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.
> There’s no reason the state’s prison system can’t generate a profit on each prisoner instead of a loss. Be creative
I'm sorry, I'm not that creative.
If we're talking prison labour, then most prisoners are very low value labourers, and need to be supervised by guards, who are much more expensive. The more labour they're doing, the more supervision they require. I can't think of any form of labour they can usefully do.
And if we're talking about selling their kidneys, I think the market is not large enough.
>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.
But that's not how you actually framed your statement.
You made a general blanket statement that dealing drugs is worse than murder, universally.
But neither I, nor a loved one, is going to buy illegal addictive drugs which set us on the road to a long and torturous death because none of us have the potential to become severe addicts. We don't have the combination of genes and early childhood trauma which would trigger those genes to use substances as emotional coping strategy.
(In fact, I'm REALLY the opposite; I had genetic testing done to prove I have a mutation of CYP2D6 (the gene responsible for the analgesic effects of opiates) which prevents me from experiencing the pain-relieving effects of opiates.)
I don't have any control over I or a loved one being murdered, but I do have control over not becoming an addict and not closely emotionally bonding with addicts.
You very much are downplaying drug addiction if you think that, because addiction kills. Either directly through overdoses, or slightly less directly through any number of closely-related problems (destroying your health, leading you into crime and violence, DWI, homelessness, etc.,) *addiction kills.* Not everyone 100% of the time, but actual recovery is rare enough, even for those few who actually get into treatment, that it's not at all inaccurate to say that statistically speaking, drug dealing is murder.
But not all murder is created equal. If I murdered you in a "standard" way (ie. through violence) then it sucks for a brief moment and then it's over. But there are other ways to kill people, and it's generally accepted that doing so in a long and drawn-out process is particularly evil and morally reprehensible. "I'm going to kill you and make sure you *suffer!*" is a stereotypical movie villain threat for a reason. Well, what death is longer, more drawn-out, and more filled with suffering, than death by addiction?
Even torture doesn't do what addiction does, destroying a person body and soul, slowly grinding away their mental faculties, their relationships with family and friends, their wealth and livelihoods, their free will, their health, and so on, over a period of years and years before *finally* taking their life. It's difficult to imagine a worse process of killing. Therefore, drug dealing is worse than (ordinary) murder.
It only sounds like a strange statement if you don't think about it much.
I think the number matter, you don't kill one person each time you sell or give someone else some drug.
Cigarettes gave cancer, and it could be a very bad death too, but we don't think selling them is like murdering people. I think the fact that the buyer was willing, knowing the possibles consequences, should count for something.
Also not all drugs are equal at all, some are a lot worse than others, you seem to describe one of the worst.
"Tough drug laws" pretty often involve cracking down on users too.
But also, trying to stop supply of drugs rather than demand has a long history of being very bad. If the demand is still there (i.e. if people are still addicted), then the more you prosecute suppliers, the more the price goes up, the greater incentive there is for more suppliers to step in and for them to commit violence.
"Dealing drugs is literally worse than murder" What? Can you provide some argument for this position?
> If the demand is still there (i.e. if people are still addicted), then the more you prosecute suppliers, the more the price goes up, the greater incentive there is for more suppliers to step in and for them to commit violence.
You deal with that through treatment programs. Reducing demand is definitely important. But reducing supply has the benefit of reducing the number of new addicts. (Especially if the price is driven up, pricing newcomers out of the market!)
> Can you provide some argument for this position?
I think we should put a massive amount of money in trying to design better less damaging drugs, and then sell it legally but with strong regulations, to replace the new demand, and even optimistically the old one.
Criminalization and crack down on the demand gave us a massive augmentation of fentanyl usage, which is one of the worst drugs possible, I think we should do the reverse.
> Across jurisdictions, there’s no correlation between tough drug laws and lower drug use
Imagine my surprise when I follow the "across jurisdictions" link and it's only across the United States, where drug laws are uniformly among the softest in the world. What happens to the correlation if we include jurisdictions where drug laws are actually meaningful, like Singapore?
I realise that "Singapore style drug laws" isn't on the table in Proposition 36, but it seems unreasonable to claim the correlation.
> and there’s substantial evidence that harsher criminal penalties won’t decrease it. So what should we do?
Following this link, it seems to make the argument that the decrease in crime caused by actually locking people up is offset by an increase in the crimes they commit when they get out. If this is so, then this is a damning indictment of the prison system, which needs to be restructured so that criminals have much less interaction with each other. But the idea of "Can't solve everything at once therefore we shouldn't solve anything" seems dumb.
One word missing from this whole discussion is "justice". Well actually the word "Justice" appears several times but only in the context of "criminal justice system". What's missing is the idea that people want to believe that they live in a just society, and that justice means punishing those who break the rules, so that those who obey the rules can feel like they made the correct choice. If a person can walk around stealing $749 handbags every day without fear of punishment, then what's my motivation to go to work and do productive things instead? The knock-on effects of feeling like you live in a just society go well beyond the decrease in crime.
The United States is unique culturally ethnically and sociopolitically so no anything Singapore does is not likely to be relevant or replicable. Our best evidence is the US and Canada. I grant that there's nowhere with extremely tough drug laws for us to see the extreme end but so it goes - Singapore doesn't generalize.
If you need to see other people punished to be sure you made the right choice then I recommend you just go steal handbags or feel bad about yourself, the rest of us will continue society without retributive savage spectacle
> which needs to be restructured so that criminals have much less interaction with each other.
So, what, solitary for the duration, or even half their time in solitary? That's illegal. Extremely so. Cruel and unusual punishment without substantial additional reason to impose it, another Supreme Court case and one which is even more doomed. And for good reason, because it's incredibly inhumane.
> the United States, where drug laws are uniformly among the softest in the world
Only by a standard which excludes all civilized countries from 'the world'. No comparable countries have drug laws significantly stricter than the USA, and quite a few have ones which are much laxer. Notably, those 'softer' countries largely get much better results, though it's probably not for that reason.
> The knock-on effects of feeling like you live in a just society go well beyond the decrease in crime.
Bullshit. People's idea of what a just society looks like adapts to their circumstances more than their perceptions of the justness of their society does.
I doubt that offset is as much as they say it is. Younger people commit more crime than older people, so locking people up for years means by the time they get out they'll be less suited for crime.
But justice isn't punishing people as strong as we can until the problem is solved. It is much more about punishing people proportionally to the crime, and more systematically.
I think what hurt the idea of justice, is uncaught criminals, and corruption, not the fact that people living months or years in overcrowded prisons even sometime falling to respect the basic rights of the prisoners, is still considered too soft.
Wow yeah, that is dumb. I have no idea where people are getting the idea that prison rehabiliatates people, let alone drug users. If it was increasing the penalty to capital punishment, that would at least make sense (not to mention it would bypass the issue of funding treatment facilities), but I guess the public still isn't ready for that yet.
> But they argue that longer sentences will help raise clearance rates by convincing police that it’s worthwhile to go after shoplifters. This argument is cruel, backwards, and if true would be a damning indictment of the motivations of law enforcement officers.
...I thought we already understood that law enforcement is filled with terrible people. Though, that doesn't mean they can't be made useful when given the right incentives. Throw them a bone once in a while to keep morale up, and they will become much more motivated to fight crime. Worst thing you can do is crucify them for every little scandal, like the left is doing right now.
Depends on what you mean by "rehabilitates". If it means that if you do X, your life is going to suck for Y time, then yes, some percentage of people would be wary to do X, or, having done it and having suffered, would be less likely to do it again. I don't see why it is "dumb". Of course it won't work for everybody every time, but I don't see why it is "dumb" to think it would work for somebody sometime.
It seems that humans are incredibly bad at taking into account the *severity* of consequences when making risk assessments, only taking into account the chance of getting caught. (Edit: Now that I think of it, it's the exact opposite when the consequences are positive. Weird how that works.) In which case, the only ways to reduce crime is by vastly improving surveillance or by actively cultivating a culture of fear that makes everyone overestimate the risk of getting caught.
Of course, capital punishment still has the benefit of just getting rid of the convict forever. Sure, just locking them up forever is the "safer" option, but apparently we can't afford to do that because our prisons are overflowing. So execution it is!
> Even capital punishment doesn't meaningfully deter criminals
History tells us otherwise. Excessive use of capital punishment, as seen under famously-harsh rulers such as Draco of Athens and Vlad the Impaler, drives crime rates virtually to zero. Both rulers have well-attested stories of producing conditions such that a person could leave a pouch of gold coins out in the street overnight and come back the next morning to find it undisturbed.
So it's clear that, at least at extremes, capital punishment is not only effective at deterrence, it creates *near-perfect* deterrence. Does this mean we should live under such policies? Of course not. But it obliterates beyond salvaging the absurd notion that "deterrence doesn't work," and with it the credibility of those who push such arguments. What's important now is to figure out which forms of deterrence are the most effective and efficient, and with the least degree of collateral damage to our freedoms, and implement policies based around this.
...Hence why I mentioned cultures of fear. What matters is increasing the *perception* of risk, not the actual risk. Capital punishment isn't going to do anything unless you start performing gruesome public executions, and even that might not be enough. Of course, you don't necessarily need to commit crimes against humanity either; Japan is peaceful enough that people are passing out drunk in the street without fear of being murdered, and that's likely because everyone is born into a culture of very strict heirarchies and extreme social pressure.
The Bloody Code in Britain didn't do much for crime rates when there wasn't a police force at all and criminals almost never got caught. Lowering punishments to prison sentences (ones that would not seem unusually long by US standards) combined with a massive increase in policing did result in a dramatic drop in crime rates - because people got caught.
There certainly needs to be an effective punishment - else merely being caught is nothing to be afraid of - but there need be no more than sufficient for the criminal to seek to avoid it. Then the bigger factor is consistently the likelihood of being punished, not the severity of punishment.
Greg Clark argued in "A Farewell to Alms" that the Bloody Code caused Britons to lower their time-preference over the generations, thus setting up the Industrial Revolution.
> Excessive use of capital punishment, as seen under famously-harsh rulers such as Draco of Athens and Vlad the Impaler, drives crime rates virtually to zero.
[Citation Needed], historians do not AFAIR believe this was in fact true in either case.
The death penalty for murder doesn't provide much deterrence because:
(a) the alternative is an extremely long prison sentence, which is not substantially better than death, and
(b) murderers are weird and extremely irrational outliers among the criminal community, committing a crime with a very high chance of getting caught and very large sentences for what is usually very small personal gain.
Other criminals aren't like that, some of them are doing crime as a business, making reasonably rational choices. Others are doing it for shits and giggles, knowing that the maximum downside is small.
Also, in part of the US with an active death penalty, there's generally a lag of 10-20 years between sentencing and execution in addition to the investigation, pretrial, and trial process which can take years all by itself. A fair amount of this delay exists for good reason (trial, appeals, giving the defense time to prepare their case, major exculpatory evidence surfacing post-trial, etc), and more of it exists for bad reasons that nobody seems interested in fixing (the court system is way too small for its case load, so there's a long wait period for anything that needs to go in front of a judge).
The very long delay before execution makes the death penalty much less of a deterrent relative to life imprisonment than a hypothetical "Judge Dredd will shoot you right here and right now once he's certain you're guilty" death penalty would be. But again, there are very, very good reasons why we don't have or want a Judge Dredd style swift-and-certain death penalty.
> Even capital punishment doesn't meaningfully deter criminals,
That's nonsense. It doesn't meaningfully deter ALL criminals. But, for example, if you're saying to me that a country where being openly gay is punished by death and the country where being openly gay has no negative consequences has an identical incidence of people being openly gay, and the capital punishment has no influence on people's behavior, sorry, I will call bullshit on that. Punishment certainly modifies people's behavior. Truly, it does not *prevent* the incidence of the behavior completely, for many reasons (one of them people being irrational), but you claim that the threat of death does no meaningful behavior modification to anybody at all is complete nonsense.
You may be confusing this with more plausible claim - that the capital punishment does not have increased deterrence compared to other kinds of severe punishment (such as life imprisonment), or with one that says that the capital punishment is not effective to deter people that are convinced (for one reason or another) that they will never be prosecuted, or some other modified claim. That very well may be plausible, but it is not helping you here. If you remain with the position that the threat of death leads to zero behavioral modification compared to no thereat at all (and thus by consequence a lesser threat, that of imprisonment, can not lead to any behavioral modification either) then it is a complete and utter baloney, sorry.
Well, there kind of is in terms of aggravated assault--apparently one of the reasons the murder rate's gone down is that medical care improved and victims tend to survive assaults more.
Humans as a whole probably do okay at thinking about long-term consequences, but the lunkhead 18 year old who makes his drug and food money by mugging people is pretty bad at that kind of thinking. "When we catch you mugging someone, we'll flog you in the town square and send you to the salt mines for three years" might work as a deterrent; "there will be an opaque process that drags on for a year or two and eventually the judge, prosecutor, and public defender will agree on some random punishment that might be nothing or might be really harsh" probably doesn't work.
No, prisons were created as a way for the State to impose punishment for crimes, as an improvement over the previous system of victims seeking private retribution with no due process for the accused, a.k.a. vendetta. Somehow the concept of punishment for crimes has become unfashionable, but it is deeply rooted in human psychology.
When the US was founded, there was punishment for crimes, but that punishment wasn't prison. There were executions, flogging, stockades, fines, etc. It was reformers (I believe Quakers) who introduced prison, and they did indeed think it would rehabilitate. When Benjamin Rush campaigned to have the first state prison introduced (in Pennsylvania), they were called "houses of repentance", stocked with religious literature for prisoners to read. They were also kept in solitude from each other, so perhaps they did work better than modern prisons for which that's officially considered "inhumane".
I don't know if keeping them isolated from each other is inhumane or not, but I think it would be good if they at least still have the possibility if they want.
The public will never be ready for capital punishment in the case of petty drug crimes. If you are, you are my enemy and I will fight you to hell. It would be an extreme expansion of state power, and there are even tons of people wrongly convicted for those crimes every year.
Rehabilitation was a thing a while ago; Johnny Cash even made it his signature cause. It disappeared as a major goal with the crime wave of the 60s, I think.
> reduced some felony crimes to misdemeanors – theft of goods valued at under $950 and simple drug possession
> from a misdemeanor (months in jail) to a felony (years in jail)
But that's not how it worked. It's not that people who steal used to sit in jail for years and now they are sitting there for less than a year. It's that people who steal now steal openly and brazenly in bright daylight without any fear of retribution and without any consideration of being caught. I don't know what is was supposed to do in theory and what complicated argument can be built from that, but I think this is very easily observable. And I have severe doubt that theft and breaking epidemics are actually "solved" - if you look at the reported crime stats, maybe people just don't bother to report it anymore? After you car has been broken into for the fifth time and police didn't do squat for the previous four times, why would you bother to report it? When my car got broken into, I certainly didn't intend to report it until insurance forced me to file some kind of online form. Obviously exactly nothing happened since then, and I am not even sure if it went to any statistics or not. But if not for the insurance, I'd never bother to report it to anybody.
> But they argue that longer sentences will help raise clearance rates by convincing police that it’s worthwhile to go after shoplifters. This argument is cruel, backwards, and if true would be a damning indictment of the motivations of law enforcement officers.
I notice never here does it say the argument is false. It says "if you believe this you are bad person and the police is bad persons and I hate you" - but it does not even try to prove it is false. To be honest, if I were still living in California, I'd rather have Clara Collier think I'm a bad person and have no theft epidemics than the reverse.
What theory do you have of law enforcement motivation that says that increasing the penalty for shoplifting would make the police more willing to investigate cases of shoplifting?
The best theory is "people making stupid crap up." The argument presented in the article that you're citing here is made-up nonsense. Police aren't failing to clear cases because they aren't properly motivated; they're failing to clear cases because California's Progressive legal system deliberately fails to clear the cases. This, in turn, demotivates police; why bother arresting someone who's not going to get punished for their crimes no matter how clear the evidence against them is? Especially if they could end up getting smeared as an x-ist or a whateverphobe and possibly even face professional or legal consequences for doing so if the criminal they arrested turns out to be under the protection of the Progressive establishment. AKA "the Ferguson Effect."
Re-criminalization is about fixing the societal problems that are keeping police from being able to do their jobs effectively, not about properly motivating the police.
> Re-criminalization is about fixing the societal problems that are keeping police from being able to do their jobs effectively, not about properly motivating the police.
I don't have to present any alternative theories to notice that arguing "if you believe this you are a bad person" has nothing in common with logic in facts. Which is of course very usual mode of arguing for many Californian politicians, but we could try to do better.
Still, if I wanted to go an extra mile and propose the theory, the obvious one must be at least considered. If you are a policeman, and you see, time after time, that thieves you catch are getting released by the prosecutors or the courts, and suffer no consequences to speak of, eventually you will recognize the futility of your efforts and your motivation will suffer. If, in addition to that, you are called a horrible person because demographical composition of people being arrested as a group does not match the political ideals of some academics, your motivation may suffer even further.
Is that because people arrested for assault are more likely to be prosecuted than those arrested for theft, and theft happens to be classified as a misdemeanor while assault happens to be classified as a felony?
The question is whether changing the classification of a crime has any effect on likelihood of prosecution or conviction, or whether the nature of the crime itself is what determines the likelihood of prosecution or conviction.
If anything, I would expect that reclassifying the same crime as having a higher penalty will make juries *less* likely to convict, because they don’t want to assign that penalty to this action.
Do you even get a jury trial for misdemeanors? But as I understand it it's more that the case doesn't even make it to court at all - the relevant DAs have something like a blanket policy of not charging misdemeanors. Of course it's possible that restoring these crimes to felony status would mean DAs would simply escalate their nonprosecution policy further, but they'd be clearly going against the will of the people if they did.
If the crime is classified as small crime, it's easy to let the criminal go. If it's classified as bigger crime, it becomes harder to let the criminal go, and so less criminals are immediately let go after they have been apprehended, and so the police is more motivated to apprehend the criminals because they know they wouldn't just be let go tomorrow.
You haven't actually presented any reason for anyone else to believe your perceptions are true. They don't match what's happened in Oakland; we're underpoliced, but not underprosecuted.
No. That's good law, and good justice. It doesn't remove Windom's culpability, only the deliberately-unfair special circumstances applied to increase his sentence.
You really don't think that investigating a felony gets higher priority than investigating a misdemeanor? I know approximately nothing about the internal operations of police departments, but this seems like common sense.
I'm not sure that's sound reasoning. It's probably true that crimes perceived as more serious get higher priority, and they're generally categorized as felonies, but it's not obvious that recategorizing traditionally-minor crimes from misdemeanors to felonies would cause them to be accorded higher priority.
Like everyone else, police are managed based on what's legible to their managers rather than what's effective or desirable. You get what you measure, and while the goal may be to prioritise more serious crimes, felony vs misdemeanour is how that's going to get operationalised, and that's what's going to feed in to promotion incentives etc.
If misdemeanors get dismissed pre-trial, that would also factor in quite a bit. I wouldn't arrest someone if I knew there was little to no chance of them getting convicted. I would treat it like a noise violation in a nice suburban neighborhood - go if there's repeated complaints and try to handle it by asking nicely if I could. I wouldn't waste my time and cause unnecessary confrontations with the populace by making arrests that go nowhere unless it were egregious.
I can even see it backfiring. Tell a cop that arresting this person for shoplifting is going to lead to a mandatory 6-month sentence and they may decide to just let them off with a warning. The more severe the more the cop may decide to deploy mercy.
Trying to psychologically predict second- and third-order effects is really hard.
There is no "they". There's just nineteen different individual policemen, each of whom thinks they're arresting the shoplifter for the first time. And none of them are going to make any official record of it, because then there'd be an official record of the fact that they let a guy go who was "supposed" to do mandatory jail time.
Theft is not "traditionally minor". Traditionally, thieves got their hands cut off or they got hanged. Theft from somebody important was a capital offense. In other cultures, thieves were forced to pay multiple times value of the stolen goods, or being unable to, could be enslaved or executed. I don't think any non-modern culture considered theft "minor" - and there are reasons for that, most people were very poor, and stealing something valuable from them may mean very grave consequences, maybe death. Well, and rich people certainly would take stealing from them lightly. So unless you mean "since the wokes took over", I don't see how it is "traditional" to treat theft as a minor crime.
Yeah, sure. I just needed a compact way to say "from just prior to this proposed recategorization." If I had said "minor" without qualifier, I anticipated the retort of "well, after we recategorize it as a felony, it would, BY DEFINITION, not be minor any more", and wished to head that off.
But that ruins your argument. Theft used to be big crime (felony), then they made it small crime (misdemeanor), you can't argue making it back big crime won't work because of entrenched perception that is a small crime artificially made big. The perception would be only based on a short time after the change, and I don't think any cultural norm could have formed that considers theft small crime, when for thousands of years it has been considered pretty serious. It can't be seriously entrenched just due to that short time.
I think it is the psychology of job satisfaction. I am not sure how to demonstrate it, but my assumption is that people work harder if they see bigger results.
I definitely perked up at this argument. American police morale is so dead that it doesn't sound categorically insane for Trump to propose not taxing them. Longer sentencing sounds like something that would make police feel it was worth collecting a case over and exposing themselves to an interaction that could go south, which appears to be the essence of the effective strike
Honestly, the problem isn't the sentencing at all. It's *getting to* the sentencing. As long as you have Progressive prosecutors and judges who refuse to do their job, to prosecute, convict, and lock up the guilty parties, it doesn't matter what the sentence is because it won't be imposed upon them.
I wouldn't be surprised if the severity of the crime - measured usually in the severity of the punishment - would be a factor considering how much the prosecution is prioritized. If somebody brings the case that gets a misdemeanor with a month's suspended sentence, it probably would be less prioritized than the one that has 2 years felony.
Right, and I think that's a part of the argument. Why does this relatively minor crime need to be a felony rather than a misdemeanour? Because the prosecutors have stopped charging misdemeanours.
>After you car has been broken into for the fifth time and police didn't do squat for the previous four times, why would you bother to report it?
If you intend to file an insurance claim, you would bother to report it because your insurer will want to see a police report. Other than that, I don't know.
Exactly. But, the reality is insurance with zero deductible is very expensive, and most thefts, even if the insurance covers the stolen goods, would be under a typical insurance deductible ($500-$1000 for a reasonably expensive car, for inexpensive one you'd have liability-only insurance that covers nothing at all here). Not to mention the inevitable price bump next year. So, for a typical theft, filing insurance claim is impractical unless something very expensive (several thousands of dollars worth at least) is stolen and is covered.
The only reason I filed mine is because it was a rental, and rental insurance has no deductible and being secondary, does not influence the price of the main one. So it was a situation of "if you file police report, you get paid $200". In any other situation, I wouldn't file neither insurance nor police report.
Agree, but with the caveat that it is surprisingly easy to do $500 or $1000 damage to a car these days, and it's not difficult to imagine it being done incidentally to the theft of relatively low value items from inside the car. Also, at least here in Southern California, a lot of theft from cars is catalytic converter theft. Those things are expensive, hence the market for stolen ones.
Replacing a catalytic converter costs about $1500-$2000. If you have a $1500 deductible, in most cases it's probably not worth it to file an insurance claim because there's a good chance your rate will go up. Replacing a smashed window is even less.
Also, a lot of people only carry liability insurance if their car is old, so there would be no reason to file a claim in that instance. I wouldn't be surprised if less than half of break-ins and catalytic converter thefts are reported.
That touches on something that mystifies me about the debate: the choices aren't "shoplifting is a felony" or "shoplifiting is de facto legal". It's "shoplifting is a felony" vs "shoplifting is a misdemeanor". Misdemeanors are still potentially subject to meaningful punishment. Which suggests to me that the actual problem is that somewhere in the police -> prosecutors -> courts chain, there's at least one stage where everyone has decided that misdemeanor petty theft isn't worth dealing with and should just be ignored.
I'd rather fix that step so prolific petty thieves face a meaningful risk of being arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and appropriately punished for their misdemeanors.
Most people seem to be identifying Progressive DAs in major cities like SF. Wasn't there a guy there recently that specifically ran on a policy of not prosecuting minor crimes?
> Misdemeanors are still potentially subject to meaningful punishment
In theory, on paper, yes. In reality, in California - almost always no. So we can choose - are we debating abstract theoretical proposition 36 in abstract world where everything works as it should be in theory, or one that will be voted by Californians and applied in California? In think the main mistake a lot of people do is that they choose the former over the latter.
> Which suggests to me that the actual problem is that somewhere
People of California want the end of legal theft (or at least those who would vote for 36 do). They don't have the means to magically wave a wand and get "somewhere" to fix itself "somehow". You can't make a proposition "let's fix somewhere at the police -> prosecutors -> courts chain to stop theft being de-facto legal". But they remember the times where theft wasn't legal, and they notice those times ended when the theft stopped to be a felony and started to be a misdemeanor. And they want to go back. It's ok to tell them "no, the actual solution is this" but only if you actually point to the solution that they can realistically implement, and not to something like "you need to fix something somewhere and I have no idea how to do it in practice and nobody does, but I am happy to dunk on you because I know the right way and you don't".
I find it strange how willing Rationalists are to depart from utilitarianism and Yimbyism when it comes to discussing cost of crime. I find it very hard to believe there is negative utility in imprisoning marginal criminals in the US. I am not even sure offenders gain utility from not being in prison.
My takeaway is that this essay doesn't argue that reducing crime is wrong, nor that it doesn't come with high costs for society, which bleed over into nearly all other areas of life. At core, this author seems to be arguing that higher penalties for various crimes isn't the optimal solution.
There's merit in that argument, if hazy memory serves. At least some studies have found that some combination of three factors makes criminals less likely to commit crimes, and are more salient than severity of punishment. Those factors: the likelihood of being caught, the certainty of punishment, and the swiftness of punishment.
Without corresponding initiatives, legislative and/or via ballot measures, that can improve those factors – putting more police on the streets and reducing judicial backlogs might be part of that – I can readily sympathize with Californians overwhelmingly seeking to more harshly criminalize certain crimes. Prop. 36 is leading handily in polls and likely will win by a large margin. Yet that's not necessarily the most productive approach, in isolation.
As well, your sharing of Ed West's essay is welcome and pertinent. There absolutely is a power law in crime (or any other societal disruption, for ill or good): a small fraction of people have wildly outlying impacts. Policing and criminal justice system approaches which identify and target those outliers makes tons of sense. Again, that's not what this proposition appears to be doing; it's a scattershot approach where a more focused one would be optimal.
As one example of a more focused approach, in this case related to youth gun violence resulting in homicide and serious injury, see Operation Ceasefire:
The author links to two iterations of such focused approaches, in Boston and Oakland, CA, and also mentions that at long last, San Francisco started targeting the recurring offenders in car break-ins, with some initial success.
Finally, there are also benefits to increasing penalties, in isolation, *if* they're insufficient to deter certain crimes. While I haven't looked into how Prop. 47 impacts shoplifting, it's quite possible that it reduced those penalties below their minimum point where they'd deter a significant fraction of offenders. One more consideration to throw into this large mix ...
As for drug addiction more generally, that's long been a huge societal challenge, alongside alcoholism. Contamination and/or spiking of drug supplies with fentanyl and similarly dangerous compounds has only made that worse.
There are fairly radical ways of approaching that which are less punitive. For example, decriminalization of personal possession with mandatory treatment, along with punishment for large-scale possession and distribution, and a slew of resources thrown at the problem, seems to have worked in Portugal and Switzerland. (For various reasons, Portugal has slid a bit from their initial successes. We've also witnessed horribly botched, ill-designed and under-resourced attempts at this, most recently in Oregon.)
Naively, I'm thinking we might ultimately – years down the road – treat most addictions with medications or other medical interventions, beyond our current, primitive options. For instance, there are tantalizing early signs that GLP-1 receptor agonists can result in some generalized reductions in a range of addictive behaviors, at least in some people:
Depart from Yimbyism? Are Yimbyism and rationalism joined at the hip somehow? Were you under the impression that the former is somehow foundational to the latter? YIMBY is just a position on the question of housing, and a flawed one at that.
I keep seeing story after story about even very young persons involved in some dread crime, with a list of their 37 prior arrests, which somehow never led to any jail time - and now it's not shooting out of the car or car theft or assault but murder. And I think - is the family of this person happy that they are continually let out, and rarely tried for anything? Is it like, oh good, Bob's home! Or: oops, Bob just killed somebody and opened up a can of worms for himself, but at least we had this really meaningful time with him at home after the folks from the justice collective bonded him out of that charge of sexual assault!
Your links support that prolific recidivist need to receive consistent and longer sentences, not that more people need to be incarcerated for less and I agree with your link and not with you.
Mandatory minimums could be workable after a 5-strikes convictions or similar. Per the power law if we laser focus on the people doing a lot and keep them out of society for a long time we will deal with the majority of crime with the smallest amount of prison infrastructure.
I'm not 100% naive utilitarian, but it seems to me the more naive-utilitarian you are the more anti-prison you should be.
Prison is horrible. You're locked in a cage with violent criminals for years, there's no A/C and it sometimes gets to 110 F, medical care is extremely substandard, you can't have any TV/phone/computer, you can only occasionally see your loved ones, and there's a decent chance of being beaten up or raped. I would rather die than spend life in prison, and rather lose a year of my life than be imprisoned for a year. I think my own preferences are probably on the extreme end - when I surveyed people about this, a year in prison averaged 40% the utility of a year outside - but you're still losing 60% of a DALY per year. So a three year prison sentence for shoplifting is costing 1.8 years of healthy life.
And for what? What misdeeds does the average petty criminal get up to if you don't put them in prison for three years? A couple hundred dollars of theft? Maybe a couple thousand? If you're unlucky, a mugging that leaves the victim really scared? It's not even obvious it's worth it on extreme naive utilitarian grounds to lock up *murderers* - the average murderer who's let out of prison only has a 2% chance of murdering again in the next five years - if the average murder takes 40 DALYs off the victim's life, then giving a murderer a five year sentence costs them 3 years utility and saves 0.8 years. If you can't even come up with a utilitarian justification for locking up murderers, you're sure not going to be able to do it for someone who stole chewing gum from a Wal-Mart.
Again, I'm not actually this naive of a utilitarian - you need to factor in a lot of stuff about deterrence and living in fear and moral desert and so on - it just shocks me that you think "but utilitarianism" is a knock down objection to anti-mass-incarceration.
Hm... I decided to play out your naive utilitarian situation.
Playing out the math:
I was surprised by how upset I was the first time I stepped foot in a QFC where everything was locked up due to shoplifting. I might have been upset enough about it to sacrifice one year of life to go back to how it was before. Hundreds of people probably shop at that grocery store every day. Let's say, total number of people affected is ~1000.
That's about 1000 years of life we can sacrifice per grocery store to prison time if it means things aren't locked behind a counter.
There are 800,000 people who live in SF. Arbitrarily, let's say half of them would pay one year of life to go back to no shoplifting. That means we have 800,000 hours of incarceration to play with. Which is 91 years. If we sentenced shoplifters to 1 year, we can only incarcerate 91 shoplifters in SF. This feels... Surprisingly low?
Math checks out. Difficult for naive utilitarian to justify prison for shoplifters on back of the envelope math.
"I was surprised by how upset I was the first time I stepped foot in a QFC where everything was locked up due to shoplifting. I might have been upset enough about it to sacrifice one year of life to go back to how it was before. Hundreds of people probably shop at that grocery store every day. Let's say, total number of people affected is ~1000."
Wait . . . you would rather be sentenced to prison for a year than have your local supermarket lock up the toothpaste?
Depends if I have the criminal record follow me or not. A criminal record would impact my earning potential forever.
But, if I was promised an immediate pardon upon release (so I can tick "no" next to "have you been convicted" on job applications), then yes. I would go to prison for one year if it meant all grocery stores I ever interact with again didn't have to pick up the toothpaste, ice cream, razors, etc.
But, even then, difficult to naively justify all that much prison time. So your point stands.
> Most people would not have that preference, I would not spend a day in prison for that. So you can't multiply by the number of people.
Right, the point of this exercise wasn't to do a rigorous utilitarian analysis. It was to a quick gut check regarding Scott's comment that a naive utilitarian would have trouble justifying prison time.
I thought this was preposterous but, even with some aggressive assumptions, found that Scott was right. Hence the comment. If you think the assumptions are too aggressive, that simply proves Scott's point further. A utilitarian has to put in some legwork to justify prison.
> To me this seems really weird to prefer to spend a year in prison than that.
"Mr. Doolittle" has suggested a more favourable framing in the thread. "Reformulate the result not as "access to drugstore goods" but as "live in a high trust society" or a safer society, or something similar." I think this better captures my (surprisingly large, even to me) emotional reaction. Low trust societies suck. My parents fled such a society and from the stories that my parents and grandparents tell, low trust societies are *really bad*.
That's not quite the statement made and reframing would change the decision for a lot of people, I suspect. Also, how narrowly are we drawing the benefits?
If I expect to live to 80, and I could instead live to 79 in a high-trust, low-crime society, I don't think I'd even blink before slamming that YES button.
If, however, I have to spend the year from age 34 to 35 in a Turkish prison in return for not having to wait for someone to unlock the razors at the store, but everything else is the same, absolutely not.
This is by far the most unreasonable QALY calculation I’ve ever seen published. You can’t possibly believe that any single person would ever seriously sacrifice a *year of their life* to have more efficient access to drugstore goods. For Pete’s sake.
> Math checks out. Difficult for naive utilitarian to justify prison for shoplifters on back of the envelope math.
I mean, yes? Obviously it's terrible math. I wasn't trying to be rigorous. I was curious whether Scott was right that it was surprisingly difficult to justify prison with some naive, quick and dirty util calculation. And... well... It is. Even with some aggressive assumptions. Utilitarian justifications for prison take a bit more than napkin math. Which I found surprising. I thought my napkin math would work out to a whole lot more prison time. Hence the post.
Reformulate the result not as "access to drugstore goods" but as "live in a high trust society" or a safer society, or something similar.
I would probably sacrifice a significant portion of my years to move from a low trust society to a high trust society. That's actually a really common thing - refugees and other immigrants often undertake dangerous and expensive trips to leave a bad country where there is crime and danger in order to have a chance at going to a better country. How many people left Cuba in dinky rafts that had a high likelihood of death? How many people hire dangerous criminals to take them across the US border?
> There are 800,000 people who live in SF. Arbitrarily, let's say half of them would pay one year of life to go back to no shoplifting. That means we have 800,000 hours of incarceration to play with. Which is 91 years.
How did you go from years to hours? Under your assumptions your math is off by a factor of ~4000.
It seems to me the optimal prison policy looks something like this: Incarcerate a few people forever. That means any really bad crime and common career criminals get incarcerated for life. Very few criminals are responsible for a large majority of crime, so getting rid of these unsalvageables would probably capture most of the gain from prison with the least utilitarian cost.
This lines up with with my thinking as well - preventing serial offenses brings down the crime rate far more effectively than anything else on the margin. I will say that there are two main caveats I would offer. One is that, afaik, it is possible to "age out" of crime - you can lose the low impulse control and physical strength that "allowed" you to perpetrate, and thus are unlikely to reoffend. Another is that a big problem with the current prison system is people learning from fellow inmates how to be better criminals when they get released, and the lack of opportunity for former inmates driving them to use what they learned as the easiest way to survive post-release. This could maybe be solved by having the "forever" criminals in separate institutions, but the current situation in a lot of places is that gang leaders in prison are more powerful than those on the outside (since gang members can expect to be jailed at some point and thus want to follow the orders of the guy inside to maintain his protection). So, dealing with gangs would either require being way harsher than your comment suggests, or going through multiple iterations of locking up the "leadership" of gangs followed by turf wars. It probably would work eventually, but I think there's a large class of people between "unsalvageable" and "hobbyist" criminal that would take a while to sort out once the incentive structure for criminality shifted from your proposal.
A guy who makes his living mugging people goes has to mug a *lot* of people. All their utility losses (from the guy who is scared and upset for a few days to the old lady whose hip gets broken when the mugger knocks her down) need to be summed up, and I'm pretty sure that much more than outweighs the utility losses for the mugger having to sit in a prison cell.
The implication is that we should execute a lot more problem who would prefer death to it, which also ensures they can't commit any more crimes afterward.
Politics is the mind-killer. Not because of the effect (although also that), but it's insidious and hard to detect and resist. Add the slightest bit of incentive, and I think the majority of people (well, at least the majority of Americans, who do seem quite broken in this regard from my informal, non-systematic observation) would succumb to the temptations therein
Consider where rationalism is centered and your surprise of where they're willing to depart from utilitarianism and rationalism should be completely unsurprising.
Treating addicts sucks. My current employer does inpatient addiction treatment and while the patients themselves aren't universally awful, it is an endless revolving door of the same hundred or so patients that are constantly cycling through on taxpayer-funded Medi-Cal.
Is there convincing data on whether methadone and buprenorphine MAT programs actually work? And by work I mean have meaningful periods of time where the patient is on no narcotic at all? My experience is extremely anecdotal, of course, but the pattern seems to be that they just get switched to one of those two and then left on them forever. The doses I see methadone addiction patients on now are absolutely balls-to-the-wall insane from what I would have guessed from the handful of patients on methadone I saw outpatient as well. One of the few patients I ever had to actually kick out of my pharmacy at retail was a hopelessly and VERY clearly addicted methadone user who accidentally admitted she was sharing her methadone.
When I worked at the state prison last year, sublingual Suboxone strips were being used as currency by inmates, which says a lot to me and none of it what the MAT program would want it to.
Methadone and buprenorphine programs work very well at preventing short-term deaths among the most at-risk populations. This is what is technically meant by claiming that “these programs work!”, except that advocates are performing a quick Motte-and-Bailey by hoping you assume that by “work” they mean “reduce drug use or addiction”.
I once heard a doctor talking about the most terrible prescription drugs in existence. Things he never liked to work with because of awful side effects, etc. Near the top of his list was methadone because, according to this doctor, "it gets into your bones." I don't know if this he meant this literally or not, but the point is that it remains in your system for a very, very extended duration and is exceptionally difficult to get off of once you're on it.
It has an unusually long half-life for an opiate (ie it does literally stay in your system longer than others) which is supposedly part of the rationale for why it's useful for addiction treatment. I guess in theory that means you can dose less often and I dunno maybe the withdrawals aren't supposed to be as sharp but in reality it's still a once daily dose and I cannot stress enough how pathetically addicted the patient I referenced earlier that I had to boot from my pharmacy was. Like I'm not kidding she would call daily and show up at the pharmacy randomly at all hours shamelessly BEGGING for early fills, seemingly in withdrawals from just the daily dosing.
Yeah, I was looking for a comment along these lines.
The whole "making treatment available" thing is dumb right from the get-go. I mean, wasn't it Scott that showed us that AA and things like that barely do anything?
Lifetime relapse rates for alcoholism is something like 60-70%, and for opiate addiction it's >80%, and those are people self-selecting into sobriety.
Now imagine non-intrinsically-motivated people forced to go into "drug treatment" to avoid jail time. All we'd be doing is wasting literally tens of millions for *nothing.* Less than 10%, probably less than 2%, of people will actually get off drugs if they're being forced.
And how much of that $800M was dedicated to crap like this? What a scandalous waste of money - if you don't want to jail drug addicts, fine, but don't waste tens of millions on "treatment" that will do literally nothing.
Skimming the article you linked, I *think* that 60-70% relapse rate you mention is from the 1991 study? Otherwise, [citation needed].
The 1991 study is more optimistic than the picture you paint. Eg it says both the AA and the non-AA group "showed substantial and sustained improvement in all aspects of job functioning". And "The proportions with warning notices dropped from 33% at intake to under 2% at months 3 and 6 and stayed under 5%" thereafter.
(Also, I think there's a *major* difference between someone who relapses once or twice over 10 years and otherwise stays the course, and someone who relapses to their prior level of substance abuse, and I don't think the 1991 study covers it; their metric seems to be "continuous abstainers".)
Yeah, sorry, that wasn't actually my cite. That was just Scott pointing out that all the claimed results are BS, and that the more rigorous you get in terms of measurement vs default outcomes, the smaller the signal of any "intervention" over noise.
Alcoholism:
Among the 25% that have positively selected for "seeking help," only 29% have achieved "abstinent recovery." The number for non-seekers is 6.5%.
Deborah A. Dawson; Bridget F. Grant; Frederick S. Stinson; Patricia S. Chou. (2006). Estimating the effect of help-seeking on achieving recovery from alcohol dependence. , 101(6), 824–834. doi:10.1111/j.1360-0443.2006.01433.x
Here's n=21k meta analysis for pharma interventions, among those seeking help:
"Data from 118 clinical trials and 20 976 participants were included. The numbers needed to treat to prevent 1 person from returning to any drinking were 11 (95% CI, 1-32) for acamprosate and 18 (95% CI, 4-32) for oral naltrexone at a dose of 50 mg/d"
In other words, you need to treat 11-18 people to prevent one person from returning to drinking. That is a 90-95% failure rate.
Opiates
You have to dig a little harder for opiates, because most "treatment" is getting them onto longer-acting, less fun opiates (methadone or suboxone), which I don't count as a "win" either for treatment providers or addicts.
If you're going to keep them on opiates, just legalize pharmaceutically pure and safe-but-still-fun opiates, and we can eliminate our 100k overdose deaths per year, the biggest cause of death for Americans under 40, tomorrow, because the non-fun ones still have pretty awful relapse rates.
Even with long term opiate treatment, "retention" ranges from 20-75%, ie failure rates of 25-80%. (DOI: 10.1186/s13643-021-01764-9)
If you look at things like 12 step programs and religious coping, you see 68% relapse within a couple of MONTHS. 10.1007/s10943-010-9418-8
If you look at 50k Medicaid patients across 105k "episodes of treatment", members relapsing DURING treatment is 20% for pharma and 44% for psyche / behavioral health.
Since the median treatment times were between 5 and 13 months, and since "substance abuse treatment prior to the current episode did not have a statistically significant effect on the risk of relapse," this does not bode well for their long term "recovery."
Oh, we also get this gem from the above study: "Opioid addiction is widely, but not universally, viewed as a chronic relapsing condition; but healthcare policies and public perceptions often treat it as a problem that can be addressed with short-term treatment."
White 2012 is the big one. "An analysis of reported outcomes in 415 Scientific Reports, 1868-2011"
Combined alcohol and drug abstinence rates average 30.3%, "although remission from opioid addiction appears to be less stable and durable than other patterns of remission."
The best number for long term opiate relapse is Hser 2007, which has findings from 33 year followups. 18% achieve abstinence "for at least 5 years."
Hser, Y (2007) Predicting long-term stable recovery from heroin addiction: Findings from a 33 year follow up study. Journal of Addictive Diseases. 26(1), 51-60.
So that's my "alcoholism has a 70% relapse and opiates >80% relapse rate" cites.
And again, this is explicitly in "seeking help and wanting to get clean" populations. Forcing mandatory "treatment" on people who are only doing it to avoid jail time? MUCH higher than 80% failure rates, guaranteed.
The multiplier was roughly 4-5x in the alcoholics - as in, those getting clean without self-selecting into treatment. So, best case, maybe 4-5 for every hundred would be positively affected by treatment programs costing tens of millions of dollars?
That money is MUCH better spent on child health, pandemic prevention, or a myriad of other ways to positively affect health and well being.
NNT = 11-18 is actually kind of not that bad, I would have guessed it was much higher; you'd probably be surprised how high it is for several common treatments that are generally considered effective.
Yeah, I actually feel fine about pharmaceutical interventions like nalaxone, despite the terrible NNT's. Sure, it'll fail for the vast majority, but it's not going to cost that much in money and time.
But "rehab treatment plans" - weeks-to-months long imprisoning of people who don't want to be there, which will have 95%+ failure rates, and will cost tens of millions of dollars (because you're paying for prisons and weeks-to-months of "treatment")? No thank you. Terrible idea, nearly 100% waste, that money would be much better used practically anywhere else.
>(talking about state averages here is actually slightly misleading: 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.)
This is not a good argument that prop 47 is not the driver. There are lots of reasons to imagine a statewide measure would produce different outcomes in different counties and while the solution might not be to repeal the measure, we definitely need to consider the measure as a cause.
Whatever the problems with this proposal, people feel “something” needs to be done, and justly so. So long as an actionable near-term alternative isn’t presented, taking your chances with a program that might, and might not work, is far preferable to sitting around while the problem festers.
Presumably, despite this argument against the proposition, there’s justification for it (I don’t believe our political system is so dysfunctional as to propose completely unjustified and unreasonable policies). If so, then so long as the choice isn’t between this, and something better justified, then it’s still a decent option if you care about the problem it’s trying to address.
It’s like Trump’s border wall. There were, and are, a lot more efficient, cost-effective and regular-effective ways to reduce illegal immigration and drug trafficking across the southern border, but if no one else has a better idea that’s viable to be implemented, then a maybe-solution is better than no solution.
>So long as an actionable near-term alternative isn’t presented, taking your chances with a program that might, and might not work, is far preferable to sitting around while the problem festers.
After all, why do nothing when you can stand up, roll up your sleeves, and get to work making the problem worse?
As others have said in more detail, this post has its problems as far as substantial evidence. There’s also apparently equally compelling evidence (at least from what I gather) that this will work.
On an intuitive level, “Actually punish criminals and lock them up for longer” seems like an extremely obvious way to reduce crime. There’s many examples of extremely tough on crime countries and places throughout history, that I’m not convinced it isn’t a viable strategy.
I wonder if you would accept this argument on the other side. Clearly racism is bad and lots of black people are poor. Mandating DEI programs in every business and university nationwide might not be "effective" or "evidence-based" or "fair" or "good", but we've got to do something!
Inequality isn't a problem in and of itself. The optimal allocation of resources isn't to distribute it equally, seeing as people are valuable in different ways and in different amounts. People are compensated based on the value and scarcity of their labor, and thus resources are allocated as necessary to subsidize and incentivize high-value labor. If the black population was getting heavily undervalued, that would be quite the market failure, but that's something that companies could exploit to further themselves. With time, eventually you'll reach an equilibrium where people are being compensated for the added value their existence provides.
...I'm kind of surprised that you think this is a problem, given your libertarian/neo-liberal sympathies and repeated mentions of HBD.
Inequality isn't necessarily a problem, but poverty is. I don't think it's fair to argue that racial issues merely redistribute poverty rather than cause it; I predict that if black people had never entered the US but there had been 30 million more Norwegian immigrants, then everyone would just be richer.
I think everything about HBD and so on gets covered in whether this proposed solution would work, and my whole point is that we need to consider that before merely saying that the problem is very bad and so we must try this solution.
Inequality isn't a problem in and of itself, but it is a problem in a capitalist system that turns it into a self-reinforcing feedback loop.
And people are paid according to their bargaining power, which, per the above, diminishes with time. Once the pay goes low enough that lack of resources damages people's ability to work and/or pushes them into criminal/parasitical underclass, the result gets clearly suboptimal even if you're a liberal.
I disagree that this is a particularly interesting distinction in the context of whether we should do a useless thing.
If my proposal was "racism is bad, therefore we should try cutting the toes off people who pirate music", then I think a reasonable response would be "no, that's completely irrelevant to racism and would just hurt people for no reason". Criminals make less sympathetic victims than non-criminals, but hurting them for no reason is still stupid.
I think intention makes the difference here. We're talking about a situation where a tough-on-crime law isn't as effective as proponents hoped, but those proponents can be forgiven for thinking it would be, right? "Racism->piracy toe cutting" is obviously going to hurt people without accomplishing the stated reason; it can't possibly have good intentions. DEI accomplishes its goal by targeting innocent people based on something they can't control for a zero-sum transfer - also not good intentions.
The reversal only works if the tough-on-crime people pass a law fully expecting it to fail. "Maybe maybe not" is good enough to clear that, imo - your mileage could very fairly vary. Maybe that is our disagreement.
You're not hurting them for no reason though, you're hurting them for violating the societally agreed upon rules. You may think that is unfair or too harsh, but it isn't for no reason, and it isn't for something that is out of their control. You can just not steal.
In that scenario there's an obvious alternative in terms of non-DEI antipoverty measures.
If we genuinely couldn't come up with the notion of race-neutral scholarships for poor students, yes, I would grit my teeth and accept race-based scholarships. And conversely if this writer could come up with an actual plausible proposed mechanism for not letting shoplifters get off scot-free without having to make it a felony, then I'd accept that we don't necessarily need to make it a felony.
Clearly racism is bad and lots of black people are poor, but it isn’t the sort of crisis that affects me, or most people, personally.
If a person genuinely cares about black people as a group, identifies some level of societal oppression as the cause, and DEI is proposed as a workable solution, I’d say they’re wrong, but it makes complete sense *why* they support DEI. I personally think a lot of democratic policies are sub-optimal for increasing welfare, but so long as Republicans are not proposing a superior solution that those democratic policies are attempting to address, then it’s perfectly reasonable that so many people support what are (in my view) sub optimal policies.
I personally don’t know too much about this issue, and am not from California, but “increase punishment for crimes and actually punish smaller crimes” seems like so obvious a solution, someone claiming it won’t work (while not having a viable near-term alternative) has a very high bar to reach. Other commenters have demonstrated this post’s claims aren’t without controversy either.
> I personally think a lot of democratic policies are sub-optimal for increasing welfare, but so long as Republicans are not proposing a superior solution that those democratic policies are attempting to address, then it’s perfectly reasonable that so many people support what are (in my view) sub optimal policies.
The problem is, such policies are typically not suboptimal (providing utility, but less than they should,) but rather counterproductive (taking the problem they're supposed to be solving and making it worse instead.) Therefore, the stereotypical (if not always accurate) Republican alternative of "just do nothing" is indeed valid, and in fact a strictly superior alternative.
This is a terrible analogy, because in your example the criminals are the <not black> people who now have DEI programs inflicted on them despite no evidence of wrongdoing.
Prop 36 revolves around people who have been convicted of criminal conduct, that is those who have been found guilty by a jury of their peers, or by their own admission, of having done things that we as a society have determined to be beyond legal acceptability. There is a clear Wrong established, and the party that has done that Wrong has also been established.
Your analogy establishes no clear wrong, nor a clear responsible party.
> I don’t believe our political system is so dysfunctional as to propose completely unjustified and unreasonable policies
It (probably) isn't, but that doesn't matter here. No politicians were harmed in the drafting of this ballot proposition. No politicians had a chance to *stop* the drafting of this ballot proposition. (Or at least none currently living; I would have some harsh words for whoever wrote a certain part of the state constitution.) This does not come from our political system, and in fact nearly the entire political system of the State of California is opposed to it.
It came directly from the voters, by the godawful clauses of the state Constitution which make it very, very easy to get enough signatures to put any damn fool thing on the statewide ballot. Bypassing the political system entirely to propose something that sounds nice if not considered deeply and allow it to be made into law without expert consultation of any kind. And is, as usual, disastrous once inspected carefully.
You must not live in California. We get a dozen of these things every two years.
> So long as an actionable near-term alternative isn’t presented, taking your chances with a program that might, and might not work, is far preferable to sitting around while the problem festers.
You need to consider how this affects the people you're giving longer sentences to. If it truly doesn't accomplish anything then you don't do it just because there's nothing else to do. Before creating more suffering you should at least have a justification for it.
Right!? And no mention of the how this crime affects the average law abiding citizens. What a drain on our society. Cops used to chase kids for TPing houses here 20 years ago. They now babysit the fully grown adult addicts for 90% of their day. The TPing kids of yesteryear now tag any open slab of concrete they can find. The top 1% pay almost half our income tax. And they're leaving the state.
Yes, very much so. I remember the falling crime of the 90s--it's depressing to watch that story in reverse as the liberals too young to remember the high crime of the 60s-80s agitate for reversal.
You act like this is ridiculous but we would see such an effect if:
1. The number of people arrested and convicted is tiny compared to the population that is using drugs.
2. People entering prison is counterbalanced by people leaving prison.
3. Secondary factors are pushing drug use to an equilibrium and removing users form the pool just causes those factors to add new users. For example, drug dealers seek out new clients, drug prices lower and it entices people to start.
4. We always talk about drug users in terms of addicts but if people generally used drugs then didn't repeat we wouldn't expect locking them up to change usage rates.
Why is it cruel and backwards to suggest that having actual consequences for shoplifting would encourage cops to arrest shoplifters? I honestly don’t understand this. If I’m a cop, if I arrest the same people again and again and again for shoplifting and they’re immediately released, that’s obviously demoralizing. Clearly I’m having no positive effect on the world, just essentially doing dangerous busywork for no reason.
It's called a strawman argument. The article is trying to insinuate that the problem is the police not arresting people, rather than a Progressive legal system failing to prosecute and convict them after they're arrested.
Because it would imply that they're doing their job to hurt people, not just to play their part in the justice system. Of course, the intended purpose of the justice system is to hurt people who deserve it, so maybe it's the rest of the justice system that's going against their purpose.
I think the claim is that a six-month sentence would be enough to deter most shoplifters, but cops are refusing to implement it.
Would it be more obvious if the example were more extreme? If we said there was a life sentence for shoplifting, but cops refused to arrest any shoplifters until the sentence was being tortured to death, so people were constantly shoplifting and politicians were suggesting "well, guess we just have to increase it to torture-to-death so that the cops will do their job"?
Again, imagine this was any other situation. Perhaps teachers refuse to teach gifted children unless we fund free four-year public university for all, because they there are limited resources and it's "not worth their time" without followup teaching at the college level.
When you're having a major teacher shortage and you can't easily replace all of them, yes. Obviously you don't need to completely give into their demands, but you at least need to negotiate with them to make a deal that both sides are happy with. Now, I understand that law enforcement does attract a lot of... unsavory individuals, but sometimes you need to make some compromises to keep the wheels turning. We are not in a position to issue ultimatums right now.
Well yes, the cop unions have us by the balls. We can discuss why they have gone to such extremes (there are some very legitimate grievances), but those don't really matter in practice. The only logic where it makes sense to ignore them is if you think they're bluffing. Do you think they're bluffing?
I tried looking that up online and it's hard to find anything, but there are plenty of Californian law firms advertising about "if you're accused of shoplifting, we can get you off by these means".
I just have the sense that literally no one spends 6 months in jail for shop lifting. But I base that on nothing and would be very interested in real data.
Your example would be obvious, but there's also no reason to think it would be the case since cops do arrest people for crimes with life-sentences like murder.
I don't think it's about the length of the sentence, it's about the likelihood of the perpetrator getting sentenced at all. I suspect that cops would be more likely to arrest someone that they thought had a 100% chance to serve a one month sentence than someone that had a 10% chance at a five year sentence for the same crime.
I knew a cop in Northern California back before marijuana was legalized, and he could drive around town and point out all the weed dealers' houses. He knew that if they went there the house would be full of weed. However, he also knew that the DA wasn't trying marijuana cases, so what would be the point of trying to arrest these people? At best he'd probably get reprimanded for bumping up crime stats that weren't going to get cleared. However, if he thought that they would actually serve time, he definitely would have picked them up.
I wonder if the pressure to reduce the overcrowding in prisons meant that the prosecutors said "we're not gonna try misdemeanours", that trickles down to the police being told "don't arrest for petty crime for the love of mike, we can't lock any more people up" and so cases of shoplifting just weren't followed up?
Sure, you could send Timmy The Thief for six months in jail, but if the jails are bursting at the seams and the Supreme Court is saying "stop this or else", nobody in the system wants to send Timmy and his pals to jail because they simply haven't the room, so Timmy can shoplift to his heart's content (as long as he doesn't go over the $950 limit) with no real prospect of being sent to jail - maybe he'll be sent to a diversion programme instead, maybe he'll be fined, maybe he'll have to pay a civil verdict of $500 to the shop - but no jail, so the cops won't even bother showing up because they know and Timmy knows that he'll just be let out again if they bother to arrest him and bring him to the police station.
"Proposition 47 was enacted to comply with a 2011 California Supreme Court order, which upheld that California’s overcrowded prisons violated incarcerated individuals’ Eighth Amendment rights against cruel and unusual punishment.
“In 2011, our prisons were bursting at the seams, and California was ranked either first or second behind Texas as having the highest per capita incarceration rate of any state in the country,” Kubrin said. “It was so bad that the Supreme Court stepped in and told us we needed to reduce our prison population by 33,000 individuals.”
“So the goal of Prop 47 was to limit our prison population, to reduce the number of people that we send to state prisons,” said Kubrin. “Prop 47 has achieved that goal while not causing crime rates to go up.”
If the police learn that "it's not worth arresting these punks", I don't see how it's cruel and backwards of them not to bother arresting the offenders until/unless there's a genuine chance of serious jail time.
My understanding is that the Prop 47 maximum of a six month sentence would be enough to deter shoplifters, and cops are willing to implement it, but progressive bay area DAs give out sentences of like 2 weeks or 1 week or 1 day or whatever for their ideological reasons, and cops stop working on arresting shoplifters. The DA elections are probably more important than whatever happens with this prop. Also the maximum sentence for a crime is almost never actually served by anybody, I think they would typically serve maybe half of that.
See this Youtube video where the leader of the SF police union says that shoplifting is equal to a traffic citation (24:40)
A cursory Google search suggests that six months is the *maximum* possible sentence, not a mandatory one, and given that the vast majority of convictions are from plea bargains these days, very few people actually get that I'd guess.
Yeah I agree, obviously it would be demoralizing! People want to feel like they accomplished something positive. When I worked for two weeks on a report at my office job and then our team went down a different path and that report wasn't needed at all it really annoyed and demoralized me.
Punishment for crime, in moral terms, is supposed to serve a couple of purposes: Removal, Rehabilitation, or Deterrence. "Make people feel good about punishing bad guys" is not supposed to be one of them - the state shouldn't be hurting people for its own pleasure, only when it makes society better off.
If putting shoplifters in jail for longer kept them from re-offending, or significantly reduced the number of shoplifters who are out and shoplifting, that would be one thing, but that's not the argument being made - the article points out that the issue is not recidivism, it's that shoplifters aren't getting caught in the first place.
The premise of the research is flawed: that passage of a new law has immediate effects on crime whether positive or negative. It takes time for DAs and police, for criminals, etc to internalize and effect changes.
Secondly, the notion that the retail epidemic is because of police (in)action is equally flawed.
In particular: there is no mention whatsoever in this article about the influx of Soros funded City Attorney Generals and their self professed public statements about not prosecuting criminals for social justice reasons.
This includes George Gascon in Los Angeles (elected December 2020), Pamela Price (elected January 2023) and others. Chesa Boudin (elected January 2020) is not in the links but is absolutely in this self professed "social justice" cohort.
Third: anecdote. I live in SF and have lived there for 20+ years. There has always been some retail crime, but it is utterly out of control now. CVS and Walgreens have closed literally 2/3rds of their locations in the downtown SF area - the FiDi, SoMa area that I am in.
Whether this is due to crime or not, is arguable but what is not arguable is that the one CVS that is still in my area - 1 block west of Union Square - I have literally witnessed a retail theft in each of the 3 times I have visited it and bought something in 2024.
Consider that I am not going there to browse - we are talking 10 minutes to get what I am looking for and then leave - this is an extraordinary record.
Some additional color: in the 2nd visit, another customer wanted to buy a 20 oz soft drink. He had to wait for an employee to unlock that refrigerator because "otherwise there would be nothing left". Later on in that visit (I'm talking 5 minutes), a guy came, scooped a double handful of candies and gum from in front of the cash register and walked out. I asked the clerk if this was common - they said that the police have arrested this guy multiple times but he just gets released right away and comes right back.
The 3rd visit - a clean cut young guy asked for some help, then just walked out with what he was given.
I actually have visited the store more than 3 times - but the other 3,4 or maybe 5 visits were extremely short because the location simply did not have what I want due to lack of inventory, which is multipacks of Mentos mints for the wife. We are talking bare shelves of that entire category (gum and mints). Only after a glass locked cabinet shows up, does inventory seem to be able to be present. I then have to cross half the city to another location near City Hall which looks like the PanOpticon: all glass, everywhere.
Anecdote 4: 2 of the CVS locations that used to exist, that were near me, the closest one almost never had anything I was looking for. I'm talking no nail clippers! The clerks there told me that there are people who literally come every day to steal something - they recognize the repeat offenders.
So in my view - the analysis presented in this article is highly flawed due to failure to take into account "social justice" district attorneys as well as to actually get information on the ground from the retail clerks who witness the theft every day. I would also highly question the statistics given the absolutely clear higher level of theft: the retail stores are not even bothering to report a lot of the thefts anymore because they know it will not do any good - and this has been going on for years now.
COVID definitely is right around the time when the retail theft turbocharged - but again, is this because of COVID or because of the "social justice" prosecutors and their public talk of deciding not to prosecute?
Failure to even note this event seems to be a serious omission to me.
I will also note that retail theft is not the only category where lawlessness is blatantly increasing.
I ride the SF Muni public transport primarily because I live in the City and don't even own a car any more. The level of crazy and/or abusive behavior is through the roof - not just the crazy homeless muttering to himself in the corner, but violent and abusive people (mostly men) bullying women and children. It has gotten so bad that I have had to intervene personally by interposing myself and facing down these people several times just this past year. Anecdotes range from a black man threatening a black woman and her child because she asked him if her child could sit down, to the latest (this past Sunday) where a white guy was cursing the Asian women around him, spitting on the ground and threatening them physically.
This shit is out of control and is completely unacceptable.
But the wife does not want to move. Some of it is stability - we've been there for years and she does not want the change. But the other reason is that SF is one of only 2 places in the US where she is not forced to drive in order to be an independent adult.
New York is the other - that is probably even worse than SF.
My guess is that with the money saved by not living in SF she can easily get someone to drive her everywhere she wants to go, if she really hates driving so much.
There are plenty of places across the country with decent mass transit systems available. Some of them, like New York and Philadelphia, are similarly crime-ridden hellscapes these days, but there are others that very much are not. Places like Iowa, Utah, and South Carolina are known for being rider-friendly and also decent places to live.
You can definitely live easily without a car in Chicago and while it gets a bad rap in the media, I think crime in the nice parts of the city is extremely rare. I have literally never witnessed someone shoplifting from a CVS in 10 years of living there the way you frequently witness, and once in a while you'll have someone unpleasant on public transit but very rarely. (Anecdotally, we probably experienced more erratic, threatening anti-social behavior in public in 5 days in SF this spring than we would in an entire year in Chicago)
I have an uncle who used to commute into Chicago from Deerfield - I have visited Chicago some.
I agree with you, I have not seen the level of social deterioration in Chicago that I have personally experienced in New York City and San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Chicago has cheaper housing than NYC. But other than that, there is no concieviable reason that someone who wants to be able to do without a car but who is concerned with crime would move to the nice parts of Chicago rather than the nice parts of NYC.
I've lived in NYC for over 14 years now. I have never witnessed anything of the scale you just described in your post. NYC has gotten worse but it is still one of the safest large cities in this country (seriously, look up the stats!). You might want to reevaluate your priors there.
Do you ride public transit? Buses as well as subway? If not, that's very possibly why you don't see this kind of thing. I visit NYC a lot and have seen similar things there because I do ride public transit predominantly.
What about shopping: do you regularly shop yourself in grocery stores and drug stores, or get everything delivered? That's another possible reason you don't see this.
But the biggest reason is area. If I lived in Pacific Heights and shopped along Chestnut, I would see a lot less. Ditto in the Sunset district (although the spitter/female Asian bully--er was on the bus coming from Sunset).
I also know people who live in New York City - Musk's mother's friends are not the only ones who have been punched in the face on the street for no apparent reason in the past year.
The reality is that there are people who will commit violence, whether due to mental illness, anger, sociopathy or whatever is irrelevant - this should not be acceptable.
I ride public transit in NYC every day, and have for more than a decade, and have not seen a crime (other than turnstile jumping). And I certainly don't waste money having food delivered. Nor have I heard any of my friends -- all of whom use public transit regularly -- complain of crime, or express fear of crime.
>The reality is that there are people who will commit violence, whether due to mental illness, anger, sociopathy or whatever is irrelevant - this should not be acceptable.
No one has said otherwise. The issue is about OP's empirical claim re how often crime occurs.
Can you further clarify: are you 5 boroughs or Manhattan?
In SF, it is the downtown that is the 1st world version of dystopia whereas in New York - it may well be opposite (i.e. Manhattan is orderly but elsewhere less so).
I am actually very familiar with all parts of New York City; I did a street parking startup in the 2008 era where I verified much of NYC's excellent street parking sign database - meaning I literally have walked on a significant percentage of all New York streets.
I do use public transit at least twice a day and often a lot more than that. It's dirty but safe. When there are homeless people there, they generally keep to themselves. And I regularly shop in the city.
I know people pretty much across the income spectrum and they too report generally safe conditions though things do get a little bit worse in e.g. the Bronx. But even there, you can find luxury condos and the stores there don't lock up everything in sight. The CVS i walk by pretty much daily has stocked shelves and the only things behind glass cages are the occasional high value items like razor blades (which is the case in much of the country).
And nobody is saying that there is no crime at all in NYC or that crime is acceptable. Don't put words in my mouth.
If youre open to suggestions, I would like to recommend Jersey City! It is across the river from NYC (with a very good transit system between the two, such that it basically functions as part of NYC) but has much more sensible governance. I live in Jersey City but work in NYC, and can see e.g. that everything is locked up in NYC but not in Jersey City.
(There is a risk that we might go downhill if our mayor becomes governor and we get a new one with further-left views. It seems mean to vote against him for governor on those grounds though.)
A lot of people have far more sympathy for petty criminals than they do wealthy business owners and the SSC commentariat is an outlier in this regard
I'd rather just implement redistributive policies sufficient to end crimes of desperation, mind you, but if we can't get those I can at least cast a ballot for those "Soros-funded" prosecutors
Does the fact that crime skyrocketed immediately after LBJ’s “Great Society” welfare programs give you pause that you might be getting causation wrong? I realize that there was a lot going on in America at the time, but the spike was massive. And it’s the opposite of what one would expect if poverty caused these “crimes of desperation”.
@birdboy2000 absolutely ridiculous question, but based on your username... were you on the bmgf/Bulbagarden forums circa like 2004? I feel like I might know you from my childhood forum days
Increased sentencing actually does reduce both drug use and shoplifting for a very simple reason: it's much harder to do drugs in prison, and even harder to shoplift from prison. The more criminals you lock up, the better society gets. It's like a magic spell. The death penalty works similar wonders.
Exactly. As I pointed out elsewhere on here, even if it does nothing whatsoever to reform criminals, incarceration is a *per se* societal good, simply by virtue of keeping them away from their next victim.
Indeed. There are three mechanisms by which a criminal justice system attempts to reduce crime: incapacitation, deterrence, and rehabilitation. Rehabilitation doesn't seem to work (except indirectly insofar as locking people up until they're older reduces their propensity for violence), and people argue endlessly about interpreting the data for deterrence. But good old incapacitation works directly, immediately and with 100 % efficacy, no regression analyses or proxy data sets required to tease out the signal!
Ha, yeah after posting I thought of revising that downward a bit. Better to victimize other criminals than little old ladies, true, but I also think we should also give a little more attention to inhumane conditions in prisons, instead of always joking about it. I want criminals off the streets, I don’t want them sentenced to 15 years of anal gang rape. It’s unseemly and embarrassing and many other countries seem to control it better than we do.
Agreed. Hard to see any good short-term solutions to it, though. This is largely a cultural problem, and like many cultural problems, will take decades of concerted effort to fix.
I've always been of the opinion that most prison should be "enriched solitary confinement".
Whenever I suggest this I get shocked reactions: "But solitary confinement is basically torture!" Sure it is, in the sensory-deprivation form that it's usually applied, not the enriched version I'm proposing. In my vision, it's more like a hotel room that you don't leave, a bit like the "hotel quarantine" that many countries subjected their citizens to during covid without anyone panicking. You get a TV, you get music, you get plenty of books, you get some kind of access to the internet, and you get to do daily video chats with friends and family on the outside (and psychologists and chaplains and social workers etc). You get occasional access to an outdoor exercise area. You get airline-style meals delivered through a slot in your door. The one thing you don't get is any contact with other inmates.
Cost wise, I can't see how it could possibly be more expensive than existing prison systems. You'd need a bigger facility but far fewer guards.
Cruelty wise, I personally would vastly prefer the boredom of six months in a drab hotel room to the terror of six months in gen pop.
This seems like a situation where population growth only makes a problem harder. I don't understand why the anarchy or thugocracy in the prisons is something most people are content to find a joke. I don't believe in rehabilitation, of course, but I do believe this horrific prison situation must be a deliberate choice for which our culture is uniquely without solutions. I've noticed that the wrong people, the worst people, tend to be indulged, and I wouldn't be surprised if that plays out in prison too.
What are they doing in Scandinavia? They have quite civilized prison environments (see the Finnish open prison system with sauna for everyone), yet quite low recidivism scores. It must work somehow. Perhaps you must try harder than has ever been done in the US?
The prison population is a tiny fraction of the drug using and shoplifting population. A population that will get out sooner rather than later, to drug use and shoplift using the newest and greatest techniques they learned in prison.
It's hard to shoplift from prison, but it's impossible not to make taxpayers pay for you, and the end result is the same. Why should I care whether I'm losing money because stores are being stolen from and passing the cost onto me or because I'm getting taxed more?
Likewise, prison might make drug use harder, but it still reduces their length of life, quality of life, and makes them more violent. It's causing all the problems drugs cause.
You do realize that people smuggle a lot of drugs in prison, though? It's not like "people getting in prison leave with much better connection to the criminal ecosystem" is a novel idea. They don't "get addicted" to prison, but prison has a lifetime negative effect on their lives.
> Why should I care whether I'm losing money because stores are being stolen from and passing the cost onto me or because I'm getting taxed more?
Because in the former hypothetical, your experience of the store is more pleasant; there aren't sketchy people lurking in the stores and parking lots, and high-value items (or all items!) aren't locked up.
*Obviously,* between paying to live in a shitty environment and paying to live in a pleasant one, it's better to pay to live in the pleasant one.
If that cop is a meaningful deterrent to shoplifting, fine. I don't care if crime stops because of beat cops or incarceration or forced hypnotic brainwashing, as long as it stops.
Why on earth do you care about the sketchy people? Things *should* be incredibly unpleasant for sketchy people; so unpleasant they are motivated to not be sketchy.
Same reason I care about animals and stopped eating meat. They can feel pain. Pain doesn't stop hurting just because you're sketchy. Pain is bad. It will always be bad.
If people are dangerous, it might be worth moving them into a heavily guarded area to at least limit their damage. But if you're creeped out by the sort of person who shoplifts, that doesn't mean it's worth it to put them in prison for the same cost to you just so you don't have to see them while they shop.
Your high sensitivity to the feelings of others is not compatible with enforcing justice or promoting physical safety in a society.
Or even on a personal level, really.
Many, many other people - likely the majority - do not experience your kind of sensitivity to the pain of others, nor the intuition your sensitivity generated that other people's "pain is always bad." *Your experience is in no way universal.*
You of course intellectually know that because you've been told that your whole life, but I don't think you *really* fully believe it; not *really.* If you had a deep understanding of predatory dispassion, if you had enough of it in yourself to vividly imagine more extreme versions of it in yourself or others, you wouldn't be pleading, "but think of the predators!"
I fully realize you're likely to object to all of the above. It might feel like I'm condescending or insulting your intelligence by accusing you of not being able to sufficiently imagine - of ironically not being able to "empathize" with - predatory indifference about the suffering of others.
But I'm not trying to insult you. Intelligence doesn't automatically confer imagination, nor vice versa. We all have limits on the kinds of things we're able to imagine (and understand!).
Were the species universally as sensitive to suffering as you, we would have very few problems. But it's demonstrably not, and, absent sci-fi-esque interventions in brain structure/chemistry, a ruinous number of people will never be as sensitive to the suffering of others as you are.
And they will take advantage of you because of it.
"What worked wasn’t increasing sentences – it was a targeted operation to track and arrest the most organized, prolific offenders."
Given that offenses are distributed among offenders roughly as a power law, maybe crime should be more like baseball, where after 3 felonies (strikes) you're out! California should look into this idea.
"3-strikes laws," (laws mandating life imprisonment after three violent felonies,) have been around for decades. I first heard about the concept in middle school, back in the early 90s. This was also when I first heard the counter-argument that this was an excessively harsh and uncaring solution that could see someone's life ruined because of youthful indiscretions remaining with them forever.
That didn't make any sense to me as a kid, and still doesn't today. I know what youthful indiscretions are. My friends and I got up to a few in our time. They looked nothing like violent felonies. Someone who makes a habit of repeatedly committing them is not an innocent with a potentially bright future ahead of them that will be ruined if they're put away; they're a thug who needs to be put away for the protection of actual innocents.
Yeah I was engaging in a bit of sarcasm there of course. I was around for all those debates. And yeah, one felony can be a “youthful indiscretion.” But getting convicted of one, then committing another one, getting caught and convicted of that, then going out and committing a third felony? That’s a career.
Old joke at the Public Defender’s office: “Everyone deserves a 47th chance!”
Some wag on twitter recently pointed out that given what we know about behavioral psychology, the perpetrator’s youth should probably be an aggravating, rather than an ameliorating factor in sentencing for violent crimes.
> given what we know about behavioral psychology, the perpetrator’s youth should probably be an aggravating, rather than an ameliorating factor in sentencing for violent crimes.
On the one hand, prefontal cortex development and impulse control is lower in adolescents, which argues for youth as an ameliorating factor.
On the other hand, many studies have shown that early aggression and violence is an excellent predictor of later criminality across a variety of domains. Both the severity and frequency of violence increases with age until early adolescence then tapers off. Someone committing “precocious” violence, like juvenile murder, is a behavioral outlier that is not likely to improve as they hit prime crime time.
>Someone committing “precocious” violence, like juvenile murder, is a behavioral outlier that is not likely to improve as they hit prime crime time.
This is no doubt true, but it doesn’t quite address the point of the criticism of the most severe 3-strikes laws, which is that they incarcerated people long past prime crime-committing ages. So, the real question is whether precocious criminals fail to age out of crime as is the usual case.
Also note that in the original CA 3 strikes law, the third strike could be any felony, including petty theft with a prior. The law was subsequently amended.
Unless they were tried as an adult, which my understanding is that is usually only for the most extreme crimes, anything they did as a minor wouldn't count towards the three strikes. So really you're looking at ages ~18-25 for the "youthful indiscretions", and if you commit three felonies in a seven year period, it seems unlikely that you are just misunderstood.
> Also note that in the original CA 3 strikes law, the third strike could be any felony, including petty theft with a prior. The law was subsequently amended.
I don't see that as a huge problem; it's difficult to commit petty theft with a prior by accident.
(Untrue for *really* petty thefts, like walking out of a store with the pen from the counter, but somehow I don't see those getting prosecuted at all.)
On the flip side though, sounds like adolescence makes sense as an ameliorating factor, at least in the long term. I do think that some of the positive effect of imprisonment is just 'locking up violent teenage/young men until they're less young and hormonally volatile.'
90% of fentanyl is brought in through normal border crossings by people legally authorized to cross the border (eg Mexicans on tourist visas, Americans on tourist visas returning home). More than half is brought through by US citizens. Almost nobody tries to bring fentanyl in through the sort of illegal Rio Grande crossings that a border wall could block (source: https://www.npr.org/2023/08/09/1191638114/fentanyl-smuggling-migrants-mexico-border-drugs, common sense and how I would do it if I were a drug dealer).
It would be pretty bold to try to get past the checkpoint with a load of fentanyl. Those dogs can smell when stuff is hidden in the gas tank, which I find unbelievable.
Your NPR article concludes: "Authorities say the operation has led to the seizure of thousands of pounds of fentanyl. Though they also estimate that they're apprehending just a fraction — roughly a quarter — of all the fentanyl that's smuggled at the border."
So I'm unclear about how they are certain of the means by which "90%" is brought in.
So maybe, if Minsu Fang and her co-conspirators were legal immigrants (the articles never say), then deportation of legal immigrants should be on the table - if there is interest in decreasing fentanyl.
You said “load”…do you realize that this is a drug whose doses are measured in double-digit numbers of micrograms? A *sugar cube* of fentanyl is *thousands* of doses.
I guess I thought that was the load, a few cubes? Stuffed in the gas tank or in the lining of the seat? A recent bust in my state claimed to net more than 14,000 pills!
I’m sorry, but I’m very skeptical of this. Your link states that 90% of fentanyl IS SEIZED at normal border crossings (not that 90% is BROUGHT IN at normal border crossings - very different!)
It makes sense that regulated border crossings at checkpoints are going to have much more seizure of fentanyl, because obviously. Drug smugglers sneaking across the border in the dead of night, ignored by an already overwhelmed border force, are going to be able to get away with a lot more.
Your article notes a different perspective - “Some of the leading voices in the Republican Party reject the official narrative that it's mostly coming through the ports. They believe there's a lot more fentanyl that's not being caught.”
It wouldn’t be the first time that the pesky Republicans reject the “official narrative” and turn out to be right!
But it would be one of the overwhelming number of times they're wrong, especially considering they have no statistical or even evidentiary support for their counterclaim. Where are the millions dead to the vaccine, the millions of illegal votes, the Dominion and Smartmatic voting machines flipping votes and communicating with China or Venezuela over smart thermostats, the government repossessing your home if you don't pay back FEMA "debt," the gain of function coronavirus labs that target ethnic Russians with bioweapons, Biden's corruption in Ukraine, Hunter Biden's child porn pictures, the satanic pedophilic Democrats meeting in basements to plot new Epstein expeditions...? Republican counternarratives post Trump are indistinguishable from Alex Jones's greatest hits, and are definitely epistemic net negatives to policy discussions.
I’m not saying every RW theory is right, but Democrats have a habit of censoring counter arguments and targeting the people who express them, then insisting they are correct and anyone saying the contrary is a LYING CONSPIRACIST and probably racist to boot.
“Biden has dementia” used to be a right wing conspiracy. So did “maybe Covid came from a lab.” Same with the Hunter Biden laptop. How much do you know about Epstein, anyway?
Also re “how I would do it if I were a drug dealer.” Scott, I really enjoy your writing and I have been reading your blog for many years, but please don’t become a drug dealer. You will definitely get shot or arrested within a week and it would be a great loss for humanity.
It is stunning how often someone (Scott) comes *so close* to getting it (the BART section of the Progress Studies post), only to talk to a girl they like and completely change their mind.
I am not kidding that reading this article made me signifigantly increase my probability that the 19th amendment was a mistake. (EDIT: I RETRACT THE PREVIOUS SENTENCE.) Giving your girlfriend a guest post on your blog would have been a mistake under almost any circumstances (even if she is a decent writer), but man, when the strongest argument is simply dismissed as, "cruel, backwards, and if true would be a damning indictment of the motivations of law enforcement officers," what are we even DOING?
To be fair, if the argument being argued against was actually real, the dismissal would be quite apt. But it's not. It's a silly strawman seeking to make police the problem here, rather than Progressive prosecutors and judges who refuse to do their jobs and put criminals away.
Do you think I am wrong? Tell me why. Talk me out of it. It would be very nice to not think these things, as they are in fact quite unpleasant.
I suppose repealing the 19th amendment would be an extreme remedy, but I do think that there is a legitimate issue in public discourse where women get their views "overrepresented" to a degree because men try to flatter and accomodate them.
EDIT: I am also going off memory on Clara being one of Scott's partners. I wouldn't normally feel comfortable posting that fact publicly, but if her writing is getting promoted on one of the most influential blogs on the planet, I think that is relevant to know.
Surely someone as logical and reasonable as yourself can tell the difference between “this writer, who happens to be a woman, made what I consider a poorly argued case” and “therefore letting American women vote has been a mistake”?
Christ on a cracker, I used to love ACX, but the incidence of weirdly sexist comments has been increasing of late and making me question what the heck I’m doing here.
Scott, if you’re reading this in between diaper changes: a rationalist discussion space will never have many women in it, but comments like the above are NOT helping.
Any straw that breaks the camel's back is going to look like a massive overreaction. Over and over again I see these sorts of soft-on-crime opinions coming from women, and they spill over into the men in their lives. This post didn't just magically appear in the ACX feed. It got here by a specific process. I have reason to believe that that process is intricately related to sex dynamics. It is not a nice thing to say, but I believe it is both true and nessesary.
Gender equality is a delusion, and delusional Progressives like you are simply being exposed as such. Get used to it, because it's only getting started.
Yeah this used to be the rare place where one could read and engage in people making good faith attempts to wrestle with difficult issues, but increasingly there has been tons of airing of grievances and culture war stuff.
Given the hostility and sexism of this comment, I think you should be banned from the comment section for it. Also, I think you should be banned permanently, rather than just for 1 month or something because, as we know, Scott can sometimes be lazy about moderation and getting a nice solid "permanent ban" would probably help motivate him.
If Scott wants to have the kind of comments section where he bans people for posting their authentic reaction to a political guest post a week out from an election, that is his perogative. I was not under the impression that this was that sort of blog.
"I was definitely under the impression that this was the sort of blog that didn’t tolerate that kind of nonsense."
I was under the impression that this is the sort of blog where most articles will contain at least one left-winger being (or perhaps pretending to be) surprised that Scott said something right-wing, linked a right-wing article, or won't ban a right-wing commenter.
I've been against mass incarceration for years now, for example https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/16/bail-out/ . I kind of want an apology for this one for multiple reasons, and I can imagine the 50% of the human race who are female wanting an apology too.
I apologize specifically for the sentence about the 19th amendment. That was a gut reaction and not a reflexively stable update. I stand by the rest. If you think that locking-up criminals does not reduce crime, I think you are factually wrong. If you think that locking up criminals is morally wrong, I think you are ethically wrong.
I was okay with it, so 50% - exactly 1, I guess. A close companion is reminded at least once a year or so that the 19th amendment was a mistake. OTOH if he could have, he'd have written in Queen Elizabeth for president every time.
Hi Scott, thank you for slapping down the sexist "women shouldn't have the right to vote" stuff!
Your statement "I've been against mass incarceration" makes it sound like you don't want *convicted criminals* to be imprisoned, but that SSC article you link to is all about bail for *suspects in jail awaiting trial*. Those are two very different things! I agree that people are innocent until proven guilty in the eyes of the law, and it's a shitty thing to keep an innocent person locked up. I would think that nowadays there are good options like tracking bracelets/anklets that would let us release even relatively high-risk individuals and still make sure they show up in court.
But if someone has been found guilty of a violent crime? Sorry not sorry, but they need to be locked up for others' safety. Also, if you are too lax with violent criminals, at some point you incentivize "And then I said to my wife, For justice, we must go to Don Corleone." That's not good for anyone (except Don Corleone). I am, however, in favor of making prisons more humane (no prison rape, for God's sake).
I think "against mass incarceration" implies "we should be trying to figure out ways to have fewer people in prison", definitely not zero. Or rather, I'm sure some leftists use it to mean zero, but that's not what I mean here.
I don't have amazing ideas for how to make this happen, but I think some of the discussion in the post above about being sure that more imprisonment *really* helps bring down crime is a good start.
IMHO, you should probably avoid use of the term, "mass incarceration." It seems to have very little in the way of substantive meaning, and to the extent that it has meaning, it seems to be used as shorthand for the claim that that most people are in prison because the state is imprisoniing certain classes of people for illegitimate reasons. I doubt that that is what you meant to convey.
"we should be trying to figure out ways to have fewer people in prison"
At the risk of being offensive, I think this is analogous to abortion.
Nobody *WANTS* more abortions. Everyone agrees that fewer abortions are good! But the right wants to reduce the *availability* of abortions to women who want/need them, and the left wants to reduce the *demand* for abortions, but reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies.
So, with crime, you could say "I want to reduce the prison population by refusing to imprison criminals [even violent ones]" or you could say "I want to reduce the prison population by preventing people from committing the kind of crimes that land you in prison [e.g., by having more police presence that deters crime, funding programs for at-risk young men to divert them from the path to crime, etc.]"
In both cases you're trying to reduce something (number of abortions, number of people in prison), but you're doing it in a very different way, and the downstream effects on society are going to be completely different.
Of course, where my analogy breaks down is that we have simple, effective ways to prevent unwanted pregnancies, but it's very hard to tell what programs are effective at preventing violent crime.
> the left wants to reduce the *demand* for abortions, but reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies.
As a matter of political dynamics this is suspect; the more demand there is for abortions, the better the left does politically. This would suggest that they want to increase demand.
Their rhetoric tends to suggest the same thing. Who's more against teen pregnancy? Who's more supportive of a "childfree" lifestyle?
Surprised the comment wasn’t immediately ban-worthy to you. Untrue, uncharitable, and inflammatory. You’re kind to be merely requesting an apology; must be tough to have to balance how much to treat this comment as a personal conflict vs something with broader community impact
I'm going to criticize this from the opposite direction: If you want to make the argument that Scott's thinking with his penis here, you should at least google the girl in question to check if she's actually hot.
It's none of my business either way (though if he were in fact dating her polyamorously he should include a disclaimer), but you don't know what Scott's attracted to.
I'm a little disappointed with your assessment here Scott. I think you probably need to write more on this for me to understand your view. One of the themes of your writing on this is a focus on treating drug users and and preventing overdose deaths. I think a lot of citizens are beyond solving for these things, and just want the criminals to be locked up somewhere away from the rest of us where they can't ruin our cars/bikes/sidewalks/businesses/workplaces. There's a few specific nitpicks I'll list, but this is the absolute core of the disagreement in my view.
> Prop 36 will certainly imprison many people, but it won’t help fight crime.
I don't think you've made this case convincingly enough in this article to state it with conviction
> California’s rise in overdose deaths is an ongoing disaster, and the state must do more to address it – but it has nothing to do with Prop 47, and we should return to our prior that longer sentences don’t do much to affect drug use.
I think most proponents would say that we're not trying to decrease drug use. They're trying to mitigate the crumbling of public order that goes with it by getting these people away from the rest of us.
> Across jurisdictions, there’s no correlation between tough drug laws and lower drug use.
This feels like a bit of a bait and switch. Proponents will say that we're not solving for lower drug use. We're solving for public safety/public order. I think you'd want to show that there's no correlation between tough drug laws and homelessness and petty crime, like bike/retail theft. I also think you'd have to compare US/Canadian laws to places like Singapore, Japan, Thailand and China to actually have th draconian end of the spectrum included in the analysis.
>There’s a thorny debate to be had about the efficacy of involuntary treatment, but at least it’s more helpful for addicts than prison.
Again, I think at this point we're trying to solve for public order more so than helping addicts. I think that's a perfectly defensible position on it's face.
>Neither outcome - getting years of prison time for a bed shortage that isn’t their fault, or walking free without treatment
They are going to be getting years of prison time for comitting a crime. The bed shortage might not be their fault, but whatever crimes resulted in their prosecution certainly are. This reads like letting perfect be the enemy of good. Criminals being away from the rest of us, whether it's for 8 months or 5 years, might not be better for the criminals, but it's certainly better for the rest of us.
> The current retail theft wave started in the summer of 2021, after the economy re-opened. I'm not going to weigh in on the root cause – it could be a functional police strike in response to the George Floyd protests, lockdown-induced dysfunction that never got better, the decrease in police staffing across California over the past few years, or maybe some combination of the above. But something about the pandemic era emboldened criminals or broke policing. Prop 47 is not to blame.
My personal experience is probably creating a large bias here, but I don't think it's enough to show that Prop 47 is not to blame for the retail theft. You need to also show us why you're confident that Prop 36 wouldn't improve it.
> It’s about low clearance rates - shoplifters never get arrested in the first place. But they argue that longer sentences will help raise clearance rates by convincing police that it’s worthwhile to go after shoplifters. This argument is cruel, backwards, and if true would be a damning indictment of the motivations of law enforcement officers.
There are a few individuals in my city that are well known to police, and were arrested between 50-150 times each last year. There is one individual in my hometown who topped the 200 arrest mark in 2023 (this is Canada, but our approach to drugs and retail theft if markedly similar). I think that when sentencing begins to resemble a revolving door like this, it's reasonable to expect people to stop reporting theft (the process of which can be arduous) , as well as for police to stop responding. I personally don't see it as a damning indictment of law enforcement.
Bemoaning a shortage of treatment beds, but it's probably illegal to build & operate any treatment beds unless they comply with a hundred thousand pages of regulations micromanaging every aspect and get permission from a lot of power centers that can veto the project. This problem overlaps a lot with YIMBY and occupational licensing reform.
I actually though perhaps mistakenly thought California was the mecca of drug treatment programs. I could swear I've read some article or other complaining about there being ~17,000 rehab places drawing people from all over the country, who generally do not leave.
I suppose it's technically not a counterargument if you do in fact think that the police are cruel, backwards, and have corrupt motives for pursuing criminals, but if you think that, then I wonder why you would support tough-on-crime policies.
I see a lot of concern for criminals and drug addicts here, and very little for law-abiding citizens who are affected by them - nothing besides this somewhat lukewarm sentence:
>Californians - at least, those of us in big cities - shouldn’t have to tolerate the current rate of retail theft.
Meanwhile, paragraph upon paragraph about how unfair and unnecessary it is to put criminals in prison.
Now, I certainly do not like any of the ideology represented here, but I can accept it as the well thought-out position of a principled person whose principles differ from mine. Except for this part:
>they argue that longer sentences will help raise clearance rates by convincing police that it’s worthwhile to go after shoplifters. This argument is cruel, backwards, and if true would be a damning indictment of the motivations of law enforcement officers.
This is highly nonsensical, and sounds like the position of someone who hates the police to the point of seriously clouded judgment. How is "we have limited resources (morale included), and it's not worth it to invest the effort to bring in a shoplifter who will receive trivial slaps on the wrist even after repeat offenses" in any way cruel or irrational?
I'm trying to understand what the author could even mean by the argument being backwards, and the best I can come up with is she imagines police officers as psychopaths salivating over the emotional high of ruining people's lives, with maintaining a healthy society an afterthought. I hope I'm missing something, because *that* would be a damning indictment of someone's motivations, i.e. hers.
To Scott: I would like to humbly suggest that guest posts not be of this political op-ed style. I'm here for the extreme high quality of your thought process. If you write a piece supporting a political position/specific ballot item, even if I disagree with you I know it's coming from you, and is worth reading. Not so for guests. Keep them cerebral, away from this sort of red meat, I say.
(and a pragmatic reason to keep the guest posts less controversial: I see at least one commenter who missed that this is a guest post and is holding the contents directly against you!)
I concur with the sentiment at the end. I don't mind guest posts but do I expect them to be extremely curated and high quality or at least interesting-topic-wise (e.g. the Georgism series). This one seems just...ok? It's not annoyingly partisan or anything, it's decently well-sourced, but it just lacks the kind of rigor that I'm used to seeing on this blog. It's a pretty typical essay you could find on a dozen substacks. I would out of curiosity want to know where Scott would honestly rank this post in comparison to even some of his weakest writings from the last year.
Fair enough (though "true things" can be found written anywhere:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-lies ). I will say that reading this essay was the first time in a long while that I felt disappointed reading an ACX article. I like to think that this blog is popular not because it says True Things About Important Issues, but because it approaches them in a particularly thoughtful and unique way.
I put it to you that you may actually be here because of the extreme high quality of Scott's *past* thought process, which set a prior expectation. I think things have changed. I come back every once in a while, and am disappointed that I'm not seeing 2015 Slate Star thoughts.
This post reminds me of the “intellectual crackhead” essay: https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/12/matthew-yglesias-anatomy-of/. The essay was regarding the war in Afghanistan, but the same principles apply here too. A common sense solution, being thrown out due to empirics that have thousands of confounders that you can never control for.
To be fair, I've heard that a lot of the problem is simply DA's declining to prosecute people. If that's true, then changing sentencing would have minimal effect, while the common sense solution would be to install DA's that are actually willing to do their job.
I feel like a larger sentence would mean the DA would be less willing to prosecute someone. If you think someone deserved a year in jail and the most you could do is a month, you'd want to at least do that. If you think they deserve a month in jail and the least they could get is a year, letting them go free is a lot more appealing.
This, I think, would be the strongest argument against the law, but I don't see it brought up in the piece (introducing mandatory minimum sentences still wouldn't prevent a prosecutor just not charging a crime, right?)
> More like quiet quitting than an honest, open process.
On the contrary, they've been *quite* open and upfront about it, brazenly proclaiming (and sometimes even outright campaigning on) an unwillingness to enforce the law.
I don't follow the news at all. Have they talked at all about why they're not enforcing it? Is it because they think the punishments are too harsh, or that they're so minor it's not even worth bothering?
I would assume the opposite effect. 90% or so of crimes are plea-bargained, and having a bigger minimum sentence for a crime you can be accused of means the prosecutor has a better opening position in the negotiation--you'll have to agree to plea to more stuff / accept a longer recommended sentence in order to get him to drop the charge with the 10 year mandatory minimum.
How would you tell the difference between that vs. a case where the common-sense solution doesn't work or has costs < benefits? There are millions of people who think the government is just stupid and evil for not solving inflation/poverty by instituting price controls. Are the people who object to these price controls also "intellectual crackheads"?
Are price controls really "common-sense"? There is a big difference between price controls (something that has been tried and has failed nearly everywhere they've been implemented) and putting *literal crackheads* in jail (what literally every sensible polity does).
If "common-sense" has any definition that's not just "popular among some demographic", I'm not sure there really are that many instances where the "common-sense solution" doesn't work or has costs > benefits. Or: if you try to second-guess every "common-sense solution" you'll likely wind up with many more false positives than false negatives.
I think the empirics are pretty clear about colonialism - it ceased being viable somewhere mid 20 century. (We can argue about specifics and causes - I'm assuming diminishing information asymmetry between the colonizers and colonized. But the larger point remains.)
I guess it's in character for Yarvin to look up to the idealized past. I don't think he has remotely enough of a case to accuse others of intellectual errors.
What I find funny is that the people who often make this, "harsh penalties don't reduce crime" argument are almost always the good-kid striver types who are absolutely the most terrified people ever of getting in trouble.
On the opposite side, there's the story of the Quaker pacifist who wouldn't fight in World War I. A bunch of patriotic citizens cornered him and made fun of him. He insisted that violence didn't solve anything. The citizens kept mocking him, until eventually he grabbed one of them, knocked them over, pinned him down, punched him in the face a few times, and screamed "NOW DO YOU AGREE THAT VIOLENCE DOESN'T SOLVE ANYTHING?"
The guy must have been pretty committed, because he just spat on his assailant and said "@#$% you, no."
So a man claims something doesn't work, others say he's wrong, so he makes a non-serious, half-assed attempt at that something, and then says the fact that it didn't work proves him right.
Pretty damn risky move by that Quaker right there.
Suppose the man he'd punched had whimpered, "Yes! Yes, I agree that violence doesn't solve anything, please don't hurt me!"
The Quaker would have realized that he got the man to say violence doesn't work... by using violence. Which defeats his point! He would have felt pretty stupid. And he'd be liable to be charged with assault, with eyewitnesses.
"San Francisco currently has 2,551 residential treatment beds, of which just 690 are for substance abuse treatment – but the city’s homeless population in need of treatment alone measures over 8,000. Worse still, due to post-COVID staffing shortages, the state is actually losing thousands of treatment beds."
I'm not sure that I read this correctly. If there were only 2,551 residential treatments beds to begin with, how can the state lose thousands of them? I couldn't get past the paywall. Did the state lose over 80% of its beds due to COVID staff shortages, or were those beds non residential?
For future reference, you can get past these flimsy paywalls by just cancelling the page being loaded before the paywall loads. Or just disable javascript.
> In 2021, the California Department of Health Care Services had licensed 987 residential substance use disorder treatment facilities with about 20,600 beds. That number has since fallen to 887 licensed facilities and just over 18,000 beds, according to department figures provided to the Chronicle editorial board and reported here for the first time. (Not included in this tally are 10 chemical dependency recovery hospitals licensed by the California Department of Public Health.)
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...So the 2,551 is just the number of beds in San Francisco, while the "thousands of beds" is being taken from the total number of beds in the state.
Has anyone noticed that when liberals REALLY dislike something, sexual harassment, domestic violence, hate crimes, people violating COVID lockdowns, they most often automatically assume that harsher punishments will provide more deterrence and a lower incidence of the thing in question, the way conservatives do with crime in general?
I'm pretty sure Freddie Deboer has probably gotten a post out of this, in his role as the current "reactionary Marxist". There usually is one, I think.
Well reasoned and sourced post, exactly what I'm excited about seeing here. Really disappointing that many commenters are hating on it (and the author!) because it disagrees with their views, but I'm looking forward to more guest posts from Collier!
I’m a long time SSC/ACX fan and I honestly find it pretty depressing that so many of my fellow readers are the kinds of people who think women shouldn’t be allowed to vote and that poverty in black communities isn’t a problem. I am generally pretty anti-woke but Jesus Christ.
This is a straw man, most of us here who have right wing sympathies and want to be tougher on crime are pro women voting and empathetic towards Black people (please note women suffer more than men from streets being unsafe, and many Black people want more policing and tougher sentences as they live in communities torn apart by crime and drugs)
You can't just take the two most unhinged comments on the page and use that to slander the entire readership of this blog. For the record, my views are so far removed from anything considered socially acceptable or sane that using me to make any point about these people here is incredibly insulting to them. Call me a monster all you want, but leave everyone else out of it.
It's not just single unhinged comments. One of the replies to the 'no woman should be allowed to vote' comment says: "Christ on a cracker, I used to love ACX, but the incidence of weirdly sexist comments has been increasing of late and making me question what the heck I’m doing here."
Isn't that what arguments are supposed to look like? I make a too-strong claim, you argue against it, and I accept that I was wrong and make a much weaker claim that is defensible?
I don't know if I should be defending someone who clearly has no intention of defending themselves, but the second post is arguing that relative black poverty is not an issue, rather than poverty itself.
I think "so many" is probably where you're going wrong. It's the internet and there will be some people with weird and bizarre takes. That tells you little about the majority of readers.
We can read the vibes. When I point out that there are such noxious and extreme views, the response from the community is to defend them and praise one of the commenters.
I never made any claims about the majority: I don’t think most readers here are that reactionary. But I will say most readers here seem unbothered by it and are much more bothered by it being called out.
I think the norm here is extra tolerant about even pretty offensive beliefs partly as a reaction to the many online and real-world venues that became much more ideologically narrow and intolerant of such beliefs. Though also, I think you need to accept a wide range of views, including some offensive ones, to have freewheeling discussions.
Suppose someone makes the argument that blacks will always be poorer than whites for HBD reasons, in a basically polite and rational way. What do you think should happen next?
Suppose someone makes the argument that blacks will always be poorer than whites because of intentional white supremacy and racism by whites, in a basically polite and raitonal way. What do you think should happen next?
[edited to add:]
My own sense is that people loudly taking offense and demanding that everyone join them in casting someone out for their expressed ideas or arguments is a tactic that has been used very extensively in the world of ideas over the last couple decades, and the result has been a substantial narrowing of ideas discussed. That closed off some bad or wrong ideas, but also some entirely defensible ones, and silenced opposition to some pretty obviously bad ideas. It seems to me that we need less of this sort of thing, not more.
It’s funny, you’re basically making all the arguments I spent the last 8 years making. And now I find myself on the other side.
I was confident then that our Overton window needed to be wider for the reasons you said and that even if the occasional person came in and said something truly noxious like “Women shouldn’t be able to vote” or “We shouldn’t care about black people”, the majority would push back and prevent those ideas from festering. I’m basically just coming to see that I was wrong and that the comments section which hates witch hunts really does just become a breeding ground for witches and witchcraft sympathizers.
For the record, neither of the comments I linked to are polite or rational. One is simply an ad hominem against the author by attacking her and half the population. The other was, as I see it, a troll tactic to derail a point Scott was saying.
It looks to me like although the thrust of prop 36 is to repeal parts of prop 47, it doesnt do that by just repealing them, rather it rewrites the relevant rules in whatever the authors apparently deemed was best.
You didnt get into the meta question of what issues should be done through props, but for me, that is a good reason to reject prop 36.
Alternatively, had it been implemented as a straight repeal, I would support it. Your arguments that prop 47 didnt cause these problems not withstanding.
You mention Newsom recently signed legislation changing punishments for retail theft, so apparently CA doesnt need props for that. No to prop 36, yes to the legislature passing useful criminal reform laws.
No. I'm sorry Clara but I flat out don't believe you or your arguments. I've seen this retail crime explode in front of my very own eyes. Two girls filled their backpacks in the Walgreens at Sansome and Bush, and ran out. They didn't even run very far, they ran across the street and were both laughing and started walking as soon as they got across the street. They had no fear. I talked to the manager and she said the police won't even come. No wonder that location closed.
There's nothing more deceitful and more weaselly than the words "there's no evidence to suggest...". No, there's plenty of evidence. You just disregard it by using weasel words and try to sow confusion, using moral and religious arguments to try to shame people into believing criminals are just down on their luck, but it won't work this time. We have seen that criminals will destroy everything to get what they can.
Retail crime caused by Prop 47 has destroyed San Francisco businesses. There needs to be teeth behind it otherwise nothing is going to get better. People like you that try to get rid of sentences for criminals are destroying the very fabric of society. Criminals need to be in jail. Period. End of Sentence. They will exploit every loophole and they've shown since Prop 47 that they will, and people like Clara will joyfully let them do so. But this city is being destroyed and it needs to stop.
> But they argue that longer sentences will help raise clearance rates by convincing police that it’s worthwhile to go after shoplifters. This argument is cruel, backwards, and if true would be a damning indictment of the motivations of law enforcement officers.
I mean, based on the fact that I've talked to multiple police officers trying to prosecute break-ins and theft in the Bay Area, who have explicitly told me that they reason this way, I guess yes, it is a damning indictment of the motivations of law enforcement officers, but that's not an argument, that's proving the case.
I really don't get this section. It's obviously true that officers are not motivated to investigate crimes that threaten very little consequences on the people committing them. I am pretty sure you could just ask some police officer whether they reason this way, I don't expect it to be a secret. People committing break-ins and theft in the Bay Area are facing very little consequence, which makes police unmotivated to pursue them. The easiest way to fix this is to increase the consequences.
I'm kind of confused about why cops would think that way. I mean, obviously, punishment severity is a proxy from crime severity, but it's really far from perfect. And I'd have thought that enforcement strategy (what crimes get focused on) would be *more* driven from management setting a general priority list than from random cops making decisions based on whatever proxies they have for severity.
But that's conflating seriousness of crime and severity of punishment, when my entire point is that enforcement should be based off the former, not the latter. Severity of punishment is an imperfect proxy for seriousness of crime, so it would surprise me if that were the dominant metric used by police.
From an elected official (sheriff, chief of police, etc.), who sets prioritization policy for the department, and runs for election on his vision for enforcement.
...Why are you confused? Do you think people become cops just for the paycheck? It's to punish lowlife criminals and exercise authority. If the lowlifes aren't getting punished, what's even the point?
I think this is a reasonable and moderately careful post and it’s unfortunate that the comment section is the way it is. I wish there were a lot more epistemic modesty on *both* sides.
I do find this argument unconvincing, though. It’s good to try to find relevant studies but I think there’s a tendency to act as if there’s no way to think other than via spraying pure intuition (see most of the other comments) or via literature review. But evidence from studies is only useful once you’ve clearly stated the problem you’re gathering evidence around. The cited evidence seems relevant if we were deciding what to do in CA in 2018.
But to my mind, the current situation is that a mix of the George Floyd protests/other recent PMC opposition to enforcing rules and the ability to spread knowledge of non-enforcement of rules virally on social media has led to a situation in California (not just California) where it’s common knowledge that you can just steal stuff from stores if you feel like it, and nothing will happen to you. This is both (1) really bad and (2) in my understanding, quite unprecedented. It would be come *extremely* bad if the proportion of the population willing to just steal stuff when they felt like continued increasing toward, say, the proportion that speeds. I think it is clearly necessary to the operation of the economy in which we all exist that people rationally expect to be stopped if they try to steal stuff.
Now, I am open to the possibility that this proposition would reimpose the presumption that you’re likely to get stopped and perhaps even punished if you steal stuff. Unfortunately that depends on a long and shaky chain of inferences: (1) cops could stop shoplifters if they wanted to (2) they don’t want to at the moment (3) this is because shoplifters aren’t getting punished even if they do arrest them.
But the past presumption that shoplifters would be stopped had very little to do with cops! How would that even work? No store has an actual cop just standing around all day, and rather few ever even had security guards. The presumption was always that the *store staff* would stop you. But it’s now common knowledge that store staff aren’t at all likely to do that, especially at big chains, because they see it as risking their lives for a faceless corporation (a faceless corporation which might even ban them from interfering by explicit policy.)
Basically, if it’s common knowledge that nobody but (maybe) an actual cop will use physical coercion to stop you stealing, which it is, I suspect it’s going to be impossible to put the genie back in the bottle, and we’re stuck with locked aisles, Amazon, or fancy stores for the foreseeable future. And there’s no plausible way that common knowledge is going to change, regardless of this proposition. So while I’d be happy to see marginally more shoplifters spend a *small* amount of time in jail, I seriously doubt this prop is actually relevant either way to the problem it supposedly is aimed at.
I haven’t even mentioned the drug stuff, since it’s a whole different issue. I’m very annoyed I have to vote on two huge complicated and not-obviously-solvable detailed policy issues (both at all and) on one ballot line.
In particular I think a post about “can we plausibly actually do *anything* to fix the shoplifting* would be vastly more interesting and useful than this. I wouldn’t be surprised if this post, as much as it’s in the 98th percentile for its class, didn’t actually change a single vote. This is just not the kind of thing that has that effect, or the kind of venue in which you should have such aims.
Lies, damn lies, and statistics. Of course you don't see a spike in shoplifting _reports_. Why even bother reporting them? Look at indirect measures if you really want a fair estimate - security costs, or maybe insurance if there is such a thing. Scott spoiled us with balanced posts - pretending there is no such thing as increase in petty crime only hurts the overall point.
As for drug crime, the simplest argument is that fentanyl looks like a lost battle from an enforcement POV, on pretty much every level. I'd bet on deregulation partly to try something new, and partly out of respect for personal freedom. If you really really want to kill yourself, it's the state's job to make sure you know what you're doing and (agree very much here) provide help when you're open to it. Not put you in jail for a drug that has no correlation with hurting others.
'Of course you don't see a spike in shoplifting _reports_. Why even bother reporting them?'
I was surprised to not see more discussion of this. Stats depend on reported crime. Are we sure that people are reporting crimes where they know action will not be taken?
I buy the drugs part of your argument to an extent. But I suspect a lot of these crime trends are down to organized crime and a smallish number of criminals with an outsized effect on the numbers. It's perfectly reasonable to expect that based on a law change, it takes years before police attitudes toward enforcement change and then crime groups wake up and really start to exploit it.
I also think police not prosecuting crimes that carry low penalties is a perfectly reasonable calculus both rationally and, especially, emotionally. Why spend your time doing things that don't take perps off the streets? Police are very busy, as you point out. And I'm sure morale is a problem.
Oh, I get to trot out my "solve the fentanyl zombie downtowns" solution.
The problem from a "regular citizen" perspective: downtowns are usless, because they're crowded with aggressive / smelly / unpleasant homeless fentanyl zombies and crime is high.
The problem from a QALY Perspective: 100k people are dying from overdoses every year, the biggest cause of death for people under 40, exceeding car accidents. Pretty much all of those deaths are due to fentanyl + illegality - if cheap, pharmaceutically pure drugs were available, we'd greatly decrease these deaths, and some portion of them will straighten up and economically contribute when older.
The solution:
"Wet hotels" in exurbs, away from city downtowns, with regular policing in the downtowns to prevent (re)congregation. The drugs themselves cost pennies, even the heaviest user would be totally fine on $5 worth of opiates a day. You're passing out pharmaceutically pure opiates for free in these hotels.
We waste $3B a year on "homelessness interventions" today, with literally zero impact. All our downtowns are still scary, crime-riddled zombie apocalypses. Wet hotels will cost a fraction of that, AND actually get people off the streets and out of downtown. At $50 a night + $5 in drugs, we can treat 55M person-days for $3B. Buy the hotels and get the cost much less than $50 a night.
Downtowns become usable again. Homeless are housed. Overdose deaths are a thing of the past.
Drug *free* housing has been vigorously resisted in the suburbs and exurbs. Hotel purchases get tied up in red tape and protests for years. Try to set up drug *using* hotels, and the exurbs will say no. Force the issue, and you'll have yourself a literal civil war.
Anywhere that fentanyl zombies congregate is a place that produces slow boil violent political energy. Anywhere that's *forced to tolerate it* by outsiders is gonna boil over very quickly.
If you did this to my community, I would push for armed conflict with your community.
Edit, supplement: I forcibly deleted two homeless tents in my community in the last five years to prevent tent cities from springing up on the other side of my back yard (60 feet from my back door). I was reluctant and sad, but I was also *furious* and very firm in my resolve. Your comment gave me a comparable sense of visceral anger. And I'm one of the *nice* ones in the burbs. I've lived in ktown LA, downtown Seattle, downtown Austin. I *like* cities. I am not a Trumpist, or a cop. Many people out here in the burbs would get much meaner than me much more quickly. So, really, understand that if you've made me this triggered, your idea in actual practice will lead to conflict.
"If I've accidentally called your place a shithole, and you've called me out in person, well, surely we can agree that *that other place* is a shithole and use that instead" is exactly the attitude that created the fury that led to the Trumpists.
Every place has people who care a whole lot that they're looked down upon, remotely mismanaged, and always losing their kids to nicer places. It's not *untrue*. I've been nearby, and I doubt Trona is nice. But your blase attitude and ignorance are what lead to revolutions.
...Did we look at the same town? The soil quality is so bad that grass doesn't grow, there's abandoned houses everywhere, and even most of the people who have jobs there are commuting from Ridgecrest. The place looks legitimately post-apocalyptic. Yes, obviously there are people who are attatched to this place, tragic as that might be, but that's still not a good reason to actually put that land to good use.
I don't disagree that Trona is bad. I disagree with you casually calling *any* place a shithole where you can dump city problems. I take issue with the attitude. It's an *extremely* bad attitude.
> Try to set up drug *using* hotels, and the exurbs will say no. Force the issue, and you'll have yourself a literal civil war.
Yeah, I wasn't thinking of the politics at all here, just at the high level, an arrow pointing to SF downtown with "literally the most economically productive real estate in the world" labeled, and then another arrow with "also the epicenter and nexus of homeless fentanyl zombies ruining everything for everyone."
Surely, the most economically productive places in a state / country should be able to shift the problem SOMEWHERE, even if not civil-war-ready exurbs.
I mean, I like the Wirehead City concept ProfGerm linked - basically Burning Man, with free tents, drugs, and booze for anyone who wants, you just need to self select to living in the middle of the desert hundreds of miles away from all the productive people.
And there's no existing residents there to be negatively impacted or initiate civil wars. Sounds like a win to me.
Why not put them in the same downtown? If the people are already there, provide the service they are asking for. Recycle some old WeWork building. The problem isn't the people in the building, it's the people waiting to get into the building because occupancy has been hit.
So you'll need to build a LOT of them, across the country wherever there are customers. Otherwise they just become meccas everyone goes to. So how do you coordinate the legal structure around them and build them in an affordable way?
> Why not put them in the same downtown? If the people are already there, provide the service they are asking for. Recycle some old WeWork building. The problem isn't the people in the building, it's the people waiting to get into the building because occupancy has been hit.
I think the problem IS the people + propinquity. Locating them downtown just keeps our downtowns useless zombie apocalypses. Wet hotels aren't prisons. If freshly-high homeless are able to wander out and panhandle and crap in the street and freely loot small businesses, they'll definitely be doing those things, so you've got to get them away and raise some barriers to entry.
Putting them out in the desert, hundreds of miles away, is a real barrier. They'd have to leave their cozy tents or hotel rooms, walk somewhere, try to get a bus or something, ride on the bus for hours...but everyone they know is back in the desert / hotel, and they don't even have to pay for drugs there! Better play it safe and just stay and get high again.
If their legal immunity only applies if they remain in the hotel for X length, then you certainly could just station the police right outside. Of course this runs back to the problem of underfunded police + court system. But maybe you could just streamline the paperwork to convict for "exiting a federally designated area while under the influence".
"A building in the middle of downtown that we put all the drug addicted criminals in and they aren't allowed to leave if we think they're going to do more crimes" that's just jail, bro. You've invented jail.
Your exurb model doesn't work because A) exurbs do have some political power and they don't want city waste either, and B) the kinds of people endlessly sympathetic to drug users seem to also want downtowns to be useless to functional people.
Also, overdose deaths wouldn't be a thing of the past; they'd spike until you've killed off enough of your user population.
Yeah, that guy's got my vote, I'm 100% behind wireheading city. And he's using old data, too - California pays something like 150k per year per prisoner.
On the overdose thing, pre-fentanyl they were at ~20k a year - fentanyl has 5x-ed them. You're right I don't think you'll eliminate them, but saving 80k lives a year is no joke either!
In response to the blogger's "I spent the last 2 weeks travelling around India, and I came up with this line: 'There’s a fine line that defines civilization.'", I offer Aldous Huxley's line from Jesting Pilate, which he thought of while he was in India:
"To travel is to discover that everybody is wrong"
It's hard for me to overstate how frustrating and depressing it is to witness daily shoplifting (frequently by the same frequent flyers, we know many of them on sight by now) at a non-soulsucking generally-well-regarded grocery store post-covid, compared to the blissful Before Times when it was a very rare occurrence. Having to hire security guards, lock up product in the back, and generally treat our valued guests with suspicion first and foremost (and not a little profiling, I'll be quite honest) is just really bad for morale. It's the sort of thing I'd expect if I worked at CVS or some other coldly corporate bullshit place that gives less than zero fucks...not a family-friendly retailer known for its fun atmosphere and upbeat staff. I want to keep being able to think the best of people, rather than retreat into bitter cynicism which seems to afflict so much of retail.
Maybe it's true that Prop 36 is mostly a This Is Something measure that won't fix anything (I'm a bit more willing to concede the drug stuff, these aren't quite gander sauce issues). But when there isn't any equivalent on offer for targeted crackdowns of the known 1% Bad Apples who steal apples, it's just hard not to be hard-hearted. A Singer is someone who tries to be good...and I just can't anymore, at least on the criminal justice reform axis. Minimal patience left for those who willingly choose to defect against Society. At least Jean Valjean had the decency to feel ashamed of himself, unlike the degenerate pricks who flout their impunity while stealing from us. (Rarely is the question asked, what is our children learning - by seeing such antisocial behaviour go unpunished, even celebrated?)
Yeah, I wish the drug stuff was decoupled from the shoplifting stuff. They're two different issues. Both severe, arguably, but different. Like others have pointed out, most drug users are probably also drug dealers. People choose to do things they probably shouldn't do and then suffer from it is the core of the hard drug issue. Truly innocent victims in this are probably rare, except for kids. Drug dealing *to minors* probably should have very harsh penalties, but I have mixed feelings beyond that.
As for widespread normalized shoplifting? That directly effects loads of uninvolved people in negative ways, such as the ones you went into good detail on.
I think the problem isn't sentencing length, it's getting convictions at all. That won't change as long as prosecutors and judge have counterproductive ideologies. Theft rates are highly unreliable because people don't report when crimes aren't prosecuted. You need to use survey data rather than police data. The proposition is unlikely to help on its own, but may be helpful in pushing a general culture of actually criminalising crime.
Would love to see TheGrahamFactor give his take on this. Feel like one of the things this community lacks is the perspective of beat cops.
You can cite as many studies designed to produce desired results as you want. They'll never overcome common sense.
Almost all people (and probably actually "all," but I don't want to be hassled for making a blanket claim) will give into the temptation to break a law if they believe the consequences of doing so are minor or nonexistent. Ever deliberately exceeded the speed limit driving a car or not come to a complete full-second stop at a stop sign? Ever pirate media? Deliberately fail to report cash tips as income? Etc.?
Now, *of course* I've *never* actually done this, but in an era of chronic under-policing in my embarrassingly Blue coastal city, it sure doesn't seem like much of a risk to frequently use the incredibly convenient HOV only entrance to the freeway express lanes as a solo vehicle occupant, even though said entrance *shares an intersection with police headquarters.* The likelihood of such an act even being noticed by law enforcement, much less provoking them to stop and ticket, is so low that - again, *strictly hypothetically* - I'd chortle and tell whomever I'm on speakerphone with at the time, "Hey, at least there's one upside to living through the downfall of civilization." And then hypothetically we would laugh over it, and then sigh that it's funny because it's true.
*Hypothetically,* of course.
My *strictly hypothetical* feelings about breaking an HOV only law would be quite a bit different if HOV enforcement was a high priority for our society, with dire punishments attached (incarceration, civil forfeiture of vehicle, etc) and enough law enforcement resources to make punishment likely. In that world, the convenience wouldn't be worth the risk; it would remove HOV violations as a temptation worth contemplating.
Would some people still violate the HOV only lanes because they have nothing to lose or they're merely stupid? Sure. But in *that* hypothetical, *I* wouldn't, and neither would everyone else in my "normal risk-adverse person" demographic.
But often not to the people who steal stuff and/or assault people. They use the same kinds of risk-assessment and (perhaps) rationalizations for engaging in those crimes that people might for speeding and HOV usage. "This isn't really hurting anyone." "I won't get caught." "Fuck it."
The HOV lane, believe it or not, was IMO essentially the "rationalist" proposal of a particular day (no matter how ineffectual it turned out). At the very least, the "urbanist" one. That seems silly now, but at the time, the Robert Moses solution to traffic problems (Robert Moses being a non-driver and once very much in the progressive vanguard himself) had carried the day and all that was left was this sad little dream, that all these cars all going to the same place, might carry more than one occupant.
Transit-like.
Since there is a lot of judgment* on this blog of what appear to be genuine views, held by people who very likely are perfectly pleasant in real life and don't deserve exile for their candor, which will leave the commentary stilted and dull - I will make a little judgement myself: I suspect *some* folks represented on this blog would actually go harder on you, the scofflaw of this once-idealistic effort, than on the drug and grocery store grabbers.
The latter, in a standard leftist view, are helping turn the world upside down, when they ransack the shelves of the CVS. They are ushering in the goal that your Whig understood to lie in the very far future, where it should always remain, just out of sight. And which logical endpoint he had the wisdom or else the cowardice never to think too much about.
*I am genuinely curious, but suspect that it is a generational thing, this drawing attention to/tattling to the host, "go get the teacher!", about internet comments. I don't want to suggest that folks are not really upset at sharing space with someone who is not even trollish or vulgar but simply thinks differently about something than they do (indeed, in one case here, about difference), and is honest about it - perhaps they may really be trembling or unable to function, or just made to feel weird and unhappy. That is something I haven't felt. But this business of wanting such a commenter gone - that seems like more than a style difference to me. I can't picture my generation engaging in that. It wouldn't just be uncool - it just would never occur to me.
How would we know whether or not this was correct?
It sure seems like the dude who knocks the old lady down and takes her purse knows he's actually hurting someone. My guess is that he just doesn't care, or in some cases that he likes the sensation of being powerful and terrorizing weaker people.
I should have put "or" between my hypothetical criminal's quotes!
The guy who knocks down the old lady to take her purse indeed likely doesn't care about her, or perhaps he cares a little, but not as much as he cares about his own well-being should there be something in her purse worth keeping. Or maybe he has an elaborate rationalization that this rich old [upsetting ethnicity] lady actually *deserves* to be knocked down because she's a member of the class that abused him. Or maybe he knocks her down for social clout with his odious social circle. Or maybe he just thought "fuck it!"
I'd argue that going 40 in a 30 is represented by "eh, fuck it," or perhaps a feeling so cavalier that it doesn't even consciously rise to the level of "eh, fuck it."
My point is that there's a whole demographic of people who are as casual about shoplifting or even knocking down old ladies as you are about going 40 in a 30. They share your disregard for certain laws, but they don't share your values about which laws can be disregarded.
I think one of the most broadly dangerous things liberals have been peddling in recent years is that if it's a big company, a little theft is even justified. I've seen this show up in otherwise even very otherwise upright, ethical, high-paid people (including a close friend of mine), and you bet your bottom dollar that attitude trickles down. Coupled with the idea that if you're poor, you get a pass? We're not actually in a society where people are stealing food for their table. We have (mostly) fixed that issue for a lot of people, I'd argue (still some room to go with the housing-homeless thing). So in that context the rhetoric is dangerous. People are not stealing out of necessity, but a lot of liberals treat it that way.
Seriously the number of people who have started to rationalize theft is disturbing. This same individual, a friend, seemed to be totally ignorant of how this actually affects regular people too. I worked at Home Depot for a while, and theft caused no end of issues from an inventory perspective, and was extremely annoying for us (low to middling paid) employees. We suffered right alongside the bigwigs. And even customers, ultimately, often suffer -- if a count is wrong, they blame us! They are the ones waiting for 20 minutes while we scour the store to see if we can find the thing our inventory system says we have. But no, he says, theft is often about "sticking it to the man", a giant corporation can afford it, so it's not so bad.
Of course I'm sure it's not at all related that this friend also thinks that the slippery slope is never a real thing /s.
Broken Windows theory is mostly bullshit but it's not like, entirely bullshit. I know this post is all about actual enforcement, not rhetorical cover, for crime, but I think it's important to state that the two are still related when it comes to societal expectations and how "seriously" we view theft. Is the law's treatment a lever or just a reflection of a larger movement? Fair question. But I think that the symbolic passing of a law can have real effects on the general attitude. Just like how Facebook cracking down and firing people for abusing their meal credits sends an effective message beyond just the meal credits.
I agree with all of this, except for describing the people peddling these luxury beliefs as "liberals." I think "leftist" is a bit more accurate, as the people who will say it's fine to hurt Home Depot's shareholders, employees, and customers by shoplifting will also say that a person should lose his job and never be able to work again if he publicly expresses doubt about various identitarian orthodoxy.
As a child I imagined driving 110mph down quiet roads after the downfall of civilization.
The downfall is quite a bit slower and less progressed, and the roads are less quiet than I expected, but there was more truth in that daydream than I would like.
>But they argue that longer sentences will help raise clearance rates by convincing police that it’s worthwhile to go after shoplifters. This argument is cruel, backwards, and if true would be a damning indictment of the motivations of law enforcement officers.
How to prioritize between fighting different types of crime is a tricky problem, and using jail time as a proxy for how much the electorate want to eliminate different types of crime seems like a not crazy way for police departments to interpret the will of the people.
I admit that a better thing would be for local politicians to run on a platform of "we'll clamp down on shoplifting", rather than changing sentencing.
California may want to hire Nayib Bukele as a correctional system consultant. Bukele has done an excellent and pragmatic job at controlling crime in El Salvador.
This essay, and the motivated studies it shared, and the ideology behind it feel like... like this generation closing its eyes, raising a shaky hand, firing a single shot that misses the monster, and quickly saying "there, I tried shooting it, it doesn't work". You can just *feel* the half hearted reluctance and distaste.
In a bustling port city with lots of foreign travelers constantly coming and going.
I consider this pretty strong evidence against "drug prohibition is futile" and pretty strong evidence in favor of "our law enforcement apparatus is much less effective than Singapore's".
A lot of the failure of prohibition boiled down to organized crime bribing local law enforcement to look the other way. If it's not hard for the customer to find the product, it can't be hard for the law to find the product either. But Singapore has absolutely zero tolerance for corruption among its public officials.
Once things reach a certain level, the cat is out of the bag, as it were. This goes for many things easier to solve than drugs, too. Part of why Prohibition ran into trouble, it wasn't all enforcement. You just had some kind of critical mass of people for which drinking was important, common, and desirable. This is extra, extra true in a big country like ours. It's a massive coordination problem. Not to say that extra enforcement can't help, but it's important to recognize scale.
As a Californian, my argument is that more criminals spending more time in jail means less crime on the street. I support this Proposition, as I believe this will be the result. More cops, more treatment centers, tougher homeless enforcement, at home monitoring for first time offenders and such are also fine ideas, but they are in addition to this one, not replacements.
I'm growing tired of this reckless naivete from progressives. If she's going to promote something so dangerous and contrary to common sense I expect a mountain of air-tight evidence.
I think a lot of substantive argument weight of this piece is carried by one word which is missing in this key sentence:
<i>Shoplifting may have gone up slightly, but this lasted less than a year – by 2016, rates were back down to 2010 levels.</i>
This word is "registered" - as in "registered shoplifting". An expected effect of decriminalising a behaviour is to have less of that behaviour reported to police and being registered by police. This is not the same as less of that behaviour happening. Yes, it may not be easy to get reliable non-reported shoplifting statistics. But to incorporate this massive bias in the analysis and not even mention it is deeply disingenious. Very disappointing. Boo.
I mean, I have similar feelings towards the discussion of mandated rehab that I have to Scotts skepticism towards involuntary commitment - in the vast majority of actually-existing real world scenarios, it's going to be better than the alternative. Released on a misdemeanor and dead days later from an overdose is worse than any involuntary rehab program. If they don't exist, build them!
I mean, looking at this as an outsider, it seems the trend towards laxer punishment for common street crime has coincided with a huge rise in crap like locking up toothpaste and, well, crap on the streets. You don't see this stuff in Texas.
Having read about the effect of the 60s crime wave on the fortunes of liberal/socdem policies such as the Great Society, and being old enough to remember how conservative candidates used to run on crime back in the 80s, the consequent drop in big-city crime in the 90s, and the subsequent revitalization of the big cities in the 90s and 2000s, it seems this is not really a hill for effective altruists to die on, or even bother defending much.
If I wanted to be snarky, I'd say stick to fighting the AI overlords. Frankly, nerds are pretty much the only people with enough knowledge of the technology to be able to say anything rooted in reality. I don't really understand how ChatGPT works, but I bet most people reading this know someone who does. You have a huge comparative advantage in a utilitarian sense over some leftist whining about 'TESCREAL' who doesn't know a do-loop from Deleuze.
"I mean, looking at this as an outsider, it seems the trend towards laxer punishment for common street crime has coincided with a huge rise in crap like locking up toothpaste and, well, crap on the streets. You don't see this stuff in Texas. "
If only someone had tried to investigate this apparent trend to see whether it was real vs. an artifact.
I took a second look. They've successfully created uncertainty in my mind as to whether the specific upswing of property crimes in California correlates with the specific Prop 47. FWIW I never had any problem with drug treatment rather than prison, so my issue is with the theft rather than the drug part of it.
However, the crime's gone up all over blue cities, not just in Cali. Granted, I may be anchoring excessively on my experience as a teenager in the 90s when I watched crime go down almost immediately after Giuliani was sworn in.
P.S. Apropos of your later post, I have almost the same psychodrama around the Democratic Party as you.
My preferences (and I think other voters' preferences) are:
#1 - Good, rehabilitation/"soft-on crime" (Competent government, Prop 47, welfare which reduces poverty driven crime, mental health treatments instead of prison, etc.)
#2 - Good, strict (Competent government, No Prop 47, lots of cops, 3 strikes, etc.)
#3 - Shitty, strict (Bad government, No Prop 47, something like 3 strikes and pre-2014 laws, etc.)
#4 - Shitty, rehabilitation/"soft-on crime" (Bad government, Prop 47, demoralized cops, progressive DAs, people walking out of jail and reoffending, not enough mental health treatment, etc.)
Nobody of any creed believes that California can achieve #2 within 20 years. Yes on Prop 36 folks would say we're choosing between #3 and #4. No on Prop 36 (and pro-reform) folks would say we're choosing between #1 and #3, or maybe a radical faction would say #4 is better than #3.
I will say that "good, competent oversight is impossible and it'll always be a costly disaster" is one of the biggest arguments against a project that I'm personally fired up about, California HSR. If anyone is No on Prop 36 because they believe in situation #1, and also against HSR, there might be some inconsistency there. But that comparison certainly has major holes.
I like this way of thinking about the issue. But I would change #1 to "strict-on-crime/good rehabilitation".
By which I mean we should make it as likely as possible that those committing crimes are caught (which is the best way to reduce crime), so lots of cops and use of tools like video surveillance, but we should also be simultaneously leaning into alternatives to long prison sentences like restorative justice, mental health treatments, etc.
The problem we have today is the fact that those who are interested in criminal justice reform are primarily interested in reducing the number of folks in prison. We need people who care about that but who are just as interested in reducing crime.
The thing that I really like about 36 and why I plan to vote for it is that it doesn't simply mandate harsher punishments. Rather it makes them possible when the situation warrants (e.g. repeat offenders), which is exactly the kind of flexibility I think the system needs.
> It creates a new category, the treatment-mandated felony. Judges can tell offenders that their crime could be a felony, but that their sentence will be commuted if they complete a substance abuse or mental health treatment program.
> This isn’t a bad idea on merits. There’s a thorny debate to be had about the efficacy of involuntary treatment
Eh, it seems like a bad idea on the merits to me. I don't see why the first amendment prohibits the government from compelling you to say something, and it prohibits them from penalizing you for refusing to say something, but it allows them to threaten you with jail unless you say the thing they want.
Look, I'm a "legalize heroin" guy (seriously). But most of the issue around drug bans isn't a concern over drug use per-se. Sure, there are concerns about people O.D.ing and lost loved ones.
The real issue is that people don't like the stuff that happens *around* drug use. They don't like the used needles, the shoplifting and other petty crime, the homeless nodding off on the sidewalk. Prosecuting the littering of used needles is hard to do. Prosecuting "nodding off on the sidewalk" is hard to do, doubly so without roping in grandpa who's late for his afternoon nap. But drug possession. Drug possession is nice and objective (you either have it or you don't), and it strongly correlates with the activities and the people that you don't want around you. Nice people don't have a bunch of heroin on them. So you go after the drug use because it is easy and because it accomplishes the goal.
So studies that show that cracking down on drug use don't reduce drug use are missing the point.
tldr because you started off with prison overcrowding. That's an easy to solve problem; just build more prisons. If there are legitimate problems with the sentencing scheme you should start with those.
It seemed like there was a moment there when the fact that mass incarceration was a giant policy failure was widely accepted, what happened to that? Seems like maybe a combination of some parts of the population becoming negatively polarized against reform due to their outrage at the 2020 protests, and the year or two of elevated crime rates we got around the same time. But the bottom line of those protests was that whatever you think of the protesters, their cause was obviously right, and crime rates are back to their historic lows...
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.
“Refusing to profit off prisoners is a sign of weakness and cowardice “ is certainly an opinion.
> There’s no reason the state’s prison system can’t generate a profit on each prisoner instead of a loss. Be creative
I'm sorry, I'm not that creative.
If we're talking prison labour, then most prisoners are very low value labourers, and need to be supervised by guards, who are much more expensive. The more labour they're doing, the more supervision they require. I can't think of any form of labour they can usefully do.
And if we're talking about selling their kidneys, I think the market is not large enough.
>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.
But that's not how you actually framed your statement.
You made a general blanket statement that dealing drugs is worse than murder, universally.
But neither I, nor a loved one, is going to buy illegal addictive drugs which set us on the road to a long and torturous death because none of us have the potential to become severe addicts. We don't have the combination of genes and early childhood trauma which would trigger those genes to use substances as emotional coping strategy.
(In fact, I'm REALLY the opposite; I had genetic testing done to prove I have a mutation of CYP2D6 (the gene responsible for the analgesic effects of opiates) which prevents me from experiencing the pain-relieving effects of opiates.)
I don't have any control over I or a loved one being murdered, but I do have control over not becoming an addict and not closely emotionally bonding with addicts.
You very much are downplaying drug addiction if you think that, because addiction kills. Either directly through overdoses, or slightly less directly through any number of closely-related problems (destroying your health, leading you into crime and violence, DWI, homelessness, etc.,) *addiction kills.* Not everyone 100% of the time, but actual recovery is rare enough, even for those few who actually get into treatment, that it's not at all inaccurate to say that statistically speaking, drug dealing is murder.
But not all murder is created equal. If I murdered you in a "standard" way (ie. through violence) then it sucks for a brief moment and then it's over. But there are other ways to kill people, and it's generally accepted that doing so in a long and drawn-out process is particularly evil and morally reprehensible. "I'm going to kill you and make sure you *suffer!*" is a stereotypical movie villain threat for a reason. Well, what death is longer, more drawn-out, and more filled with suffering, than death by addiction?
Even torture doesn't do what addiction does, destroying a person body and soul, slowly grinding away their mental faculties, their relationships with family and friends, their wealth and livelihoods, their free will, their health, and so on, over a period of years and years before *finally* taking their life. It's difficult to imagine a worse process of killing. Therefore, drug dealing is worse than (ordinary) murder.
It only sounds like a strange statement if you don't think about it much.
Statically speaking, even driving kill.
I think the number matter, you don't kill one person each time you sell or give someone else some drug.
Cigarettes gave cancer, and it could be a very bad death too, but we don't think selling them is like murdering people. I think the fact that the buyer was willing, knowing the possibles consequences, should count for something.
Also not all drugs are equal at all, some are a lot worse than others, you seem to describe one of the worst.
"Tough drug laws" pretty often involve cracking down on users too.
But also, trying to stop supply of drugs rather than demand has a long history of being very bad. If the demand is still there (i.e. if people are still addicted), then the more you prosecute suppliers, the more the price goes up, the greater incentive there is for more suppliers to step in and for them to commit violence.
"Dealing drugs is literally worse than murder" What? Can you provide some argument for this position?
> If the demand is still there (i.e. if people are still addicted), then the more you prosecute suppliers, the more the price goes up, the greater incentive there is for more suppliers to step in and for them to commit violence.
You deal with that through treatment programs. Reducing demand is definitely important. But reducing supply has the benefit of reducing the number of new addicts. (Especially if the price is driven up, pricing newcomers out of the market!)
> Can you provide some argument for this position?
See my answer here: https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/the-case-against-proposition-36?r=5hme8&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=74717825
I think we should put a massive amount of money in trying to design better less damaging drugs, and then sell it legally but with strong regulations, to replace the new demand, and even optimistically the old one.
Criminalization and crack down on the demand gave us a massive augmentation of fentanyl usage, which is one of the worst drugs possible, I think we should do the reverse.
> Across jurisdictions, there’s no correlation between tough drug laws and lower drug use
Imagine my surprise when I follow the "across jurisdictions" link and it's only across the United States, where drug laws are uniformly among the softest in the world. What happens to the correlation if we include jurisdictions where drug laws are actually meaningful, like Singapore?
I realise that "Singapore style drug laws" isn't on the table in Proposition 36, but it seems unreasonable to claim the correlation.
> and there’s substantial evidence that harsher criminal penalties won’t decrease it. So what should we do?
Following this link, it seems to make the argument that the decrease in crime caused by actually locking people up is offset by an increase in the crimes they commit when they get out. If this is so, then this is a damning indictment of the prison system, which needs to be restructured so that criminals have much less interaction with each other. But the idea of "Can't solve everything at once therefore we shouldn't solve anything" seems dumb.
One word missing from this whole discussion is "justice". Well actually the word "Justice" appears several times but only in the context of "criminal justice system". What's missing is the idea that people want to believe that they live in a just society, and that justice means punishing those who break the rules, so that those who obey the rules can feel like they made the correct choice. If a person can walk around stealing $749 handbags every day without fear of punishment, then what's my motivation to go to work and do productive things instead? The knock-on effects of feeling like you live in a just society go well beyond the decrease in crime.
Many of the countries in the "Golden Triangle" supernarcotics trade have some of the strictest drug laws in the world.
Are you talking about laws-as-written, or laws-as-enforced?
Big difference there, in some jurisdictions at least.
How does prop 36 change enforcement?
It's a step in the right direction?
And the weakest enforcement, not to mention are generally 3rd World countries.
The United States is unique culturally ethnically and sociopolitically so no anything Singapore does is not likely to be relevant or replicable. Our best evidence is the US and Canada. I grant that there's nowhere with extremely tough drug laws for us to see the extreme end but so it goes - Singapore doesn't generalize.
If you need to see other people punished to be sure you made the right choice then I recommend you just go steal handbags or feel bad about yourself, the rest of us will continue society without retributive savage spectacle
> which needs to be restructured so that criminals have much less interaction with each other.
So, what, solitary for the duration, or even half their time in solitary? That's illegal. Extremely so. Cruel and unusual punishment without substantial additional reason to impose it, another Supreme Court case and one which is even more doomed. And for good reason, because it's incredibly inhumane.
> the United States, where drug laws are uniformly among the softest in the world
Only by a standard which excludes all civilized countries from 'the world'. No comparable countries have drug laws significantly stricter than the USA, and quite a few have ones which are much laxer. Notably, those 'softer' countries largely get much better results, though it's probably not for that reason.
> The knock-on effects of feeling like you live in a just society go well beyond the decrease in crime.
Bullshit. People's idea of what a just society looks like adapts to their circumstances more than their perceptions of the justness of their society does.
I doubt that offset is as much as they say it is. Younger people commit more crime than older people, so locking people up for years means by the time they get out they'll be less suited for crime.
But justice isn't punishing people as strong as we can until the problem is solved. It is much more about punishing people proportionally to the crime, and more systematically.
I think what hurt the idea of justice, is uncaught criminals, and corruption, not the fact that people living months or years in overcrowded prisons even sometime falling to respect the basic rights of the prisoners, is still considered too soft.
Wow yeah, that is dumb. I have no idea where people are getting the idea that prison rehabiliatates people, let alone drug users. If it was increasing the penalty to capital punishment, that would at least make sense (not to mention it would bypass the issue of funding treatment facilities), but I guess the public still isn't ready for that yet.
> But they argue that longer sentences will help raise clearance rates by convincing police that it’s worthwhile to go after shoplifters. This argument is cruel, backwards, and if true would be a damning indictment of the motivations of law enforcement officers.
...I thought we already understood that law enforcement is filled with terrible people. Though, that doesn't mean they can't be made useful when given the right incentives. Throw them a bone once in a while to keep morale up, and they will become much more motivated to fight crime. Worst thing you can do is crucify them for every little scandal, like the left is doing right now.
Depends on what you mean by "rehabilitates". If it means that if you do X, your life is going to suck for Y time, then yes, some percentage of people would be wary to do X, or, having done it and having suffered, would be less likely to do it again. I don't see why it is "dumb". Of course it won't work for everybody every time, but I don't see why it is "dumb" to think it would work for somebody sometime.
Even capital punishment doesn't meaningfully deter criminals, why the hell would a prison sentence fare any better?
https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/247350.pdf
It seems that humans are incredibly bad at taking into account the *severity* of consequences when making risk assessments, only taking into account the chance of getting caught. (Edit: Now that I think of it, it's the exact opposite when the consequences are positive. Weird how that works.) In which case, the only ways to reduce crime is by vastly improving surveillance or by actively cultivating a culture of fear that makes everyone overestimate the risk of getting caught.
Of course, capital punishment still has the benefit of just getting rid of the convict forever. Sure, just locking them up forever is the "safer" option, but apparently we can't afford to do that because our prisons are overflowing. So execution it is!
> Even capital punishment doesn't meaningfully deter criminals
History tells us otherwise. Excessive use of capital punishment, as seen under famously-harsh rulers such as Draco of Athens and Vlad the Impaler, drives crime rates virtually to zero. Both rulers have well-attested stories of producing conditions such that a person could leave a pouch of gold coins out in the street overnight and come back the next morning to find it undisturbed.
So it's clear that, at least at extremes, capital punishment is not only effective at deterrence, it creates *near-perfect* deterrence. Does this mean we should live under such policies? Of course not. But it obliterates beyond salvaging the absurd notion that "deterrence doesn't work," and with it the credibility of those who push such arguments. What's important now is to figure out which forms of deterrence are the most effective and efficient, and with the least degree of collateral damage to our freedoms, and implement policies based around this.
...Hence why I mentioned cultures of fear. What matters is increasing the *perception* of risk, not the actual risk. Capital punishment isn't going to do anything unless you start performing gruesome public executions, and even that might not be enough. Of course, you don't necessarily need to commit crimes against humanity either; Japan is peaceful enough that people are passing out drunk in the street without fear of being murdered, and that's likely because everyone is born into a culture of very strict heirarchies and extreme social pressure.
> Capital punishment isn't going to do anything unless you start performing gruesome public executions,
USSR in 1930s did not have gruesome public executions, and did have widespread culture of fear.
I think gruesome publish executions are a less bad thing than reproducing everything that USSR was doing in the 30s.
> Capital punishment isn't going to do anything unless you start performing gruesome public executions, and even that might not be enough.
I don't follow. Your friend lets you know he's planning to rob a liquor store, and then you never hear from him again.
By the third time that happens, you don't think anyone will start to feel nervous about their own criminal plans?
The Bloody Code in Britain didn't do much for crime rates when there wasn't a police force at all and criminals almost never got caught. Lowering punishments to prison sentences (ones that would not seem unusually long by US standards) combined with a massive increase in policing did result in a dramatic drop in crime rates - because people got caught.
There certainly needs to be an effective punishment - else merely being caught is nothing to be afraid of - but there need be no more than sufficient for the criminal to seek to avoid it. Then the bigger factor is consistently the likelihood of being punished, not the severity of punishment.
Greg Clark argued in "A Farewell to Alms" that the Bloody Code caused Britons to lower their time-preference over the generations, thus setting up the Industrial Revolution.
> Excessive use of capital punishment, as seen under famously-harsh rulers such as Draco of Athens and Vlad the Impaler, drives crime rates virtually to zero.
[Citation Needed], historians do not AFAIR believe this was in fact true in either case.
The death penalty for murder doesn't provide much deterrence because:
(a) the alternative is an extremely long prison sentence, which is not substantially better than death, and
(b) murderers are weird and extremely irrational outliers among the criminal community, committing a crime with a very high chance of getting caught and very large sentences for what is usually very small personal gain.
Other criminals aren't like that, some of them are doing crime as a business, making reasonably rational choices. Others are doing it for shits and giggles, knowing that the maximum downside is small.
Also, in part of the US with an active death penalty, there's generally a lag of 10-20 years between sentencing and execution in addition to the investigation, pretrial, and trial process which can take years all by itself. A fair amount of this delay exists for good reason (trial, appeals, giving the defense time to prepare their case, major exculpatory evidence surfacing post-trial, etc), and more of it exists for bad reasons that nobody seems interested in fixing (the court system is way too small for its case load, so there's a long wait period for anything that needs to go in front of a judge).
The very long delay before execution makes the death penalty much less of a deterrent relative to life imprisonment than a hypothetical "Judge Dredd will shoot you right here and right now once he's certain you're guilty" death penalty would be. But again, there are very, very good reasons why we don't have or want a Judge Dredd style swift-and-certain death penalty.
> Even capital punishment doesn't meaningfully deter criminals,
That's nonsense. It doesn't meaningfully deter ALL criminals. But, for example, if you're saying to me that a country where being openly gay is punished by death and the country where being openly gay has no negative consequences has an identical incidence of people being openly gay, and the capital punishment has no influence on people's behavior, sorry, I will call bullshit on that. Punishment certainly modifies people's behavior. Truly, it does not *prevent* the incidence of the behavior completely, for many reasons (one of them people being irrational), but you claim that the threat of death does no meaningful behavior modification to anybody at all is complete nonsense.
You may be confusing this with more plausible claim - that the capital punishment does not have increased deterrence compared to other kinds of severe punishment (such as life imprisonment), or with one that says that the capital punishment is not effective to deter people that are convinced (for one reason or another) that they will never be prosecuted, or some other modified claim. That very well may be plausible, but it is not helping you here. If you remain with the position that the threat of death leads to zero behavioral modification compared to no thereat at all (and thus by consequence a lesser threat, that of imprisonment, can not lead to any behavioral modification either) then it is a complete and utter baloney, sorry.
Do we have a big data set on murders that didn't happen?
LOL!
Well, there kind of is in terms of aggravated assault--apparently one of the reasons the murder rate's gone down is that medical care improved and victims tend to survive assaults more.
Humans as a whole probably do okay at thinking about long-term consequences, but the lunkhead 18 year old who makes his drug and food money by mugging people is pretty bad at that kind of thinking. "When we catch you mugging someone, we'll flog you in the town square and send you to the salt mines for three years" might work as a deterrent; "there will be an opaque process that drags on for a year or two and eventually the judge, prosecutor, and public defender will agree on some random punishment that might be nothing or might be really harsh" probably doesn't work.
>Wow yeah, that is dumb. I have no idea where people are getting the idea that prison rehabiliatates people, let alone drug users
This was one of the central arguments for creating prisons in the first place
I agree that the US prison system is completely failing at this goal, mind.
No, prisons were created as a way for the State to impose punishment for crimes, as an improvement over the previous system of victims seeking private retribution with no due process for the accused, a.k.a. vendetta. Somehow the concept of punishment for crimes has become unfashionable, but it is deeply rooted in human psychology.
When the US was founded, there was punishment for crimes, but that punishment wasn't prison. There were executions, flogging, stockades, fines, etc. It was reformers (I believe Quakers) who introduced prison, and they did indeed think it would rehabilitate. When Benjamin Rush campaigned to have the first state prison introduced (in Pennsylvania), they were called "houses of repentance", stocked with religious literature for prisoners to read. They were also kept in solitude from each other, so perhaps they did work better than modern prisons for which that's officially considered "inhumane".
I don't know if keeping them isolated from each other is inhumane or not, but I think it would be good if they at least still have the possibility if they want.
The public will never be ready for capital punishment in the case of petty drug crimes. If you are, you are my enemy and I will fight you to hell. It would be an extreme expansion of state power, and there are even tons of people wrongly convicted for those crimes every year.
Rehabilitation was a thing a while ago; Johnny Cash even made it his signature cause. It disappeared as a major goal with the crime wave of the 60s, I think.
> reduced some felony crimes to misdemeanors – theft of goods valued at under $950 and simple drug possession
> from a misdemeanor (months in jail) to a felony (years in jail)
But that's not how it worked. It's not that people who steal used to sit in jail for years and now they are sitting there for less than a year. It's that people who steal now steal openly and brazenly in bright daylight without any fear of retribution and without any consideration of being caught. I don't know what is was supposed to do in theory and what complicated argument can be built from that, but I think this is very easily observable. And I have severe doubt that theft and breaking epidemics are actually "solved" - if you look at the reported crime stats, maybe people just don't bother to report it anymore? After you car has been broken into for the fifth time and police didn't do squat for the previous four times, why would you bother to report it? When my car got broken into, I certainly didn't intend to report it until insurance forced me to file some kind of online form. Obviously exactly nothing happened since then, and I am not even sure if it went to any statistics or not. But if not for the insurance, I'd never bother to report it to anybody.
> But they argue that longer sentences will help raise clearance rates by convincing police that it’s worthwhile to go after shoplifters. This argument is cruel, backwards, and if true would be a damning indictment of the motivations of law enforcement officers.
I notice never here does it say the argument is false. It says "if you believe this you are bad person and the police is bad persons and I hate you" - but it does not even try to prove it is false. To be honest, if I were still living in California, I'd rather have Clara Collier think I'm a bad person and have no theft epidemics than the reverse.
What theory do you have of law enforcement motivation that says that increasing the penalty for shoplifting would make the police more willing to investigate cases of shoplifting?
The best theory is "people making stupid crap up." The argument presented in the article that you're citing here is made-up nonsense. Police aren't failing to clear cases because they aren't properly motivated; they're failing to clear cases because California's Progressive legal system deliberately fails to clear the cases. This, in turn, demotivates police; why bother arresting someone who's not going to get punished for their crimes no matter how clear the evidence against them is? Especially if they could end up getting smeared as an x-ist or a whateverphobe and possibly even face professional or legal consequences for doing so if the criminal they arrested turns out to be under the protection of the Progressive establishment. AKA "the Ferguson Effect."
Re-criminalization is about fixing the societal problems that are keeping police from being able to do their jobs effectively, not about properly motivating the police.
> Re-criminalization is about fixing the societal problems that are keeping police from being able to do their jobs effectively, not about properly motivating the police.
Do people claim this measure does that?
I don't have to present any alternative theories to notice that arguing "if you believe this you are a bad person" has nothing in common with logic in facts. Which is of course very usual mode of arguing for many Californian politicians, but we could try to do better.
Still, if I wanted to go an extra mile and propose the theory, the obvious one must be at least considered. If you are a policeman, and you see, time after time, that thieves you catch are getting released by the prosecutors or the courts, and suffer no consequences to speak of, eventually you will recognize the futility of your efforts and your motivation will suffer. If, in addition to that, you are called a horrible person because demographical composition of people being arrested as a group does not match the political ideals of some academics, your motivation may suffer even further.
I don’t understand why classifying it as a felony or a misdemeanor has anything to do with that though.
Those arrested for misdemeanors are much less likely to be prosecuted and/or jailed than those arrested for felonies.
Is that because people arrested for assault are more likely to be prosecuted than those arrested for theft, and theft happens to be classified as a misdemeanor while assault happens to be classified as a felony?
The question is whether changing the classification of a crime has any effect on likelihood of prosecution or conviction, or whether the nature of the crime itself is what determines the likelihood of prosecution or conviction.
If anything, I would expect that reclassifying the same crime as having a higher penalty will make juries *less* likely to convict, because they don’t want to assign that penalty to this action.
Do you even get a jury trial for misdemeanors? But as I understand it it's more that the case doesn't even make it to court at all - the relevant DAs have something like a blanket policy of not charging misdemeanors. Of course it's possible that restoring these crimes to felony status would mean DAs would simply escalate their nonprosecution policy further, but they'd be clearly going against the will of the people if they did.
If the crime is classified as small crime, it's easy to let the criminal go. If it's classified as bigger crime, it becomes harder to let the criminal go, and so less criminals are immediately let go after they have been apprehended, and so the police is more motivated to apprehend the criminals because they know they wouldn't just be let go tomorrow.
You haven't actually presented any reason for anyone else to believe your perceptions are true. They don't match what's happened in Oakland; we're underpoliced, but not underprosecuted.
California v. Windom suggests it may be under-judged, then.
No. That's good law, and good justice. It doesn't remove Windom's culpability, only the deliberately-unfair special circumstances applied to increase his sentence.
You really don't think that investigating a felony gets higher priority than investigating a misdemeanor? I know approximately nothing about the internal operations of police departments, but this seems like common sense.
I'm not sure that's sound reasoning. It's probably true that crimes perceived as more serious get higher priority, and they're generally categorized as felonies, but it's not obvious that recategorizing traditionally-minor crimes from misdemeanors to felonies would cause them to be accorded higher priority.
Like everyone else, police are managed based on what's legible to their managers rather than what's effective or desirable. You get what you measure, and while the goal may be to prioritise more serious crimes, felony vs misdemeanour is how that's going to get operationalised, and that's what's going to feed in to promotion incentives etc.
If misdemeanors get dismissed pre-trial, that would also factor in quite a bit. I wouldn't arrest someone if I knew there was little to no chance of them getting convicted. I would treat it like a noise violation in a nice suburban neighborhood - go if there's repeated complaints and try to handle it by asking nicely if I could. I wouldn't waste my time and cause unnecessary confrontations with the populace by making arrests that go nowhere unless it were egregious.
> I wouldn't arrest someone if I knew there was little to no chance of them getting convicted.
Psychologists refer to this as "learned helplessness." It's a commonly-observed feature of abusive relationships.
I can even see it backfiring. Tell a cop that arresting this person for shoplifting is going to lead to a mandatory 6-month sentence and they may decide to just let them off with a warning. The more severe the more the cop may decide to deploy mercy.
Trying to psychologically predict second- and third-order effects is really hard.
The first time, maybe. When they catch him for the 19th time, they will probably decide otherwise.
There is no "they". There's just nineteen different individual policemen, each of whom thinks they're arresting the shoplifter for the first time. And none of them are going to make any official record of it, because then there'd be an official record of the fact that they let a guy go who was "supposed" to do mandatory jail time.
Theft is not "traditionally minor". Traditionally, thieves got their hands cut off or they got hanged. Theft from somebody important was a capital offense. In other cultures, thieves were forced to pay multiple times value of the stolen goods, or being unable to, could be enslaved or executed. I don't think any non-modern culture considered theft "minor" - and there are reasons for that, most people were very poor, and stealing something valuable from them may mean very grave consequences, maybe death. Well, and rich people certainly would take stealing from them lightly. So unless you mean "since the wokes took over", I don't see how it is "traditional" to treat theft as a minor crime.
Yeah, sure. I just needed a compact way to say "from just prior to this proposed recategorization." If I had said "minor" without qualifier, I anticipated the retort of "well, after we recategorize it as a felony, it would, BY DEFINITION, not be minor any more", and wished to head that off.
But that ruins your argument. Theft used to be big crime (felony), then they made it small crime (misdemeanor), you can't argue making it back big crime won't work because of entrenched perception that is a small crime artificially made big. The perception would be only based on a short time after the change, and I don't think any cultural norm could have formed that considers theft small crime, when for thousands of years it has been considered pretty serious. It can't be seriously entrenched just due to that short time.
I think it is the psychology of job satisfaction. I am not sure how to demonstrate it, but my assumption is that people work harder if they see bigger results.
I definitely perked up at this argument. American police morale is so dead that it doesn't sound categorically insane for Trump to propose not taxing them. Longer sentencing sounds like something that would make police feel it was worth collecting a case over and exposing themselves to an interaction that could go south, which appears to be the essence of the effective strike
Honestly, the problem isn't the sentencing at all. It's *getting to* the sentencing. As long as you have Progressive prosecutors and judges who refuse to do their job, to prosecute, convict, and lock up the guilty parties, it doesn't matter what the sentence is because it won't be imposed upon them.
I wouldn't be surprised if the severity of the crime - measured usually in the severity of the punishment - would be a factor considering how much the prosecution is prioritized. If somebody brings the case that gets a misdemeanor with a month's suspended sentence, it probably would be less prioritized than the one that has 2 years felony.
Right, and I think that's a part of the argument. Why does this relatively minor crime need to be a felony rather than a misdemeanour? Because the prosecutors have stopped charging misdemeanours.
>After you car has been broken into for the fifth time and police didn't do squat for the previous four times, why would you bother to report it?
If you intend to file an insurance claim, you would bother to report it because your insurer will want to see a police report. Other than that, I don't know.
Exactly. But, the reality is insurance with zero deductible is very expensive, and most thefts, even if the insurance covers the stolen goods, would be under a typical insurance deductible ($500-$1000 for a reasonably expensive car, for inexpensive one you'd have liability-only insurance that covers nothing at all here). Not to mention the inevitable price bump next year. So, for a typical theft, filing insurance claim is impractical unless something very expensive (several thousands of dollars worth at least) is stolen and is covered.
The only reason I filed mine is because it was a rental, and rental insurance has no deductible and being secondary, does not influence the price of the main one. So it was a situation of "if you file police report, you get paid $200". In any other situation, I wouldn't file neither insurance nor police report.
Agree, but with the caveat that it is surprisingly easy to do $500 or $1000 damage to a car these days, and it's not difficult to imagine it being done incidentally to the theft of relatively low value items from inside the car. Also, at least here in Southern California, a lot of theft from cars is catalytic converter theft. Those things are expensive, hence the market for stolen ones.
Replacing a catalytic converter costs about $1500-$2000. If you have a $1500 deductible, in most cases it's probably not worth it to file an insurance claim because there's a good chance your rate will go up. Replacing a smashed window is even less.
Also, a lot of people only carry liability insurance if their car is old, so there would be no reason to file a claim in that instance. I wouldn't be surprised if less than half of break-ins and catalytic converter thefts are reported.
I'd say your figures are on the low side, but maybe it depends on where you live.
Are $1500 deductibles common? I've always had either $500 or $1000.
That touches on something that mystifies me about the debate: the choices aren't "shoplifting is a felony" or "shoplifiting is de facto legal". It's "shoplifting is a felony" vs "shoplifting is a misdemeanor". Misdemeanors are still potentially subject to meaningful punishment. Which suggests to me that the actual problem is that somewhere in the police -> prosecutors -> courts chain, there's at least one stage where everyone has decided that misdemeanor petty theft isn't worth dealing with and should just be ignored.
I'd rather fix that step so prolific petty thieves face a meaningful risk of being arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and appropriately punished for their misdemeanors.
Most people seem to be identifying Progressive DAs in major cities like SF. Wasn't there a guy there recently that specifically ran on a policy of not prosecuting minor crimes?
> Misdemeanors are still potentially subject to meaningful punishment
In theory, on paper, yes. In reality, in California - almost always no. So we can choose - are we debating abstract theoretical proposition 36 in abstract world where everything works as it should be in theory, or one that will be voted by Californians and applied in California? In think the main mistake a lot of people do is that they choose the former over the latter.
> Which suggests to me that the actual problem is that somewhere
People of California want the end of legal theft (or at least those who would vote for 36 do). They don't have the means to magically wave a wand and get "somewhere" to fix itself "somehow". You can't make a proposition "let's fix somewhere at the police -> prosecutors -> courts chain to stop theft being de-facto legal". But they remember the times where theft wasn't legal, and they notice those times ended when the theft stopped to be a felony and started to be a misdemeanor. And they want to go back. It's ok to tell them "no, the actual solution is this" but only if you actually point to the solution that they can realistically implement, and not to something like "you need to fix something somewhere and I have no idea how to do it in practice and nobody does, but I am happy to dunk on you because I know the right way and you don't".
So if that's the case, why don't we leave the theft categorized as a misdemeanor?
I find it strange how willing Rationalists are to depart from utilitarianism and Yimbyism when it comes to discussing cost of crime. I find it very hard to believe there is negative utility in imprisoning marginal criminals in the US. I am not even sure offenders gain utility from not being in prison.
https://www.bensouthwood.co.uk/p/how-crime-worsens-sprawl
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/cPDptuFTiCLr8XXkL/cause-exploration-prizes-crime-reduction
https://www.edwest.co.uk/p/the-power-law-of-crime
That's weird - I saw the first sentence of your comment and thought you were going to make the opposite claim that you did!
My takeaway is that this essay doesn't argue that reducing crime is wrong, nor that it doesn't come with high costs for society, which bleed over into nearly all other areas of life. At core, this author seems to be arguing that higher penalties for various crimes isn't the optimal solution.
There's merit in that argument, if hazy memory serves. At least some studies have found that some combination of three factors makes criminals less likely to commit crimes, and are more salient than severity of punishment. Those factors: the likelihood of being caught, the certainty of punishment, and the swiftness of punishment.
Without corresponding initiatives, legislative and/or via ballot measures, that can improve those factors – putting more police on the streets and reducing judicial backlogs might be part of that – I can readily sympathize with Californians overwhelmingly seeking to more harshly criminalize certain crimes. Prop. 36 is leading handily in polls and likely will win by a large margin. Yet that's not necessarily the most productive approach, in isolation.
As well, your sharing of Ed West's essay is welcome and pertinent. There absolutely is a power law in crime (or any other societal disruption, for ill or good): a small fraction of people have wildly outlying impacts. Policing and criminal justice system approaches which identify and target those outliers makes tons of sense. Again, that's not what this proposition appears to be doing; it's a scattershot approach where a more focused one would be optimal.
As one example of a more focused approach, in this case related to youth gun violence resulting in homicide and serious injury, see Operation Ceasefire:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ceasefire
The author links to two iterations of such focused approaches, in Boston and Oakland, CA, and also mentions that at long last, San Francisco started targeting the recurring offenders in car break-ins, with some initial success.
Finally, there are also benefits to increasing penalties, in isolation, *if* they're insufficient to deter certain crimes. While I haven't looked into how Prop. 47 impacts shoplifting, it's quite possible that it reduced those penalties below their minimum point where they'd deter a significant fraction of offenders. One more consideration to throw into this large mix ...
As for drug addiction more generally, that's long been a huge societal challenge, alongside alcoholism. Contamination and/or spiking of drug supplies with fentanyl and similarly dangerous compounds has only made that worse.
There are fairly radical ways of approaching that which are less punitive. For example, decriminalization of personal possession with mandatory treatment, along with punishment for large-scale possession and distribution, and a slew of resources thrown at the problem, seems to have worked in Portugal and Switzerland. (For various reasons, Portugal has slid a bit from their initial successes. We've also witnessed horribly botched, ill-designed and under-resourced attempts at this, most recently in Oregon.)
Naively, I'm thinking we might ultimately – years down the road – treat most addictions with medications or other medical interventions, beyond our current, primitive options. For instance, there are tantalizing early signs that GLP-1 receptor agonists can result in some generalized reductions in a range of addictive behaviors, at least in some people:
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2023/05/ozempic-addictive-behavior-drinking-smoking/674098/
Brandon Galbraith was thinking along those very lines, when they shared this post:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-case-against-proposition-36/comment/74665259
Depart from Yimbyism? Are Yimbyism and rationalism joined at the hip somehow? Were you under the impression that the former is somehow foundational to the latter? YIMBY is just a position on the question of housing, and a flawed one at that.
I definitely think the three ideas are linked in the people who support them.
I keep seeing story after story about even very young persons involved in some dread crime, with a list of their 37 prior arrests, which somehow never led to any jail time - and now it's not shooting out of the car or car theft or assault but murder. And I think - is the family of this person happy that they are continually let out, and rarely tried for anything? Is it like, oh good, Bob's home! Or: oops, Bob just killed somebody and opened up a can of worms for himself, but at least we had this really meaningful time with him at home after the folks from the justice collective bonded him out of that charge of sexual assault!
Your links support that prolific recidivist need to receive consistent and longer sentences, not that more people need to be incarcerated for less and I agree with your link and not with you.
Mandatory minimums could be workable after a 5-strikes convictions or similar. Per the power law if we laser focus on the people doing a lot and keep them out of society for a long time we will deal with the majority of crime with the smallest amount of prison infrastructure.
I'm not 100% naive utilitarian, but it seems to me the more naive-utilitarian you are the more anti-prison you should be.
Prison is horrible. You're locked in a cage with violent criminals for years, there's no A/C and it sometimes gets to 110 F, medical care is extremely substandard, you can't have any TV/phone/computer, you can only occasionally see your loved ones, and there's a decent chance of being beaten up or raped. I would rather die than spend life in prison, and rather lose a year of my life than be imprisoned for a year. I think my own preferences are probably on the extreme end - when I surveyed people about this, a year in prison averaged 40% the utility of a year outside - but you're still losing 60% of a DALY per year. So a three year prison sentence for shoplifting is costing 1.8 years of healthy life.
And for what? What misdeeds does the average petty criminal get up to if you don't put them in prison for three years? A couple hundred dollars of theft? Maybe a couple thousand? If you're unlucky, a mugging that leaves the victim really scared? It's not even obvious it's worth it on extreme naive utilitarian grounds to lock up *murderers* - the average murderer who's let out of prison only has a 2% chance of murdering again in the next five years - if the average murder takes 40 DALYs off the victim's life, then giving a murderer a five year sentence costs them 3 years utility and saves 0.8 years. If you can't even come up with a utilitarian justification for locking up murderers, you're sure not going to be able to do it for someone who stole chewing gum from a Wal-Mart.
Again, I'm not actually this naive of a utilitarian - you need to factor in a lot of stuff about deterrence and living in fear and moral desert and so on - it just shocks me that you think "but utilitarianism" is a knock down objection to anti-mass-incarceration.
Hm... I decided to play out your naive utilitarian situation.
Playing out the math:
I was surprised by how upset I was the first time I stepped foot in a QFC where everything was locked up due to shoplifting. I might have been upset enough about it to sacrifice one year of life to go back to how it was before. Hundreds of people probably shop at that grocery store every day. Let's say, total number of people affected is ~1000.
That's about 1000 years of life we can sacrifice per grocery store to prison time if it means things aren't locked behind a counter.
There are 800,000 people who live in SF. Arbitrarily, let's say half of them would pay one year of life to go back to no shoplifting. That means we have 800,000 hours of incarceration to play with. Which is 91 years. If we sentenced shoplifters to 1 year, we can only incarcerate 91 shoplifters in SF. This feels... Surprisingly low?
Math checks out. Difficult for naive utilitarian to justify prison for shoplifters on back of the envelope math.
"I was surprised by how upset I was the first time I stepped foot in a QFC where everything was locked up due to shoplifting. I might have been upset enough about it to sacrifice one year of life to go back to how it was before. Hundreds of people probably shop at that grocery store every day. Let's say, total number of people affected is ~1000."
Wait . . . you would rather be sentenced to prison for a year than have your local supermarket lock up the toothpaste?
Depends if I have the criminal record follow me or not. A criminal record would impact my earning potential forever.
But, if I was promised an immediate pardon upon release (so I can tick "no" next to "have you been convicted" on job applications), then yes. I would go to prison for one year if it meant all grocery stores I ever interact with again didn't have to pick up the toothpaste, ice cream, razors, etc.
But, even then, difficult to naively justify all that much prison time. So your point stands.
Most people would not have that preference, I would not spend a day in prison for that. So you can't multiply by the number of people.
To me this seems really weird to prefer to spend a year in prison than that.
> Most people would not have that preference, I would not spend a day in prison for that. So you can't multiply by the number of people.
Right, the point of this exercise wasn't to do a rigorous utilitarian analysis. It was to a quick gut check regarding Scott's comment that a naive utilitarian would have trouble justifying prison time.
I thought this was preposterous but, even with some aggressive assumptions, found that Scott was right. Hence the comment. If you think the assumptions are too aggressive, that simply proves Scott's point further. A utilitarian has to put in some legwork to justify prison.
> To me this seems really weird to prefer to spend a year in prison than that.
"Mr. Doolittle" has suggested a more favourable framing in the thread. "Reformulate the result not as "access to drugstore goods" but as "live in a high trust society" or a safer society, or something similar." I think this better captures my (surprisingly large, even to me) emotional reaction. Low trust societies suck. My parents fled such a society and from the stories that my parents and grandparents tell, low trust societies are *really bad*.
That's not quite the statement made and reframing would change the decision for a lot of people, I suspect. Also, how narrowly are we drawing the benefits?
If I expect to live to 80, and I could instead live to 79 in a high-trust, low-crime society, I don't think I'd even blink before slamming that YES button.
If, however, I have to spend the year from age 34 to 35 in a Turkish prison in return for not having to wait for someone to unlock the razors at the store, but everything else is the same, absolutely not.
This is by far the most unreasonable QALY calculation I’ve ever seen published. You can’t possibly believe that any single person would ever seriously sacrifice a *year of their life* to have more efficient access to drugstore goods. For Pete’s sake.
> Math checks out. Difficult for naive utilitarian to justify prison for shoplifters on back of the envelope math.
I mean, yes? Obviously it's terrible math. I wasn't trying to be rigorous. I was curious whether Scott was right that it was surprisingly difficult to justify prison with some naive, quick and dirty util calculation. And... well... It is. Even with some aggressive assumptions. Utilitarian justifications for prison take a bit more than napkin math. Which I found surprising. I thought my napkin math would work out to a whole lot more prison time. Hence the post.
Reformulate the result not as "access to drugstore goods" but as "live in a high trust society" or a safer society, or something similar.
I would probably sacrifice a significant portion of my years to move from a low trust society to a high trust society. That's actually a really common thing - refugees and other immigrants often undertake dangerous and expensive trips to leave a bad country where there is crime and danger in order to have a chance at going to a better country. How many people left Cuba in dinky rafts that had a high likelihood of death? How many people hire dangerous criminals to take them across the US border?
Sure, it’s much more plausible to sacrifice a year of life for a high trust society.
> There are 800,000 people who live in SF. Arbitrarily, let's say half of them would pay one year of life to go back to no shoplifting. That means we have 800,000 hours of incarceration to play with. Which is 91 years.
How did you go from years to hours? Under your assumptions your math is off by a factor of ~4000.
It seems to me the optimal prison policy looks something like this: Incarcerate a few people forever. That means any really bad crime and common career criminals get incarcerated for life. Very few criminals are responsible for a large majority of crime, so getting rid of these unsalvageables would probably capture most of the gain from prison with the least utilitarian cost.
This lines up with with my thinking as well - preventing serial offenses brings down the crime rate far more effectively than anything else on the margin. I will say that there are two main caveats I would offer. One is that, afaik, it is possible to "age out" of crime - you can lose the low impulse control and physical strength that "allowed" you to perpetrate, and thus are unlikely to reoffend. Another is that a big problem with the current prison system is people learning from fellow inmates how to be better criminals when they get released, and the lack of opportunity for former inmates driving them to use what they learned as the easiest way to survive post-release. This could maybe be solved by having the "forever" criminals in separate institutions, but the current situation in a lot of places is that gang leaders in prison are more powerful than those on the outside (since gang members can expect to be jailed at some point and thus want to follow the orders of the guy inside to maintain his protection). So, dealing with gangs would either require being way harsher than your comment suggests, or going through multiple iterations of locking up the "leadership" of gangs followed by turf wars. It probably would work eventually, but I think there's a large class of people between "unsalvageable" and "hobbyist" criminal that would take a while to sort out once the incentive structure for criminality shifted from your proposal.
A guy who makes his living mugging people goes has to mug a *lot* of people. All their utility losses (from the guy who is scared and upset for a few days to the old lady whose hip gets broken when the mugger knocks her down) need to be summed up, and I'm pretty sure that much more than outweighs the utility losses for the mugger having to sit in a prison cell.
The implication is that we should execute a lot more problem who would prefer death to it, which also ensures they can't commit any more crimes afterward.
Politics is the mind-killer. Not because of the effect (although also that), but it's insidious and hard to detect and resist. Add the slightest bit of incentive, and I think the majority of people (well, at least the majority of Americans, who do seem quite broken in this regard from my informal, non-systematic observation) would succumb to the temptations therein
Everyone says "Torture over dust specks" until they see someone sympathetic being tortured.
Consider where rationalism is centered and your surprise of where they're willing to depart from utilitarianism and rationalism should be completely unsurprising.
I don't think it's strange; it's just an accessible example of utilitarianism not working and people instinctively understanding that.
You might also see a societal utility gain from imprisoning jerks.
Treating addicts sucks. My current employer does inpatient addiction treatment and while the patients themselves aren't universally awful, it is an endless revolving door of the same hundred or so patients that are constantly cycling through on taxpayer-funded Medi-Cal.
Is there convincing data on whether methadone and buprenorphine MAT programs actually work? And by work I mean have meaningful periods of time where the patient is on no narcotic at all? My experience is extremely anecdotal, of course, but the pattern seems to be that they just get switched to one of those two and then left on them forever. The doses I see methadone addiction patients on now are absolutely balls-to-the-wall insane from what I would have guessed from the handful of patients on methadone I saw outpatient as well. One of the few patients I ever had to actually kick out of my pharmacy at retail was a hopelessly and VERY clearly addicted methadone user who accidentally admitted she was sharing her methadone.
When I worked at the state prison last year, sublingual Suboxone strips were being used as currency by inmates, which says a lot to me and none of it what the MAT program would want it to.
Thank you for these insights, however discouraging they may be.
Have you run across any more promising approaches, than the programs you observed here?
Methadone and buprenorphine programs work very well at preventing short-term deaths among the most at-risk populations. This is what is technically meant by claiming that “these programs work!”, except that advocates are performing a quick Motte-and-Bailey by hoping you assume that by “work” they mean “reduce drug use or addiction”.
I once heard a doctor talking about the most terrible prescription drugs in existence. Things he never liked to work with because of awful side effects, etc. Near the top of his list was methadone because, according to this doctor, "it gets into your bones." I don't know if this he meant this literally or not, but the point is that it remains in your system for a very, very extended duration and is exceptionally difficult to get off of once you're on it.
It has an unusually long half-life for an opiate (ie it does literally stay in your system longer than others) which is supposedly part of the rationale for why it's useful for addiction treatment. I guess in theory that means you can dose less often and I dunno maybe the withdrawals aren't supposed to be as sharp but in reality it's still a once daily dose and I cannot stress enough how pathetically addicted the patient I referenced earlier that I had to boot from my pharmacy was. Like I'm not kidding she would call daily and show up at the pharmacy randomly at all hours shamelessly BEGGING for early fills, seemingly in withdrawals from just the daily dosing.
> Treating addicts sucks.
Yeah, I was looking for a comment along these lines.
The whole "making treatment available" thing is dumb right from the get-go. I mean, wasn't it Scott that showed us that AA and things like that barely do anything?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/10/26/alcoholics-anonymous-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
Lifetime relapse rates for alcoholism is something like 60-70%, and for opiate addiction it's >80%, and those are people self-selecting into sobriety.
Now imagine non-intrinsically-motivated people forced to go into "drug treatment" to avoid jail time. All we'd be doing is wasting literally tens of millions for *nothing.* Less than 10%, probably less than 2%, of people will actually get off drugs if they're being forced.
And how much of that $800M was dedicated to crap like this? What a scandalous waste of money - if you don't want to jail drug addicts, fine, but don't waste tens of millions on "treatment" that will do literally nothing.
Skimming the article you linked, I *think* that 60-70% relapse rate you mention is from the 1991 study? Otherwise, [citation needed].
The 1991 study is more optimistic than the picture you paint. Eg it says both the AA and the non-AA group "showed substantial and sustained improvement in all aspects of job functioning". And "The proportions with warning notices dropped from 33% at intake to under 2% at months 3 and 6 and stayed under 5%" thereafter.
(Also, I think there's a *major* difference between someone who relapses once or twice over 10 years and otherwise stays the course, and someone who relapses to their prior level of substance abuse, and I don't think the 1991 study covers it; their metric seems to be "continuous abstainers".)
Yeah, sorry, that wasn't actually my cite. That was just Scott pointing out that all the claimed results are BS, and that the more rigorous you get in terms of measurement vs default outcomes, the smaller the signal of any "intervention" over noise.
Alcoholism:
Among the 25% that have positively selected for "seeking help," only 29% have achieved "abstinent recovery." The number for non-seekers is 6.5%.
https://imgur.com/a/3h82rIP
Deborah A. Dawson; Bridget F. Grant; Frederick S. Stinson; Patricia S. Chou. (2006). Estimating the effect of help-seeking on achieving recovery from alcohol dependence. , 101(6), 824–834. doi:10.1111/j.1360-0443.2006.01433.x
Here's n=21k meta analysis for pharma interventions, among those seeking help:
"Data from 118 clinical trials and 20 976 participants were included. The numbers needed to treat to prevent 1 person from returning to any drinking were 11 (95% CI, 1-32) for acamprosate and 18 (95% CI, 4-32) for oral naltrexone at a dose of 50 mg/d"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmid/37934220/
In other words, you need to treat 11-18 people to prevent one person from returning to drinking. That is a 90-95% failure rate.
Opiates
You have to dig a little harder for opiates, because most "treatment" is getting them onto longer-acting, less fun opiates (methadone or suboxone), which I don't count as a "win" either for treatment providers or addicts.
If you're going to keep them on opiates, just legalize pharmaceutically pure and safe-but-still-fun opiates, and we can eliminate our 100k overdose deaths per year, the biggest cause of death for Americans under 40, tomorrow, because the non-fun ones still have pretty awful relapse rates.
Even with long term opiate treatment, "retention" ranges from 20-75%, ie failure rates of 25-80%. (DOI: 10.1186/s13643-021-01764-9)
If you look at things like 12 step programs and religious coping, you see 68% relapse within a couple of MONTHS. 10.1007/s10943-010-9418-8
If you look at 50k Medicaid patients across 105k "episodes of treatment", members relapsing DURING treatment is 20% for pharma and 44% for psyche / behavioral health.
Since the median treatment times were between 5 and 13 months, and since "substance abuse treatment prior to the current episode did not have a statistically significant effect on the risk of relapse," this does not bode well for their long term "recovery."
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4560989/
Oh, we also get this gem from the above study: "Opioid addiction is widely, but not universally, viewed as a chronic relapsing condition; but healthcare policies and public perceptions often treat it as a problem that can be addressed with short-term treatment."
White 2012 is the big one. "An analysis of reported outcomes in 415 Scientific Reports, 1868-2011"
https://alco-retab.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/White-2012-1-Recovery-from-SUD-Analysis-of-415-scientific-reports.pdf
Combined alcohol and drug abstinence rates average 30.3%, "although remission from opioid addiction appears to be less stable and durable than other patterns of remission."
https://imgur.com/a/MwtqFEf
The best number for long term opiate relapse is Hser 2007, which has findings from 33 year followups. 18% achieve abstinence "for at least 5 years."
Hser, Y (2007) Predicting long-term stable recovery from heroin addiction: Findings from a 33 year follow up study. Journal of Addictive Diseases. 26(1), 51-60.
So that's my "alcoholism has a 70% relapse and opiates >80% relapse rate" cites.
And again, this is explicitly in "seeking help and wanting to get clean" populations. Forcing mandatory "treatment" on people who are only doing it to avoid jail time? MUCH higher than 80% failure rates, guaranteed.
The multiplier was roughly 4-5x in the alcoholics - as in, those getting clean without self-selecting into treatment. So, best case, maybe 4-5 for every hundred would be positively affected by treatment programs costing tens of millions of dollars?
That money is MUCH better spent on child health, pandemic prevention, or a myriad of other ways to positively affect health and well being.
NNT = 11-18 is actually kind of not that bad, I would have guessed it was much higher; you'd probably be surprised how high it is for several common treatments that are generally considered effective.
Yeah, I actually feel fine about pharmaceutical interventions like nalaxone, despite the terrible NNT's. Sure, it'll fail for the vast majority, but it's not going to cost that much in money and time.
But "rehab treatment plans" - weeks-to-months long imprisoning of people who don't want to be there, which will have 95%+ failure rates, and will cost tens of millions of dollars (because you're paying for prisons and weeks-to-months of "treatment")? No thank you. Terrible idea, nearly 100% waste, that money would be much better used practically anywhere else.
>(talking about state averages here is actually slightly misleading: 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.)
This is not a good argument that prop 47 is not the driver. There are lots of reasons to imagine a statewide measure would produce different outcomes in different counties and while the solution might not be to repeal the measure, we definitely need to consider the measure as a cause.
Whatever the problems with this proposal, people feel “something” needs to be done, and justly so. So long as an actionable near-term alternative isn’t presented, taking your chances with a program that might, and might not work, is far preferable to sitting around while the problem festers.
Presumably, despite this argument against the proposition, there’s justification for it (I don’t believe our political system is so dysfunctional as to propose completely unjustified and unreasonable policies). If so, then so long as the choice isn’t between this, and something better justified, then it’s still a decent option if you care about the problem it’s trying to address.
It’s like Trump’s border wall. There were, and are, a lot more efficient, cost-effective and regular-effective ways to reduce illegal immigration and drug trafficking across the southern border, but if no one else has a better idea that’s viable to be implemented, then a maybe-solution is better than no solution.
>So long as an actionable near-term alternative isn’t presented, taking your chances with a program that might, and might not work, is far preferable to sitting around while the problem festers.
After all, why do nothing when you can stand up, roll up your sleeves, and get to work making the problem worse?
As others have said in more detail, this post has its problems as far as substantial evidence. There’s also apparently equally compelling evidence (at least from what I gather) that this will work.
On an intuitive level, “Actually punish criminals and lock them up for longer” seems like an extremely obvious way to reduce crime. There’s many examples of extremely tough on crime countries and places throughout history, that I’m not convinced it isn’t a viable strategy.
I wonder if you would accept this argument on the other side. Clearly racism is bad and lots of black people are poor. Mandating DEI programs in every business and university nationwide might not be "effective" or "evidence-based" or "fair" or "good", but we've got to do something!
Well, the first problem with that is that it's trying to solve something that isn't a problem...
It's not a problem that lots of black people are poor? What is your definition of problem?
Inequality isn't a problem in and of itself. The optimal allocation of resources isn't to distribute it equally, seeing as people are valuable in different ways and in different amounts. People are compensated based on the value and scarcity of their labor, and thus resources are allocated as necessary to subsidize and incentivize high-value labor. If the black population was getting heavily undervalued, that would be quite the market failure, but that's something that companies could exploit to further themselves. With time, eventually you'll reach an equilibrium where people are being compensated for the added value their existence provides.
...I'm kind of surprised that you think this is a problem, given your libertarian/neo-liberal sympathies and repeated mentions of HBD.
Inequality isn't necessarily a problem, but poverty is. I don't think it's fair to argue that racial issues merely redistribute poverty rather than cause it; I predict that if black people had never entered the US but there had been 30 million more Norwegian immigrants, then everyone would just be richer.
I think everything about HBD and so on gets covered in whether this proposed solution would work, and my whole point is that we need to consider that before merely saying that the problem is very bad and so we must try this solution.
It seems wrong to me to say that everyone would be richer, when those Africans would be 10x poorer (or simply dead) having stayed in Africa.
Inequality isn't a problem in and of itself, but it is a problem in a capitalist system that turns it into a self-reinforcing feedback loop.
And people are paid according to their bargaining power, which, per the above, diminishes with time. Once the pay goes low enough that lack of resources damages people's ability to work and/or pushes them into criminal/parasitical underclass, the result gets clearly suboptimal even if you're a liberal.
That reversal falls flat because of who is hurt, and for what reasons.
Flawed tough-on-crime laws: criminals are hurt, for committing crimes.
DEI and affirmative action: innocent people are hurt, for being the wrong color.
I disagree that this is a particularly interesting distinction in the context of whether we should do a useless thing.
If my proposal was "racism is bad, therefore we should try cutting the toes off people who pirate music", then I think a reasonable response would be "no, that's completely irrelevant to racism and would just hurt people for no reason". Criminals make less sympathetic victims than non-criminals, but hurting them for no reason is still stupid.
I think intention makes the difference here. We're talking about a situation where a tough-on-crime law isn't as effective as proponents hoped, but those proponents can be forgiven for thinking it would be, right? "Racism->piracy toe cutting" is obviously going to hurt people without accomplishing the stated reason; it can't possibly have good intentions. DEI accomplishes its goal by targeting innocent people based on something they can't control for a zero-sum transfer - also not good intentions.
The reversal only works if the tough-on-crime people pass a law fully expecting it to fail. "Maybe maybe not" is good enough to clear that, imo - your mileage could very fairly vary. Maybe that is our disagreement.
You're not hurting them for no reason though, you're hurting them for violating the societally agreed upon rules. You may think that is unfair or too harsh, but it isn't for no reason, and it isn't for something that is out of their control. You can just not steal.
In that scenario there's an obvious alternative in terms of non-DEI antipoverty measures.
If we genuinely couldn't come up with the notion of race-neutral scholarships for poor students, yes, I would grit my teeth and accept race-based scholarships. And conversely if this writer could come up with an actual plausible proposed mechanism for not letting shoplifters get off scot-free without having to make it a felony, then I'd accept that we don't necessarily need to make it a felony.
Clearly racism is bad and lots of black people are poor, but it isn’t the sort of crisis that affects me, or most people, personally.
If a person genuinely cares about black people as a group, identifies some level of societal oppression as the cause, and DEI is proposed as a workable solution, I’d say they’re wrong, but it makes complete sense *why* they support DEI. I personally think a lot of democratic policies are sub-optimal for increasing welfare, but so long as Republicans are not proposing a superior solution that those democratic policies are attempting to address, then it’s perfectly reasonable that so many people support what are (in my view) sub optimal policies.
I personally don’t know too much about this issue, and am not from California, but “increase punishment for crimes and actually punish smaller crimes” seems like so obvious a solution, someone claiming it won’t work (while not having a viable near-term alternative) has a very high bar to reach. Other commenters have demonstrated this post’s claims aren’t without controversy either.
> I personally think a lot of democratic policies are sub-optimal for increasing welfare, but so long as Republicans are not proposing a superior solution that those democratic policies are attempting to address, then it’s perfectly reasonable that so many people support what are (in my view) sub optimal policies.
The problem is, such policies are typically not suboptimal (providing utility, but less than they should,) but rather counterproductive (taking the problem they're supposed to be solving and making it worse instead.) Therefore, the stereotypical (if not always accurate) Republican alternative of "just do nothing" is indeed valid, and in fact a strictly superior alternative.
This is a terrible analogy, because in your example the criminals are the <not black> people who now have DEI programs inflicted on them despite no evidence of wrongdoing.
Prop 36 revolves around people who have been convicted of criminal conduct, that is those who have been found guilty by a jury of their peers, or by their own admission, of having done things that we as a society have determined to be beyond legal acceptability. There is a clear Wrong established, and the party that has done that Wrong has also been established.
Your analogy establishes no clear wrong, nor a clear responsible party.
> I don’t believe our political system is so dysfunctional as to propose completely unjustified and unreasonable policies
It (probably) isn't, but that doesn't matter here. No politicians were harmed in the drafting of this ballot proposition. No politicians had a chance to *stop* the drafting of this ballot proposition. (Or at least none currently living; I would have some harsh words for whoever wrote a certain part of the state constitution.) This does not come from our political system, and in fact nearly the entire political system of the State of California is opposed to it.
It came directly from the voters, by the godawful clauses of the state Constitution which make it very, very easy to get enough signatures to put any damn fool thing on the statewide ballot. Bypassing the political system entirely to propose something that sounds nice if not considered deeply and allow it to be made into law without expert consultation of any kind. And is, as usual, disastrous once inspected carefully.
You must not live in California. We get a dozen of these things every two years.
> So long as an actionable near-term alternative isn’t presented, taking your chances with a program that might, and might not work, is far preferable to sitting around while the problem festers.
You need to consider how this affects the people you're giving longer sentences to. If it truly doesn't accomplish anything then you don't do it just because there's nothing else to do. Before creating more suffering you should at least have a justification for it.
“ Across jurisdictions, there’s no correlation between tough drug laws and lower drug use.”
So when drug users go to prison for a long instead of a short sentence, other people start using drugs in order to make up the difference?
Right!? And no mention of the how this crime affects the average law abiding citizens. What a drain on our society. Cops used to chase kids for TPing houses here 20 years ago. They now babysit the fully grown adult addicts for 90% of their day. The TPing kids of yesteryear now tag any open slab of concrete they can find. The top 1% pay almost half our income tax. And they're leaving the state.
Yes, very much so. I remember the falling crime of the 90s--it's depressing to watch that story in reverse as the liberals too young to remember the high crime of the 60s-80s agitate for reversal.
They still use heavily in prison, though with much less of an impact on society.
I really agree. It's such an extreme claim, and with very little evidence to support it.
You act like this is ridiculous but we would see such an effect if:
1. The number of people arrested and convicted is tiny compared to the population that is using drugs.
2. People entering prison is counterbalanced by people leaving prison.
3. Secondary factors are pushing drug use to an equilibrium and removing users form the pool just causes those factors to add new users. For example, drug dealers seek out new clients, drug prices lower and it entices people to start.
4. We always talk about drug users in terms of addicts but if people generally used drugs then didn't repeat we wouldn't expect locking them up to change usage rates.
Why is it cruel and backwards to suggest that having actual consequences for shoplifting would encourage cops to arrest shoplifters? I honestly don’t understand this. If I’m a cop, if I arrest the same people again and again and again for shoplifting and they’re immediately released, that’s obviously demoralizing. Clearly I’m having no positive effect on the world, just essentially doing dangerous busywork for no reason.
It's called a strawman argument. The article is trying to insinuate that the problem is the police not arresting people, rather than a Progressive legal system failing to prosecute and convict them after they're arrested.
Because it would imply that they're doing their job to hurt people, not just to play their part in the justice system. Of course, the intended purpose of the justice system is to hurt people who deserve it, so maybe it's the rest of the justice system that's going against their purpose.
I think the claim is that a six-month sentence would be enough to deter most shoplifters, but cops are refusing to implement it.
Would it be more obvious if the example were more extreme? If we said there was a life sentence for shoplifting, but cops refused to arrest any shoplifters until the sentence was being tortured to death, so people were constantly shoplifting and politicians were suggesting "well, guess we just have to increase it to torture-to-death so that the cops will do their job"?
Cops do have a lot of leverage in this situation. It would be pretty foolish to completely ignore their demands for ideological reasons.
Again, imagine this was any other situation. Perhaps teachers refuse to teach gifted children unless we fund free four-year public university for all, because they there are limited resources and it's "not worth their time" without followup teaching at the college level.
Is it foolish to "ignore their demands"?
When you're having a major teacher shortage and you can't easily replace all of them, yes. Obviously you don't need to completely give into their demands, but you at least need to negotiate with them to make a deal that both sides are happy with. Now, I understand that law enforcement does attract a lot of... unsavory individuals, but sometimes you need to make some compromises to keep the wheels turning. We are not in a position to issue ultimatums right now.
Well yes, the cop unions have us by the balls. We can discuss why they have gone to such extremes (there are some very legitimate grievances), but those don't really matter in practice. The only logic where it makes sense to ignore them is if you think they're bluffing. Do you think they're bluffing?
Maybe this question is unanswerable, but does anyone actually get 6 months for shoplifting in California?
I tried looking that up online and it's hard to find anything, but there are plenty of Californian law firms advertising about "if you're accused of shoplifting, we can get you off by these means".
I just have the sense that literally no one spends 6 months in jail for shop lifting. But I base that on nothing and would be very interested in real data.
To what extent is the longer/shorter sentence just about giving the prosecutor a better or worse opening position in the plea deal negotiation?
Cops don't implement sentences.
Your example would be obvious, but there's also no reason to think it would be the case since cops do arrest people for crimes with life-sentences like murder.
I don't think it's about the length of the sentence, it's about the likelihood of the perpetrator getting sentenced at all. I suspect that cops would be more likely to arrest someone that they thought had a 100% chance to serve a one month sentence than someone that had a 10% chance at a five year sentence for the same crime.
I knew a cop in Northern California back before marijuana was legalized, and he could drive around town and point out all the weed dealers' houses. He knew that if they went there the house would be full of weed. However, he also knew that the DA wasn't trying marijuana cases, so what would be the point of trying to arrest these people? At best he'd probably get reprimanded for bumping up crime stats that weren't going to get cleared. However, if he thought that they would actually serve time, he definitely would have picked them up.
I wonder if the pressure to reduce the overcrowding in prisons meant that the prosecutors said "we're not gonna try misdemeanours", that trickles down to the police being told "don't arrest for petty crime for the love of mike, we can't lock any more people up" and so cases of shoplifting just weren't followed up?
Sure, you could send Timmy The Thief for six months in jail, but if the jails are bursting at the seams and the Supreme Court is saying "stop this or else", nobody in the system wants to send Timmy and his pals to jail because they simply haven't the room, so Timmy can shoplift to his heart's content (as long as he doesn't go over the $950 limit) with no real prospect of being sent to jail - maybe he'll be sent to a diversion programme instead, maybe he'll be fined, maybe he'll have to pay a civil verdict of $500 to the shop - but no jail, so the cops won't even bother showing up because they know and Timmy knows that he'll just be let out again if they bother to arrest him and bring him to the police station.
https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-160551360299
"Proposition 47 was enacted to comply with a 2011 California Supreme Court order, which upheld that California’s overcrowded prisons violated incarcerated individuals’ Eighth Amendment rights against cruel and unusual punishment.
“In 2011, our prisons were bursting at the seams, and California was ranked either first or second behind Texas as having the highest per capita incarceration rate of any state in the country,” Kubrin said. “It was so bad that the Supreme Court stepped in and told us we needed to reduce our prison population by 33,000 individuals.”
“So the goal of Prop 47 was to limit our prison population, to reduce the number of people that we send to state prisons,” said Kubrin. “Prop 47 has achieved that goal while not causing crime rates to go up.”
If the police learn that "it's not worth arresting these punks", I don't see how it's cruel and backwards of them not to bother arresting the offenders until/unless there's a genuine chance of serious jail time.
My understanding is that the Prop 47 maximum of a six month sentence would be enough to deter shoplifters, and cops are willing to implement it, but progressive bay area DAs give out sentences of like 2 weeks or 1 week or 1 day or whatever for their ideological reasons, and cops stop working on arresting shoplifters. The DA elections are probably more important than whatever happens with this prop. Also the maximum sentence for a crime is almost never actually served by anybody, I think they would typically serve maybe half of that.
See this Youtube video where the leader of the SF police union says that shoplifting is equal to a traffic citation (24:40)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URfCwT3UQy4
(29:20) a criminal says that he was arrested "but never stayed more than a couple weeks"
A cursory Google search suggests that six months is the *maximum* possible sentence, not a mandatory one, and given that the vast majority of convictions are from plea bargains these days, very few people actually get that I'd guess.
Yeah I agree, obviously it would be demoralizing! People want to feel like they accomplished something positive. When I worked for two weeks on a report at my office job and then our team went down a different path and that report wasn't needed at all it really annoyed and demoralized me.
Punishment for crime, in moral terms, is supposed to serve a couple of purposes: Removal, Rehabilitation, or Deterrence. "Make people feel good about punishing bad guys" is not supposed to be one of them - the state shouldn't be hurting people for its own pleasure, only when it makes society better off.
If putting shoplifters in jail for longer kept them from re-offending, or significantly reduced the number of shoplifters who are out and shoplifting, that would be one thing, but that's not the argument being made - the article points out that the issue is not recidivism, it's that shoplifters aren't getting caught in the first place.
Regarding retail theft:
The premise of the research is flawed: that passage of a new law has immediate effects on crime whether positive or negative. It takes time for DAs and police, for criminals, etc to internalize and effect changes.
Secondly, the notion that the retail epidemic is because of police (in)action is equally flawed.
In particular: there is no mention whatsoever in this article about the influx of Soros funded City Attorney Generals and their self professed public statements about not prosecuting criminals for social justice reasons.
This includes George Gascon in Los Angeles (elected December 2020), Pamela Price (elected January 2023) and others. Chesa Boudin (elected January 2020) is not in the links but is absolutely in this self professed "social justice" cohort.
Here are some links showing this is not a recent phenomenon: https://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/george-soros-criminal-justice-reform-227519
https://www.policedefense.org/sorosmap/
Third: anecdote. I live in SF and have lived there for 20+ years. There has always been some retail crime, but it is utterly out of control now. CVS and Walgreens have closed literally 2/3rds of their locations in the downtown SF area - the FiDi, SoMa area that I am in.
Whether this is due to crime or not, is arguable but what is not arguable is that the one CVS that is still in my area - 1 block west of Union Square - I have literally witnessed a retail theft in each of the 3 times I have visited it and bought something in 2024.
Consider that I am not going there to browse - we are talking 10 minutes to get what I am looking for and then leave - this is an extraordinary record.
Some additional color: in the 2nd visit, another customer wanted to buy a 20 oz soft drink. He had to wait for an employee to unlock that refrigerator because "otherwise there would be nothing left". Later on in that visit (I'm talking 5 minutes), a guy came, scooped a double handful of candies and gum from in front of the cash register and walked out. I asked the clerk if this was common - they said that the police have arrested this guy multiple times but he just gets released right away and comes right back.
The 3rd visit - a clean cut young guy asked for some help, then just walked out with what he was given.
I actually have visited the store more than 3 times - but the other 3,4 or maybe 5 visits were extremely short because the location simply did not have what I want due to lack of inventory, which is multipacks of Mentos mints for the wife. We are talking bare shelves of that entire category (gum and mints). Only after a glass locked cabinet shows up, does inventory seem to be able to be present. I then have to cross half the city to another location near City Hall which looks like the PanOpticon: all glass, everywhere.
Anecdote 4: 2 of the CVS locations that used to exist, that were near me, the closest one almost never had anything I was looking for. I'm talking no nail clippers! The clerks there told me that there are people who literally come every day to steal something - they recognize the repeat offenders.
So in my view - the analysis presented in this article is highly flawed due to failure to take into account "social justice" district attorneys as well as to actually get information on the ground from the retail clerks who witness the theft every day. I would also highly question the statistics given the absolutely clear higher level of theft: the retail stores are not even bothering to report a lot of the thefts anymore because they know it will not do any good - and this has been going on for years now.
COVID definitely is right around the time when the retail theft turbocharged - but again, is this because of COVID or because of the "social justice" prosecutors and their public talk of deciding not to prosecute?
Failure to even note this event seems to be a serious omission to me.
I will also note that retail theft is not the only category where lawlessness is blatantly increasing.
I ride the SF Muni public transport primarily because I live in the City and don't even own a car any more. The level of crazy and/or abusive behavior is through the roof - not just the crazy homeless muttering to himself in the corner, but violent and abusive people (mostly men) bullying women and children. It has gotten so bad that I have had to intervene personally by interposing myself and facing down these people several times just this past year. Anecdotes range from a black man threatening a black woman and her child because she asked him if her child could sit down, to the latest (this past Sunday) where a white guy was cursing the Asian women around him, spitting on the ground and threatening them physically.
This shit is out of control and is completely unacceptable.
> I live in SF and have lived there for 20+ years.
The ancient words remain as relevant today as ever: "Go ye forth of Babylon, flee ye from the Chaldeans."
Believe me, I would love to.
But the wife does not want to move. Some of it is stability - we've been there for years and she does not want the change. But the other reason is that SF is one of only 2 places in the US where she is not forced to drive in order to be an independent adult.
New York is the other - that is probably even worse than SF.
Don't they have Uber in Cleveland?
My guess is that with the money saved by not living in SF she can easily get someone to drive her everywhere she wants to go, if she really hates driving so much.
Trust me, I have pointed this out.
There are plenty of places across the country with decent mass transit systems available. Some of them, like New York and Philadelphia, are similarly crime-ridden hellscapes these days, but there are others that very much are not. Places like Iowa, Utah, and South Carolina are known for being rider-friendly and also decent places to live.
Quite true, but my wife would never deign to live in the provinces.
I know, I know but she was born and raised in a major international metropolis. Des Moines, Salt Lake City and Savannah are a non-starter.
>New York ... are similarly crime-ridden hellscapes
It is remarkable how dedicated people can be to believing things that are demonstrably untrue.
https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/murder-map-deadliest-u-s-cities/61/
First off, I didn't say murder, I said crime.
Second, this says nothing about NYC; it simply says that there are other places that are worse.
Third, when crime is bad enough that you have to pull out statistics to try to show that it's not as bad as people think, *it's bad.*
>First off, I didn't say murder, I said crime.
1. As is common knowledge, murder is the most accurate measure of overall crime rates.
2. You are the one who used the word "hell hole." I assumed you were not referring to littering.
>Second, this says nothing about NYC; it simply says that there are other places that are worse.
It actually says that there are at least 65 cities that are worse. And note that the the safest city on that list has a murder rate of 11.26/100,000. NYC's murder rate in the year in question was about half that. https://nypost.com/2022/01/01/nyc-recorded-485-murders-in-2021/ And NYC's murder rate has been below the national rate for years. NYC'r rate of other crimes is also lower than most places. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_crime_rate
If you think that all cities are "crime-hellscapes," well, that is silly, too, but your claim that NYC is particularly bad is borne of ignorance.
>Third, when crime is bad enough that you have to pull out statistics to try to show that it's not as bad as people think, *it's bad.*
Is this some sort of parody? "Any evidence that conflicts with my priors must be rejected, because it conflicts with my priors"
You can definitely live easily without a car in Chicago and while it gets a bad rap in the media, I think crime in the nice parts of the city is extremely rare. I have literally never witnessed someone shoplifting from a CVS in 10 years of living there the way you frequently witness, and once in a while you'll have someone unpleasant on public transit but very rarely. (Anecdotally, we probably experienced more erratic, threatening anti-social behavior in public in 5 days in SF this spring than we would in an entire year in Chicago)
I have an uncle who used to commute into Chicago from Deerfield - I have visited Chicago some.
I agree with you, I have not seen the level of social deterioration in Chicago that I have personally experienced in New York City and San Francisco and Los Angeles.
But that Chicago weather...
Chicago has cheaper housing than NYC. But other than that, there is no concieviable reason that someone who wants to be able to do without a car but who is concerned with crime would move to the nice parts of Chicago rather than the nice parts of NYC.
I've lived in NYC for over 14 years now. I have never witnessed anything of the scale you just described in your post. NYC has gotten worse but it is still one of the safest large cities in this country (seriously, look up the stats!). You might want to reevaluate your priors there.
Do you ride public transit? Buses as well as subway? If not, that's very possibly why you don't see this kind of thing. I visit NYC a lot and have seen similar things there because I do ride public transit predominantly.
What about shopping: do you regularly shop yourself in grocery stores and drug stores, or get everything delivered? That's another possible reason you don't see this.
But the biggest reason is area. If I lived in Pacific Heights and shopped along Chestnut, I would see a lot less. Ditto in the Sunset district (although the spitter/female Asian bully--er was on the bus coming from Sunset).
I also know people who live in New York City - Musk's mother's friends are not the only ones who have been punched in the face on the street for no apparent reason in the past year.
The reality is that there are people who will commit violence, whether due to mental illness, anger, sociopathy or whatever is irrelevant - this should not be acceptable.
I ride public transit in NYC every day, and have for more than a decade, and have not seen a crime (other than turnstile jumping). And I certainly don't waste money having food delivered. Nor have I heard any of my friends -- all of whom use public transit regularly -- complain of crime, or express fear of crime.
>The reality is that there are people who will commit violence, whether due to mental illness, anger, sociopathy or whatever is irrelevant - this should not be acceptable.
No one has said otherwise. The issue is about OP's empirical claim re how often crime occurs.
Can you further clarify: are you 5 boroughs or Manhattan?
In SF, it is the downtown that is the 1st world version of dystopia whereas in New York - it may well be opposite (i.e. Manhattan is orderly but elsewhere less so).
I am actually very familiar with all parts of New York City; I did a street parking startup in the 2008 era where I verified much of NYC's excellent street parking sign database - meaning I literally have walked on a significant percentage of all New York streets.
I do use public transit at least twice a day and often a lot more than that. It's dirty but safe. When there are homeless people there, they generally keep to themselves. And I regularly shop in the city.
I know people pretty much across the income spectrum and they too report generally safe conditions though things do get a little bit worse in e.g. the Bronx. But even there, you can find luxury condos and the stores there don't lock up everything in sight. The CVS i walk by pretty much daily has stocked shelves and the only things behind glass cages are the occasional high value items like razor blades (which is the case in much of the country).
And nobody is saying that there is no crime at all in NYC or that crime is acceptable. Don't put words in my mouth.
If youre open to suggestions, I would like to recommend Jersey City! It is across the river from NYC (with a very good transit system between the two, such that it basically functions as part of NYC) but has much more sensible governance. I live in Jersey City but work in NYC, and can see e.g. that everything is locked up in NYC but not in Jersey City.
(There is a risk that we might go downhill if our mayor becomes governor and we get a new one with further-left views. It seems mean to vote against him for governor on those grounds though.)
Seriously
I don’t understand how Californians can keep voting against their own interests as their state turns into a waste land
Because they're surrounded by people on all sides telling them that if they don't, they're x-ists and whateverphobes.
2 words: urban domination.
Most of California by area is red, but the twin 10m+ metropolises and their suburbs dominate the overall vote.
Because California is actually a good place to live?
This is the answer, of course.
A lot of people have far more sympathy for petty criminals than they do wealthy business owners and the SSC commentariat is an outlier in this regard
I'd rather just implement redistributive policies sufficient to end crimes of desperation, mind you, but if we can't get those I can at least cast a ballot for those "Soros-funded" prosecutors
If someone has more stuff than you, you should be allowed to steal from them. This can only end well
Does the fact that crime skyrocketed immediately after LBJ’s “Great Society” welfare programs give you pause that you might be getting causation wrong? I realize that there was a lot going on in America at the time, but the spike was massive. And it’s the opposite of what one would expect if poverty caused these “crimes of desperation”.
@birdboy2000 absolutely ridiculous question, but based on your username... were you on the bmgf/Bulbagarden forums circa like 2004? I feel like I might know you from my childhood forum days
Will GLP-1s provide a meaningful reduction in addiction harm in your opinion? Is this a potential path to treatment at scale?
https://recursiveadaptation.com/p/the-growing-scientific-case-for-using
Increased sentencing actually does reduce both drug use and shoplifting for a very simple reason: it's much harder to do drugs in prison, and even harder to shoplift from prison. The more criminals you lock up, the better society gets. It's like a magic spell. The death penalty works similar wonders.
Exactly. As I pointed out elsewhere on here, even if it does nothing whatsoever to reform criminals, incarceration is a *per se* societal good, simply by virtue of keeping them away from their next victim.
Indeed. There are three mechanisms by which a criminal justice system attempts to reduce crime: incapacitation, deterrence, and rehabilitation. Rehabilitation doesn't seem to work (except indirectly insofar as locking people up until they're older reduces their propensity for violence), and people argue endlessly about interpreting the data for deterrence. But good old incapacitation works directly, immediately and with 100 % efficacy, no regression analyses or proxy data sets required to tease out the signal!
> and with 100 % efficacy
Well... not *quite;* prison violence is still a thing. But even so it significantly beats the alternative!
Ha, yeah after posting I thought of revising that downward a bit. Better to victimize other criminals than little old ladies, true, but I also think we should also give a little more attention to inhumane conditions in prisons, instead of always joking about it. I want criminals off the streets, I don’t want them sentenced to 15 years of anal gang rape. It’s unseemly and embarrassing and many other countries seem to control it better than we do.
Agreed. Hard to see any good short-term solutions to it, though. This is largely a cultural problem, and like many cultural problems, will take decades of concerted effort to fix.
I've always been of the opinion that most prison should be "enriched solitary confinement".
Whenever I suggest this I get shocked reactions: "But solitary confinement is basically torture!" Sure it is, in the sensory-deprivation form that it's usually applied, not the enriched version I'm proposing. In my vision, it's more like a hotel room that you don't leave, a bit like the "hotel quarantine" that many countries subjected their citizens to during covid without anyone panicking. You get a TV, you get music, you get plenty of books, you get some kind of access to the internet, and you get to do daily video chats with friends and family on the outside (and psychologists and chaplains and social workers etc). You get occasional access to an outdoor exercise area. You get airline-style meals delivered through a slot in your door. The one thing you don't get is any contact with other inmates.
Cost wise, I can't see how it could possibly be more expensive than existing prison systems. You'd need a bigger facility but far fewer guards.
Cruelty wise, I personally would vastly prefer the boredom of six months in a drab hotel room to the terror of six months in gen pop.
This seems like a situation where population growth only makes a problem harder. I don't understand why the anarchy or thugocracy in the prisons is something most people are content to find a joke. I don't believe in rehabilitation, of course, but I do believe this horrific prison situation must be a deliberate choice for which our culture is uniquely without solutions. I've noticed that the wrong people, the worst people, tend to be indulged, and I wouldn't be surprised if that plays out in prison too.
> I don't understand why the anarchy or thugocracy in the prisons is something most people are content to find a joke.
In a word, "karma." There are a lot of people out there who don't have any real problem with bad things happening to bad people.
Are you sure the horrific prison situation you are referring to is real in the modern US?
What are they doing in Scandinavia? They have quite civilized prison environments (see the Finnish open prison system with sauna for everyone), yet quite low recidivism scores. It must work somehow. Perhaps you must try harder than has ever been done in the US?
They are aided enormously in this by the fact that Scandanavian prisons are mostly populated by Scandanavians. Although that's changing . . .
It only keeps them away from potential victims if you're doing solitary confinement.
The prison population is a tiny fraction of the drug using and shoplifting population. A population that will get out sooner rather than later, to drug use and shoplift using the newest and greatest techniques they learned in prison.
It's hard to shoplift from prison, but it's impossible not to make taxpayers pay for you, and the end result is the same. Why should I care whether I'm losing money because stores are being stolen from and passing the cost onto me or because I'm getting taxed more?
Likewise, prison might make drug use harder, but it still reduces their length of life, quality of life, and makes them more violent. It's causing all the problems drugs cause.
> It's causing all the problems drugs cause.
Other than... you know... the actual problem of drugs, of course. Never heard of someone getting addicted to prison.
You do realize that people smuggle a lot of drugs in prison, though? It's not like "people getting in prison leave with much better connection to the criminal ecosystem" is a novel idea. They don't "get addicted" to prison, but prison has a lifetime negative effect on their lives.
Not "addiction" per se, but still the same problem that you always seem to end up back there.
Are you for real?
> Why should I care whether I'm losing money because stores are being stolen from and passing the cost onto me or because I'm getting taxed more?
Because in the former hypothetical, your experience of the store is more pleasant; there aren't sketchy people lurking in the stores and parking lots, and high-value items (or all items!) aren't locked up.
*Obviously,* between paying to live in a shitty environment and paying to live in a pleasant one, it's better to pay to live in the pleasant one.
How about spending the extra 100k/year on another cop then?
If that cop is a meaningful deterrent to shoplifting, fine. I don't care if crime stops because of beat cops or incarceration or forced hypnotic brainwashing, as long as it stops.
It's more pleasant for me, but less pleasant for the sketchy people.
Why on earth do you care about the sketchy people? Things *should* be incredibly unpleasant for sketchy people; so unpleasant they are motivated to not be sketchy.
Same reason I care about animals and stopped eating meat. They can feel pain. Pain doesn't stop hurting just because you're sketchy. Pain is bad. It will always be bad.
If people are dangerous, it might be worth moving them into a heavily guarded area to at least limit their damage. But if you're creeped out by the sort of person who shoplifts, that doesn't mean it's worth it to put them in prison for the same cost to you just so you don't have to see them while they shop.
Your high sensitivity to the feelings of others is not compatible with enforcing justice or promoting physical safety in a society.
Or even on a personal level, really.
Many, many other people - likely the majority - do not experience your kind of sensitivity to the pain of others, nor the intuition your sensitivity generated that other people's "pain is always bad." *Your experience is in no way universal.*
You of course intellectually know that because you've been told that your whole life, but I don't think you *really* fully believe it; not *really.* If you had a deep understanding of predatory dispassion, if you had enough of it in yourself to vividly imagine more extreme versions of it in yourself or others, you wouldn't be pleading, "but think of the predators!"
I fully realize you're likely to object to all of the above. It might feel like I'm condescending or insulting your intelligence by accusing you of not being able to sufficiently imagine - of ironically not being able to "empathize" with - predatory indifference about the suffering of others.
But I'm not trying to insult you. Intelligence doesn't automatically confer imagination, nor vice versa. We all have limits on the kinds of things we're able to imagine (and understand!).
Were the species universally as sensitive to suffering as you, we would have very few problems. But it's demonstrably not, and, absent sci-fi-esque interventions in brain structure/chemistry, a ruinous number of people will never be as sensitive to the suffering of others as you are.
And they will take advantage of you because of it.
"What worked wasn’t increasing sentences – it was a targeted operation to track and arrest the most organized, prolific offenders."
Given that offenses are distributed among offenders roughly as a power law, maybe crime should be more like baseball, where after 3 felonies (strikes) you're out! California should look into this idea.
"3-strikes laws," (laws mandating life imprisonment after three violent felonies,) have been around for decades. I first heard about the concept in middle school, back in the early 90s. This was also when I first heard the counter-argument that this was an excessively harsh and uncaring solution that could see someone's life ruined because of youthful indiscretions remaining with them forever.
That didn't make any sense to me as a kid, and still doesn't today. I know what youthful indiscretions are. My friends and I got up to a few in our time. They looked nothing like violent felonies. Someone who makes a habit of repeatedly committing them is not an innocent with a potentially bright future ahead of them that will be ruined if they're put away; they're a thug who needs to be put away for the protection of actual innocents.
Yeah I was engaging in a bit of sarcasm there of course. I was around for all those debates. And yeah, one felony can be a “youthful indiscretion.” But getting convicted of one, then committing another one, getting caught and convicted of that, then going out and committing a third felony? That’s a career.
Old joke at the Public Defender’s office: “Everyone deserves a 47th chance!”
Some wag on twitter recently pointed out that given what we know about behavioral psychology, the perpetrator’s youth should probably be an aggravating, rather than an ameliorating factor in sentencing for violent crimes.
> given what we know about behavioral psychology, the perpetrator’s youth should probably be an aggravating, rather than an ameliorating factor in sentencing for violent crimes.
That's an interesting take. Can you elaborate?
On the one hand, prefontal cortex development and impulse control is lower in adolescents, which argues for youth as an ameliorating factor.
On the other hand, many studies have shown that early aggression and violence is an excellent predictor of later criminality across a variety of domains. Both the severity and frequency of violence increases with age until early adolescence then tapers off. Someone committing “precocious” violence, like juvenile murder, is a behavioral outlier that is not likely to improve as they hit prime crime time.
Have they compared it to how good a predictor more recent aggression and violence is?
>Someone committing “precocious” violence, like juvenile murder, is a behavioral outlier that is not likely to improve as they hit prime crime time.
This is no doubt true, but it doesn’t quite address the point of the criticism of the most severe 3-strikes laws, which is that they incarcerated people long past prime crime-committing ages. So, the real question is whether precocious criminals fail to age out of crime as is the usual case.
Also note that in the original CA 3 strikes law, the third strike could be any felony, including petty theft with a prior. The law was subsequently amended.
Unless they were tried as an adult, which my understanding is that is usually only for the most extreme crimes, anything they did as a minor wouldn't count towards the three strikes. So really you're looking at ages ~18-25 for the "youthful indiscretions", and if you commit three felonies in a seven year period, it seems unlikely that you are just misunderstood.
> Also note that in the original CA 3 strikes law, the third strike could be any felony, including petty theft with a prior. The law was subsequently amended.
I don't see that as a huge problem; it's difficult to commit petty theft with a prior by accident.
(Untrue for *really* petty thefts, like walking out of a store with the pen from the counter, but somehow I don't see those getting prosecuted at all.)
On the flip side though, sounds like adolescence makes sense as an ameliorating factor, at least in the long term. I do think that some of the positive effect of imprisonment is just 'locking up violent teenage/young men until they're less young and hormonally volatile.'
:)
I’ll just say it - if fentanyl is the problem, maybe we need a border wall and deportation of illegal immigrants.
And military action against the cartels.
Yeah. This election is bigger than the USA - Latin America is suffering too
I'd rather not.
90% of fentanyl is brought in through normal border crossings by people legally authorized to cross the border (eg Mexicans on tourist visas, Americans on tourist visas returning home). More than half is brought through by US citizens. Almost nobody tries to bring fentanyl in through the sort of illegal Rio Grande crossings that a border wall could block (source: https://www.npr.org/2023/08/09/1191638114/fentanyl-smuggling-migrants-mexico-border-drugs, common sense and how I would do it if I were a drug dealer).
It would be pretty bold to try to get past the checkpoint with a load of fentanyl. Those dogs can smell when stuff is hidden in the gas tank, which I find unbelievable.
Your NPR article concludes: "Authorities say the operation has led to the seizure of thousands of pounds of fentanyl. Though they also estimate that they're apprehending just a fraction — roughly a quarter — of all the fentanyl that's smuggled at the border."
So I'm unclear about how they are certain of the means by which "90%" is brought in.
This is interesting: the precursors brought from China through American cities and thence to Mexico: https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/criminal-justice/2024/07/23/494249/federal-investigators-seize-two-tons-of-chemicals-used-in-fentanyl-production-in-largest-bust-in-texas-history-doj-says/
So maybe, if Minsu Fang and her co-conspirators were legal immigrants (the articles never say), then deportation of legal immigrants should be on the table - if there is interest in decreasing fentanyl.
You said “load”…do you realize that this is a drug whose doses are measured in double-digit numbers of micrograms? A *sugar cube* of fentanyl is *thousands* of doses.
I guess I thought that was the load, a few cubes? Stuffed in the gas tank or in the lining of the seat? A recent bust in my state claimed to net more than 14,000 pills!
I’m sorry, but I’m very skeptical of this. Your link states that 90% of fentanyl IS SEIZED at normal border crossings (not that 90% is BROUGHT IN at normal border crossings - very different!)
It makes sense that regulated border crossings at checkpoints are going to have much more seizure of fentanyl, because obviously. Drug smugglers sneaking across the border in the dead of night, ignored by an already overwhelmed border force, are going to be able to get away with a lot more.
Your article notes a different perspective - “Some of the leading voices in the Republican Party reject the official narrative that it's mostly coming through the ports. They believe there's a lot more fentanyl that's not being caught.”
It wouldn’t be the first time that the pesky Republicans reject the “official narrative” and turn out to be right!
But it would be one of the overwhelming number of times they're wrong, especially considering they have no statistical or even evidentiary support for their counterclaim. Where are the millions dead to the vaccine, the millions of illegal votes, the Dominion and Smartmatic voting machines flipping votes and communicating with China or Venezuela over smart thermostats, the government repossessing your home if you don't pay back FEMA "debt," the gain of function coronavirus labs that target ethnic Russians with bioweapons, Biden's corruption in Ukraine, Hunter Biden's child porn pictures, the satanic pedophilic Democrats meeting in basements to plot new Epstein expeditions...? Republican counternarratives post Trump are indistinguishable from Alex Jones's greatest hits, and are definitely epistemic net negatives to policy discussions.
I’m not saying every RW theory is right, but Democrats have a habit of censoring counter arguments and targeting the people who express them, then insisting they are correct and anyone saying the contrary is a LYING CONSPIRACIST and probably racist to boot.
“Biden has dementia” used to be a right wing conspiracy. So did “maybe Covid came from a lab.” Same with the Hunter Biden laptop. How much do you know about Epstein, anyway?
Also re “how I would do it if I were a drug dealer.” Scott, I really enjoy your writing and I have been reading your blog for many years, but please don’t become a drug dealer. You will definitely get shot or arrested within a week and it would be a great loss for humanity.
It is stunning how often someone (Scott) comes *so close* to getting it (the BART section of the Progress Studies post), only to talk to a girl they like and completely change their mind.
I am not kidding that reading this article made me signifigantly increase my probability that the 19th amendment was a mistake. (EDIT: I RETRACT THE PREVIOUS SENTENCE.) Giving your girlfriend a guest post on your blog would have been a mistake under almost any circumstances (even if she is a decent writer), but man, when the strongest argument is simply dismissed as, "cruel, backwards, and if true would be a damning indictment of the motivations of law enforcement officers," what are we even DOING?
To be fair, if the argument being argued against was actually real, the dismissal would be quite apt. But it's not. It's a silly strawman seeking to make police the problem here, rather than Progressive prosecutors and judges who refuse to do their jobs and put criminals away.
Awful comment
Do you think I am wrong? Tell me why. Talk me out of it. It would be very nice to not think these things, as they are in fact quite unpleasant.
I suppose repealing the 19th amendment would be an extreme remedy, but I do think that there is a legitimate issue in public discourse where women get their views "overrepresented" to a degree because men try to flatter and accomodate them.
EDIT: I am also going off memory on Clara being one of Scott's partners. I wouldn't normally feel comfortable posting that fact publicly, but if her writing is getting promoted on one of the most influential blogs on the planet, I think that is relevant to know.
"Clara being one of Scott's partners."
If that is the case, it really merits a disclaimer.
Holy shit, dude.
Surely someone as logical and reasonable as yourself can tell the difference between “this writer, who happens to be a woman, made what I consider a poorly argued case” and “therefore letting American women vote has been a mistake”?
Christ on a cracker, I used to love ACX, but the incidence of weirdly sexist comments has been increasing of late and making me question what the heck I’m doing here.
Scott, if you’re reading this in between diaper changes: a rationalist discussion space will never have many women in it, but comments like the above are NOT helping.
Any straw that breaks the camel's back is going to look like a massive overreaction. Over and over again I see these sorts of soft-on-crime opinions coming from women, and they spill over into the men in their lives. This post didn't just magically appear in the ACX feed. It got here by a specific process. I have reason to believe that that process is intricately related to sex dynamics. It is not a nice thing to say, but I believe it is both true and nessesary.
Gender equality is a delusion, and delusional Progressives like you are simply being exposed as such. Get used to it, because it's only getting started.
>I used to love ACX
Yeah this used to be the rare place where one could read and engage in people making good faith attempts to wrestle with difficult issues, but increasingly there has been tons of airing of grievances and culture war stuff.
Exactly.
“airing of grievances”
A Festivus for the rest of us = much more fun on Seinfeld than in ACX comment threads. (Yes, I am dating myself.)
Given the hostility and sexism of this comment, I think you should be banned from the comment section for it. Also, I think you should be banned permanently, rather than just for 1 month or something because, as we know, Scott can sometimes be lazy about moderation and getting a nice solid "permanent ban" would probably help motivate him.
If Scott wants to have the kind of comments section where he bans people for posting their authentic reaction to a political guest post a week out from an election, that is his perogative. I was not under the impression that this was that sort of blog.
"I was definitely under the impression that this was the sort of blog that didn’t tolerate that kind of nonsense."
I was under the impression that this is the sort of blog where most articles will contain at least one left-winger being (or perhaps pretending to be) surprised that Scott said something right-wing, linked a right-wing article, or won't ban a right-wing commenter.
I've been against mass incarceration for years now, for example https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/16/bail-out/ . I kind of want an apology for this one for multiple reasons, and I can imagine the 50% of the human race who are female wanting an apology too.
I apologize specifically for the sentence about the 19th amendment. That was a gut reaction and not a reflexively stable update. I stand by the rest. If you think that locking-up criminals does not reduce crime, I think you are factually wrong. If you think that locking up criminals is morally wrong, I think you are ethically wrong.
I was okay with it, so 50% - exactly 1, I guess. A close companion is reminded at least once a year or so that the 19th amendment was a mistake. OTOH if he could have, he'd have written in Queen Elizabeth for president every time.
Hi Scott, thank you for slapping down the sexist "women shouldn't have the right to vote" stuff!
Your statement "I've been against mass incarceration" makes it sound like you don't want *convicted criminals* to be imprisoned, but that SSC article you link to is all about bail for *suspects in jail awaiting trial*. Those are two very different things! I agree that people are innocent until proven guilty in the eyes of the law, and it's a shitty thing to keep an innocent person locked up. I would think that nowadays there are good options like tracking bracelets/anklets that would let us release even relatively high-risk individuals and still make sure they show up in court.
But if someone has been found guilty of a violent crime? Sorry not sorry, but they need to be locked up for others' safety. Also, if you are too lax with violent criminals, at some point you incentivize "And then I said to my wife, For justice, we must go to Don Corleone." That's not good for anyone (except Don Corleone). I am, however, in favor of making prisons more humane (no prison rape, for God's sake).
I think "against mass incarceration" implies "we should be trying to figure out ways to have fewer people in prison", definitely not zero. Or rather, I'm sure some leftists use it to mean zero, but that's not what I mean here.
I don't have amazing ideas for how to make this happen, but I think some of the discussion in the post above about being sure that more imprisonment *really* helps bring down crime is a good start.
IMHO, you should probably avoid use of the term, "mass incarceration." It seems to have very little in the way of substantive meaning, and to the extent that it has meaning, it seems to be used as shorthand for the claim that that most people are in prison because the state is imprisoniing certain classes of people for illegitimate reasons. I doubt that that is what you meant to convey.
"we should be trying to figure out ways to have fewer people in prison"
At the risk of being offensive, I think this is analogous to abortion.
Nobody *WANTS* more abortions. Everyone agrees that fewer abortions are good! But the right wants to reduce the *availability* of abortions to women who want/need them, and the left wants to reduce the *demand* for abortions, but reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies.
So, with crime, you could say "I want to reduce the prison population by refusing to imprison criminals [even violent ones]" or you could say "I want to reduce the prison population by preventing people from committing the kind of crimes that land you in prison [e.g., by having more police presence that deters crime, funding programs for at-risk young men to divert them from the path to crime, etc.]"
In both cases you're trying to reduce something (number of abortions, number of people in prison), but you're doing it in a very different way, and the downstream effects on society are going to be completely different.
Of course, where my analogy breaks down is that we have simple, effective ways to prevent unwanted pregnancies, but it's very hard to tell what programs are effective at preventing violent crime.
> the left wants to reduce the *demand* for abortions, but reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies.
As a matter of political dynamics this is suspect; the more demand there is for abortions, the better the left does politically. This would suggest that they want to increase demand.
Their rhetoric tends to suggest the same thing. Who's more against teen pregnancy? Who's more supportive of a "childfree" lifestyle?
Surprised the comment wasn’t immediately ban-worthy to you. Untrue, uncharitable, and inflammatory. You’re kind to be merely requesting an apology; must be tough to have to balance how much to treat this comment as a personal conflict vs something with broader community impact
I'm going to criticize this from the opposite direction: If you want to make the argument that Scott's thinking with his penis here, you should at least google the girl in question to check if she's actually hot.
It's none of my business either way (though if he were in fact dating her polyamorously he should include a disclaimer), but you don't know what Scott's attracted to.
Scott will always be a progressive at heart, above the rationalism of his brain.
Interesting to see his responses to the dissenting comments here, not just your own.
And kind of funny to see someone call an opinion untrue.
I'm a little disappointed with your assessment here Scott. I think you probably need to write more on this for me to understand your view. One of the themes of your writing on this is a focus on treating drug users and and preventing overdose deaths. I think a lot of citizens are beyond solving for these things, and just want the criminals to be locked up somewhere away from the rest of us where they can't ruin our cars/bikes/sidewalks/businesses/workplaces. There's a few specific nitpicks I'll list, but this is the absolute core of the disagreement in my view.
> Prop 36 will certainly imprison many people, but it won’t help fight crime.
I don't think you've made this case convincingly enough in this article to state it with conviction
> California’s rise in overdose deaths is an ongoing disaster, and the state must do more to address it – but it has nothing to do with Prop 47, and we should return to our prior that longer sentences don’t do much to affect drug use.
I think most proponents would say that we're not trying to decrease drug use. They're trying to mitigate the crumbling of public order that goes with it by getting these people away from the rest of us.
> Across jurisdictions, there’s no correlation between tough drug laws and lower drug use.
This feels like a bit of a bait and switch. Proponents will say that we're not solving for lower drug use. We're solving for public safety/public order. I think you'd want to show that there's no correlation between tough drug laws and homelessness and petty crime, like bike/retail theft. I also think you'd have to compare US/Canadian laws to places like Singapore, Japan, Thailand and China to actually have th draconian end of the spectrum included in the analysis.
>There’s a thorny debate to be had about the efficacy of involuntary treatment, but at least it’s more helpful for addicts than prison.
Again, I think at this point we're trying to solve for public order more so than helping addicts. I think that's a perfectly defensible position on it's face.
>Neither outcome - getting years of prison time for a bed shortage that isn’t their fault, or walking free without treatment
They are going to be getting years of prison time for comitting a crime. The bed shortage might not be their fault, but whatever crimes resulted in their prosecution certainly are. This reads like letting perfect be the enemy of good. Criminals being away from the rest of us, whether it's for 8 months or 5 years, might not be better for the criminals, but it's certainly better for the rest of us.
> The current retail theft wave started in the summer of 2021, after the economy re-opened. I'm not going to weigh in on the root cause – it could be a functional police strike in response to the George Floyd protests, lockdown-induced dysfunction that never got better, the decrease in police staffing across California over the past few years, or maybe some combination of the above. But something about the pandemic era emboldened criminals or broke policing. Prop 47 is not to blame.
My personal experience is probably creating a large bias here, but I don't think it's enough to show that Prop 47 is not to blame for the retail theft. You need to also show us why you're confident that Prop 36 wouldn't improve it.
> It’s about low clearance rates - shoplifters never get arrested in the first place. But they argue that longer sentences will help raise clearance rates by convincing police that it’s worthwhile to go after shoplifters. This argument is cruel, backwards, and if true would be a damning indictment of the motivations of law enforcement officers.
There are a few individuals in my city that are well known to police, and were arrested between 50-150 times each last year. There is one individual in my hometown who topped the 200 arrest mark in 2023 (this is Canada, but our approach to drugs and retail theft if markedly similar). I think that when sentencing begins to resemble a revolving door like this, it's reasonable to expect people to stop reporting theft (the process of which can be arduous) , as well as for police to stop responding. I personally don't see it as a damning indictment of law enforcement.
Scott didn’t write this post.
And it shows!
Bemoaning a shortage of treatment beds, but it's probably illegal to build & operate any treatment beds unless they comply with a hundred thousand pages of regulations micromanaging every aspect and get permission from a lot of power centers that can veto the project. This problem overlaps a lot with YIMBY and occupational licensing reform.
I actually though perhaps mistakenly thought California was the mecca of drug treatment programs. I could swear I've read some article or other complaining about there being ~17,000 rehab places drawing people from all over the country, who generally do not leave.
> "This argument is cruel, backwards, and if true would be a damning indictment of the motivations of law enforcement officers."
Is this intended to be a counterargument?
I suppose it's technically not a counterargument if you do in fact think that the police are cruel, backwards, and have corrupt motives for pursuing criminals, but if you think that, then I wonder why you would support tough-on-crime policies.
I see a lot of concern for criminals and drug addicts here, and very little for law-abiding citizens who are affected by them - nothing besides this somewhat lukewarm sentence:
>Californians - at least, those of us in big cities - shouldn’t have to tolerate the current rate of retail theft.
Meanwhile, paragraph upon paragraph about how unfair and unnecessary it is to put criminals in prison.
Now, I certainly do not like any of the ideology represented here, but I can accept it as the well thought-out position of a principled person whose principles differ from mine. Except for this part:
>they argue that longer sentences will help raise clearance rates by convincing police that it’s worthwhile to go after shoplifters. This argument is cruel, backwards, and if true would be a damning indictment of the motivations of law enforcement officers.
This is highly nonsensical, and sounds like the position of someone who hates the police to the point of seriously clouded judgment. How is "we have limited resources (morale included), and it's not worth it to invest the effort to bring in a shoplifter who will receive trivial slaps on the wrist even after repeat offenses" in any way cruel or irrational?
I'm trying to understand what the author could even mean by the argument being backwards, and the best I can come up with is she imagines police officers as psychopaths salivating over the emotional high of ruining people's lives, with maintaining a healthy society an afterthought. I hope I'm missing something, because *that* would be a damning indictment of someone's motivations, i.e. hers.
To Scott: I would like to humbly suggest that guest posts not be of this political op-ed style. I'm here for the extreme high quality of your thought process. If you write a piece supporting a political position/specific ballot item, even if I disagree with you I know it's coming from you, and is worth reading. Not so for guests. Keep them cerebral, away from this sort of red meat, I say.
(and a pragmatic reason to keep the guest posts less controversial: I see at least one commenter who missed that this is a guest post and is holding the contents directly against you!)
Strong agree!
I concur with the sentiment at the end. I don't mind guest posts but do I expect them to be extremely curated and high quality or at least interesting-topic-wise (e.g. the Georgism series). This one seems just...ok? It's not annoyingly partisan or anything, it's decently well-sourced, but it just lacks the kind of rigor that I'm used to seeing on this blog. It's a pretty typical essay you could find on a dozen substacks. I would out of curiosity want to know where Scott would honestly rank this post in comparison to even some of his weakest writings from the last year.
I think this said a true thing about a very important law being voted on next week which I have not seen said anywhere else.
Fair enough (though "true things" can be found written anywhere:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-lies ). I will say that reading this essay was the first time in a long while that I felt disappointed reading an ACX article. I like to think that this blog is popular not because it says True Things About Important Issues, but because it approaches them in a particularly thoughtful and unique way.
Word.
I put it to you that you may actually be here because of the extreme high quality of Scott's *past* thought process, which set a prior expectation. I think things have changed. I come back every once in a while, and am disappointed that I'm not seeing 2015 Slate Star thoughts.
This post reminds me of the “intellectual crackhead” essay: https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/12/matthew-yglesias-anatomy-of/. The essay was regarding the war in Afghanistan, but the same principles apply here too. A common sense solution, being thrown out due to empirics that have thousands of confounders that you can never control for.
To be fair, I've heard that a lot of the problem is simply DA's declining to prosecute people. If that's true, then changing sentencing would have minimal effect, while the common sense solution would be to install DA's that are actually willing to do their job.
I feel like a larger sentence would mean the DA would be less willing to prosecute someone. If you think someone deserved a year in jail and the most you could do is a month, you'd want to at least do that. If you think they deserve a month in jail and the least they could get is a year, letting them go free is a lot more appealing.
This, I think, would be the strongest argument against the law, but I don't see it brought up in the piece (introducing mandatory minimum sentences still wouldn't prevent a prosecutor just not charging a crime, right?)
This is what we see here. The prosectorial machinery just seems to have ground to a halt. More like quiet quitting than an honest, open process.
> More like quiet quitting than an honest, open process.
On the contrary, they've been *quite* open and upfront about it, brazenly proclaiming (and sometimes even outright campaigning on) an unwillingness to enforce the law.
I don't follow the news at all. Have they talked at all about why they're not enforcing it? Is it because they think the punishments are too harsh, or that they're so minor it's not even worth bothering?
I would assume the opposite effect. 90% or so of crimes are plea-bargained, and having a bigger minimum sentence for a crime you can be accused of means the prosecutor has a better opening position in the negotiation--you'll have to agree to plea to more stuff / accept a longer recommended sentence in order to get him to drop the charge with the 10 year mandatory minimum.
How would you tell the difference between that vs. a case where the common-sense solution doesn't work or has costs < benefits? There are millions of people who think the government is just stupid and evil for not solving inflation/poverty by instituting price controls. Are the people who object to these price controls also "intellectual crackheads"?
Are price controls really "common-sense"? There is a big difference between price controls (something that has been tried and has failed nearly everywhere they've been implemented) and putting *literal crackheads* in jail (what literally every sensible polity does).
If "common-sense" has any definition that's not just "popular among some demographic", I'm not sure there really are that many instances where the "common-sense solution" doesn't work or has costs > benefits. Or: if you try to second-guess every "common-sense solution" you'll likely wind up with many more false positives than false negatives.
Price controls are incredibly popular. Rent control in particular https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4811534
And also for food and groceries: https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/investing/commodities/2024/10/16/kamala-harris-hyped-ban-on-price-gouging-set-to-disappoint-shoppers/
That essay was more about Iran than Afghanistan.
I think the empirics are pretty clear about colonialism - it ceased being viable somewhere mid 20 century. (We can argue about specifics and causes - I'm assuming diminishing information asymmetry between the colonizers and colonized. But the larger point remains.)
I guess it's in character for Yarvin to look up to the idealized past. I don't think he has remotely enough of a case to accuse others of intellectual errors.
What I find funny is that the people who often make this, "harsh penalties don't reduce crime" argument are almost always the good-kid striver types who are absolutely the most terrified people ever of getting in trouble.
On the opposite side, there's the story of the Quaker pacifist who wouldn't fight in World War I. A bunch of patriotic citizens cornered him and made fun of him. He insisted that violence didn't solve anything. The citizens kept mocking him, until eventually he grabbed one of them, knocked them over, pinned him down, punched him in the face a few times, and screamed "NOW DO YOU AGREE THAT VIOLENCE DOESN'T SOLVE ANYTHING?"
The guy must have been pretty committed, because he just spat on his assailant and said "@#$% you, no."
"Exactly my point," said the Quaker.
So a man claims something doesn't work, others say he's wrong, so he makes a non-serious, half-assed attempt at that something, and then says the fact that it didn't work proves him right.
...I guess that does happen a lot in politics.
Pretty damn risky move by that Quaker right there.
Suppose the man he'd punched had whimpered, "Yes! Yes, I agree that violence doesn't solve anything, please don't hurt me!"
The Quaker would have realized that he got the man to say violence doesn't work... by using violence. Which defeats his point! He would have felt pretty stupid. And he'd be liable to be charged with assault, with eyewitnesses.
"San Francisco currently has 2,551 residential treatment beds, of which just 690 are for substance abuse treatment – but the city’s homeless population in need of treatment alone measures over 8,000. Worse still, due to post-COVID staffing shortages, the state is actually losing thousands of treatment beds."
I'm not sure that I read this correctly. If there were only 2,551 residential treatments beds to begin with, how can the state lose thousands of them? I couldn't get past the paywall. Did the state lose over 80% of its beds due to COVID staff shortages, or were those beds non residential?
For future reference, you can get past these flimsy paywalls by just cancelling the page being loaded before the paywall loads. Or just disable javascript.
> In 2021, the California Department of Health Care Services had licensed 987 residential substance use disorder treatment facilities with about 20,600 beds. That number has since fallen to 887 licensed facilities and just over 18,000 beds, according to department figures provided to the Chronicle editorial board and reported here for the first time. (Not included in this tally are 10 chemical dependency recovery hospitals licensed by the California Department of Public Health.)
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...So the 2,551 is just the number of beds in San Francisco, while the "thousands of beds" is being taken from the total number of beds in the state.
Ah thanks!
Has anyone noticed that when liberals REALLY dislike something, sexual harassment, domestic violence, hate crimes, people violating COVID lockdowns, they most often automatically assume that harsher punishments will provide more deterrence and a lower incidence of the thing in question, the way conservatives do with crime in general?
Great point.
I'm pretty sure Freddie Deboer has probably gotten a post out of this, in his role as the current "reactionary Marxist". There usually is one, I think.
Well reasoned and sourced post, exactly what I'm excited about seeing here. Really disappointing that many commenters are hating on it (and the author!) because it disagrees with their views, but I'm looking forward to more guest posts from Collier!
I’m a long time SSC/ACX fan and I honestly find it pretty depressing that so many of my fellow readers are the kinds of people who think women shouldn’t be allowed to vote and that poverty in black communities isn’t a problem. I am generally pretty anti-woke but Jesus Christ.
This is a straw man, most of us here who have right wing sympathies and want to be tougher on crime are pro women voting and empathetic towards Black people (please note women suffer more than men from streets being unsafe, and many Black people want more policing and tougher sentences as they live in communities torn apart by crime and drugs)
No it’s not a straw man, these are literal comments in this thread. See for yourself:
- Person who thinks a woman writing an article he disagrees with is evidence no woman should be allowed to vote: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-case-against-proposition-36/comment/74669884
- Person who is shocked Scott would think black people being in poverty is a problem: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-case-against-proposition-36/comment/74685375
You can't just take the two most unhinged comments on the page and use that to slander the entire readership of this blog. For the record, my views are so far removed from anything considered socially acceptable or sane that using me to make any point about these people here is incredibly insulting to them. Call me a monster all you want, but leave everyone else out of it.
Sending hugs
...Look, I don't want to be associated with you guys either. I'm doing my own thing, understand?
It's not just single unhinged comments. One of the replies to the 'no woman should be allowed to vote' comment says: "Christ on a cracker, I used to love ACX, but the incidence of weirdly sexist comments has been increasing of late and making me question what the heck I’m doing here."
Of these two, the first explicitly retracted that statement and the second was specifically talking about inequality, not poverty.
I like that people here feel safe to let their wild opinions fly, but I don't think you get to just say "takesy backsies!" in response to criticism.
Isn't that what arguments are supposed to look like? I make a too-strong claim, you argue against it, and I accept that I was wrong and make a much weaker claim that is defensible?
In context it's more "gah this was clearly rhetorical exaggeration not meant literally".
I don't know if I should be defending someone who clearly has no intention of defending themselves, but the second post is arguing that relative black poverty is not an issue, rather than poverty itself.
Perhaps I should have linked to the earlier comment instead: https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/the-case-against-proposition-36?utm_source=direct&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=74682502. In response to Scott talking about racism being bad and black people being poor, the commenter responded this was not a problem.
I think "so many" is probably where you're going wrong. It's the internet and there will be some people with weird and bizarre takes. That tells you little about the majority of readers.
We can read the vibes. When I point out that there are such noxious and extreme views, the response from the community is to defend them and praise one of the commenters.
I never made any claims about the majority: I don’t think most readers here are that reactionary. But I will say most readers here seem unbothered by it and are much more bothered by it being called out.
I think the norm here is extra tolerant about even pretty offensive beliefs partly as a reaction to the many online and real-world venues that became much more ideologically narrow and intolerant of such beliefs. Though also, I think you need to accept a wide range of views, including some offensive ones, to have freewheeling discussions.
Suppose someone makes the argument that blacks will always be poorer than whites for HBD reasons, in a basically polite and rational way. What do you think should happen next?
Suppose someone makes the argument that blacks will always be poorer than whites because of intentional white supremacy and racism by whites, in a basically polite and raitonal way. What do you think should happen next?
[edited to add:]
My own sense is that people loudly taking offense and demanding that everyone join them in casting someone out for their expressed ideas or arguments is a tactic that has been used very extensively in the world of ideas over the last couple decades, and the result has been a substantial narrowing of ideas discussed. That closed off some bad or wrong ideas, but also some entirely defensible ones, and silenced opposition to some pretty obviously bad ideas. It seems to me that we need less of this sort of thing, not more.
It’s funny, you’re basically making all the arguments I spent the last 8 years making. And now I find myself on the other side.
I was confident then that our Overton window needed to be wider for the reasons you said and that even if the occasional person came in and said something truly noxious like “Women shouldn’t be able to vote” or “We shouldn’t care about black people”, the majority would push back and prevent those ideas from festering. I’m basically just coming to see that I was wrong and that the comments section which hates witch hunts really does just become a breeding ground for witches and witchcraft sympathizers.
For the record, neither of the comments I linked to are polite or rational. One is simply an ad hominem against the author by attacking her and half the population. The other was, as I see it, a troll tactic to derail a point Scott was saying.
It looks to me like although the thrust of prop 36 is to repeal parts of prop 47, it doesnt do that by just repealing them, rather it rewrites the relevant rules in whatever the authors apparently deemed was best.
You didnt get into the meta question of what issues should be done through props, but for me, that is a good reason to reject prop 36.
Alternatively, had it been implemented as a straight repeal, I would support it. Your arguments that prop 47 didnt cause these problems not withstanding.
You mention Newsom recently signed legislation changing punishments for retail theft, so apparently CA doesnt need props for that. No to prop 36, yes to the legislature passing useful criminal reform laws.
No. I'm sorry Clara but I flat out don't believe you or your arguments. I've seen this retail crime explode in front of my very own eyes. Two girls filled their backpacks in the Walgreens at Sansome and Bush, and ran out. They didn't even run very far, they ran across the street and were both laughing and started walking as soon as they got across the street. They had no fear. I talked to the manager and she said the police won't even come. No wonder that location closed.
There's nothing more deceitful and more weaselly than the words "there's no evidence to suggest...". No, there's plenty of evidence. You just disregard it by using weasel words and try to sow confusion, using moral and religious arguments to try to shame people into believing criminals are just down on their luck, but it won't work this time. We have seen that criminals will destroy everything to get what they can.
Retail crime caused by Prop 47 has destroyed San Francisco businesses. There needs to be teeth behind it otherwise nothing is going to get better. People like you that try to get rid of sentences for criminals are destroying the very fabric of society. Criminals need to be in jail. Period. End of Sentence. They will exploit every loophole and they've shown since Prop 47 that they will, and people like Clara will joyfully let them do so. But this city is being destroyed and it needs to stop.
This post explicitly says that the retail crime explosion is real. Are you sure you read it all the way through?
> But they argue that longer sentences will help raise clearance rates by convincing police that it’s worthwhile to go after shoplifters. This argument is cruel, backwards, and if true would be a damning indictment of the motivations of law enforcement officers.
I mean, based on the fact that I've talked to multiple police officers trying to prosecute break-ins and theft in the Bay Area, who have explicitly told me that they reason this way, I guess yes, it is a damning indictment of the motivations of law enforcement officers, but that's not an argument, that's proving the case.
I really don't get this section. It's obviously true that officers are not motivated to investigate crimes that threaten very little consequences on the people committing them. I am pretty sure you could just ask some police officer whether they reason this way, I don't expect it to be a secret. People committing break-ins and theft in the Bay Area are facing very little consequence, which makes police unmotivated to pursue them. The easiest way to fix this is to increase the consequences.
I'm kind of confused about why cops would think that way. I mean, obviously, punishment severity is a proxy from crime severity, but it's really far from perfect. And I'd have thought that enforcement strategy (what crimes get focused on) would be *more* driven from management setting a general priority list than from random cops making decisions based on whatever proxies they have for severity.
But that's conflating seriousness of crime and severity of punishment, when my entire point is that enforcement should be based off the former, not the latter. Severity of punishment is an imperfect proxy for seriousness of crime, so it would surprise me if that were the dominant metric used by police.
From an elected official (sheriff, chief of police, etc.), who sets prioritization policy for the department, and runs for election on his vision for enforcement.
...Why are you confused? Do you think people become cops just for the paycheck? It's to punish lowlife criminals and exercise authority. If the lowlifes aren't getting punished, what's even the point?
I think this is a reasonable and moderately careful post and it’s unfortunate that the comment section is the way it is. I wish there were a lot more epistemic modesty on *both* sides.
I do find this argument unconvincing, though. It’s good to try to find relevant studies but I think there’s a tendency to act as if there’s no way to think other than via spraying pure intuition (see most of the other comments) or via literature review. But evidence from studies is only useful once you’ve clearly stated the problem you’re gathering evidence around. The cited evidence seems relevant if we were deciding what to do in CA in 2018.
But to my mind, the current situation is that a mix of the George Floyd protests/other recent PMC opposition to enforcing rules and the ability to spread knowledge of non-enforcement of rules virally on social media has led to a situation in California (not just California) where it’s common knowledge that you can just steal stuff from stores if you feel like it, and nothing will happen to you. This is both (1) really bad and (2) in my understanding, quite unprecedented. It would be come *extremely* bad if the proportion of the population willing to just steal stuff when they felt like continued increasing toward, say, the proportion that speeds. I think it is clearly necessary to the operation of the economy in which we all exist that people rationally expect to be stopped if they try to steal stuff.
Now, I am open to the possibility that this proposition would reimpose the presumption that you’re likely to get stopped and perhaps even punished if you steal stuff. Unfortunately that depends on a long and shaky chain of inferences: (1) cops could stop shoplifters if they wanted to (2) they don’t want to at the moment (3) this is because shoplifters aren’t getting punished even if they do arrest them.
But the past presumption that shoplifters would be stopped had very little to do with cops! How would that even work? No store has an actual cop just standing around all day, and rather few ever even had security guards. The presumption was always that the *store staff* would stop you. But it’s now common knowledge that store staff aren’t at all likely to do that, especially at big chains, because they see it as risking their lives for a faceless corporation (a faceless corporation which might even ban them from interfering by explicit policy.)
Basically, if it’s common knowledge that nobody but (maybe) an actual cop will use physical coercion to stop you stealing, which it is, I suspect it’s going to be impossible to put the genie back in the bottle, and we’re stuck with locked aisles, Amazon, or fancy stores for the foreseeable future. And there’s no plausible way that common knowledge is going to change, regardless of this proposition. So while I’d be happy to see marginally more shoplifters spend a *small* amount of time in jail, I seriously doubt this prop is actually relevant either way to the problem it supposedly is aimed at.
I haven’t even mentioned the drug stuff, since it’s a whole different issue. I’m very annoyed I have to vote on two huge complicated and not-obviously-solvable detailed policy issues (both at all and) on one ballot line.
In particular I think a post about “can we plausibly actually do *anything* to fix the shoplifting* would be vastly more interesting and useful than this. I wouldn’t be surprised if this post, as much as it’s in the 98th percentile for its class, didn’t actually change a single vote. This is just not the kind of thing that has that effect, or the kind of venue in which you should have such aims.
Thank goodness it's going to pass anyway.
Lies, damn lies, and statistics. Of course you don't see a spike in shoplifting _reports_. Why even bother reporting them? Look at indirect measures if you really want a fair estimate - security costs, or maybe insurance if there is such a thing. Scott spoiled us with balanced posts - pretending there is no such thing as increase in petty crime only hurts the overall point.
As for drug crime, the simplest argument is that fentanyl looks like a lost battle from an enforcement POV, on pretty much every level. I'd bet on deregulation partly to try something new, and partly out of respect for personal freedom. If you really really want to kill yourself, it's the state's job to make sure you know what you're doing and (agree very much here) provide help when you're open to it. Not put you in jail for a drug that has no correlation with hurting others.
'Of course you don't see a spike in shoplifting _reports_. Why even bother reporting them?'
I was surprised to not see more discussion of this. Stats depend on reported crime. Are we sure that people are reporting crimes where they know action will not be taken?
I buy the drugs part of your argument to an extent. But I suspect a lot of these crime trends are down to organized crime and a smallish number of criminals with an outsized effect on the numbers. It's perfectly reasonable to expect that based on a law change, it takes years before police attitudes toward enforcement change and then crime groups wake up and really start to exploit it.
I also think police not prosecuting crimes that carry low penalties is a perfectly reasonable calculus both rationally and, especially, emotionally. Why spend your time doing things that don't take perps off the streets? Police are very busy, as you point out. And I'm sure morale is a problem.
Oh, I get to trot out my "solve the fentanyl zombie downtowns" solution.
The problem from a "regular citizen" perspective: downtowns are usless, because they're crowded with aggressive / smelly / unpleasant homeless fentanyl zombies and crime is high.
The problem from a QALY Perspective: 100k people are dying from overdoses every year, the biggest cause of death for people under 40, exceeding car accidents. Pretty much all of those deaths are due to fentanyl + illegality - if cheap, pharmaceutically pure drugs were available, we'd greatly decrease these deaths, and some portion of them will straighten up and economically contribute when older.
The solution:
"Wet hotels" in exurbs, away from city downtowns, with regular policing in the downtowns to prevent (re)congregation. The drugs themselves cost pennies, even the heaviest user would be totally fine on $5 worth of opiates a day. You're passing out pharmaceutically pure opiates for free in these hotels.
We waste $3B a year on "homelessness interventions" today, with literally zero impact. All our downtowns are still scary, crime-riddled zombie apocalypses. Wet hotels will cost a fraction of that, AND actually get people off the streets and out of downtown. At $50 a night + $5 in drugs, we can treat 55M person-days for $3B. Buy the hotels and get the cost much less than $50 a night.
Downtowns become usable again. Homeless are housed. Overdose deaths are a thing of the past.
Why can't we do this??
Lolllll.
Drug *free* housing has been vigorously resisted in the suburbs and exurbs. Hotel purchases get tied up in red tape and protests for years. Try to set up drug *using* hotels, and the exurbs will say no. Force the issue, and you'll have yourself a literal civil war.
Anywhere that fentanyl zombies congregate is a place that produces slow boil violent political energy. Anywhere that's *forced to tolerate it* by outsiders is gonna boil over very quickly.
If you did this to my community, I would push for armed conflict with your community.
Edit, supplement: I forcibly deleted two homeless tents in my community in the last five years to prevent tent cities from springing up on the other side of my back yard (60 feet from my back door). I was reluctant and sad, but I was also *furious* and very firm in my resolve. Your comment gave me a comparable sense of visceral anger. And I'm one of the *nice* ones in the burbs. I've lived in ktown LA, downtown Seattle, downtown Austin. I *like* cities. I am not a Trumpist, or a cop. Many people out here in the burbs would get much meaner than me much more quickly. So, really, understand that if you've made me this triggered, your idea in actual practice will lead to conflict.
You could always put the hotels some remote shithole like Trona. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trona,_San_Bernardino_County,_California
"If I've accidentally called your place a shithole, and you've called me out in person, well, surely we can agree that *that other place* is a shithole and use that instead" is exactly the attitude that created the fury that led to the Trumpists.
Every place has people who care a whole lot that they're looked down upon, remotely mismanaged, and always losing their kids to nicer places. It's not *untrue*. I've been nearby, and I doubt Trona is nice. But your blase attitude and ignorance are what lead to revolutions.
...Did we look at the same town? The soil quality is so bad that grass doesn't grow, there's abandoned houses everywhere, and even most of the people who have jobs there are commuting from Ridgecrest. The place looks legitimately post-apocalyptic. Yes, obviously there are people who are attatched to this place, tragic as that might be, but that's still not a good reason to actually put that land to good use.
Of course, if you care so much about Trona, we could also consider the other Trona right next door, which has a population of 87 and is an *actual* wasteland. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trona,_Inyo_County,_California
I don't disagree that Trona is bad. I disagree with you casually calling *any* place a shithole where you can dump city problems. I take issue with the attitude. It's an *extremely* bad attitude.
> Try to set up drug *using* hotels, and the exurbs will say no. Force the issue, and you'll have yourself a literal civil war.
Yeah, I wasn't thinking of the politics at all here, just at the high level, an arrow pointing to SF downtown with "literally the most economically productive real estate in the world" labeled, and then another arrow with "also the epicenter and nexus of homeless fentanyl zombies ruining everything for everyone."
Surely, the most economically productive places in a state / country should be able to shift the problem SOMEWHERE, even if not civil-war-ready exurbs.
I mean, I like the Wirehead City concept ProfGerm linked - basically Burning Man, with free tents, drugs, and booze for anyone who wants, you just need to self select to living in the middle of the desert hundreds of miles away from all the productive people.
And there's no existing residents there to be negatively impacted or initiate civil wars. Sounds like a win to me.
Why not put them in the same downtown? If the people are already there, provide the service they are asking for. Recycle some old WeWork building. The problem isn't the people in the building, it's the people waiting to get into the building because occupancy has been hit.
So you'll need to build a LOT of them, across the country wherever there are customers. Otherwise they just become meccas everyone goes to. So how do you coordinate the legal structure around them and build them in an affordable way?
> Why not put them in the same downtown? If the people are already there, provide the service they are asking for. Recycle some old WeWork building. The problem isn't the people in the building, it's the people waiting to get into the building because occupancy has been hit.
I think the problem IS the people + propinquity. Locating them downtown just keeps our downtowns useless zombie apocalypses. Wet hotels aren't prisons. If freshly-high homeless are able to wander out and panhandle and crap in the street and freely loot small businesses, they'll definitely be doing those things, so you've got to get them away and raise some barriers to entry.
Putting them out in the desert, hundreds of miles away, is a real barrier. They'd have to leave their cozy tents or hotel rooms, walk somewhere, try to get a bus or something, ride on the bus for hours...but everyone they know is back in the desert / hotel, and they don't even have to pay for drugs there! Better play it safe and just stay and get high again.
If their legal immunity only applies if they remain in the hotel for X length, then you certainly could just station the police right outside. Of course this runs back to the problem of underfunded police + court system. But maybe you could just streamline the paperwork to convict for "exiting a federally designated area while under the influence".
"A building in the middle of downtown that we put all the drug addicted criminals in and they aren't allowed to leave if we think they're going to do more crimes" that's just jail, bro. You've invented jail.
Yeah, desert seems viable if the logistics can be worked out.
My dad long ago proposed the same thing for (true, unchangeable) sex offenders as an alternate to prison and post-prison life.
Wireheading City! https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2023/04/11/wireheading-city.html
Your exurb model doesn't work because A) exurbs do have some political power and they don't want city waste either, and B) the kinds of people endlessly sympathetic to drug users seem to also want downtowns to be useless to functional people.
Also, overdose deaths wouldn't be a thing of the past; they'd spike until you've killed off enough of your user population.
Yeah, that guy's got my vote, I'm 100% behind wireheading city. And he's using old data, too - California pays something like 150k per year per prisoner.
On the overdose thing, pre-fentanyl they were at ~20k a year - fentanyl has 5x-ed them. You're right I don't think you'll eliminate them, but saving 80k lives a year is no joke either!
This, yes.
Edit:
In response to the blogger's "I spent the last 2 weeks travelling around India, and I came up with this line: 'There’s a fine line that defines civilization.'", I offer Aldous Huxley's line from Jesting Pilate, which he thought of while he was in India:
"To travel is to discover that everybody is wrong"
It's hard for me to overstate how frustrating and depressing it is to witness daily shoplifting (frequently by the same frequent flyers, we know many of them on sight by now) at a non-soulsucking generally-well-regarded grocery store post-covid, compared to the blissful Before Times when it was a very rare occurrence. Having to hire security guards, lock up product in the back, and generally treat our valued guests with suspicion first and foremost (and not a little profiling, I'll be quite honest) is just really bad for morale. It's the sort of thing I'd expect if I worked at CVS or some other coldly corporate bullshit place that gives less than zero fucks...not a family-friendly retailer known for its fun atmosphere and upbeat staff. I want to keep being able to think the best of people, rather than retreat into bitter cynicism which seems to afflict so much of retail.
Maybe it's true that Prop 36 is mostly a This Is Something measure that won't fix anything (I'm a bit more willing to concede the drug stuff, these aren't quite gander sauce issues). But when there isn't any equivalent on offer for targeted crackdowns of the known 1% Bad Apples who steal apples, it's just hard not to be hard-hearted. A Singer is someone who tries to be good...and I just can't anymore, at least on the criminal justice reform axis. Minimal patience left for those who willingly choose to defect against Society. At least Jean Valjean had the decency to feel ashamed of himself, unlike the degenerate pricks who flout their impunity while stealing from us. (Rarely is the question asked, what is our children learning - by seeing such antisocial behaviour go unpunished, even celebrated?)
Yeah, I wish the drug stuff was decoupled from the shoplifting stuff. They're two different issues. Both severe, arguably, but different. Like others have pointed out, most drug users are probably also drug dealers. People choose to do things they probably shouldn't do and then suffer from it is the core of the hard drug issue. Truly innocent victims in this are probably rare, except for kids. Drug dealing *to minors* probably should have very harsh penalties, but I have mixed feelings beyond that.
As for widespread normalized shoplifting? That directly effects loads of uninvolved people in negative ways, such as the ones you went into good detail on.
I think the problem isn't sentencing length, it's getting convictions at all. That won't change as long as prosecutors and judge have counterproductive ideologies. Theft rates are highly unreliable because people don't report when crimes aren't prosecuted. You need to use survey data rather than police data. The proposition is unlikely to help on its own, but may be helpful in pushing a general culture of actually criminalising crime.
Would love to see TheGrahamFactor give his take on this. Feel like one of the things this community lacks is the perspective of beat cops.
*eye roll*
You can cite as many studies designed to produce desired results as you want. They'll never overcome common sense.
Almost all people (and probably actually "all," but I don't want to be hassled for making a blanket claim) will give into the temptation to break a law if they believe the consequences of doing so are minor or nonexistent. Ever deliberately exceeded the speed limit driving a car or not come to a complete full-second stop at a stop sign? Ever pirate media? Deliberately fail to report cash tips as income? Etc.?
Now, *of course* I've *never* actually done this, but in an era of chronic under-policing in my embarrassingly Blue coastal city, it sure doesn't seem like much of a risk to frequently use the incredibly convenient HOV only entrance to the freeway express lanes as a solo vehicle occupant, even though said entrance *shares an intersection with police headquarters.* The likelihood of such an act even being noticed by law enforcement, much less provoking them to stop and ticket, is so low that - again, *strictly hypothetically* - I'd chortle and tell whomever I'm on speakerphone with at the time, "Hey, at least there's one upside to living through the downfall of civilization." And then hypothetically we would laugh over it, and then sigh that it's funny because it's true.
*Hypothetically,* of course.
My *strictly hypothetical* feelings about breaking an HOV only law would be quite a bit different if HOV enforcement was a high priority for our society, with dire punishments attached (incarceration, civil forfeiture of vehicle, etc) and enough law enforcement resources to make punishment likely. In that world, the convenience wouldn't be worth the risk; it would remove HOV violations as a temptation worth contemplating.
Would some people still violate the HOV only lanes because they have nothing to lose or they're merely stupid? Sure. But in *that* hypothetical, *I* wouldn't, and neither would everyone else in my "normal risk-adverse person" demographic.
I'll admit that stealing stuff or assaulting people feels fundamentally different from speeding or using the HOV lane while driving alone.
Of course it does...to *us.*
But often not to the people who steal stuff and/or assault people. They use the same kinds of risk-assessment and (perhaps) rationalizations for engaging in those crimes that people might for speeding and HOV usage. "This isn't really hurting anyone." "I won't get caught." "Fuck it."
The HOV lane, believe it or not, was IMO essentially the "rationalist" proposal of a particular day (no matter how ineffectual it turned out). At the very least, the "urbanist" one. That seems silly now, but at the time, the Robert Moses solution to traffic problems (Robert Moses being a non-driver and once very much in the progressive vanguard himself) had carried the day and all that was left was this sad little dream, that all these cars all going to the same place, might carry more than one occupant.
Transit-like.
Since there is a lot of judgment* on this blog of what appear to be genuine views, held by people who very likely are perfectly pleasant in real life and don't deserve exile for their candor, which will leave the commentary stilted and dull - I will make a little judgement myself: I suspect *some* folks represented on this blog would actually go harder on you, the scofflaw of this once-idealistic effort, than on the drug and grocery store grabbers.
The latter, in a standard leftist view, are helping turn the world upside down, when they ransack the shelves of the CVS. They are ushering in the goal that your Whig understood to lie in the very far future, where it should always remain, just out of sight. And which logical endpoint he had the wisdom or else the cowardice never to think too much about.
*I am genuinely curious, but suspect that it is a generational thing, this drawing attention to/tattling to the host, "go get the teacher!", about internet comments. I don't want to suggest that folks are not really upset at sharing space with someone who is not even trollish or vulgar but simply thinks differently about something than they do (indeed, in one case here, about difference), and is honest about it - perhaps they may really be trembling or unable to function, or just made to feel weird and unhappy. That is something I haven't felt. But this business of wanting such a commenter gone - that seems like more than a style difference to me. I can't picture my generation engaging in that. It wouldn't just be uncool - it just would never occur to me.
How would we know whether or not this was correct?
It sure seems like the dude who knocks the old lady down and takes her purse knows he's actually hurting someone. My guess is that he just doesn't care, or in some cases that he likes the sensation of being powerful and terrorizing weaker people.
I should have put "or" between my hypothetical criminal's quotes!
The guy who knocks down the old lady to take her purse indeed likely doesn't care about her, or perhaps he cares a little, but not as much as he cares about his own well-being should there be something in her purse worth keeping. Or maybe he has an elaborate rationalization that this rich old [upsetting ethnicity] lady actually *deserves* to be knocked down because she's a member of the class that abused him. Or maybe he knocks her down for social clout with his odious social circle. Or maybe he just thought "fuck it!"
None of that seems very similar to what goes through my mind when I'm driving 40 in a 30.
I'd argue that going 40 in a 30 is represented by "eh, fuck it," or perhaps a feeling so cavalier that it doesn't even consciously rise to the level of "eh, fuck it."
My point is that there's a whole demographic of people who are as casual about shoplifting or even knocking down old ladies as you are about going 40 in a 30. They share your disregard for certain laws, but they don't share your values about which laws can be disregarded.
I'm amazed anyone would push back on this idea.
I think one of the most broadly dangerous things liberals have been peddling in recent years is that if it's a big company, a little theft is even justified. I've seen this show up in otherwise even very otherwise upright, ethical, high-paid people (including a close friend of mine), and you bet your bottom dollar that attitude trickles down. Coupled with the idea that if you're poor, you get a pass? We're not actually in a society where people are stealing food for their table. We have (mostly) fixed that issue for a lot of people, I'd argue (still some room to go with the housing-homeless thing). So in that context the rhetoric is dangerous. People are not stealing out of necessity, but a lot of liberals treat it that way.
Seriously the number of people who have started to rationalize theft is disturbing. This same individual, a friend, seemed to be totally ignorant of how this actually affects regular people too. I worked at Home Depot for a while, and theft caused no end of issues from an inventory perspective, and was extremely annoying for us (low to middling paid) employees. We suffered right alongside the bigwigs. And even customers, ultimately, often suffer -- if a count is wrong, they blame us! They are the ones waiting for 20 minutes while we scour the store to see if we can find the thing our inventory system says we have. But no, he says, theft is often about "sticking it to the man", a giant corporation can afford it, so it's not so bad.
Of course I'm sure it's not at all related that this friend also thinks that the slippery slope is never a real thing /s.
Broken Windows theory is mostly bullshit but it's not like, entirely bullshit. I know this post is all about actual enforcement, not rhetorical cover, for crime, but I think it's important to state that the two are still related when it comes to societal expectations and how "seriously" we view theft. Is the law's treatment a lever or just a reflection of a larger movement? Fair question. But I think that the symbolic passing of a law can have real effects on the general attitude. Just like how Facebook cracking down and firing people for abusing their meal credits sends an effective message beyond just the meal credits.
I agree with all of this, except for describing the people peddling these luxury beliefs as "liberals." I think "leftist" is a bit more accurate, as the people who will say it's fine to hurt Home Depot's shareholders, employees, and customers by shoplifting will also say that a person should lose his job and never be able to work again if he publicly expresses doubt about various identitarian orthodoxy.
This.
As a child I imagined driving 110mph down quiet roads after the downfall of civilization.
The downfall is quite a bit slower and less progressed, and the roads are less quiet than I expected, but there was more truth in that daydream than I would like.
Alex Tabarrock's Under Policed Over Prisoned (https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/08/still-under-policed-and-over-imprisoned.html) is still the best tool for understanding the fundamental problem with American law enforcement. Great article applying this important insight.
>But they argue that longer sentences will help raise clearance rates by convincing police that it’s worthwhile to go after shoplifters. This argument is cruel, backwards, and if true would be a damning indictment of the motivations of law enforcement officers.
How to prioritize between fighting different types of crime is a tricky problem, and using jail time as a proxy for how much the electorate want to eliminate different types of crime seems like a not crazy way for police departments to interpret the will of the people.
I admit that a better thing would be for local politicians to run on a platform of "we'll clamp down on shoplifting", rather than changing sentencing.
California may want to hire Nayib Bukele as a correctional system consultant. Bukele has done an excellent and pragmatic job at controlling crime in El Salvador.
"n rounds from a machine gun did not kill the monster, therefore the monster is fully resistant to bullet damage"
~ Evil Zvi Mowshowitz
This essay, and the motivated studies it shared, and the ideology behind it feel like... like this generation closing its eyes, raising a shaky hand, firing a single shot that misses the monster, and quickly saying "there, I tried shooting it, it doesn't work". You can just *feel* the half hearted reluctance and distaste.
Could be resistant, just not immune. Does half damage.
You get into the older editions, you've got stuff doing a quarter damage, doing only the plus without the actual weapon damage, etc.
"The study’s findings reveal that the lifetime and past 12-month prevalence of illicit drug consumption in Singapore are 2.3% and 0.7%, respectively."
https://annals.edu.sg/illicit-drug-consumption-in-singapore-where-are-we-in-the-fight-against-drugs/#:~:text=The%20study's%20findings%20reveal%20that,a%20false%20sense%20of%20security.
In a bustling port city with lots of foreign travelers constantly coming and going.
I consider this pretty strong evidence against "drug prohibition is futile" and pretty strong evidence in favor of "our law enforcement apparatus is much less effective than Singapore's".
A lot of the failure of prohibition boiled down to organized crime bribing local law enforcement to look the other way. If it's not hard for the customer to find the product, it can't be hard for the law to find the product either. But Singapore has absolutely zero tolerance for corruption among its public officials.
Once things reach a certain level, the cat is out of the bag, as it were. This goes for many things easier to solve than drugs, too. Part of why Prohibition ran into trouble, it wasn't all enforcement. You just had some kind of critical mass of people for which drinking was important, common, and desirable. This is extra, extra true in a big country like ours. It's a massive coordination problem. Not to say that extra enforcement can't help, but it's important to recognize scale.
As a Californian, my argument is that more criminals spending more time in jail means less crime on the street. I support this Proposition, as I believe this will be the result. More cops, more treatment centers, tougher homeless enforcement, at home monitoring for first time offenders and such are also fine ideas, but they are in addition to this one, not replacements.
I'm growing tired of this reckless naivete from progressives. If she's going to promote something so dangerous and contrary to common sense I expect a mountain of air-tight evidence.
I think a lot of substantive argument weight of this piece is carried by one word which is missing in this key sentence:
<i>Shoplifting may have gone up slightly, but this lasted less than a year – by 2016, rates were back down to 2010 levels.</i>
This word is "registered" - as in "registered shoplifting". An expected effect of decriminalising a behaviour is to have less of that behaviour reported to police and being registered by police. This is not the same as less of that behaviour happening. Yes, it may not be easy to get reliable non-reported shoplifting statistics. But to incorporate this massive bias in the analysis and not even mention it is deeply disingenious. Very disappointing. Boo.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/restore-deterrence
Nope, don't find this very persuasive:
https://thecausalfallacy.com/p/the-case-for-prop-36
I find your case far more convincing.
I mean, I have similar feelings towards the discussion of mandated rehab that I have to Scotts skepticism towards involuntary commitment - in the vast majority of actually-existing real world scenarios, it's going to be better than the alternative. Released on a misdemeanor and dead days later from an overdose is worse than any involuntary rehab program. If they don't exist, build them!
Hey, Freddie and I agree on a thing!
I mean, looking at this as an outsider, it seems the trend towards laxer punishment for common street crime has coincided with a huge rise in crap like locking up toothpaste and, well, crap on the streets. You don't see this stuff in Texas.
Having read about the effect of the 60s crime wave on the fortunes of liberal/socdem policies such as the Great Society, and being old enough to remember how conservative candidates used to run on crime back in the 80s, the consequent drop in big-city crime in the 90s, and the subsequent revitalization of the big cities in the 90s and 2000s, it seems this is not really a hill for effective altruists to die on, or even bother defending much.
If I wanted to be snarky, I'd say stick to fighting the AI overlords. Frankly, nerds are pretty much the only people with enough knowledge of the technology to be able to say anything rooted in reality. I don't really understand how ChatGPT works, but I bet most people reading this know someone who does. You have a huge comparative advantage in a utilitarian sense over some leftist whining about 'TESCREAL' who doesn't know a do-loop from Deleuze.
"I mean, looking at this as an outsider, it seems the trend towards laxer punishment for common street crime has coincided with a huge rise in crap like locking up toothpaste and, well, crap on the streets. You don't see this stuff in Texas. "
If only someone had tried to investigate this apparent trend to see whether it was real vs. an artifact.
I took a second look. They've successfully created uncertainty in my mind as to whether the specific upswing of property crimes in California correlates with the specific Prop 47. FWIW I never had any problem with drug treatment rather than prison, so my issue is with the theft rather than the drug part of it.
However, the crime's gone up all over blue cities, not just in Cali. Granted, I may be anchoring excessively on my experience as a teenager in the 90s when I watched crime go down almost immediately after Giuliani was sworn in.
P.S. Apropos of your later post, I have almost the same psychodrama around the Democratic Party as you.
My preferences (and I think other voters' preferences) are:
#1 - Good, rehabilitation/"soft-on crime" (Competent government, Prop 47, welfare which reduces poverty driven crime, mental health treatments instead of prison, etc.)
#2 - Good, strict (Competent government, No Prop 47, lots of cops, 3 strikes, etc.)
#3 - Shitty, strict (Bad government, No Prop 47, something like 3 strikes and pre-2014 laws, etc.)
#4 - Shitty, rehabilitation/"soft-on crime" (Bad government, Prop 47, demoralized cops, progressive DAs, people walking out of jail and reoffending, not enough mental health treatment, etc.)
Nobody of any creed believes that California can achieve #2 within 20 years. Yes on Prop 36 folks would say we're choosing between #3 and #4. No on Prop 36 (and pro-reform) folks would say we're choosing between #1 and #3, or maybe a radical faction would say #4 is better than #3.
I will say that "good, competent oversight is impossible and it'll always be a costly disaster" is one of the biggest arguments against a project that I'm personally fired up about, California HSR. If anyone is No on Prop 36 because they believe in situation #1, and also against HSR, there might be some inconsistency there. But that comparison certainly has major holes.
I like this way of thinking about the issue. But I would change #1 to "strict-on-crime/good rehabilitation".
By which I mean we should make it as likely as possible that those committing crimes are caught (which is the best way to reduce crime), so lots of cops and use of tools like video surveillance, but we should also be simultaneously leaning into alternatives to long prison sentences like restorative justice, mental health treatments, etc.
The problem we have today is the fact that those who are interested in criminal justice reform are primarily interested in reducing the number of folks in prison. We need people who care about that but who are just as interested in reducing crime.
Very well said, and I agree with your order of preferences.
The thing that I really like about 36 and why I plan to vote for it is that it doesn't simply mandate harsher punishments. Rather it makes them possible when the situation warrants (e.g. repeat offenders), which is exactly the kind of flexibility I think the system needs.
> It creates a new category, the treatment-mandated felony. Judges can tell offenders that their crime could be a felony, but that their sentence will be commuted if they complete a substance abuse or mental health treatment program.
> This isn’t a bad idea on merits. There’s a thorny debate to be had about the efficacy of involuntary treatment
Eh, it seems like a bad idea on the merits to me. I don't see why the first amendment prohibits the government from compelling you to say something, and it prohibits them from penalizing you for refusing to say something, but it allows them to threaten you with jail unless you say the thing they want.
Look, I'm a "legalize heroin" guy (seriously). But most of the issue around drug bans isn't a concern over drug use per-se. Sure, there are concerns about people O.D.ing and lost loved ones.
The real issue is that people don't like the stuff that happens *around* drug use. They don't like the used needles, the shoplifting and other petty crime, the homeless nodding off on the sidewalk. Prosecuting the littering of used needles is hard to do. Prosecuting "nodding off on the sidewalk" is hard to do, doubly so without roping in grandpa who's late for his afternoon nap. But drug possession. Drug possession is nice and objective (you either have it or you don't), and it strongly correlates with the activities and the people that you don't want around you. Nice people don't have a bunch of heroin on them. So you go after the drug use because it is easy and because it accomplishes the goal.
So studies that show that cracking down on drug use don't reduce drug use are missing the point.
It would be better if we could prosecute people for having it in their system rather than on their body.
With this and the recent Karthik Tadepalli post on firms, I have substantially downgraded my assessment of asterisk magazine!
tldr because you started off with prison overcrowding. That's an easy to solve problem; just build more prisons. If there are legitimate problems with the sentencing scheme you should start with those.
It seemed like there was a moment there when the fact that mass incarceration was a giant policy failure was widely accepted, what happened to that? Seems like maybe a combination of some parts of the population becoming negatively polarized against reform due to their outrage at the 2020 protests, and the year or two of elevated crime rates we got around the same time. But the bottom line of those protests was that whatever you think of the protesters, their cause was obviously right, and crime rates are back to their historic lows...
One should not mistake "people who say X are very loud" for "X is widely accepted".