they do. In some of these neighborhoods, drug dealing is so endemic that any home or vehicle is likely to have drugs in it, our possession laws are wiggly enough that anyone in the home or vehicle can reasonably be charged with felony possession with intent to deal, and the police that deal with these situations tend to view every person in these communities with maximum suspicion automatically.
I've had officers literally tell me, while I was working as a defense attorney with the suspect as my client, that I should accept a felony plea against a 16-year-old on sketchy evidence, because that way he'll never be able to own a gun, and will never be a danger to the community. Keep in mind that almost every job application, especially for the kinds of jobs a kid like this can get, screens out felons.
A 17-year-old dummy caught with an eight ball under his seat in a traffic stop might have actually been intending to use cocaine or might have had no idea the cocaine was there. But the dumber he is, the more likely he is to take the fall for it, and the facts of his particular case have very little to do with whether he does.
So it's more like "there is a thunderhead overhead of powerful people who can ruin my life at any time for any reason, might as well do whatever I want."
> 1) Criminals are generally wildly stupid, in a way it's hard for the educated, high-performing people who run society to understand.
Moreover, it is (at least in my experience) hard to persuade educated, high-performing people who have no or very little first-hand experience that grownup people can be this stupid and that this is not a condition that can be cured with a bit of study and training and self-discipline. I even had moments of dark comedy when otherwise extremely intelligent people went "What do you mean, 1/3 of the population cannot learn even precalculus? Anybody can learn precalculus if they are motivated! What is there to learn in it?!111" on me.
>I hear so many outrageous stories of extreme strictness and so many outrageous stories of extreme laxity (see also this post) that I’m nervous about turning the dial one way or the other compared to trying to figure out what’s going on.
> I content myself with thinking that the incapacitation-optimal amount of prison (probably 20 years to life for a murder) is already pretty extreme.
We can look at median and mean times served for various crimes.
Of course, the median times served were shorter (sometimes significantly), and due to the practice of pleading down to lesser offenses, the actual crimes committed for each sentence would have on average been more severe than the ones listed.
The link also includes more data on the time served distribution.
E.g. 96.7% of those convicted of larceny-theft served less than 5 years. 8.9% of convicted murderers served less than 3 years, etc.
Re. "I’m not even sure how one would put a “price” on the harm caused by rape... the punishment for rape is substantially higher than the punishment for the average crime": The probability that a convicted person is innocent should also be factored in. I suspect this is much higher for rape than for other crimes. I watched one rape trial when I was in high school as part of a social studies course, and the defendant was convicted even though all of the evidence indicated that the sex was consensual. Does anyone know of any data on the probability that a convicted person did in fact commit the crime, for different crimes?
How did you choose the trial? Perhaps you teacher chose it because it was not representative?
My impression is that prosecution for date rape is very rare. Prosecution is for stranger rape where there is a serious problem of identifying the rapist. When you were in high school, 15% of rape convicts were the wrong man, which we know because of retrospective DNA testing. This isn't an issue of consent!
It is hard to imagine how you could get data about any other crime. The same lab found a similar rate of DNA matches for murder convicts, but there were very few cases where there was samples with DNA at all and the failure to match is not necessarily exonerating.
>How come in one million articles about Bukele and crime in El Salvador, including many trying to discredit him or say it wasn’t worth it, I’ve never heard a peep about this? And if it wasn’t Bukele or mass incarceration that did it, then what was it?
I'm sorry, Scott, but you probably didn't search very much at all here. It's been a very frequent mention in almost every debat about Bukele that I've witnessed.
>Compare the Nazi eugenics program against schizophrenics discussed here. They killed almost every schizophrenic in Germany
Last time you discussed this, you claimed:
>The Nazis ran a eugenics program that killed most of the schizophrenics in Germany
>Sebjenseb did a similar analysis and finds that if you execute the most criminal 1% of the population each generation, population level criminality decreases by about 0.1 standard deviation per 400 years
If I understand correctly, he assumed criminals and non criminals have similar fertility, but I think that there's reason to assume that criminals have higher fertility. E.g. in the US, Hispanics and Blacks have higher fertility than Whites and Asians, while they (particularly Blacks) have a much higher criminal propensity: https://www.statista.com/statistics/226292/us-fertility-rates-by-race-and-ethnicity/.
Hard to tell. Subsequent German governments have been running a program to eliminate top-tier scientific talent by paying them far far less than they could make in the US.
Re: E.g. in the US, Hispanics and Blacks have higher fertility than Whites and Asians, while they (particularly Blacks) have a much higher criminal propensity
Which tells us exactly nothing about the fertility rate of criminals.
Performative Bafflement's estimate of 80% of cop hours spent on traffic tickets is missing numerous factors and makes a lot of bad assumptions.
To start with, he is basing this on an estimate of cops' FTE work hours. But cops also work what they call "grant shifts", which are 8 hour overtime shifts paid for by grant money. A common one is NHTSA, which requires you to spend the entire 8 hour overtime shift writing tickets. Other ones are purely for DUI interdiction. Grant shifts are paid a higher hourly wage, and are heavily sought-after by cops, in my jurisdictions they were always taken when available.
The small town where I was recently the municipal prosecutor had a police force of ~8 fulltime officers and had several such shifts per month. NHTSA alone gives out hundreds of millions of dollars per year in these grants. I assume there's overhead and administrative costs, but these paid $25-30/hr in my town so we're easily talking 12-15 million hours of overtime which is dedicated solely to traffic enforcement. A substantial portion of the tickets being written were on these overtime shifts.
Additionally, a traffic stop tends to produce multiple tickets. People who drive with expired plates often are also driving with an expired license and no insurance and not wearing a seat belt. I would say that in my experience, the most common number of tickets to be written on a stop (if the cop wrote any at all) was 2, but it frequently went as high as 6, so the average was likely closer to 3.
He mentions setting up speed trap locations for traffic enforcement, but this is only common for highway patrol officers not local cops. To the extent local cops do this, it is primarily the ones on the aforementioned grant shifts who had to be writing tickets the whole time. Patrol cops make traffic stops in the course of patrolling -- you are heading back from checking on the gas station drive-off call you just responded to, you see Joe Smith who you pulled over last month and had a revoked license, you pull in behind him to follow him for a block or two, he doesn't come to a complete stop at a stop sign, you pull him over and run his license yada yada.
He also claims writing tickets generates revenue for the governmental unit, however this is a dubious claim based on old assumptions that haven't survived the modernization of the justice system. My state, and many others, have caps on the percentage of revenue that can be generated by municipal tickets. A number of small munis in St Louis metro were affected, but my city came nowhere remotely close to the cap. There are also caps on the amounts of fines you can impose for minor traffic offenses. By the time you factored in paying for a city judge, paying for cops to show up at court, paying my salary, paying the court clerk, and paying the administrative police officer who assisted me, it wasn't making money. Increasingly, municipalities are turning this over to county governments. The days of the speed trap city funded entirely by ticketing out-of-towners have ended.
I'd also say that language in PB's piece is unnecessarily prejudicial for what is supposed to be a numerical analysis. Oh the policeman "waddled" back to his car? "Heave your tired bulk out of the SUV?" Assuming cops are just lazy and sitting there for 15 minutes to waste time? C'mon man. The whole thing is written like PB has never met a cop except on the roadside when he was getting pulled over. That piece is dripping with contempt and seems to be getting its idea of police work entirely from outdated TV and movie tropes.
The excerpt quoted also fails to consider, "Why do cops often make those stops?"
The stops are made in hopes that some police interactions will reveal evidence of more extreme lawlessness--distributing drugs, felon in possession, etc.
>I would say that in my experience, the most common number of tickets to be written on a stop (if the cop wrote any at all) was 2, but it frequently went as high as 6, so the average was likely closer to 3.
This is interesting to me because in my own experience and experiences I've heard from friends and coworkers, traffic stops we've been on the receiving end of virtually never end with more than one ticket written.
But come to think of it, the one time I went to court for a traffic ticket (Los Angeles County in 2003), the arraignment was full of people who were charged with three tickets apiece (driving without a license, driving without insurance, and a moving violation). Although that has a different sampling issue than anecdotes from my social circle, as people who just got a ticket for one moving violation but have proper license, registration, and insurance are probably mostly just paying the fine and doing traffic school.
It's a consistent conundrum of policing that cops actually do have very good metis for looking at a person and quickly assessing the likelihood they are a criminal or a lout, but this metis isn't legal probable cause.
I was also somewhat suspicious of this data but I don't have counter data, only anecdote. I worked public safety IT for about 10 years so literally worked inside a police station and worked on IT equipment in police units. It's true that most cops are patrol officers and 80%+ of patrol officers' time is being in a car. But they aren't all just sitting at speed traps. They are responding to calls that come in to dispatch. Patrol is also a deterrent of itself. They will drive around or just park in high crime areas *because* crime happens there and it's less likely to happen when a police vehicle is parked in the street.
And, yes, the one speed trap that was consistently manned was on the interstate in a large construction zone and was paid for by state grant money. That zone also had several terrible car wrecks a year, sometimes fatal, so I would say the speed trap was not there mostly for reasons of grift.
I don't think that's a plausible heuristic. Try applying it to murder, for example. I'm sure there's no amount of money most people would accept in order to willingly be killed, but that doesn't mean that the value of a life is infinite. People are bad at being rational about extreme things like this.
A better method might be to look at the prices of high-end escorts.
I think murder would be relatively easy to figure out. There are people who accept jobs with a non-negligible chance of death, in exchange for better pay than otherwise equivalent safe jobs, from which market rates can be extrapolated. Then there's cases of suicide with express intent to collect insurance payouts - a central plot point in the classic Christmas movie It's A Wonderful Life. As another data point, whatever rate the EPA uses for cost/benefit analysis of hazmat remediation.
Rape is a much trickier question. Can't just use prices for sex workers doing a consensual version of the same physical acts, any more than you could usefully base rates for murder on how much a professional actor would want in exchange for being struck with a rubber knife and then falling down spurting ketchup. Trauma associated with a genuinely unplanned loss of control is central to the real crime's personal costs, and play-pretend hourly rates don't even vaguely approximate such a thing.
>Can't just use prices for sex workers doing a consensual version of the same physical acts
How's that different from your murder example? The high-risk job comparison is equally inappropriate because that's a willing acceptance of risk.
Being mugged or suffering a home break-in is a comparable loss of autonomy (it's less than rape but I think it's the same order of magnitude) but we're still happy to account the cost as the value of goods stolen.
I agree that the cost of rape is higher than the price of consensual prostitution, but the latter gives us a general ballpark. The difference shouldn't be 100x, for example.
Somebody working on an oil rig is willingly accepting the risk of death but can reasonably be presumed to still prefer staying alive. There's a widely-accepted principle that any two human lives are, if not exactly equal, at least close enough to be vaguely comparable.
Sex itself isn't remotely fungible like that. Different people have wildly different preferences, and even an individual person's interest can be immensely context-sensitive. A given sex worker probably has some stuff they wouldn't be willing to do for any amount of money, and other acts they enjoy so much they'd gladly pay someone else for the chance, and there's no guarantee those lists will be even vaguely similar from one to the next.
If as a matter of practicality and/or principle you HAD to index it to some existing profession's pay scale, surrogate pregnancy seems like a better starting point, since long-term compromise of bodily autonomy is more central to the salary negotiations there.
Fair point. Consensual acceptance of risk isn't equivalent to consensual acceptance of death. Yeah maybe my argument there is just wrong. But I dunno actually. Is saying "I require $10k per year to accept a 1% chance of dying on the job" really not equivalent to saying "I value my life at $1 million"?
>surrogate pregnancy seems like a better starting point,
Excellent idea. I bet it's actually similar to high-end escort pay (same order of magnitude, anyway) which kinda makes sense when you think about it. One could also try looking at revealed preferences and try to figure out how hard women try to avoid sexual assault in the real world: maybe look at gender ratios in different neighborhoods and try to correlate that with rent and crime rates somehow to back out an estimate of how much women are willing to pay to avoid violent crime.
That could be simulated. The offer is made to a person: you agree to take a pill which prevents medium-term memory formation (this exists) immediately after accepting this offer. With no memory of having agreed to it, you will then be raped, with all the attendant trauma, fear of permanent injury or death, et cetera. How much money would it take for you to agree to this?
Some people would indeed willingly be killed in order to have enough money for others, such as to allow the rest of their family to live comfortably for the rest of their lives without having to work. This must be balanced against the murderer choosing the victim, who would have an unknown value for the victim's own life.
Bare minimum is looking at the cost potentially inflicted on the victim by unwanted pregnancy, bodily injury, and STDs which certainly puts the crime at least on a level with subjecting someone to a severe beating. And the reputational and psychological damage consistently seems worse as well but is harder to calculate.
> The “proudly told me that I was wrong - nothing bad happened” reminds me of the Generalized Anti-Caution Argument - “you said we should worry about AI, but then we invented a new generation of large language model, and nothing bad happened!”
I believe the term of art for this is a stuck prior.
(I kid - I'm well aware that LLMs are not the general concern for AI risk people and that the safety of a lower capability model doesn't prove a higher capability version of that same model will be same. This can quickly turn into a fully general argument against ever letting your ol' lying eyes force you to update theory based beliefs. Smart people are better at rationalizations.)
>People call Gaza an “open-air prison”, and the comparison makes sense. It contains two million Palestinians, separated from Israel by a wall, barbed wire, and military guards
National borders frequently feature walls and guards.
Gaza, like most countries, lets people out to any countries that let them in. Most countries don't want many Palestinians.
Most developed countries don't want many people from most non-developed countries, and to an extent, from developed countries, as well.
Many people are trapped in poor countries, unable to emigrate. This is unfortunate, and should be featured in the discussion of immigration policy, and it is in that context that the discussion of Gaza makes the most sense.
You are discussing whether or not the walls and guards around Gaza are justified, whereas all Scott meant is that the walls and guards around Gaza are similar enough to the walls and guards of a prison that Gaza can be used as a model of what a large prison would look like. This is independent of whether they are justified.
The term "open air prison" in relation to Gaza is generally used in the context of treatment, which admittedly wasn't Scott's context. However, his comment was still arguably somewhat oddly worded, as the prison like nature of Gaza is a function of other countries not allowing its inhabitants to immigrate, not the walls that happen to partially surround it.
As I said, Gaza isn't unique in that regard. All countries trap those who aren't wanted elsewhere.
If you just want to talk about dense countries that are or aren't able to survive on domestic agriculture, you can look at e.g. Bermuda that relies on food imports and Bangladesh that doesn't, both of which are significantly more densely populated than Gaza.
Everyone on this thread is ignoring the fact that Gaza shares a border with Egypt, and the Rafah crossing was never closed (other than for brief periods). It is surprising that people don't know this. The "open air prison" phrase was too catchy I guess.
Back when I lived in southern California (2003-2006), I once took a day trip where I drove down to San Diego and walked across the border to Tijuana. There was a wall across that section of the border, but the contrast between the guards on each crossing side was interesting.
There's a large highway that crosses the border through a toll-plaza-like area set into the wall. I didn't get a close look at this part since I crossed on foot. The pedestrian crossings are on either side of the border, with Mexican customs next to the southbound side of the freeway and US ICE next to the northbound. The Mexican Customs pedestrian crossing was a courtyard area with open gates in the walls entering and existing. There was one bored-looking uniformed officer sitting at a card table off to one side and watching people go past. I and most other border crossers got waved past without any checks or questions.
The American pedestrian crossing was likewise built into the walls, but was a fully enclosed building. There were long lines for security checks (I think there was an x-ray for bags and walk-through metal detectors) and everyone got passport checks and at least token questioning. There were quite a few uniformed officers watching the crowd in addition to the ones operating the x-rays and checking the passports.
If you try to walk or swim from Mexico to the US you may indeed encounter wall, barbed wire, and military guards set up by the Americans. But if you take the boat to some other country the US will generally leave you alone. If you try to do the same thing from Gaza, Israel will not leave you alone.
Regarding the thought-experiment about society of Buddhist angels, my intuition is "OF COURSE they should eliminate me" (one way or another, be it mind control chip and sterilization to prevent my faulty genotype from spreading, exile, or death - punishment that wouldn't result in making me as virtuous as them doesn't seem just). And if I proved myself to be the person I aspire to be even in the moment of crisis, I would embrace this judgement with equanimity of Socrates.
Of course, there likely is a fourth option that would be at the top of the list: just like there's a thing called "bad company", as Seneca notes living with sages would rub off (the best thing you can do for your own virtue is to live with virtuous people... he himself of course was thrust into the dilemma of being in a position to try to reign in the worst impulses of a tyrannical emperor), and I'd like to imagine I'm sage-like enough that Buddhist angels would eventually learn to at least grudgingly tolerate me (that is, to remodel me into their image doesn't take measures as drastic as a mind control chip), and that my genotype is not so irredeemable that offspring with a genetic peer or superior, when raised in a society of sages, wouldn't learn to become a sage in her own right.
And that, I think, is actually crux of most problems. In the original post I recall one of the commenters noting that in Europe they have enough police to efficiently go after even petty crimes like using public transportation without ticket, but in Sweden for instance they aren't even checking the tickets. In a society with high social trust, boarding a train without a ticket just isn't a thing you do. And that presumably is how the Nordic prison system also works: most inmates come from a family background of husband-beating mothers and alcoholic fathers and youth gangs, and then they get exposed to basically normal compassionate non-sadistic non-abusive people and are given an opportunity to e.g. study in high school and once they get out of prison they can continue their lives without judgement (if not always in practice then as an aspirational goal that sometimes works out).
There undoubtedly are people that are irredeemable (in the absence of mind control chips and the like), like psychopaths, or those with almost complete absence of executive function, or trapped priors regarding values that contradict those of the enlightenment, etc (and here you still have marginal decisions regarding what to do with these people). And it's not that people in the Nordics are sages, far from it. But I think virtue-ethicists are correct and in the usual human case the best way to make people behave virtuously isn't really the carrot-and-stick approach, but surrounding them with virtuous people, and that's why it's socially crucial to perpetuate virtue. What kinds of policies accomplish that is a different question entirely (besides the obvious one of generally improving human welfare and hoping that Rousseau is correct and humans are basically decent unless circumstances force their hand), but if you had somehow achieved a society of angels, you wouldn't want to start eroding its standards of virtue: who knows, maybe even the angels would start raising their voices or littering, because that degree of vice has become socially permissible.
I understand they also imprison people for speeding, so perhaps the Nordic prison population is different enough from America's that comparisons aren't helpful.
>but the average criminal is an IQ 75 moron with the impulse control of a young child. Probably they are genetically suited to some kind of hunter-gatherer tribe with strong kinship bonds and zero superstimuli; in modern society, they are totally doomed. I’m not sure what our goal is here in creating a bunch of people incapable of living cooperatively in modern civilization...If you’re going to take that perspective, you might as well torture three-year-olds who throw tantrums in the grocery store.
So when it comes to considering the harms of incarceration, criminals are presented as often being hardworking family men, but when it comes to punishing them, they're presented as being helpless toddlers throwing tantrums.
The blame on modern society for crime also seems backwards. Violent deaths were much more common in prehistory than today. That indicates that as far as violent behavior, the present is not a less suitable environment for the criminally inclined.
> So when it comes to considering the harms of incarceration, criminals are presented as often being hardworking family men, but when it comes to punishing them, they're presented as being helpless toddlers throwing tantrums.
It can read a bit like a rhetorical trick, but I don't think that anyone believes criminals are a monolith. When considering harms we should include the number of prisoners who could lead relatively normal lives absent a long prison sentence, when considering punishment we should include the number who may be biologically incapable of / predisposed against following the law. Think of it as focusing on two bounds of a spectrum depending on what's being evaluated.
Some criminals are hardworking family men, some criminals are impulsive children, some are rich kids cosplaying as a murderous Batman, and some - I assume - are good people. Most are between the extremes.
That didn't surprise me at all. Scott is a utilitarian, so according to his ethical system he is obligated to personally kill a person if killing that person would shorten the commute of ten thousand people.
(This isn't some original thought, it's the absolutely bog-standard objection to utilitarianism.)
For delays on the part of ten thousand commuters to justify a single random death, my back-of-the-envelope math suggests the resultant time savings would need to be more like a full hour every day for at least half a year. Lot of people are upset that such a break-even point can be calculated at all, though, yeah.
Solitary as currently implemented is a more extreme version of imprisonment (esp. WRT deprivation); I interpret Scott as envisioning an opt-in solitary to have similar amenities as current gen pop prisons just without interaction with other inmates.
The part that gets missed in criminal justice policy is the culture of crime. In particular, the sex appeal that criminal status buys. A young male without money, career prospects, or a quick wit is likely to be an incel — except if he’s a criminal, a bad boy.
Globally and in the US in particular, the bad boy aesthetic dominates what is seen as “cool”.
One of the shocking statements in Freakenomics was that the average corner drug dealer makes less net income than a McDonalds worker. That may or may not actually be true, but granting it for the sake of argument, there is a huge delta in status to being an outlaw vs being at the bottom of the social hierarchy.
When we reframe the incentives of crime to include “Clyde impressing Bonnie” it’s a lot more understandable — it’s not more rational, but it’s more understandable that people would be deeply irrational in pursuit of sex and love and belonging, not just money.
And an idea for the solution emerges too: society has to find a way to provide more status for the bottom quartile of males.
>One of the shocking statements in Freakenomics was that the average corner drug dealer makes less net income than a McDonalds worker. That may or may not actually be true, but granting it for the sake of argument, there is a huge delta in status to being an outlaw vs being at the bottom of the social hierarchy.
Freakonomics' argument had nothing to do with status. IIRC his explanation was that drug dealing was like being an artist or a musician - most people don't make much money off of it, but there's a tiny minority who become drug kingpins/Hollywood superstars and make huge amounts of money. So becoming a drug dealer is sort of a lottery ticket - a bad idea in terms of expected value, but the chance of a huge payoff is attractive if you're poor and have no prospects.
> The “proudly told me that I was wrong - nothing bad happened” reminds me of the Generalized Anti-Caution Argument - “you said we should worry about AI, but then we invented a new generation of large language model, and nothing bad happened!”
Hot take: that kid was actually correct, based on available data. The social worker told him, "if you speed or drive drunk, you might be pulled over". He did that 9 times in a row and was not pulled over. What are the chances that the 10th time will be different ? What if he did that 99 times in a row, and what should he believe about the social worker's predictive prowess ?
Of course, in actuality the kid was wrong because he had not considered the massive body of available data concerning people like him, which does indeed indicate that habitually driving dunk will eventually land you in jail (or worse). But we don't always have the luxury of such massive bodies of data; and if your argument is "we should listen to anyone who is predicting that anything bad will happen regardless of how many times he guessed wrong, because otherwise something bad might happen one day", then that's a generalized argument against doing anything ever.
Tell that kid to cover his eyes and not read this but....
Less than 1% of drunk driving incidents result in an accident or police encounter. And it would be committing the gambler's fallacy to suppose that the chances were any worse just because you'd gotten away with it 100 times before. Rationally, unless the risk/loss factors have changed from the last time you did it, you should continue to drive drunk!
Or every two years if you drive drunk once a week, or every four years if you drive drunk once a month. The account in the comment sounded more like once a month than every day to me. Jude seemed to have been talking about teenagers, and four years is an eternity in teenager time.
Yeah especially since this is a Bayesian space, it's more rational to update your internal odds of getting caught to be lower and lower everytime you're not getting caught. Maybe you're just that slick!
Yes, I think this is one of those cases where reasoning in a perfectly Bayesian manner leads you to an incorrect conclusion. But I don't think there's a good solution to this, other than seeking additional data (always good but not always possible or practical). As I'd said though, if you bias your thinking against doing anything that could be potentially dangerous, then you end up in a situation where you're sitting in your padded room all day, afraid to move even a muscle.
A few days ago Jennifer Doleac published a lay review of the state of crime in the US (https://www.economicstrategygroup.org/publication/doleac-crime/) which summarizes a variety of policy approaches beyond prison sentences. As in your original post, she also concludes that the deterrence effect of longer sentences is minimal. But she highlights several studies, including RCTs, demonstrating effective crime prevention through e.g. summer jobs programs for teens (Heller 2014 is the primary ref and Doleac interviews Sara Heller here : https://www.probablecausation.com/podcasts/episode-25-sara-heller). Interestingly, these programs do NOT appear to function through poverty/income but rather by simply keeping teenagers occupied with more productive activities ala midnight basketball. There is also a fade out effect, suggesting that you need to continue keeping these teens occupied until they move to a better part of the age-crime curve. I guess this isn't a particularly crazy scheme, nor is it punitive, but seems like a policy solution worth considering.
Police hiring is seriously broken in most jurisdictions. It's typically a process that takes at least six months and at least a dozen unpaid hours filling out applications, doing interviews, and taking tests. Some jurisdictions still use polygraphs in their hiring process, which is banned in civilian hiring and has been scientifically discredited for decades. Unless they really want to be cops, most people will go to the private sector where talented people are hired quickly. Add in overt or unwritten DEI quotas, and it's no wonder police departments have a staffing problem.
I think your analogy comparing low-iq criminals to 3-year-olds is probably right. As the parent of small childen, I'll note that certain things work better with three-year-olds than others. If you want them to truly control their impulses, it works best for punishment to be 1) consistent, and 2) swift. But it doesn't have to be particularly harsh. Maybe there's data backing up this observation, but I have the flu and I'm too tired to look it up. But if true, we should swarms of beat cops, and lots of swift, small penalties for bad behavior, i.e., a night in jail, maybe some light physical punishment, etc. Re: cops spending too much time on traffic... take away their cars and track their phones to make sure they actually walk the beat.
Mark Kleiman compared incentivizing children to both raising a small child and training a pet. Interestingly, Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" also said that society is to blame for teenagers getting executed because they hadn't been disciplined properly as children, using a similar analogy to a dog.
"His ideas were dressed up with a glib mechanistic pseudopsychology based on the observed orders of precedence among barnyard fowls, and on the famous Pavlov conditioned reflex experiments on dogs. He failed to note that human beings are neither dogs nor chickens." --Robert Heinlein, *The Roads Must Roll*.
Strong agree: harsh punishments are pointlessly cruel, the important thing is that there *is* a punishment and it is immediate (even just 'you need to leave the dinner table if you yell'). I'm confident I'm a better parent of toddlers because I got to practice on my dog first.
The displeasure of the punishment still needs to exceed the benefit you get from the crime, though.
This is easy with three-year-olds (who generally don't get any actual benefit from their misbehaviour anyway) but not necessarily so easy with shoplifters -- if you get a night in jail every time you're caught, but you can get away with $5K worth of stuff on average for every time you get caught, then many people are willing to pay that price.
In my neck of the woods we have a traffic police who are the only ones allowed to enforce traffic laws, a guard force that handles crowd control and patrols, precinct cops who patrol their neighborhood and investigate petty crimes and county police who investigate major crimes.
As a non-American all I know about American health care is that it's really expensive. I don't understand the analogy of having high sticker prices to overcome some regulatory hurdle. Could someone please explain the analogy to me?
The idea is that hospitals (and pharmacies) assign an an outrageously high "sticker price", presumably as a bargaining tactic with the insurance companies, but at any rate it's one that almost no one pays: for anyone insured, the insurance companies cover most of it, and they pay sharply discounted rates. But if you DON'T have insurance, you're fucked. And hospitals don't even tell you how much you'll be billed for their services beforehand; some claim they don't know themselves until afterwards.
If you don't have insurance, they will bargain with you, too, offering a "cash discount", "self-pay discount", "uninsured discount", "charity care", or "financial assistance". Sometimes the price with the cash discount will be even less than insurance would pay, in part because it spares them the hassle of dealing with insurance.
Prices for all medical services in the U.S. are hilariously inflated due to a doom cycle nobody seems interested in fixing.
Take the birth of my daughter - in total we were billed around $60,000. That's obviously an insane number and we didn't pay anywhere near that. Our insurer "negotiated" this price down to $6,000 and we paid around $1,200 because we had 20% coinsurance. The $6,000 is the actual value of the procedure, the $60,000 is made up.
There is no requirement that we be insured though! So imagine that we weren't - insurance is generally provided through work, so maybe I work part-time and don't get benefits as nearly a third of Americans do. Well, with my part-time salary, insurance for me and my wife would be around $2,000 a month in my area, which I can't afford.
The hospital, by law, still has to help my wife deliver the baby despite our inability to pay. So imagine they do that, charge us the $6,000 actual value of the procedure, and send us a bill. We...won't pay it. Even if I wanted to I can't afford it. If you take me to court and garnish my wages you still won't ever get your money back. So now they need to raise the price to make up the money we won't ever pay. They'll get about 10% of the value from us (either because only one in ten people pay their bill or because we'll get a debt consolidator to get the amount to payable), so the price needs to be 10x the actual price to maintain profitability.
Except now we've really really screwed uninsured people. And as prices continue to rise due, ironically, to the fact that fewer people can actually pay, insurance must become more expensive, causing fewer people to be able to be insured.
It's a nonsense problem that could be solved by literally any intervention in price-setting at all, but alas, our federal government just does not work anymore, so this will never get fixed and we'll all go bankrupt paying for routine medical services I guess.
Part (but not all) of the issue is that Medicare/Medicaid (the latter for childbirth) require that they get billed the lowest rates offered to anyone. But then are only willing, generally, to pay at about the marginal cost of the procedure (a fraction of the billing rate, and not including the fixed costs). So private insurance has to get billed at least that much, but more generally enough more that after the negotiated discounts, the hospital can cover the fixed costs. This is why a lot of doctors don't take Medicaid. But obstetricians basically have to, since a large percentage of all births are only covered via Medicaid.
Keep in mind that El Salvador has a small population, ~6 million people. The large spikes pre-Bukele were driven by particular events, such as gang turf wars. In a country that size and given the size of MS 13 and Barrio 18, basically two criminal organizations could determine what your murder rate would be in a given year.
My best Zany Scheme is to steal a page from regulations elsewhere and try to just mandate embarrassing disclosure. The entirety of the legal change is this:
Whenever someone has been arrested 10 times and no charges have been filed against them, the prosecutors' office must write up and make publicly available their explanation of why, for future reference.
The comments are here are overwhelmingly focused on "street" crime.
As someone who deals with white collar crime, the reality is that prison is not a serious deterrent for them either - and the excuse of low IQ/low understanding of consequences is not applicable here.
What ACX types don't realize is that crime of all types - "street" vs "white collar" ultimately rest on the same foundations: the street crime types do it because they have nothing to lose - identical but different orientation with the "white collar" crime types who have too much to gain.
It is one thing to say that X boy or Y girl are criminals because they don't know any better - but the reality is that the broken homes and minimal opportunities open to these people mean that they might as well be criminals as not.
The white collar complement is the same: you can slave away as a middle manager or even a "regular" elite C-level executive, or you can take the chance to become REALLY rich and risk only a handful of years in a country club.
I expect that rehabilitation works much much worse for white-collar crimes, because you can't just educate them more about consequences of crime. In this respect, incapacitation works even better! You'll cut them from their money-making well and considering compound interest, it'll hurt them a lot. Although of course, just like blue collar crimes, consistent arrest is much more effective.
Perhaps check fraud is white collar in your book, but white collar crime is committed by white collar people.
A lot of the check frauds are also not committed by individuals - those tend to get caught really fast. There are many groups out there engaged in this.
Your focus is on the numbers - and the numbers will always be on the little crimes.
The difference is that crimes involving the theft of millions and billions are basically impossible with regular crime.
White collar criminals in the upper tiers also have a powerful capability to whitewash their crimes - see Milken.
Nor is Milken the only example - you might be too young to remember the Savings and Loan crisis of the 1980s but you certainly are not too young to have missed the Global Financial Crisis of 2008.
Both were directly a function of systemic white collar crime; the former by Savings and Loan bank owners and the latter by mortgage issuers, mortgage ratings agencies and the institutions that repackaged this NINJA loans into securities for pension funds and what not to buy.
As is noted elsewhere - shitcoin crypto pump and dump schemes are another example of white collar crime as are the multi-level marketing pyramid schemes, the illegal price fixing collusion over internet messaging and all the other schemes by which the unscrupulous fleece suckers.
2008 was caused the Federal Reserve getting spooked by rising oil prices into thinking inflation was a threat. They started paying interest on excess reserves, an obviously deflationary action, because Ben Bernanke believed in a "credit channel" explanation of the Great Depression rather than a "monetary channel" one, and thought this would prevent banks from going under while also heading off inflation. Real estate prices have since headed back up to their prior peak, making the dip seem like the temporary aberration.
2008 was caused by a massive control fraud extending from loan origination, to packaging of said loans into MBS's, to splitting of tranches which were then rated AAA.
Bear Stearns, Lehman etc were not taken down by the Fed - they were taken down because these were a couple of the bigger but less well capitalized players in that scam - who were left holding the bag on the pipeline of garbage when it became clear that these NINJA loan MBS's were a pile of shit.
Equally imaginative (and wrong) is your attempt to portray the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 as nothing more than a temporary blip.
As for real estate prices - between Biden's (and Trump 45s COVID era) massive money printing plus the addition of 5 million? 10 million? 20 million? more illegal immigrants into the US coupled with post GFC cessation of new building for a couple of years - it is not the least bit surprising that real estate prices have been going up recently.
Pray the AI bubble is not the scam that it almost certainly is - because the popping of that bubble means a situation on par with 1929. The US stock market cap is 70% of the entire world's stock market caps, put together - a little more and it will be in 1929 territory.
Is white collar crime, so narrowly defined, really a big problem? I'm sure it happens, and that it occasionally causes large financial losses somewhere, but I'm not concerned that it's going to happen to me, so it doesn't really affect my life.
If we waved a magic wand and eradicated all white collar crime then I don't think my life would change significantly, maybe certain prices would go down a bit? But if we waved a magic wand and eradicated all blue collar crime then life would be amazingly better.
Magically eliminating all white-collar crime would mean no subprime mortgage crisis, no crypto bros giving Effective Altruism a bad name, no landlords neglecting repair-and-maintenance obligations, no corporate espionage and counter-espionage making medical research inaccessible. Almost certainly no Trump. You're really sure that wouldn't change things?
As others correctly note: the amounts and social damage caused by the white collar criminals - specifically including those who have achieved the "none dare call it crime" category - dwarf those of the plebeian thieves and robbers.
A specific example: Bill Black's book: The Best Way To Rob A Bank Is To Own One.
While what you said is true - the real difference is that most white collar criminals are far more likely to be doing this out of greed as opposed to need, or ignorance, or idiocy.
This is second-hand knowledge as my best friend is a Sargent at a PD in Indiana. Mistakes are mine.
RE: Hard to hire cops;
1. Many departments have a soft-requirement for either a college degree or honorable discharge from military for people without experience, even if they don't list that on their hard requirements. Places without that soft-requirement pay less.
2. Multiple minor arrests for minor crimes or one arrest for a violent misdemeanor or any felony is essentially disqualifying. This is arrest, not conviction, and is enforced much more strictly than other blue-collar jobs
3. The reputational harm among communities of color and those with college degrees greatly narrows down the applicant pool. He has said that he knows many people who would be proud to have their children be doctors or nurses, but would steer them away from police work
4. At least where he is, factory and foundry jobs are readily available to anybody who can regularly show up on-time, in good health, and sober. Since the opioid crisis, competition for anyone who meets those three qualifications is quite high, and those places currently need to use overtime to meet their output goals, so are always hiring.
RE: Stop writing traffic tickets and go after actual crime
This isn't just beat-cops preferring to be in a car writing tickets to soccer moms: a performance metric used for evaluating beat cops is "number of civilian interactions." Showing up to a domestic dispute, defusing the situation and possibly transporting someone to be booked takes way more time than writing a speeding ticket, but both count as a single "interaction" so you get dinged on a performance review if you aren't spending 80% of your time running speed traps.
> Yeah, everyone I know with experience says that solitary confinement is torture, but I would naively expect to prefer it to normal prison. Maybe at least give prisoners the choice?
Also what we really want is just physical isolation, you can still let people speaking with each others with some interphones system or whatever, where they can speak with whoever they want, and as a bonus you can actually know what they are speaking about.
> I do think solitary might be more expensive
But why prison cost this much in the first place ?
Is the construction of the cells costing this much ? or is it the surveillance ? or something else ?
I don't know if anybody has pointed it out, but the estimates of cost of crime from that review study you used are laughably low. The "unquantifiable costs" you listed dwarf even the very large costs of keeping people in American prisons, and can be estimated from the size of the housing market. The total cost (opportunity cost? deadweight loss? not sure about the economese) of crime and public disorder in America is easily in the trillions per year, because much of what is spent on "homes in good school districts", tank-sized cars, time wasted on commuting, and so on - even part of helicopter parenting, not to mention loss of kids' experience of autonomy - is spent on avoiding crime and public disorder. American parents condemn themselves to years of hard labor behind the wheel just to move their kids around, when in a safe and orderly country Japanese first graders can ride the subway to school by their own selves without anyone raising an eyebrow much less calling CPS to report unaccompanied minors. All those extra mortgage payments and rent, opportunity costs of commuting, and so on, represent a huge deadweight loss for the economy. But few people discuss this, because it is not actionable due to well known political constraints (stemming from "optics") and merely turns their attention to tiresome subjects, which is depressing. Much more practical to put it out of one's mind and get in that minivan - the kids won't drive themselves to their minor league baseball, pole vaulting, charity kitchens and violin lessons, after all.
And I'm guessing that that still underestimates the benefits of locking up criminals, as they're presumably tremendously overrepresented among those who generally cause non-criminal suffering to others.
E.g. retail has a reputation for being hell, due to working with abusive customers. I'd bet that these customers are disproportionately criminals.
Unfortunately the study you reference postdates the Sci-Hub cutoff ("thanks" Elsevier and co.) so I can't access it. Does it discuss home prices?
ETA: the abstract lists "indirect costs of private deterrence, fear and agony, and time lost to avoidance and recovery", so maybe it doesn't, which means that my seat-of-the-pants estimate may have to be increased by another order of magnitude. As they say, a trillion here, another trillion there, pretty soon we're talking real money...
People being paranoid morons occurs independently of actual crime rates, and stricter requirements around crime reporting would be far more effective (and no less authoritarian) in defeating this social malady
Japan is safe and orderly not because it has a uniquely harsh attitude towards crime (on the contrary, their law enforcement has a reputation for incompetence and only prosecuting sure things) but because it has one of the lowest rates of wealth inequality in the developed world and because its society doesn't normalize violence as a foreign policy; Imperial Japan was not known for its safety.
In your example, this assumes that there is a lot of public transportation capacity, which simply doesn’t seem to be often the case except in dense areas?
I was looking into this question out of curiosity the other day and didn't find any estimates that low, the lowest I found was about a quarter of an acre per person.
What can I plant on my eighth of an acre to get sufficient sustenance for the year? Is this perhaps an estimate based on the total caloric yield for the year rather than a balanced diet consistently available throughout the year?
Yield per acre depends wildly on the soil, climate, and how you're farming it. You can feed a family from a small fraction of an acre if it's good land and you're tightly interplanting and constantly hand-tending it. Plowing the same land produces less food per acre, but more food per farmer. Also, tech level matters a lot. An acre of wheat in England yielded about seven bushels in the 16th century, but over 30 bushels in the early 20th century.
That seven bushels per acre works out 420 lbs, or about 1800 calories per day for one person. Which is in the right range for subsistence calories for a sedentary adult, but doesn't seem nearly enough for a hard-working peasant.
Scott is himself an angel for wading through the comments on the other post to pick out some gems. I feel like that post attracted an unusually low-quality comments section (for ACX), with the majority of the comments boiling down to, "I'm not really going to respond to all this complexity, and instead here's my still-uninformed, non-updated opinion".
I know comparisons to Scandinavian prison systems and their recidivism rates are flawed at best, but I still enjoyed the TV doc series Prison Project: Little Scandinavia a lot – just for the cultural contrast, which provides some kind of insight itself, even if it’s not hard data.
It follows a group of American corrections officers as they work three weeks in Norwegian prisons and then try to bring some of the practices back to their prison in Pennsylvania.
This extended trailer gives a sense, though is very short on the the prisoners’ own reactions and experiences compared to the series itself:
"Sure, there’s a lot of bureaucracy and nonsense and dealing with terrible people, but that’s also true of eg teaching, nursing, etc, and those are highly competitive."
There's terrible, and there's 'might get shot.'
There's terrible bureaucracy and nonsense, and there's 'the entire nation judging you for your most stressed decision ever.'
Police work is not really that dangerous. It's not even in the top 10, and most police officer deaths are from traffic crashes. If we can get people to work as garbage collectors, which is more dangerous than policing, then I don't think danger should be an obstacle to hiring police.
Danger isn't an obstacle to hiring police. It's our dismissal of the danger they feel that's hurting recruitment.
Police officers and garbage collectors have vastly different experiences of danger. Garbage collectors might be injured or killed in crashes, but policemen might get attacked. These are very different experiences of danger.
Police think of themselves as a thin blue line between civilization and utter chaos. They see themselves as heroically standing up to the worst so the rest can live their lives. They don't define their own jobs by the day-to-day. The sort of person that would make a good police officer has to view the most intense moments of policing as the core of their work. Someone who signed up because it's a decent job with good benefits isn't going to be much use to a department dealing with a breakdown of order or an active shooter. (Look at the police response in Uvalde and Parkland. In those two cases, there were officers who acted like normal people, because that's what they were. This wasn't what they'd signed up for.)
We don't need traffic cops. We need heroes, and heroes don't just want money. Heroes want songs and stories.
Police are attacked by their own choice in nearly all situations. Quit escalating the situation or treating people as inferiors. Feel free to retreat if needed, there is no legal requirement for you to engage.
We don't want heroes, we want competent professional bureaucrats who do their jobs in good faith, not cowboys.
Well except you don't, you get incompetent lazy bureaucrats in uniform that spend all day harassing the public, zero customer service skills, sleeping in their in cars, sexual assaulting women and children while robbing men, and generally just acting like the criminals police general are while attempting to avoid pissing off anyone powerful enough to get them reprimanded and working just hard enough they can't get fired. We could only be so lucky if police on average were as competent as a garbage man, a DMV worker, or the guy filling in the pothole and that last guy is a pretty low bar given the quality of their work.
Nothing stops you from TERMINATING them for failure to perform but that isn't a legal duty; they can just resign on the spot and if not, get fired by the first manager on the scene if was unwarranted. Cops aren't Federal Title 10 employees with desertion laws, i.e. soldiers whom can legally and summarily be shot for retreating after ordered to go forward as much they like to pretend they are. Cops aren't cowards as a class, they are, and should be, simply treated as the municipal bureaucrat they are, no different nor more glamorous than the parks and rec employee that empties trash bins near the public bathrooms nor the human resources receptionist. People at Jiffy Lube wear uniforms too, that doesn't make them magical.
Uvalde was perfectly OK, per the US Supreme Court you have no individualized entitlement to police services. The police did what the should have, contained the suspect and isolated him from the GENERAL public while preventing a work force injury to themselves. At that point their responsibility is simply siege the suspect out while waiting on SWAT. SWAT may or may not decided to go in given their superior training and equipment but once again, if they don't, feel free to fire them in the same way you can fire a life guard who refuses to jump in the ocean to save a drowning kid; but you can't, nor should you, make it a CRIME, like it is for soldiers, to risk their life in a situation they aren't comfortable in their ability to succeed in.
You can claim cowardness all you want but society punishes heroes, Daniel Penny's verdict for example was a pure fluke, the overwhelming majority of the jury found him guilty and he will lose in the eventual future civil case. He's notable because he won, most heroes whom are prosecuted, and that's many of them, end up in prison and lose as reckless is nearly impossible to win after they are besmirched as as "vigilantes".
Uvalde happened not because of cowardness, it happened because the the local teacher and police unions refused let the school implement measures that would have serious minimized the danger of a school shooting. It's why schools are attacked, they are easy targets. That's on the public sector unions, not the "cowards".
"There's terrible bureaucracy and nonsense, and there's 'the entire nation judging you for your most stressed decision ever.'"
I feel like medicine is also like this - write the wrong number on a prescription pad one time, and somebody dies, and you can get sued for everything you own. It's a little better because there's malpractice insurance, but this doesn't always work if you make a really bad mistake.
In an old essay of yours you made it sound even more like policing. You described fears of prescribing medications that have extremely rare side effects because of how ridiculous it would sound to a jury. In that case it sounded like doctors aren't just nervous about making mistakes. They're nervous about the masses not understanding why they did what they did.
I haven't read his post yet, but one problem with Performative Bafflement's position is that for the vast majority of departments, traffic tickets are most of the crime they face. The violent crime PB is worried about is extremely Pareto-skewed (as an example, per numbers from here, 6 cities alone are ~20% of all murders in the US).
Re: @astralcodexten's comment about inability to hire cops, I think Scott's wrong about teachers and nurses, too-my understanding is both of those fields are desperate for people, as well (I know for nurses that they are offering lots of incentives for nurses from overseas to come here and work). Obviously at pretty good school districts/police departments where you can spend most of your time issuing traffic tickets the jobs are pretty competitive (not sure if it's similar ofr hospitals or not)...but also the problems in education/crime are in the areas where departments are hurting for people.
Cops are generally known to be bullying jocks who like to prey on the weak. It turns out that this kind of people will also prey on the weak among themselves.
1) They have a terrible culture as seen from the inside, leading to a very fast turnover -> the people getting promoted for police chief don't have the experience or the shear age to be able to dominate that pack of wolves, so the internal problems aren't getting addressed, let alone the external problems.
2) In France, as in everywhere, the cops are majority right wing, but here they are the old school of racist where any black/arab man who attempts to become a cop will soon be harassed until they quit.
(I'm basing this from the testimony of flunk-outs so it will be biased, but I think it describes a reality)
"If the Buddhist angels are really mad (or, I suppose, sad/disappointed/victimized, since they’ve transcended anger), do they deserve to take out those feelings by inflicting arbitrary unbounded “retribution” on you? "
I get what you're saying, but I do think it's worth pointing out that retributive justice is not supposed to be unbounded or arbitrary. Our justice system is based on the idea that people should be punished in retribution for their crimes, but that punishment should be proportional to the crime. Which is why we don't lock people up for life for shoplifting, even though it would be an excellent deterrent: it would be punishment out of proportion to the crime.
A lot of people have turned against the idea of retribution being part of our justice system and want to focus on deterrence instead, but proportional retribution is kind of the foundation stone of our system: if you take it out, the rest doesn't make sense. For example, why does our system spend so much effort and make itself so inefficient in the name of preventing innocent people from being punished? We have all these rules about what kind of evidence can be admitted, we provide each accused person with a lawyer, we let people appeal convictions, but we don't let the system appeal acquittals, the whole idea of "innocent until proven guilty", all of these result in a lot of criminals going free who otherwise would be locked up. It really harms deterrence. And locking up innocent people arguably increases deterrence! The more people you know who have been locked up for crimes, the less eager you may be to try some crimes yourself, or get anywhere near criminal activity. Sure the innocent person suffers, but his suffering will have a strong deterring effect. Why not be like Japan, and have a 99% conviction rate? Why do we ever let exonorated people out of jail, that's just going to shake faith in the system!
Well, because innocent people do not *deserve* to be punished, while guilty people do. Even if punishing an innocent person would result in more deterrence, or even more utils overall, we don't do it because he didn't do anything to deserve punishment.
So I would object to unbounded punishment for any crime because it would be unjust, not because it is retributive punishment.
Yeah that part of the argument is flawed because of the assumption of infinite retribution. I can kinda see it though, if he read comments that do support infinite retribution too often (those comments that justifies prison rape for instance). And I can also see his point on arbitrary "average behavior", which if set to infinitely high, will result in infinite retribution. Though I think this is also flawed but I haven't thought of an argument yet.
Frankly, our current system isn't optimized for "justice" either. Because lets face it, how would anyone know if someone was falsely convicted? Well, if you got new evidence proving their innocence, you could try to overturn the guilty verdict... but there's nothing forcing the state to do that (unless it's incredibly blantant that they're innocent), nor do they have to allow people to have a second trial.
The very knowledge that the person was initially falsely convicted would reduce the public's trust in the justice system. That would reduce their feeling that society is just. It runs contrary to the interests of both the state and the public. What they don't know can't hurt them.
> And locking up innocent people arguably increases deterrence!
Changes the nature of it, though - eventually you're just deterring everyone, regardless of criminality, from letting themselves be noticed by the state at all.
What does it even mean for some amount of punishment to be "naturally" proportional to some amount of crime? Causes the same amount of suffering? I don't think that would work since it would imply a literal slap on the wrist for shoplifting. Or for example, if kidnapping puts a family through a week of terror, should kidnappers only go to prison for a week? If prison is 10x worse than worrying about your kidnapped family members, 10 weeks? This doesn't really seem to be how we think about things.
I feel like we all have some sort of vague idea in our heads that fifty years in prison would be "too much" for shoplifting, and five minutes would be "too little", but are we just quietly checking what we think the punishment system was like when we were kids and our prejudices were forming? Otherwise what does this even mean?
Figuring out the answer to that question is kind of the whole point of jurisprudence as a field of study and practice. It’s why judges are the ones with the most control over the amount of punishment. But beyond that what is or is not a just punishment is a moral question, determined by what the people making up society feel is right: which is why we have trials by juries of our peers, and not by professional inquisitors. C. S. Lewis writes on this subject in the essay “The Humanitarian Theory of Justice”:
“On the old view the problem of fixing the right sentence was a moral problem. Accordingly, the judge who did it was a person trained in jurisprudence; trained, that is, in a science which deals with rights and duties, and which, in origin at least, was consciously accepting guidance from the Law of Nature, and from Scripture. We must admit that in the actual penal code of most countries at most times these high originals were so much modified by local custom, class interests, and utilitarian concessions, as to be very imperfectly recognizable. But the code was never in principle, and not always in fact, beyond the control of the conscience of the society. And when (say, in eighteenth-century England) actual punishments conflicted too violently with the moral sense of the community, juries refused to convict and reform was finally brought about. This was possible because, so long as we are thinking in terms of Desert, the propriety of the penal code, being a moral question, is a question on which every man has the right to an opinion, not because he follows this or that profession, but because he is simply a man, a rational animal enjoying the Natural Light. But all this is changed when we drop the concept of Desert. The only two questions we may now ask about a punishment are whether it deters and whether it cures. But these are not questions on which anyone is entitled to have an opinion simply because he is a man. He is not entitled to an opinion even if, in addition to being a man, he should happen also to be a jurist, a Christian, and a moral theologian. For they are not question about principle but about matter of fact; and for such cuiquam in sua arte credendum. Only the expert ‘penologist’ (let barbarous things have barbarous names), in the light of previous experiment, can tell us what is likely to deter: only the psychotherapist can tell us what is likely to cure. It will be in vain for the rest of us, speaking simply as men, to say, ‘but this punishment is hideously unjust, hideously disproportionate to the criminal’s deserts’. The experts with perfect logic will reply, ‘but nobody was talking about deserts. No one was talking about punishment in your archaic vindictive sense of the word. Here are the statistics proving that this treatment deters. Here are the statistics proving that this other treatment cures. What is your trouble?”
I still think Lewis is just appealing to "well everyone knows what the deserts are", whereas I would expect everyone is working off their own personal prejudices, and a Muslim is as likely to feel intuitively deeply convinced that the just punishment for theft is amputation of the hand as a San Franciscan is convinced that it's a warning and referral to social services.
>What does it even mean for some amount of punishment to be "naturally" proportional to some amount of crime? Causes the same amount of suffering? I don't think that would work since it would imply a literal slap on the wrist for shoplifting. Or for example, if kidnapping puts a family through a week of terror, should kidnappers only go to prison for a week? If prison is 10x worse than worrying about your kidnapped family members, 10 weeks? This doesn't really seem to be how we think about things.
I've been thinking more about your point here, and I think I know what the problem is. Our criminal justice system is based on punishing criminals proportionate to their crime: however, that is not proportionate to the harm the crime causes but to how evil the crime was. That's why pre-meditated murder is punished more harshly than murders that were not planned, even though the damage caused is equivalent in both cases. It's also why if I kidnap you and lock you in my cellar for 24 hours I will be punished far worse than if I didn't know you were down there and accidently locked you in there for the same period of time: in fact, though the harm caused is equal the kidnapping is so evil a crime that it is punished severely while the accidental imprisonment isn't punished at all! Of course, I could still sue you in civil court if you accidently lock me in your cellar, but at that point we are actually looking at balancing out the harm caused: you pay me an amount roughly equivalent to the harm I suffered. Civil court does the weregild thing, but criminal court does retributive punishment.
Why is manslaughter punished less than murder one? Why is deliberately running over a child with your car punished more severely than running over one while drunk? Why is it that if I give my toddler a strawberry and I don't know they're allergic to it and they die I will not be punished, but if I knowlingly give my toddler rat poison and they die I will be? Because in each case one of the actions is more evil than the other, and *deserves* a harsher punishment.
>Well, because innocent people do not *deserve* to be punished, while guilty people do.
That's an excellent argument for the logic of retribution. Thanks, I'd never heard it before - and I once took a philosophy seminar on Theories of Justice. Is it original to you?
You’re not going to believe this, but I first heard about these ideas from C. S. Lewis, in his essay “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment”:
“When you punish a man in terrorem, make of him an ‘example’ to others, you are admittedly using him as a means to an end; someone else’s end. This, in itself, would be a very wicked thing to do. On the classical theory of Punishment it was of course justified on the ground that the man deserved it. That was assumed to be established before any question of ‘making him an example arose’ arose. You then, as the saying is, killed two birds with one stone; in the process of giving him what he deserved you set an example to others. But take away desert and the whole morality of the punishment disappears. Why, in Heaven’s name, am I to be sacrificed to the good of society in this way?—unless, of course, I deserve it.”
As a citizen you have a duty to your country, just as you have a duty to your family (even though we choose neither). “Duty” is just the flip side of “deserve”: if I have a duty to pay taxes, then the government deserves that money.
Of course our duty to our country is not infinite, just as our duty to our family isn’t: but paying reasonable taxes, chosen by elected representatives, seems well within the bounds of our plausible duty as citizens.
Firstly, nobody can rightfully have a duty to do what is evil. Participating in a scheme to lie to your countrymen and punish the innocent is evil, so you can have no duty to do it. Just as your duty to your father does not give him the right to ask you to help him commit murder or rape.
Even if you set that aside, our duty to country is not infinite. Your duty to your country does not give your country the right to execute you; unless, of course, you did something to deserve it.
On policing: I was surprised when recently listening to the Good on Paper podcast to hear that apparently hiring 10-17 police marginal officers prevents one murder per year. The hose (Jerusalem Demsas) seemed to think that was a small effect, but it would correspond to maybe $1-2m per life saved. A lot more than GiveWell, but much less than the marginal healthcare expenditure. And that doesn't include all the other crime you would be preventing. And apperently results like these can be achieved by just posting officers on high crime localities.
"'this WILL hurt a little but that MIGHT ruin your life.' And 'will' beats 'might' every time."
I wonder how much this attitude drives anti-vax sentiment. I might get and spread a terrible disease, but that's worth avoiding the guaranteed hassle and minor pain of getting a needle.
"but interestingly wife (135+ish, based off ACT score, STEM PhD from Ivy League uni) is closer to modal for this site."
Still blows my mind that people actually accept that the typical IQ here is really that high.
The brain might waive away those future possible risks in favor of immediate certain pain ig. This is the bedrock of lots of problems in organization and government.
I'd never considered before that anti-vax sentiment might come from just hating needles. Doesn't really seem likely to me given how well it correlates with other political positions.
anti-vax sentiment is better predicted by general distrust. Someone is going to put a foreign substance into your blood stream, with the only assurance that the FDA said it's fine.
If parents tell kids to eat vegetables and some do, while others don't, the characteristics of the two sets would probably correlate with personality traits and political positions, but that doesn't mean that kids' opposition to eating vegetables is driven by politics, rather than taste.
Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name,
Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven,
Give us this day our daily bread,
And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us
My best friend conspired with her GF to steal almost 10K from me. I managed to get a little over half of it back. I forgave them and we remain pals. People make mistakes. I never even considered like cutting them off or calling the police. Though of course I was more careful around them and have no been robbed since.
My sad seriously abused me growing up. Explicitly pointless physical violence was common. Deep into adulthood I would flinch whenever someone raised their hands near me because I was so used to getting slapped/hit in the face by my father. I forgave him too. Sadly he has died but I actually was pretty helpful to the guy in costly ways when at the end of his life.
I was more of a ruffian than most of this comment section in my youth. I had a tooth knocked out in a fight. One time someone cut me with a knife! I maybe deserved the lost tooth but I did nothing to deserve the slash. As you might expect I forgave everyone, did not even consider pressing charges, actually made sure to minimize the odds the people who hurt me got in legal trouble.
People make mistakes. I am not sentencing them to hell for it. Besides isn't this a Christian country. Jesus taught us to forgive those who hurt us. When asked how to pray Jesus taught the Lords prayer. How is any of this vengeance Christian.
Or perhaps justice should have nothing whatsoever to do with Christianity.
Perhaps you were conditioned during your early childhood to absolutely *know* that the nurturing and love you required would not be unaccompanied by abuse, and thus if you want to be loved, you must be tolerant of abuse.
What if Christian "forgiveness" is merely a useful institutional practice formalizing your deeply toxic intuitions?
My first name really is "Christina." I was thoroughly indoctrinated into - and deeply believed - what is arguably the wackiest and most dangerous Christian denomination, Christian Science. Once I got exposed to some rational arguments against the supernatural, I left it because its premise was demonstrably untrue and illogical.
So while I was physically harmed by religiously-motivated benign medical neglect, I was never abused by my parents, and Christian Science orthodoxy is that sin literally does not exist (thus "forgiveness" is a bit of a non sequitur). Thus I was never conditioned to tolerate the kind of abuses you suffer, nor to be attracted to the kind of people who would perpetuate such an abuse. I'm not *capable* of tolerating abuse, because I absolutely *know* that nurturing and love can only come from people who don't deliberately hurt you, and nothing good comes from thinking otherwise, especially not as a mandate from God.
Robin Hanson's proposal is that EVERY crime should be like a traffic ticket, generating revenue for the bounty-hunter that increases with the severity of the crime.
> I also don’t think it’s exactly right to say that incarceration only relocates (rather than prevents) crime. This may be true for murder and rape.
Not for murder. Lifespans increase for criminals when they're incaracerated, as the murder rate is much lower inside than outside. The tv show "Oz" was nothing like real life in that respect.
> Doesn't seem that relevant to me - even if we don’t get a singularity in the next few decades like I expect, we’ll probably get better genetic engineering or go multiplanetary
So I don't take it you don't agree with Hanson that our current most likely trajectory is technological regression due to declining population.
I think the society of Buddhist angels would remain that way by purging anyone who wasn't a Buddhist angel. Hopefully there's an analogue for Australia where mere mortal Jains can be sent.
> Which is more likely - that a murderer settles down to do backbreaking farm labor, or that murder their neighbor and take their crops?
There won't be any crops if the farmers just get murdered. They'll have to work something out as stationary rather than roving bandits.
> Here’s an even more hare-brained scheme: if this would devolve into Haiti, why not skip the middleman and pay Haiti to take our prisoners directly? It probably couldn’t make them any worse-off, and they could use the money. It would be win-win!
That is basically the linked proposal, but not specific to Haiti. Their government basically collapsed, we want a country that's poor but with some state capacity.
> something public, sudden, and dramatic might have better deterrence properties!
A reason to bring back public execution. Although the downside is people might realize how rare executions are, which is a reason to execute a lot more murderers.
In retrospect, I should have said that retribution is a good in itself, rather than saying punishment is. Punishment is good if it provides an appropriate retribution for the wrong done. I didn't mean to imply that punishment can never go too far. It isn't right to shoot someone dead for carelessly scuffing your shoe, even if the law were to allow it. But a slap to the back of the head might be appropriate.
There are cases where punishment, even punishment that some would consider cruel or unproductive, is needed. Consider a truly heinous criminal (serial pedophile, torturer, etc., I will leave the details to your imagination.) Imagine that this person is caught, and after a few months of the lightest conceivable detention conditions, they are fully rehabilitated to the point that we can be certain they will never reoffend. In this case additional punishment would still be necessary. It would be morally outrageous to simply allow them to walk free without imposing more serious consequences. It would be an affront to our sense of justice.
I think people disregard the significance of retribution for two main reasons. Sometimes it is dismissed out of hand as being too old-fashioned or "uncivilized". I don't take this very seriously as an objection. What's fashionable can be morally incorrect.
Other times it is dismissed out of a firm commitment to utilitarian ethics where any additional suffering must always be calculated to reduce suffering/increase pleasure elsewhere. I respect this more, but I'm not a utilitarian so I think this is mistaken.
When we apply our moral judgement to more weighty scenarios most people do see value in retribution, whether begrudgingly or enthusiastically. In this case it is correct to trust our intuition. The fashionable rhetorical position that retribution is uncivilized tends to fall away in the face of a sufficiently offensive crime. The attempt to isolate some fundamental axiom, or some atomic "unit of good", that we can reason from is sometimes useful as a tool, but it should remain subordinate to our more fundamental moral instincts.
I think there's a small flaw in the thought experiment: if you could rehabilitate truly heinous criminals at little to no inconvenience suffered by anyone involved, presumably you could "rehabilitate" everyone pre-emptively and achieve the society of the buddhist angels. Or any kind of society really, because at that point you are God.
As such, I don't think the thought experiment has much traction in the real world in which we have to muddle through nasty tradeoffs. Nevertheless, I am inclined to agree. After all, I believe how we respond to moral infractions does shape the development of our moral characters, which is broader than just laws. Sometimes we can construct moral beliefs just sitting down and trying to logically derive them from axioms that seem self-evident, or allowing ourselves to be persuaded by an argument of this form, but for all people most of the time and most people all of the time it's a little bit of biological hard-wiring and a lot of looking and observing, specifically looking at reactions to one act of another. If the reaction to torture-rape-murder is what looks like a slap in the wrist, what is that going to do to people's moral development (see: historical societies in which rape, murder and enslavement were a-okay, at least on the proviso they were committed against "the other"/non-citizens/women/you wife/people you have enslaved - clearly people didn't derive the wrongness of murder/enslavement/rape from axioms and simply looked at what was deemed acceptable, and ultimately we moderns are the same people)? Indeed, I find that the reluctance of moderns to act and punish, regarding laws but also non-law social infractions, isn't good for people's individual moral development, even if "the sensible majority" with typical levels of executive function managed to avoid committing crimes of which they might be convicted. I don't know how you could possibly research this kind of question because there are so many confounders from urbanization and suburbanization to advancements in policing to secularization to regulation to advancements in moral philosophy, but that's my gestalt impression and if true, it seems like a bad thing.
Of course, there's the obvious counterargument that this effect of habituation in fact goes the other way: credible commitment to avoiding any cruelty (including retribution against crimes) fosters enlightenment values. But I counter that this seems like an empirically answerable question and what I see suggests my interpretation is right and the kind of utilitarian argument is of the ivory tower variety few people actually apply in their everyday lives. And indeed that reluctance to punish has much more at stake than exact severity of punishments for murderers and rapists who are, at the end of the day, pretty rare. Consider school (or work or any other form of) bullying for instance: the reluctance to punish (not necessarily with violent means: I would wager collective punishment for the bully's friends for instance would be effective, or isolating the bully from her friends by forcing them to redo the school grade) is effective permission for the bullies. I myself was bullied for years and on seventh grade I finally snapped, threw the bullies into the ground, and that was the last time I was ever bullied. Violence works! I would wager violence works even if you were a weaker student who'd lose rather than win the ensuing fight (if you bite and claw and go for the balls, it doesn't matter for the bully that it is you on the ground with your nose bleeding, it's still too risky)! But this kind of apprehension to do anything whatsoever that Actually Works, and telling children that it is Wrong to respond to violence with violence, literally gets bullied children dead.
Which ties back to the question of punishing criminals and retribution. If the literature review in the last thread established anything, it is that the primary effect of imprisonment within the subset of people who commit crimes and are caught and judged is in incapacitation: however, that leaves out the people who were already deterred by extant punishments, and if rape-torture-murder had slap in the wrist punishments, who knows, you might e.g. get a lot more incels trying to lose their virginity that way - we should not discount the effect of deterrence because people self-selected for being undeterred aren't deterred! As a matter of fact deterrence through harsh punishments likely is highly important in reducing crimes, which is the best case scenario, as this way there are no victims. I deeply suspect that extremely few people are insensitive to threat of punishments. Sometimes or often it is the certainty more so than severity itself. And then there's the option of corporal punishment that I believe is more vivid than uncertainty of imprisonment for a duration the brain cannot even comprehend and that the criminals often don't even know about (while I can readily believe that some of those unresponsive to prison sentences might get a vivid "noooo! I don't want to be caned!" reaction). But also, there's one more thing that makes people hurt, and that's social shame, often alleged to be a thing more fearful than death (after all, it is known that the shame of abandoning your comrades does in fact keep people in battle even in the face of imminent death). And tying up the second paragraph to this point, if it was the case that people by large thought rape-torture-murder wasn't such a big deal and an appropriate reaction would be a few week's treatment, well, now you've lost probably THE greatest deterrent. And on the other hand, if punishment was lax while the general population's views of the crime remained unchanged, that would do immense harm to perception of the justice system: after all, as FLWAB wrote in his post slightly above, proportionality is really important to our innate sense of justice and wicked crimes require harsh, proportional, punishments.
"There are cases where punishment, even punishment that some would consider cruel or unproductive, is needed. Consider a truly heinous criminal (serial pedophile, torturer, etc., I will leave the details to your imagination.) Imagine that this person is caught, and after a few months of the lightest conceivable detention conditions, they are fully rehabilitated to the point that we can be certain they will never reoffend. In this case additional punishment would still be necessary. It would be morally outrageous to simply allow them to walk free without imposing more serious consequences. It would be an affront to our sense of justice. "
Huh, this isn't obvious at all to me.
I accept that we may want to punish him to deter future pedophiles.
But in terms of his own - moral course? - I'm imagining that this person has had some kind of extraordinary experience where he sees Jesus or gets new brain connections or something and suddenly realizes that pedophilia is wrong, and maybe has his sex drive zapped into place so that it only refers to adults from then on. And if I imagine him suddenly regretting all of his past actions so much that he'll never do them again, the idea of also keeping him in jail for a long time for retribution no longer seems valuable to me.
But you do understand that his victims would still want to murder him, right? The point of the justice system is to serve as a "civilized" proxy for those people. So they can get revenge. Civilly.
Because the person whose standards should be used to decide whether X brings them utility is the person who's affected, unless we have a specific reason to say "we want to ignore this person's standards". Most people with trauma would think it is terrible to have this magical cure, so you can't count the magical cure as utility-increasing.
It's really the same feeling that your great-grandmother had, just applied more broadly. Here's a few real-world examples:
There were many former Nazis caught hiding in South America late in life, decades after WWII. These people probably did not present any current threat, yet people were passionate about tracking them down and bringing them to justice.
The murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. (I won't take a position on this and don't want to derail the conversation, but I will note the reasoning of people who support the killer.) Supporters of the killing typically claim that the actions of the company were so evil and morally intolerable that violence against the CEO was warranted in response. Most recognize that it is unlikely to change the behavior of the company or improve the wellbeing of any specific person, yet they still feel that it was a moral good for the leader of the company to face retribution.
To take another shot at a hypothetical: Image that the heinous criminal, after years of inflicting violence and misery, is not caught but as they age they no longer feel compelled to cause harm. They don't feel particularly sorry, but they are no longer a danger and their crimes we never significantly publicized. It it okay for this person to go on and live a comfortable life, never facing consequences for their actions?
2. Fire the chiefs who don't get their closure rates up
3. Increase funding where needed to hire sufficient officers (for example it's fine that they do traffic stops, traffic should be safe too, so we may need more to handle the best)
> Fire the chiefs who don't get their closure rates up
I cannot predict exactly which unintended consequences this policy would give you, but I'm confident that they would be bad. "Closure rates" is a terrible metric to start Goodharting.
Ok, you could use a community survey and fire the chiefs who don't improve citizens' reports of policing quality, you could fire the ones who don't reduce reported crimes, fire the ones who don't reduce insurance premiums in their precincts, pick one of a dozen obvious metrics. If you hate them all you are anti-measuring things and there is a philosophical divide you and I won't be able to cross on the issue.
How about we implement the full court press ideal liberal Scandinavian rehabilitative justice system for X amount of times based on the crime, and at a certain point of reoffending, we just have an execution. Presumably, if the Scandinavian system, properly implemented, really does manage to reform most of the reformable, then this should catch all the fixable cases. After a point, the state just pays however much a lethal morphine dose costs and calls it a day. More cost-efficient than life imprisonment and possibly more humane. Personally, I'd rather OD than spend the rest of my life in ADX Florence. Figuring out when to throw up our hands would presumably be the challenge here. It seems like the Ted Bundys and Mansons of the world should just be killed without an attempt at reform, but I'm really not sure where you'd draw the line with petty criminals or the schizo drug zombies. X amount of public defecations or stolen shampoo bottles = death just doesn’t sound right. Maybe the penal colony idea has some merit. After the point of no return, you're offered the choice between execution or exile.
> After the point of no return, you're offered the choice between execution or exile.
Then most people choose exile, and your penal colony has ted bundy running around in it.
Execute Ted Bundy. Send the chronic shoplifters to the penal colony. (And because the really bad people have been executed, your penal colony has a chance to not be a total shithole)
> Sure, there’s a lot of bureaucracy and nonsense and dealing with terrible people, but that’s also true of eg teaching, nursing, etc, and those are highly competitive.
I feel like I've seen many articles recently which are worried about shortages in both nursing and teaching. And policing has the added factor that it's a red-coded job which is most needed in big blue-culture cities, so I wouldn't be surprised if potential cops just didn't want to live and work in such places.
Police work is not really that dangerous. It's not even in the top 10, and most police officer deaths are from traffic crashes. If we can get people to work as garbage collectors, which is more dangerous than policing, then I don't think danger should be an obstacle to hiring police.
Yes, but Scott's point was about status and respectability. All those more dangerous professions either pay a lot of are low status and not filled with the kinds of people you'd want to be cops.
Also, I suppose I should have said "perception of danger" as people are motivated by perceptions.
Isn't writing traffic tickets a form of fighting crime? There are real risks to speeding, driving without a headlight, running stop signs or other traffic violations. It's reasonable for governments to spend resources discouraging these behaviors.
>I would be curious to learn whether European countries really do have more street cops than the US, and, if so, why (given that the US has more crime). The data is from 2019, before the wave of “defund the police”, so that can’t be it.
Firstly, I think the causality backwards: while it's sort of true that "more crime" -> "more police" via the mechanism of "more incentive to hire police", it's much truer that "more police" -> "less crime", via the mechanism of policing.
Secondly, I think the main reason America has fewer police, and hence more crime, is obvious: it's a more right-wing culture, with lower taxes, and hence less purchasing power (not the same as "less money") to spend on police.
>Being an officer is respectable (liberals might yell at you, but it confers status in a way that eg retail or construction doesn’t)
Strongly disagree, though my impression is based on a major city with an extremely anti-police populace. The core problem is that crime is high in cities, and cities are mostly full of people who hate police officers--or at the very least, look down on it the same way that you might look down on a lobbyist for ExxonMobil or a marketer for Phillip Morris ("Delivering a Smoke-Free Future!"). Who wants a job where you deal with awfulness all day, then in your free time, are surrounded by people who despise you? At least the ExxonMobil employees can all move to Texas. Not sure what the cigarette people do. Cry all the way to the bank?
That leads to an interesting question: from a utilitarian perspective, what's the appropriate salary for cops? Seems like there's a similar marginal-dollar-value argument re: prisons.
> the people who mostly need to be deterred are frankly too stupid for that to work
I'm not sure I am buying this. For example, many criminals constantly need money. Either for drugs, or just because most of them don't have stable income jobs. Now, there are a lot of people walk around with money, and a lot of money are stored in seemingly easily accessible places - stores, bank tellers, etc. Why criminals aren't robbing those more often? I mean, some certainly do, but if the theory that criminals are totally incapable of being deterred due to their stupidity, they obviously should be robbing the first "soft" target they notice. However, most of them either don't do it or do it only when they are extremely sure they would not suffer the consequences. They can be wrong, but clearly there's some deterrent factor in play. In 2A-friendly places, this may be fear of being shot, but the pattern seems to hold in 2A-hostile places (and countries) too. This suggests that the criminals, at least to some measure, perceive the threat of punishment as a factor and are capable of being deterred by it. It can be argued how big the effect is, but I think flatly denying its existence does not match with the observed behavioral patterns.
"Either way, I think being exposed to intra-prison crimes is a small fraction of the badness of prison that doesn’t change that analysis much."
This seems false. If I imagine being imprisoned in the US, the number one thing I would be worried about is crimes committed against me by other inmates, and the number two thing I would be worried about is crimes committed against me by the guards.
Isn't a large root cause of the whole prison gang system that US prisons are so unsafe that criminals form little proto-societies with horrible tribal law enforcement in them just to survive?
This does not strike me as the kind of thing that would happen if crimes committed against you in prison weren't considered one of the most major downsides of prison.
Prison rape in particular is so widespread that referencing it has become a cultural cliche. When someone gets arrested on a tv show, people sometimes joke about or take satisfaction in the knowledge that they might get raped soon.
It's quite stunning the degree to which prison rape is accepted in society, despite still being nominally a crime. Violent rape can be a staple of comedy, as long as the victim wears an orange suit. I've seen it used as joke in cartoons Gor children.
> among other things they are very proactive about using what we wouldn't really consider due process, eg cops browsing facebook and like, going after guys that people post from their security camera footage as taking their bike or whatever
What's the due process problem with that supposed to be? It would be completely kosher for American cops. The problem with submitting a video of some guy stealing your bike to the police is that they won't investigate, not that they can't investigate.
I've spent months noodling with an essay confrontationally titled, "Being Smart Makes You Stupid About Stupid People," so I'm biased, but I'm pretty sure that @Blackshoe's comment is by far the most relevant here, and deserving of its own deep essay.
Because most ACX readers
simply.
don't.
get.
it.
They're so imaginative, analytical, and devoted to updating their priors that they simply *can't* stop imagining, analyzing, and updating their priors. Most ACX readers simply *can't* model what it's like to be unobservant, to be literally incapable of dispassionate self-reflection, and to never have a useful idea simply rise out of consciousness,.
Most critically, ACX readers can't seem to model what it's like to be a person who NEVER wonders if they might be wrong, much less what it's like to be incapable of making adaptations to become - ba-dum-dum! - less wrong.
I'm deliberately underemployed in a job low on the hospitality industry's totem pole. It has provided long-term exposure to people across socioeconomic classes and intellectual abilities. In particular, I spent *years* working closely with three low-IQ people, individuals who were only *just* intelligent enough to have a fairly simple job, and it took me years of witnessing them never, ever learning from their experiences before I finally accepted that they weren't merely under-educated or emotionally unbalanced, problems which might be corrected with enough intellectual resources.
No.
They were just...
...stupid.
Very literally too stupid to choose to do better. Too stupid for them to have any meaningful "choice" at all.
And these were stupid people who were just smart enough to be capable of keeping a job for multiple years! There's a whole bubble of people under them who are too stupid to see the advantages of keeping a job, much less actually manage to keep one.
Not all petty criminals are stupid, of course, but most of them are, and smart people attempting to gameify stupid people into thinking better is...well...
> Most ACX readers simply *can't* model what it's like to be unobservant, to be literally incapable of dispassionate self-reflection, and to never have a useful idea simply rise out of consciousness.
I think they're perfectly capable of that, actually. Most people here have interacted with animals before.
>Unfortunately solutions to this are probably unpalatable. Removing the gangs' power to commit violence and smuggle drugs would look like making conditions better and safer for prisoners (undesirable to the right), but would require large increases in funding for prisons alongside stricter security (undesirable to the left).
There are ways around the issues with the right - solitary confinement and/or execution for prison gang members likely wouldn't trigger an objection from them.
"I would be curious to learn whether European countries really do have more street cops than the US, and, if so, why (given that the US has more crime)."
Oh, come on! Next you'll wonder why Europe has better road infrastructure and stricter drivers exams, given that they have fewer traffic accidents. Or why the zoo has a high fence around their animals given that so few ever escape. :P
> My impression is that many are doomed from birth
How should we be thinking about criminals who are doomed from birth? Should we be finding policies to un-doom them? Or just accept that they are doomed and protect them (and us) from their worst instincts?
Or just let them bump along through life until they get sent to prison?
If they can be identified early, as Scott says, they could be targeted with different interventions, and over time what things work could be figured out.
This has to be done secretly though. The government can't go around classifying people as too dumb to stay out of jail.
“ Probably they are genetically suited to some kind of hunter-gatherer tribe with strong kinship bonds and zero superstimuli; in modern society, they are totally doomed.”
Is this because there we more effective reinforcers in those societies?
Today, the delay between action and consequence is so great that it forces us to use system 2 to predict positive vs negative outcomes. Maybe if we had more prosocial reinforcement early in the lives of at risk kids (or adults) we could head off some of this behavior.
I'm not sure why it's obvious that banning lead gasoline would lead El Salvador's murder rate to drop by well over an order of magnitude down to near 0, when other countries that banned leaded gasoline and started with lower homicide rates than El Salvador still have higher homicide rates, now - that is, they experienced far less dramatic declines.
It struck me as obvious that if you have a big drop in crime you should check if they banned leaded gasoline a generation ago, and I claim that such explanations are obvious to a sufficiently SSCpilled reader (Scott has been writing about this for a decade now! https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biology-is-mutable/).
> other countries that banned leaded gasoline and started with lower homicide rates than El Salvador still have higher homicide rates
Even if banning leaded gasoline can't explain all the variance in "murder rates from high to low are [2015 El Salvador]>[2015 Honduras]>[2024 Honduras]>[2024 El Salvador]", it could easily be a factor and worthy of noticing. Simple model that could explain that ordering (i.e. I havent fact-checked this): if you're lead poisoned, you can't rationally respond to the incentives from tough-on-crime policies, and El Salvador always had really tough policies, but they only "took effect" when a non-lead-poisoned generation came of age.
My default is that we should all make a good faith effort to understand people who engage in dangerous behavior, in terms of whether we can understand some causes of that behavior, giving us the ability to moderate it. After all, if we really could change some social conditions and make it less likely that certain people will commit dangerous crimes, we would all benefit.
However, if this doesn't work or isn't working fast enough, we have to default then to protecting ourselves and the people we care about. If the only cost-effective option left is to punish them, then that's what I will endorse, because not doing anything feels wrong.
But I remain open to new arguments: I didn't know there was evidence that hiring an additional police officer was more cost-effective in most cases than lengthening sentences, now that I do know that, I would rather support it.
Note that my default is whatever most benefits me and the people I care about, moderated by the knowledge that to get any policy implemented, a group of us have to collaborate to the point that we form a plurality of voters, so I have to make concessions toward protecting them and the people they care about. Provided that we can trust each other not to be dangerous toward each other, this should work.
Theodore Dalrymple -- yes, him -- observed that many violent criminals could keep to the straight and narrow in prison because of the punishment block. For further evidence toward the "catch 'em all" school being the best deterrent.
The bit about the motivation of criminals makes me think of the motivations of Donald Westlake's Dortmunder gang. They're fictional, but fiction can be interesting, whether it relates to reality or not, and I have no idea if the Dortmunder gang are anything like any real criminals.
Anyway, the Dortmunder gang certainly aren't impulsive or compulsive. They're not arrogant either, because they don't assume they're smarter than the cops, although usually they are. The possibility of being caught is always in their minds, and some of them are stated to have been imprisoned in the past. To them, crime is a job, sometimes even a tiresome workaday one, but they do it to get a living. It's just a risky job, and their acceptance of the risk reminds me of the attitude of test pilots and astronauts towards the deadly risk of their jobs. It's just something you know might happen, and you get on with it. (My reference is the memoirs of real astronauts like Michael Collins and Walter Schirra, not the exaggerated assumptions of invulnerability depicted in Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff.)
2) A large fraction of criminals have 0 skills and 0 interest in hard work, but aren't actively evil.
This looks like something that could be solved with UBI or similar.
Set up something with cheap standards of living, a simple and comprehensible social order (0 paperwork on the inside), and low work requirements. (And the work that is done is stuff with direct self impact, ie cooking food for yourself.)
This fits with the prison island approach. But set up more as a cushy place for the people not cut out for modern society. All the brutal gang leaders are in high security.
"Our friend Joe from the Open Thread my intellectually get that he shouldn't murder someone for repeatedly taking fries off his plate (actual case Manning notes) and that he will be punished if he does so, but it will be very hard for that intellectual knowledge to kick in before he has killed the fry taker."
If I take this comment at face value, it makes me think the Flynn effect is a lot more "real" in this regard than I would have expected. By which I mean, could this be a significant part of why we used to give a lot more legal force to defenses and mitigating circumstance like fighting words, crimes of passion, and the like?
The cost of the monitoring device seems to be quite high and in the majority of states must be borne by the offender. Failure to pay fees may result in additional fees or jail time.
re: the final comment, there was an interesting inversion of expectations at the CA state prison I was briefly contracted at. The "maximum security" yards were mostly for inmates who were gang deconverts and other inmates who were especially at risk for abuse (eg child rapists), it would be a better understanding to say the extra security was -for the inmates-. The next-security-level-down yards were significantly more rowdier and riskier for conventional prison staff, and all of the worst individual inmates were generally in solitary confinement.
Performative Bafflement is completely wrong due to:
1. his assumption #4, that a full time police work week is 40 hours.
2. his treatment of traffic stops as fundamentally unrelated to criminal investigation.
1. Police are unionized employees who will fight tooth and nail to keep their overtime, which DOJ routinely notes is excessive and recommends that municipalities reduce, despite its own role in inflating overtime numbers by subsidizing drug investigations. It is one of the most significant perks of their job. Base pay is often low, but overtime pay not so much. Often 2x the base pay rate. Most police work significant overtime, and the biggest portions of that are narcotics investigations, followed by court appearances. Some overtime is also for processing arrests conducted near the end of their scheduled shift. And then some is actually not crime related, such as security for special events, or being flaggers at road construction sites.
I would guess the average police officer works about 60 hours a week, the 10th percentile works 40 hours a week, and the 90th percentile works 80 hours a week. If you want a more rigorous estimate, a lot of states/major cities (or their major newspapers after doing a FOIA request) publish employee pay data. You could cross reference that with their department's collective bargaining agreement to figure out how much people are actually working.
2. In the US, searches of someone's home (or their person under most circumstances), have to meet a higher constitutional bar than vehicle searches. So a lot of traffic stops are pretextual stops to allow them to conduct drug investigations/gun possession investigations.
The police are Goodhart's Law enjoyers. They get paid extra to investigate drugs, and if they don't have any hot leads good enough to get a warrant, traffic stops make it easier to investigate drugs.
We can debate whether criminal justice policy should go this far in favor of drug investigations at the expense of everything else, but PB's claim is clearly wrong because he has written off the majority of their criminal investigative time as not being used for criminal investigations.
Policing priorities vary between jurisdictions, so while this might be somewhat true in some places, for most urban areas today, this is inaccurate in several respects. It is true that police appreciate and take full advantage of overtime as a way to partially offset low base pay, but only a minority of police time, in both standard hours and OT, goes to drug enforcement.
Let’s start with misdemeanors. In most places you will find that about 2/3rds of cases filed are for DUI/DWI and assaults, particularly domestic violence assaults. The rest is a mix of petty thefts, criminal mischief, some low level drug possession, trespass, and other assorted things.
At the felony level, much more time is spent on murders/aggravated assaults, sex crimes (including child sex crimes), and robberies—particularly the increasing occurrence of what is sometimes called jugging, often perpetrated by low level criminal street gangs—than on drug possession cases.
Granted some time goes into drug enforcement, particularly manufacture and distribution, but I would point out that, more often than not, this comes up when police are investigating some other crime. If they see the drugs, they have to investigate that too. Don’t forget, most police are wearing body cameras now, so they face negative career consequences if they are found to be ignoring narcotics possession when it presents itself to them.
The overtime situation you describe is real, but it’s driven more by staffing shortages than by a desire to lock up people with substance abuse problems, provided at least that they are not committing other crimes to feed their habits.
No. I am speaking from experience here, not pulling shit out of my ass. Drug arrests are far more common that DUI arrests. The FBI's data says about 1.5x as common. https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/topic-pages/persons-arrested. You are being misled by criminal defense lawyers' ads. They want the DUIs because those are middle class clients who pay better than the drug cases do.
And the raw number of arrests doesn't really tell you the time spent. There's very little "investigation" of a DUI. Someone calls about an erratic driver, you stop them, give them field sobriety tests, a breathalyzer, then you arrest them when they fail. Or maybe you do a checkpoint and collect a whole bunch in one night. Same for a typical assault. Victim calls, you go to the scene, interview both parties, arrest the perp.
Meanwhile, doing a controlled buy from even a low-level street dealer requires you to identify the dealer via either surveillance of the area or talking to their customers, arrange for an informant or an undercover to pretend to be a legit buyer, prep them, figure out an appropriate area where you have line of sight to observe the sale, contact the dealer, give your guy cash and search him thoroughly to make sure he has no drugs on him, watch the sale, maybe even do this several times just to make sure you really have the guy. Usually you want to try to escalate it to a school zone so you get a mandatory minimum kicking in. Which means you do several sales in the dealer's preferred location(s) until he trusts your buyer enough to meet up where the buyer asks. All for one arrest. Going up the chain is even more complex because the next guy up isn't as stupid, as visible, or as expendable as the bottom guy.
Simple possession arrests come up mostly as a side effect of other crimes, but that is not at all the case for distribution.
I didn’t say you pulled anything out of your ass, just that I believe you are incorrect. Let’s use the numbers you cite. ~ 10M arrests in 2019, of which 1.5M were drug cases. The majority of those 1.5 are going to be simple possession cases, so something in the neighborhood of 5% of arrests are for drug dealers.
To your other point, about lengthy investigations, you have laid out the steps that would, in my experience (though I acknowledge this varies by location), typically go into a mid-level dealer’s case. Street level guys, of which most delivery cases are, are typically seen doing hand to hand transactions, stopped, and found with individual packaging for sale, a scale, large amount of cash, etc. It doesn’t take an inordinate amount of time. You are also underplaying the amount of time that goes into those other cases. The DUI refusal cases that require the cop to get a warrant, the scene investigation to rule out a self defense claim on shootings/agg assaults, and so on. That’s not to mention the hours and hours of body cam video that have to be watched after the arrest, community supervision while those other cases are on bond, etc.
Now, is the time put into those more involved drug investigations worth it? That’s a question that I think reasonable people might disagree on. But it’s no where close to the resource-sink your initial comment made it out to be. That was the only point I was trying to make.
The idea that El Salvador's recent success in getting homicides down is due to something that was solved in 2015 or that just reverted from in 2015 reads like speculating that there's some unobserved variable at play or a misunderstanding of regression to the mean (noted before, here: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1754983099241275749).
The idea that murder is now legal in El Salvador is totally false and hasn't even held up since the time the FP piece was published. There are no missing persons numbers to support a lot of hidden homicides, and every other number has continued to improve. For example, the number of police confrontation deaths was 120 in 2022, 38 in 2023, and has just been 3 through December 10th of this year. The projected homicide rate for 2024 (1.8 per 100k) uses the same measurement practices as it has since for a while now, and homicides are still down, regardless of whatever else people might (more or less credibly) claim should be included in those numbers.
I know it's completely beside the point here, but Gaza was not an "open air prison." The Rafah crossing with Egypt was quite active, though Egypt demanded fees/bribes for using it.
So we, as a society, are giving cars an absolute priority of movement over large parts of our living space, with one small provision that the drivers can't use it to just outright murder someone, and the drivers' response is "Noo! That's being too kind! We should be able to murder people!"
The sheer entitlement, and the sheer toxicity of the mindset. No, you don't need to murder people who block your path. You can just turn around and drive away. If you can't drive away because other cars are blocking your path, well, maybe it's a good reminder of the externalities your hobby is pushing on all of us.
Which is to say, sorry, no, there is only one group here that's praying on the kindness of others here, and it's been going for so long that they don't even realize how kind we are being to them. (Which we are. I'm not normally going to begrudge some random driver and make his life harder, he's probably a regular person trying to go on with his life, who may have no other choice but to use the car because of how much we've organized our space around them. So I'm usually stepping aside, even on woonerfs, etc. But apparently they do need an occasional reminder that they're operating dangerous, deadly machines that would in any other case not be allowed to be used anywhere near people.)
Funnily enough, typical plot of "deaths from X / vaccine against X developed" looks a lot like this Salvador homicide plot. Imagine someone trying to spin it in a way like anti-Bukele quotes above.
Few years after 2015 it's just regression to the mean, as Cremieux says, then crime doing well below level expected for Central American country is a work of Bukele government.
I would recommend looking into Stanton Samenow, if you haven't already. He was a forensic psychologist whose work with criminals in the 70's caused him to begin identifying traits common among criminals, which he called "mistakes of thinking." He wasn't as interested in identifying why people became criminals, partly because so much of that field devolves into excusing criminal activity, partly because he found the same tendencies across backgrounds, income levels, and partly because the tendency for criminals to lie made that research rather difficult.
Samenow's ideas about a "criminal personality" relate most directly to Peter's comments, because being a police officer, and encountering people who bend or break the truth frequently, his story raised several red flags.
Now, is it possible that Peter's "friend" genuinely drove the speed limit in Texas, that speed limit was higher than the speed limit in Hawaii, and he was sent back to prison for that reason? I'm not particularly knowledgeable with the probation system in Hawaii, so I can't say those aren't the rules.
But would you consider this alternate story more, or less, likely? This friend, John Doe, drove in Texas, in excess of the speed limit. He was then pulled over by a Texas police officer, who, whether or not he chose to give a citation for speeding, ran his Hawaii driver's license. The probation officer sees John Doe has been run through NCIC, and contacts the Texas jurisdiction to find out why. The Texas Trooper emails back to say "yes, I pulled him over in a rental car driving 17 mph above the speed limit." Once John Doe returns to Hawaii, he meets back with his PO, who gives him two opportunities to come clean regarding the encounter. So he goes to jail for breaking the law in Texas, then lying about it to his probation officer (again). But because he's a criminal, he immediately convinces himself that all of this only happened because the entire system is determined to get him, and adjusts his story to match this.
Then consider that a quick google search identifies that despite the stereotypes, Texas only has one 41 mile stretch of highway with a posted speed limit of 85mph.
Regarding Performative Bafflement's post...that man knows less about policing than my pit bull.
My proposal wasn't as well written as the ones you shared, but I think it deserves another look:
For the 300 shoplifters problem: when the bottleneck is the court capacity to process and not prison capacity to put 300 extra people, just merge the cases into a single one. There's for sure some people these lifters are selling their wares to, and that makes it organised crime, which can be prosecuted as a single case rather than 300 separate ones. Also, it carries way more penalty so would be more deterring.
Except that makes the single case much more complicated.
There's a reason no one does RICO cases anymore - they're more or less impossible to prove.
About the only place where bundling cases works is suing for class actions, and that's because there's a lot of money from the tobacco lawyers pushing to make class actions easier. Even then, they mostly don't go to trial, they end up in a settlement. I.e. "nice thing you've got here; shame if something were to happen to it..."
That's up to the courts though, right? They can just as well say "well you 300 stole all this merchandise, and passed more than half of that to those 10 brokers so we count this as a single organized crime case, and 20 years to you all take care goodbye". What does something being impossible to prove mean when the reform we're suggesting is to the organization which decides if something is proven or not? Do this once, and get it rid of the sticky shoplifting issue for good.
I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that the judge takes the evidence before him. He doesn't go out and collect evidence, or make arguments. He may ask questions of the lawyers representing the two sides, but his role is a judge.
So it's up to the prosecutor to say "We want to bundle these cases because they're related. Here's the arguments, and here is the applicable case law."
And the other side gives their arguments as to why they shouldn't be bundled, because they're different actors doing different things, then the judge decides.
The prosecutor has to provide evidence that they're organized and controlled. For suing a company, it's easier because they're organized for their legitimate activity, so the prosecution has to show that this extends into the illegitimate activity being tried.
A thief is not guilty of organized crime if he steals something, not even if he sells it to a fence. Not even if he does it multiple times.
For it to be organized (again not a lawyer, it's probably more complicated) the fence and the thieves would have to be organized to all steal something from the same place at the same time, or a pattern of same.
The fence is on the hook for receiving stolen goods for the multiple times, but he's not guilty of organized crime unless he's actually organizing it. If he were doing something like setting up those fantasy "thieves guild", where you parcel out who's going to steal from where and taking a cut, and you can get evidence of that, that is (I think) organized.
Maybe there need to be changes in the law to make this easier to prosecute. I don't know. Though if the law is badly written you could end up with a grandstanding prosecutor going after unpopular people and companies for it. We have enough of that already.
I understand what you mean, and you're right, but my point is different. If the justice system says milk is black, then milk *will* be black. If they say this is organized and send them to the jail for organized, and the upper courts don't overturn the case, then it *will* be organized. The rules are not something unchangeable like God's laws coming from the heavens, it's whatever suits the society. If putting them away without putting strain on the court system is what's good, then that can simply be done. Maybe the judges in question need some favors for something, maybe there is a stick that can be used instead of a carrot, maybe they just believe in the solution, maybe the parliament changes the law; it doesn't matter.
There's a coordination problem there. Judges use precedence because it helps to keep judgements in line with previous ones, which helps people accept them as legitimate.
Changing things that drastically makes it much more likely that other judges and the public are going to say "That judge is making illegitimate decisions."
That way lies actual impeachment etc.
Having said that, there's are ways that judges can change the rules without changing them as such.
- new laws
- new regulations that the judge recognizes (in the US the Chevron deference precedent has been overruled, but this depends on below).
- the judge can effectively say "This case looks like that other case over there, but it's actually different for these reasons. Therefore I'm ruling the other way on this one." Which is setting a new precedent. It changes that case; whether other cases also change depends on how reasonable that ruling is seen etc.
Law is meant to change slowly at most. Yeah, you hear of cases that "change things" - Chevron, the abortion thing, the second amendment cases. Those are often things that haven't been heard at that level before, or they're overruling judgments that were controversial to start with. And they're generally pretty minimal in what changes they make.
E.g. overturning Chevron didn't say "Ignore the agency" it just said "The agency doesn't have the last word on what's reasonable".
The abortion thing didn't say "Abortion's illegal" it just said "It's not actually a federal matter". Which just reversed the previous case which said "yes it is a federal matter".
The second amendment cases said a) the second amendment is a real amendment like the others and b) it applies to the states like the other amendments do. That took two cases, not one.
But the stick and the carrot, as you say, would be new laws. New laws can render old precedents irrelevant. For example, any precedents about the disposition of slaves or indentured servants (similar but different) became irrelevant once the 13th amendment was passed.
Maybe the root cause is this very slow changing nature prevents from creating solutions? After all, criminals can change their methods quite fast. I come from a country where things change too fast, and that doesn't feel like a stable place to live or do any business, but the way USA (or EU) works might be too slow for efficiency. There needs to be a Goldilocks legal change speed somewhere but I'm not qualified enough to give any examples to it.
> idk about the statistics but multiple people I talked to in el salvador specifically told me theft was WAY down
I flew back yesterday from a company retreat in El Salvador, and had a long conversation with a colleague who's lived there his whole life about the recent downturn change in crime. I unfortunately didn't ask for exact dates of things for the reverse causation question, but can confirm that local sentiment is that theft and pretty much all other crimes are way down.
Cops didn't seem more abundant than in the US, but did seem more vigilant - e.g. walking around the street in pairs rather than just sitting in their cars like in the US.
Re: traffic tickets, I would be really really really reeeeeally hesitant to advocate for *less* traffic enforcement as a magic bullet to reduce crime in the year of our Lord 2024. In my city, part of the perception of widespread disorder stems from a sense* of "traffic anarchy" that began during the lockdowns and never abated, with drivers openly speeding, blowing stop signs, doing donuts, driving with lights out at night, and so on (and the obnoxious exhaust systems on the muscle cars every dipshit now owns don't help). And apparently whatever law formally exists requiring motorcycles to be registered and plated hasn't been enforced here since 2020 either. I put it to you that this doesn't exactly argue for yet another wave of official "eh, just do what you want with your 4,000 pound death machines, it's fine" policy in US cities.
*And it's not just a sense--traffic and pedestrian deaths are up noticeably.
I remember reading a post and the comments at, I think, "Noahpinion", discussing the ~30% increase in traffic fatalaties starting in 2020, especially pedestrian fatalaties, and the puzzling fact that African-Americans neighborhoods were hardest hit, and the effect was still persisting there.
The commenters had a few theories, but they mostly were just irresponsible projections of their own lives and behavior. "More Homeless In The Street" was a popular idea. (*) "Texting While Driving" had everybody nodding in agreement. "Huge Gas-Guzzling Selfish Trucks" -- of course.
Nobody considered that in June 2020, every metro Police Department publicly accounced they would no longer pull over Black drivers. Maybe not enforcing basic traffic laws, especially in certain areas or for certain people, might lead to people driving recklessly all the time?
BR
* - (Possibly valid, I can attest that my closest call in ~20 years was almost running over a homeless man at 6am who was wandering in the street covered in a filthy gray blanket the EXACT color of the pavement.)
> "More Homeless In The Street" was a popular idea
Almost certainly a contributor. There are, very obviously, more homeless people in the street. There are also, very very very obviously, more mentally disturbed people walking on the freeway, especially at night, which really sets them up to be hit by drivers who don't see them in time.
>"Texting While Driving" had everybody nodding in agreement.
As well it should have--there are, very very very very very very very very very obviously, a lot of people looking at screens instead of the road. You can see them every time you go out driving. They are incredibly easy to spot: like drunks, they wander out of their lane constantly, but unlike drunks, the sound of your horn suddenly restores to them the proprioception, reaction time, and visual processing needed to keep a car properly positioned in traffic
Of course, this didn't start in 2020, but it sure seems to have gotten worse. Whether the social and economic changes post-2020 accelerated it I don't know. I wouldn't be surprised.
>"Huge Gas-Guzzling Selfish Trucks" -- of course.
The amount of gas they guzzle doesn't enter into it, but they are difficult to drive properly, which wouldn't be a problem if there were any selection mechanism at all, formal or informal, to prevent bad drivers from driving them, as there mostly is for other large vehicles. It's not a huge stretch to imagine that a rise in the number of gigantic vehicles with limited visibility (especially of pedestrians and cyclists) might cause a slight uptick in traffic injuries and fatalities.
I certainly don't think it's the main reason, though.
>Nobody considered that in June 2020, every metro Police Department publicly accounced they would no longer pull over Black drivers. Maybe not enforcing basic traffic laws, especially in certain areas or for certain people, might lead to people driving recklessly all the time?
You should consider the possibility that they considered this possibility and rejected it based on what their eyes are telling them. First of all, "every metro Police Department" did no such thing, as anybody who used their eyes to pay attention to the news is already aware. More to the point, people's eyes can quite often contribute to identifying the ethnicity of drivers whom they see openly flouting traffic laws. I myself have found my own eyes useful for this.
My eyes, in the greater Los Angeles area, tell me that the drivers who have been behaving anarchically with no apparent fear of consequences are mostly not black. In cars, Blacks are a substantial minority, but they are a minority. Latinos are heavily represented. Whites are, I would guess, a little underrepresented relative to the population. Asians are actually somewhat overrepresented. On those obnoxious unregistered mini-motorcycles and ATVs, whites and Latinos are overrepresented, blacks are relatively rare, and I have yet to see a single identifiable Asian person riding one.
I think it's safe to assume that if the various police agencies in Southern California had decided to let black people do whatever they want while devoting even half of their pre-2020 efforts to traffic enforcement for non-blacks, non-blacks would have quickly discovered that it's not worth the risk to brazenly drive over 100 MPH, blow stop signs and traffic lights, and ride unregistered motorcycles wherever and whenever they please, while blacks would have learned the opposite lesson, leading to a very noticeable overrepresentation of blacks among the visibly feral and reckless drivers that some of us see every day. That this hasn't occurred militates pretty strongly against the "police are too nice to blacks" explanation for the changes on the streets post-pandemic.
You're likely on the right track, though, minus the gratuitous generic anti-woke narrative bit. A sharp reduction in traffic enforcement, *for any reason known or unknown*, does seem to lead to more dangerous streets!
I will maintain my previous take that eventually the resolution you get is most American cities will severely ghettoize (to a much greater extent than is already the case) with a heavy police presence outside of the ghetto. You will have concentrations of underpoliced violence, poverty, and crime concentrated in the parts of cities that are geographically easy to avoid, and you will have heavy police profiling when the 'wrong type' begin to migrate out from these areas. Public transit will mostly be rerouted to not service these areas. Fairly strict laws regarding public order will get passed and mostly go unenforced in these areas. Most homeless shelters or other services for the poor will get moved to these areas.
The underlying problem is that a big segment of the American population is not intelligent enough to 'get' morals, and a big segment of the American population has severe and untreatable mental illnesses. Even if you could reduce crime, do you really want these people working at a retail store your kids go to? Serving you food?
"shuffling all prisoners between large prison networks every 3 months"
This might work if you could be confident that all prisoners would be shuffled, and the shuffling would be random.
However, there are limits to the ability to shuffle - they already limit who goes where because gangs are racially based.
The other possible downside is that after a few shuffles you end up with gangs that are distributed over the entire prison system instead of gangs based in one prison, and the shuffling process allows them to communicate.
Regarding penal colonies, there is a pretty big difference between the Australian model and the Gaza / Haiti model you speculate about. Convicts deported to Australia were not left to their own devices to govern themselves, they were firmly under the authority of the British government as represented by a civilian governor and military presence. There was even an additional recursive penal colony within the Australian penal colony to deport people who reoffended to.
murder numbers went down sharply after the crackdown started (late March 2022)
there was a reduction from 2015 to early 2022. but lots of reduction after the crackdown
either the low resolution graph was done in a very misleading way, or they literally lied. hard to know from the very low resolution graph that cannot be used to judge this question
In reply to Scott's question, "Why is it so hard to fill these positions? Sure, there's a lot of bureaucracy and nonsense and dealing with terrible people, but that's also true of eg teaching, nursing, etc..." Those jobs are nothing like policing. Yes, teachers have to deal with overbearing and unreasonable parents but, just to name one difference, teaching or nursing are not careers where you would expect to routinely encounter real, physical violence. I think of it this way: there is no other job where, one day, you are forced to enter into physical combat with someone who may be much larger than you and may or may not be armed--you get to find out in real time, surprise!--and the next day you may have to sit on the witness stand and do mental combat with a highly-skilled and capable defense attorney, armed with the benefit of hindsight, whose goal is to pick apart everything you did on a case that you may have worked years ago. And even if you do not testify all that often, all of your work is scrutinized by lawyers that have those same resources and advantages. That is not a common skill set and persons that can do both well are harder to find than persons that can, e.g., teach grade school math.
With regard to the last bit, about reducing gang power, one things I've heard is that bigger prisons give more power to gangs. Is there any evidence on having more smaller prisons reducing crime compared to fewer big prisons? Can prisons be big but separate gang prisoners from non gang?
I don't know what any of that means. There was a housing bubble in the years before the 2008 debt crisis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s_United_States_housing_bubble) but prices were already declining in 2006, before the crisis. Thus, probably connected in many ways, but two distinguishable things.
> Being an officer is respectable (liberals might yell at you, but it confers status in a way that eg retail or construction doesn’t), doesn’t have a lot of prereqs, and has good room for advancement. Why is it so hard to fill these positions? Sure, there’s a lot of bureaucracy and nonsense and dealing with terrible people, but that’s also true of eg teaching, nursing, etc, and those are highly competitive.
I think realistically, cop at the very least "feels" like a more dangerous job than those alternatives. You usually don't find yourself in shoot-outs as a nurse. And there's also a bad complementary situation here with political perceptions. One side is suspicious of cops (or downright hates them); the other side however is paranoid about criminals. So one side is deterred by morality and in-group status considerations, and the other is more vulnerable to fearing the job as too dangerous (possibly overestimating said dangers). If you admire the cops as fearless heroes facing unhinged madmen all day long it's all the easier to just decide that it's cool that they can do it, but it's not the job for you. The additional 5% in salary might not be motivation enough to risk it. For example, how much money would you have to pay the average peaceful suburban dweller that hates trouble of all sorts to persuade them to be deployed to a warzone?
I keep reading "the criminals make bad choices and then bad things happen to them that they aren't predicting" and I keep thinking "society actually literally locks them up and curtails their freedom for some amount after they're convicted" - why not just force them to make better choices? Is it just that sounds authoritarian?
I'm an insane freedom loving libertarian but you're already locking them up! As a non-criminal, I am happy they aren't committing crimes but I would also like them to not commit crimes after they get out. Why not use that time to put them on a more productive path? Yes, some people make bad choices! If they are out and about in society, it is indeed hard to stop them. But we're already talking a group of people we're sending to jail!
How do you force people not to commit crimes?
I certainly don't have a magic recipe, but naively I would guess it would be something like:
- have good police that usually catch you when you commit crimes
- while you're imprisoned for those crimes, be forced - yes, biting that bullet - to do productive non-crimes in whatever methods pointy-headed criminal rehabilitation researchers determine is best associated with continuing to do non-crimes after
- maybe have some kind of post-release quasi-parole where you are yes, forced to test clear from drugs, (I think of that HOPE (?) program from Hawaii that I feel like I read about in maybe Megan McArdle's book a few years back?) forced to report to a job, forced to pay child support, or perhaps even forced to go to boot camp or some kind of *hand waves* rehab type thing?
You are right, "Forcing people to not commit crimes" is pretty hard, in the "proving a negative sort of way." But I feel like we can do a decent (certainly not even close to perfect) job of forcing people to commit productive non-crimes. School and boot camp are historically pretty successful at reducing the amount of crime that the historically criminal "young dude" demographic commits.
I feel like this is pretty close to a lot of historic scenarios in this and other countries, so not too outlandish? Again, as a libertarian, I don't like it in myself that I keep using the word "force" but once you've locked someone in jail and have taken the "force" step of curtailing their freedom so heavily, I think maybe adding a little extra force to make the experience more productive both for society AND the criminals (who we have committed to releasing at a future date) when they get out... is okay?
I think this is just rehabilitation and parole, which everyone already does.
Yes, at a high level, but... how effectively? I agree that I am essentially advocating for "rehabilitation and parole" but I am arguing for "a lot more of it" and "make it more effective."
You may be interested to know that Minnesota is hoping to go all-in on this approach in the coming years, offering years off one’s sentence for people that voluntarily engage in intense rehabilitation.
There are a lot of obstacles, including finding enough therapists who want to work with felons and even having to remodel prisons to find enough space for treatment.
My guess, judging from the correctional people I work with, is that if they get the funding to make it work (they’re hoping to make it up on the back end with less recidivism and shorter sentences, but there’s quite the up-front cost), it’ll have positive effects on the margin, but that we haven’t figured out the secret sauce yet to have real broad success. Nor do we yet have the kind of system on the outside that can provide the support they need.
But I’m a big believer in hope, and I am hopeful here.
That's very interesting, and I hope it works!
Presumably it would look like the Nordic prison system, which I believe works better than the American system with any possible marginal improvement available including those outside the Overton window (although I don't think Nordics have solved criminal justice either and the same kind of considerations apply in regards to what to do with 300-time shoplifters and the like).
But how to get from A to B is the big question: it's a lot easier to have social workers available and set up rehabilitating work for the inmates when the incarceration rate is tenth of that of the US. You'd basically have to start from scratch, beginning with abandoning all extant prisons and replacing them with nicer ones, re-training all of the prison guards (and paying them a lot more because it's no longer untrained work), hiring more councilors and psychiatrists than there's available in the workforce, etc, etc, and ultimately all of this probably also comes with a bundle of tacit knowledge that you can't get simply by "doing what Norway does".
"But you can still try to be more like the Nordics"
That's true of course, but if you refer to the fitness landscape idea, there's no assurance that any movement to that direction is a marginal improvement - there may well be a valley in between that you would have to cross until things start getting better. Probably the first practical step would be to increase policing, and rehabilitating the image of the police (by increasing training, hiring requirements, etc, so it's no longer unskilled labor).
Maybe I misspoke then, I don't necessarily want "more rehab/parole, but in ways just like what we have now, and require massive investments." Definitely I think the on the ground facts of Nordic countries means that a system that works there isn't going to work in the US.
I want a qualitatively different plan. Basically instead of all that stuff traditionally labeled rehab/probation/parole, just ... force convicted criminals (in the non-violent, we-are-going-to-release-some-day category) to do productive work. Forced convict labor as terrible as it sounds, preferably in something that produces genuine value, and perhaps even gives skills/discipline.
Then when they get out, (and perhaps they get out earlier if they do a great job!) not wimpy parole stuff. Like, you are forced to go to work/school/bootcamp. You are forced to test clean for drugs. If the people in your life who you need to cooperate and work with and support report that you don't, you go back to prison-work.
None of the silly counter-productive probation requirements (driving 80mph in Texas) in the post above. But all of the productive requirements, (you need to show up to work) enforced more harshly. The entire point of "crime" is that people are doing things that are bad for society and the entire point of "the criminal justice system" is to force them to do things that are good for society (and almost certainly better for them too!). I think we should do that latter part more.
The Nordic countries don't actually have significantly lower recidivism rates than the US: https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/the-case-for-prisons, https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/recidivism-in-norway, https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/the-myth-of-the-nordic-rehabilitative.
If you try and make rehabilitation work in the US you're up against the fact that once you're in prison you're in an environment surrounded by a) the sorts of people who choose to commit crimes and b) the sorts of people who choose to become prison guards in the utterly pathological US system, and that's a deeply debilitating environment.
I think that to make it work, you'd need to change the prison culture enough that you could attract more people whose motivation was to help prisoners rather than just (at best) to protect other people from them and (at worst) sadism, and that may be a vicious circle.
As noted above, the US does not have much of a higher rate of recidivism than the Nordic countries
I definitely think a big part of it would be yes, removing potentially rehabbable people from the current prison environment, especially away from non-rehabbable people. My preference would be moving them somewhere they could do a productive job/work.
"Make it more effective". We as humans *don't know how to do that*.
We do know how to make many humans, the vast majority, behave in ways that we want, almost all the time. If we didn't, then society would fall apart almost immediately. Much (almost all) of this occurs in early childhood, with the help of occasional reinforcement as one gets older.
But for those humans where this behavior modification doesn't take, or was not done well in the first place, we don't know how to change that.
At most we know how to make those humans sort of behave some of the time, while they're under direct supervision, with the threat of intolerable levels of violence if they don't.
Occasionally, this will cause a few of those humans to want to change their innate behavior patterns. This is seen as a great victory, and it is.
But it's quite rare. Which is not surprising.
It usually involves the person in question basically re-inventing their entire life. New friends, new work, new place to live (far away from the old one), etc. Since if they don't do it that way, most fail and fall back on the old patterns.
Note I am talking here about *habitual* criminals, not people who were pushed into doing something due to unique circumstances. Those people will do their time, and go back to their original life, or as much as they can scrape back together. And you won't see them back in prison again.
I agree with this. I think this part of the wider "tailored responses to different categories of person, as categorized by their actions."
"We do know how to make many humans, the vast majority, behave in ways that we want, almost all the time. "
Absolutely. That category is the "good citizen" and the societal tailored response is "you got good parents/education, this resulted in you being a normal peaceful citizen and therefore you get to be free!"
"But for those humans where this behavior modification doesn't take, or was not done well in the first place, we don't know how to change that."
So now we move on to other categories. This is "citizen whose education/parents didn't work to prevent bad behavior" and the tailored repsonse is "we set up cops to accurately arrest them and then render punishments designed to prevent costs to society."
"At most we know how to make those humans sort of behave some of the time, while they're under direct supervision, with the threat of intolerable levels of violence if they don't."
This is a 3rd category: "people who need [some amount of direct supervision] to be peaceful and productive." I think our society's reaction to that should be "apply that level of direct supervision."
"Occasionally, this will cause a few of those humans to want to change their innate behavior patterns. This is seen as a great victory, and it is."
4th category: people who messed up, but respond to the incentives and voluntarily return to peacefulness. You're right: this is a win! Tailored response: We should set up incentives to, errr, incentivize this as much as possible, with the understanding that it won't work for everyone.
"Note I am talking here about *habitual* criminals,"
5th category: habitual non-peaceful/productive people. Tailored response: longer incapacitation, and (I am suggeseting) that we force them into (monitored to the appropriate level) productive tasks. Maybe that will work and move them back into category 4, maybe not.
Last category: people who've committed sufficiently bad crimes that we think you can't ever trust them. Tailored response: life/long sentences, for maximum "incapacitation"
>- have good police that usually catch you when you commit crimes
That's...deeply unhelpful. They're already trying, all over the world, in a variety of ways, and mostly failing. Barring a high-tech totalitarian surveillance state, criminals are free to pick the time & place where they can commit their crime safely.
Preventing crime and catching criminals isn't a single-player optimization problem, the criminals have a hand to play too.
There’s a whole discussion to be had there, but one of the key things in the original post here is that a lot of crime is committed by a small number of people who literally have - despite your comments - been caught and arrested (and linked to their many crimes) multiple times. It is absolutely not a binary choice between a “totalitarian surveillance state” and “criminals get to do anything they want.”
“the criminals have a hand to play too.”
Totally agree, which is why the other steps from the comment you quoted address that.
I think we’re close to being able to technologically prevent people from committing crimes without imprisoning them. They could be forced to wear a device that not only tracks their location but uses AI to perceive what they’re doing and bring any likely criminal acts to the attention of remote monitoring staff. It could even tase and then sedate them if they’re about to assault somebody — basically a crude version of the “slap drone” of science fiction. In practice, the device would also serve as a brand, allowing others to act with appropriate caution around the criminal.
This is draconian, but much less so than prison, even if it involves an implanted device that can incapacitate. It seems not very far away, indeed much easier than a self-driving car, if we wanted to develop the technology. The only question is whether society would accept it, since it is ugly and flawed in a new, more visible way compared with the accepted status quo of prison.
Well I have to hope that works better than the GPS tracking devices. Which usually work, but you hear stories about devices that can't place you within a hundred yards with any accuracy.
Which if you're under house arrest means you're "outside" half the time.
Iain Banks' slap drones are a great thought experiment. We don't have that tech yet, but we do have decent GPS tracking bands, AND .... you could just do human slap drones. Imprisoning people costs 100k a year, that's not radically different than hiring a ton more probation officers and literally monitoring non-violent released ex-criminals. How much easier could they reintegratre into society if their potential employers knew they had a human slap drone making them go to work, making sure they don't commit more crimes?
This is draconian, full stop. Where you have perfect enforcement you MUST have perfect law, and the law is never perfect. Not to mention, if everyone submitted to wearing this sort of devices, that would automatically make it as easy as pushing a button for anyone to enslave the country. Literally just go "ok the new law says I am the God-King, anyone disrespecting me is violating it". Let's not discuss as serious scenarios that would sound cartoonishly evil even in some YA novel about a plucky teenager fighting an oppressive dystopia.
I should clarify that this wouldn’t be for everyone, for all the reasons you pointed out and more. It would be an alternative for people that we are currently locking in prison, a fate about as draconian and indeed cartoonishly evil as could be imagined. Our byword for a depraved lunatic is someone who abducts people and keeps them locked in their basement — yet this is exactly what the government does today. This is the level of wanton cruelty that we are trying to replace when we contemplate new means of incapacitating dangerous criminals.
Under the AI monitoring scenario, these people get to enjoy the daylight and maintain relationships with the family instead of being locked in a dungeon.
I still think the technical challenges would be a lot harder than you seem to assume (if we had AI that good at making sense of human behavior... let's just say crime recidivism would not be even close to my main concern). But point taken. I do think we've taken Beccaria's old lessons a bit the wrong way. For example most people would recoil in horror at the sheer barbarism of corporal punishment. But apparently jail is fine. It's not even a matter of degree or quality - jail is just *fine*, by default, unlike just about anything else. Me, if I was given a choice between one hour of medically supervised, no-long-term-damage guaranteed amount of extreme physical pain, and even just three months in jails as they exist today in most western countries (barring maybe the Nordics), I know what I would pick as the obviously more humane choice.
You can't force them, unless we do something like brain surgery or lobotomies. There's a point where character and preferences are formed, and I think that happens at an early age, as well as your basic character via genetics/heredity. Stick environment on top of that as well.
You end up with someone who doesn't care about others, doesn't care about consequences, and will always pick option B when option A is the better (but harder) choice. Unless you intend to put a shock collar on them, or have a guard following them around 24/7 with a big stick to hit them if they so much as look like they intend to do the wrong thing, there's no real means of "forcing" them to make better choices.
Now, not everybody, because some people will get fed-up of "in and out of Wandsworth with the numbers on their names" and turn their lives around, but there are others who won't, short of a personality transplant, and we can't do those yet.
I think that is true for some criminals, and if you can't actually force someone to not commit crimes, then yes you probably do need to lock them up for ever.
But there's a lot of other kinds of (potential) criminals, that you *can* force to not commit crimes. We do it ever day! Every day there's some kid we've legally forced to sit in class, where he can't commit crimes. Or boot camp.
For the category of person you're talking about, yes, nothing will work. But we don't know who those people are ahead of time. So, take criminals, do your best to force them to do productive non crimes while in prison, and do your best to set them on the path to do so after too. The status quo is, you were gonna release them anyway.
If it works, great! If it doesn't, say, on your hardened criminal that you can't fix, and they commit more crimes and reveal to us that they aren't going to stop... then yeah, imprison them for as long as it takes.
"or have a guard following them around 24/7 with a big stick to hit them if they so much as look like they intend to do the wrong thing"
I know you're saying this rhetorically, but in all seriousness, what would be the per-year cost ratio between hiring 2 shifts of guards for your "24/7 Big Stick Program" compared to the current costs of imprisoning someone?
"We do it ever day! Every day there's some kid we've legally forced to sit in class, where he can't commit crimes. Or boot camp."
And truancy never occurs.
For boot camp? You're in a training facility generally in the middle of nowhere, with no transportation. You don't have any clothing other than a highly distinctive uniform. You're marched from place to place, generally in formation (so if you're missing it's obvious) with other trainees. And you have very little free time, deliberately so.
And you volunteered to be there, at least if you're American. I don't know what they do in the conscript countries, but I suspect there's a lot more guards etc.
Nothing is ever perfect, but I am confident that Hours Spent In School is negatively correlated (causatively) with Hours Spent Doing Crime.
"You're marched from place to place, generally in formation (so if you're missing it's obvious) with other trainees. And you have very little free time, deliberately so."
Yep! No time for crimes! Success!
"I don't know what they do in the conscript countries, but I suspect there's a lot more guards etc."
I mean, they got MPs for a reason. :) A lot of MP's job, even in fully volunteer armies, is.... well.... let's say, very similar to prison guard duty.
Independently of whether it is ethical or not, castration would probably help for some crimes. Probably for most violent crimes. Perhaps for others as well.
Read up on what "eunuchs" got up to. It may help some, but it's certainly not a complete solution.
Not to mention many doctors would have ethical qualms. I suppose it would depend on how you presented it though...
Not to pick on Brian, but this is a pretty good summation of my point about "smart people can't understand how dumb people live, and thus can't come up with policy solutions to fix them."
Because the magic recipe that would fix this is "we find a way to raise IQ by an SD or more, and hope that there are commensurate gains in sociability and executive planning functions to boot". There is no way to do this right now.
I do think our system actually does *prevent* lots of people from becoming criminals, but I also think that these people tend to be prosocial enough that they aren't very likely to ever become criminals.
"smart people can't understand how dumb people live, and thus can't come up with policy solutions to fix them."
I was absolutely thinking of that when I wrote it. I agree that "if criminals just had better planning skills" is just a magic fix that wouldn't work, so my thought is "how did societies in the past get people with bad planning skills to do the pro-social things?" and the answer was "they forced them to." I don't like how it sounds, but... obviously?
"I do think our system actually does *prevent* lots of people from becoming criminals"
Definitely. And even lots of them probably are potentially anti-social people, but something in our system worked to prevent it. So let's replicate that as much as possible. It certainly will not be perfect.
> how did societies in the past get people with bad planning skills to do the pro-social things?" and the answer was "they forced them to." I don't like how it sounds, but... obviously?
Perhaps what is really needed is a more reasonable path-of-least-resistance. A baseline life plan that ensures that no matter how badly you've screwed up all your previous decisions, you can always just move to California and pick cabbages for five cents a piece and a bed in a dormitory. Then that, instead of drug addiction and vagrancy, becomes the default plan for everyone who fucks everything else up.
I think that something like that would indeed be a good thing.
We're talking about people who have no plan whatsoever, let alone a default plan. Why would they move to California instead of getting high?
Because last time they got high, a police bus rolled up, tested them, put them in a cell overnight, and dropped them off outside Salinas with a sunhat and a brochure detailing the benefits of cabbage picking and tips on the best method for doing it.
Sure, they don't _have_ to pick cabbages, but to someone with no other plan it starts to seem like a pretty good option.
Right, at some point you commit enough offenses and it becomes less a default choice and more “we force you to” like prison.
"how did societies in the past get people with bad planning skills to do the pro-social things?""
Graham (the cop whose comment appeared in the top of a recent Open Thread) had a post review policing in medieval Bologna; he parenthetically notes that for someone committing a felony (which would start around burglary), the lightest punishment they could hope for was public torture.
https://grahamfactor.substack.com/p/really-really-old-school-cops
Now, if we got a middle school class together to watch one of their classmates who had been caught stealing get fingers cut off and his face branded, would this inspire them to not become criminals? Maybe, I'm genuinely not sure. I just don't really think it's an option in general (and I don't think we could can go back to that mindset where that is even an option).
I am of the opinion that a large amount of our problem over the last 60 years come from a belief in "equal systems" that attempt to be "fair" to everyone by treating everyone the same, but much of our breakdown comes from the simple fact that not everyone is equal. Maybe the answer here is a system that isn't fair because it's pretty brutal to the proto-criminal class (understood as a class of people who, for various reasons, are highly susceptible to the egregore of antisocial behaviors) but that keeps them in line, while the non-proto criminal class (those who for various reasons are not immune to this egregore) gets to have various liberties and be hypocrites about it.
The widespread proliferation of sports gambling is giving as an interesting peak at this process, IMHO: it was fine for sports gambling to exist when there were only a few places you could do it and it wasn't easy to do; but when access is made more "fair", it's a disaster for a subset.
Thanks for the recommendation, I requested to subscribe to Graham's.
I think you make a good point: responses to criminals (or things like gambling) should not be equal for everyone. They should be tailored to provide the best outcomes for society, (and where appropriate, better outcomes for the criminals). Some of those tailored responses are going to involve some pretty harsh restrictions on their freedoms, unfortunately.
Some criminals (first degree murder) have demonstrated that they can't be allowed freedom of action - okay, life sentence.
Others have only committed one minor crime, and respond well to being put on a "here is this pro-social path" - so let's do that.
Others might commit one minor crime and then be released, and continue to commit many more crimes. Some combination of "incapacitation" for a time plus more stringent "no really, here is the pro-social thing you HAVE to do now" seems like the right idea.
I think in medieval Bologna it looks like they made the same choice, contingent on different levels of resources and beliefs.
For gambling I feel the same way! We should tailor the response to the "crime." Gambling with no bad effects? Ok. Gambling (abuse) that ruins your life? I am fine prohibiting "ruining your life."
If you gamble and lose 50 bucks but you make 50k a year, I say: totally legal. Does this mean I am fine with rich people being allowed the Privilege to gamble more? Yes, I am a terrible inequality-promoting bastard, except for the part where rich people being able to gamble more means inequality will go down.
If you gamble and lose 25k and you make 40k a year, I think we should cap how much you're allowed to wager to something smaller.
If you gamble and lose tons and can't feed your kids and lose your job, I am fine convicting you of Reckless Gambling (like a DUI) and outlawing gambling (For you).
How about state-issued Gambler's Licenses, like a driver's license but the test is mostly statistical fallacies and household budgeting, serves as clearinghouse for incremental records of troubling trends, and any bankruptcy involving significant gambling debts gets it revoked? Extra ID card check wouldn't put unreasonable burden on any establishment which already has security appropriate for handling lots of cash.
Sure there’s all kinds of good ideas there. I might just make it even more simple. All gambling places have to report winnings above a certain amount for taxes. Just expand that reporting to include losses and cross reference with your latest tax return and prohibit gambling after losses exceeding 20% of that or whatever. To bring it back to the crime question, it’s part of the wider “how to promote pro social behavior without limiting freedom, including for people with bad planning skills” across all of society.
Require some form of Known Your Customer law that requires income reporting and monitoring for addictive behavior and restrict the allowed amount of losses, or amount to be to set for a month, and restricted thereafter. Or maybe only allow a floor of a small aggregate bet size unless the user opts in for the enhanced KYC and monitoring.
In the past your clan would have to pay wergild and you might become a slave if you couldn't pay.
And that system worked in its day, and was explicitly predicated on the idea that the criminal was potentially still a valuable, productive member of society that you'd want to continue producing things or being conscripted for battle.
I'm fine with criminal fines, too.... nowadays though, like Jeff Goldblum, I'm not a big fan of the s-word, so maybe we could brand it as prisoners-with-jobs... and also ex-prisoners-continuing-to-have-jobs.
This is a modern attempt to achieve what that system did:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/who-vouches-for-youhtml
Hey I remember reading that! I thought it was a good idea , especially since it was explicitly an attempt to address a wider topic of social trust than just crime.
They were rather less effective at catching criminals, so when they did catch them punishments were rather harsher.
There was also a lot more room in many areas for what we would consider criminal behavior today. Some of it was even praised. See what soldiers were like.
100%. As noted in the whole original discussion, a huge % of this topic is "we need way more effective police" and that would "fix" a lot of the problems.
And yes, in the past, the number one domestic crime reduction program was "conscripting all the young men and ordering them to commit crimes in the next country over"
Mark Kleiman's argument for restricting convicted criminals was that we already do just that via incarceration, restricting them while letting them out is win-win.
Yes, I like it, except in addition I don't just want to just restrict them from committing crimes, but instead (both in jail and after) also force/nudge/encourage/incentivize (whichever method works in their case) them to do productive things instead.
That sounds like a great idea as the next problem to tackle, after we figure out how to consistently motivate non-criminals to do productive things.
I suspect both questions exist on the same spectrum
> why not just force them to make better choices? Is it just that sounds authoritarian?
Because while you can make educated guesses you can't in practice rigorously predict who falls in that general criminal type - some are people who may as well clean their act before doing anything serious. The law allows for forfeiting someone's liberties after they explicitly break the social contract. But introducing some kind of guess (e.g. "this person has low IQ and low impulse control as measured by a psychologist, hence they get less rights") is extremely vulnerable to exploitation and almost guaranteed to turn into some kind of systemically biased process to create a permanent pariah underclass.
"you can't in practice rigorously predict who falls in that general criminal type "
No, but once they've committed one crime (the category of person we're talking about) that is pretty decent info (again, not perfect - just better than 50/50) in one direction (see the "most crimes committed by previous criminals").
"The law allows for forfeiting someone's liberties after they explicitly break the social contract."
Right, and "committing one crime" is a break in that contract that we do indeed curtail liberties for, what I am suggesting is that (for crimes where we accept the offender will be released at some point) we curtail their liberties in a specific way that - I suggest - might be A) less costly to society while it is being imposed, B) more conducive to them not committing as many crimes in the future because it is a smoother transition to Non Jail Productive Life.
"But introducing some kind of guess (e.g. "this person has low IQ and low impulse control as measured by a psychologist, hence they get less rights") is extremely vulnerable to exploitation and almost guaranteed to turn into some kind of systemically biased process to create a permanent pariah underclass."
But the system we have right now does that even more! My whole point is not that we should magically assess who has low impulse control and impose less rights on them - I would argue the current system (ably described above of "infrequent but harsh punishment") is a status quo far more rights-limiting to those people AND to all offenders, because it is applied "equally" to everyone.
I don't think we should "guess" anything. My suggestion is instead equally apply a policy of "if you commit a moderate, non-violent, we-think-you-can-return-to-society-one-day crime, then we will demand that you demonstrate (with funding for monitoring that) that you are returning to productive society , or if you fail to do so (i.e. this is a multiple offense, or you fail monitoring) then the sentence we impose (rather than just "prison") is a forced work program that as closely as possible resembles the productive behavior that society would like you to return to after your sentence." No guessing! Discovering who is in which group and tailoring the Punishment Method to reduce costs for society (and post-sentencing offender) the most.
I think (pathway to return to productive peaceful life) this is HOW you avoid creating a permanent pariah underclass (at least of minor criminals, I am fine with murderers being a permanent pariah class of prisoners-who-can't-murder-anymore). Because right now the people in that group are sentenced (unbiasedly perhaps!) to prison where they hang out with criminals all day, which seems likely to foster that. Because say you are biased against some group and you levy my punishment on them: the whole point is it is designed to avoid them becoming lifelong criminals by instead (yes, forcing them to) doing productive things. No matter if you think it works or not, it certainly works better than the status quo.
If the target of the punishment just made a mistake and would indeed clean up their act, I would like the system to not try to guess that, but require that to be demonstrated, and if so, reward them with freedom and no future rights curtailment.
If the target does turn out to be a "general criminal type" then I also don't want that to be "guessed" I want it to be observed and then I want society to execute the most effective policy we can think of that A) reduces the chances of future harm and B) increases the chances of them returning to productive peaceful life (even if at gunpoint!)
Regarding the amount of police per capita in Europe vs USA, the difference is even more stark when you consider the number of violent crimes per police officer. I remember looking at the numbers at it was around 1:70 for homicides (US vs Germany).
My intuition tells me that this has a significant effect on police brutality. A policeman that has 70x chances of dealing with a violent criminal would almost certainly be much more rough compared to somebody who mostly deals with traffic violations and children who got lost on the way to school.
Yes. As I commented on the original prison post, the US is an extreme outlier in having an extremely low number of police officers, relative to crime. See: https://direct.mit.edu/ajle/article/doi/10.1162/ajle_a_00030/112647 that the US has only one ninth the number of police officers per homicide as the median developed country.
When I lived in Baltimore I had occasion to call the police one night-- and they didn't come. It wasn't an emergency but I called the city complaint line the next day and they did put me through to the police and I found out why: Baltimore is divided into
nine policing districts (the eight compass directions pus a central district) and the southern district where I lived had just three police units available-- and they were already tied up that night (serious car accident; a shooting). My matter did get handled promptly that morning, and to my satisfaction. But having only three units available in a very crime-ridden city strikes me as far too few cops.
Yup. Besides for taking a long time to respond, even to emergencies, Baltimore also sometimes puts callers on hold when they call 911: https://www.reddit.com/r/baltimore/comments/wdjoei/911_hold_times/.
To be fair to the Baltimore PD the one time I did have an emergency they were there before I was off the phone with 911.
Is part of the per capita difference just that Europe is more urbanized, though? What happens if you just compare the top 30 metro areas between the US and Europe?
Too lazy to do a full check here, but only looking at NYC and Paris (they came to mind first):
"As shown in Figure 2, New York City (with 53 police officers per 10,000 residents) is currently second only to Washington among the nation’s 25 most populous cities in terms of police officers per capita, with the average ratio in the other cities at 29 police officers per 10,000 residents." [1]
"there were 117 police officers or gendarmes per 10,000 inhabitants in Paris." [2]
So, even in our (2nd) most policed city, we have half the per capita officers of Paris.
Source:
1. https://ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/crimerep.html
2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1368088/rate-police-officers-gendarmes-department-france/
Thanks, so…probably not just a difference in urbanization, then.
Paris is denser than New York, but that's mostly bounding. Paris proper is about the same size and population as Manhattan plus half of the Bronx.
Add in the Petite Couronne (the inner suburbs) and it's bigger and a bit less dense than the five boroughs.
I'm not sure about how all the European countries do it, but from what I have seen "traffic police" tends to be a separate institution with separate people that are not "police-police" even if their full official name include "police" somewhere, and the same is done for various administrative violations (e.g. municipal police) so any actual policeman is handling only criminal acts and would never ever deal with traffic violations unless they indicate a possibility of crime (e.g. a traffic accident with fatalities becoming a potential manslaughter case) - in my city they even don't have any authority at all to address traffic violations, and if they *really* wanted to all they can do is they can document it and notify the road safety department so that they might issue a ticket for that.
But the point I wanted to make is that even accounting for this aspect, a European criminal police officer who will only handle potential crimes (and not traffic violation or lost children) will still usually do their job unarmed.
>I’m pretty sympathetic to laws making it illegal to run over protesters who are deliberately blocking roads. The end result of legal protections for people who prey on the kindness of others is the transformation of decent people into chumps who get exploited harder and harder until they crack and become cruel just to keep up.
Is this meant to read "laws making it legal to run over protesters"?
And also damn, I honestly didn't expect him to say that outright. Well, as I've said before, the next administration can make your dream a reality, and it's not too late to cozy up to them!
I'm surprised he went with "mild sympathy towards maiming people" instead of "outlaw blocking roads and let the police handle it cleanly". Doesn't sound very Scott-like.
I think he meant "legal", and I think it is a horrible take.
Protesters are spending times and money, and even put themselves at risk, to try to improve our society, and they certainly do not deserve random death penalty from frustrated drivers.
They are kind people, and they don't exploit anyone.
If the protesters were trying to make society worse, would your opinion change?
The rights and wrongs of running over protestors shouldn't be dependent on whether you happen to believe their cause is right or not.
To anyone who starts coming up with ideas of how to deal with protestors, you really need to visualise:
a) The case where the protestors are protesting in favour of a cause near and dear to your heart, and
b) The case where the protestors are protesting in favour of a cause that you find absolutely abominable.
If your answers on how to deal with those protestors aren't exactly the same, then you ought not to be having opinions.
> If the protesters were trying to make society worse, would your opinion change?
- I think that mostly nobody do that, even the people I don't like who are protesting for policies I think would be awful. They are still trying to improve things, even if they are confused or have very different values than me.
- Even if they did, I still don't think running over people with your car because they block the road is ok. I think doing it is really extreme.
I don't think protesting falls in the category of preying on the niceness of others.
The question isn't about whether anyone *actually* protests to make society worse, it's about whether your opinion would change if you knew for sure they were trying to make society worse.
The reason this is relevant is that many people do believe protestors for X cause are actively making things worse; when you imagine just protestors for a cause you yourself believe in, it is privileging a certain set of beliefs rather than engaging with the reasoning behind the hypothetical run-them-over law.
E.g., suppose protestors for—I dunno, something you hate; deportation of all minorites? taking the vote away from women? whatever it is—are blocking a major road for an hour, causing a death due to an ambulance being stuck in traffic. Consider also the economic costs—and the wasting a chunk of many people's limited time on Earth (add up the hours stolen, wasted just sitting in traffic, across thousands of people!).
They're taking advantage of the fact that even though anyone in the front lines *could* run them over, they don't and won't do it... all for a terrible cause. How about the law now?
You may still think it's a terrible idea, of course—but in this case, you at least understand the feeling of people who hate what the protestors stand for, and think they're causing harm for not just no reason but a *bad* reason.
My opinion about them being kind, would change.
In fact, I don't really believe protestors are kind in general, I was obviously wrong about this part, but still, I think they are probably nicer than average.
My opinion about not allowing running over them with your car would not change, this was the second part of my message.
At the very least they internalize costs for political change they generally do not internalize private benefits of. So this will at least limit protest to what the protesters themselves think will benefit society.
> then you ought not to be having opinions.
I will continue to have opinions even if I ought not to have them, opinions are like beliefs, it is just something you have, that you ought to have them or not.
Personally, I really don't see the point of people protesting over an issue that they're not willing to die for. If the state isn't stopping the protesters by force, the state is effectively sanctioning the protest. That either means the state supports the causes of the protest, or that state feels completely unthreatened by the protest. Either way, that means the protest is largely pointless. If protest is actually meaningful, however... hopefully its participants are prepared to sacrifice everything.
Die for is a bit strong, depending on the cause. But be arrested and face minor jail time and fines. Yes, I think that is reasonable for sufficient convictions for civil disobedience.
I'm not saying they should die, I'm saying that for cases where protesting would actually accomplish something, people WILL die.
There are plenty of lower stakes issues worth a bit of protest. A few years ago there was a protest at a city council meeting in my state about a corrupt property deal. The local indy-weekly newspaper had an article about it that led the protest. The article didn't do anything on its own, but he protest led to TV coverage. Within a few days the council member indicated resigned and the deal didn't make it through in the form proposed. Maybe this requires politicians or bureaucrats to feel shame to work, but it seems to me that this kind of thing can still have an import.
On the other hand, the highly divisive issues of national and international salience that already have widespread awareness probably aren't impacted by the marginal non-violent protest
Protestors blocking traffic are an example of "taking advantage of decency": they count upon you being a decent person that won't just keep going, and in return inflict costs¹ upon you and other ordinary, decent people who are almost never actually involved, in a unambiguously morally culpable way, in whatever they're protesting.
Especially with controversial causes in which it is unclear—or when most people think it IS clear, and that the protestors are wrong—who has the right of it, this is pretty shitty behavior; something like unilaterally enforcing a punishment. Depending on one's purpose in driving (perhaps it is an emergency, or you have an extremely important doctor's appointment, or a job interview, etc.) and how long the road is blocked, the punishment can be much more severe than just "irritation".
Just as with other minor anti-social behaviors, blocking traffic is defecting from the agreements that hold society together. They've chosen for everyone else involved that they and their cause have the right to "detain" the drivers—whereas normally, one would have to ask the city and schedule and etc. to block off a road for an event. Nope! Not in this case; you don't get a choice, now; we've decided for you!
So... I'm sympathetic to Scott's take. Not for "the road was blocked for five minutes", of course, but... a major traffic artery, for an hour or more...? Hmm.
I think you're wrong about what motivates many protestors, btw—I've *met* many of them—but that's a pointless road to go down, if you haven't actually met the median screeching protestor / are yourself this sort of person.
.............
¹(traffic jams & accidents, wasted time, extra pollution, ambulance stuck—these have all happened)
> Protestors blocking traffic are an example of "taking advantage of decency": they count upon you being a decent person that won't just keep going, and in return inflict costs
They are acting in a way where they expect decency, and they are inflicting a cost, but I don't think they are taking advantage.
Also, I am not against the cops making the road not blocked, this is how we ought to deal with this situation.
I'm okay with that—I don't think "make it legal to run over protestors" is actually a *good* idea, just trying to give an intuition for why one might be *sympathetic* to it, heh.
Ok, I am happy to hear it.
Honestly I can sort of get the logic of it, but given the extreme violence of what it actually means to roll over people with your car, I have absolutely no sympathy with the idea.
I think there's various shades of what it could mean.
I don't think there should be a special law saying "you can run down anyone blocking the street".
But there could be some tweaks to existing self-defence law that make it clear that preventing someone from going where they want to go is a form of assault (which is generally already is) and that the use of reasonable force in order to get past someone who is attempting to block your passage is allowed.
I don't think that it should be entirely open season on anyone who steps in the road for even a moment, but if your only alternatives are pushing someone with your car or being stuck then I think the push is entirely appropriate.
To be clearer, I don't think the correct way to deal with people who are imposing some cost, conditional of people having some decency, is to abandon all decency.
Particularly when this is not a necessary condition, you don't have to block the road with your body, a lot of other things will do. Doing it with your body is just symbolic, and allow the "wall" to be quickly moved if they are an emergency and to not completely block the road.
>They are kind people, and they don't exploit anyone.
They certainly hurt people. When you block a road you are harming everyone who needs to use that road. Mothers are kept from their hungry children who want dinner, employees are fired for getting to work late, ambulances take longer to get people in jeopardy to the hospital, time sensitive deliveries don't make it on time, and everyone involved is harmed.
And why? Because you didn't want to protest on a sidewalk or in a public park like ordinary people? We have many legal mechanisms for protesting in this country, and blocking a road is not one of them. The protesters are putting themselves into danger in order to harm others in order for their message to get on the news. They are exploiting everyone who is delayed or stopped by their protest, exploiting their pain and suffering for the chance a publicity. They are doing a bad thing, and an illegal thing, and we should stop them from doing it.
I think this is a bad way to protest for the reasons you gave.
I agree it is uselessly hurtful, but I think people use this way because they are confused, or because they just follow the group, not really because they have any personal gain from using it.
That is a wildly naive belief.
Protestors who block roads aren't good, confused people. They inconvenience and endanger drivers and passengers because inconveniencing and endangering people makes the protestors feel powerful. They love this feeling of power so much that they continue to block roads even though it makes the general public *much* less sympathetic to their cause.
If the protestors cared about their cause more than they enjoyed the feeling of power which comes from harming others, the protestors would legally *make and spend the money it takes to make change.* They'd work overtime to donate to their causes and they'd legally do the boring work at their legislature.
Saying somebody else is naive, then saying "my political enemies don't do the things they do because they think they are a good idea, it is because they are just evil and malicious, delighting in the most petty, stupid kind of tyranny imaginable" is certainly... a take you can have.
Saying that all protesters who block roads are my political enemies is certainly...an assumption you can have.
Related: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12144-023-04463-x
"The results of multiple regression analyses showed that a strong ideological view, according to which a violent revolution against existing societal structures is legitimate (i.e., anti-hierarchical aggression), was associated with antagonistic narcissism (Study 1) and psychopathy (Study 2)."
Oh …
I think you are the one being overly pessimistic about the intentions of people.
I even think this level of pessimism probably hurt you, because it can't be good to live in a world where a lot of people are like that.
> They inconvenience and endanger drivers and passengers because inconveniencing and endangering people makes the protestors feel powerful.
Maybe some, but I think it is a very little minority, less than 5%.
I think most :
- Think it is effective
- Are unsure but desperate and don't see better ways
- Think they have a duty to do it, even if they don't like it
- Didn't think about it too much, they are just following the group because they are confident others know what they are doing
I wasn't discussing the explicit *intentions* of road-blockers, I was discussing their *motivations,* an important distinction.
The motivation is to feel powerful by taking time and freedom of movement away from others. They will pursue this sense of power even when it's widely known to harm their own cause, even when their victims and the general public tells them that.
They tell the world and themselves that they're doing it for a good reason, but they're picking the worst way to protest because...it's super fun. It's dramatic. It's personal gratification. It might even make them infamous!
Picking up a shift instead of road-blocking and then donating one's pay for those hours to the most powerful lobbyists for that particular cause is the most effective thing a road-blocker can do, but it's boring and won't end up on YouTube.
That's how you can know they obviously care far more about themselves than the cause.
In the Netherlands there are two main groups of protesters that block roads. Climate protesters (mostly students) that block the road with their bodies, and farmers that block the road with their tractors over nitrogen emissions policy. Scott's proposal would interfere with the former while leaving the latter alone. Which is a direct result of the greater wealth that farmers have (in the form of large farm equipment).
I dislike both of these groups, but dislike even more the prospect of creating a law that leaves disruptive protest the exclusive right of the wealthy.
In the US all citizens have the right to protest: they don't have the right to block a road. The farmer who blocks the road with a tractor should have his tractor seized. He has more wealth, so he has more wealth that society can take away from him as punishment. More to lose.
In the Netherlands both are illegal, but both still happen unfortunately. My impression is that the climate protesters meet stricter enforcement as is. But adopting Scott's proposal would create a stark de facto (if not de jure) rights contrast between the two.
Well yes, there are a lot of reasons why running down protestors is bad policy. Ideally we would have police that consistently enforce the laws! For a long while in the US at least, particularly in big cities, the police treated road blocking protestors with kid gloves.
But there's a preexisting asymmetry: using, e.g., a large truck to push a tractor off the road is a very different infraction (if it even is one!) than to use that same truck to push a protestor themselves off the road.
"some are in a gray area where they could potentially go either way depending on things like availability of drugs, availability of drug treatment, someone holding their hand to help them land a job, etc."
I absolutely agree with that, but (and it's a big but, a but big enough to satisfy Sir Mix-a-Lot) some don't and won't, no matter how much hand-holding, shift off the path they're on. That was my point about the early school leaver services, because that's pretty much the last stop before you get on the "school to prison pipeline" or whatever the current term is.
There are kids on that who do take advantage of it to help themselves and access services so they get diverted from the path of "no education, no skills, no job". There are kids on that who treat it as a laugh and free money (there's a payment to attend, it's a small training allowance depending on age, and can be as much as a social welfare payment) and have no intention of doing even the bare minimum (but they make sure to turn up for the weekly payment when it's paid out).
https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/education/further-education-and-training/youthreach/
I've been on training/re-skilling courses myself where I'm sitting in the yard at break time listening to a young guy bragging on his phone to a friend about how he came in still hung over from being stoned last night (if that's the correct term, I'm not up on my drugs lingo) and how he had no idea what the class was about and he intended to smoke as soon as he got off class. These weren't academic classes, these were "learn a trade" classes, so it' s not because"oh well he was in the wrong place and should have been placed learning manual skills".
I really do believe in early intervention and in family supports to help people who need the help and want the help. But I also believe, by experience, that there are some people who no amount of help will do any good, who only regard those that provide that help as being the suckers to be taken advantage of, and who game the system as much as they can. They're heading to prison eventually. Might as well be there ten years as six months, because six months is not going to lead to a Damascene conversion about getting out of crime (it might lead them to 'not wanting to go back to prison' but they won't stop crime because they think that next time they won't get caught, they aren't willing or able to break the connection with crime, and they have no other options at that point because they've burned all the bridges).
As for the married/partnered with children, that's another question. A lot of the people who end up in courts have kids, may have spouses but more likely partners (or a succession thereof) and are not working. What appears to be the typical case, at least for female criminals, is the shoplifter who has been given a succession of 'second chances', has been warned that the next conviction will mean jail time, whose legal representative swears up and down that she will be engaging with support services to tackle alcohol/drugs abuse, and who is not really responsible as she has a tragic backstory.
And then after the 36th "second chance", they go out and do it again and this time end up doing time, like this lady - released in October, straight back to robbing from shops, convicted this month:
https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/courtandcrime/arid-41531042.html
"A Cork woman was warned she was in last chance saloon in relation to several shoplifting charges when she was released on bail in mid-October but she carried out several more thefts shortly after she got out.
Now at Cork District Court, Maggie Foley has been jailed for eight months for a litany of thefts committed in Cork City — many of them occurring over the last few weeks.
Foley, 37, of Grenville Court, Grenville Place, Cork, was told by a judge at Cork District Court in mid-October she would be released on bail but she was in “last chance saloon”.
At that time, she was accused of burglary at Blue Nile, French Church Street, where she stole a laptop and Nike runners from an office area on June 9.
She was also charged with thefts at Tommy Hilfiger on St Patrick’s Street on June 16, at Dunnes Stores, Merchants Quay, on October 1, and at Tesco Express, South Main Street, Cork, on October 8 stealing €50 worth of alcohol.
She stole a small amount of goods on October 12 at Centra, North Main Street. The following day, she stole three cans of Four Loco at Tesco Express on South Main Street.
And the day after that, she stole €85 worth of clothing at TK Maxx on Cornmarket Street.
Despite the warning given to her about being at risk, Maggie Foley went on to steal €315 worth of clothing from Marks & Spencer on October 23.
As recently as November 9, she stole a €240 jacket from Brown Thomas in Cork.
On the same date, she stole €138 worth of clothing from Dunnes Stores across the street.
Her solicitor, Diarmuid Kelleher, said she had had an awful lot of tragedy in her past when a number of family members died in various circumstances when young.
Mr Kelleher said unusually her difficulty with alcohol did not even commence until she was 25 years old.
“More than incarceration she needs to get into rehabilitation to deal with her alcohol problem,” Mr Kelleher said.
The judge who dealt with Ms Foley on this latest appearance at Cork District Court — Judge Treasa Kelly — imposed a total sentence of eight months on her for all of the offences to which she pleaded guilty."
Prison is by no means an ideal solution, but right now it's the only solution to certain persons that we have.
Dangit I miss having you on the Motte. Alas.
The fear and trembling before the Rightful Caliph keeps somewhat of a bridle on my tongue here (though even so I've needed to be smacked on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper a time or two), but over on The Motte it was looser and I went faster for heat than light. Too many spats with one particular mod, so I said "goodbye and I'm sticking to that".
I still lurk, and am tempted sometimes to comment, but no! Stern Duty, daughter of the voice of God, refrains me!
Am I the only (retired) juvenile delinquent who's an ACX reader? Just wondering.
Shoplifting, drugs, auto theft - being young and dumb was most of it but getting far away from all the old friends in the old neighborhood (you would be horrified by the number of close friends I've had that didn't make it out of their 20s) was a lot of it.
I think rationalists tend to believe in rules, and so you are going to have much more than your fair share of goody two-shoes. But welcome! I think people here tend to be too naive and having someone with actual experience like this is a valuable corrective.
That's the part about "bad company/bad companions" from the old kind of upbringing rules that we trashed because Liberty! Freedom! Question Authority! You ain't the boss of me!
I'm going to have a question about this in the survey.
Instead of sending someone to Australia, we fly them to another part of the country (not all to one spot, just a "different" spot is enough) to break all their old ties, and land them in a community that doesn't encourage that shit.
100% of politics in that world will be about making sure those people aren't sent to your town or neighborhood.
This already exists, and people on the receiving end are very aware of the programs and absolutely hate them.
Even if you only put one criminal in a small community, they will notice. Any amount that actually makes a difference will destroy those communities.
What if they got the equivalent of the witness protection program?
Why would this stop them destroying that community? Or do you mean spread them around?
“Even if you only put one criminal in a small community, they will notice”
I assumed “notice” meant “the locals will know this is a transplanted delinquent and shun them, making it impossible for them to re-integrate into a more positive social group the way Peteski did”.
But also, yes you would spread them around so they can’t form another delinquent subcommunity, that’s basically the point. They need a fresh start away from bad influences for that to work.
The witness protection program is very different, in that the people involved are highly monitored and have a strong incentive to not be noticed.
I didn’t mean it as a precise analogy and was only half serious.
The idea I was trying to evoke was “the government assists them in keeping their convict status a secret, with a new identity if necessary”.
Sure, but it's a legit question - what makes that program different?
The adjusted program would help from a psychological perspective (the new community can give them a clean slate) but not if the behavior doesn't change with it. What made them into petty criminals may be left behind, but if they have no reason to change then they often will not. They may see the new community as overly trusting suckers, taking advantage of the goodwill until they destroy their reputation and want the government to move them again.
In witness protection the government is helping them avoid likely painful death, so they have a really strong incentive to play along. I don't think either of us would be happy with a "get along in this new community or we kill you" program.
Yup. Look how popular Section 8 housing is.
A criminal exchange program perhaps? We sent a shoplifter from district A in California to district Z and district Z sends a shoplifter to district A. We match crime and severity & keep it within the state whenever possible so that it minimizes bureaucracy. No one place gets an influx of criminals but the old ties get broken.
There’s definitely a risk in breaking a criminals pro-social ties as well — old mothers who aren’t going to move but were a good influence for example.
Still worth trying in my opinion.
I stole apples from the local farm.
You have any friends with invisibility rings, by chance?
Yeah, but on his last heist it slipped off and he got stoned by the beholder.
Ouch. Probably no Peter Jackson adaptation of that story in the offing. :(
So did my late mother (born 1930). She used to regale us with stories of when she was a kid, and one story was her and a bunch of her age-mates planning to raid the local orchard. Of course, so were a bunch of other kids. Older boys took their apples, so she and another girl teamed up to attack the leader and push him into the ditch full of water.
Ten year old girls were tougher in her day! 😁
I shoplifted some trifles a few times as a teen, due to "bad influence" and for the thrill of it. Stopped after getting caught the first time.
A lot of kids shoplift. I remember friends who did that. They may get caught and quit, or just grow out of it.
I do think we need a more severe law to deal with the sort of gang "shoplifting" that basically is open looting of a store. A furtive shoplifter isn't seen as an implied threat to other people as his motive is not b e noticed at all; a loot gang definitely is threatening.
I wouldn't be horrified. We shouldn't pretend to miss people we aren't actually going to miss.
For one thing, it leads to the idea that we need to spend lots more money on people like that, which is absurd.
I ate meat when I was young.
You're not the only one. I never stole cars, but shoplifted A LOT in high school, as did all my friends. Not little things, thousands of dollars, constantly. Drugs and other bad stuff too. I never got caught but almost did once, it scared the crap out of me, and I never did it again. Everyone who engaged in this is now a boring, married, suburban professional, including me...except for some of the boys, who have disappeared, died or gone to jail. I guess the difference is mainly that we never got caught, the girls anyway. I do sometimes wonder if we were actually somewhat sociopaths back then? I would not even steal a tube of ChapStick now, without feeling terrified and guilty. But at 16 I really DNGAF whatsoever and had zero moral qualms.
"I wonder if people ever try GPS tracking (without the rest of probation) as a prison alternative. “You’re getting off with a warning this time, but wear this tracker, and if you commit any other crimes in the future, we’ll know."
Go on the youtubes and start watching court videos. Not the funny Sov Cit ones, not the fancy trials, but the normal everyday court hearings. 50 people in a row on probation/home arrest with tethering. What you'll find is that tethering is expensive, constantly breaks (especially when people are trying to accidentally-done-a-purpose break it to have an excuse to violate it) and a nightmare for judges to monitor constant tiny violations (that might be a faulty system reporting someone left when they didn't!). They're hauling prosecutors in/probation officers in/defendant in to court to argue about "was it a intentional tech problem, a person problem, an unintentional tech problem" or something else all the time.
Maybe some of the crim defense/prosecutors here can speak to this, but from my perspective (lawyer, not in this system) it seems like a technical answer, but the tech is nowhere near cheap/good enough right now.
Also, I went hunting with a GPS this fall and in tree cover with no leaves it consistently couldn't place me within 100 yards. Often the metes/bounds of someone's limits are "their house" + work at certain times. Maybe this is a tech issue we can solve using cell signals, but I'm not sure the real accuracy (not the "your phone uses its best guess of where you are so it looks like the GPS is accurate" accuracy) is actually close enough in city/suburban conditions.
Having done a little defense work - partially a tech problem, partially a social problem. The equipment breaks regularly but the bigger problem is that many of these folks don't have a stable home and are forced to relocate a lot, which requires a hearing to update monitoring conditions. Even if they do, home monitoring often forces them to be in a home with drugs in violation of the probation the monitoring is enforcing.
Reasonable. I think about the amount of times I've lost the good cell charger or something coming back from a trip or had charging issues (had to buy 4 different charges this fall and a pile of cables to get one that would properly charge a new device everytime). Then you imagine the life circumstances... Not exactly like you want to be calling up a probation officer and inviting them in your home to troubleshoot (even if you/they had time).
I know someone that works in a company that sells GPS correction services, trying to correct for errors and inaccuracies in the signals by watching the GPS signals at various known locations and measuring the error.
In rural areas with wide open fields, the big issues are things like distortions in the signal coming from the ionosphere. But that isn’t the biggest problem in GPS overall. Cities are apparently an absolute nightmare.
In cities, a GPS signal can bounce several times off of nearby buildings, meaning that your phone or tracker is getting multiple conflicting signals at once and has to differentiate between them.
This is why phones often end up relying on alternative localization methods to disambiguate, like measuring how far you are from nearby cell towers and wifi networks at known locations. Turns out wifi networks, like your home one, change infrequently enough that with enough data you can get a good sense of where they are, and then use that data to geolocate other phones.
Edit: to be clear I don’t have a strong opinion on how GPS should be used in probation or house arrest, just adding some context on why GPS alone is often inaccurate in cities.
Makes sense. I think a problem here is that, like many things related to the law, the tech is pretty "behind" b/c it's a small market dominated by a few companies AND the evidence has to hold up in court. Raw GPS/Tether data (strength of signal to a defined point in the house for example) is pretty easy to explain to a judge and relatively hard to attack vs "well our algo heuristically learns over time and many measurements where each of these wifi signals is in relation to GPS data/mobile tower data".
How about solving the "small market" problem by adding a new use case? Lighter sentence than probation or house arrest, no pre-defined forbidden locations, just gotta wear it in case the cops need to find you again for some other reason. Larger quantities could allow R&D and manufacturing investments to reduce cost and improve reliability.
I certainly like the idea in the abstract. Sentence someone (or more likely, have them agree as part of a pre-trial agreement) to something like probation, but different:
1. No random check-ins/lower costs.
2. Probably still want right to inspect house by assigned officer.
3. Keep device charged and you don't get hassled much, much more limited drug testing.
4. Fail to keep device charged some set amount and converts to normal probation.
5. Controversially and probably impossible part: additional "minor" crimes of limited importance to continued participation.
One thing large issue that you can see if you check into this stuff is how many people seem to be incapable of not driving without a license, driving without registration, invalid plates, blinkers not working, fare jumping and other stuff. Look, you or I forget out wallet and get stopped probably get a show-up ticket, automatically dismissed if you go to police station with 72 hours showing you had valid license/reg/insurance at time of stop.
A lot of people already struggling with the system end up facing charges (my personal guess is a combination of reduced leniency, screaming at cops, and really annoying judges/probation officers by continuing to use the same stupid excuses (you forgot your wallet? for 4 traffic stops in 4 months?).
I think 1-4 helps, 1-5 probably helps a lot more in terms of keeping people employed/functioning while they get through a series of brushes with the legal system and (hopefully) gets some of the scared straight factor without the life damaging problems of 6months to 1.5 years in jail.
OTOH this is basically what probation was/is supposed to be so maybe we need more probation reform, vs creating a new "good probation" system.
On the other hand, both my fitness watch and bicycle computer work quite well in the city and rural areas. They have problems indoors, but the location accuracy is good enough as long as I go somewhere.
Any device can use the same GPS chip, costing about $6.
Googlemaps on my phone does a pretty good job of knowing my location (with maybe a very slight lag in updating if I'm traveling)
Phone by design has access to cell towers and usually wifi, it makes positioning much easier. Garmin devices have to do without.
I've had GPS on phones (and other devices, when people actually used non-phone devices for GPS) fail all the time in a big city. Jumping to different road, showing at wrong intersection, etc. For me it was a low-cost problem - I would just walk to the closest intersection, read the signs, find it on the map and problem solved. But relying only on this technology (and without the help of Google Maps readjusting it by secondary parameters - which has been getting much better over the years) for decisions that can get a person in jail for years would make me feel very un-easy.
That phenomenon of GPS signals bouncing off buildings is something that I learned about when I was playing Ingress regularly. You can sometimes generate semi-predictable "drift" effects, where if you hug the wall on one side of the street, you predominantly get signals that are bounced off the wall opposite you -- which means the location you get is ~30-40 meters off to the other side of that wall, which was enough to hit targets that otherwise you would've had to walk around the block to reach.
>This is why I’m pretty sympathetic to laws making it illegal to run over protesters who are deliberately blocking roads.
Did you mean "legal" or "illegal"?
Reposting my late comment from the the original post with a crazy scheme:
Okay so it seems that the optimal policy is:
1. Instead of years in prison, different crimes are assigned different number of crime points. The more severe the crime - the more points are given to a person who commits it.
2. All prisons are closed. The resources are spent on other more effective crime preventing methods. Former-incarcerated people are assgned the number of crime points corresponding to their crimes, with discount for already spent years in prison.
3. Social services try to actively help people convicted of any crime, giving the priority to first time offenders.
4. When people accumulate enough crime points, they are immediately publicly executed by a guillotine or a shot to the head - no bullshit with ridiculously expensive lethal injections or decades of waiting.
That gives us:
No negative aftereffects, maybe even some deterrence and full incapacitation. And public entertainment as a nice bonus.
Now, I think some amount of corporal punishment can also be added after certain amount of crime points is reached.
There are a lot of issues with this proposal, but I will mention two that don't fight the hypothetical.
1) Getting caught is still the primary driver of whether someone has points, not crime.
2) Knowing that you will get away with literally anything (and in fact get additional services and money) before your execution will cause a massive increase in crime from people knowingly getting those points. They may even do it intentionally in a way to get caught if the services are nice.
We could count the points by carving tally marks on their back. Two birds with one stone!
1) Sure, but I don't think there is any way around it. In any case it's not worse than the status quo. At least now cops will be motivated to catch shoplifters, because, every point counts.
2) Noone said you will get money. Government will be paying social workers to rehabilitate you. This process doesn't have to be particularly pleasant. Of course some amount of crime preventative social services should be available to everyone in order not to create an actual incentive. Which will be easier to do when millions of dollars are not wasted on prisons. Add here corporal punishments and I think we will have less motivation to commit crime than under current system where it's a way to get free food and shelter.
1) Cops will also be motivated to avoid getting people points if they are sympathetic and know that either in the future or especially if it's the final point will lead to death. Nobody wants to be the final arrest for a single point when that's going to be the death point.
2) Okay, so you add in corporal punishment as an in-between and make the process painful. That's an option that may have some merit, but then what's the real difference? Not wasting away for years in expensive prison? If so, that's going against one of Scott's biggest findings, that sequestering criminals may be one of the most important factors of prison.
1) One of us is very wrong about what kind of people become cops, it seems. I expect that an average cop would be glad to finally punish the irredimable asshole who was given every chance to become a productive member of society, got thousands and thousands of dollars spent on them in the attempts to rehabilitate them, and yet still continued their wicked ways. Obviously sympathetic criminals will be getting away with things more, just like under current system, this is not an argument against my proposition in particular. The point is that it's much harder to appear sympathetic when you are a serial criminal than when it's your first mistake.
2) Incapacitation happens due to the execution - this is the most important effect of the prison, but much cheaper, more humane, as it doesn't involve torture, and without negative externalities.
This kind of stuff is why most talk about policy strikes me as absurd.
You know that your proposal makes you sound like a cartoon villain and therefore it has zero chance of ever becoming popular.
You may as well say "the solution to crime is to stop committing crime".
If you can make the population accept such a "crazy scheme", that means you have mind control superpowers, so why not just magically convince the population not to commit crime?
In general, I feel the same towards 90% of talk about how to solve public problems, especially on this site. People imagine themselves as god-kings.
Whenever I read "this is what should be done", I'd like to ask: what would voters think of this policy? what would the current political establishment think? how much money in lobbying, activism and campaign donations would it take to convince them? is it really the best way to spend money? is there anyone who agrees with your crazy proposal and has that money?
If you don't want to ask those question then you may as well say things like "the solution to crime is to stop committing crime", "the solution to the threat posed by aggressive dictators is that dictators have a change of heart and stop being bad", "the solution to disease is that germs have a change of heart and stop infecting people"... it's just as whimsical.
If you can magically control people and get them to accept your proposal, why can't you just magically control criminals, dictators, germs...
The true "optimal policy" is one that is politically viable.
I'm not criticizing you in particular, I'm making a general point.
God-kings everywhere. I myself am guilty of that.
> You know that your proposal makes you sound like a cartoon villain and therefore it has zero chance of ever becoming popular.
God, people are so pessimistic. Times are changing! People are losing their patience for crime, for disorder, for the stains of society. No longer will they be forced to tolerate the cries of bleeding heart liberals, moaning about "ethics" and "human rights". We are entering a new era, an era of JUSTICE. The blood of the wicked will sate the hearts of the public.
Is that a quote?
No.
I thought this too. Was also sure I would see "Bwahaha" typed out.
Mate, you're in the comments section of a post sympathizing with people running over protesters. What I'm prophesizing is tame by comparison.
> God, people are so pessimistic. Times are changing! People are losing their patience for crime, for disorder, for the stains of society. No longer will they be forced to tolerate the cries of bleeding heart liberals, moaning about "ethics" and "human rights". We are entering a new era, an era of JUSTICE. The blood of the wicked will sate the hearts of the public.
It is now.
This particular idea would have no chance to be implemented, and I think it wouldn't even be good.
But I think trying to find alternative policies and trying to see if they can be good or not, before trying to see if they can become popular or not, is not a bad thing.
I don't view these kind of posts as policy proposals but as something akin to brainstorming.
Before you can make a policy proposal you must first know what you would like to propose. Reality is messy and for many problems it's not obvious what a solution would even look like.
So you start by simplifying the problem until it is easy enough to that a solution can be found. Only once you have a solution that might perhaps work in principle you start looking on if or how it could be implemented.
Many of the solutions will be impossible in reality but at least they might give a hint which form possible solutions could take. Also the alternative is generally not coming up with any solution because issues like "how do we stop crime" are just that hard.
In the past, a lot more crimes did result in execution. So it's entirely possible, and the past didn't consist of cartoon characters. Of course, they didn't let people go with "crime marks", they had corporal punishment for lesser crimes.
Solving coordination problems comes after figuring out what to coordinate around. I think it's completely proper to first develop the optimal solution and then care about the PR.
How difficult the PR is depends gigantically on what solution you're proposing.
Therefore you can't treat the two problems as independent.
I'm not saying they are independent. I'm saying that there is an order in which we are supposed to solve them. Maybe some aspects of the optimal solution will have to be tweaked later to make it more appealing. Or maybe it would be possible to come up with a perfect pitch for all parts of political spectrum. In any case, it's secondary.
I need a wife. I have determined that the optimal solution to this problem is that I marry Scarlett Johansson. The PR problem of getting her to agree will be solved later. Maybe some aspects of the optimal solution will have to be tweaked.
Well, now when your optimal target is determined, it's time to concentrate on figuring out the PR problem. Maybe you will have to settle down to a woman who isn't literally Scarlett Johansson but shares the qualities with her, that you deem most important. Good thing that you actually did the work of figuring out what are they.
But suppose you were not sure which qualities you want in a perfect wife. Then comming up with a different ideas of what you might or might not like, and looking for possible unexpected effects, is the first step, regardless of how likely is that your perfect woman would have you.
>The thing is that mass incarceration in El Salvador started in 2022
>WTF? This appears to be totally true! Here’s the graph from the original post, now with key events marked in red:
Per Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_Control_Plan the operation began in 2019 and proceeded through multiple phases. Phase one included stationing thousands of police and soldiers in gang areas.
Still, the homicide rate dropped considerably not only after the earlier phases, but after the later phases. The homicide rate in 2018 was 53.1 per 100,000. In 2021, 18.1. In 2022, 7.8. In 2023, 2.4. In Jan-Nov 2024, 1.9.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_El_Salvador#El_Salvador_homicides
https://elsalvadorinfo.net/homicide-rate-in-el-salvador/
>This means, unless I'm missing something, that the vast majority of the decrease in the murder rate occurred before Bukele took office
As Cremieux notes, although homicides fell before Bukele's crackdown, they continued to fall even faster after him, and the trend doesn't reflect mere regression to the mean of the lower rate of the past: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1828521194942816375.
And as Hanania notes, trends don't tend to just increase things infinitely, or decrease them down to 0: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/the-midwit-meme-and-the-denial-of.
> the post-Bukele homicide data is dubious in several ways. The Bukele government stopped counting...
Per the linked article, one change was implemented in May of 2021 and the other in April 2022. But recorded homicides have fallen sharply since then, within the same recording system.
[The comment / article sort of try to get around the implication by suggesting that use of mass graves in increasing, but it's not obvious why that would be.
The article does state:
>“we began to find more unmarked and clandestine graves where the gangs would bury their victims.”
But it doesn't quantify that increase, at all. And the numbers it does provide (68 in 2021, 43 in 2022, and 60 in 2023) don't show any clear upward trend, which both provides a bit more reason to doubt the claim that unmarked graves are increasing and removes that potential objection to post 2021/2022 trends.]
Even the article which insists on lumping criminals killed in shootouts with police together with innocent victims still only estimates a homicide rate of 4.5 in 2023, which still represents a massive decline, contrary to the commenters claim that:
>It’s not that murder has disappeared in El Salvador - it’s more like it’s now de facto legal in many contexts
The commenter also infers from the fact that victims found in mass graves (which often date from the 1990s) aren't included in annual national homicide tallies, that such murders aren't prosecuted at all, which seems both baseless and very unlikely.
Assuming arguendo that El Salvador mass incarceration worked, they had the unusual circumstance that gang members gave themselves a distinctive tattoo. (And I'm guessing it would be dangerous to get that tattoo if you weren't a gang member.)
It may be good evidence that there are some points on the incarceration curve where more incarceration substantially reduces some crimes, but for purposes of cost-benefit analysis, it was also really unusually cheap to identify and incarcerate gang members.
Yup: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1723454732008603703.
The fact that criminals are willing to identify themselves that way is itself an indicator that their society is far too lax on crime.
Being a police officer is no longer a "no college" profession. Thr NYPD, for example:
Education: You must have earned 60 college credits with a minimum 2.0 GPA from an accredited institution or 2 years of active military service in the U.S. Armed Forces in order to be appointed to the title of Police Officer.
Yeah, I was about to say the same thing. There's been some heavy proliferation of Criminal Justice degree programs on non-elite college campuses over the last 30 years or so, and graduates of these programs are not going on to become Jay Edgar Hoover; they're just gonna be cops somewhere, 80% of them. Seems like a pernicious example of credentialism, if you ask me, but at the same time, in cities like Philly, you don't need any college credits to join, and they have massive manpower shortages anyway.
https://www.joinphillypd.com/qualifications/overview
https://whyy.org/articles/philadelphia-police-department-hiring-crisis-rules-recruits/
As much as I'm pretty anti-credentialism, policing is an area where we need more. If you're going to be charged with the role of bearer of state violence, you should need some certs and testing.
I want educated, sane, and most of all socially conscious people to become those bearers, not the noodniks that couldn't hack a more thinky job because they spent high school willfully ignoring advice and teaching or who couldn't because their guidance counselors failed them.
A big confounding issue here is that if you want people who are well qualified, and you want them to be held responsible for their actions, then you both need to pay them well and give them really strong job protections. A new mayor coming in to office can't fire them without cause, etc.
I agree, they should be paid well if we're going to ask a lot of them. Every job that asks for a credential should pay well. It should be *desirable* to be a police officer.
Our current system hedges so far in the other direction that it's hard to see how we'd get from here to there. Maybe we could start by reappropriating budgets for IFVs and milspec rifles and put that toward educating current police in 2 and 4 year degrees (screw those horseshit warrior programs).
I don't have a core problem with well-educated police, but I think you're missing a lot about how police work in different areas. State Police do tend to be quite qualified, and get paid well. 20 years of service at nice rates, then a pension. Local town police tend to be poorly qualified and poorly paid by comparison, but I think that's okay. You don't need all police officers to do the same job, or have the same qualifications. Traffic cops are not homicide detectives and are not SWAT teams. And that's perfectly fine.
It's fair to want more out of higher police positions with more consequence, but there consequences on both sides of the ledger. Sgt. Cleetus Demeetus in Bumblefud, Kentucky has as much authority to unholster his weapon and take aim as my (former state police) trainer did.
He did exactly what you described. As I remember, he spent 12 years as NJ state police, retired with a pension, and got his CDL-A. As a fellow holder of a CDL-A, I am intimately familiar with how police-public interactions ought to go.
I'm not saying my local beat cop needs a JD. I want him, her, them, or whatever to be as afraid of their sidearm as I am.
Editing because I hit post early by accident. What engenders that kind of healthy respect for state violence is compassion and education.
I don't understand why the US has all these different police forces anyway. A whole different organisation with its own standards and budgets and procedures and uniforms and vehicles for each freaking town?
In Australia we have a police force for each state or territory, and this seems to work better. Resources can be shared and diverted to where they're needed. Training and procedures are consistent across the whole state. Corruption is more difficult because there's higher-level oversight of everything.
Look, do you want law enforcement or not? You know we can't afford to have that high of a standard...
I dunno, I guess I want my police to know the difference between Armani jackboots and Timberlands.
Okay, but is a four year college degree the appropriate credential for that? Why not an associate's degree? Why not a trade school? Why not a city operated training program...maybe you could even call it a "police academy?"
Because imparting skills and knowledge is only part of it. We want to enculturate new police into a value system that favors. Rule Of Law over Rule Of Man. That means we need them to spend four years as a minority surrounded by children of the professional class.
There's no way that would instill those values. Making people, especially low-iq people, feel powerless doesn't create an appreciation for pluralism, it creates a thirst for power.
I posted this further up, reprinting for ease:
"Maybe we could start by reappropriating budgets for IFVs and milspec rifles and put that toward educating current police in 2 and 4 year degrees (screw those horseshit warrior programs)."
I'm open to both. I'm open to a 10-18 month certification program, like a rigorous academy. I'm unfathomably open to having police from all over a state training at a state police academy so there's less of a federalist-style patchwork and more of a standard/baseline for what's expected and how they're compensated.
That's not going to work for everywhere. But, I want the police, writ large, to be more highly educated and compassionate than they are.
No group is a true monolith. I *like* most of my local police, and every one that's in my age bracket or younger has been a stand-up kinda person. The problem is that I have no expectation that any other department is as functional or compassionate.
I think weeding out sociopaths, sadists, and other people you wouldn't want wielding authority over you is good. Again, I'm not sure education accomplishes that task, though.
It's worth pointing out, though, that not every cop can be Andy Griffith; nor would you probably want them to be. George Orwell's observation that "people sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf" is not with some validity, and frankly, the more compassionate someone is, I suspect the less useful or effective they're going to be at the violence part.
One other thing this comment made me think of: Scott wrote that "I am most willing to discount the suffering of prisoners when I think of this in a game theoretic way. I imagine some sneering criminal robbing me, saying “Sure, you could stop me at any point - but then I would be suffering, so you have to let me continue my crime spree or else you’ll be a bad person, mwahaha!”"
I think it's worth pointing out that if you're a miscreant and want to minimize your chances of being punished for your misdeeds, one other approach besides painting prison as horrific is to paint the police as horrific. Tell everybody that they go around beating and murdering people all the time for no reason. Call them racist, maybe come up with a slogan to delegitimize them, or maybe advocate for their funding to be cut. Invent statistics to back up your rhetoric.
We just lived through an episode where all that stuff happened. The results weren't pretty. I think a lot of people got taken in by irresponsible, emotionally charged rhetoric that was just plain bunk and now privately should have a lot of egg on their faces.
"I think weeding out sociopaths, sadists, and other people you wouldn't want wielding authority over you is good." Agreed.
"I think a lot of people got taken in by irresponsible, emotionally charged rhetoric and now privately should have a lot of egg on their faces." Definitely. Biden's been right: more police, not fewer, with more funding, not less.
"Again, I'm not sure education accomplishes that task, though." Let's go to fundamentals. How do we learn?
Police officers certainly need training, and in some cases I think they need more training, but I can't see that a NYPD style "get half a degree in anything" is a good qualification.
It should either be no degree, or a specialist degree in Policing.
I'd support an Associate's of Science in Policing or I guess maybe you could craft a Juris Petit of Policing or something along those lines.
Per William Stuntz, the way Gilded Age northern cities managed to have low crime & incarceration rates was by hiring lots of the exact sorts of crime-prone immigrant types to act as police, and they were frequently quite corrupt.
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2018/06/23/the-collapse-of-american-criminal-justice/
There's a much larger supply of uneducated people than there are educated people.
I'll have to give that a read, thanks for the rec.
I think the question is more, does it make sense for this to be a *college degree*, rather than internal training and certification (which should be of course transferable if you want to e.g. go be a cop in a different state)?
Additionally, there's been a push to make police officers more qualified, primarily by people who are already anti-incarceration. Requiring a college education may result in fewer cops doing bad things (highly uncertain), but it will definitely result in less cops.
Some of this is just classism. I remember reading an article by some journalist shocked that someone who *didn't even have a degree* (gasp) could be in a position of power over him.
The military has separate "officer" and "enlisted" career tracks for higher-class college educated people and lower-class uneducated people. Being a high ranked military officer is quite prestigious, while being an experienced enlisted man is prestigious and lucrative enough for someone with limited other prospects.
Maybe the police should do something similar to make its higher ranks more prestigious.
Some key components of that:
1. There are paths directly to a commission that do not require prior enlistment (although there are ways to earn a commission as an enlisted service member).
2. Officers are accountable for their subordinates behavior.
3. Rotation of duty stations, which serves to keep everyone more aligned with the service as a whole than with the other people in their current unit.
I think it could work, albeit with a lot of political effort (in the US it would likely require folding all city PDs & county SDs into the State police (possibly with the current State police becoming an elite within the larger structure akin to Rangers within the US Army), which would be simultaneously kicking dozens of hornets' nests).
>I was curious whether the country really had more police
As I commented on the original prison post, this study: https://direct.mit.edu/ajle/article/doi/10.1162/ajle_a_00030/112647 shows how the US is an outlier in its number of police.
The study is discussed here: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/08/still-under-policed-and-over-imprisoned.html.
>writing tickets generates revenue for the city
Surely stationary cameras and radars with subsequent electronic fines are much more efficient in this regard, it's no longer the '70s. Or is that too much dystopian anti-freedom for the US of A?
Also, it's clear that traffic tickets generating revenue results in bad incentives (you hear stories in Germany of a city council installing radars at very lucrative positions in order to get more revenue, though not completely sure it's true).
This is issue is #1 on Eliezer's rebooting the police manifesto (https://yudkowsky.medium.com/a-comprehensive-reboot-of-law-enforcement-b76bfab850a3 ):
"All fines, forfeitures, penalties, or prison revenues, exacted by any level of government, must go into a separate state or federal fund; ideally, a fund that is annually refunded to all tax-filing residents. No level of government should have a predatory financial incentive to exact more fines from its people and create more ‘criminals’."
This seems so obvious that I'm now mad thinking about it. Just refund all of the fines received to law-abiding tax payers. It's a bonus to not commit crimes, and completely eliminates the incentives to hunt for more crimes. You can do the same thing with civil asset forfeiture.
> you hear stories in Germany of a city council installing radars at very lucrative positions in order to get more revenue, though not completely sure it's true
Having lived in the US where traffic can be a significant part of revenue for some towns, it’s definitely considered true there.
One town near where I grew up had a state-highway running through it, and the local newspaper would publish where the speed traps were going to be ahead of time. They weren't even trying to hide the fact they were extracting money from people commuting through the town.
I remember there being a part of the 101 from SF to LA where the highway was part of a town jurisdiction, but forget the name. The CHP must get a bit pissed off when this happens, if every local jurisdiction did it then they’d be out of a job.
There was a one horse burg near me that had a speed camera hidden around a bend on a downhill on a 65mph state highway right where it dropped to a 45mph limit. Clearly a predatory fine generator.
I think it finally got removed due to a state law banning speed cameras on state highways.
> This is issue is #1 on Eliezer's rebooting the police manifesto (https://yudkowsky.medium.com/a-comprehensive-reboot-of-law-enforcement-b76bfab850a3 ):
"All fines, forfeitures, penalties, or prison revenues, exacted by any level of government, must go into a separate state or federal fund; _ideally, a fund that is annually refunded to all tax-filing residents_. No level of government should have a predatory financial incentive to exact more fines from its people and create more ‘criminals’."
[Emphasis mine]
Which galaxy brain 4D chess move am I missing where there is not an incentive upon introduction of this scheme to raise the taxes by the exact amount this "separate fund" generates. In a rational world this should create approximately zero backlash since total tax load remains exactly the same, "just with extra steps". Even _very_ generously assuming that people are going to expect _some_ kickback compared to the status quo ante, surely they will happy with less than the full amount being distributed because that still would be an improvement.
>Also, it's clear that traffic tickets generating revenue results in bad incentives (you hear stories in Germany of a city council installing radars at very lucrative positions in order to get more revenue, though not completely sure it's true).
Towns are incentivized to enforce the law in a way that catches the most offenders? Sounds like a benign incentive to me!
Not so benign when they shorten the yellow light's duration from five seconds to three, trying to score more "running a red light" tickets, and thereby trick otherwise well-behaved drivers into deadly side-impact crashes.
Then the person should have used that example instead. This is clearly much worse for people not worried about a surveillance state.
Urban traffic lights usually have three seconds of yellow, high speed highways have five seconds of yellow. I don’t know if there’s some good way to universally designate some lights as unchangeable, but it’s reasonable to sometimes have these things change as a location changes its character.
The very idea of any jurisdiction smaller than a country changing anything about how traffic lights work is completely alien to me.
I think the argument is that the police *want* to be doing easier work that is safer. That it also generates revenue keeps their bosses happy.
The bosses want to have cops available for serious issues that come up, but don't really care what they do with their time otherwise (so long as it doesn't generate bad PR and crime isn't going up).
Installing cameras would often be a solution in search of a problem. Some areas would want this, maybe like St. Louis that was using the police force to add a layer of taxation on the people in bad neighborhoods (came up after Michael Brown). But most jurisdictions don't think about fines in quite the "we need to maximize this" kind of way. In fact, doing so may be a good way to get voted out. St. Louis was mainly doing this in a few neighborhoods, rather than across the city.
I'm pretty sure there was a well-publicized case of a woman who ran through a construction area a couple years ago, killing a number of workers, I want to say in the D.C. area - and the public was (briefly) outraged to learn she had hundreds of moving violations and (presumably unpaid) tickets.
Paying fines is part of the orderliness that some take for granted, and that other places have surrendered.
Y'all are seeming unusually keyboard today.
I read that the problem with DC is there is some difficulty enforcing penalties on the large number of people who commute in from Maryland and Virginia. Recent news is that they can finally sue for unpaid tickets: https://www.axios.com/local/washington-dc/2024/10/01/dc-traffic-tickets-lawsuits-dangerous-driving-rules
Good to know.
I got a ticket in a construction area in Virginia last year-- but there wasn't any actual construction on the road until miles farther up. They had set out orange barrels on the shoulder but no work of any kind had been done and the road itself was unimpeded. I think it was mainly a way to create a "construction zone" that would qualify for a speeding camera and generate extra revenue.
I've always been surprised by the American revulsion towards automated speed cameras.
Several European countries are plastered with these things and they haven't turned society into some kind of a totalitarian dystopia: https://www.statista.com/chart/16913/countries-with-most-speed-cameras-per-km2/ .
It's safer for citizens because cops don't have to physically confront them. It's fairer because the camera doesn't care if you drive a Lamborghini or a beat-up Civic, if you're Navajo or Nigerian, man or woman, turban or afro, with or without a criminal record. It only cares if you were speeding or not.
Why the reluctance to adopt this? You'd think at least the left-leaning crowd would be clamoring for this.
A lot of people want to be able to break the law and get away with it.
Even better would be making navigational GPS into mandatory safety equipment, then adding a billing mechanism to turn every road into a hassle-free toll road. Machine-readable database of traffic laws, defined as a function that takes position and velocity as arguments then outputs cost in dollars per time, plus realtime data on where every other car is, would also make self-driving automation enormously easier. I've never heard libertarian complaints about the requirement for transponders on aircraft, and the FAA seems to do alright at keeping the rate of midair collisions low.
Additionally you don't usually get points on your license and your insurer won't know about those tickets and raise your rates. As the vehicle owner you can be held responsible for the fine, but since the process cannot identify the driver you aren't liable beyond that.
An annoying note however: a friend's car was stolen and the thieves later ran a red light where there was a camera. My friend got the ticket and even though he had already reported the car as stolen, there was an incredible amount of red tape to go through to get out of that ticket, which is ridiculous. The simple existence of a stolen car report in such an event should immediately be grounds for eliminating the owner's responsibility.
Americans are too addicted to breaking traffic laws to allow the police to monitor them with cameras. Leftists and Rightists and Libertarians use different arguments against the traffic cameras (the cameras are racist vs this is big government vs this will secretly cause *more* collisions because people stop too quickly at red lights vs this is all just a cash grab) but it really feels in most cases like it's just that people don't want these laws to actually be enforced.
Yeah, from my benighted perspective having an armed agent of the state arbitrarily choose to have a physical confrontation with you is much worse by any of those lights, and if the real problem is that the rules are broadly unpopular, maybe they should be changed? (uh-huh, dream on, etc...)
It's a pretty open secret that many speed limits are set well below what actually is the maximum safe speed since the authorities assume people will be traveling 5-10 miles above the posted limit.
The fact of the matter is that different people can operate on the same road with the same car at different safe maximum speeds. The law says driving above a certain speed is not allowed, but the real aim is to reduce reckless driving, which is the actual thing not allowed by law or ethics. It's just more subjective than a stated speed limit.
I understand Montana used to have something like a "reasonable and prudent" speed law, which people interpreted to mean as no speed limit. This was, unfortunately, thrown out in 1999, when the state Supreme Court ruled it was unconstitutionally vague.
And cameras don't just measure your speed, they check that:
- the seatbelts are on
- the driver isn't using a phone
- the red light hasn't been run
- the lane markings aren't ignored
- pedestrians have been yielded to
A far older and simpler trick that some countries use is having road police be a separate unit, like Autobahnpolizei in Germany, the RPU in the UK or the DPS in Russia. You can't spend your shift stopping cars for speeding if it's not your job.
“ then I’m not sure how you get away with thinking that X years stuck getting raped in a cage for shoplifting is “proportional” either”
It’s surely easy enough to take rape out of the penal system - most countries have done it. It’s pretty odd that in a litigious country like the US this hasn’t been handled in civil court, even if criminal courts don’t want to apply the same penalties to rape inside, as they do outside.
Scott mentioned revenge in the sense of the existing system, but State retribution is not revenge, which is personal. It’s about replacing the personal revenge with societal retribution. It’s about stopping the hatfields and the mccoys by imposing restrictions on their revenge, and sating their need for it.
Retributive justice is merely a system that applies penalties appropriate to the crime.
It isn't handled in civil court because civil courts awarded damages: that is, the person that caused the harm must pay money to the person that they harmed.
When Prisoner A rapes (or assaults or otherwise harms) Prisoner B, B can sue A, but A has no money to pay any damages awarded. And even if they did, the American justice system takes away basically all money that convicts get from whatever source, so even in the rare case where A wasn't judgement-proof due to poverty, any money B gets is going to be taken from them and used to satisfy B's unpaid fines or provide restitution to whomever B committed crimes against in the past.
Oh I was thinking about the prison having to pay out. This has to be a disregard for the civil rights of prisoners because a hostel that allowed or encouraged rape - by allowing know rapists go stay in a room with potential victims - would see criminal charges against the employees and civil cases against the company.
This would be exactly the kind of lawsuit that "qualified immunity" and similar doctrines make impossible to actually win.
I get qualified immunity for cops. Prison officers not so much.
That's a common misconception, the doctrine applies to ALL government employees including teachers. It's why it's near impossible to reform because it's universally resisted by the entire bureaucracy which who need to make those reforms.
Judgement proof defendants wouldn't be an issue if everyone was required to have crime insurance.
How would that work when the insurer tries to charge a higher premium for covering a hardened criminal, who then turns out not to have that much money?
Under Robin Hanson's proposal, whoever the criminal picks as their insurer would have the legal ability to do anything they deem fit to their client to ensure they don't incur more fines, including anything our justice system does to convicts. If such measures seem intolerable to any client, they have the option of switching to a different insurer. If no insurer is willing to let the client have any freedom, so be it.
Inside a week you'd have claims adjusters handing out icepick lobotomies for problem clients, and then if that worked smoothly, the definition of "problem" would start to expand. I would not want the sort of society which tolerated that kind of cost-cutting to exist on the same planet with me.
Anyone can avoid an icepick lobotomy by switching to an insurer who doesn't do that. If nobody is willing to spare such a client, then they really would appear to be intolerable for the rest of society.
You already live on a planet where genocides have happened, and where the perpetrators of genocide in Darfur are currently being funded by Qatar to fight a civil war in Sudan. You live on a planet where the North Korean regime considers large swathes of its subjects to be hereditary class enemies who belong in prison camps. You don't have much of an option to live on a planet containing things you find intolerable, although which society you live in is another story.
> It’s surely easy enough to take rape out of the penal system - most countries have done it
I don't think South Africa has. There are "numbers gangs" that even have something like that as part of their founding lore.
They don't want to take rape out of the penal system. Our culture sees it as a form of retribution and deterrent to crime.
Informally, perhaps. But if you tried to formalize this it would never pass muster.
I'm not personally okay with giving people convicted of stealing from the register a sentence of violent sexual assault and a nasty case of Hep C + genital herpes. Pretty sure there's a Constitutional Amendment that's supposed to protect against that kind of thing, yet for many there is no de facto protection under the law.
No, I *agree* with you (and see it as a gender discrimination issue as well)!
I just think it's one of those things everyone nods and winks and looks the other way about because they want criminals to suffer.
Sorry, reading over you comment more carefully I can see that you're calling out the status quo, not endorsing it.
I guess the principle here is that you can get the public to tacitly allow - and eventually support - something they consider extremely immoral and would ever explicitly agree to.
Add to that conversions about increasing incarceration rates for the marginal offender, and it's kind of crazy.
That's correct. This is my personal crusade-- I think rationalists could do with a little cynicism.
I'm actually quite ambivalent about this as I think a lot of the 'progressive DAs' and their soft-on-crime policies have done a lot to increase crime in deep-blue cities. Real life is often quite complicated, unfortunately.
I feel two ways about this topic:
1. In discussions about capital punishment, the argument from the anti side of the debate seems to hinge around the idea that in an imperfect world we know we're going to sentence innocent people to die. This is undeniably true. Personally, I don't come down on either side of the capital punishment debate, because the innocent convicted are going to suffer regardless of the punishment. I don't think the tail should wag the dog here, where we just keep making punishments easier and easier on everyone as a way to reduce the suffering of the innocent convicted. Is it really better to lock an innocent person up in a rape cage for the rest of their lives than to kill them? I guess you could say that because prisoners have a strong preference for the rape cage over the death penalty there's a revealed preference answer. But it doesn't feel like it answers the objection of this anti capital punishment argument to 'only' toss innocent people in the rape cage. Seems like we should worry about punishment of innocents as its own issue. When talking about punishment, it should be a discussion of whether or to what extent we feel the crime merits that punishment, and whether that's a punishment we citizens are willing to inflict on a fellow human being.
2. The Bill of Rights guarantees citizens won't have to worry about "cruel and unusual" punishment, but what about "cruel and totally normalized" punishments? If you were sentenced to prison for the rest of your life, but I offered to replace that sentence with the amputation of your entire dominant arm, would you take it? Your arm or the rest of your life in a cage? What if it's an arm for 25 years? 15 years? 5 years? At what point does the permanent loss of a body part become preferable to being 'temporarily' locked in a cage or vice versa? And what does that say about the cruelty of the 'normal' punishment?
You can't do an Australia anymore but you can definitely do exile. There are, without a doubt, at least 50 countries on earth who would take a one time 100k payment from the USG to host an exilee and make nominal efforts to keep them from crossing the border out.
All you would need from them is a commitment to not harass or extort the exiled population, and to ensure they get nominally fair treatment from their justice system in the event they are ever accused of a crime. This commitment would be no doubt faithfully kept because these countries really need and want the 100k.
Under such a system, we could rid the US of the half a million most dangerous and persistent criminals for only $5 billion.
Take Honduras, for example.
Their government brings in about $800 in revenue per-person, per-year. $100,000, the price of about 2 1/2 years of incarceration in the US, is roughly what the average Honduran would pay in taxes during two lifetimes and would cover the average police officer's salary for 12 years.
While each additional felon would surely increase crime somewhat, crime there is already high and people are already on alert. Some exilees might even find they are a better fit in another country where they don't have to live under the rule of New England nerds who like to make rules for everything.
Roman Polanski is effectively exiled from the United States for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl. People usually consider this to be an example of justice not having been served.
Because exile wasn't the sentence given him by a court.
What TGGP said, also, Polanski got to go to a nice cushy first-world country. What if he was forced to live out his days in Tajikistan? That would feel pretty just
Roman Polanski will presumably never again rape an American in America. From the perspective of crime prevention, this is a success.
From the perspective of deterrence, it is weak because he is rich enough to live a luxury life in France. The average criminal, though, would probably not have a pleasant life if deported to a third world country.
So exile could be an effective punishment in general, even if in the case of Polanski it's not quite what he deserves.
We could just give up on the idea of extradition (in conjunction with a less-leaky border); the criminals would self-exile on their own dime.
I don't think 1800s Australia works, no.
Convicts in Australia were weird for a number of reasons. One of which was the fact that political prisoners (Fenians) were often overrepresented - also, for public support reasons political prisoners were sometimes charged under other non-treason crime, because findings lots of traitors is a bad look (the traitors may think they have strength in numbers!).
But the thing about having groups of Fenians together on a ship doing a multi-month journey is that a lot of them tend to wanna stay in a band and permanently relocate to somewhere that isn't England, because these people wanted independence from the Crown (apparently lots of them chose to settle in America).
There were people who mostly did crimes of desperation, and when they got released they stayed in Australia and often got a little plot of land (often as a reward for helping colonial authorities enact violence on the First Nations people).
Also, convict Australia operated under severe manpower shortages and were first in an uneasy truce with the First Nations inhabitants, then straight up war. Manpower shortages means opportunity for released felons.
I don't know if there's anywhere in the world that has these specific conditions - shipped far from home, but you get to build a life far away from home once you finish your sentence (and authorities don't really wanna extend your sentence because they can't spare the guards and need a freedperson labour force, if you eg steal something as a freed person in Australia, they'd likely to just do a public flogging then call it a day because you're way more useful watching cattle than you are locked up - your years of bush survival and Australia experience cannot be replaced with a fresh convict).
Disclaimer: My Crazy Scheme is obviously a crazy scheme.
I like the idea of paying Haiti to take our prisoners, if not for all the non-criminals already there who would probably suffer more (if that’s possible) from a bunch of criminals being shipped in.
I assume Australia had a system of penal guards at the colony or something like that. There’s probably some minimal level of effort needed to keep food imports from devolving into chaos where every new prisoner is just immediately executed.
> Here’s an even more hare-brained scheme: if this would devolve into Haiti, why not skip the middleman and pay Haiti to take our prisoners directly? It probably couldn’t make them any worse-off, and they could use the money. It would be win-win!
Prior art in the form of A Modest Proposal: https://shanggyangg.substack.com/p/bukele-should-use-his-prisoners-to
"I have no idea of what comes after. Without the permanent gang war, Haiti would be a nicer place to live. To ensure the gang war doesn’t break out again, the island now has a permanent population of armed El Salvadorans with face tattoos. But beyond establishing some most basic order, I don’t know if there is a way to reform the country.
Still, you can’t make Haiti worse. And a pacification operation against the worst anarchy in the Western Hemisphere is a better use of 60 000 violent young men than just letting them rot for decades.
If Bukele manages to pull that off, he might really be Latin America’s savior he aspires to be."
Regarding policing and crime, I'd like to recommend a podcast interview of Jennifer Doleac by Jerusalem Demsas. Good discussions about the quality of the evidence.
https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2024/12/policing-crime-public-safety/680854/
I need to wail that my autocorrect replaced “epistemic” with “epidemic,” making me look like a doofus in my comment.
“Being an officer is respectable. Liberals might yell at you, but it confers status in a way that eg retail or construction doesn’t”
I think this take is way off the mark. Maybe this is directionally true in e.g. small town America, but in big cities, where the problems of hiring police are most exacerbated, this is the problem.
American big cities (NY, SF, LA, etc) are what, 70-80% liberal? So if you have 80% of people in your city not only yelling at police, but spitting in their food and refusing them service (many such cases) it should come as no surprise that these departments have a hard time hiring.
They are 80% democrat which isn’t the same. New York has been tough on crime in its past.
And from the looks of things is going to be tough on crime again in the near future.
Liam is still correct, though, that police in big cities are not prestige (or often even acceptable) vocations. You can't whipsaw back and forth between BLM/Defund and hiring large numbers of police in just a few years. People remember. It also often takes more than a few years to get new recruits trained and in place, even if they were interested. If public perception can go back the other way in such a short time, potential recruits would be fools to take the jobs during a window when a city decides they like cops again. Double fools if the city still doesn't really want them.
I have a friend who is a cop in Indiana and claims it isn't true even there.
Yes, I also think it off the mark.
Also I believe it is a vicious circle, police officers being overworked make police officers worse at their jobs, and make them less liked.
And fewer police officers mean more crimes overall mean a lot more crimes by police officers.
And it makes the jobs in itself worse.
> Why is it so hard to fill these positions? Sure, there’s a lot of bureaucracy and nonsense and dealing with terrible people, but that’s also true of eg teaching, nursing, etc, and those are highly competitive
This is also off the mark, you aren't dealing with criminals when you are a teacher or a nurse.
Also as a liberal, I really dislike when liberals attack all the profession ("acab", things like that), instead of just the bad cops, while congratulating the good ones.
It's just disincentivizing liberals to become cops, while right-wingers are a much more pro-cops, and I don't like the direction of this at all (+ it is really unfair).
Except there are effectively no good cops once you hit a certain mark where nativity burns off, generally that's about five year maximum in any job that attracts good faith ideologues. After that they either burn out and quit or accept the system and become part of the problem. The same rot that affects teachers, doctors, social workers, politicians, judges, lawyers, etc.
A cop looking to arrest criminals in good faith would never make it out the precinct daily given every person commits numerous crimes a day and police on average studies show commit them at an even higher rate; he would spend all day arresting his peers. I live near a police station and I observe dozens of crimes by the police each and every day, the most common would be the petty misdemeanors of blowing the stop sign in front of their station parking garage, parking in a handicap spot at the liquor store across the street, and driving 15' the wrong way down a one way to avoid having to circle the block on their way home. And all in open view of hundreds of cops charged with arresting criminals. But those same cops no problem arresting other people doing that same 15' shortcut. But yeah "good cops" lol.
> After that they either burn out and quit or accept the system and become part of the problem.
I don't think it is this bad everywhere, but I see how it cans be hard to go against some systemic problems in the group you are in.
But then, we should help the one trying, and change something in the system, not just insult them just because they are cops.
And people should still want to be cops for the good reasons.
> given every person commits numerous crimes a day
This can't be right, or there is some problem with the law.
Anyway, I don't think they should arrest anyone breaking the law without knowing it, if it doesn't matter, they should focus on important things.
And if it matters, you should have some information campaign about it first, because arresting every person one by one to tell them it is illegal would be super inefficient.
> police on average studies show commit them at an even higher rate
Cops are just people, but yes this is bad, it should be a lot less.
In my point of view, a bad cop is a corrupted cop, or a cop who are increasing tension in situations of conflict instead of dissipating it, or who doesn't defend people in danger, stuff like that.
Not one that deal with every petty misdemeanors, if it would not really help (they should also not do them, but I still think a lot don't).
Your police station is probably just worse than average.
> This can't be right, or there is some problem with the law.
My guess is most of those crimes are "watched a show or listened to a song in a way that is not properly sanctioned by the Priests of the Holy IP", which is indeed quite a silly business at this point.
> "The police is full of fascists!"
> no one remotely left of center wants to go into the police
> the police gets even more full of fascists
Self-fulfilling prophecies are always a fun time.
> This is also off the mark, you aren't dealing with criminals when you are a teacher or a nurse.
You are, just in lesser ways. I agree it's not as dangerous, but teachers can be stationed in schools in absolutely terrible neighbourhoods in which half their class is budding future criminals. I went to school in a small town in Italy that was comparatively quiet and we had at least one episode of a teacher being stabbed by a student. I imagine it won't be very much better in a crime-ridden gang-infested neighbourhood.
And as nurses go, they may interact with criminals (where do you think they go when they get shot or stabbed? Very often, the hospital), but most importantly, they may interact with dangerously mentally ill patient, which can be just as dangerous.
Still, I don't think either category interacts with those kind of dangerous people at the same rate, which is the determining factor here (of course, cops aren't constantly chasing Pablo Escobar wannabes either).
You're conflating "votes Democratic" [but look at that 2024 red shift, especially in NYC], "is liberal", and "spits in cops' food (etc)". I feel confident [hand-wavingly] that 80% of the NYC population isn't up for that last one.
Yeah. You never hear about people spitting at retail or construction workers, or accosting their families with "All Cashiers Are Bastards" -- and even if it happened, it would be more likely to roll off of them because, unlike good cops, retail workers don't see it as part of their identity, a calling to service.
I don't even have a clue where Scott is coming from with this.
The mayor of NYC is a former policeman and made it a prominent part of his campaign. Although the NYC mayoral race is mostly decided in the democratic primary, it's worth noting that his opponent in the general was the founder of a group that trained civilians in unarmed combat to make citizen's arrests while patrolling the subway. Law enforcement still garners respect, even in big cities.
Or you can look at polls. According to gallup, Americans are more likely to trust the police than most institutions like schools or unions.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/647303/confidence-institutions-mostly-flat-police.aspx
Stories about barista writing PIG on coffee cups go viral for a reason. Many people find them offensive because they think disrespecting police officers is inappropriate.
> American police spend approximately all police-hours on traffic tickets
Police in San Francisco reduced traffic enforcement by 97% between 2014 and 2023, bottoming out at 4,000 tickets in 2022 (vs 130,000 in 2014). https://sfstandard.com/2024/04/08/sfpd-traffic-enforcement-cost/
It is not clear this had any effect on clearance rates for other crimes. I would be hesitant before looking to "police are spending all their time on traffic tickets" as an explanation for anything.
I will say this again: exponentially increasing MANDATORY MINIMUM prison sentences will solve >75% of most crimes since most crimes are committed by repeat offenders. This would solve:
- Prosecutor discretion
- Police not wanting to book people because they don't go to jail
- The criminals actually doing crime
It wouldn't solve prosecutor discretion, they can still choose not to charge people at all. What actually solved discretion in the past (per William Stuntz) was having prosecutor pay depend on convicting people.
"Here's what we'd be willing to pay a prosecutor who miraculously delivered a lasting fix for our city's violent crime problem. As you can see, it's quite generous. Your take-home pay in any given year will be that, multiplied by the clearing rate - that is, ratio of homicide-related convictions to homicides reported. Any such conviction that you pushed for which was later overturned on appeal counts as negative ten, for extra encouragement to actually find the right guy. Minimum pay zero, cold cases worth half but could in principle push you over 100%.
"If we ever catch you suppressing homicide reports, you'll be stripped naked and locked in a room with the victims' next of kin, who then get a full pardon afterward, so whatever happens inside won't count toward your successor's performance stats. When there are legitimately no homicides left to prosecute, 100% pay - and we still expect you to keep busy on smaller stuff - but that basically already counts as a win."
I think the negative ten for appeals would discourage anyone from taking the job. Appeals courts don't even have the job of determining whether the defendant was the "right guy". As William Stuntz also emphasized, the current legal system is focused mostly on procedural motions rather than investigating whether people are actually guilty. Negative one would provide an incentive to avoid getting overturned, while also not pushing them away from prosecuting at all. Multiplying by the clearance rate would not make sense for prosecutors, since they can't possibly have a higher rate than the police, and a great many are never "cleared" in the ordinary sense of police determining a suspect. It would result in prosecutors flocking to cities with lower crime rates.
> they can't possibly have a higher rate than the police
But they can probably do all sorts of stuff that's hard to measure formally, which then influences how the police operate (not least in terms of morale), thus impacting that portion of the clearance rate. Cops will be more willing to do the work to nab some violent offender if they're confident it'll result in marginally safer streets, rather than walking back out a revolving door.
Strategic efforts toward prevention would also be incentivized, without locking in any particularly Goodhart-able preconceptions about what might work, since less overall violent crime statistically means fewer reported homicides, thus proportionately better pay for the same or less direct work.
> It would result in prosecutors flocking to cities with lower crime rates.
A city with such troubles can simply keep ramping up the theoretical 100% pay rate, until the marginal reward per case cleared becomes worthwhile.
Could prosecutors have an effect on the margin? Perhaps, but not enough to boost the homicide clearance rate much. Police already exert a lot of effort to clear such cases. The arrests they don't bother to make due to prosecutors are for smaller crimes, like shoplifting.
Increasing that rate would also increase the cost of that negative multiplier.
I feel like Scott wrote stuff relevant to this argument in the "So What Do We Do About Shoplifting In California?" and "Prelude To Incapacitation: Superoffenders" sections. My takeaways:
- Increasing mandatory minimums would greatly increase prison population and therefore prison costs. We could do this and it would probably marginally decrease crime, but it would be a giant waste of money compared to hiring more police and otherwise increasing the likelihood of being caught when committing any given crime.
- Escalating punishments for repeat offenders is probably a good idea, but for a fixed prison size, that's at odds with longer sentences for first time offenders. Multi-time offender laws should also apply to low level offenses like property crime.
- Increasing mandatory minimums for the worst subset of crimes could provide an incentive for criminals to fight their conviction for those crimes harder, making it more likely that they plea down to lesser charges, since one of the primary bottlenecks for the state is the cost of trial. This actually might not be a bad thing, but could work around your goal of decreasing prosecutor discretion. Also, this implies that any prison increases should be coupled with increase funding for courts, and again, probably funding the courts is the low-hanging fruit.
- Police not booking people because they don't want to book people who won't go to jail should probably be solved by discouraging that attitude among police through education, better punishment of superoffenders, hiring better police leadership, or firing lazy officers. It sounds like the evidence shows that "catch and release" does reduce crime, so it seems incredibly problematic if police are just given license to ignore that.
I also think your 75% number is pulled from nowhere.
I think what I would suggest after reading Scott's post is a combination of the following policies:
- Hire more police to the point of seriously raising crime clearance rates. This would also probably involve better priorities/leadership. (I want to note that orthogonal to Scott's research I think we should pay police more but increase police accountability by busting problematic police unions and making it more likely that police are punished for misconduct).
- Get rid of short-length prison sentences. It seems like any prison sentence shorter than 5 years is probably a bad idea. Short prison sentences have low incapacitation effects and high aftereffects, plus high costs per crime reduction due to the court process. Plus, the people committing crimes deserving of short sentences are the most reformable. For first time offenders committing low-level crimes, we should focus on reliably catching them and quickly sentencing them to mild punishments (e.g. community service, suspended sentence, or even no punishment, as long as it comes with a conviction). Serial criminals, even those committing low-level crimes, should have the book thrown at them (but securing the convictions for the initial crimes is a necessary part of that). Probably part of this is reforming the parole system so that it's not just a way to sneakily send people to prison.
- There's not much info on whether this would be marginally effective in Scott's post, but I'd guess increasing funding for the courts would also be helpful.
Aside: I found this Tableau of California's prison population interesting. https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/cdcr.or/viz/OffenderDataPoints/SummaryInCustodyandParole
One point to note is that most prisoners at any given time seem to be in for violent offenses, but the average *release* is for people jailed for just over 1 year.
>the only answer I would really be comfortable giving is that I did it for the greater good of preventing/deterring future crime and protecting the innocent
Well, "seeing red" is the way that evolution implemented enforcement of that desideratum in dumb monkeys that didn't understand game theory. Of course, the notion of "God" inflicting infinite punishments for stuff probably also makes sense in this framework...
"Take a moment to imagine how your own life would change if you spent ten years in prison. Seriously, spend a literal few seconds thinking about your specific, personal life."
"According to BJS and this fact sheet: 60% of prisoners had a job in the 30 days before their crime, and 50% were working full-time. 40% had ever married, and 15% - 25% were currently married (though I can’t tell if that’s at time of crime, or at time of survey in prison). About half had children, and 40% of fathers lived with their children at the time of the crime."
These stats can all be 'true' and Deiseach's point can still be correct that these people are mostly not living a 'normal' life, like the kind your readers live, that is then destroyed when they go to prison. You later claim that most criminals are basically retarded children with an average IQ of 75, which seems much more in line the Deiseach's characterization than the implication from the original post.
How about we imagine what would happen to 'Henry' from Radicalizing the Romanceless if he got a ten year sentence for brutally assaulting one of his ex-wives instead of imagining the average tech worker stumbling into a ten year prison sentence.
> How about we imagine what would happen to 'Henry' from Radicalizing the Romanceless if he got a ten year sentence
Most likely, not much. I have an uncle who's a Henry. He's been to jail. He's come out of it. He's got a... not wife, a partner I guess, I don't think he married her like the previous two. He keeps mooching off people when he can, living of expedients and mixing up with the local criminal crowds when he can't. The thing is that he doesn't even fit the profile of the average criminal outlined here. He's fairly smart, if unruly. And he wasn't born in some shitty hopeless broken family or neighbourhood. He was a small town kid. His dad was a cop, a very serious one. He's one of the strongest pieces of evidence I have for "some people really are fucking doomed from the start, or at least break bad due to completely unfathomable chaotic effects".
He might have done better perhaps with some serious targeted psychological help, but dunno. Maybe he's just a sociopath and that's that.
Re the police supposedly enjoying driving around "nice" areas: a policeman could spend a happy hour going up and down the streets of the neighborhood I grew up in, in the 4th largest metro - but I've literally never seen a city policeman in that neighborhood but for one memorable day a couple years ago when - in a distant part of the city - a perp stopped for speeding or something, bolted and (I can't recall exactly) ran over the foot of a lady cop or injured her in some other way; and some sort of chivalry kicked in and that guy had like 20 LEOs of different stripes chasing him around the city. Somehow he turned into our rather secluded neighborhood at one point in the many-miles chase, which resulted in the curious scene of all these cars going 75 down my parents' quiet narrow street. It was "To Think It Happened on Mulberry Street" come to life.
In fact, the neighborhood like many others in that city - understands that ordinary "beat" police protection is not *theirs* no matter their tax burden; and they pay extra for a security guy to do just that, drive round and round the neighborhood day and night. Those who think immigration doesn't "have anything to do with anyone else's lives" - e.g. lots of NYT commenters - do not grasp that this state of affairs is in great measure part of the bargain of living with an open border, and immigrant enclaves.
Ditto the safe neighborhood I lived in, though it was a more "egalitarian" city and the security guy idea hadn't taken off there. Virtually never a cop; so much so that the moms of the neighborhood would occasionally call and beg one to come work the 3 school zones once in awhile, as a reminder to people. They would generally respond by saying they were too busy, working accidents or else working the greater dysfunction in other parts of town.
I rather think cops like mixing it up with people.
Those who like solitary driving around are going to seek other jobs.
If you live in a safe neighborhood with a low crime rate why would you need extensive police presence-- as opposed to a bad neighborhood where crime is a daily occurence?
Because you lose the benefits of orderliness that were once taken for granted. You get speeding, for instance, on the through street, because everyone's in a hurry. You get your cars stolen in the night. Bikes and such are stolen. But because the thieves came from "outside" - the police don't have much interest in it. And in cities where they've paid to have a large homeless and feral population - which is not every city, as yet - in an increasingly large and even "nice" area, you get homeless people banging on the back door, or walking right in. And the message is that these are First World problems, as they used to say. You didn't get murdered! File a report online.
And there is a wide gulf between not needing much help from the police - which will be the goal of more and more people, leading to a real fragmentation of the civic fabric, a la Latin America - and getting *no* attention whatsoever. A curious thing about my parents' neighborhood, is that they don't even expect *any* city services. They practically forget there is municipal government. They live with the oddest things. like there's been for years a huge hump in the road that you have to navigate around on a blind curve. A worse neighborhood would call about this, ironically. They seem to know the city has bifurcated.
I've never had a homeless person begging at my door, not even in Baltimore. In fact I've never been panhandled on a street where I lived, though that has happened numerous time in high foot traffic areas.
And really, like anything else the police are a limited resource and they should be concentrated where they are most needed, just as medical resources should be used for the more serious conditions, not clogged up with people suffering heartburn or the sniffles
Okay.
I don't know much about Baltimore. It is an affluent city? Because the homeless are drawn to affluence, of course.
It wouldn't matter if you did have such banging, down here. You needn't worry about the bangers being unfairly harassed lol.
You can be a woman alone in her home and call the police to report this is *happening right now* and unless you are lucky, you will not find there is any urgency to the police responding.
This fascinates me in an era of so much prudery around the fragility of women.
As always, there's a disconnect between ideology and reality.
Baltimore is a poor city, and yes it has lots of homeless and panhandling
Not really poor, apparently - looks like you've been given many hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on the homeless.
Here's an example of a poor town: Prairie View, Texas. The google AI helpfully tells me that 44.7% of the population ... live below the poverty line, a number that is higher than the national average of 12.5%." Smart Google!
I expect if you go there, you will see people walking around - as you will in many an East Texas town, many a Texas city, in fact. This is a sign of poverty - no car. At least Prairie View has a college. The deep impoverishment of East Texas is historically ironic, of course, and yet I expect it is a better place to be in certain ways, than Baltimore.
You won't see any homeless people attracted to East Texas from elsewhere. Very probably there are few to no homeless people in those once-prosperous towns. That's how poor it is.
Richard Hanania theorizes that high homicide cities like Chicago (and presumably Baltimore) can't have the homeless problems of a low homicide city like SF. The huge SF encampments would turn into dead bodies much more quickly.
I have had a homeless person come into the foyer of my apartment building in Arlington a decade ago, and a friend had a homeless person sleep in their unlocked van in NY a few years ago.
I don't think anyone was violent but it's not too farfetched that things like this happen.
Was your foyer open in a way that anyone could just wander in? Sounds like it. I've never lived in a place like that. Even way back in the day when I lived in apartments there was no common foyer, just individual doors. And of course that's true of individual houses, even Baltimore row houses. The closest thing I can think of happened to friends in my college days,. They had hosted a big old wild party and the next morning they found some homeless guy in the back yard collecting all the empty beer cans for the ten cent deposit on each (This was in Michigan and empty beverage containers worth 10 cents were something the homeless and other paupers went after)
Yeah it was a small ~9 unit building with a little foyer and stairwell. The door was closed but wasn't locked. They installed a mechanism to lock fork th inside when it shut after that (with a special key that caused me a bunch of annoyance as well).
Rich people, or just net tax payers, don't want cops in their neighborhoods. They'll vote over this. Cops go where they are allowed to go by people who get voted in. I think the example talked about is working traffic and speeding tickets when they could be chasing down career criminals, rather than just hanging out in nice areas. Not sure how accurate that is, but it's a different argument.
Nice neighborhoods want two things from cops. 1) Keep the riffraff and crime away from themselves, and 2) to be readily available if crime does come their way.
They definitely do not want a daily presence unless there's a problem.
You guys really don't get it.
The cops are not coming. Maybe they will come in 2 hours.
You are paying for nothing. Or if you want to think of it like that - "keep the riffraff away from themselves" - they are paying in vehicles and bicycles, and in car accidents with uninsured people, and getting T-boned by the red light thrill runner, and the occasional mugging or carjacking, getting shot at a gas station (don't go to that one anymore, though it's but a mile from your "safe" area! - this is an actual topic of discussion among relatives) to have colonies of the criminally-minded and illegible-to-the-state - some distance way from *their homes*.
I'm sensing a real geographic disparity. Federalism really doesn't work.
I'm happy to admit that I live in a good town with nice services and a very low crime rate. I talk to the local police fairly often (work-related) and always get a really quick and friendly response. The few times I've had to talk to the police outside of my job was exactly the same. Very friendly, very responsive.
May you continue to enjoy the blessings of an intact civic and cultural fabric! Hang on tight!
That's going to be the tale of real estate going forward.
Thanks! I think that's actually the tale of real estate now, maybe for more than my lifetime. People looking for "good schools" are usually just looking for low-crime neighborhoods and the people who live in them.
Depends on the people. Older people and people with kids prioritize low crime. Young people not as much (I am generalizing of course) which helps explain the gentrification process that turns poor, crime-ridden neighborhoods into spiffy, reasonably safe places. The early gentrifiers are like old time pioneers willing to brave the dangers of the wilderness for as cheap place.
Smart people’s mistakes also happen to affect way more people. And they are better at denying they were really mistakes. At least with dumb people, the mistakes largely affect them and the people around them. Smart people can lead billions down a dark path, whistling the whole time that only the stupid people are complaining. And the other, obviously smart people who say this is a bad idea? Those are just bad guys.
One thing I might have mentioned in the other thread.
When people show statistically that “deterrence doesn’t work” what they mean is that it doesn’t work so well for the existing classes of criminal. If shoplifting were fully legal tomorrow with absolutely no consequences for anybody then the normie who is not a criminal would in many cases start shoplifting. In fact it’s hard to explain why anybody wouldn’t.
The breakdown of society, after a war or whatever, shows that ordinary people engage in general criminality, black marketing and go back to normal non criminal life when that is available.
Almost anybody except the rare saint will engage in crime if driven by sufficient desperation. I'm no saint, and I am adequately provided for. I can't see myself becoming a shoplifter in my current circumstances even if it were legal.
I’ve kept found money before nothing more than £20, but not a found wallet with name and address - I’ve handed that it with the money intact. Both are technically illegal, googling the issue and I find I’m supposed to reasonably try find the owner in both cases.
Presumably the fact that the wallet is easier to return to owner matters, but I’m also pretty much aware that taking the £20 even if reported, even if there were multiple CC cameras proving the issue, would lead to nothing.
The UK police aren’t going to bother finding the owner, no prosecutor is going to try the case, and no court convict. Furthermore in the court of public opinion nobody would be shocked either.
Let’s imagine, though I’m in Singapore or somewhere like that, where for the purposes of this thought experiment this *is* prosecuted. And where there are lots of cc tv cameras so there’s a chance I’m getting caught. If I’m caught there’s a large fine, or some other penalty.
And let’s imagine that all the guide books tell me this. And let’s imagine I’m walking along in Singapore and a nice 30$ (SGD) is floating by.
I’m not taking that.
So at least at some level the law is deterring me.
Right--it's at the margin. Going from 10 to 11 years in prison doesn't seem to have much effect on the lunkheads who commit most crimes. It might work on people considering complex tax fraud or something, but not guys who hold up liquor stores or mug little old ladies.
If we closed all the jails and prisons, I expect we'd see a huge increase in crime because of the lack of any deterrence.
Also, even most people who aren't deterred from burgling someone's house by a longer prison sentence can be deterred from burgling someone's house by realizing the homeowner has a couple of big dogs running around loose in the house. That's a much more immediate kind of deterrence.
Yeah, I think probably the best way to frame this is "deterrence doesn't work on the margin".
In recent years there has been pushback against cops engaging in high-speed chases. Adrenaline operates, of course, so that one still hears about the occasional high-speed chase, of course. But I think on some level, there must have been successfully put a fear of it into the average cop, the fear of injuring others or themselves; and there's a class of people - young men - happy to exploit this gap. Even anti-cop Reddit is full of posts complaining that cops don't seem to even patrol freeways anymore. There is nightly drag racing in every major city in my state, sometimes with added thrills involving ordinary arterials and red lights. Not just at night - some people race, improbably, on the interstate in the middle of the day. I remember once trying to call it in: "So I'm at I10 and ******* eastbound and these guys are weaving in and out of traffic, going about 95 ...." The operator stopped me to ask my name. Spell my name. And give my address .... my home address ... and then finally, where was this incident? I repeated my location. Deep unfamiliarity with the street grid. What was the hundred block? I don't know, I said, but by this time they're ten miles away. Nevermind.
The sound of it carries. It's not something I ever heard my first 40 years. Drag racing if it existed, was done out on rural roads, not on the freeways of the city as if it was a big Hot Wheels track.
Maybe I sound like a killjoy, but this kills people on the regular; and it's no big deal at all. There's not billboards about it. There's not talk about doing something about it. It's just become normalized. It's almost a little embarrassing. Over the weekend a woman was driving to the fast food restaurant to pick up her two teenagers who were both working shifts there. She was killed. She somehow was hit simultaneously by 2 Mustangs. The police said the drivers were not drunk. (Drunk is the worst!) There will be no charges. It was just unfortunate, they said.
They used to make those Fast and Furious movies that glorified street racing. And I used to think "this is dumb, it's going to get people killed". And then the star of the Fast and Furious movies got killed while street racing. And then they just kept making Fast and Furious movies without any introspection on the part of anybody.
(I know they're less about street racing and more about sending Hondas into space these days, but they're still not promoting safe and cautious driving.)
It's funny seeing "Videogame causes violence" crowd actually getting more and more justified these days (just fill in the "entertainment" and "crime" variable in "entertainment cause crime" formula)
It really started in the wake of COVID.
A silver lining for libertarians then, I guess. Maybe with the next plague we can get rid of flotation devices and all their concerns will be met.
Nah. Car chase have been glorified for as long as I can remember and probably before I was born.
Covid did make it possible to speed in places that were normally congested. I saw a lot of that in 2020. There might be all of six cars on a normally gridlocked major road at rush hour-- and they were driving fast.
I tend to be a fan of old school an "eye for an eye" on nuisance crimes. Caught shoplifting $50 worth of stuff? Cool, the state gets to take your shoes. Walk home barefooted, dude. Won't stop panhandling on this corner though we've repeatedly told you to stop? Cool, we are going to take you for a 15 mile ride outside of town and leave you on the side of the road in West Podunk. Etc. Maybe I'm naive, but I feel like this kind of stuff coupled with a high chance of getting caught would render a lot of nuisance crimes very quickly not worth it.
This isn't inflicting ludicrous suffering on criminals (being raped in prison) for being a nuisance. It's making their life inconvenient and irritating back instead.
*Edit* This was the unspoken way of dealing with intractable homeless people since basically forever. You harass homeless people into not congregating in certain places you don't want them to be. Then you let them be in certain places with somewhat less scrutiny like flophouses or shady parts of town. We just stopped doing this because we worried about this making their lives suck more. But them congregating in the park in an otherwise nice area makes everyone else's lives suck more. If we admit that endemic homelessness is a uniquely pernicious problem to solve, what we are really arguing about is who should have to bear the brunt of homeless people's intrinsic obnoxiousness.
I'm frankly more interested in helping relatively normal but poor people escape neighborhoods full of dysfunction than I am letting the dysfunctional elements wander everywhere because they can't help it. Poor, single mom who can hold down a job with some help should be getting the "help people" social resources. Not wandering heroin addled chronic shoplifter who sometimes screams at people and waves a knife. That guy needs to be managed, not helped. He is a lost cause 95%+ of the time. And even if you could help him, he would probably need a ludicrous amount of resources compared to single mom. This equally applies to the IQ 65 guy with no impulse control as it does to the homeless person.
I like the immediate nuisance for small crime idea.
But I don't really like the examples, because having to walk home barefoot could be barely a nuisance, or very bad, depending on the circumstances.
Also, a lot of homeless people aren't a nuisance at all.
Also the shoplifter will probably just steal some shoes.
Then he'll raise his crime quotient until he's eligible to be exiled!
The key point of this is the meaning of that "a lot." You are correct that any number of specific homeless people aren't a big deal. Andy Griffith can in fact be reasonably accommodating to Otis (the town drunk) because there's one of him. But "a lot" of homeless people in any place are an unpleasant nuisance. I can't think of an exception.
All of this. I'm always stunned when people don't have this intuition.
>Won't stop panhandling on this corner though we've repeatedly told you to stop? Cool, we are going to take you for a 15 mile ride outside of town and leave you on the side of the road in West Podunk.
I fail to see how this is "eye for an eye." Last time I checked panhandling doesn't involve forcing people into cars and driving them 15 miles away.
Also, if you make a policy of having the police punish people without due process, they're going to abuse that power. It's kinda why due process exists in the first place.
"I’m including this here as a counter to Peter’s story of the guy who got two years in jail for driving the speed limit. I hear so many outrageous stories of extreme strictness and so many outrageous stories of extreme laxity (see also this post) that I’m nervous about turning the dial one way or the other compared to trying to figure out what’s going on."
Note that the two comments aren't talking about the same thing. Peter talks about **probation**, while Charlotte talks about **parole**. In Peter's comment it's also explained how **parole** officers have every incentive to keep people out of prisons, while for **probation** officers it's the exact opposite, they want people moved to prison as much and as soon as possible. Both the probation system and the parole system seem to be utterly broken, but in opposite ways.
Seconded, came to the comments to point this out. Peter makes a huge point of how *probation* is too strict in ways *entirely unlike* parole. I'm hoping this was just an oversight on Scott's part as he was rushing to find a counterexample since this seems uncharacteristically sloppy for him.
"This isn’t very clearly written, but my impression is that Peter is saying that violating probation gives you a longer prison sentence than just accepting prison in the first place, probation is deliberately designed to be near-impossible to keep, and so it’s a con to trick criminals into longer sentences without having to get them through a judge and jury. Criminals know this, so they refuse probation.
This kind of conflicts with the “criminals have high time preference and make terrible decisions” point above, so I’m not sure what to think of it. "
My understanding is, this is because they're mostly not making these decisions independently, they're making them conditioned on the advice of other people they're hearing from while in jail, plus people they've likely associated with to lead them there in the first place.
I've participated in a number of clinical studies, which also filters for a lot of people with poor time discounting and not great decisionmaking overall (a lot of them also casually discuss time spent in prison,) and there are a whole lot of participant practices which are contrary to what the clinics actually want from them which participants openly discuss among each other as things that "everyone knows" you do. I should probably write something up some time about how this sort of thing affects the results of clinical research as well.
I'm still surprised this doesn't translate into better judgment in general - surely there's also a lot of gossip in the criminal underworld about "don't commit crimes because prison is very bad".
I think the problem here is that risk of prison is low. The lesson would have to be "prison is very bad and while my chances of going to prison for any given act are very low, if I lead a life of crime I will likely eventually go there." Which can be difficult if you're bad at risk.
I think if the chances of going to jail for crime were magically 100% for some reason, this would work.
If they feel desperate enough, then the advice they are likely to take is about not getting caught. Advice about not being a criminal probably sounds extremely unhelpful to a guy with no job prospects and a need for immediate money.
Fellow criminals may be acting under a harm reduction mentality. Knowing that your cousin is going to commit crimes no matter what you say, you tell him how not to get caught instead.
This only works when the chances of getting caught are low enough to pass whatever mental clearance rate the person is acting under. Even a 95% catch rate will still see really really high time preference people committing crimes. But a 50% catch rate will see a lot more people doing it no matter how bad prison is.
Considering how much of a disruption having gone to prison even once causes to trying to live a straight and narrow life afterwards, I think the prison system is full of a lot of people talking about how hard that is, and their efforts to explore alternatives.
Publication bias. The people who have a really bad time in prison aren't there to talk. Those who had a pretty bad time don't say much to avoid looking weak. Those who had an ok experience talk some. Those who avoided it entirely enjoy boasting.
So most of the stories a prospective criminal hears are that prison can be avoided, with a few "it's not that bad"s mixed in.
Also, people who are persuaded to stop doing crimes after experiencing how bad prison seem like they'd be somewhat less likely to be part of the criminal underworld.
I'm coming back to this again after thinking about it more, I think there's another factor I failed to address in my first response. With probation cases, we're looking at a one-off decision. People get asked "do you want to take probation?" They're given the opportunity to consider the question, and their answer is taken as binding. But if we offered people a similar choice of "Do you want to commit crimes?" a lot of people who go on to commit crimes would probably say no. They're not resolving in advance to commit crimes as a considered judgment about their best interests, they're responding to daily temptations, frustrations and crises which occasionally push them into crime. If 364 days out of the year, you don't commit any crimes, but on one day you get really angry and assault someone and get arrested, you're a criminal, but it's not because you decided committing crimes was a good direction for your life.
>This kind of conflicts with the “criminals have high time preference and make terrible decisions” point above, so I’m not sure what to think of it. "
I'm sure they do what their lawyers tell them to, and the lawyers know what's up.
"STOP BREAKING THE LAW, ASSHOLE!"
> My understanding is, this is because they're mostly not making these decisions independently, they're making them conditioned on the advice of other people they're hearing from while in jail, plus people they've likely associated with to lead them there in the first place.
Plus, I expect, an attorney?
There's been research findings for years that certainty of getting caught has far more deterrent effect than the severity of the sentence. This shouldn't be any great revelation as we see it regularly when bringing up children and in domestic animal behavior too.
Right, this is the reasoning behind the proposal of having more cops and fewer prisons.
I suppose the main point of Scott's post is to summarize and broadcast those findings. It may be an obvious point to criminologists, but it's not something that is widely understood in public discourse (and I don't think I valued the point enough before reading this post).
I basically think everyone is right (except the "punishment is a social good in itself" types but of course that's a philosophical difference). I've worked (briefly) as an attorney in both criminal prosecution and defense, and basically:
1) Criminals are generally wildly stupid, in a way it's hard for the educated, high-performing people who run society to understand. They are both impulsive and highly susceptible to peer pressure.
2) They are still people! Many 16-y/o gang members who have literally threatened a gas station attendant's life with a gun to steal $270 are sweet, kind, well-meaning kids who were just trying to help out their friends. ("...okay, but holding someone at gunpoint is still evil." Agreed, and see point one).
3) In a lot of these communities, being arrested is seen as similar to being struck by lightning. Drugs are everywhere, every person in their life is some species of criminal, and for the most part they get away with it. Sometimes you get arrested, and sometimes randomly that means you go to jail for a long time. Lots of people in these communities know better, but they don't get caught and/or they instinctively work the system in a way that keeps them from being struck by lightning.
4) This is only exacerbated by our bail and probation systems. In particular, most prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges view probation as a kindness - no need to lose your job, spend Christmas in jail, etc. But in reality, probationers don't really have the mental faculties to care about their probation. So the typical trajectory of a life of crime in their mind goes: "No consequences, no consequences, no consequences, suddenly and randomly 20 years in prison."
In order to condition good behavior in dumb people (and make no mistake, it would need to be conditioned), you'd need to defeat the pervasive idea that punishment is essentially arbitrary. You'd want bad behavior to be almost certain to have small consequences, increasing in severity with successive offenses. That's exactly opposite of the way our current system works, where almost no behavior is punished, but when punishment comes it's life-shatteringly harsh.
#4 is absolutely right about their mentality. Scott's reading of Peter's comments is off, even if criminals SHOULD negotiate for a lower DOC sentence rather than a probation term with a higher backup sentence, they don't in practice. As a public defender, on numerous occasions I recommended to a guy to accept a 2 yr DOC sentence (parole in a matter of 5-6 months) rather than a 7 yr suspended execution of sentence (5 yrs probation, they do the 7 if they are violated, which is maybe a year or two before parole followed by the remaining several years on parole that they also might violate and get sent back.) Maybe once a guy took my advice, the rest of the time they took probation because it gets them out of jail today, and they overestimate their ability to succeed on probation.
I will say that in my experience probationers were never sent back for violations like the employment requirement. It was always a new laws violation or absconding from probation or some related residency violation. On the rare occasion the record might reflect that somebody got sent to DOC for violating the employment condition, what actually happened is that they agreed to confess to that violation in exchange for having an absconding violation dropped, because absconding violations took away their eligibility for 120-day release whereas employment didn't. In no case would somebody have been sent up for an employment violation alone.
That comment threw me too - Admittedly I have only a very little bit of criminal experience, but in the two or so years I was doing that work, I have never seen a suspect say "oh no, I don't want probation, give me the jail time" even in cases where it was like 6 months vs. 10 years suspended time.
Also agree that people aren't often violated for minor infractions in my jurisdiction, though I suspect this depends a lot on the culture of your prosecutor's office.
Aside, the first case I ever tried was a minor probation violation case where the defendant had shoplifted. I read out the terms of his probation, to which he got frustrated and said that he knew them. I asked if he understood that his sentence could be revoked if he violated those terms. He said that he did but that he thought his probation ran from the date of his original crime, not the date of his sentencing. His exact words were "so I thought my probation had ended and didn't know that I couldn't do that <shoplift from Target>." I asked, "You didn't know you couldn't break the law?" to which he took a deep breath, looked the judge in the eye, and said "No sir I did not know I wasn't allowed to break the law."
While admittedly very funny, both this person and society at large would have been better served if he'd been subject to a simpler punishment scheme.
So would you say that to these people law is like a thunderhead which they are vaguely aware of as floating somewhere high overhead and which sometimes discharges lightnings, but which they ignore in practice and just do whatever they want?
Yes and no. I didn't want to get into the politics of policing in my comment so I left out a lot of relevant details. Essentially these people are screwed whatever they do. In some of these neighborhoods, drug dealing is so endemic that any home or vehicle is likely to have drugs in it, our possession laws are wiggly enough that anyone in the home or vehicle can reasonably be charged with felony possession with intent to deal, and the police that deal with these situations tend to view every person in these communities with maximum suspicion automatically.
I've had officers literally tell me, while I was working as a defense attorney with the suspect as my client, that I should accept a felony plea against a 16-year-old on sketchy evidence, because that way he'll never be able to own a gun, and will never be a danger to the community. Keep in mind that almost every job application, especially for the kinds of jobs a kid like this can get, screens out felons.
A 17-year-old dummy caught with an eight ball under his seat in a traffic stop might have actually been intending to use cocaine or might have had no idea the cocaine was there. But the dumber he is, the more likely he is to take the fall for it, and the facts of his particular case have very little to do with whether he does.
So it's more like "there is a thunderhead overhead of powerful people who can ruin my life at any time for any reason, might as well do whatever I want."
> 1) Criminals are generally wildly stupid, in a way it's hard for the educated, high-performing people who run society to understand.
Moreover, it is (at least in my experience) hard to persuade educated, high-performing people who have no or very little first-hand experience that grownup people can be this stupid and that this is not a condition that can be cured with a bit of study and training and self-discipline. I even had moments of dark comedy when otherwise extremely intelligent people went "What do you mean, 1/3 of the population cannot learn even precalculus? Anybody can learn precalculus if they are motivated! What is there to learn in it?!111" on me.
>I hear so many outrageous stories of extreme strictness and so many outrageous stories of extreme laxity (see also this post) that I’m nervous about turning the dial one way or the other compared to trying to figure out what’s going on.
> I content myself with thinking that the incapacitation-optimal amount of prison (probably 20 years to life for a murder) is already pretty extreme.
We can look at median and mean times served for various crimes.
As of 2018, mean years served in state prison by crime (listed here: https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/tssp18.pdf) was:
Murder: 17.8
Rape: 9.6
Sexual Assault: 5
Robbery (violent): 4.8
Burglary: 2.3
Motor vehicle theft: 1.3
Of course, the median times served were shorter (sometimes significantly), and due to the practice of pleading down to lesser offenses, the actual crimes committed for each sentence would have on average been more severe than the ones listed.
The link also includes more data on the time served distribution.
E.g. 96.7% of those convicted of larceny-theft served less than 5 years. 8.9% of convicted murderers served less than 3 years, etc.
Re. "I’m not even sure how one would put a “price” on the harm caused by rape... the punishment for rape is substantially higher than the punishment for the average crime": The probability that a convicted person is innocent should also be factored in. I suspect this is much higher for rape than for other crimes. I watched one rape trial when I was in high school as part of a social studies course, and the defendant was convicted even though all of the evidence indicated that the sex was consensual. Does anyone know of any data on the probability that a convicted person did in fact commit the crime, for different crimes?
How did you choose the trial? Perhaps you teacher chose it because it was not representative?
My impression is that prosecution for date rape is very rare. Prosecution is for stranger rape where there is a serious problem of identifying the rapist. When you were in high school, 15% of rape convicts were the wrong man, which we know because of retrospective DNA testing. This isn't an issue of consent!
It is hard to imagine how you could get data about any other crime. The same lab found a similar rate of DNA matches for murder convicts, but there were very few cases where there was samples with DNA at all and the failure to match is not necessarily exonerating.
I think this is the source:
https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/25506/412589-Post-Conviction-DNA-Testing-and-Wrongful-Conviction.PDF
My teacher chose the trial, but we watched it live. We sat in the courtroom. Nobody knew what the outcome would be, so it wasn't cherry-picked.
It couldn't have been cherry-picked for the outcome, but it could have been cherry-picked for being about consent, rather than a typical rape trial.
>How come in one million articles about Bukele and crime in El Salvador, including many trying to discredit him or say it wasn’t worth it, I’ve never heard a peep about this? And if it wasn’t Bukele or mass incarceration that did it, then what was it?
I'm sorry, Scott, but you probably didn't search very much at all here. It's been a very frequent mention in almost every debat about Bukele that I've witnessed.
>Compare the Nazi eugenics program against schizophrenics discussed here. They killed almost every schizophrenic in Germany
Last time you discussed this, you claimed:
>The Nazis ran a eugenics program that killed most of the schizophrenics in Germany
>Sebjenseb did a similar analysis and finds that if you execute the most criminal 1% of the population each generation, population level criminality decreases by about 0.1 standard deviation per 400 years
If I understand correctly, he assumed criminals and non criminals have similar fertility, but I think that there's reason to assume that criminals have higher fertility. E.g. in the US, Hispanics and Blacks have higher fertility than Whites and Asians, while they (particularly Blacks) have a much higher criminal propensity: https://www.statista.com/statistics/226292/us-fertility-rates-by-race-and-ethnicity/.
EDIT: Yup, criminals have higher fertility: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513814000774.
The Nazis' breeding program to eliminate top-tier scientific talent seems to have been somewhat more successful.
Hard to tell. Subsequent German governments have been running a program to eliminate top-tier scientific talent by paying them far far less than they could make in the US.
Germans are still winning Nobel prizes, 18 of them since 2000.
Re: E.g. in the US, Hispanics and Blacks have higher fertility than Whites and Asians, while they (particularly Blacks) have a much higher criminal propensity
Which tells us exactly nothing about the fertility rate of criminals.
US whites and blacks have almost identical fertilities. It's something like 1.5 vs 1.6.
Performative Bafflement's estimate of 80% of cop hours spent on traffic tickets is missing numerous factors and makes a lot of bad assumptions.
To start with, he is basing this on an estimate of cops' FTE work hours. But cops also work what they call "grant shifts", which are 8 hour overtime shifts paid for by grant money. A common one is NHTSA, which requires you to spend the entire 8 hour overtime shift writing tickets. Other ones are purely for DUI interdiction. Grant shifts are paid a higher hourly wage, and are heavily sought-after by cops, in my jurisdictions they were always taken when available.
The small town where I was recently the municipal prosecutor had a police force of ~8 fulltime officers and had several such shifts per month. NHTSA alone gives out hundreds of millions of dollars per year in these grants. I assume there's overhead and administrative costs, but these paid $25-30/hr in my town so we're easily talking 12-15 million hours of overtime which is dedicated solely to traffic enforcement. A substantial portion of the tickets being written were on these overtime shifts.
Additionally, a traffic stop tends to produce multiple tickets. People who drive with expired plates often are also driving with an expired license and no insurance and not wearing a seat belt. I would say that in my experience, the most common number of tickets to be written on a stop (if the cop wrote any at all) was 2, but it frequently went as high as 6, so the average was likely closer to 3.
He mentions setting up speed trap locations for traffic enforcement, but this is only common for highway patrol officers not local cops. To the extent local cops do this, it is primarily the ones on the aforementioned grant shifts who had to be writing tickets the whole time. Patrol cops make traffic stops in the course of patrolling -- you are heading back from checking on the gas station drive-off call you just responded to, you see Joe Smith who you pulled over last month and had a revoked license, you pull in behind him to follow him for a block or two, he doesn't come to a complete stop at a stop sign, you pull him over and run his license yada yada.
He also claims writing tickets generates revenue for the governmental unit, however this is a dubious claim based on old assumptions that haven't survived the modernization of the justice system. My state, and many others, have caps on the percentage of revenue that can be generated by municipal tickets. A number of small munis in St Louis metro were affected, but my city came nowhere remotely close to the cap. There are also caps on the amounts of fines you can impose for minor traffic offenses. By the time you factored in paying for a city judge, paying for cops to show up at court, paying my salary, paying the court clerk, and paying the administrative police officer who assisted me, it wasn't making money. Increasingly, municipalities are turning this over to county governments. The days of the speed trap city funded entirely by ticketing out-of-towners have ended.
I'd also say that language in PB's piece is unnecessarily prejudicial for what is supposed to be a numerical analysis. Oh the policeman "waddled" back to his car? "Heave your tired bulk out of the SUV?" Assuming cops are just lazy and sitting there for 15 minutes to waste time? C'mon man. The whole thing is written like PB has never met a cop except on the roadside when he was getting pulled over. That piece is dripping with contempt and seems to be getting its idea of police work entirely from outdated TV and movie tropes.
The excerpt quoted also fails to consider, "Why do cops often make those stops?"
The stops are made in hopes that some police interactions will reveal evidence of more extreme lawlessness--distributing drugs, felon in possession, etc.
>I would say that in my experience, the most common number of tickets to be written on a stop (if the cop wrote any at all) was 2, but it frequently went as high as 6, so the average was likely closer to 3.
This is interesting to me because in my own experience and experiences I've heard from friends and coworkers, traffic stops we've been on the receiving end of virtually never end with more than one ticket written.
But come to think of it, the one time I went to court for a traffic ticket (Los Angeles County in 2003), the arraignment was full of people who were charged with three tickets apiece (driving without a license, driving without insurance, and a moving violation). Although that has a different sampling issue than anecdotes from my social circle, as people who just got a ticket for one moving violation but have proper license, registration, and insurance are probably mostly just paying the fine and doing traffic school.
It's a consistent conundrum of policing that cops actually do have very good metis for looking at a person and quickly assessing the likelihood they are a criminal or a lout, but this metis isn't legal probable cause.
I was also somewhat suspicious of this data but I don't have counter data, only anecdote. I worked public safety IT for about 10 years so literally worked inside a police station and worked on IT equipment in police units. It's true that most cops are patrol officers and 80%+ of patrol officers' time is being in a car. But they aren't all just sitting at speed traps. They are responding to calls that come in to dispatch. Patrol is also a deterrent of itself. They will drive around or just park in high crime areas *because* crime happens there and it's less likely to happen when a police vehicle is parked in the street.
And, yes, the one speed trap that was consistently manned was on the interstate in a large construction zone and was paid for by state grant money. That zone also had several terrible car wrecks a year, sometimes fatal, so I would say the speed trap was not there mostly for reasons of grift.
The way you calculate the cost of rape is determining how much money a typical rape victim would have to be paid to undergo the experience willingly.
I don't think that's a plausible heuristic. Try applying it to murder, for example. I'm sure there's no amount of money most people would accept in order to willingly be killed, but that doesn't mean that the value of a life is infinite. People are bad at being rational about extreme things like this.
A better method might be to look at the prices of high-end escorts.
I think murder would be relatively easy to figure out. There are people who accept jobs with a non-negligible chance of death, in exchange for better pay than otherwise equivalent safe jobs, from which market rates can be extrapolated. Then there's cases of suicide with express intent to collect insurance payouts - a central plot point in the classic Christmas movie It's A Wonderful Life. As another data point, whatever rate the EPA uses for cost/benefit analysis of hazmat remediation.
Rape is a much trickier question. Can't just use prices for sex workers doing a consensual version of the same physical acts, any more than you could usefully base rates for murder on how much a professional actor would want in exchange for being struck with a rubber knife and then falling down spurting ketchup. Trauma associated with a genuinely unplanned loss of control is central to the real crime's personal costs, and play-pretend hourly rates don't even vaguely approximate such a thing.
>Can't just use prices for sex workers doing a consensual version of the same physical acts
How's that different from your murder example? The high-risk job comparison is equally inappropriate because that's a willing acceptance of risk.
Being mugged or suffering a home break-in is a comparable loss of autonomy (it's less than rape but I think it's the same order of magnitude) but we're still happy to account the cost as the value of goods stolen.
I agree that the cost of rape is higher than the price of consensual prostitution, but the latter gives us a general ballpark. The difference shouldn't be 100x, for example.
Somebody working on an oil rig is willingly accepting the risk of death but can reasonably be presumed to still prefer staying alive. There's a widely-accepted principle that any two human lives are, if not exactly equal, at least close enough to be vaguely comparable.
Sex itself isn't remotely fungible like that. Different people have wildly different preferences, and even an individual person's interest can be immensely context-sensitive. A given sex worker probably has some stuff they wouldn't be willing to do for any amount of money, and other acts they enjoy so much they'd gladly pay someone else for the chance, and there's no guarantee those lists will be even vaguely similar from one to the next.
If as a matter of practicality and/or principle you HAD to index it to some existing profession's pay scale, surrogate pregnancy seems like a better starting point, since long-term compromise of bodily autonomy is more central to the salary negotiations there.
Fair point. Consensual acceptance of risk isn't equivalent to consensual acceptance of death. Yeah maybe my argument there is just wrong. But I dunno actually. Is saying "I require $10k per year to accept a 1% chance of dying on the job" really not equivalent to saying "I value my life at $1 million"?
>surrogate pregnancy seems like a better starting point,
Excellent idea. I bet it's actually similar to high-end escort pay (same order of magnitude, anyway) which kinda makes sense when you think about it. One could also try looking at revealed preferences and try to figure out how hard women try to avoid sexual assault in the real world: maybe look at gender ratios in different neighborhoods and try to correlate that with rent and crime rates somehow to back out an estimate of how much women are willing to pay to avoid violent crime.
That could be simulated. The offer is made to a person: you agree to take a pill which prevents medium-term memory formation (this exists) immediately after accepting this offer. With no memory of having agreed to it, you will then be raped, with all the attendant trauma, fear of permanent injury or death, et cetera. How much money would it take for you to agree to this?
Some people would indeed willingly be killed in order to have enough money for others, such as to allow the rest of their family to live comfortably for the rest of their lives without having to work. This must be balanced against the murderer choosing the victim, who would have an unknown value for the victim's own life.
Yes, excellent point.
Bare minimum is looking at the cost potentially inflicted on the victim by unwanted pregnancy, bodily injury, and STDs which certainly puts the crime at least on a level with subjecting someone to a severe beating. And the reputational and psychological damage consistently seems worse as well but is harder to calculate.
> The “proudly told me that I was wrong - nothing bad happened” reminds me of the Generalized Anti-Caution Argument - “you said we should worry about AI, but then we invented a new generation of large language model, and nothing bad happened!”
I believe the term of art for this is a stuck prior.
(I kid - I'm well aware that LLMs are not the general concern for AI risk people and that the safety of a lower capability model doesn't prove a higher capability version of that same model will be same. This can quickly turn into a fully general argument against ever letting your ol' lying eyes force you to update theory based beliefs. Smart people are better at rationalizations.)
>People call Gaza an “open-air prison”, and the comparison makes sense. It contains two million Palestinians, separated from Israel by a wall, barbed wire, and military guards
National borders frequently feature walls and guards.
But most people are allowed to pass through them most of the time
Gaza, like most countries, lets people out to any countries that let them in. Most countries don't want many Palestinians.
Most developed countries don't want many people from most non-developed countries, and to an extent, from developed countries, as well.
Many people are trapped in poor countries, unable to emigrate. This is unfortunate, and should be featured in the discussion of immigration policy, and it is in that context that the discussion of Gaza makes the most sense.
You are discussing whether or not the walls and guards around Gaza are justified, whereas all Scott meant is that the walls and guards around Gaza are similar enough to the walls and guards of a prison that Gaza can be used as a model of what a large prison would look like. This is independent of whether they are justified.
The term "open air prison" in relation to Gaza is generally used in the context of treatment, which admittedly wasn't Scott's context. However, his comment was still arguably somewhat oddly worded, as the prison like nature of Gaza is a function of other countries not allowing its inhabitants to immigrate, not the walls that happen to partially surround it.
As I said, Gaza isn't unique in that regard. All countries trap those who aren't wanted elsewhere.
If you just want to talk about dense countries that are or aren't able to survive on domestic agriculture, you can look at e.g. Bermuda that relies on food imports and Bangladesh that doesn't, both of which are significantly more densely populated than Gaza.
Everyone on this thread is ignoring the fact that Gaza shares a border with Egypt, and the Rafah crossing was never closed (other than for brief periods). It is surprising that people don't know this. The "open air prison" phrase was too catchy I guess.
Back when I lived in southern California (2003-2006), I once took a day trip where I drove down to San Diego and walked across the border to Tijuana. There was a wall across that section of the border, but the contrast between the guards on each crossing side was interesting.
There's a large highway that crosses the border through a toll-plaza-like area set into the wall. I didn't get a close look at this part since I crossed on foot. The pedestrian crossings are on either side of the border, with Mexican customs next to the southbound side of the freeway and US ICE next to the northbound. The Mexican Customs pedestrian crossing was a courtyard area with open gates in the walls entering and existing. There was one bored-looking uniformed officer sitting at a card table off to one side and watching people go past. I and most other border crossers got waved past without any checks or questions.
The American pedestrian crossing was likewise built into the walls, but was a fully enclosed building. There were long lines for security checks (I think there was an x-ray for bags and walk-through metal detectors) and everyone got passport checks and at least token questioning. There were quite a few uniformed officers watching the crowd in addition to the ones operating the x-rays and checking the passports.
If you try to walk or swim from Mexico to the US you may indeed encounter wall, barbed wire, and military guards set up by the Americans. But if you take the boat to some other country the US will generally leave you alone. If you try to do the same thing from Gaza, Israel will not leave you alone.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/altruism-and-vitalism-as-fellow-travelers/comment/64881672
Gaza has a coast. If it were a state its residents wouldn't need permission from either Egypt or Israel to leave, they would just catch a boat.
Would Israel actually stop a boat from another country taking Gazans away?
Gaza used to be a port city, and Israel has repeatedly refused to let the port facilities be repaired.
I think people have traveled by water from places that don't have fully functional port facilities.
Israel also prevents air and sea traffic from reaching Gaza, not merely land traffic. Ordinary nations are allowed to control their own ports.
Regarding the thought-experiment about society of Buddhist angels, my intuition is "OF COURSE they should eliminate me" (one way or another, be it mind control chip and sterilization to prevent my faulty genotype from spreading, exile, or death - punishment that wouldn't result in making me as virtuous as them doesn't seem just). And if I proved myself to be the person I aspire to be even in the moment of crisis, I would embrace this judgement with equanimity of Socrates.
Of course, there likely is a fourth option that would be at the top of the list: just like there's a thing called "bad company", as Seneca notes living with sages would rub off (the best thing you can do for your own virtue is to live with virtuous people... he himself of course was thrust into the dilemma of being in a position to try to reign in the worst impulses of a tyrannical emperor), and I'd like to imagine I'm sage-like enough that Buddhist angels would eventually learn to at least grudgingly tolerate me (that is, to remodel me into their image doesn't take measures as drastic as a mind control chip), and that my genotype is not so irredeemable that offspring with a genetic peer or superior, when raised in a society of sages, wouldn't learn to become a sage in her own right.
And that, I think, is actually crux of most problems. In the original post I recall one of the commenters noting that in Europe they have enough police to efficiently go after even petty crimes like using public transportation without ticket, but in Sweden for instance they aren't even checking the tickets. In a society with high social trust, boarding a train without a ticket just isn't a thing you do. And that presumably is how the Nordic prison system also works: most inmates come from a family background of husband-beating mothers and alcoholic fathers and youth gangs, and then they get exposed to basically normal compassionate non-sadistic non-abusive people and are given an opportunity to e.g. study in high school and once they get out of prison they can continue their lives without judgement (if not always in practice then as an aspirational goal that sometimes works out).
There undoubtedly are people that are irredeemable (in the absence of mind control chips and the like), like psychopaths, or those with almost complete absence of executive function, or trapped priors regarding values that contradict those of the enlightenment, etc (and here you still have marginal decisions regarding what to do with these people). And it's not that people in the Nordics are sages, far from it. But I think virtue-ethicists are correct and in the usual human case the best way to make people behave virtuously isn't really the carrot-and-stick approach, but surrounding them with virtuous people, and that's why it's socially crucial to perpetuate virtue. What kinds of policies accomplish that is a different question entirely (besides the obvious one of generally improving human welfare and hoping that Rousseau is correct and humans are basically decent unless circumstances force their hand), but if you had somehow achieved a society of angels, you wouldn't want to start eroding its standards of virtue: who knows, maybe even the angels would start raising their voices or littering, because that degree of vice has become socially permissible.
I understand they also imprison people for speeding, so perhaps the Nordic prison population is different enough from America's that comparisons aren't helpful.
>but the average criminal is an IQ 75 moron with the impulse control of a young child. Probably they are genetically suited to some kind of hunter-gatherer tribe with strong kinship bonds and zero superstimuli; in modern society, they are totally doomed. I’m not sure what our goal is here in creating a bunch of people incapable of living cooperatively in modern civilization...If you’re going to take that perspective, you might as well torture three-year-olds who throw tantrums in the grocery store.
So when it comes to considering the harms of incarceration, criminals are presented as often being hardworking family men, but when it comes to punishing them, they're presented as being helpless toddlers throwing tantrums.
The blame on modern society for crime also seems backwards. Violent deaths were much more common in prehistory than today. That indicates that as far as violent behavior, the present is not a less suitable environment for the criminally inclined.
> So when it comes to considering the harms of incarceration, criminals are presented as often being hardworking family men, but when it comes to punishing them, they're presented as being helpless toddlers throwing tantrums.
It can read a bit like a rhetorical trick, but I don't think that anyone believes criminals are a monolith. When considering harms we should include the number of prisoners who could lead relatively normal lives absent a long prison sentence, when considering punishment we should include the number who may be biologically incapable of / predisposed against following the law. Think of it as focusing on two bounds of a spectrum depending on what's being evaluated.
Some criminals are hardworking family men, some criminals are impulsive children, some are rich kids cosplaying as a murderous Batman, and some - I assume - are good people. Most are between the extremes.
What percent of below average IQ people are criminals?
> Yeah, everyone I know with experience says that solitary confinement is torture, but I would naively expect to prefer it to normal prison.
I was genuinely surprised to read this from a mental health professional.
Really, and not the part where he wants to legalize running over protesters? Is no one even going to mention that?
That didn't surprise me at all. Scott is a utilitarian, so according to his ethical system he is obligated to personally kill a person if killing that person would shorten the commute of ten thousand people.
(This isn't some original thought, it's the absolutely bog-standard objection to utilitarianism.)
For delays on the part of ten thousand commuters to justify a single random death, my back-of-the-envelope math suggests the resultant time savings would need to be more like a full hour every day for at least half a year. Lot of people are upset that such a break-even point can be calculated at all, though, yeah.
Did he not, in the very next paragraph, indicate that he doesn't really think that way?
Is this your first time reading Scott?
Solitary as currently implemented is a more extreme version of imprisonment (esp. WRT deprivation); I interpret Scott as envisioning an opt-in solitary to have similar amenities as current gen pop prisons just without interaction with other inmates.
Great discussion. One addition:
The part that gets missed in criminal justice policy is the culture of crime. In particular, the sex appeal that criminal status buys. A young male without money, career prospects, or a quick wit is likely to be an incel — except if he’s a criminal, a bad boy.
Globally and in the US in particular, the bad boy aesthetic dominates what is seen as “cool”.
One of the shocking statements in Freakenomics was that the average corner drug dealer makes less net income than a McDonalds worker. That may or may not actually be true, but granting it for the sake of argument, there is a huge delta in status to being an outlaw vs being at the bottom of the social hierarchy.
When we reframe the incentives of crime to include “Clyde impressing Bonnie” it’s a lot more understandable — it’s not more rational, but it’s more understandable that people would be deeply irrational in pursuit of sex and love and belonging, not just money.
And an idea for the solution emerges too: society has to find a way to provide more status for the bottom quartile of males.
Or castrate criminals.
>One of the shocking statements in Freakenomics was that the average corner drug dealer makes less net income than a McDonalds worker. That may or may not actually be true, but granting it for the sake of argument, there is a huge delta in status to being an outlaw vs being at the bottom of the social hierarchy.
Freakonomics' argument had nothing to do with status. IIRC his explanation was that drug dealing was like being an artist or a musician - most people don't make much money off of it, but there's a tiny minority who become drug kingpins/Hollywood superstars and make huge amounts of money. So becoming a drug dealer is sort of a lottery ticket - a bad idea in terms of expected value, but the chance of a huge payoff is attractive if you're poor and have no prospects.
> The “proudly told me that I was wrong - nothing bad happened” reminds me of the Generalized Anti-Caution Argument - “you said we should worry about AI, but then we invented a new generation of large language model, and nothing bad happened!”
Hot take: that kid was actually correct, based on available data. The social worker told him, "if you speed or drive drunk, you might be pulled over". He did that 9 times in a row and was not pulled over. What are the chances that the 10th time will be different ? What if he did that 99 times in a row, and what should he believe about the social worker's predictive prowess ?
Of course, in actuality the kid was wrong because he had not considered the massive body of available data concerning people like him, which does indeed indicate that habitually driving dunk will eventually land you in jail (or worse). But we don't always have the luxury of such massive bodies of data; and if your argument is "we should listen to anyone who is predicting that anything bad will happen regardless of how many times he guessed wrong, because otherwise something bad might happen one day", then that's a generalized argument against doing anything ever.
Tell that kid to cover his eyes and not read this but....
Less than 1% of drunk driving incidents result in an accident or police encounter. And it would be committing the gambler's fallacy to suppose that the chances were any worse just because you'd gotten away with it 100 times before. Rationally, unless the risk/loss factors have changed from the last time you did it, you should continue to drive drunk!
1% is still kind of a lot, though. If you drive drunk every day, you'll end up in trouble about three times per year.
Or every two years if you drive drunk once a week, or every four years if you drive drunk once a month. The account in the comment sounded more like once a month than every day to me. Jude seemed to have been talking about teenagers, and four years is an eternity in teenager time.
Yeah especially since this is a Bayesian space, it's more rational to update your internal odds of getting caught to be lower and lower everytime you're not getting caught. Maybe you're just that slick!
Yes, I think this is one of those cases where reasoning in a perfectly Bayesian manner leads you to an incorrect conclusion. But I don't think there's a good solution to this, other than seeking additional data (always good but not always possible or practical). As I'd said though, if you bias your thinking against doing anything that could be potentially dangerous, then you end up in a situation where you're sitting in your padded room all day, afraid to move even a muscle.
A few days ago Jennifer Doleac published a lay review of the state of crime in the US (https://www.economicstrategygroup.org/publication/doleac-crime/) which summarizes a variety of policy approaches beyond prison sentences. As in your original post, she also concludes that the deterrence effect of longer sentences is minimal. But she highlights several studies, including RCTs, demonstrating effective crime prevention through e.g. summer jobs programs for teens (Heller 2014 is the primary ref and Doleac interviews Sara Heller here : https://www.probablecausation.com/podcasts/episode-25-sara-heller). Interestingly, these programs do NOT appear to function through poverty/income but rather by simply keeping teenagers occupied with more productive activities ala midnight basketball. There is also a fade out effect, suggesting that you need to continue keeping these teens occupied until they move to a better part of the age-crime curve. I guess this isn't a particularly crazy scheme, nor is it punitive, but seems like a policy solution worth considering.
Police hiring is seriously broken in most jurisdictions. It's typically a process that takes at least six months and at least a dozen unpaid hours filling out applications, doing interviews, and taking tests. Some jurisdictions still use polygraphs in their hiring process, which is banned in civilian hiring and has been scientifically discredited for decades. Unless they really want to be cops, most people will go to the private sector where talented people are hired quickly. Add in overt or unwritten DEI quotas, and it's no wonder police departments have a staffing problem.
I think your analogy comparing low-iq criminals to 3-year-olds is probably right. As the parent of small childen, I'll note that certain things work better with three-year-olds than others. If you want them to truly control their impulses, it works best for punishment to be 1) consistent, and 2) swift. But it doesn't have to be particularly harsh. Maybe there's data backing up this observation, but I have the flu and I'm too tired to look it up. But if true, we should swarms of beat cops, and lots of swift, small penalties for bad behavior, i.e., a night in jail, maybe some light physical punishment, etc. Re: cops spending too much time on traffic... take away their cars and track their phones to make sure they actually walk the beat.
Mark Kleiman compared incentivizing children to both raising a small child and training a pet. Interestingly, Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" also said that society is to blame for teenagers getting executed because they hadn't been disciplined properly as children, using a similar analogy to a dog.
"His ideas were dressed up with a glib mechanistic pseudopsychology based on the observed orders of precedence among barnyard fowls, and on the famous Pavlov conditioned reflex experiments on dogs. He failed to note that human beings are neither dogs nor chickens." --Robert Heinlein, *The Roads Must Roll*.
...They are animals, though.
Strong agree: harsh punishments are pointlessly cruel, the important thing is that there *is* a punishment and it is immediate (even just 'you need to leave the dinner table if you yell'). I'm confident I'm a better parent of toddlers because I got to practice on my dog first.
The displeasure of the punishment still needs to exceed the benefit you get from the crime, though.
This is easy with three-year-olds (who generally don't get any actual benefit from their misbehaviour anyway) but not necessarily so easy with shoplifters -- if you get a night in jail every time you're caught, but you can get away with $5K worth of stuff on average for every time you get caught, then many people are willing to pay that price.
How are you getting away with that much if the punishments are consistent and swift?
"So how do we get police to fight crime?"
Division of labor.
In my neck of the woods we have a traffic police who are the only ones allowed to enforce traffic laws, a guard force that handles crowd control and patrols, precinct cops who patrol their neighborhood and investigate petty crimes and county police who investigate major crimes.
I feel the same way about solitary confinement, assuming there are books or something.
"You laugh, but this is exactly how our health care system works." (Scott's response to this comment: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prison-and-crime-much-more-than-you/comment/79254172)
As a non-American all I know about American health care is that it's really expensive. I don't understand the analogy of having high sticker prices to overcome some regulatory hurdle. Could someone please explain the analogy to me?
The idea is that hospitals (and pharmacies) assign an an outrageously high "sticker price", presumably as a bargaining tactic with the insurance companies, but at any rate it's one that almost no one pays: for anyone insured, the insurance companies cover most of it, and they pay sharply discounted rates. But if you DON'T have insurance, you're fucked. And hospitals don't even tell you how much you'll be billed for their services beforehand; some claim they don't know themselves until afterwards.
If you don't have insurance, they will bargain with you, too, offering a "cash discount", "self-pay discount", "uninsured discount", "charity care", or "financial assistance". Sometimes the price with the cash discount will be even less than insurance would pay, in part because it spares them the hassle of dealing with insurance.
Prices for all medical services in the U.S. are hilariously inflated due to a doom cycle nobody seems interested in fixing.
Take the birth of my daughter - in total we were billed around $60,000. That's obviously an insane number and we didn't pay anywhere near that. Our insurer "negotiated" this price down to $6,000 and we paid around $1,200 because we had 20% coinsurance. The $6,000 is the actual value of the procedure, the $60,000 is made up.
There is no requirement that we be insured though! So imagine that we weren't - insurance is generally provided through work, so maybe I work part-time and don't get benefits as nearly a third of Americans do. Well, with my part-time salary, insurance for me and my wife would be around $2,000 a month in my area, which I can't afford.
The hospital, by law, still has to help my wife deliver the baby despite our inability to pay. So imagine they do that, charge us the $6,000 actual value of the procedure, and send us a bill. We...won't pay it. Even if I wanted to I can't afford it. If you take me to court and garnish my wages you still won't ever get your money back. So now they need to raise the price to make up the money we won't ever pay. They'll get about 10% of the value from us (either because only one in ten people pay their bill or because we'll get a debt consolidator to get the amount to payable), so the price needs to be 10x the actual price to maintain profitability.
Except now we've really really screwed uninsured people. And as prices continue to rise due, ironically, to the fact that fewer people can actually pay, insurance must become more expensive, causing fewer people to be able to be insured.
It's a nonsense problem that could be solved by literally any intervention in price-setting at all, but alas, our federal government just does not work anymore, so this will never get fixed and we'll all go bankrupt paying for routine medical services I guess.
Part (but not all) of the issue is that Medicare/Medicaid (the latter for childbirth) require that they get billed the lowest rates offered to anyone. But then are only willing, generally, to pay at about the marginal cost of the procedure (a fraction of the billing rate, and not including the fixed costs). So private insurance has to get billed at least that much, but more generally enough more that after the negotiated discounts, the hospital can cover the fixed costs. This is why a lot of doctors don't take Medicaid. But obstetricians basically have to, since a large percentage of all births are only covered via Medicaid.
Keep in mind that El Salvador has a small population, ~6 million people. The large spikes pre-Bukele were driven by particular events, such as gang turf wars. In a country that size and given the size of MS 13 and Barrio 18, basically two criminal organizations could determine what your murder rate would be in a given year.
Until Bukele's crackdown.
My best Zany Scheme is to steal a page from regulations elsewhere and try to just mandate embarrassing disclosure. The entirety of the legal change is this:
Whenever someone has been arrested 10 times and no charges have been filed against them, the prosecutors' office must write up and make publicly available their explanation of why, for future reference.
Make sure to specify "resisting arrest" all by itself isn't enough to weasel out of that.
The comments are here are overwhelmingly focused on "street" crime.
As someone who deals with white collar crime, the reality is that prison is not a serious deterrent for them either - and the excuse of low IQ/low understanding of consequences is not applicable here.
What ACX types don't realize is that crime of all types - "street" vs "white collar" ultimately rest on the same foundations: the street crime types do it because they have nothing to lose - identical but different orientation with the "white collar" crime types who have too much to gain.
It is one thing to say that X boy or Y girl are criminals because they don't know any better - but the reality is that the broken homes and minimal opportunities open to these people mean that they might as well be criminals as not.
The white collar complement is the same: you can slave away as a middle manager or even a "regular" elite C-level executive, or you can take the chance to become REALLY rich and risk only a handful of years in a country club.
I expect that rehabilitation works much much worse for white-collar crimes, because you can't just educate them more about consequences of crime. In this respect, incapacitation works even better! You'll cut them from their money-making well and considering compound interest, it'll hurt them a lot. Although of course, just like blue collar crimes, consistent arrest is much more effective.
Most white collar crimes are not committed by PMC types. More typical is check fraud committed by people with sketchy employment histories.
Perhaps check fraud is white collar in your book, but white collar crime is committed by white collar people.
A lot of the check frauds are also not committed by individuals - those tend to get caught really fast. There are many groups out there engaged in this.
Not just my book. I was discussing this under a recent post here:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/friendly-and-hostile-analogies-for/comment/80331815
Your focus is on the numbers - and the numbers will always be on the little crimes.
The difference is that crimes involving the theft of millions and billions are basically impossible with regular crime.
White collar criminals in the upper tiers also have a powerful capability to whitewash their crimes - see Milken.
Nor is Milken the only example - you might be too young to remember the Savings and Loan crisis of the 1980s but you certainly are not too young to have missed the Global Financial Crisis of 2008.
Both were directly a function of systemic white collar crime; the former by Savings and Loan bank owners and the latter by mortgage issuers, mortgage ratings agencies and the institutions that repackaged this NINJA loans into securities for pension funds and what not to buy.
As is noted elsewhere - shitcoin crypto pump and dump schemes are another example of white collar crime as are the multi-level marketing pyramid schemes, the illegal price fixing collusion over internet messaging and all the other schemes by which the unscrupulous fleece suckers.
2008 was caused the Federal Reserve getting spooked by rising oil prices into thinking inflation was a threat. They started paying interest on excess reserves, an obviously deflationary action, because Ben Bernanke believed in a "credit channel" explanation of the Great Depression rather than a "monetary channel" one, and thought this would prevent banks from going under while also heading off inflation. Real estate prices have since headed back up to their prior peak, making the dip seem like the temporary aberration.
Bzzzt wrong.
2008 was caused by a massive control fraud extending from loan origination, to packaging of said loans into MBS's, to splitting of tranches which were then rated AAA.
Bear Stearns, Lehman etc were not taken down by the Fed - they were taken down because these were a couple of the bigger but less well capitalized players in that scam - who were left holding the bag on the pipeline of garbage when it became clear that these NINJA loan MBS's were a pile of shit.
Equally imaginative (and wrong) is your attempt to portray the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 as nothing more than a temporary blip.
As for real estate prices - between Biden's (and Trump 45s COVID era) massive money printing plus the addition of 5 million? 10 million? 20 million? more illegal immigrants into the US coupled with post GFC cessation of new building for a couple of years - it is not the least bit surprising that real estate prices have been going up recently.
Pray the AI bubble is not the scam that it almost certainly is - because the popping of that bubble means a situation on par with 1929. The US stock market cap is 70% of the entire world's stock market caps, put together - a little more and it will be in 1929 territory.
Is white collar crime, so narrowly defined, really a big problem? I'm sure it happens, and that it occasionally causes large financial losses somewhere, but I'm not concerned that it's going to happen to me, so it doesn't really affect my life.
If we waved a magic wand and eradicated all white collar crime then I don't think my life would change significantly, maybe certain prices would go down a bit? But if we waved a magic wand and eradicated all blue collar crime then life would be amazingly better.
Magically eliminating all white-collar crime would mean no subprime mortgage crisis, no crypto bros giving Effective Altruism a bad name, no landlords neglecting repair-and-maintenance obligations, no corporate espionage and counter-espionage making medical research inaccessible. Almost certainly no Trump. You're really sure that wouldn't change things?
the dollar amounts involved in white collar crime dwarf those involved in shoplifting
also, the great recession
As others correctly note: the amounts and social damage caused by the white collar criminals - specifically including those who have achieved the "none dare call it crime" category - dwarf those of the plebeian thieves and robbers.
A specific example: Bill Black's book: The Best Way To Rob A Bank Is To Own One.
White collar crime is a much better choice if you're intending to do crime. Likely much more profitable, and lesser penalties for getting caught.
https://tapas.io/episode/4115
While what you said is true - the real difference is that most white collar criminals are far more likely to be doing this out of greed as opposed to need, or ignorance, or idiocy.
This is second-hand knowledge as my best friend is a Sargent at a PD in Indiana. Mistakes are mine.
RE: Hard to hire cops;
1. Many departments have a soft-requirement for either a college degree or honorable discharge from military for people without experience, even if they don't list that on their hard requirements. Places without that soft-requirement pay less.
2. Multiple minor arrests for minor crimes or one arrest for a violent misdemeanor or any felony is essentially disqualifying. This is arrest, not conviction, and is enforced much more strictly than other blue-collar jobs
3. The reputational harm among communities of color and those with college degrees greatly narrows down the applicant pool. He has said that he knows many people who would be proud to have their children be doctors or nurses, but would steer them away from police work
4. At least where he is, factory and foundry jobs are readily available to anybody who can regularly show up on-time, in good health, and sober. Since the opioid crisis, competition for anyone who meets those three qualifications is quite high, and those places currently need to use overtime to meet their output goals, so are always hiring.
RE: Stop writing traffic tickets and go after actual crime
This isn't just beat-cops preferring to be in a car writing tickets to soccer moms: a performance metric used for evaluating beat cops is "number of civilian interactions." Showing up to a domestic dispute, defusing the situation and possibly transporting someone to be booked takes way more time than writing a speeding ticket, but both count as a single "interaction" so you get dinged on a performance review if you aren't spending 80% of your time running speed traps.
Speed traps are also a major source of catching people with open warrants, is my understanding.
It was great reading your selected comments. There's a lot of learning about a complex situation.
> Yeah, everyone I know with experience says that solitary confinement is torture, but I would naively expect to prefer it to normal prison. Maybe at least give prisoners the choice?
Also what we really want is just physical isolation, you can still let people speaking with each others with some interphones system or whatever, where they can speak with whoever they want, and as a bonus you can actually know what they are speaking about.
> I do think solitary might be more expensive
But why prison cost this much in the first place ?
Is the construction of the cells costing this much ? or is it the surveillance ? or something else ?
I wonder how much of it turns out to be medical care.
I don't know if anybody has pointed it out, but the estimates of cost of crime from that review study you used are laughably low. The "unquantifiable costs" you listed dwarf even the very large costs of keeping people in American prisons, and can be estimated from the size of the housing market. The total cost (opportunity cost? deadweight loss? not sure about the economese) of crime and public disorder in America is easily in the trillions per year, because much of what is spent on "homes in good school districts", tank-sized cars, time wasted on commuting, and so on - even part of helicopter parenting, not to mention loss of kids' experience of autonomy - is spent on avoiding crime and public disorder. American parents condemn themselves to years of hard labor behind the wheel just to move their kids around, when in a safe and orderly country Japanese first graders can ride the subway to school by their own selves without anyone raising an eyebrow much less calling CPS to report unaccompanied minors. All those extra mortgage payments and rent, opportunity costs of commuting, and so on, represent a huge deadweight loss for the economy. But few people discuss this, because it is not actionable due to well known political constraints (stemming from "optics") and merely turns their attention to tiresome subjects, which is depressing. Much more practical to put it out of one's mind and get in that minivan - the kids won't drive themselves to their minor league baseball, pole vaulting, charity kitchens and violin lessons, after all.
Indeed. This study, estimates the cost of crime in the US to be several trillion annually: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/715713.
And I'm guessing that that still underestimates the benefits of locking up criminals, as they're presumably tremendously overrepresented among those who generally cause non-criminal suffering to others.
E.g. retail has a reputation for being hell, due to working with abusive customers. I'd bet that these customers are disproportionately criminals.
Criminals seem to spend a lifetime terrorizing those around them, as illustrated here: https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1654363419951390722
And noted here: https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1766609835007889443.
Unfortunately the study you reference postdates the Sci-Hub cutoff ("thanks" Elsevier and co.) so I can't access it. Does it discuss home prices?
ETA: the abstract lists "indirect costs of private deterrence, fear and agony, and time lost to avoidance and recovery", so maybe it doesn't, which means that my seat-of-the-pants estimate may have to be increased by another order of magnitude. As they say, a trillion here, another trillion there, pretty soon we're talking real money...
I don't know. I ran into the same problem when I tried to read it in Sci-Hub!
Lmao. Hopefully some academic among SSC's readership can take a look.
People being paranoid morons occurs independently of actual crime rates, and stricter requirements around crime reporting would be far more effective (and no less authoritarian) in defeating this social malady
Japan is safe and orderly not because it has a uniquely harsh attitude towards crime (on the contrary, their law enforcement has a reputation for incompetence and only prosecuting sure things) but because it has one of the lowest rates of wealth inequality in the developed world and because its society doesn't normalize violence as a foreign policy; Imperial Japan was not known for its safety.
In your example, this assumes that there is a lot of public transportation capacity, which simply doesn’t seem to be often the case except in dense areas?
> In theory, one person needs an acre of land to support themselves through subsistence farming
Actually, it's more like 1/8th of an acre.
I think the confusion comes from 1 acre historically being the amount of land that 1 farmer can till in a day or something.
I was looking into this question out of curiosity the other day and didn't find any estimates that low, the lowest I found was about a quarter of an acre per person.
What can I plant on my eighth of an acre to get sufficient sustenance for the year? Is this perhaps an estimate based on the total caloric yield for the year rather than a balanced diet consistently available throughout the year?
If conditions are right, perhaps cannabis? You can then sell it to get what you need.
This is obviously something that depends on the local climate, soil conditions, presence of pests, use of fertilizer, and a million other things.
Yield per acre depends wildly on the soil, climate, and how you're farming it. You can feed a family from a small fraction of an acre if it's good land and you're tightly interplanting and constantly hand-tending it. Plowing the same land produces less food per acre, but more food per farmer. Also, tech level matters a lot. An acre of wheat in England yielded about seven bushels in the 16th century, but over 30 bushels in the early 20th century.
That seven bushels per acre works out 420 lbs, or about 1800 calories per day for one person. Which is in the right range for subsistence calories for a sedentary adult, but doesn't seem nearly enough for a hard-working peasant.
Scott is himself an angel for wading through the comments on the other post to pick out some gems. I feel like that post attracted an unusually low-quality comments section (for ACX), with the majority of the comments boiling down to, "I'm not really going to respond to all this complexity, and instead here's my still-uninformed, non-updated opinion".
I know comparisons to Scandinavian prison systems and their recidivism rates are flawed at best, but I still enjoyed the TV doc series Prison Project: Little Scandinavia a lot – just for the cultural contrast, which provides some kind of insight itself, even if it’s not hard data.
It follows a group of American corrections officers as they work three weeks in Norwegian prisons and then try to bring some of the practices back to their prison in Pennsylvania.
This extended trailer gives a sense, though is very short on the the prisoners’ own reactions and experiences compared to the series itself:
https://youtu.be/gTC1KI0STIY?si=v0QymfEjWVrX0c7_ If you can find the whole show, I recommend it for the entertainment value alone.
"Sure, there’s a lot of bureaucracy and nonsense and dealing with terrible people, but that’s also true of eg teaching, nursing, etc, and those are highly competitive."
There's terrible, and there's 'might get shot.'
There's terrible bureaucracy and nonsense, and there's 'the entire nation judging you for your most stressed decision ever.'
Police work is not really that dangerous. It's not even in the top 10, and most police officer deaths are from traffic crashes. If we can get people to work as garbage collectors, which is more dangerous than policing, then I don't think danger should be an obstacle to hiring police.
Danger isn't an obstacle to hiring police. It's our dismissal of the danger they feel that's hurting recruitment.
Police officers and garbage collectors have vastly different experiences of danger. Garbage collectors might be injured or killed in crashes, but policemen might get attacked. These are very different experiences of danger.
Police think of themselves as a thin blue line between civilization and utter chaos. They see themselves as heroically standing up to the worst so the rest can live their lives. They don't define their own jobs by the day-to-day. The sort of person that would make a good police officer has to view the most intense moments of policing as the core of their work. Someone who signed up because it's a decent job with good benefits isn't going to be much use to a department dealing with a breakdown of order or an active shooter. (Look at the police response in Uvalde and Parkland. In those two cases, there were officers who acted like normal people, because that's what they were. This wasn't what they'd signed up for.)
We don't need traffic cops. We need heroes, and heroes don't just want money. Heroes want songs and stories.
Police are attacked by their own choice in nearly all situations. Quit escalating the situation or treating people as inferiors. Feel free to retreat if needed, there is no legal requirement for you to engage.
We don't want heroes, we want competent professional bureaucrats who do their jobs in good faith, not cowboys.
Definitely. And as the majority in most major cities, you'll get what you want.
"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard." - H.L. Mencken
Well except you don't, you get incompetent lazy bureaucrats in uniform that spend all day harassing the public, zero customer service skills, sleeping in their in cars, sexual assaulting women and children while robbing men, and generally just acting like the criminals police general are while attempting to avoid pissing off anyone powerful enough to get them reprimanded and working just hard enough they can't get fired. We could only be so lucky if police on average were as competent as a garbage man, a DMV worker, or the guy filling in the pothole and that last guy is a pretty low bar given the quality of their work.
>"Feel free to retreat if needed, there is no legal requirement for you to engage."
There should be. Uvalde would've turned out much better if the cops loitering outside could've been punished for cowardice.
Nothing stops you from TERMINATING them for failure to perform but that isn't a legal duty; they can just resign on the spot and if not, get fired by the first manager on the scene if was unwarranted. Cops aren't Federal Title 10 employees with desertion laws, i.e. soldiers whom can legally and summarily be shot for retreating after ordered to go forward as much they like to pretend they are. Cops aren't cowards as a class, they are, and should be, simply treated as the municipal bureaucrat they are, no different nor more glamorous than the parks and rec employee that empties trash bins near the public bathrooms nor the human resources receptionist. People at Jiffy Lube wear uniforms too, that doesn't make them magical.
Uvalde was perfectly OK, per the US Supreme Court you have no individualized entitlement to police services. The police did what the should have, contained the suspect and isolated him from the GENERAL public while preventing a work force injury to themselves. At that point their responsibility is simply siege the suspect out while waiting on SWAT. SWAT may or may not decided to go in given their superior training and equipment but once again, if they don't, feel free to fire them in the same way you can fire a life guard who refuses to jump in the ocean to save a drowning kid; but you can't, nor should you, make it a CRIME, like it is for soldiers, to risk their life in a situation they aren't comfortable in their ability to succeed in.
You can claim cowardness all you want but society punishes heroes, Daniel Penny's verdict for example was a pure fluke, the overwhelming majority of the jury found him guilty and he will lose in the eventual future civil case. He's notable because he won, most heroes whom are prosecuted, and that's many of them, end up in prison and lose as reckless is nearly impossible to win after they are besmirched as as "vigilantes".
Uvalde happened not because of cowardness, it happened because the the local teacher and police unions refused let the school implement measures that would have serious minimized the danger of a school shooting. It's why schools are attacked, they are easy targets. That's on the public sector unions, not the "cowards".
SCOTUS was correct about current law, but the law is an ass.
With great power comes great responsibility, and cops have much more power than a parks & rec janitor et al.
> Police work is not really that dangerous.
And why do you think anyone cares about the data? All that matters in social issues is perception.
"There's terrible bureaucracy and nonsense, and there's 'the entire nation judging you for your most stressed decision ever.'"
I feel like medicine is also like this - write the wrong number on a prescription pad one time, and somebody dies, and you can get sued for everything you own. It's a little better because there's malpractice insurance, but this doesn't always work if you make a really bad mistake.
In an old essay of yours you made it sound even more like policing. You described fears of prescribing medications that have extremely rare side effects because of how ridiculous it would sound to a jury. In that case it sounded like doctors aren't just nervous about making mistakes. They're nervous about the masses not understanding why they did what they did.
I haven't read his post yet, but one problem with Performative Bafflement's position is that for the vast majority of departments, traffic tickets are most of the crime they face. The violent crime PB is worried about is extremely Pareto-skewed (as an example, per numbers from here, 6 cities alone are ~20% of all murders in the US).
https://usafacts.org/articles/which-cities-have-the-highest-murder-rates/
Re: @astralcodexten's comment about inability to hire cops, I think Scott's wrong about teachers and nurses, too-my understanding is both of those fields are desperate for people, as well (I know for nurses that they are offering lots of incentives for nurses from overseas to come here and work). Obviously at pretty good school districts/police departments where you can spend most of your time issuing traffic tickets the jobs are pretty competitive (not sure if it's similar ofr hospitals or not)...but also the problems in education/crime are in the areas where departments are hurting for people.
Re: hiring cops – specifically in France
Cops are generally known to be bullying jocks who like to prey on the weak. It turns out that this kind of people will also prey on the weak among themselves.
1) They have a terrible culture as seen from the inside, leading to a very fast turnover -> the people getting promoted for police chief don't have the experience or the shear age to be able to dominate that pack of wolves, so the internal problems aren't getting addressed, let alone the external problems.
2) In France, as in everywhere, the cops are majority right wing, but here they are the old school of racist where any black/arab man who attempts to become a cop will soon be harassed until they quit.
(I'm basing this from the testimony of flunk-outs so it will be biased, but I think it describes a reality)
"If the Buddhist angels are really mad (or, I suppose, sad/disappointed/victimized, since they’ve transcended anger), do they deserve to take out those feelings by inflicting arbitrary unbounded “retribution” on you? "
I get what you're saying, but I do think it's worth pointing out that retributive justice is not supposed to be unbounded or arbitrary. Our justice system is based on the idea that people should be punished in retribution for their crimes, but that punishment should be proportional to the crime. Which is why we don't lock people up for life for shoplifting, even though it would be an excellent deterrent: it would be punishment out of proportion to the crime.
A lot of people have turned against the idea of retribution being part of our justice system and want to focus on deterrence instead, but proportional retribution is kind of the foundation stone of our system: if you take it out, the rest doesn't make sense. For example, why does our system spend so much effort and make itself so inefficient in the name of preventing innocent people from being punished? We have all these rules about what kind of evidence can be admitted, we provide each accused person with a lawyer, we let people appeal convictions, but we don't let the system appeal acquittals, the whole idea of "innocent until proven guilty", all of these result in a lot of criminals going free who otherwise would be locked up. It really harms deterrence. And locking up innocent people arguably increases deterrence! The more people you know who have been locked up for crimes, the less eager you may be to try some crimes yourself, or get anywhere near criminal activity. Sure the innocent person suffers, but his suffering will have a strong deterring effect. Why not be like Japan, and have a 99% conviction rate? Why do we ever let exonorated people out of jail, that's just going to shake faith in the system!
Well, because innocent people do not *deserve* to be punished, while guilty people do. Even if punishing an innocent person would result in more deterrence, or even more utils overall, we don't do it because he didn't do anything to deserve punishment.
So I would object to unbounded punishment for any crime because it would be unjust, not because it is retributive punishment.
Yeah that part of the argument is flawed because of the assumption of infinite retribution. I can kinda see it though, if he read comments that do support infinite retribution too often (those comments that justifies prison rape for instance). And I can also see his point on arbitrary "average behavior", which if set to infinitely high, will result in infinite retribution. Though I think this is also flawed but I haven't thought of an argument yet.
Frankly, our current system isn't optimized for "justice" either. Because lets face it, how would anyone know if someone was falsely convicted? Well, if you got new evidence proving their innocence, you could try to overturn the guilty verdict... but there's nothing forcing the state to do that (unless it's incredibly blantant that they're innocent), nor do they have to allow people to have a second trial.
The very knowledge that the person was initially falsely convicted would reduce the public's trust in the justice system. That would reduce their feeling that society is just. It runs contrary to the interests of both the state and the public. What they don't know can't hurt them.
> And locking up innocent people arguably increases deterrence!
Changes the nature of it, though - eventually you're just deterring everyone, regardless of criminality, from letting themselves be noticed by the state at all.
What does it even mean for some amount of punishment to be "naturally" proportional to some amount of crime? Causes the same amount of suffering? I don't think that would work since it would imply a literal slap on the wrist for shoplifting. Or for example, if kidnapping puts a family through a week of terror, should kidnappers only go to prison for a week? If prison is 10x worse than worrying about your kidnapped family members, 10 weeks? This doesn't really seem to be how we think about things.
I feel like we all have some sort of vague idea in our heads that fifty years in prison would be "too much" for shoplifting, and five minutes would be "too little", but are we just quietly checking what we think the punishment system was like when we were kids and our prejudices were forming? Otherwise what does this even mean?
Figuring out the answer to that question is kind of the whole point of jurisprudence as a field of study and practice. It’s why judges are the ones with the most control over the amount of punishment. But beyond that what is or is not a just punishment is a moral question, determined by what the people making up society feel is right: which is why we have trials by juries of our peers, and not by professional inquisitors. C. S. Lewis writes on this subject in the essay “The Humanitarian Theory of Justice”:
“On the old view the problem of fixing the right sentence was a moral problem. Accordingly, the judge who did it was a person trained in jurisprudence; trained, that is, in a science which deals with rights and duties, and which, in origin at least, was consciously accepting guidance from the Law of Nature, and from Scripture. We must admit that in the actual penal code of most countries at most times these high originals were so much modified by local custom, class interests, and utilitarian concessions, as to be very imperfectly recognizable. But the code was never in principle, and not always in fact, beyond the control of the conscience of the society. And when (say, in eighteenth-century England) actual punishments conflicted too violently with the moral sense of the community, juries refused to convict and reform was finally brought about. This was possible because, so long as we are thinking in terms of Desert, the propriety of the penal code, being a moral question, is a question on which every man has the right to an opinion, not because he follows this or that profession, but because he is simply a man, a rational animal enjoying the Natural Light. But all this is changed when we drop the concept of Desert. The only two questions we may now ask about a punishment are whether it deters and whether it cures. But these are not questions on which anyone is entitled to have an opinion simply because he is a man. He is not entitled to an opinion even if, in addition to being a man, he should happen also to be a jurist, a Christian, and a moral theologian. For they are not question about principle but about matter of fact; and for such cuiquam in sua arte credendum. Only the expert ‘penologist’ (let barbarous things have barbarous names), in the light of previous experiment, can tell us what is likely to deter: only the psychotherapist can tell us what is likely to cure. It will be in vain for the rest of us, speaking simply as men, to say, ‘but this punishment is hideously unjust, hideously disproportionate to the criminal’s deserts’. The experts with perfect logic will reply, ‘but nobody was talking about deserts. No one was talking about punishment in your archaic vindictive sense of the word. Here are the statistics proving that this treatment deters. Here are the statistics proving that this other treatment cures. What is your trouble?”
I still think Lewis is just appealing to "well everyone knows what the deserts are", whereas I would expect everyone is working off their own personal prejudices, and a Muslim is as likely to feel intuitively deeply convinced that the just punishment for theft is amputation of the hand as a San Franciscan is convinced that it's a warning and referral to social services.
>What does it even mean for some amount of punishment to be "naturally" proportional to some amount of crime? Causes the same amount of suffering? I don't think that would work since it would imply a literal slap on the wrist for shoplifting. Or for example, if kidnapping puts a family through a week of terror, should kidnappers only go to prison for a week? If prison is 10x worse than worrying about your kidnapped family members, 10 weeks? This doesn't really seem to be how we think about things.
I've been thinking more about your point here, and I think I know what the problem is. Our criminal justice system is based on punishing criminals proportionate to their crime: however, that is not proportionate to the harm the crime causes but to how evil the crime was. That's why pre-meditated murder is punished more harshly than murders that were not planned, even though the damage caused is equivalent in both cases. It's also why if I kidnap you and lock you in my cellar for 24 hours I will be punished far worse than if I didn't know you were down there and accidently locked you in there for the same period of time: in fact, though the harm caused is equal the kidnapping is so evil a crime that it is punished severely while the accidental imprisonment isn't punished at all! Of course, I could still sue you in civil court if you accidently lock me in your cellar, but at that point we are actually looking at balancing out the harm caused: you pay me an amount roughly equivalent to the harm I suffered. Civil court does the weregild thing, but criminal court does retributive punishment.
Why is manslaughter punished less than murder one? Why is deliberately running over a child with your car punished more severely than running over one while drunk? Why is it that if I give my toddler a strawberry and I don't know they're allergic to it and they die I will not be punished, but if I knowlingly give my toddler rat poison and they die I will be? Because in each case one of the actions is more evil than the other, and *deserves* a harsher punishment.
>Well, because innocent people do not *deserve* to be punished, while guilty people do.
That's an excellent argument for the logic of retribution. Thanks, I'd never heard it before - and I once took a philosophy seminar on Theories of Justice. Is it original to you?
You’re not going to believe this, but I first heard about these ideas from C. S. Lewis, in his essay “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment”:
“When you punish a man in terrorem, make of him an ‘example’ to others, you are admittedly using him as a means to an end; someone else’s end. This, in itself, would be a very wicked thing to do. On the classical theory of Punishment it was of course justified on the ground that the man deserved it. That was assumed to be established before any question of ‘making him an example arose’ arose. You then, as the saying is, killed two birds with one stone; in the process of giving him what he deserved you set an example to others. But take away desert and the whole morality of the punishment disappears. Why, in Heaven’s name, am I to be sacrificed to the good of society in this way?—unless, of course, I deserve it.”
You can find the whole essay here: http://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/ResJud/1954/30.pdf
That's also an argument against taxes, which I'm pretty sure Lewis didn't think were evil.
As a citizen you have a duty to your country, just as you have a duty to your family (even though we choose neither). “Duty” is just the flip side of “deserve”: if I have a duty to pay taxes, then the government deserves that money.
Of course our duty to our country is not infinite, just as our duty to our family isn’t: but paying reasonable taxes, chosen by elected representatives, seems well within the bounds of our plausible duty as citizens.
Then why can't you argue that the criminal has a "duty" to be an example to others about the punishment for crimes?
Firstly, nobody can rightfully have a duty to do what is evil. Participating in a scheme to lie to your countrymen and punish the innocent is evil, so you can have no duty to do it. Just as your duty to your father does not give him the right to ask you to help him commit murder or rape.
Even if you set that aside, our duty to country is not infinite. Your duty to your country does not give your country the right to execute you; unless, of course, you did something to deserve it.
On policing: I was surprised when recently listening to the Good on Paper podcast to hear that apparently hiring 10-17 police marginal officers prevents one murder per year. The hose (Jerusalem Demsas) seemed to think that was a small effect, but it would correspond to maybe $1-2m per life saved. A lot more than GiveWell, but much less than the marginal healthcare expenditure. And that doesn't include all the other crime you would be preventing. And apperently results like these can be achieved by just posting officers on high crime localities.
You can listen or read the transcript here: https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2024/12/policing-crime-public-safety/680854/
But putting more police in high crime areas was considered racist.
I wish I was being facetious.
"'this WILL hurt a little but that MIGHT ruin your life.' And 'will' beats 'might' every time."
I wonder how much this attitude drives anti-vax sentiment. I might get and spread a terrible disease, but that's worth avoiding the guaranteed hassle and minor pain of getting a needle.
"but interestingly wife (135+ish, based off ACT score, STEM PhD from Ivy League uni) is closer to modal for this site."
Still blows my mind that people actually accept that the typical IQ here is really that high.
The brain might waive away those future possible risks in favor of immediate certain pain ig. This is the bedrock of lots of problems in organization and government.
I'd never considered before that anti-vax sentiment might come from just hating needles. Doesn't really seem likely to me given how well it correlates with other political positions.
anti-vax sentiment is better predicted by general distrust. Someone is going to put a foreign substance into your blood stream, with the only assurance that the FDA said it's fine.
If parents tell kids to eat vegetables and some do, while others don't, the characteristics of the two sets would probably correlate with personality traits and political positions, but that doesn't mean that kids' opposition to eating vegetables is driven by politics, rather than taste.
Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name,
Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven,
Give us this day our daily bread,
And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us
My best friend conspired with her GF to steal almost 10K from me. I managed to get a little over half of it back. I forgave them and we remain pals. People make mistakes. I never even considered like cutting them off or calling the police. Though of course I was more careful around them and have no been robbed since.
My sad seriously abused me growing up. Explicitly pointless physical violence was common. Deep into adulthood I would flinch whenever someone raised their hands near me because I was so used to getting slapped/hit in the face by my father. I forgave him too. Sadly he has died but I actually was pretty helpful to the guy in costly ways when at the end of his life.
I was more of a ruffian than most of this comment section in my youth. I had a tooth knocked out in a fight. One time someone cut me with a knife! I maybe deserved the lost tooth but I did nothing to deserve the slash. As you might expect I forgave everyone, did not even consider pressing charges, actually made sure to minimize the odds the people who hurt me got in legal trouble.
People make mistakes. I am not sentencing them to hell for it. Besides isn't this a Christian country. Jesus taught us to forgive those who hurt us. When asked how to pray Jesus taught the Lords prayer. How is any of this vengeance Christian.
Or perhaps justice should have nothing whatsoever to do with Christianity.
Perhaps you were conditioned during your early childhood to absolutely *know* that the nurturing and love you required would not be unaccompanied by abuse, and thus if you want to be loved, you must be tolerant of abuse.
What if Christian "forgiveness" is merely a useful institutional practice formalizing your deeply toxic intuitions?
My first name really is "Christina." I was thoroughly indoctrinated into - and deeply believed - what is arguably the wackiest and most dangerous Christian denomination, Christian Science. Once I got exposed to some rational arguments against the supernatural, I left it because its premise was demonstrably untrue and illogical.
So while I was physically harmed by religiously-motivated benign medical neglect, I was never abused by my parents, and Christian Science orthodoxy is that sin literally does not exist (thus "forgiveness" is a bit of a non sequitur). Thus I was never conditioned to tolerate the kind of abuses you suffer, nor to be attracted to the kind of people who would perpetuate such an abuse. I'm not *capable* of tolerating abuse, because I absolutely *know* that nurturing and love can only come from people who don't deliberately hurt you, and nothing good comes from thinking otherwise, especially not as a mandate from God.
> So how do we get police to fight crime?
Robin Hanson's proposal is that EVERY crime should be like a traffic ticket, generating revenue for the bounty-hunter that increases with the severity of the crime.
> I also don’t think it’s exactly right to say that incarceration only relocates (rather than prevents) crime. This may be true for murder and rape.
Not for murder. Lifespans increase for criminals when they're incaracerated, as the murder rate is much lower inside than outside. The tv show "Oz" was nothing like real life in that respect.
> Doesn't seem that relevant to me - even if we don’t get a singularity in the next few decades like I expect, we’ll probably get better genetic engineering or go multiplanetary
So I don't take it you don't agree with Hanson that our current most likely trajectory is technological regression due to declining population.
I think the society of Buddhist angels would remain that way by purging anyone who wasn't a Buddhist angel. Hopefully there's an analogue for Australia where mere mortal Jains can be sent.
On Sol's suggestion of penal colonies:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/consider-exilehtml
> Which is more likely - that a murderer settles down to do backbreaking farm labor, or that murder their neighbor and take their crops?
There won't be any crops if the farmers just get murdered. They'll have to work something out as stationary rather than roving bandits.
> Here’s an even more hare-brained scheme: if this would devolve into Haiti, why not skip the middleman and pay Haiti to take our prisoners directly? It probably couldn’t make them any worse-off, and they could use the money. It would be win-win!
That is basically the linked proposal, but not specific to Haiti. Their government basically collapsed, we want a country that's poor but with some state capacity.
On corporal punishment:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/in-favor-of-flogginghtml
> something public, sudden, and dramatic might have better deterrence properties!
A reason to bring back public execution. Although the downside is people might realize how rare executions are, which is a reason to execute a lot more murderers.
In retrospect, I should have said that retribution is a good in itself, rather than saying punishment is. Punishment is good if it provides an appropriate retribution for the wrong done. I didn't mean to imply that punishment can never go too far. It isn't right to shoot someone dead for carelessly scuffing your shoe, even if the law were to allow it. But a slap to the back of the head might be appropriate.
There are cases where punishment, even punishment that some would consider cruel or unproductive, is needed. Consider a truly heinous criminal (serial pedophile, torturer, etc., I will leave the details to your imagination.) Imagine that this person is caught, and after a few months of the lightest conceivable detention conditions, they are fully rehabilitated to the point that we can be certain they will never reoffend. In this case additional punishment would still be necessary. It would be morally outrageous to simply allow them to walk free without imposing more serious consequences. It would be an affront to our sense of justice.
I think people disregard the significance of retribution for two main reasons. Sometimes it is dismissed out of hand as being too old-fashioned or "uncivilized". I don't take this very seriously as an objection. What's fashionable can be morally incorrect.
Other times it is dismissed out of a firm commitment to utilitarian ethics where any additional suffering must always be calculated to reduce suffering/increase pleasure elsewhere. I respect this more, but I'm not a utilitarian so I think this is mistaken.
When we apply our moral judgement to more weighty scenarios most people do see value in retribution, whether begrudgingly or enthusiastically. In this case it is correct to trust our intuition. The fashionable rhetorical position that retribution is uncivilized tends to fall away in the face of a sufficiently offensive crime. The attempt to isolate some fundamental axiom, or some atomic "unit of good", that we can reason from is sometimes useful as a tool, but it should remain subordinate to our more fundamental moral instincts.
I think there's a small flaw in the thought experiment: if you could rehabilitate truly heinous criminals at little to no inconvenience suffered by anyone involved, presumably you could "rehabilitate" everyone pre-emptively and achieve the society of the buddhist angels. Or any kind of society really, because at that point you are God.
As such, I don't think the thought experiment has much traction in the real world in which we have to muddle through nasty tradeoffs. Nevertheless, I am inclined to agree. After all, I believe how we respond to moral infractions does shape the development of our moral characters, which is broader than just laws. Sometimes we can construct moral beliefs just sitting down and trying to logically derive them from axioms that seem self-evident, or allowing ourselves to be persuaded by an argument of this form, but for all people most of the time and most people all of the time it's a little bit of biological hard-wiring and a lot of looking and observing, specifically looking at reactions to one act of another. If the reaction to torture-rape-murder is what looks like a slap in the wrist, what is that going to do to people's moral development (see: historical societies in which rape, murder and enslavement were a-okay, at least on the proviso they were committed against "the other"/non-citizens/women/you wife/people you have enslaved - clearly people didn't derive the wrongness of murder/enslavement/rape from axioms and simply looked at what was deemed acceptable, and ultimately we moderns are the same people)? Indeed, I find that the reluctance of moderns to act and punish, regarding laws but also non-law social infractions, isn't good for people's individual moral development, even if "the sensible majority" with typical levels of executive function managed to avoid committing crimes of which they might be convicted. I don't know how you could possibly research this kind of question because there are so many confounders from urbanization and suburbanization to advancements in policing to secularization to regulation to advancements in moral philosophy, but that's my gestalt impression and if true, it seems like a bad thing.
Of course, there's the obvious counterargument that this effect of habituation in fact goes the other way: credible commitment to avoiding any cruelty (including retribution against crimes) fosters enlightenment values. But I counter that this seems like an empirically answerable question and what I see suggests my interpretation is right and the kind of utilitarian argument is of the ivory tower variety few people actually apply in their everyday lives. And indeed that reluctance to punish has much more at stake than exact severity of punishments for murderers and rapists who are, at the end of the day, pretty rare. Consider school (or work or any other form of) bullying for instance: the reluctance to punish (not necessarily with violent means: I would wager collective punishment for the bully's friends for instance would be effective, or isolating the bully from her friends by forcing them to redo the school grade) is effective permission for the bullies. I myself was bullied for years and on seventh grade I finally snapped, threw the bullies into the ground, and that was the last time I was ever bullied. Violence works! I would wager violence works even if you were a weaker student who'd lose rather than win the ensuing fight (if you bite and claw and go for the balls, it doesn't matter for the bully that it is you on the ground with your nose bleeding, it's still too risky)! But this kind of apprehension to do anything whatsoever that Actually Works, and telling children that it is Wrong to respond to violence with violence, literally gets bullied children dead.
Which ties back to the question of punishing criminals and retribution. If the literature review in the last thread established anything, it is that the primary effect of imprisonment within the subset of people who commit crimes and are caught and judged is in incapacitation: however, that leaves out the people who were already deterred by extant punishments, and if rape-torture-murder had slap in the wrist punishments, who knows, you might e.g. get a lot more incels trying to lose their virginity that way - we should not discount the effect of deterrence because people self-selected for being undeterred aren't deterred! As a matter of fact deterrence through harsh punishments likely is highly important in reducing crimes, which is the best case scenario, as this way there are no victims. I deeply suspect that extremely few people are insensitive to threat of punishments. Sometimes or often it is the certainty more so than severity itself. And then there's the option of corporal punishment that I believe is more vivid than uncertainty of imprisonment for a duration the brain cannot even comprehend and that the criminals often don't even know about (while I can readily believe that some of those unresponsive to prison sentences might get a vivid "noooo! I don't want to be caned!" reaction). But also, there's one more thing that makes people hurt, and that's social shame, often alleged to be a thing more fearful than death (after all, it is known that the shame of abandoning your comrades does in fact keep people in battle even in the face of imminent death). And tying up the second paragraph to this point, if it was the case that people by large thought rape-torture-murder wasn't such a big deal and an appropriate reaction would be a few week's treatment, well, now you've lost probably THE greatest deterrent. And on the other hand, if punishment was lax while the general population's views of the crime remained unchanged, that would do immense harm to perception of the justice system: after all, as FLWAB wrote in his post slightly above, proportionality is really important to our innate sense of justice and wicked crimes require harsh, proportional, punishments.
Immediately reminded me of https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2007-05-24
"There are cases where punishment, even punishment that some would consider cruel or unproductive, is needed. Consider a truly heinous criminal (serial pedophile, torturer, etc., I will leave the details to your imagination.) Imagine that this person is caught, and after a few months of the lightest conceivable detention conditions, they are fully rehabilitated to the point that we can be certain they will never reoffend. In this case additional punishment would still be necessary. It would be morally outrageous to simply allow them to walk free without imposing more serious consequences. It would be an affront to our sense of justice. "
Huh, this isn't obvious at all to me.
I accept that we may want to punish him to deter future pedophiles.
But in terms of his own - moral course? - I'm imagining that this person has had some kind of extraordinary experience where he sees Jesus or gets new brain connections or something and suddenly realizes that pedophilia is wrong, and maybe has his sex drive zapped into place so that it only refers to adults from then on. And if I imagine him suddenly regretting all of his past actions so much that he'll never do them again, the idea of also keeping him in jail for a long time for retribution no longer seems valuable to me.
But you do understand that his victims would still want to murder him, right? The point of the justice system is to serve as a "civilized" proxy for those people. So they can get revenge. Civilly.
In a universe where the predator can have a magical curative experience, surely there's also a magical cure for the trauma done to his victims.
In that case - if there's a magic spell that resets trauma for both parties to true zero - then why not let the perp go?
Because the person whose standards should be used to decide whether X brings them utility is the person who's affected, unless we have a specific reason to say "we want to ignore this person's standards". Most people with trauma would think it is terrible to have this magical cure, so you can't count the magical cure as utility-increasing.
It's really the same feeling that your great-grandmother had, just applied more broadly. Here's a few real-world examples:
There were many former Nazis caught hiding in South America late in life, decades after WWII. These people probably did not present any current threat, yet people were passionate about tracking them down and bringing them to justice.
The murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. (I won't take a position on this and don't want to derail the conversation, but I will note the reasoning of people who support the killer.) Supporters of the killing typically claim that the actions of the company were so evil and morally intolerable that violence against the CEO was warranted in response. Most recognize that it is unlikely to change the behavior of the company or improve the wellbeing of any specific person, yet they still feel that it was a moral good for the leader of the company to face retribution.
To take another shot at a hypothetical: Image that the heinous criminal, after years of inflicting violence and misery, is not caught but as they age they no longer feel compelled to cause harm. They don't feel particularly sorry, but they are no longer a danger and their crimes we never significantly publicized. It it okay for this person to go on and live a comfortable life, never facing consequences for their actions?
"So how do we get police to fight crime?"
1. Bust the unions
2. Fire the chiefs who don't get their closure rates up
3. Increase funding where needed to hire sufficient officers (for example it's fine that they do traffic stops, traffic should be safe too, so we may need more to handle the best)
> Fire the chiefs who don't get their closure rates up
I cannot predict exactly which unintended consequences this policy would give you, but I'm confident that they would be bad. "Closure rates" is a terrible metric to start Goodharting.
Ok, you could use a community survey and fire the chiefs who don't improve citizens' reports of policing quality, you could fire the ones who don't reduce reported crimes, fire the ones who don't reduce insurance premiums in their precincts, pick one of a dozen obvious metrics. If you hate them all you are anti-measuring things and there is a philosophical divide you and I won't be able to cross on the issue.
How about we implement the full court press ideal liberal Scandinavian rehabilitative justice system for X amount of times based on the crime, and at a certain point of reoffending, we just have an execution. Presumably, if the Scandinavian system, properly implemented, really does manage to reform most of the reformable, then this should catch all the fixable cases. After a point, the state just pays however much a lethal morphine dose costs and calls it a day. More cost-efficient than life imprisonment and possibly more humane. Personally, I'd rather OD than spend the rest of my life in ADX Florence. Figuring out when to throw up our hands would presumably be the challenge here. It seems like the Ted Bundys and Mansons of the world should just be killed without an attempt at reform, but I'm really not sure where you'd draw the line with petty criminals or the schizo drug zombies. X amount of public defecations or stolen shampoo bottles = death just doesn’t sound right. Maybe the penal colony idea has some merit. After the point of no return, you're offered the choice between execution or exile.
> After the point of no return, you're offered the choice between execution or exile.
Then most people choose exile, and your penal colony has ted bundy running around in it.
Execute Ted Bundy. Send the chronic shoplifters to the penal colony. (And because the really bad people have been executed, your penal colony has a chance to not be a total shithole)
> Sure, there’s a lot of bureaucracy and nonsense and dealing with terrible people, but that’s also true of eg teaching, nursing, etc, and those are highly competitive.
I feel like I've seen many articles recently which are worried about shortages in both nursing and teaching. And policing has the added factor that it's a red-coded job which is most needed in big blue-culture cities, so I wouldn't be surprised if potential cops just didn't want to live and work in such places.
"Why is it so hard to fill these positions?"
The danger, obviously. Vastly more danger than being a teacher or nurse.
As I wrote elsewhere in these comments:
Police work is not really that dangerous. It's not even in the top 10, and most police officer deaths are from traffic crashes. If we can get people to work as garbage collectors, which is more dangerous than policing, then I don't think danger should be an obstacle to hiring police.
Yes, but Scott's point was about status and respectability. All those more dangerous professions either pay a lot of are low status and not filled with the kinds of people you'd want to be cops.
Also, I suppose I should have said "perception of danger" as people are motivated by perceptions.
Someone on dsl points out that Bukele became mayor of the largest city, San Salvador, in 2015, and implemented anti-crime measures there, which seems to be correct; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayib_Bukele#Mayor_of_San_Salvador
Isn't writing traffic tickets a form of fighting crime? There are real risks to speeding, driving without a headlight, running stop signs or other traffic violations. It's reasonable for governments to spend resources discouraging these behaviors.
I mean yes, but if that's what police spend most of their resources in, it's out of whack.
>I would be curious to learn whether European countries really do have more street cops than the US, and, if so, why (given that the US has more crime). The data is from 2019, before the wave of “defund the police”, so that can’t be it.
Firstly, I think the causality backwards: while it's sort of true that "more crime" -> "more police" via the mechanism of "more incentive to hire police", it's much truer that "more police" -> "less crime", via the mechanism of policing.
Secondly, I think the main reason America has fewer police, and hence more crime, is obvious: it's a more right-wing culture, with lower taxes, and hence less purchasing power (not the same as "less money") to spend on police.
>Being an officer is respectable (liberals might yell at you, but it confers status in a way that eg retail or construction doesn’t)
Strongly disagree, though my impression is based on a major city with an extremely anti-police populace. The core problem is that crime is high in cities, and cities are mostly full of people who hate police officers--or at the very least, look down on it the same way that you might look down on a lobbyist for ExxonMobil or a marketer for Phillip Morris ("Delivering a Smoke-Free Future!"). Who wants a job where you deal with awfulness all day, then in your free time, are surrounded by people who despise you? At least the ExxonMobil employees can all move to Texas. Not sure what the cigarette people do. Cry all the way to the bank?
That leads to an interesting question: from a utilitarian perspective, what's the appropriate salary for cops? Seems like there's a similar marginal-dollar-value argument re: prisons.
> the people who mostly need to be deterred are frankly too stupid for that to work
I'm not sure I am buying this. For example, many criminals constantly need money. Either for drugs, or just because most of them don't have stable income jobs. Now, there are a lot of people walk around with money, and a lot of money are stored in seemingly easily accessible places - stores, bank tellers, etc. Why criminals aren't robbing those more often? I mean, some certainly do, but if the theory that criminals are totally incapable of being deterred due to their stupidity, they obviously should be robbing the first "soft" target they notice. However, most of them either don't do it or do it only when they are extremely sure they would not suffer the consequences. They can be wrong, but clearly there's some deterrent factor in play. In 2A-friendly places, this may be fear of being shot, but the pattern seems to hold in 2A-hostile places (and countries) too. This suggests that the criminals, at least to some measure, perceive the threat of punishment as a factor and are capable of being deterred by it. It can be argued how big the effect is, but I think flatly denying its existence does not match with the observed behavioral patterns.
"Either way, I think being exposed to intra-prison crimes is a small fraction of the badness of prison that doesn’t change that analysis much."
This seems false. If I imagine being imprisoned in the US, the number one thing I would be worried about is crimes committed against me by other inmates, and the number two thing I would be worried about is crimes committed against me by the guards.
Isn't a large root cause of the whole prison gang system that US prisons are so unsafe that criminals form little proto-societies with horrible tribal law enforcement in them just to survive?
This does not strike me as the kind of thing that would happen if crimes committed against you in prison weren't considered one of the most major downsides of prison.
Prison rape in particular is so widespread that referencing it has become a cultural cliche. When someone gets arrested on a tv show, people sometimes joke about or take satisfaction in the knowledge that they might get raped soon.
It's quite stunning the degree to which prison rape is accepted in society, despite still being nominally a crime. Violent rape can be a staple of comedy, as long as the victim wears an orange suit. I've seen it used as joke in cartoons Gor children.
> among other things they are very proactive about using what we wouldn't really consider due process, eg cops browsing facebook and like, going after guys that people post from their security camera footage as taking their bike or whatever
What's the due process problem with that supposed to be? It would be completely kosher for American cops. The problem with submitting a video of some guy stealing your bike to the police is that they won't investigate, not that they can't investigate.
I've spent months noodling with an essay confrontationally titled, "Being Smart Makes You Stupid About Stupid People," so I'm biased, but I'm pretty sure that @Blackshoe's comment is by far the most relevant here, and deserving of its own deep essay.
Because most ACX readers
simply.
don't.
get.
it.
They're so imaginative, analytical, and devoted to updating their priors that they simply *can't* stop imagining, analyzing, and updating their priors. Most ACX readers simply *can't* model what it's like to be unobservant, to be literally incapable of dispassionate self-reflection, and to never have a useful idea simply rise out of consciousness,.
Most critically, ACX readers can't seem to model what it's like to be a person who NEVER wonders if they might be wrong, much less what it's like to be incapable of making adaptations to become - ba-dum-dum! - less wrong.
And because ACX readers smart and naturally self-select into smart "bubbles" (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/02/different-worlds/), it's rare for them to be meaningfully exposed to stupid people they can observe.
I'm deliberately underemployed in a job low on the hospitality industry's totem pole. It has provided long-term exposure to people across socioeconomic classes and intellectual abilities. In particular, I spent *years* working closely with three low-IQ people, individuals who were only *just* intelligent enough to have a fairly simple job, and it took me years of witnessing them never, ever learning from their experiences before I finally accepted that they weren't merely under-educated or emotionally unbalanced, problems which might be corrected with enough intellectual resources.
No.
They were just...
...stupid.
Very literally too stupid to choose to do better. Too stupid for them to have any meaningful "choice" at all.
And these were stupid people who were just smart enough to be capable of keeping a job for multiple years! There's a whole bubble of people under them who are too stupid to see the advantages of keeping a job, much less actually manage to keep one.
Not all petty criminals are stupid, of course, but most of them are, and smart people attempting to gameify stupid people into thinking better is...well...
...stupid.
> Most ACX readers simply *can't* model what it's like to be unobservant, to be literally incapable of dispassionate self-reflection, and to never have a useful idea simply rise out of consciousness.
I think they're perfectly capable of that, actually. Most people here have interacted with animals before.
If I’m reading this right, I think the idea here is, animals get a free pass.
No, I'd argue that most ACX readers can't adequately model what it would be like to be an animal, either.
Or they'd flinch away from the very notion of comparing people to animals.
>Unfortunately solutions to this are probably unpalatable. Removing the gangs' power to commit violence and smuggle drugs would look like making conditions better and safer for prisoners (undesirable to the right), but would require large increases in funding for prisons alongside stricter security (undesirable to the left).
There are ways around the issues with the right - solitary confinement and/or execution for prison gang members likely wouldn't trigger an objection from them.
"I would be curious to learn whether European countries really do have more street cops than the US, and, if so, why (given that the US has more crime)."
Oh, come on! Next you'll wonder why Europe has better road infrastructure and stricter drivers exams, given that they have fewer traffic accidents. Or why the zoo has a high fence around their animals given that so few ever escape. :P
> My impression is that many are doomed from birth
How should we be thinking about criminals who are doomed from birth? Should we be finding policies to un-doom them? Or just accept that they are doomed and protect them (and us) from their worst instincts?
Or just let them bump along through life until they get sent to prison?
> Should we be finding policies to un-doom them?
I mean if we had something that worked, we should use it. The question is if there is anything short of serious genetic engineering that will do this.
If they can be identified early, as Scott says, they could be targeted with different interventions, and over time what things work could be figured out.
This has to be done secretly though. The government can't go around classifying people as too dumb to stay out of jail.
“ Probably they are genetically suited to some kind of hunter-gatherer tribe with strong kinship bonds and zero superstimuli; in modern society, they are totally doomed.”
Is this because there we more effective reinforcers in those societies?
Today, the delay between action and consequence is so great that it forces us to use system 2 to predict positive vs negative outcomes. Maybe if we had more prosocial reinforcement early in the lives of at risk kids (or adults) we could head off some of this behavior.
I found an interesting paper on this idea: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9517385/
Scott's premise just seems wrong: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-prison/comment/80913059.
The obvious explanation for El Salvador crime rates: they banned leaded gasoline in 1992 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead#:~:text=Dominican%20Republic%3A%201999-,El%20Salvador%3A%201992,-Guatemala%3A%201991). There's a 23 year lag from banning gasoline in 1992 to crime peaking in 2015, and 23 years is exactly the offset used in the graph of US lead-crime connection at https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-lead-crime-roundup-for-2018/
I'm not sure why it's obvious that banning lead gasoline would lead El Salvador's murder rate to drop by well over an order of magnitude down to near 0, when other countries that banned leaded gasoline and started with lower homicide rates than El Salvador still have higher homicide rates, now - that is, they experienced far less dramatic declines.
Cremieux also presents evidence that the apparent causal impacts of lead are largely the results of confounding: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/who-gets-exposed-to-lead and see: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1657856633811156992.
The lead-crime hypothesis is questioned here: https://medium.com/@tgof137/debunking-the-lead-crime-hypothesis-949e6fc2b0dc.
> I'm not sure why it's obvious
It struck me as obvious that if you have a big drop in crime you should check if they banned leaded gasoline a generation ago, and I claim that such explanations are obvious to a sufficiently SSCpilled reader (Scott has been writing about this for a decade now! https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biology-is-mutable/).
> other countries that banned leaded gasoline and started with lower homicide rates than El Salvador still have higher homicide rates
Even if banning leaded gasoline can't explain all the variance in "murder rates from high to low are [2015 El Salvador]>[2015 Honduras]>[2024 Honduras]>[2024 El Salvador]", it could easily be a factor and worthy of noticing. Simple model that could explain that ordering (i.e. I havent fact-checked this): if you're lead poisoned, you can't rationally respond to the incentives from tough-on-crime policies, and El Salvador always had really tough policies, but they only "took effect" when a non-lead-poisoned generation came of age.
My default is that we should all make a good faith effort to understand people who engage in dangerous behavior, in terms of whether we can understand some causes of that behavior, giving us the ability to moderate it. After all, if we really could change some social conditions and make it less likely that certain people will commit dangerous crimes, we would all benefit.
However, if this doesn't work or isn't working fast enough, we have to default then to protecting ourselves and the people we care about. If the only cost-effective option left is to punish them, then that's what I will endorse, because not doing anything feels wrong.
But I remain open to new arguments: I didn't know there was evidence that hiring an additional police officer was more cost-effective in most cases than lengthening sentences, now that I do know that, I would rather support it.
Note that my default is whatever most benefits me and the people I care about, moderated by the knowledge that to get any policy implemented, a group of us have to collaborate to the point that we form a plurality of voters, so I have to make concessions toward protecting them and the people they care about. Provided that we can trust each other not to be dangerous toward each other, this should work.
Robert Huben: Why not just lower the threshold for felonies instead?
Theodore Dalrymple -- yes, him -- observed that many violent criminals could keep to the straight and narrow in prison because of the punishment block. For further evidence toward the "catch 'em all" school being the best deterrent.
The bit about the motivation of criminals makes me think of the motivations of Donald Westlake's Dortmunder gang. They're fictional, but fiction can be interesting, whether it relates to reality or not, and I have no idea if the Dortmunder gang are anything like any real criminals.
Anyway, the Dortmunder gang certainly aren't impulsive or compulsive. They're not arrogant either, because they don't assume they're smarter than the cops, although usually they are. The possibility of being caught is always in their minds, and some of them are stated to have been imprisoned in the past. To them, crime is a job, sometimes even a tiresome workaday one, but they do it to get a living. It's just a risky job, and their acceptance of the risk reminds me of the attitude of test pilots and astronauts towards the deadly risk of their jobs. It's just something you know might happen, and you get on with it. (My reference is the memoirs of real astronauts like Michael Collins and Walter Schirra, not the exaggerated assumptions of invulnerability depicted in Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff.)
So.
1) A large fraction of crime is property crime.
2) A large fraction of criminals have 0 skills and 0 interest in hard work, but aren't actively evil.
This looks like something that could be solved with UBI or similar.
Set up something with cheap standards of living, a simple and comprehensible social order (0 paperwork on the inside), and low work requirements. (And the work that is done is stuff with direct self impact, ie cooking food for yourself.)
This fits with the prison island approach. But set up more as a cushy place for the people not cut out for modern society. All the brutal gang leaders are in high security.
"Our friend Joe from the Open Thread my intellectually get that he shouldn't murder someone for repeatedly taking fries off his plate (actual case Manning notes) and that he will be punished if he does so, but it will be very hard for that intellectual knowledge to kick in before he has killed the fry taker."
If I take this comment at face value, it makes me think the Flynn effect is a lot more "real" in this regard than I would have expected. By which I mean, could this be a significant part of why we used to give a lot more legal force to defenses and mitigating circumstance like fighting words, crimes of passion, and the like?
The cost of the monitoring device seems to be quite high and in the majority of states must be borne by the offender. Failure to pay fees may result in additional fees or jail time.
Perhaps it’s not a great trade-off for offenders.
https://finesandfeesjusticecenter.org/articles/electronic-monitoring-fees-a-50-state-survey-of-the-costs-assessed-to-people-on-e-supervision/
re: the final comment, there was an interesting inversion of expectations at the CA state prison I was briefly contracted at. The "maximum security" yards were mostly for inmates who were gang deconverts and other inmates who were especially at risk for abuse (eg child rapists), it would be a better understanding to say the extra security was -for the inmates-. The next-security-level-down yards were significantly more rowdier and riskier for conventional prison staff, and all of the worst individual inmates were generally in solitary confinement.
Performative Bafflement is completely wrong due to:
1. his assumption #4, that a full time police work week is 40 hours.
2. his treatment of traffic stops as fundamentally unrelated to criminal investigation.
1. Police are unionized employees who will fight tooth and nail to keep their overtime, which DOJ routinely notes is excessive and recommends that municipalities reduce, despite its own role in inflating overtime numbers by subsidizing drug investigations. It is one of the most significant perks of their job. Base pay is often low, but overtime pay not so much. Often 2x the base pay rate. Most police work significant overtime, and the biggest portions of that are narcotics investigations, followed by court appearances. Some overtime is also for processing arrests conducted near the end of their scheduled shift. And then some is actually not crime related, such as security for special events, or being flaggers at road construction sites.
I would guess the average police officer works about 60 hours a week, the 10th percentile works 40 hours a week, and the 90th percentile works 80 hours a week. If you want a more rigorous estimate, a lot of states/major cities (or their major newspapers after doing a FOIA request) publish employee pay data. You could cross reference that with their department's collective bargaining agreement to figure out how much people are actually working.
2. In the US, searches of someone's home (or their person under most circumstances), have to meet a higher constitutional bar than vehicle searches. So a lot of traffic stops are pretextual stops to allow them to conduct drug investigations/gun possession investigations.
The police are Goodhart's Law enjoyers. They get paid extra to investigate drugs, and if they don't have any hot leads good enough to get a warrant, traffic stops make it easier to investigate drugs.
We can debate whether criminal justice policy should go this far in favor of drug investigations at the expense of everything else, but PB's claim is clearly wrong because he has written off the majority of their criminal investigative time as not being used for criminal investigations.
Policing priorities vary between jurisdictions, so while this might be somewhat true in some places, for most urban areas today, this is inaccurate in several respects. It is true that police appreciate and take full advantage of overtime as a way to partially offset low base pay, but only a minority of police time, in both standard hours and OT, goes to drug enforcement.
Let’s start with misdemeanors. In most places you will find that about 2/3rds of cases filed are for DUI/DWI and assaults, particularly domestic violence assaults. The rest is a mix of petty thefts, criminal mischief, some low level drug possession, trespass, and other assorted things.
At the felony level, much more time is spent on murders/aggravated assaults, sex crimes (including child sex crimes), and robberies—particularly the increasing occurrence of what is sometimes called jugging, often perpetrated by low level criminal street gangs—than on drug possession cases.
Granted some time goes into drug enforcement, particularly manufacture and distribution, but I would point out that, more often than not, this comes up when police are investigating some other crime. If they see the drugs, they have to investigate that too. Don’t forget, most police are wearing body cameras now, so they face negative career consequences if they are found to be ignoring narcotics possession when it presents itself to them.
The overtime situation you describe is real, but it’s driven more by staffing shortages than by a desire to lock up people with substance abuse problems, provided at least that they are not committing other crimes to feed their habits.
No. I am speaking from experience here, not pulling shit out of my ass. Drug arrests are far more common that DUI arrests. The FBI's data says about 1.5x as common. https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/topic-pages/persons-arrested. You are being misled by criminal defense lawyers' ads. They want the DUIs because those are middle class clients who pay better than the drug cases do.
And the raw number of arrests doesn't really tell you the time spent. There's very little "investigation" of a DUI. Someone calls about an erratic driver, you stop them, give them field sobriety tests, a breathalyzer, then you arrest them when they fail. Or maybe you do a checkpoint and collect a whole bunch in one night. Same for a typical assault. Victim calls, you go to the scene, interview both parties, arrest the perp.
Meanwhile, doing a controlled buy from even a low-level street dealer requires you to identify the dealer via either surveillance of the area or talking to their customers, arrange for an informant or an undercover to pretend to be a legit buyer, prep them, figure out an appropriate area where you have line of sight to observe the sale, contact the dealer, give your guy cash and search him thoroughly to make sure he has no drugs on him, watch the sale, maybe even do this several times just to make sure you really have the guy. Usually you want to try to escalate it to a school zone so you get a mandatory minimum kicking in. Which means you do several sales in the dealer's preferred location(s) until he trusts your buyer enough to meet up where the buyer asks. All for one arrest. Going up the chain is even more complex because the next guy up isn't as stupid, as visible, or as expendable as the bottom guy.
Simple possession arrests come up mostly as a side effect of other crimes, but that is not at all the case for distribution.
I didn’t say you pulled anything out of your ass, just that I believe you are incorrect. Let’s use the numbers you cite. ~ 10M arrests in 2019, of which 1.5M were drug cases. The majority of those 1.5 are going to be simple possession cases, so something in the neighborhood of 5% of arrests are for drug dealers.
To your other point, about lengthy investigations, you have laid out the steps that would, in my experience (though I acknowledge this varies by location), typically go into a mid-level dealer’s case. Street level guys, of which most delivery cases are, are typically seen doing hand to hand transactions, stopped, and found with individual packaging for sale, a scale, large amount of cash, etc. It doesn’t take an inordinate amount of time. You are also underplaying the amount of time that goes into those other cases. The DUI refusal cases that require the cop to get a warrant, the scene investigation to rule out a self defense claim on shootings/agg assaults, and so on. That’s not to mention the hours and hours of body cam video that have to be watched after the arrest, community supervision while those other cases are on bond, etc.
Now, is the time put into those more involved drug investigations worth it? That’s a question that I think reasonable people might disagree on. But it’s no where close to the resource-sink your initial comment made it out to be. That was the only point I was trying to make.
The idea that El Salvador's recent success in getting homicides down is due to something that was solved in 2015 or that just reverted from in 2015 reads like speculating that there's some unobserved variable at play or a misunderstanding of regression to the mean (noted before, here: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1754983099241275749).
The idea that murder is now legal in El Salvador is totally false and hasn't even held up since the time the FP piece was published. There are no missing persons numbers to support a lot of hidden homicides, and every other number has continued to improve. For example, the number of police confrontation deaths was 120 in 2022, 38 in 2023, and has just been 3 through December 10th of this year. The projected homicide rate for 2024 (1.8 per 100k) uses the same measurement practices as it has since for a while now, and homicides are still down, regardless of whatever else people might (more or less credibly) claim should be included in those numbers.
Fun aside: There's data on the impacts of the formation of the gangs in El Salvador. They were bad for labor mobility: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1841203138608443708
Already cited you on this: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-prison/comment/80885876!
I know it's completely beside the point here, but Gaza was not an "open air prison." The Rafah crossing with Egypt was quite active, though Egypt demanded fees/bribes for using it.
So we, as a society, are giving cars an absolute priority of movement over large parts of our living space, with one small provision that the drivers can't use it to just outright murder someone, and the drivers' response is "Noo! That's being too kind! We should be able to murder people!"
The sheer entitlement, and the sheer toxicity of the mindset. No, you don't need to murder people who block your path. You can just turn around and drive away. If you can't drive away because other cars are blocking your path, well, maybe it's a good reminder of the externalities your hobby is pushing on all of us.
Which is to say, sorry, no, there is only one group here that's praying on the kindness of others here, and it's been going for so long that they don't even realize how kind we are being to them. (Which we are. I'm not normally going to begrudge some random driver and make his life harder, he's probably a regular person trying to go on with his life, who may have no other choice but to use the car because of how much we've organized our space around them. So I'm usually stepping aside, even on woonerfs, etc. But apparently they do need an occasional reminder that they're operating dangerous, deadly machines that would in any other case not be allowed to be used anywhere near people.)
Re:Salvador
Funnily enough, typical plot of "deaths from X / vaccine against X developed" looks a lot like this Salvador homicide plot. Imagine someone trying to spin it in a way like anti-Bukele quotes above.
Few years after 2015 it's just regression to the mean, as Cremieux says, then crime doing well below level expected for Central American country is a work of Bukele government.
I would recommend looking into Stanton Samenow, if you haven't already. He was a forensic psychologist whose work with criminals in the 70's caused him to begin identifying traits common among criminals, which he called "mistakes of thinking." He wasn't as interested in identifying why people became criminals, partly because so much of that field devolves into excusing criminal activity, partly because he found the same tendencies across backgrounds, income levels, and partly because the tendency for criminals to lie made that research rather difficult.
Samenow's ideas about a "criminal personality" relate most directly to Peter's comments, because being a police officer, and encountering people who bend or break the truth frequently, his story raised several red flags.
Now, is it possible that Peter's "friend" genuinely drove the speed limit in Texas, that speed limit was higher than the speed limit in Hawaii, and he was sent back to prison for that reason? I'm not particularly knowledgeable with the probation system in Hawaii, so I can't say those aren't the rules.
But would you consider this alternate story more, or less, likely? This friend, John Doe, drove in Texas, in excess of the speed limit. He was then pulled over by a Texas police officer, who, whether or not he chose to give a citation for speeding, ran his Hawaii driver's license. The probation officer sees John Doe has been run through NCIC, and contacts the Texas jurisdiction to find out why. The Texas Trooper emails back to say "yes, I pulled him over in a rental car driving 17 mph above the speed limit." Once John Doe returns to Hawaii, he meets back with his PO, who gives him two opportunities to come clean regarding the encounter. So he goes to jail for breaking the law in Texas, then lying about it to his probation officer (again). But because he's a criminal, he immediately convinces himself that all of this only happened because the entire system is determined to get him, and adjusts his story to match this.
Then consider that a quick google search identifies that despite the stereotypes, Texas only has one 41 mile stretch of highway with a posted speed limit of 85mph.
Regarding Performative Bafflement's post...that man knows less about policing than my pit bull.
I would love to see a more concrete objection.
My proposal wasn't as well written as the ones you shared, but I think it deserves another look:
For the 300 shoplifters problem: when the bottleneck is the court capacity to process and not prison capacity to put 300 extra people, just merge the cases into a single one. There's for sure some people these lifters are selling their wares to, and that makes it organised crime, which can be prosecuted as a single case rather than 300 separate ones. Also, it carries way more penalty so would be more deterring.
Except that makes the single case much more complicated.
There's a reason no one does RICO cases anymore - they're more or less impossible to prove.
About the only place where bundling cases works is suing for class actions, and that's because there's a lot of money from the tobacco lawyers pushing to make class actions easier. Even then, they mostly don't go to trial, they end up in a settlement. I.e. "nice thing you've got here; shame if something were to happen to it..."
That's up to the courts though, right? They can just as well say "well you 300 stole all this merchandise, and passed more than half of that to those 10 brokers so we count this as a single organized crime case, and 20 years to you all take care goodbye". What does something being impossible to prove mean when the reform we're suggesting is to the organization which decides if something is proven or not? Do this once, and get it rid of the sticky shoplifting issue for good.
I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that the judge takes the evidence before him. He doesn't go out and collect evidence, or make arguments. He may ask questions of the lawyers representing the two sides, but his role is a judge.
So it's up to the prosecutor to say "We want to bundle these cases because they're related. Here's the arguments, and here is the applicable case law."
And the other side gives their arguments as to why they shouldn't be bundled, because they're different actors doing different things, then the judge decides.
The prosecutor has to provide evidence that they're organized and controlled. For suing a company, it's easier because they're organized for their legitimate activity, so the prosecution has to show that this extends into the illegitimate activity being tried.
A thief is not guilty of organized crime if he steals something, not even if he sells it to a fence. Not even if he does it multiple times.
For it to be organized (again not a lawyer, it's probably more complicated) the fence and the thieves would have to be organized to all steal something from the same place at the same time, or a pattern of same.
The fence is on the hook for receiving stolen goods for the multiple times, but he's not guilty of organized crime unless he's actually organizing it. If he were doing something like setting up those fantasy "thieves guild", where you parcel out who's going to steal from where and taking a cut, and you can get evidence of that, that is (I think) organized.
Maybe there need to be changes in the law to make this easier to prosecute. I don't know. Though if the law is badly written you could end up with a grandstanding prosecutor going after unpopular people and companies for it. We have enough of that already.
I understand what you mean, and you're right, but my point is different. If the justice system says milk is black, then milk *will* be black. If they say this is organized and send them to the jail for organized, and the upper courts don't overturn the case, then it *will* be organized. The rules are not something unchangeable like God's laws coming from the heavens, it's whatever suits the society. If putting them away without putting strain on the court system is what's good, then that can simply be done. Maybe the judges in question need some favors for something, maybe there is a stick that can be used instead of a carrot, maybe they just believe in the solution, maybe the parliament changes the law; it doesn't matter.
There's a coordination problem there. Judges use precedence because it helps to keep judgements in line with previous ones, which helps people accept them as legitimate.
Changing things that drastically makes it much more likely that other judges and the public are going to say "That judge is making illegitimate decisions."
That way lies actual impeachment etc.
Having said that, there's are ways that judges can change the rules without changing them as such.
- new laws
- new regulations that the judge recognizes (in the US the Chevron deference precedent has been overruled, but this depends on below).
- the judge can effectively say "This case looks like that other case over there, but it's actually different for these reasons. Therefore I'm ruling the other way on this one." Which is setting a new precedent. It changes that case; whether other cases also change depends on how reasonable that ruling is seen etc.
Law is meant to change slowly at most. Yeah, you hear of cases that "change things" - Chevron, the abortion thing, the second amendment cases. Those are often things that haven't been heard at that level before, or they're overruling judgments that were controversial to start with. And they're generally pretty minimal in what changes they make.
E.g. overturning Chevron didn't say "Ignore the agency" it just said "The agency doesn't have the last word on what's reasonable".
The abortion thing didn't say "Abortion's illegal" it just said "It's not actually a federal matter". Which just reversed the previous case which said "yes it is a federal matter".
The second amendment cases said a) the second amendment is a real amendment like the others and b) it applies to the states like the other amendments do. That took two cases, not one.
But the stick and the carrot, as you say, would be new laws. New laws can render old precedents irrelevant. For example, any precedents about the disposition of slaves or indentured servants (similar but different) became irrelevant once the 13th amendment was passed.
Maybe the root cause is this very slow changing nature prevents from creating solutions? After all, criminals can change their methods quite fast. I come from a country where things change too fast, and that doesn't feel like a stable place to live or do any business, but the way USA (or EU) works might be too slow for efficiency. There needs to be a Goldilocks legal change speed somewhere but I'm not qualified enough to give any examples to it.
> idk about the statistics but multiple people I talked to in el salvador specifically told me theft was WAY down
I flew back yesterday from a company retreat in El Salvador, and had a long conversation with a colleague who's lived there his whole life about the recent downturn change in crime. I unfortunately didn't ask for exact dates of things for the reverse causation question, but can confirm that local sentiment is that theft and pretty much all other crimes are way down.
Cops didn't seem more abundant than in the US, but did seem more vigilant - e.g. walking around the street in pairs rather than just sitting in their cars like in the US.
Re: traffic tickets, I would be really really really reeeeeally hesitant to advocate for *less* traffic enforcement as a magic bullet to reduce crime in the year of our Lord 2024. In my city, part of the perception of widespread disorder stems from a sense* of "traffic anarchy" that began during the lockdowns and never abated, with drivers openly speeding, blowing stop signs, doing donuts, driving with lights out at night, and so on (and the obnoxious exhaust systems on the muscle cars every dipshit now owns don't help). And apparently whatever law formally exists requiring motorcycles to be registered and plated hasn't been enforced here since 2020 either. I put it to you that this doesn't exactly argue for yet another wave of official "eh, just do what you want with your 4,000 pound death machines, it's fine" policy in US cities.
*And it's not just a sense--traffic and pedestrian deaths are up noticeably.
I remember reading a post and the comments at, I think, "Noahpinion", discussing the ~30% increase in traffic fatalaties starting in 2020, especially pedestrian fatalaties, and the puzzling fact that African-Americans neighborhoods were hardest hit, and the effect was still persisting there.
The commenters had a few theories, but they mostly were just irresponsible projections of their own lives and behavior. "More Homeless In The Street" was a popular idea. (*) "Texting While Driving" had everybody nodding in agreement. "Huge Gas-Guzzling Selfish Trucks" -- of course.
Nobody considered that in June 2020, every metro Police Department publicly accounced they would no longer pull over Black drivers. Maybe not enforcing basic traffic laws, especially in certain areas or for certain people, might lead to people driving recklessly all the time?
BR
* - (Possibly valid, I can attest that my closest call in ~20 years was almost running over a homeless man at 6am who was wandering in the street covered in a filthy gray blanket the EXACT color of the pavement.)
> "More Homeless In The Street" was a popular idea
Almost certainly a contributor. There are, very obviously, more homeless people in the street. There are also, very very very obviously, more mentally disturbed people walking on the freeway, especially at night, which really sets them up to be hit by drivers who don't see them in time.
>"Texting While Driving" had everybody nodding in agreement.
As well it should have--there are, very very very very very very very very very obviously, a lot of people looking at screens instead of the road. You can see them every time you go out driving. They are incredibly easy to spot: like drunks, they wander out of their lane constantly, but unlike drunks, the sound of your horn suddenly restores to them the proprioception, reaction time, and visual processing needed to keep a car properly positioned in traffic
Of course, this didn't start in 2020, but it sure seems to have gotten worse. Whether the social and economic changes post-2020 accelerated it I don't know. I wouldn't be surprised.
>"Huge Gas-Guzzling Selfish Trucks" -- of course.
The amount of gas they guzzle doesn't enter into it, but they are difficult to drive properly, which wouldn't be a problem if there were any selection mechanism at all, formal or informal, to prevent bad drivers from driving them, as there mostly is for other large vehicles. It's not a huge stretch to imagine that a rise in the number of gigantic vehicles with limited visibility (especially of pedestrians and cyclists) might cause a slight uptick in traffic injuries and fatalities.
I certainly don't think it's the main reason, though.
>Nobody considered that in June 2020, every metro Police Department publicly accounced they would no longer pull over Black drivers. Maybe not enforcing basic traffic laws, especially in certain areas or for certain people, might lead to people driving recklessly all the time?
You should consider the possibility that they considered this possibility and rejected it based on what their eyes are telling them. First of all, "every metro Police Department" did no such thing, as anybody who used their eyes to pay attention to the news is already aware. More to the point, people's eyes can quite often contribute to identifying the ethnicity of drivers whom they see openly flouting traffic laws. I myself have found my own eyes useful for this.
My eyes, in the greater Los Angeles area, tell me that the drivers who have been behaving anarchically with no apparent fear of consequences are mostly not black. In cars, Blacks are a substantial minority, but they are a minority. Latinos are heavily represented. Whites are, I would guess, a little underrepresented relative to the population. Asians are actually somewhat overrepresented. On those obnoxious unregistered mini-motorcycles and ATVs, whites and Latinos are overrepresented, blacks are relatively rare, and I have yet to see a single identifiable Asian person riding one.
I think it's safe to assume that if the various police agencies in Southern California had decided to let black people do whatever they want while devoting even half of their pre-2020 efforts to traffic enforcement for non-blacks, non-blacks would have quickly discovered that it's not worth the risk to brazenly drive over 100 MPH, blow stop signs and traffic lights, and ride unregistered motorcycles wherever and whenever they please, while blacks would have learned the opposite lesson, leading to a very noticeable overrepresentation of blacks among the visibly feral and reckless drivers that some of us see every day. That this hasn't occurred militates pretty strongly against the "police are too nice to blacks" explanation for the changes on the streets post-pandemic.
You're likely on the right track, though, minus the gratuitous generic anti-woke narrative bit. A sharp reduction in traffic enforcement, *for any reason known or unknown*, does seem to lead to more dangerous streets!
My observation is that the median driver is generally about as good (or bad) as before COVID. But the bottom end is much worse.
Unfortunately the bottom end is what causes collisions.
I don't call them "accidents" any more since at least one driver is negligent in all cases. Thus, not an accident.
I will maintain my previous take that eventually the resolution you get is most American cities will severely ghettoize (to a much greater extent than is already the case) with a heavy police presence outside of the ghetto. You will have concentrations of underpoliced violence, poverty, and crime concentrated in the parts of cities that are geographically easy to avoid, and you will have heavy police profiling when the 'wrong type' begin to migrate out from these areas. Public transit will mostly be rerouted to not service these areas. Fairly strict laws regarding public order will get passed and mostly go unenforced in these areas. Most homeless shelters or other services for the poor will get moved to these areas.
The underlying problem is that a big segment of the American population is not intelligent enough to 'get' morals, and a big segment of the American population has severe and untreatable mental illnesses. Even if you could reduce crime, do you really want these people working at a retail store your kids go to? Serving you food?
Some more novel ideas:
- break prison gangs by shuffling all prisoners between large prison networks every 3 months
- could we try giving prisoners magic mushrooms? I hear that changes people's brains for the better
- ozempic helps with many harmful behaviours like addictions we've heard, could it help low-impulse crime-adjacent people curb their impulses?
"shuffling all prisoners between large prison networks every 3 months"
This might work if you could be confident that all prisoners would be shuffled, and the shuffling would be random.
However, there are limits to the ability to shuffle - they already limit who goes where because gangs are racially based.
The other possible downside is that after a few shuffles you end up with gangs that are distributed over the entire prison system instead of gangs based in one prison, and the shuffling process allows them to communicate.
Regarding penal colonies, there is a pretty big difference between the Australian model and the Gaza / Haiti model you speculate about. Convicts deported to Australia were not left to their own devices to govern themselves, they were firmly under the authority of the British government as represented by a civilian governor and military presence. There was even an additional recursive penal colony within the Australian penal colony to deport people who reoffended to.
the el Salvador graph is untrue.
murder numbers went down sharply after the crackdown started (late March 2022)
there was a reduction from 2015 to early 2022. but lots of reduction after the crackdown
either the low resolution graph was done in a very misleading way, or they literally lied. hard to know from the very low resolution graph that cannot be used to judge this question
In reply to Scott's question, "Why is it so hard to fill these positions? Sure, there's a lot of bureaucracy and nonsense and dealing with terrible people, but that's also true of eg teaching, nursing, etc..." Those jobs are nothing like policing. Yes, teachers have to deal with overbearing and unreasonable parents but, just to name one difference, teaching or nursing are not careers where you would expect to routinely encounter real, physical violence. I think of it this way: there is no other job where, one day, you are forced to enter into physical combat with someone who may be much larger than you and may or may not be armed--you get to find out in real time, surprise!--and the next day you may have to sit on the witness stand and do mental combat with a highly-skilled and capable defense attorney, armed with the benefit of hindsight, whose goal is to pick apart everything you did on a case that you may have worked years ago. And even if you do not testify all that often, all of your work is scrutinized by lawyers that have those same resources and advantages. That is not a common skill set and persons that can do both well are harder to find than persons that can, e.g., teach grade school math.
With regard to the last bit, about reducing gang power, one things I've heard is that bigger prisons give more power to gangs. Is there any evidence on having more smaller prisons reducing crime compared to fewer big prisons? Can prisons be big but separate gang prisoners from non gang?
I don't know what any of that means. There was a housing bubble in the years before the 2008 debt crisis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s_United_States_housing_bubble) but prices were already declining in 2006, before the crisis. Thus, probably connected in many ways, but two distinguishable things.
Regarding penal colonies: I can't believe nobody has yet mentioned the 1981 cult classic Escape From New York, set in the "near future" of 1997:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_from_New_York
Campy action flick and insightful social commentary, rolled into one. Don't forget the 1996 sequel, Escape From LA.
European cities are a lot denser than US cities, so the same number of beat cops would cover a much higher population.
> Being an officer is respectable (liberals might yell at you, but it confers status in a way that eg retail or construction doesn’t), doesn’t have a lot of prereqs, and has good room for advancement. Why is it so hard to fill these positions? Sure, there’s a lot of bureaucracy and nonsense and dealing with terrible people, but that’s also true of eg teaching, nursing, etc, and those are highly competitive.
I think realistically, cop at the very least "feels" like a more dangerous job than those alternatives. You usually don't find yourself in shoot-outs as a nurse. And there's also a bad complementary situation here with political perceptions. One side is suspicious of cops (or downright hates them); the other side however is paranoid about criminals. So one side is deterred by morality and in-group status considerations, and the other is more vulnerable to fearing the job as too dangerous (possibly overestimating said dangers). If you admire the cops as fearless heroes facing unhinged madmen all day long it's all the easier to just decide that it's cool that they can do it, but it's not the job for you. The additional 5% in salary might not be motivation enough to risk it. For example, how much money would you have to pay the average peaceful suburban dweller that hates trouble of all sorts to persuade them to be deployed to a warzone?