The current focus on thoughtcrime imprisonment, particularly in the UK, where violent habitual offenders are being released to make room for those who posted mean tweets, will have some very interesting effects.
In "A Clockwork Orange," the Home Secretary explains that they need to let violent criminals like Alex out to make room for the new political prisoners.
Wasn't there the implication that the party that tried the Ludovico Technique ('rehabilitation') was Labor, and the one that let him out was the Tories (the politician's kind of conservatively dressed)?
If so it would be a funny comment on who's into censorship over 60 years.
That will be a no, then. It's also straight nonsense that people are being imprisoned for "mean tweets". Musk has been ploughing this unfortunate furrow.
Okay, so if I find you a story of a person who was arrested for "mean tweets," would you admit you are wrong? I expect what you will do instead is say either that it's very few people, or that if their tweets were illegal (labeled "hate speech", "incitement" or whatever), then them being imprisoned is GOOD actually.
Malicious Communications Act 1988, Communications Act 2003, Harassment Act 1997 all play a role, and the Online Safety Act is icing on the cake but seems not technically enforced yet?
I agree there is no law that uses the phrase "mean tweets." Or even specifically criminalizing tweets in particular instead of "online communications" more broadly. Is that your claim?
Otherwise, see the Online Safety Act of 2023, for a particularly recent and well-publicized example.
The Online Safety Act appears not to criminalize mean tweets. The closest thing seems to be making it an offense for X to not try hard to prevent children from being subject to harmful bullying via tweets. To me that's a different thing entirely, but if that's what you're referring to then we're down to semantics. Or if I'm wrong in my reading of the Act, let me know.
The problem here is not there is no law making tweets criminal - tweets are a form of communication, so they're subject to the same laws as any other communication, it's the word "mean".
The UK has a notably broader definition of promoting violence (or "violent hatred", which is what things like "incitement to racial hatred" means when you look at the elements of the offense rather than just the name) than the US. In the US, only a "true threat" can be criminal. In the UK, the standard is "would a person who you could reasonably expect to read the communication be more likely to commit violence"
So in a racist case: would a violent racist be more likely to be violent against non-white people as a result of reading your racist tweet? If so, that tweet is criminal unless you can show that you wouldn't reasonably expect a violent racist to see it. Note that negative inspiration (ie an anti-racist posting things that annoy racists into violence) doesn't count. Obviously an anti-racist posting things that inspire other anti-racists into violence against white people does qualify.
Does that constitute "mean", or is it more in the "violent rhetoric" category?
I'm aware that a disturbing number of people are being questioned by police, arrested, or even prosecuted over tweets and posts in the UK. But none of the cases I am aware of led to actual *imprisonment*, as far as I know.
And umpteen bajillion stories of people getting police visits for the radically Orwellian “non crime hate incidents,” but I’ll leave that googling to you.
I’m pretty sure it was the UK, where I read about an old Jewish dude who likes to haunt anti-Israel protests. He hadn’t done anything much, so as to say, but he made the mistake of looking thoroughly Jewish, apparently.
So “mean tweets” has a physical manifestation. Seen deets?
People who end up in prison tend to have very high time preference. That seems to me like the probable reason that adding more time to an already long sentence will have a very weak deterrent effect. Think about it this way: does the kind of person who would get convicted of two felonies and then go back out and consider committing a third felony seem like someone whose decision-making is driven by what happens to him five years from now?
It takes a long time, lots of support, and most importantly of all, willingness. Some people *do* want to do better, but don't know how/need a ton of help. I have sympathy for them, they often came out of circumstances that were chaotic, they slipped through cracks, and if they get help they will be grateful for it.
And some people, with all the help from all the bleeding hearts in the world, will never change because they have nothing but contempt for ordinary people with ordinary lives and the mores of ordinary society. I have no sympathy for them and no "oh no if they have to spend ten years in jail it will interfere with their enjoyment of life" cares.
Historically, the approach was rather the opposite, with frequent and aggressive use of the death penalty for offenses that we wouldn't today think merit it - that's actually the root meaning of "felony" - a crime subject to the death penalty. And the spectacle and ritual around public executions and torturings had social control functions as well.
I think at least part of the reason for this is that certain types of crime represent an economic niche that *somebody* is going to fill, and it's typically going to be people with the least to lose.
That is true of supplying various vices, but not of normal crimes with victims. There's not an economic niche needing to be filled for people stealing cars, burgling houses, or mugging little old ladies.
If true, this suggests corporal punishment would have a much more significant deterrence effect, since it's delivered all at once in the immediate future. (It likely won't have the incapacitation effect, because it doesn't take that long to heal from lashes.)
FWIW, pickpockets used to operate in the crowd that gathered to watch convicted pickpockets have their hand chopped off. (I think that was Dickens, but it's probably true.)
Sure, because the spectacle of public punishment would have been one of the largest and most crowded reliably-scheduled gatherings of multiple classes on offer at the time - too good a target to pass up.
You're misremembering your history. Pickpockets were sometimes publicly hanged, as stealing enough handkerchiefs could be a capital offence (though many would have had the sentence commuted), but even 100 years earlier than Dicken's time, amputating hands had long since fallen out of use as a punishment.
OTOH, hanging doesn't detract from the main point. Awareness of severe penalties does not, in itself, act as a strong deterrent. You need to combine that with an expectation of being caught , and if you do that you don't need the *severe* penalty. It just has to be more than "the cost of doing business".
I agree with all that. I think another relevant factor with the pickpocket example is that income inequality was pretty vast, such that minor theft could be very profitable, and many people lived in conditions of great immiseration so compared to starvation or the workhouse, it could be a better option even considering the risks.
Yeah, I think the Gary Becker model of rational crime runs aground on the limited mentality of most criminals. Bad outcomes far in the future are heavily discounted, and most people (let alone the criminal class, who are on average a lot less smart than the rest of the population) round low probabilities to zero in their heads.
That kind of raises a point about whether there's a huge block of "missing deterrence," where accountants' and HR managers' crime sprees are completely prevented by the level of incarceration we have now.
Unless you're talking about white collar crime sprees, those would be prevented in most cases even by a much lower level of deterrence. Those people have something to lose (namely, a decent career) so even a modest risk of an arrest record will outweigh any economic benefit of property crime.
Yeah, I think at least for lunkhead street crime, if the dude committing the crime was thinking a lot about where his current choices would leave him in ten years, he would be on an entirely different life path. That kind of crime selects for people who are giving *very little* weight to possible bad outcomes a decade or more in the future.
Seems like the only real solution is for society to develop a parallel informal justice system based on the intuition that any method of clear self-defense of property and/or body is justified and allowable. Shoplifting rates would drop precipitously if there was a very good chance of being whacked with a baseball bat or even shot by a shopkeeper. Vehicle theft would probably stop if there was an excellent chance of painful booby-trapping. Etc.
The standard advice in east Africa is: if someone snatches your bag think before shouting "stop thief" because if you shout that the crowd will kill the thief. I don't know if this is true but I believe it is, and the belief doesn't give me a particularly warm and comfortable feeling. Also, theft is very very common in east Africa.
I don't know. Possibly the mob turns on you if it murders the "thief" and finds no stolen property on the corpse. Being given the warning has had the beneficial effect on me of being extra careful of my possessions so as not to have to initiate the process.
I can't remember the source of the advice but a Google finds this in a guide book (other side of Africa)
"The only thing worse than being robbed is seeing what happens if some poor unfortunate is caught: mob justice looms large on the streets of Freetown, where suspected thieves can be beaten up, belted or worse by angry bands at a moment’s notice."
If you love criminals so much go live in San Francisco. Otherwise keep your soft hearted nonsense to yourself. Normal people don't want to live in the violence and chaos that people like you create. Maybe when you see people you care about being victimized as a consequence of attitudes like yours you'll get some sense.
The tone is totally deserved. We have rampant robbery, assault, and murder because of soft on crime policies pushed by people like him. I’m tried of seeing people I know become victims so that people like him can pat themselves on the back about how compassionate and enlightened they are. He’s the one coming in here thumbing his nose as if he is superior to East Africans, when in reality his attitude has never reduced crime and their methods are probably effective given the circumstances and resources available.
I actually do. The problem is community punishment is really prone to false-positives (you bump into someone, they think you're stealing from them, and therefore are allowed to beat you up) and differential enforcement.
One of the advantages of having cops is it's their job to do this stuff, and when they screw up we can go after them. Diffusing it onto the general public leads to all kinds of problems that are the reasons we outsource it to cops in the first place.
So... "stand your ground, and also all your stuff's ground, and also the appropriate punishment for stealing Juicy Fruit gum is death" is your position? Not worried about misuse or misperception? Or just really, really into e-commerce?
Well, certainly the shopkeep has to be careful about not whacking a non-thief with his bat, lest s/he be punished for engaging in *unjustified* violence.
But that's also why I used the words like "clear self defense."
Remember when I said the words like "informal" and "intuition?"
Even monkeys know when something has been stolen from them. People know what's right and wrong. When it's clear and obvious that one person is attempting to wrong another, a good civilization would shrug at whatever immediate consequences happen to the wrong-doer as a result of their wrong-doing.
So standard of proof = "I think so" / "clear to me"? I sure hope that monkey's perceptions are always correct when it decides to rip the other monkey's face to shreds...
Texan law, which allows deadly force for the recovery of stolen property under limited circumstances, is probably closer to most people's intuition. You can't execute someone after you've taken back your bag, but you can absolutely magdump into them if they're still running away with it (and it's at night, and you have no other means of recovery, and...).
I don't think this is morally right, but there is a certain justice to it.
What you said was "clear self-defense of property and/or body," which is incoherent on its face (given what self-defense is and what property is).
But if your recent post sought to stress "clear" rather than "self" in "clear self defense," was your point that perceived clarity = factual verity? If so, when you say "clear," I say "false positives are common!" Ready? Go!
Risk of prosecution is what is suppressing such shootings and baseball battings right now. Presumably you want to expand the range of circumstances under which it is justifiable. But do you want to expand it so much that loss of *property* can be justifiably met with *fatal* forc e?
Sure. While a *deep* value of property is not intuitive for the economic upper classes, that is not how people much closer to basic survival think of their items. Having a car stolen is at worst an inconvenience for a wealthy person, but for a working poor person, having their car stolen often means losing income, perhaps even their job, and possibly even their home/safety net. If a poor person wants to booby trap their car, I sympathize with the urge.
How the hell are you shoplifting accidentally? I swear to god, people need to live with more fear in their lives.
Edit: well okay I read it, and damn, my point still stands. I really do not understand how people like this can survive... Surely living like this would have massive, life-ruining consequences in other contexts?
I agree. It's forgivable when young children get over-excited and carry something out of a store, but the other two examples aren't okay.
I have never, ever, not once in almost 45 years of life, been accused of shoplifting, because I am ostentatiously careful about not giving the impression I could be shoplifting. I don't think I've even even put an item in a pocket when my hands were fuller than I was expecting.
But that's because I care a lot about presenting myself as an honest and trustworthy customer. Someone saying, "but I happen to care about other stuff more, so I shouldn’t be punished for that!" isn't a persuasive argument for me.
The examples are ok, this can happen, and it doesn't really matter.
It matters a lot less than some shoplifters, or some distracted people, or some people seeming like they did shoplift when not, dying because they took a wrong hit.
I accidentally shoplifted not long ago. I bought four yogurts and only ran it through three times. I discovered my error by accident when looking at the receipt to check my fuel points.
Caba lists two cases of accidental shoplifting, one as a kid. Leaving only one as an adult.
N=1 isn't much evidence for anything. Assuming they had 10 years of adult life, even if you use p < 0.05 as a criterion, you can't rule out their actual rate of such mishaps being once in 190 years.
Consequences for violent crime and shoplifting are pretty severe in Singapore, are they not? And personal /property crime is comparatively low, is it not?
Does it really make sense to call that torture? Punishment of any kind has to be unpleasant to be effective, no? I don't know where the line between torture and punishment should be drawn, but Singaporean caning strikes me as one that falls on the P side of it.
I would rather be caned a few times than spend several years in prison. While I suppose that doesn’t change whether it meets the definition of torture, it does diminish the value of the heuristic ‘is it torture’ for deciding whether something is moral. A society that uses relatively proportional corporal punishment is a more just society than one that gives ‘humane’ life sentences for misdemeanors.
Yep, it's amusing how the current western Overton window is squarely at "everything except prison is cruel and unusual". Prison is plenty cruel in most places, and the unusual part is self-fulfilling.
A lot of traditional punishment was just announcing to the community that somebody had done something wrong. So you have stocks and other displays. There's a good Chinese film called A Beautiful Mistake that shows the customary justice system of a traditional village - an older guy gets caught peeping at a bathing teenager, and his initial sentence, delivered by a council of village women, is to spend three days standing in the village square wearing a big sign that says "pervert".
But after the first day, he almost passes out from exposure to the sun, and the council decide that this initial sentence was 𝘁𝗼𝗼 𝗵𝗮𝗿𝘀𝗵, and it's OK if he pays a modest fine in lieu of standing the remaining two days.
Urban living doesn't really allow for this kind of thing, because the community is too large and the message won't reach enough people. This would mean you'd need flogging to be more brutal in order to achieve the same effect it used to have.
I agree that "cruel and unusual" is hardly a good way to distinguish lengthy imprisonment from corporal punishment. But I think a lot of realities of corporal punishment are now easy to overlook. Just a few I can think of:
1. Having torturers is all kinds of problematic. They can be bribed to make the punishment easier or harsher, and largely decide the consequences, up to and including crippling and death. Not that there aren't accidents, too. Also, do we really want to be a society having this profession at all? Are we okay with it being a magnet for sadists? Can we trust anyone to maintain professionalism, even if they aren't getting off on the process?
2. To a first approximation, some sort of a threshing machine could solve these problems, although it'll probably need different settings depending on the victim's health and constitution: it definitely isn't fair to sentence a person to 20% chance of death for a crime normally punishable by something orders of magnitude lighter. So this will require research. (Personally I find the idea of sanctioning such research repulsive...) I guess prisons also don't affect everyone the same and a lot of people end up dead or crippled without that being the intention, so the problem is not unique to corporal punishment.
3. I think a lot of the popularity of corporal punishments came from them being a form of entertainment. No, that's not the "easy to overlook" part itself. But I think this means the math was different: they didn't do it because it was a good tool for controlling the crime rates, it was a way to extract value out of criminals.
4. It should depend on the person, but I think a significant fraction (tens of percents?) of people can only be deterred so much by painful but non-life-threatening corporal punishment. So it may work as a substitute for shorter sentences, but probably won't be good for longer ones.
5. Escalating to significantly life-threatening punishments basically adds probabilistic capital punishment, which seems like a terrible idea if the chance is primarily based on the person's health. (Probabilistic capital punishment is likely a terrible idea in any case, but an interesting one.)
So while corporal punishment is not automatically orders of magnitude more barbaric than what the civilized world has, I also don't expect it to be an extremely useful tool we ignore out of stupid squeamishness.
Sure, maybe not an extremely useful one, but probably useful enough on the margin, particularly for replacing the "prison as a crime school" effect of the short sentences. I'd also say that the problem isn't so much squeamishness, but rather naivety, when the "barbarity" of torture is implicitly compared to an imaginary perfect prison, which in theory could be "civilized", but as the experience shows, clearly not in practice.
You're one of the few well-functioning dictatorships in the world, and very small in size...and if I can be a little un-PC don't have populations that cause huge problems.
One day drones will do this non-lethally and prison won’t make as much sense for most things. You’ll just shout a drone word and a bunch of them will flock in and take care of the problem.
Laser drones with a 99.99% correct conviction rate will instantly non-damagingly laser the culprit for three city blocks unless they reverse plea bargain into being arrested and tried
Should this approach be reserved for poor people's crimes, or would you condone extending it to upper class crimes as well, such as wage theft, tax evasion and bribery?
I'll go you one further: I'd love to live in the kind of society where someone enacts vengeance on any of the key Purdue Pharma Sacklers, and, after a trial establishing the facts, the jury takes 30 seconds to deliberate before issuing a dismissive shrug as their verdict.
Our justice system has way, way over-corrected in favor of predators like the Sacklers. It'd be great to live in a world where no DA would even bother to bring the murderer of a Sackler Board member to trial because there would be no hope of finding a jury willing to convict them. The Sackler Board members probably wouldn't have been quite so cavalier about pushing an addictive product if they believed there was a good chance of being injured or murdered by grieving family members.
I'd like to rely on the collective intuition of a far-more justice-based society to make those decisions! It'd be great if a sales person way down the hierarchy was just a *little* worried that a grieving parent of a dead overdosed 20 year old might decide to come after *them* for selling to that kid's doctor. But I'd also like that parent to be worried it might not fly with a jury.
This is all true, and you may even have a specific country (or era in this country) in mind. But we don't live there. I mean, I probably would have done the whole family thing if I wasn't convinced they were going to divorce me and take half my savings, but we don't live in that kind of a society, so I didn't. (I'm sure you can come up with your own example stated the other way, maybe something about safety from crime.) You have to live in society as it exists, not as you might like it to be.
EDIT: nah, you did say utopia. So it's just a hypothetical. You are correct.
What on earth is the point of this kind of comment?
Do you remember when I said at the end of my parent comment:
> "Man, I wish I could live in that utopia. "
Utopias don't exist; that final line was designed to indicate my wistful yearning for a paradise that cannot be. You did not need to dudesplain that we live in a world that is not my yearned-for paradise. Maybe a little more careful reading?
I seriously doubt this be the result. Most people wouldn't suddenly start carrying weapons to wave for starts, surely there are only a few who want to, but can't right now. Plus, crime happens mostly because it *isn't* caught in time. The outrageous occasions when someone steals something on broad daylight, simply isn't much of it. It's not like chains and department stores are going to adopt this either - liability for accidents is likely way scarier then some inventory lose. And for detterence? Scott already covered that!
Plus people would make the calculation that it would be OK to rob old or frail people or children or women, because they could count on winning the ensuing fight. Plus a lot of people would get killed defending themselves from the crooks where they might have previously lost a handbag or backpack.
Spoken like a dude who isn't a woman who thwarted TWO separate robbery attempts by strangers merely by indicating she had a firearm and was prepared to use it.
Nice job! (Seriously--I was scared of criminals before I was scared of feminists.) Happy you got out safe...I would have been tempted to fire.
You then get into the whole gun ownership question, which I am always flipping back and forth on. I get the feeling the rationalists have already looked into this but I also get the feeling they are liberal wimps who just don't like the idea (look at the recent Prop 36 thread) . I'm sure someone here can fill me in further with actual data...
While I had my hand on my weapon during both encounters, I never actually pointed it at either would-be attacker. The pistol was *drawn,* it would have only been a brief flick to point it, but thankfully both encounters were extremely slow-moving and I had time to reach, draw, and then wait to see what was going to happen. According to the law, I didn't have just cause to actually point it yet. (pt 1)
(This substack break is so annoying; can't post more than a few lines!) ..
...and I didn't *need* to. My would-be attackers correctly interpreted the motion of reaching for a pistol and the expression on my face, the same way a scrawny solo wolf understands the hostile stare of a squared-off adult water buffalo. So they decided not to engage.
Great research here
The current focus on thoughtcrime imprisonment, particularly in the UK, where violent habitual offenders are being released to make room for those who posted mean tweets, will have some very interesting effects.
In "A Clockwork Orange," the Home Secretary explains that they need to let violent criminals like Alex out to make room for the new political prisoners.
Wasn't there the implication that the party that tried the Ludovico Technique ('rehabilitation') was Labor, and the one that let him out was the Tories (the politician's kind of conservatively dressed)?
If so it would be a funny comment on who's into censorship over 60 years.
Do you have a link on the violent offenders being released point?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPlA8EYv4mI
I don't see anything about violent offenders in the video or the related news articles.
It’s not specifically violent only, but they’re in the mix for early release
That will be a no, then. It's also straight nonsense that people are being imprisoned for "mean tweets". Musk has been ploughing this unfortunate furrow.
Okay, so if I find you a story of a person who was arrested for "mean tweets," would you admit you are wrong? I expect what you will do instead is say either that it's very few people, or that if their tweets were illegal (labeled "hate speech", "incitement" or whatever), then them being imprisoned is GOOD actually.
Instead of talking hypotheticals, it would be preferable to just find such a case.
I disagree. I'd have the goalposts marked BEFORE they are moved.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jun/14/ex-police-officer-jailed-for-20-weeks-over-racist-whatsapp-messages
Many Thanks!
Andrew B. : Do you retract your
>It's also straight nonsense that people are being imprisoned for "mean tweets".
now that friendlybombs has demonstrated that your claim is false?
Would you describe those WhatsApp messages as merely "mean", or would you say they fell more into the "violent rhetoric" category?
"grossly offensive or menacing" is the legal term.
And another: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gdww5lx2vo
It's even simpler than that: just find a law that makes "mean" tweets illegal.
Malicious Communications Act 1988, Communications Act 2003, Harassment Act 1997 all play a role, and the Online Safety Act is icing on the cake but seems not technically enforced yet?
I agree there is no law that uses the phrase "mean tweets." Or even specifically criminalizing tweets in particular instead of "online communications" more broadly. Is that your claim?
Otherwise, see the Online Safety Act of 2023, for a particularly recent and well-publicized example.
The Online Safety Act appears not to criminalize mean tweets. The closest thing seems to be making it an offense for X to not try hard to prevent children from being subject to harmful bullying via tweets. To me that's a different thing entirely, but if that's what you're referring to then we're down to semantics. Or if I'm wrong in my reading of the Act, let me know.
The problem here is not there is no law making tweets criminal - tweets are a form of communication, so they're subject to the same laws as any other communication, it's the word "mean".
The UK has a notably broader definition of promoting violence (or "violent hatred", which is what things like "incitement to racial hatred" means when you look at the elements of the offense rather than just the name) than the US. In the US, only a "true threat" can be criminal. In the UK, the standard is "would a person who you could reasonably expect to read the communication be more likely to commit violence"
So in a racist case: would a violent racist be more likely to be violent against non-white people as a result of reading your racist tweet? If so, that tweet is criminal unless you can show that you wouldn't reasonably expect a violent racist to see it. Note that negative inspiration (ie an anti-racist posting things that annoy racists into violence) doesn't count. Obviously an anti-racist posting things that inspire other anti-racists into violence against white people does qualify.
Does that constitute "mean", or is it more in the "violent rhetoric" category?
I'm aware that a disturbing number of people are being questioned by police, arrested, or even prosecuted over tweets and posts in the UK. But none of the cases I am aware of led to actual *imprisonment*, as far as I know.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gdww5lx2vo
The legal standard of incitement is much, much, much lower in the UK, the American mind cannot fathom how low: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy76dxkpjpjo
And umpteen bajillion stories of people getting police visits for the radically Orwellian “non crime hate incidents,” but I’ll leave that googling to you.
I’m pretty sure it was the UK, where I read about an old Jewish dude who likes to haunt anti-Israel protests. He hadn’t done anything much, so as to say, but he made the mistake of looking thoroughly Jewish, apparently.
So “mean tweets” has a physical manifestation. Seen deets?
Whoops, forgot the link and apparently substack wont let you edit: https://news.sky.com/story/amp/met-police-chief-mark-rowley-should-resign-says-antisemitism-campaigner-called-openly-jewish-by-officer-13119818
I assume that case? Crazy! Haven’t seen more follow up though.
Someone called for violence: someone else committed the violence they called for. Of course that's incitement. What other standard could there be?
If you don't want to be held legally responsible for violence, then don't call for it.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jun/14/ex-police-officer-jailed-for-20-weeks-over-racist-whatsapp-messages
In other news, Australia just approved s law that makes social media off-limits to children under 16.
Neatly avoids all vague thought police free speech issues!
Courtesy of the BBC, "more than a third" of early release offenders had violent offenses: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd0594gx71xo
At least one early release offender went on to commit sexual assault literally the same day as his release and was sent back: https://www.the-independent.com/news/uk/crime/prisoner-early-release-scheme-amari-ward-assault-b2612921.html
Further comments that sexual offenders are not supposed to be eligible and that the vetting may be inadequate: https://www.the-independent.com/news/uk/politics/prisoners-early-release-sex-offenders-priti-patel-b2632979.html
People who end up in prison tend to have very high time preference. That seems to me like the probable reason that adding more time to an already long sentence will have a very weak deterrent effect. Think about it this way: does the kind of person who would get convicted of two felonies and then go back out and consider committing a third felony seem like someone whose decision-making is driven by what happens to him five years from now?
Over a long enough time you can change the culture even of the underclass to assume that a life of crime is a bad idea. But it takes a long time.
It takes a long time, lots of support, and most importantly of all, willingness. Some people *do* want to do better, but don't know how/need a ton of help. I have sympathy for them, they often came out of circumstances that were chaotic, they slipped through cracks, and if they get help they will be grateful for it.
And some people, with all the help from all the bleeding hearts in the world, will never change because they have nothing but contempt for ordinary people with ordinary lives and the mores of ordinary society. I have no sympathy for them and no "oh no if they have to spend ten years in jail it will interfere with their enjoyment of life" cares.
Historically, the approach was rather the opposite, with frequent and aggressive use of the death penalty for offenses that we wouldn't today think merit it - that's actually the root meaning of "felony" - a crime subject to the death penalty. And the spectacle and ritual around public executions and torturings had social control functions as well.
I think at least part of the reason for this is that certain types of crime represent an economic niche that *somebody* is going to fill, and it's typically going to be people with the least to lose.
That is true of supplying various vices, but not of normal crimes with victims. There's not an economic niche needing to be filled for people stealing cars, burgling houses, or mugging little old ladies.
If true, this suggests corporal punishment would have a much more significant deterrence effect, since it's delivered all at once in the immediate future. (It likely won't have the incapacitation effect, because it doesn't take that long to heal from lashes.)
FWIW, pickpockets used to operate in the crowd that gathered to watch convicted pickpockets have their hand chopped off. (I think that was Dickens, but it's probably true.)
Sure, because the spectacle of public punishment would have been one of the largest and most crowded reliably-scheduled gatherings of multiple classes on offer at the time - too good a target to pass up.
You're misremembering your history. Pickpockets were sometimes publicly hanged, as stealing enough handkerchiefs could be a capital offence (though many would have had the sentence commuted), but even 100 years earlier than Dicken's time, amputating hands had long since fallen out of use as a punishment.
OTOH, hanging doesn't detract from the main point. Awareness of severe penalties does not, in itself, act as a strong deterrent. You need to combine that with an expectation of being caught , and if you do that you don't need the *severe* penalty. It just has to be more than "the cost of doing business".
I agree with all that. I think another relevant factor with the pickpocket example is that income inequality was pretty vast, such that minor theft could be very profitable, and many people lived in conditions of great immiseration so compared to starvation or the workhouse, it could be a better option even considering the risks.
Yeah, I think the Gary Becker model of rational crime runs aground on the limited mentality of most criminals. Bad outcomes far in the future are heavily discounted, and most people (let alone the criminal class, who are on average a lot less smart than the rest of the population) round low probabilities to zero in their heads.
By "immediate future" you mean after months of trials in court, like any other punishment?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prison-and-crime-much-more-than-you/comment/79108162
You might be interested in my other comment, about how most of the logistics here is a policy choice, which we could choose differently.
That kind of raises a point about whether there's a huge block of "missing deterrence," where accountants' and HR managers' crime sprees are completely prevented by the level of incarceration we have now.
Unless you're talking about white collar crime sprees, those would be prevented in most cases even by a much lower level of deterrence. Those people have something to lose (namely, a decent career) so even a modest risk of an arrest record will outweigh any economic benefit of property crime.
Yeah, I think at least for lunkhead street crime, if the dude committing the crime was thinking a lot about where his current choices would leave him in ten years, he would be on an entirely different life path. That kind of crime selects for people who are giving *very little* weight to possible bad outcomes a decade or more in the future.
Seems like the only real solution is for society to develop a parallel informal justice system based on the intuition that any method of clear self-defense of property and/or body is justified and allowable. Shoplifting rates would drop precipitously if there was a very good chance of being whacked with a baseball bat or even shot by a shopkeeper. Vehicle theft would probably stop if there was an excellent chance of painful booby-trapping. Etc.
Man, I wish I could live in that utopia.
The standard advice in east Africa is: if someone snatches your bag think before shouting "stop thief" because if you shout that the crowd will kill the thief. I don't know if this is true but I believe it is, and the belief doesn't give me a particularly warm and comfortable feeling. Also, theft is very very common in east Africa.
Can you summon a mob to kill anyone you don't like by shouting this at them?
Yes, and it is one of the major reasons support for mob violence is actually supported by more women than men in many countries (men fear they could be falsely accused). There are also several cases where mobs are used to kill out-group members with disabilities etc: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/10/nigeria-escalation-of-mob-violence-emboldens-impunity/
I don't know. Possibly the mob turns on you if it murders the "thief" and finds no stolen property on the corpse. Being given the warning has had the beneficial effect on me of being extra careful of my possessions so as not to have to initiate the process.
I can't remember the source of the advice but a Google finds this in a guide book (other side of Africa)
https://www.bradtguides.com/destinations/africa/sierra-leone/
"The only thing worse than being robbed is seeing what happens if some poor unfortunate is caught: mob justice looms large on the streets of Freetown, where suspected thieves can be beaten up, belted or worse by angry bands at a moment’s notice."
Only if your target fails a saving throw.
Consider directing your overactive empathy towards the actual victims of crime, rather than the perpetrators.
Have a think about what crimes are being perpetrated and by whom, in this scenario
If you love criminals so much go live in San Francisco. Otherwise keep your soft hearted nonsense to yourself. Normal people don't want to live in the violence and chaos that people like you create. Maybe when you see people you care about being victimized as a consequence of attitudes like yours you'll get some sense.
Sure. More on the spot extra-judicial lynchings is what san Francisco is crying out for.
They're working on extra-judicial Waymo harassment, escalation might happen eventually.
I propose a one-strike law for comments like these.
Please, if this is the tone you need to communicate in, do it elsewhere.
The tone is totally deserved. We have rampant robbery, assault, and murder because of soft on crime policies pushed by people like him. I’m tried of seeing people I know become victims so that people like him can pat themselves on the back about how compassionate and enlightened they are. He’s the one coming in here thumbing his nose as if he is superior to East Africans, when in reality his attitude has never reduced crime and their methods are probably effective given the circumstances and resources available.
Thank you
I actually do. The problem is community punishment is really prone to false-positives (you bump into someone, they think you're stealing from them, and therefore are allowed to beat you up) and differential enforcement.
One of the advantages of having cops is it's their job to do this stuff, and when they screw up we can go after them. Diffusing it onto the general public leads to all kinds of problems that are the reasons we outsource it to cops in the first place.
Ehhh, call me a wimp, but that's not the culture I want to live in.
So... "stand your ground, and also all your stuff's ground, and also the appropriate punishment for stealing Juicy Fruit gum is death" is your position? Not worried about misuse or misperception? Or just really, really into e-commerce?
Well, certainly the shopkeep has to be careful about not whacking a non-thief with his bat, lest s/he be punished for engaging in *unjustified* violence.
But that's also why I used the words like "clear self defense."
What's the standard for proof? Who gets to decide?
Seems like a *really* bad approach.
Remember when I said the words like "informal" and "intuition?"
Even monkeys know when something has been stolen from them. People know what's right and wrong. When it's clear and obvious that one person is attempting to wrong another, a good civilization would shrug at whatever immediate consequences happen to the wrong-doer as a result of their wrong-doing.
Yes
So standard of proof = "I think so" / "clear to me"? I sure hope that monkey's perceptions are always correct when it decides to rip the other monkey's face to shreds...
And that's a literal whatevery ncluding execution for theft?
Texan law, which allows deadly force for the recovery of stolen property under limited circumstances, is probably closer to most people's intuition. You can't execute someone after you've taken back your bag, but you can absolutely magdump into them if they're still running away with it (and it's at night, and you have no other means of recovery, and...).
I don't think this is morally right, but there is a certain justice to it.
What you said was "clear self-defense of property and/or body," which is incoherent on its face (given what self-defense is and what property is).
But if your recent post sought to stress "clear" rather than "self" in "clear self defense," was your point that perceived clarity = factual verity? If so, when you say "clear," I say "false positives are common!" Ready? Go!
Nah.
Risk of prosecution is what is suppressing such shootings and baseball battings right now. Presumably you want to expand the range of circumstances under which it is justifiable. But do you want to expand it so much that loss of *property* can be justifiably met with *fatal* forc e?
Sure. While a *deep* value of property is not intuitive for the economic upper classes, that is not how people much closer to basic survival think of their items. Having a car stolen is at worst an inconvenience for a wealthy person, but for a working poor person, having their car stolen often means losing income, perhaps even their job, and possibly even their home/safety net. If a poor person wants to booby trap their car, I sympathize with the urge.
How does the old joke go?
"Do you really value your *property* more than his *life*?"
"The fact he's trying to steal my property is proof he values my property more than his life, too!"
The value of property is defined socially. So is the value of life. It's not just A against B.
"Shoplifting rates would drop precipitously if there was a very good chance of being whacked with a baseball bat or even shot by a shopkeeper."
Multiple times in my life I shoplifted accidentally and came across as a thief.
I'm glad I didn't get whacked with a baseball bat, or shot!
I wrote about it in another thread:
https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/open-thread-354?r=1dtkhh&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=76683665
Probably you would have been more careful not to accidentally shopliftt if there were dire consequences attached, no?
No kidding. Also, multiple times? Like, more than 3? At some point, it stops being accidental.
Even so, is severe injury/brain damage/dying a reasonable thing to experience for a (potentially one-time!) genuine mistake?
Let's try it for a while and see how often people are injured for genuine mistakes!
Consider the possibility that we used to implement it, and it proved unsatisfactory.
Consider the possibility that what we have now is unsatisfactory, and, according to Scott, can't be fixed by formal institutions.
Let's swing that pendulum back!
Where I live you'd have a hard time finding anyone who agrees it's a reasonable punishment even for actual, intentional shoplifting.
Same here, luckily.
Maybe. But most people who shoplift once or twice aren’t doing it because they’re thinking clearly about the consequences.
How the hell are you shoplifting accidentally? I swear to god, people need to live with more fear in their lives.
Edit: well okay I read it, and damn, my point still stands. I really do not understand how people like this can survive... Surely living like this would have massive, life-ruining consequences in other contexts?
Also relevant: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=3903
"Surely living like this would have massive, life-ruining consequences in other contexts?"
Maybe if I were a surgeon, which I am not.
I agree. It's forgivable when young children get over-excited and carry something out of a store, but the other two examples aren't okay.
I have never, ever, not once in almost 45 years of life, been accused of shoplifting, because I am ostentatiously careful about not giving the impression I could be shoplifting. I don't think I've even even put an item in a pocket when my hands were fuller than I was expecting.
But that's because I care a lot about presenting myself as an honest and trustworthy customer. Someone saying, "but I happen to care about other stuff more, so I shouldn’t be punished for that!" isn't a persuasive argument for me.
> I agree. It's forgivable when young children get over-excited and carry something out of a store, but the other two examples aren't okay.
Really? Example #3 is "I paid for a bunch of bananas, stuffed them into my jacket, and left the store". How could that not be OK?
My mistake, I meant the book example. He obviously paid for the bananas in the third anecdote, it wasn't stealing.
The examples are ok, this can happen, and it doesn't really matter.
It matters a lot less than some shoplifters, or some distracted people, or some people seeming like they did shoplift when not, dying because they took a wrong hit.
I accidentally shoplifted not long ago. I bought four yogurts and only ran it through three times. I discovered my error by accident when looking at the receipt to check my fuel points.
Caba lists two cases of accidental shoplifting, one as a kid. Leaving only one as an adult.
N=1 isn't much evidence for anything. Assuming they had 10 years of adult life, even if you use p < 0.05 as a criterion, you can't rule out their actual rate of such mishaps being once in 190 years.
Why is that the only real solution?
We don't have such crazy crime problems here in Singapore, and we certainly didn't use your 'only real solution'.
Consequences for violent crime and shoplifting are pretty severe in Singapore, are they not? And personal /property crime is comparatively low, is it not?
If so, great, that works, too!
Singapore canes people. Caning is incredibly painful! Effectively, the Singaporean solution to crime is torture.
https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1858978956982022350
Does it really make sense to call that torture? Punishment of any kind has to be unpleasant to be effective, no? I don't know where the line between torture and punishment should be drawn, but Singaporean caning strikes me as one that falls on the P side of it.
How would you define torture in a way that excludes caning, but doesn't exclude a bunch of things that you'd consider torture?
I think the more important question is, how do you define just punishment then, without it being torture?
I would rather be caned a few times than spend several years in prison. While I suppose that doesn’t change whether it meets the definition of torture, it does diminish the value of the heuristic ‘is it torture’ for deciding whether something is moral. A society that uses relatively proportional corporal punishment is a more just society than one that gives ‘humane’ life sentences for misdemeanors.
If I had to chose between being caned, or going to prison for a year, I would choose caning every time.
Yep, it's amusing how the current western Overton window is squarely at "everything except prison is cruel and unusual". Prison is plenty cruel in most places, and the unusual part is self-fulfilling.
A lot of traditional punishment was just announcing to the community that somebody had done something wrong. So you have stocks and other displays. There's a good Chinese film called A Beautiful Mistake that shows the customary justice system of a traditional village - an older guy gets caught peeping at a bathing teenager, and his initial sentence, delivered by a council of village women, is to spend three days standing in the village square wearing a big sign that says "pervert".
But after the first day, he almost passes out from exposure to the sun, and the council decide that this initial sentence was 𝘁𝗼𝗼 𝗵𝗮𝗿𝘀𝗵, and it's OK if he pays a modest fine in lieu of standing the remaining two days.
Urban living doesn't really allow for this kind of thing, because the community is too large and the message won't reach enough people. This would mean you'd need flogging to be more brutal in order to achieve the same effect it used to have.
I agree that "cruel and unusual" is hardly a good way to distinguish lengthy imprisonment from corporal punishment. But I think a lot of realities of corporal punishment are now easy to overlook. Just a few I can think of:
1. Having torturers is all kinds of problematic. They can be bribed to make the punishment easier or harsher, and largely decide the consequences, up to and including crippling and death. Not that there aren't accidents, too. Also, do we really want to be a society having this profession at all? Are we okay with it being a magnet for sadists? Can we trust anyone to maintain professionalism, even if they aren't getting off on the process?
2. To a first approximation, some sort of a threshing machine could solve these problems, although it'll probably need different settings depending on the victim's health and constitution: it definitely isn't fair to sentence a person to 20% chance of death for a crime normally punishable by something orders of magnitude lighter. So this will require research. (Personally I find the idea of sanctioning such research repulsive...) I guess prisons also don't affect everyone the same and a lot of people end up dead or crippled without that being the intention, so the problem is not unique to corporal punishment.
3. I think a lot of the popularity of corporal punishments came from them being a form of entertainment. No, that's not the "easy to overlook" part itself. But I think this means the math was different: they didn't do it because it was a good tool for controlling the crime rates, it was a way to extract value out of criminals.
4. It should depend on the person, but I think a significant fraction (tens of percents?) of people can only be deterred so much by painful but non-life-threatening corporal punishment. So it may work as a substitute for shorter sentences, but probably won't be good for longer ones.
5. Escalating to significantly life-threatening punishments basically adds probabilistic capital punishment, which seems like a terrible idea if the chance is primarily based on the person's health. (Probabilistic capital punishment is likely a terrible idea in any case, but an interesting one.)
So while corporal punishment is not automatically orders of magnitude more barbaric than what the civilized world has, I also don't expect it to be an extremely useful tool we ignore out of stupid squeamishness.
Sure, maybe not an extremely useful one, but probably useful enough on the margin, particularly for replacing the "prison as a crime school" effect of the short sentences. I'd also say that the problem isn't so much squeamishness, but rather naivety, when the "barbarity" of torture is implicitly compared to an imaginary perfect prison, which in theory could be "civilized", but as the experience shows, clearly not in practice.
Prison is stronger torture than caning.
Singapore's solution of torture ("corporal punishment") would work too.
You're one of the few well-functioning dictatorships in the world, and very small in size...and if I can be a little un-PC don't have populations that cause huge problems.
One day drones will do this non-lethally and prison won’t make as much sense for most things. You’ll just shout a drone word and a bunch of them will flock in and take care of the problem.
Laser drones with a 99.99% correct conviction rate will instantly non-damagingly laser the culprit for three city blocks unless they reverse plea bargain into being arrested and tried
Should this approach be reserved for poor people's crimes, or would you condone extending it to upper class crimes as well, such as wage theft, tax evasion and bribery?
Of course I would.
I'll go you one further: I'd love to live in the kind of society where someone enacts vengeance on any of the key Purdue Pharma Sacklers, and, after a trial establishing the facts, the jury takes 30 seconds to deliberate before issuing a dismissive shrug as their verdict.
Our justice system has way, way over-corrected in favor of predators like the Sacklers. It'd be great to live in a world where no DA would even bother to bring the murderer of a Sackler Board member to trial because there would be no hope of finding a jury willing to convict them. The Sackler Board members probably wouldn't have been quite so cavalier about pushing an addictive product if they believed there was a good chance of being injured or murdered by grieving family members.
They already more or less do that with pedophiles.
How far do you extend culpability? Board members? Executives? Managers? Truck drivers? The guy who did Purdue's IT support?
I always kind of wondered how much worse the Sacklers were than every other pharm company selling opioids, which have legitimate medical uses.
I'd like to rely on the collective intuition of a far-more justice-based society to make those decisions! It'd be great if a sales person way down the hierarchy was just a *little* worried that a grieving parent of a dead overdosed 20 year old might decide to come after *them* for selling to that kid's doctor. But I'd also like that parent to be worried it might not fly with a jury.
This is all true, and you may even have a specific country (or era in this country) in mind. But we don't live there. I mean, I probably would have done the whole family thing if I wasn't convinced they were going to divorce me and take half my savings, but we don't live in that kind of a society, so I didn't. (I'm sure you can come up with your own example stated the other way, maybe something about safety from crime.) You have to live in society as it exists, not as you might like it to be.
EDIT: nah, you did say utopia. So it's just a hypothetical. You are correct.
What on earth is the point of this kind of comment?
Do you remember when I said at the end of my parent comment:
> "Man, I wish I could live in that utopia. "
Utopias don't exist; that final line was designed to indicate my wistful yearning for a paradise that cannot be. You did not need to dudesplain that we live in a world that is not my yearned-for paradise. Maybe a little more careful reading?
I seriously doubt this be the result. Most people wouldn't suddenly start carrying weapons to wave for starts, surely there are only a few who want to, but can't right now. Plus, crime happens mostly because it *isn't* caught in time. The outrageous occasions when someone steals something on broad daylight, simply isn't much of it. It's not like chains and department stores are going to adopt this either - liability for accidents is likely way scarier then some inventory lose. And for detterence? Scott already covered that!
Plus people would make the calculation that it would be OK to rob old or frail people or children or women, because they could count on winning the ensuing fight. Plus a lot of people would get killed defending themselves from the crooks where they might have previously lost a handbag or backpack.
Spoken like a dude who isn't a woman who thwarted TWO separate robbery attempts by strangers merely by indicating she had a firearm and was prepared to use it.
Nice job! (Seriously--I was scared of criminals before I was scared of feminists.) Happy you got out safe...I would have been tempted to fire.
You then get into the whole gun ownership question, which I am always flipping back and forth on. I get the feeling the rationalists have already looked into this but I also get the feeling they are liberal wimps who just don't like the idea (look at the recent Prop 36 thread) . I'm sure someone here can fill me in further with actual data...
While I had my hand on my weapon during both encounters, I never actually pointed it at either would-be attacker. The pistol was *drawn,* it would have only been a brief flick to point it, but thankfully both encounters were extremely slow-moving and I had time to reach, draw, and then wait to see what was going to happen. According to the law, I didn't have just cause to actually point it yet. (pt 1)
(This substack break is so annoying; can't post more than a few lines!) ..
...and I didn't *need* to. My would-be attackers correctly interpreted the motion of reaching for a pistol and the expression on my face, the same way a scrawny solo wolf understands the hostile stare of a squared-off adult water buffalo. So they decided not to engage.
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Post a one-paragraph reply, small enough not to trigger the error.
Go back and edit. Now you'll notice the reply button scrolls normally. Write whatever you want to write and post.