By "immediate release", do you mean that the 6 months in jail that shoplifting is currently punishable with feel the same as "immediate release" to you, or that the plain text of the law is misleading and people aren't actually punished with 6 months in jail in real life?
And if it got upgraded to a felony, would people genuinely get the 3 years involved in a felony charge?
I think Clara's position (which I agree with) is that shoplifters shouldn't get off with zero penalty, but that six months sounds more appropriate than three years + felony record. Therefore we should give the system the directive + resources to enforce the existing laws, which allow this penalty, rather than increase to a higher penalty in the hopes that maybe that one will get enforced.
It sounds like you're saying there's no way to actually give someone six months in prison from a misdemeanor - unless we upgrade it to a felony, the system will round it down to zero. And it sounds like Clara's recommendation is "no, we should actually have the thing everyone thinks we mean by misdemeanor".
You're probably the only person in this conversation who really understands the incentives here, so - why can't we have the thing that it sounds like "misdemeanor" means?
...the "treatment mandated felony" thing doesn't sound at all like what I'm thinking of as "misdemeanor" - for example, how does it resolve anything around shoplifting cases not linked to drugs?
My impression is that asking the voters these kinds of questions about sentence length inherently assumes some concept of proportionate punishment. If you said shoplifting should be punished by torturing the person to death, I would say that's disproportionate, even though they're a thief. If you said "six months in jail" or "three years in jail", then we could argue about which of those is more proportionate.
I feel like the other side of this debate is not just unwilling to accept these terms of figuring out what a proportionate punishment is and sticking to it, they're constantly shifting goalposts in a weird way: "if the law says six months, we'll do zero, but if the law says three years, we'll do some amount we refuse to specify beforehand which you'll just have to hope will be better." I'm still trying to figure out why this is, or why we can't just let voters/policymakers/cops decide on some specific amount that gets enshrined in rule of law and then carried out.
Various legal systems do actually do all sorts of weird rounding. For example in Texas if you have a 5-year+ sentence you will usually get out of prison before someone with a 2-year sentence. Why? With the backlog of resources it takes to review parole requests, by the someone gets a review, usually they are most of the way through the 2-year sentence anyway, so might as well let them finish it, while the 5-year sentence might stay in the queue to get reviewed and get out at 1.25 years or sooner (plus the remainder on parole).
The greater sin here is simply unfunded mandates. Let's make all these things illegal but not give the police enough funding to enforce them, or the courts enough funding to then process what the police catch, or the prisons enough funding to house (or review for parole) what the courts convict. Or parole enough funding to monitor what the prisons let out. And then... perhaps... right back to police again.
If we actually put our money where our missives were, then maybe someone would stand a significant chance of being caught, and a significant chance of actually facing jail time. Instead we keep grasping for knobs that don't actually effect real change.
I think this is why your argument doesn't really resonate with me - it seems like petty theft is always going to be at the bottom of the priority list (to the extent that cops actually have the latitude to prioritze what the focus on), regardless of whether the expected sentence is 0, 6, or 36 months.
So when I hear cops say that they aren't arresting thieves because there isn't much of a penalty, it feels more like an unwillingness to engage with the system and less like a "I'll focus on more important things", since if they have more important things to do, they should focus on them anyways!
To be clear, I'm not actually against 36 (or harsher punishments for thieves), I'm undecided (and don't live in CA). I just struggle with this argument and it's many variants.
>Instead, we should give police departments the resources they need to do their jobs. Yes, this means more cops - California is under-policed for its size, and our police staffing rate has been declining since 2008. But we should also expect officers to do their best to enforce the law using the resources they have – even if it means changing a department policy or two. Instead of longer sentences, we should ask our police departments for smarter, more targeted interventions. Unfortunately, police accountability is hard. As with drug addiction, we know the answer – but it’s expensive, difficult to implement, politically unpalatable, involves lots of reduplicated work across 58 counties and countless municipalities, and won’t yield immediate results.
>But we shouldn’t give up. Californians can solve our problems – after all, we solved our car break-in epidemic and our prison overcrowding crisis. Our decade of progress on sentencing reform is a significant accomplishment for tens of thousands of people in our state. Reversing it won’t fix the issues we have now. Californians deserve real solutions, not imaginary ones. Vote no on 36.
Sure, but which ballot measure is this, and when will it happen? I found this article as unsatisfying as I have found other arguments against reinstating various criminal laws pared back in the 2010s; It attacks a proposed solution but provides no actionable solution of its own. The voting public is incredibly frustrated, for good reason, and a bad but somewhat functional fix now is better than trusting the California state bureaucracy to comprehensively tackle massive issues such as "California is under-policed for its size...police accountability is hard. As with drug addiction... it’s expensive, difficult to implement, politically unpalatable" at some point in the future with no way for it to happen.
Opponents of recriminalization need to provide actual solutions, not just 'wait and see :) :)'.
"Sure, but which ballot measure is this, and when will it happen?"
It looks like California Democrats tried to get something on the ballot and something went wrong. https://calmatters.org/politics/elections/2024/07/gavin-newsom-crime-measure/ suggests the Republicans defeated the measure, but I didn't think that was possible in California and I don't know what the real story is.
I'm too lazy to google the specifics right now, but ballot measures preempt legislation, so there are rules relating to passing any legislation for which there is a substantially similar pending ballot measure. The usual thing to do is for the majority party to put an alternative ballot measure on the ballot for voters to choose; sounds like Newsom et. al. failed to finish theirs in time.
This is hard to find information about, but there are a lot of rules in the California state constitution limiting the power of the legislature and governor. Things like bond measures and constitutional amendments need to be passed by the legislature and also as a ballot measure. (Weirdly, I think anything that raises a tax requires something like a 2/3 majority at both levels, while something that changes civil rights like marriage can be a bare majority. Though one of the current ballot measures is about reducing the 2/3 threshold to 55% for certain kinds of bonds.)
I've heard the proposal to run a ballot measure that says: All ballot measures can be amended or repealed by a 2/3 majority of the legislature, but that declines by a percentage point each year.
So seventeen years after passage, it becomes just a regular law that can be amended or repealed by simple majority. That would strike a balance between retaining direct democracy as a counterweight to issues where partisans on both sides have an interest in maintaining the status quo (like on redistricting reform, or introducing proportional representation) while also providing an eventual pressure release for when the citizens do something dumb.
We also need to ban paid signature gathering. If you can't find an army of volunteers to collect signatures for your issue, then it's inappropriate to use a tool that was intended to enable direct democracy for it. "I had $50M to blow on a pet issue" is not direct democracy. We don't let people offer to pay for votes, either.
Chesterton’s Fence: there is a reason why Initiatives, along with Recall and a bunch of other direct democracy measures were introduced by Progressive (in the Teddy Roosevelt sense of the word) governor Hiram Johnson in the early 1900s, as a check on the incredibly corrupt state legislature. Initiatives brought us things like CCPA/CPRA Privacy laws that are as tough as anything in the EU and I would not throw out the baby with the bathwater.
To be precise, there are four-ish types of ballot measures:
- Referenda, where the legislature has already passed a bill and signed it into law, but some people didn't like it and collected enough signatures to get it on the ballot. It gets suspended until the election, then the law is enacted or repealed depending on the result of the vote. These are rare.
- Bond measures, where the state government or a sub-state governmental body (city, county, water district, school district, etc) is asking permission from voters to borrow money. These go on the ballot because California's constitution requires bond measures be approved by voters.
- Initiative statutes, where someone got a bunch of signatures to put a new law on the ballot and bypass the legislature. The legislature isn't allowed to amend or repeal these by default, since otherwise it's a pretty weak bypass. Some of these contain special provisions allowing the legislature to change them by a supermajority vote. Other states with initiative statutes mostly handle this by requiring a supermajority to modify or repeal an initiative stature within a certain number of years after it passes, after which it becomes a normal law, but CA doesn't do this for some reason.
- Constitutional amendments, where either the legislature wants to change the constitution and needs permission from voters, or someone got a bunch of signature to put their own proposed amendment on the ballot. The legislature is extra-special-double not allowed to mess with constitutional amendments.
Traditionally, a fair number of ballot measure that look like they should be initiative statutes have actually been constitutional amendments, since it's only moderately harder to get a constitutional amendment on the ballot than an initiative statute (874k signatures vs 547k signature) and no harder to get it passed once it's there (simple majority of votes cast). Nobody seems to be doing this this time around though: there are three amendments on the ballot, but they're all proposed by the legislature and all three of the appear to be amendments because they're altering existing constitutional provisions.
This occurred 5 days after the Biden/Trump debate, and 19 days before Biden dropped out and Kamala was endorsed. At the time, Gavin Newsom was very heavily mentioned as a potential candidate.
At the time, and now, I thought there might be some relationship between a potential top of the Democratic ticket being open and Gavin Newsom deciding not to keep his name on a comparatively soft on crime measure.
No, it’s because polls show overwhelming support for Prop. 36 and as a realist politician Newsom didn’t want to waste political capital on a lost cause.
That doesn't follow. If there were a hypothetical "Proposition X" that proposed spending $800M on hiring psychic detectives in order to crack down on crime, I don't need to come up with an alternative solution to argue that it won't work.
This article is saying that recriminalization won't work and will cost a lot of money.
I think the biggest problem with the article is that it outsources the pivotal "won't work" part of the argument to a couple of links of potentially dubious quality, specifically this one:
I think if you're going to argue for something heavily counterintuitive like "locking up more criminals won't reduce crime" then you need to do a deeper dive than a couple of papers that happen to come down on your side of the argument. You need to be writing a "More Than You Wanted To Know" style article that goes through all the different studies with all the different methodologies, otherwise I'm going to suspect that you might be cherrypicking your studies and there's a whole mess of contradictory ones using slightly different methods.
(Is this an isolated demand for rigour? No, it's just a demand for rigour if you're going to try to get me to accept something highly counterintuitive.)
I would say that's a misleading way to phrase it. If you think "a couple of links of potentially dubious quality" means the same thing as "only a couple of links" then you should say the latter.
"Faster and more consistent clearance is a much better deterrent than harsh sentences" is by far the consensus across empirical criminology work as far as I know.
"SSRN" isn't even a source. It's a repository for people to upload social science working papers (like ArXiV is for math and physics.) So the source is just some guy who works at Open Philanthropy.
I don't know that SSRN really counts as a source, but the Roodman paper linked to reads more like a blogpost about why prison doesn't work that someone has written "meta-analysis" on top of. It's not the sort of thing that would convince anyone, it's more "here's a talking point if someone raises study X; here's a talking point if someone raises study Y." Saying "this, therefore prison doesn't work" is, charitably, disingenuous.
>otherwise I'm going to suspect that you might be cherrypicking your studies and there's a whole mess of contradictory ones using slightly different methods.
It's sad to say, but at this point I have zero trust in academia for anything that touches on political issues (other than climate change) and comes down on the left-wing side. There could be zero contradictory studies out there, and I would just think "oh, academia thinks we shouldn't put criminals in prison? SHOCKER, I'm sure there are no flaws, dishonesty, or ignored data here". They can't all be bad, but it's becoming clear that there are enough to poison the whole system.
It really is a shame. Carefully thought out essays citing high-quality peer-reviewed research every other sentence ought to be the gold standard for political persuasion. But nope, the researchers want their tribe to win, and the essayists are happy to receive good ammo for their fight. Chalk another one up for Moloch, I guess.
Fair question. A few factors: 1) the mechanism and potential for danger was established before it was politicized; 2) the researchers in question, although doubtless overwhelmingly left-leaning, are real scientists, not humanities clowns whose journals publish literal Mein Kampf excerpts; 3) if there is significant rot going on, I trust the people (like Scott) I outsource my intellectual rigor to to notice and say something.
Not to say there can never be a thumb even brushing the scale, but yeah, overall I trust them. Also, I'm talking specifically about the content of scientific papers, not essays arguing for policies.
Also, the raw weather data is a lot harder to fake, and things like "number of hurricanes" don't need much nuanced interpretation, nor are core theoretical underpinnings in dispute, unlike nearly everything involving high-level predictions of human minds.
Much as I enjoy economics, I'd be a bit surprised if anyone had *ever* really nailed down a real-world supply or demand curve to the sort of parts-per-million precision that chemistry considers routine, and opacity or blackbody-radiation calculations find almost amateurish.
"The spread of fentanyl is a tragic natural experiment. If states with tougher drug possession were weathering the fentanyl epidemic with fewer deaths, we’d have seen that in the data. But they’re not. There’s no relationship."
At least for drugs this is very convincing, no?
For theft it uses basic crime data,
"""
[...] shoplifting is down or static in California's small counties and a few of the larger ones, but very high in Los Angeles and the Bay Area. Shoplifting rates in San Francisco were 24% higher in 2022 compared to 2019, while San Mateo saw a rise of 53%. This is another indicator that Prop 47 – a statewide measure – isn’t the primary driver of the trend
"""
It seems pretty clear that the length of sentence barely has any effect on the crime rate.
....
The smoking gun is regarding why crime is high and the police sucks was in the comments a few months ago, in the "Details That You Should Include In Your Article On How We Should Do Something About Mentally Ill Homeless People" post.
It takes half a day to process just one criminal. Just driving to the jail is hours. And the DA still might not press charges.
And this is the classic broken window effect. The solution is simple, but it costs a lot of money.
"""
Guess how many police are patrolling at one time among 430k people in the crime that Oakland gets? 200? 100? It's 30! 30 officers to respond to whatever mayhem is going on. One officer busy filing paperwork and driving 2 hours to Dublin jail for every 40,000 people.
The article argues, at length, that it won't work for actually treating drug addiction. It does not attack the core logic that locking people up for longer will keep them off the street for longer.
See "So the most likely outcome in many of these drug cases is that an offender will be willing to go into treatment, but there are no treatment beds available. What happens then? The proposition doesn’t say. Neither outcome - getting years of prison time for a bed shortage that isn’t their fault, or walking free without treatment - makes the treatment-mandated felony idea look very good." a conclusion I completely disagree with. Giving drug addicted offenders years of prison time makes this idea look great! It's the whole point!
> It does not attack the core logic that locking people up for longer will keep them off the street for longer.
Because it really can't. As much as some people don't like to hear this, *incarceration of criminals is a societal good per se.* Even if it does nothing whatsoever to reform or rehabilitate the criminal, it is still a societal good, because it keeps them away from whoever would have been their next victim.
What would you consider the ideal sentence length? Do you want mandatory life imprisonment for all crimes? If not, what criteria would you use to decide sentence length?
I can't speak for Bob, but yes, something in that neighborhood sounds good. For trivial things like small-scale teen shoplifting, *actual, caring* rehabilitation with zero focus on punishment. For everything else, get fucked.
I'm surprised. You want a category with *zero* focus on punishment, and then you want to jump straight from that to life, with nothing in between?
Which of these deserve "rehabilitation with zero focus on punishment", and which deserve life in prison: Run a red light? Trespassing? Late filing your taxes? Steal a rare Magic card from your friend? Throw one punch while angry or drunk? Public urination? Peeping tom? Buying a firework in one state where it's legal and then carrying it into another state where it's illegal?
>It does not attack the core logic that locking people up for longer will keep them off the street for longer.
It quite explicitly attacks the notion that, at least as far as theft is concerned, the immediate problem is that offenders aren't locked up for long enough. It argues instead that the problem is that offenders aren't arrested in the first place. Arrest for a crime, under our system of justice, is a bit of a prerequisite for being locked up.
And so is conviction. The article tries to pretend like that doesn't matter, like the problem is cops not arresting people, rather than Progressive prosecutors and judges letting them go after they've been arrested.
Thousands of people in custody awaiting trial would disagree with you .
> The article tries to pretend like that doesn't matter, like the problem is cops not arresting people, rather than Progressive prosecutors and judges letting them go after they've been arrested.
That is one of the explicit arguments presented by the author, yes. Whether that amounts to "pretending" depends on the truth value of the statement ("smash-and-grab thieves and shoplifters are primarily emboldened by the low likelihood of arrest rather than by the promise of leniency once arrested") underlying the argument. I'm not in a position to determine that value, so I won't pretend that I am.
> "Prop 36 supporters’ explicit argument is that, if we raise criminal penalties, it might motivate our police officers to put in a similarly impressive effort and actually arrest criminals. They admit that California’s shoplifting crisis isn’t about recidivism - ie shoplifters getting arrested, serving short sentences, getting out of jail, and shoplifting again. It’s about low clearance rates - shoplifters never get arrested in the first place. "
...and links to a report with clearance rate statistics demonstrating that this is true.
Clearance isn't arrests. From the linked report you're referring to: "Two years after Prop 47, California’s clearance rate—or reported crimes that lead to an arrest and referral to prosecution—for property crime dropped 3 percent."
Arrest *and prosecution* is clearance. (See also this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearance_rate. "In criminal justice, clearance rate is calculated by dividing the number of crimes that are "cleared" (a charge being laid) by the total number of crimes recorded." Again, clearance equals being brought up on charges, not simply arrest.) When the prosecutors refuse to do their jobs, and turn criminals loose time after time, that's not the fault of the police.
Meanwhile, the article doesn't provide a single link to any Prop 36 supporters actually making this "explicit argument." Which makes it look more and more like a strawman.
One of the reasons that low-level offenses aren't heavily policed is that DAs treat misdemeanors categorically much less seriously than felonies, and so enforcement of felonies is heavily prioritized by police departments because they don't want to waste time and resources tracking down and arresting a misdemeanant who is just going to get diversion or probation and be right back out doing the same damn thing the very next day (if they even bother to show up to their court date at all).
That decision is made by the elected DA, whose constituents prefer to vote for the softest approach possible (due to tribal politics).
Also it's pretty hard to fine habitual criminals in practice. What are you going to do if someone can't or won't pay the fine? How are you even going to track who the people who haven't paid their fines are? Any possible approach pretty quickly reduces to either "let them go" or "lock them up" and we're back where we started.
Most misdemeanants don't have much money and won't pay, which will lead them to be brought back in on deliquency charges, which is a giant hassle for everyone, creates huge amounts of paperwork that don't actually go towards solving actual crimes, and pisses off the "criminal justice reform" types. There's no percentage in it for anyone.
Your delusions about clairevoyance and telepathy (both of which are scientifically established beyond any rational doubt) are nothing more than fashionable pseudoscience.
Firstly, I think "your proposed `solution' will not actually alleviate the problem, and will cause other problems" - which is the case article makes, to my untrained eye plausibly - is a valuable contribution to a debate even if you don't couple it with "...but here are some other things that would". "We must do something; this is something; therefore we must do this" is not a good strategy.
And secondly, demanding not merely that the article propose concrete, actionable solutions (which it does) but that it propose ones that are currently popular seems like an even more artificially high bar.
That link seems pretty bad for arguing your claim, given that it essentially boils down to one offhand remark by the author, and the article just describes the author's betting strategy but there is no ground truth to compare to (author states "Since I only have data on the successes, there's no way to judge my performance right now.")
Oh thank you for pointing that out. I mistakenly linked to the wrong article (he wrote two very similar ones). Here is the right one: https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with-social-science-and-how-to-fix-it/ The whole thing is good but in particular Ctrl+F for "Criminology Should Just Be Scrapped" and you should see the right stuff. I'll just quote it here as well to save some time:
"If you thought social psychology was bad, you ain't seen nothin' yet. Other fields have a mix of good and bad papers, but criminology is a shocking outlier. Almost every single paper I read was awful. Even among the papers that are highly likely to replicate, it's de rigueur to confuse correlation for causation. [..] There's no doubt in my mind that the net effect of criminology as a discipline is negative: to the extent that public policy is guided by these people, it is worse. Just shameful."
I agree, but for a slightly different reason. I don't think posts like this appreciate how politics actually works. There's some very literal-minded and dare I say slightly autistic thinking behind arguments like "yes x is a problem, and this candidate or ballot measure promises to solve x, but their policy as literally stated probably won't solve x, therefore vote for the x-isn't-actually-a-problem candidate/position". There's little appreciation of how much elections and referenda function as symbolic expressions of the direction the people want government or society to take.
Going through the details of exactly what is being proposed and exactly what effect it will likely have is appropriate for bureaucrats and policy-makers but not to the same degree for popular votes. Now, I'm not sure about California, and whether ballot measures are actually widely viewed more like detailed policy-setting than like elections over there.
But in most jurisdictions, a referendum is sufficiently rare that its result provides a very strong signal to all levels of government and society about the people's view of the importance of an issue and the general direction to take. So in a referendum on same-sex marriage, it's rational to consider both the excesses of the trans movement and the harms and prevalence of anti-gay bullying, despite neither of those things being technically on the ballot. In a referendum on affirmative action, it's rational to consider freedom of speech and the legacy of segregation. Despite neither being on the ballot. Because you can bet these things will be substantially influenced by the result. Because that's how politics works.
At least, in my jurisdiction there were votes on both those things, and I took those factors into account in casting my vote. I suspect it was rational of me to do so, and I suspect it's similarly rational for CA voters to take a general grievance of "insufficient enforcement of criminal laws" into account when voting on a much more specific formulation of that.
Tl; dr--Consider the message your vote sends to everyone in the government at every level, not just its narrowest literal legal effect.
Ugh, this probably describes the typical voter pretty well and it's awful. People vote for bad legislation based on vibes, tribal affiliation, or wanting to signal they're upset about some vaguely related issue. Politicians in turn propose bad legislation that can be summed up in some simplistic one-line pitch, like "long mandatory sentences", because us voters don't have the time or desire to do in-depth research on complex societal systems for every proposed law. Then we end up with laws that make life worse, the problem doesn't get fixed, and everyone one either side of the issue remains angry.
Any nuance to the single-bit binary signal you're trying to send is lost, and the message received ends up being that proposing bad, simplistic, ineffective legislations gets votes.
> Across jurisdictions, there’s no correlation between tough drug laws and lower drug use. This is an ecological result , and vulnerable to obvious confounders - for example, maybe jurisdictions with more drug use are more likely to institute strict laws. But the best quasi-experimental studies we have, usually looking at changes in drug use after sentencing reforms, find the same. It also matches common sense: drug users are often deeply addicted and not thinking about the long term.
Wait, what?
What?
What?!?
That is not what "tough drug laws" means. (Well, maybe in California it might, but not in *sane* jurisdictions!) Tough drug laws means dealing with the actual problem by getting tough on the actual criminals: the drug dealers.
Dealing drugs is literally worse than murder, and should be treated as such by the law. Dealing with addicts is an entirely different matter. Sending them to treatment, as the article notes, is a good idea when it's available. But "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." The best way to deal with addiction is to keep it from happening in the first place, by getting rid of the supply. We urgently need tough drug laws, and even tougher policy on international drug suppliers, to get dealers off our streets and their upstream suppliers into early graves.
> Dealing drugs is literally worse than murder, and should be treated as such by the law. Dealing with addicts is an entirely different matter.
I see different numbers from different sources, but they do seem to agree that the majority of drug dealers are also drug users; if they are dealing to fund their addiction, then it's not "an entirely different matter."
I think the more interesting question is what percentage of drug users are drug dealers. If you recriminalize just for the drug dealers (with the largest sentences for the largest dealers), would that still cause an overpopulation issue?
Probably a majority of drug users sometimes share their drugs with their friends, and often these friends pay them back for getting some for them. Does that make them "drug dealers"?
These "just sharing with their friends" dealers are probably responsible for minting the vast majority of new drug addicts. People don't try drugs for the first time because some drug lord is standing on the street corner handing out free samples, they try it through their friends.
This also means that someone claiming that they don’t want to punish ordinary users, but just want to punish some select class of dealers, are being dishonest, since ordinary users count as dealers under this sort of definition.
This is not a new category. The borderline group has been charged with "possession with intent [to sell]" for a while. I don't like that category, but I'm not sure what else we could do. People selling drugs, even to friends, is actually really bad.
> I think the more interesting question is what percentage of drug users are drug dealers.
Good catch. Turning a correlation inside-out to obfuscate the point is a very common rhetorical dirty trick. It's good to be aware of them so you won't get fooled when someone pulls one out.
Sentencing people for committing crimes doesn't cause an overpopulation issue. Failing to build enough prisons to cope with the crime level is what causes an overpopulation issue.
Ideally though, if you like maximizing utility your goal should be to try to keep people out of the prison system and put to work if at all possible, as prisons are generally negative utility and only really useful as a disincentive for negative behavior or as a way to contain am individual causing disproportionate amounts of negative utility.
That *is* what "tough drug laws" means. It's not what "smart drug laws" means, but no one is proposing "smart drug laws" (if we could even figure out a good way to identify what counts as "dealing").
Dealing is any distribution, sale, or transfer of illegal drugs from one person to another without explicit authorization from the state. Is that not good enough of a definition?
That makes the majority of drug users into dealers.
Most drug users take drugs with other drug users. It is common to e.g. pool money and for one person to buy drugs for the group - as it is also very common when buying legal items.*
That is selling illegal drugs, which makes that person a drug dealer.
If you want a useful distinction between a drug dealer and a drug user, you need a better definition, and (because it needs to be written into law) that's going to be hard. There's a reason that the law usually does it by quantity (or value) of drugs dealt - it's too hard to make a useful distinction otherwise.
* Note: if you place an UberEats order for a bunch of people and they all Venmo you their share of the order price, you are not a food retailer subject to FDA regulation and (state) food inspection. Making that distinction is actually quite hard in law, but only works because there are legal retailers who are subject to the inspection regime.
But would there even be a problem with prosecuting those people as if they were drug dealers? As soon as they get other people involved in their drug habits, they lose the right to claim that they're just a victim. Minimizing the amount of contagion by disincentivizing any social use of drugs could have an effect on reducing the rate of new drug users.
At that point, you might as well just not bother making a distinction between dealing and possession. Taking drugs alone is pretty unusual other than for hardcore addicts - I’m sure you’ve heard comments about how the only people that drink alone are alcoholics, the case is similar for most drugs.
If, as OP suggests, you want to treat drug dealers as murderers, then you probably should not also support a policy that treats most drug users as drug dealers.
That's why prosecutorial discretion exists. The drug user who was tasked by his 3 friends to buy drugs for them is technically a drug dealer, but a reasonable prosecutor would not prosecute him on that technicality, just as a reasonable police officer would not pull you over for going 2 mph over the speed limit. On the other hand, if the drug user persistently pushes drugs on his non-addict friends to try to turn them into addicts, and some of them die as a result, maybe he should be prosecuted as a drug dealer.
I don't think that is an accurate model of how prosecutors operate. Instead: what is my caseload, can I get this in the news, am I trying to get elected/promoted, what are my KPIs, and if all of those fall the right way then suddenly you have this nice big stick to compel someone to agree to a harsher plea bargain. "Agree to 5 years or I will charge you for distribution."
Are the laws whose effects have been studied the same kind of law being proposed for California? If they're importantly different, wouldn't that be a much stronger point for you to make? And if they're not, don't you think you should clarify that you are only criticizing the article's word choice and not its arguments?
> That is not what "tough drug laws" means. (Well, maybe in California it might, but not in *sane* jurisdictions!) Tough drug laws means dealing with the actual problem by getting tough on the actual criminals: the drug dealers.
Drug dealers are only criminals because we criminalised a transaction between willing participants.
You can git rid of most drug crimes (in the statistics) by getting rid of most drug crimes (in the law books).
If a case can be made than the strong addict is not willing, there is also a case that not getting the drug could be worse than getting it for him, if nothing is done otherwise to help him.
And the war on drugs seems to be a complete fail, filling prisons and financing criminality.
We would be a lot better by designing less damaging drugs, and let people sell it under strict regulations.
The "war on drugs" is nothing but rhetoric. The biggest problem with the war on drugs is that we've never actually had one.
Spend a year or two sending the military against the cartels, and treating drug dealers at home as enemy combatants — with everything that implies — and we'll see far better results than we've gotten in the last 50 years of *not* waging war on drugs.
I admit it is rhetoric to call it a "war", but I wasn't using it for the rhetorical aspect, it is just how people named it, so I use it too (but I will try to use another name in the future).
I think a real war would lead to what real wars lead to, a massive amount of death and suffering, and I don't really believe it will solve the problem durably.
>Dealing drugs is literally worse than murder, and should be treated as such by the law.
No it's not.
...I guess if I squint I can see how it could be true of a sufficiently nasty drug, or if someone was selling drugs that were easy to overdose on and it was just murder by another name. But as a general rule, no way.
I'd far rather have a drug habit than be dead, I'd far rather have anyone I cared about be a drug addict than die. I don't mean to downplay drug addiction, but nothing's worse than murder except something like multiple murders or wars.
While I agree "dealing drugs is literally worse than murder" is an incredibly silly statement, I'd argue that severe ritualized [edit, I mean "routine"] abuse of children actually is worse than murder because of the unacceptably high probability that victims will become offenders as adults. The world is better off if a five year old is murdered than if that five year old is [routinely] molested by his uncle and then grows up to [routinely] molest a handful of his own young family members or neighborhood kids or whatever.
Does this sort of ritualized abuse actually happen outside of that Delta Green RPG module I read a few weeks ago? There certainly are lots of horny adults with bad desires who take advantage of children and teenagers, but even Epstein was just putting some neo-Egyptian woo over his illicit sex parties, not running an actual cult. There seems to be a whole paranoia among Christians about satanic rape or molestation cults, but I don't think I've ever heard of one actually existing--the McMartin preschool case turned out to be bunk. I've heard there are groups like the OTO that practice sex magic, but from what I can tell it's all consenting adults.
But that then means the world is better off if a 5-year-old is better off dead than if he's abused, because he might become an abuser. I'm having a hard time getting numbers on what percentage of abused people become abusers, but it seems to be less than half. Even going all high-decoupling, doesn't seem like an improvement if your only concern is decreasing the total amount of abuse.
We sort of have a three-issue debate going on - I don't agree that drug dealing is literally worse than murder, but in the interest of contemplating things that might be worse than murder, routinely sexually abusing multiple children (it's rarely ever just one in a molester's whole life) and thus incubating future child molesters sure seems like a more destructive act than drug dealing.
Huh! I've heard the phrases "ritual abuse" and "ritualized abuse" used by podcasts (and old episodes of Loveline) to describe, "My dad came into my room every night from when I was 8 years old to 12," but you definitely made me pause long enough to go out to Google and discover that usage is NOT at all common!
I was wondering 'is this QAnon?' Because the stories about adults abusing drugs made from the adrenal glands of tortured children sounded more to me like a Call of Cthulhu scenario than anything else.
By "immediate release", do you mean that the 6 months in jail that shoplifting is currently punishable with feel the same as "immediate release" to you, or that the plain text of the law is misleading and people aren't actually punished with 6 months in jail in real life?
And if it got upgraded to a felony, would people genuinely get the 3 years involved in a felony charge?
I think Clara's position (which I agree with) is that shoplifters shouldn't get off with zero penalty, but that six months sounds more appropriate than three years + felony record. Therefore we should give the system the directive + resources to enforce the existing laws, which allow this penalty, rather than increase to a higher penalty in the hopes that maybe that one will get enforced.
It sounds like you're saying there's no way to actually give someone six months in prison from a misdemeanor - unless we upgrade it to a felony, the system will round it down to zero. And it sounds like Clara's recommendation is "no, we should actually have the thing everyone thinks we mean by misdemeanor".
You're probably the only person in this conversation who really understands the incentives here, so - why can't we have the thing that it sounds like "misdemeanor" means?
...the "treatment mandated felony" thing doesn't sound at all like what I'm thinking of as "misdemeanor" - for example, how does it resolve anything around shoplifting cases not linked to drugs?
My impression is that asking the voters these kinds of questions about sentence length inherently assumes some concept of proportionate punishment. If you said shoplifting should be punished by torturing the person to death, I would say that's disproportionate, even though they're a thief. If you said "six months in jail" or "three years in jail", then we could argue about which of those is more proportionate.
I feel like the other side of this debate is not just unwilling to accept these terms of figuring out what a proportionate punishment is and sticking to it, they're constantly shifting goalposts in a weird way: "if the law says six months, we'll do zero, but if the law says three years, we'll do some amount we refuse to specify beforehand which you'll just have to hope will be better." I'm still trying to figure out why this is, or why we can't just let voters/policymakers/cops decide on some specific amount that gets enshrined in rule of law and then carried out.
Various legal systems do actually do all sorts of weird rounding. For example in Texas if you have a 5-year+ sentence you will usually get out of prison before someone with a 2-year sentence. Why? With the backlog of resources it takes to review parole requests, by the someone gets a review, usually they are most of the way through the 2-year sentence anyway, so might as well let them finish it, while the 5-year sentence might stay in the queue to get reviewed and get out at 1.25 years or sooner (plus the remainder on parole).
The greater sin here is simply unfunded mandates. Let's make all these things illegal but not give the police enough funding to enforce them, or the courts enough funding to then process what the police catch, or the prisons enough funding to house (or review for parole) what the courts convict. Or parole enough funding to monitor what the prisons let out. And then... perhaps... right back to police again.
If we actually put our money where our missives were, then maybe someone would stand a significant chance of being caught, and a significant chance of actually facing jail time. Instead we keep grasping for knobs that don't actually effect real change.
What is the effort that would otherwise have been put towards small-scale theft typically being instead redirected to?
I think this is why your argument doesn't really resonate with me - it seems like petty theft is always going to be at the bottom of the priority list (to the extent that cops actually have the latitude to prioritze what the focus on), regardless of whether the expected sentence is 0, 6, or 36 months.
So when I hear cops say that they aren't arresting thieves because there isn't much of a penalty, it feels more like an unwillingness to engage with the system and less like a "I'll focus on more important things", since if they have more important things to do, they should focus on them anyways!
To be clear, I'm not actually against 36 (or harsher punishments for thieves), I'm undecided (and don't live in CA). I just struggle with this argument and it's many variants.
A combination of filling out more paperwork and spending the money on non-police things.
https://www.ppic.org/publication/law-enforcement-staffing-in-california/
Shouldn't the manager set priorities, and if that isn't working, sack people? Seems a lot clearer than the length of sentence.
>Instead, we should give police departments the resources they need to do their jobs. Yes, this means more cops - California is under-policed for its size, and our police staffing rate has been declining since 2008. But we should also expect officers to do their best to enforce the law using the resources they have – even if it means changing a department policy or two. Instead of longer sentences, we should ask our police departments for smarter, more targeted interventions. Unfortunately, police accountability is hard. As with drug addiction, we know the answer – but it’s expensive, difficult to implement, politically unpalatable, involves lots of reduplicated work across 58 counties and countless municipalities, and won’t yield immediate results.
>But we shouldn’t give up. Californians can solve our problems – after all, we solved our car break-in epidemic and our prison overcrowding crisis. Our decade of progress on sentencing reform is a significant accomplishment for tens of thousands of people in our state. Reversing it won’t fix the issues we have now. Californians deserve real solutions, not imaginary ones. Vote no on 36.
Sure, but which ballot measure is this, and when will it happen? I found this article as unsatisfying as I have found other arguments against reinstating various criminal laws pared back in the 2010s; It attacks a proposed solution but provides no actionable solution of its own. The voting public is incredibly frustrated, for good reason, and a bad but somewhat functional fix now is better than trusting the California state bureaucracy to comprehensively tackle massive issues such as "California is under-policed for its size...police accountability is hard. As with drug addiction... it’s expensive, difficult to implement, politically unpalatable" at some point in the future with no way for it to happen.
Opponents of recriminalization need to provide actual solutions, not just 'wait and see :) :)'.
"Sure, but which ballot measure is this, and when will it happen?"
It looks like California Democrats tried to get something on the ballot and something went wrong. https://calmatters.org/politics/elections/2024/07/gavin-newsom-crime-measure/ suggests the Republicans defeated the measure, but I didn't think that was possible in California and I don't know what the real story is.
I'm confused. If the Governor and the legislature both want something, can't they just go ahead and do it, rather than making it a ballot measure?
I'm too lazy to google the specifics right now, but ballot measures preempt legislation, so there are rules relating to passing any legislation for which there is a substantially similar pending ballot measure. The usual thing to do is for the majority party to put an alternative ballot measure on the ballot for voters to choose; sounds like Newsom et. al. failed to finish theirs in time.
Ok but stuff like "more police, more prisons" are well within their power even if they can't repeal Prop 47.
This is hard to find information about, but there are a lot of rules in the California state constitution limiting the power of the legislature and governor. Things like bond measures and constitutional amendments need to be passed by the legislature and also as a ballot measure. (Weirdly, I think anything that raises a tax requires something like a 2/3 majority at both levels, while something that changes civil rights like marriage can be a bare majority. Though one of the current ballot measures is about reducing the 2/3 threshold to 55% for certain kinds of bonds.)
> Weirdly, I think anything that raises a tax requires something like a 2/3 majority at both levels
Yes, that's the result of a ballot measure. Citizen-Initiated Ballot Measures: Not Even Once.
California constitution is a wreck from previous ballot propositions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_ballot_proposition, changes to previous ballot measures must go through a new ballot measure
Time to enact a ballot measure that amends the constitution to strip all ballot-prop-added language and ends the ballot initiative system forever.
I will literally campaign for this. I think everyone is sick and tired of having to learn and re-learn the minutiae of kidney dialysis.
It's okay, we can just vote down all of them because they're extortion attempts from the Nurse's Guild.
> [...] and ends the ballot initiative system forever.
Why do you hate democracy?
(Only half-joking.)
I've heard the proposal to run a ballot measure that says: All ballot measures can be amended or repealed by a 2/3 majority of the legislature, but that declines by a percentage point each year.
So seventeen years after passage, it becomes just a regular law that can be amended or repealed by simple majority. That would strike a balance between retaining direct democracy as a counterweight to issues where partisans on both sides have an interest in maintaining the status quo (like on redistricting reform, or introducing proportional representation) while also providing an eventual pressure release for when the citizens do something dumb.
We also need to ban paid signature gathering. If you can't find an army of volunteers to collect signatures for your issue, then it's inappropriate to use a tool that was intended to enable direct democracy for it. "I had $50M to blow on a pet issue" is not direct democracy. We don't let people offer to pay for votes, either.
Chesterton’s Fence: there is a reason why Initiatives, along with Recall and a bunch of other direct democracy measures were introduced by Progressive (in the Teddy Roosevelt sense of the word) governor Hiram Johnson in the early 1900s, as a check on the incredibly corrupt state legislature. Initiatives brought us things like CCPA/CPRA Privacy laws that are as tough as anything in the EU and I would not throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Seems extreme but I'd vote for almost anything to destroy Prop 13
To be precise, there are four-ish types of ballot measures:
- Referenda, where the legislature has already passed a bill and signed it into law, but some people didn't like it and collected enough signatures to get it on the ballot. It gets suspended until the election, then the law is enacted or repealed depending on the result of the vote. These are rare.
- Bond measures, where the state government or a sub-state governmental body (city, county, water district, school district, etc) is asking permission from voters to borrow money. These go on the ballot because California's constitution requires bond measures be approved by voters.
- Initiative statutes, where someone got a bunch of signatures to put a new law on the ballot and bypass the legislature. The legislature isn't allowed to amend or repeal these by default, since otherwise it's a pretty weak bypass. Some of these contain special provisions allowing the legislature to change them by a supermajority vote. Other states with initiative statutes mostly handle this by requiring a supermajority to modify or repeal an initiative stature within a certain number of years after it passes, after which it becomes a normal law, but CA doesn't do this for some reason.
- Constitutional amendments, where either the legislature wants to change the constitution and needs permission from voters, or someone got a bunch of signature to put their own proposed amendment on the ballot. The legislature is extra-special-double not allowed to mess with constitutional amendments.
Traditionally, a fair number of ballot measure that look like they should be initiative statutes have actually been constitutional amendments, since it's only moderately harder to get a constitutional amendment on the ballot than an initiative statute (874k signatures vs 547k signature) and no harder to get it passed once it's there (simple majority of votes cast). Nobody seems to be doing this this time around though: there are three amendments on the ballot, but they're all proposed by the legislature and all three of the appear to be amendments because they're altering existing constitutional provisions.
This occurred 5 days after the Biden/Trump debate, and 19 days before Biden dropped out and Kamala was endorsed. At the time, Gavin Newsom was very heavily mentioned as a potential candidate.
At the time, and now, I thought there might be some relationship between a potential top of the Democratic ticket being open and Gavin Newsom deciding not to keep his name on a comparatively soft on crime measure.
No, it’s because polls show overwhelming support for Prop. 36 and as a realist politician Newsom didn’t want to waste political capital on a lost cause.
How many far-left Dems wouldn't go along with sensible repairs to the law? That's the only time they beg for Republican votes.
That doesn't follow. If there were a hypothetical "Proposition X" that proposed spending $800M on hiring psychic detectives in order to crack down on crime, I don't need to come up with an alternative solution to argue that it won't work.
This article is saying that recriminalization won't work and will cost a lot of money.
I think the biggest problem with the article is that it outsources the pivotal "won't work" part of the argument to a couple of links of potentially dubious quality, specifically this one:
https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-briefs/2018/03/more-imprisonment-does-not-reduce-state-drug-problems
and this one
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3635864
I think if you're going to argue for something heavily counterintuitive like "locking up more criminals won't reduce crime" then you need to do a deeper dive than a couple of papers that happen to come down on your side of the argument. You need to be writing a "More Than You Wanted To Know" style article that goes through all the different studies with all the different methodologies, otherwise I'm going to suspect that you might be cherrypicking your studies and there's a whole mess of contradictory ones using slightly different methods.
(Is this an isolated demand for rigour? No, it's just a demand for rigour if you're going to try to get me to accept something highly counterintuitive.)
Why are SSRN and The Pew Charitable Trusts dubious sources?
Placing drug addicts in the "criminals" category doesn't change the way in which they differ from other kinds of "criminals".
I don't know much about SSRN or Pew, my point is that any single study is potentially dubious.
I would say that's a misleading way to phrase it. If you think "a couple of links of potentially dubious quality" means the same thing as "only a couple of links" then you should say the latter.
Particularly in the social sciences, where any given study has a >50% chance of being irreproducible.
"Faster and more consistent clearance is a much better deterrent than harsh sentences" is by far the consensus across empirical criminology work as far as I know.
"SSRN" isn't even a source. It's a repository for people to upload social science working papers (like ArXiV is for math and physics.) So the source is just some guy who works at Open Philanthropy.
I don't know that SSRN really counts as a source, but the Roodman paper linked to reads more like a blogpost about why prison doesn't work that someone has written "meta-analysis" on top of. It's not the sort of thing that would convince anyone, it's more "here's a talking point if someone raises study X; here's a talking point if someone raises study Y." Saying "this, therefore prison doesn't work" is, charitably, disingenuous.
I think the point is that the prop isnt (1) “locking up more criminals” but it’s (2) “locking up the same criminals for longer”
And (1) would be amazing to do, but has nothing to with longer mandatory minimum sentences
>otherwise I'm going to suspect that you might be cherrypicking your studies and there's a whole mess of contradictory ones using slightly different methods.
It's sad to say, but at this point I have zero trust in academia for anything that touches on political issues (other than climate change) and comes down on the left-wing side. There could be zero contradictory studies out there, and I would just think "oh, academia thinks we shouldn't put criminals in prison? SHOCKER, I'm sure there are no flaws, dishonesty, or ignored data here". They can't all be bad, but it's becoming clear that there are enough to poison the whole system.
It really is a shame. Carefully thought out essays citing high-quality peer-reviewed research every other sentence ought to be the gold standard for political persuasion. But nope, the researchers want their tribe to win, and the essayists are happy to receive good ammo for their fight. Chalk another one up for Moloch, I guess.
'other than climate change' what gives you faith in this one exception?
Fair question. A few factors: 1) the mechanism and potential for danger was established before it was politicized; 2) the researchers in question, although doubtless overwhelmingly left-leaning, are real scientists, not humanities clowns whose journals publish literal Mein Kampf excerpts; 3) if there is significant rot going on, I trust the people (like Scott) I outsource my intellectual rigor to to notice and say something.
Not to say there can never be a thumb even brushing the scale, but yeah, overall I trust them. Also, I'm talking specifically about the content of scientific papers, not essays arguing for policies.
Also, the raw weather data is a lot harder to fake, and things like "number of hurricanes" don't need much nuanced interpretation, nor are core theoretical underpinnings in dispute, unlike nearly everything involving high-level predictions of human minds.
Much as I enjoy economics, I'd be a bit surprised if anyone had *ever* really nailed down a real-world supply or demand curve to the sort of parts-per-million precision that chemistry considers routine, and opacity or blackbody-radiation calculations find almost amateurish.
I agree I should research the effects of incarceration more. I've been wanting to do that for a while and this has moved it up the priority queue.
Outsources?
"The spread of fentanyl is a tragic natural experiment. If states with tougher drug possession were weathering the fentanyl epidemic with fewer deaths, we’d have seen that in the data. But they’re not. There’s no relationship."
At least for drugs this is very convincing, no?
For theft it uses basic crime data,
"""
[...] shoplifting is down or static in California's small counties and a few of the larger ones, but very high in Los Angeles and the Bay Area. Shoplifting rates in San Francisco were 24% higher in 2022 compared to 2019, while San Mateo saw a rise of 53%. This is another indicator that Prop 47 – a statewide measure – isn’t the primary driver of the trend
"""
It seems pretty clear that the length of sentence barely has any effect on the crime rate.
....
The smoking gun is regarding why crime is high and the police sucks was in the comments a few months ago, in the "Details That You Should Include In Your Article On How We Should Do Something About Mentally Ill Homeless People" post.
It takes half a day to process just one criminal. Just driving to the jail is hours. And the DA still might not press charges.
And this is the classic broken window effect. The solution is simple, but it costs a lot of money.
"""
Guess how many police are patrolling at one time among 430k people in the crime that Oakland gets? 200? 100? It's 30! 30 officers to respond to whatever mayhem is going on. One officer busy filing paperwork and driving 2 hours to Dublin jail for every 40,000 people.
"""
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/details-that-you-should-include-in/comment/61457308
The article argues, at length, that it won't work for actually treating drug addiction. It does not attack the core logic that locking people up for longer will keep them off the street for longer.
See "So the most likely outcome in many of these drug cases is that an offender will be willing to go into treatment, but there are no treatment beds available. What happens then? The proposition doesn’t say. Neither outcome - getting years of prison time for a bed shortage that isn’t their fault, or walking free without treatment - makes the treatment-mandated felony idea look very good." a conclusion I completely disagree with. Giving drug addicted offenders years of prison time makes this idea look great! It's the whole point!
> It does not attack the core logic that locking people up for longer will keep them off the street for longer.
Because it really can't. As much as some people don't like to hear this, *incarceration of criminals is a societal good per se.* Even if it does nothing whatsoever to reform or rehabilitate the criminal, it is still a societal good, because it keeps them away from whoever would have been their next victim.
What would you consider the ideal sentence length? Do you want mandatory life imprisonment for all crimes? If not, what criteria would you use to decide sentence length?
I can't speak for Bob, but yes, something in that neighborhood sounds good. For trivial things like small-scale teen shoplifting, *actual, caring* rehabilitation with zero focus on punishment. For everything else, get fucked.
I'm surprised. You want a category with *zero* focus on punishment, and then you want to jump straight from that to life, with nothing in between?
Which of these deserve "rehabilitation with zero focus on punishment", and which deserve life in prison: Run a red light? Trespassing? Late filing your taxes? Steal a rare Magic card from your friend? Throw one punch while angry or drunk? Public urination? Peeping tom? Buying a firework in one state where it's legal and then carrying it into another state where it's illegal?
>It does not attack the core logic that locking people up for longer will keep them off the street for longer.
It quite explicitly attacks the notion that, at least as far as theft is concerned, the immediate problem is that offenders aren't locked up for long enough. It argues instead that the problem is that offenders aren't arrested in the first place. Arrest for a crime, under our system of justice, is a bit of a prerequisite for being locked up.
And so is conviction. The article tries to pretend like that doesn't matter, like the problem is cops not arresting people, rather than Progressive prosecutors and judges letting them go after they've been arrested.
>And so is conviction.
Thousands of people in custody awaiting trial would disagree with you .
> The article tries to pretend like that doesn't matter, like the problem is cops not arresting people, rather than Progressive prosecutors and judges letting them go after they've been arrested.
That is one of the explicit arguments presented by the author, yes. Whether that amounts to "pretending" depends on the truth value of the statement ("smash-and-grab thieves and shoplifters are primarily emboldened by the low likelihood of arrest rather than by the promise of leniency once arrested") underlying the argument. I'm not in a position to determine that value, so I won't pretend that I am.
No, the article explicitly says:
> "Prop 36 supporters’ explicit argument is that, if we raise criminal penalties, it might motivate our police officers to put in a similarly impressive effort and actually arrest criminals. They admit that California’s shoplifting crisis isn’t about recidivism - ie shoplifters getting arrested, serving short sentences, getting out of jail, and shoplifting again. It’s about low clearance rates - shoplifters never get arrested in the first place. "
...and links to a report with clearance rate statistics demonstrating that this is true.
Clearance isn't arrests. From the linked report you're referring to: "Two years after Prop 47, California’s clearance rate—or reported crimes that lead to an arrest and referral to prosecution—for property crime dropped 3 percent."
Arrest *and prosecution* is clearance. (See also this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearance_rate. "In criminal justice, clearance rate is calculated by dividing the number of crimes that are "cleared" (a charge being laid) by the total number of crimes recorded." Again, clearance equals being brought up on charges, not simply arrest.) When the prosecutors refuse to do their jobs, and turn criminals loose time after time, that's not the fault of the police.
Meanwhile, the article doesn't provide a single link to any Prop 36 supporters actually making this "explicit argument." Which makes it look more and more like a strawman.
One of the reasons that low-level offenses aren't heavily policed is that DAs treat misdemeanors categorically much less seriously than felonies, and so enforcement of felonies is heavily prioritized by police departments because they don't want to waste time and resources tracking down and arresting a misdemeanant who is just going to get diversion or probation and be right back out doing the same damn thing the very next day (if they even bother to show up to their court date at all).
Why don't they fine the misdemeanants?
That decision is made by the elected DA, whose constituents prefer to vote for the softest approach possible (due to tribal politics).
Also it's pretty hard to fine habitual criminals in practice. What are you going to do if someone can't or won't pay the fine? How are you even going to track who the people who haven't paid their fines are? Any possible approach pretty quickly reduces to either "let them go" or "lock them up" and we're back where we started.
Most misdemeanants don't have much money and won't pay, which will lead them to be brought back in on deliquency charges, which is a giant hassle for everyone, creates huge amounts of paperwork that don't actually go towards solving actual crimes, and pisses off the "criminal justice reform" types. There's no percentage in it for anyone.
Your delusions about clairevoyance and telepathy (both of which are scientifically established beyond any rational doubt) are nothing more than fashionable pseudoscience.
I disagree.
Firstly, I think "your proposed `solution' will not actually alleviate the problem, and will cause other problems" - which is the case article makes, to my untrained eye plausibly - is a valuable contribution to a debate even if you don't couple it with "...but here are some other things that would". "We must do something; this is something; therefore we must do this" is not a good strategy.
And secondly, demanding not merely that the article propose concrete, actionable solutions (which it does) but that it propose ones that are currently popular seems like an even more artificially high bar.
I think you make a good point. I'd also add that a lot of the "but studies say it doesn't do anything" arguments do not read as very convincing. They're always from replication-crisis areas of science, and the studies on crime are particularly bad (https://fantasticanachronism.com/2021/11/18/how-i-made-10k-predicting-which-papers-will-replicate/#Ex-1-Criminology).
That link seems pretty bad for arguing your claim, given that it essentially boils down to one offhand remark by the author, and the article just describes the author's betting strategy but there is no ground truth to compare to (author states "Since I only have data on the successes, there's no way to judge my performance right now.")
Oh thank you for pointing that out. I mistakenly linked to the wrong article (he wrote two very similar ones). Here is the right one: https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with-social-science-and-how-to-fix-it/ The whole thing is good but in particular Ctrl+F for "Criminology Should Just Be Scrapped" and you should see the right stuff. I'll just quote it here as well to save some time:
"If you thought social psychology was bad, you ain't seen nothin' yet. Other fields have a mix of good and bad papers, but criminology is a shocking outlier. Almost every single paper I read was awful. Even among the papers that are highly likely to replicate, it's de rigueur to confuse correlation for causation. [..] There's no doubt in my mind that the net effect of criminology as a discipline is negative: to the extent that public policy is guided by these people, it is worse. Just shameful."
I agree, but for a slightly different reason. I don't think posts like this appreciate how politics actually works. There's some very literal-minded and dare I say slightly autistic thinking behind arguments like "yes x is a problem, and this candidate or ballot measure promises to solve x, but their policy as literally stated probably won't solve x, therefore vote for the x-isn't-actually-a-problem candidate/position". There's little appreciation of how much elections and referenda function as symbolic expressions of the direction the people want government or society to take.
Going through the details of exactly what is being proposed and exactly what effect it will likely have is appropriate for bureaucrats and policy-makers but not to the same degree for popular votes. Now, I'm not sure about California, and whether ballot measures are actually widely viewed more like detailed policy-setting than like elections over there.
But in most jurisdictions, a referendum is sufficiently rare that its result provides a very strong signal to all levels of government and society about the people's view of the importance of an issue and the general direction to take. So in a referendum on same-sex marriage, it's rational to consider both the excesses of the trans movement and the harms and prevalence of anti-gay bullying, despite neither of those things being technically on the ballot. In a referendum on affirmative action, it's rational to consider freedom of speech and the legacy of segregation. Despite neither being on the ballot. Because you can bet these things will be substantially influenced by the result. Because that's how politics works.
At least, in my jurisdiction there were votes on both those things, and I took those factors into account in casting my vote. I suspect it was rational of me to do so, and I suspect it's similarly rational for CA voters to take a general grievance of "insufficient enforcement of criminal laws" into account when voting on a much more specific formulation of that.
Tl; dr--Consider the message your vote sends to everyone in the government at every level, not just its narrowest literal legal effect.
Ugh, this probably describes the typical voter pretty well and it's awful. People vote for bad legislation based on vibes, tribal affiliation, or wanting to signal they're upset about some vaguely related issue. Politicians in turn propose bad legislation that can be summed up in some simplistic one-line pitch, like "long mandatory sentences", because us voters don't have the time or desire to do in-depth research on complex societal systems for every proposed law. Then we end up with laws that make life worse, the problem doesn't get fixed, and everyone one either side of the issue remains angry.
Any nuance to the single-bit binary signal you're trying to send is lost, and the message received ends up being that proposing bad, simplistic, ineffective legislations gets votes.
how exactly is affirmative action related to freedom of speech?
> Across jurisdictions, there’s no correlation between tough drug laws and lower drug use. This is an ecological result , and vulnerable to obvious confounders - for example, maybe jurisdictions with more drug use are more likely to institute strict laws. But the best quasi-experimental studies we have, usually looking at changes in drug use after sentencing reforms, find the same. It also matches common sense: drug users are often deeply addicted and not thinking about the long term.
Wait, what?
What?
What?!?
That is not what "tough drug laws" means. (Well, maybe in California it might, but not in *sane* jurisdictions!) Tough drug laws means dealing with the actual problem by getting tough on the actual criminals: the drug dealers.
Dealing drugs is literally worse than murder, and should be treated as such by the law. Dealing with addicts is an entirely different matter. Sending them to treatment, as the article notes, is a good idea when it's available. But "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." The best way to deal with addiction is to keep it from happening in the first place, by getting rid of the supply. We urgently need tough drug laws, and even tougher policy on international drug suppliers, to get dealers off our streets and their upstream suppliers into early graves.
> Dealing drugs is literally worse than murder, and should be treated as such by the law. Dealing with addicts is an entirely different matter.
I see different numbers from different sources, but they do seem to agree that the majority of drug dealers are also drug users; if they are dealing to fund their addiction, then it's not "an entirely different matter."
I think the more interesting question is what percentage of drug users are drug dealers. If you recriminalize just for the drug dealers (with the largest sentences for the largest dealers), would that still cause an overpopulation issue?
Probably a majority of drug users sometimes share their drugs with their friends, and often these friends pay them back for getting some for them. Does that make them "drug dealers"?
Yes?
These "just sharing with their friends" dealers are probably responsible for minting the vast majority of new drug addicts. People don't try drugs for the first time because some drug lord is standing on the street corner handing out free samples, they try it through their friends.
This also means that someone claiming that they don’t want to punish ordinary users, but just want to punish some select class of dealers, are being dishonest, since ordinary users count as dealers under this sort of definition.
True. Let's be ingenuous: ordinary drug users (of certain drugs) are casually murdering their friends and should be treated like manslaughterers.
This is not a new category. The borderline group has been charged with "possession with intent [to sell]" for a while. I don't like that category, but I'm not sure what else we could do. People selling drugs, even to friends, is actually really bad.
> I think the more interesting question is what percentage of drug users are drug dealers.
Good catch. Turning a correlation inside-out to obfuscate the point is a very common rhetorical dirty trick. It's good to be aware of them so you won't get fooled when someone pulls one out.
Sentencing people for committing crimes doesn't cause an overpopulation issue. Failing to build enough prisons to cope with the crime level is what causes an overpopulation issue.
According to this article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_California_state_prisons there have been just three new state prisons opened in California this century, with a capacity of just 8000.
Can they not both cause overpopulation?
Ideally though, if you like maximizing utility your goal should be to try to keep people out of the prison system and put to work if at all possible, as prisons are generally negative utility and only really useful as a disincentive for negative behavior or as a way to contain am individual causing disproportionate amounts of negative utility.
That *is* what "tough drug laws" means. It's not what "smart drug laws" means, but no one is proposing "smart drug laws" (if we could even figure out a good way to identify what counts as "dealing").
Dealing is any distribution, sale, or transfer of illegal drugs from one person to another without explicit authorization from the state. Is that not good enough of a definition?
That makes the majority of drug users into dealers.
Most drug users take drugs with other drug users. It is common to e.g. pool money and for one person to buy drugs for the group - as it is also very common when buying legal items.*
That is selling illegal drugs, which makes that person a drug dealer.
If you want a useful distinction between a drug dealer and a drug user, you need a better definition, and (because it needs to be written into law) that's going to be hard. There's a reason that the law usually does it by quantity (or value) of drugs dealt - it's too hard to make a useful distinction otherwise.
* Note: if you place an UberEats order for a bunch of people and they all Venmo you their share of the order price, you are not a food retailer subject to FDA regulation and (state) food inspection. Making that distinction is actually quite hard in law, but only works because there are legal retailers who are subject to the inspection regime.
But would there even be a problem with prosecuting those people as if they were drug dealers? As soon as they get other people involved in their drug habits, they lose the right to claim that they're just a victim. Minimizing the amount of contagion by disincentivizing any social use of drugs could have an effect on reducing the rate of new drug users.
At that point, you might as well just not bother making a distinction between dealing and possession. Taking drugs alone is pretty unusual other than for hardcore addicts - I’m sure you’ve heard comments about how the only people that drink alone are alcoholics, the case is similar for most drugs.
If, as OP suggests, you want to treat drug dealers as murderers, then you probably should not also support a policy that treats most drug users as drug dealers.
That's why prosecutorial discretion exists. The drug user who was tasked by his 3 friends to buy drugs for them is technically a drug dealer, but a reasonable prosecutor would not prosecute him on that technicality, just as a reasonable police officer would not pull you over for going 2 mph over the speed limit. On the other hand, if the drug user persistently pushes drugs on his non-addict friends to try to turn them into addicts, and some of them die as a result, maybe he should be prosecuted as a drug dealer.
I don't think that is an accurate model of how prosecutors operate. Instead: what is my caseload, can I get this in the news, am I trying to get elected/promoted, what are my KPIs, and if all of those fall the right way then suddenly you have this nice big stick to compel someone to agree to a harsher plea bargain. "Agree to 5 years or I will charge you for distribution."
It is just a numbers game.
Are the laws whose effects have been studied the same kind of law being proposed for California? If they're importantly different, wouldn't that be a much stronger point for you to make? And if they're not, don't you think you should clarify that you are only criticizing the article's word choice and not its arguments?
> That is not what "tough drug laws" means. (Well, maybe in California it might, but not in *sane* jurisdictions!) Tough drug laws means dealing with the actual problem by getting tough on the actual criminals: the drug dealers.
Drug dealers are only criminals because we criminalised a transaction between willing participants.
You can git rid of most drug crimes (in the statistics) by getting rid of most drug crimes (in the law books).
The word "willing" is doing a whole lot of heavy lifting here. There's a strong case to be made that it can't be fairly applied to addicts.
I stand by my original statement: drug dealing is literally murder and worse than murder, and should be treated as such by the law.
Do you consider bartending also equivalent to murder? The Internet says that alcohol kills 2.6M people a year.
The non addicts are willing.
If a case can be made than the strong addict is not willing, there is also a case that not getting the drug could be worse than getting it for him, if nothing is done otherwise to help him.
And the war on drugs seems to be a complete fail, filling prisons and financing criminality.
We would be a lot better by designing less damaging drugs, and let people sell it under strict regulations.
The "war on drugs" is nothing but rhetoric. The biggest problem with the war on drugs is that we've never actually had one.
Spend a year or two sending the military against the cartels, and treating drug dealers at home as enemy combatants — with everything that implies — and we'll see far better results than we've gotten in the last 50 years of *not* waging war on drugs.
I admit it is rhetoric to call it a "war", but I wasn't using it for the rhetorical aspect, it is just how people named it, so I use it too (but I will try to use another name in the future).
I think a real war would lead to what real wars lead to, a massive amount of death and suffering, and I don't really believe it will solve the problem durably.
>Dealing drugs is literally worse than murder, and should be treated as such by the law.
No it's not.
...I guess if I squint I can see how it could be true of a sufficiently nasty drug, or if someone was selling drugs that were easy to overdose on and it was just murder by another name. But as a general rule, no way.
I'd far rather have a drug habit than be dead, I'd far rather have anyone I cared about be a drug addict than die. I don't mean to downplay drug addiction, but nothing's worse than murder except something like multiple murders or wars.
While I agree "dealing drugs is literally worse than murder" is an incredibly silly statement, I'd argue that severe ritualized [edit, I mean "routine"] abuse of children actually is worse than murder because of the unacceptably high probability that victims will become offenders as adults. The world is better off if a five year old is murdered than if that five year old is [routinely] molested by his uncle and then grows up to [routinely] molest a handful of his own young family members or neighborhood kids or whatever.
Does this sort of ritualized abuse actually happen outside of that Delta Green RPG module I read a few weeks ago? There certainly are lots of horny adults with bad desires who take advantage of children and teenagers, but even Epstein was just putting some neo-Egyptian woo over his illicit sex parties, not running an actual cult. There seems to be a whole paranoia among Christians about satanic rape or molestation cults, but I don't think I've ever heard of one actually existing--the McMartin preschool case turned out to be bunk. I've heard there are groups like the OTO that practice sex magic, but from what I can tell it's all consenting adults.
"Ritualized abuse" in this case simply means "repeated abuse, part of a routine, part of a family system's household rituals," not religious/magical.
Ah.
But that then means the world is better off if a 5-year-old is better off dead than if he's abused, because he might become an abuser. I'm having a hard time getting numbers on what percentage of abused people become abusers, but it seems to be less than half. Even going all high-decoupling, doesn't seem like an improvement if your only concern is decreasing the total amount of abuse.
We sort of have a three-issue debate going on - I don't agree that drug dealing is literally worse than murder, but in the interest of contemplating things that might be worse than murder, routinely sexually abusing multiple children (it's rarely ever just one in a molester's whole life) and thus incubating future child molesters sure seems like a more destructive act than drug dealing.
Huh! I've heard the phrases "ritual abuse" and "ritualized abuse" used by podcasts (and old episodes of Loveline) to describe, "My dad came into my room every night from when I was 8 years old to 12," but you definitely made me pause long enough to go out to Google and discover that usage is NOT at all common!
Thanks!
Sure, no prob.
I was wondering 'is this QAnon?' Because the stories about adults abusing drugs made from the adrenal glands of tortured children sounded more to me like a Call of Cthulhu scenario than anything else.
Haha, no, just me using words completely incorrectly, apparently. Thanks again for the correction.
> While I agree "dealing drugs is literally worse than murder" is an incredibly silly statement
See my reply to @birdboy2000. It is very true, and only sounds silly if you don't think about it rationally.
I was thinking about it rationally. Pick one:
1. You, or a loved one be murdered.
or
2. Someone, somewhere deals illegal drugs.
False comparison. The actual, rational question is, pick one:
1. You, or a loved one be murdered.
or
2. Someone deals illegal drugs to you or a loved one, getting them addicted and on the road to a long, torturous death.
They're murdered either way, but #2 is significantly worse because it takes so long and does massive amounts of damage along the way.