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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   25701 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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I worked in a tech hub next to a ghetto. A large number of engineers were terrorized by a small group of young men. There were more engineers who were fit gun owning veterans than there were criminals.

The criminals were generally in poor physical condition, disorganized and not an especially impressive force.

Had the cops not been there the criminals would have been dealt with swiftly. However, the police protected them. If they stole a bike, nothing happened. If an engineer with friends shut it down, they would have had their lives ruined. The criminals didn't mind getting arrested for smaller crimes. The engineers were terrified of even getting arrested. The imbalance in the risk acceptance between tech workers and criminals completely shifted the power dynamic on the street. When they mugged a developer on the way home from work it wasn't by physically overpowering them, it essentially a game of chicken in which the developer was more afraid of going to prison. It is simply cheaper to clean up graffiti on a weekly basis than to spend an night waiting in the bushes with bats and dealing with the problem.

The justice system is too harsh toward people with a life while not being effective at keeping people who can't function of the street. Ideally the dysfunctional crowd shouldn't be punished but warehoused in a place that provides them with structure, meaning and a well balanced life. Mental asylums need to be scaled up.

This is a point which our dear departed permabanned follower of Hobbes liked to make: The government is not there to protect the honest people from the criminals. It is there to protect the criminals from the honest people.

I think about this whenever I see “protestors” shut down highways. If there was a 100% guarantee of no police involvement whatsoever the commuters would physically move them out of the way within a few minutes. But if you did that you’d be arrested and lose your job. Functionally the police are there to protect those obstructing traffic and falsely imprisoning people.

It's like this in prison too. I read extracts from this shocking report about what goes on in US prisons. If it were down to me, this alone would get America expelled from the first world, though considering Rotherham and similar the ranks of the civilized countries would dwindle very quickly:

https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/prison/report.html

Joe Schmo gets into prison for some DUI offence. Unfortunately he has a slightly feminine looking appearance and isn't that big. His attitude isn't sufficiently manly, maybe he's not streetsmart, maybe he's too intellectual, maybe he's white...

Punishment for his crime? Vicious anal rape and forced prostitution, HIV infection too.

Wayne "Booty Bandit" Robertson is in prison for murder - life sentence. But he is big and very strong.

Punishment for his crime? Sex on demand with his cellmate and exciting opportunities in the slave-trading business.

This is the reverse of justice. It would be far more humane and civilized to blow Wayne's head off with an autocannon and let Joe serve his sentence in peace. Wayne is a bad hombre and should be liquidated in a spectacular and intimidating way, to demonstrate that we are not in the stone-age anymore, there are more important things than muscle mass and naked aggression.

Imagining a social media intern barging into the HRW editor's office.
"Someone linked your report, sir!"
"Excellent, what conclusion did he draw from it?"
"Um..."

"I want to reduce the prison population."

"Great! The Innocence Project is looking for new advo..."

"That's not quite what I meant..."

According to wikipedia (though others dispute this), the US is the only country on Earth where there's more male-on-male rape than male-on-female, there have been some legal changes but no significant practical improvements since 2001.

It's ridiculous that people who commit the worst crimes are practically untouchable since their sentence can hardly get longer.

I'm fully on board with the death penalty proposal, but also, I don't understand why prison operators can't maintain a monopoly on violence even in its absence. Is it simply jurisprudence that has made corporal punishment and solitary confinement impossible or would it somehow be unaffordable to apply them as needed? A guy alone in a room with food coming through a slot can't rape or intimidate anyone, and I have a hard time believing that the extra number of toilets required wouldn't pay for itself by cutting down on all the violence that prison guards have to deal with, even leaving aside the benefits to cooperative prisoners.

According to HRW the problem is due to understaffing and overcrowding in prisons (often poorly designed older ones) and a lack of consequences. De facto, lawyers don't want to prosecute prisoners or prisons, they don't feel like there's any good payoff there (especially if they're basically telling prisons they don't know what they're doing). They want to have a cordial relationship with prisons apparently.

Prison guards basically outsource social control to prisoners because they're lazy and don't care. They'll line up 20 people in front of the victim and go 'alright which one was it' - marking the victim as a snitch who recieves worse treatment. It's indirect corporal punishment, like anarcho-tyranny but for prisons (maximum anarchy and maximum tryanny). If they don't like you, they can see to it that Wayne Robertson is your cellmate.

In the worst cases, prisoners are actually placed in the same cell with inmates who are likely to victimize them--sometimes even with inmates who have a demonstrated proclivity for sexually abusing others. The case of Eddie Dillard, a California prisoner who served time at Corcoran State Prison in 1993, is an especially chilling example of this problem. Dillard, a young first-timer who had kicked a female correctional officer, was transferred to the cell of Wayne Robertson, a prisoner known by all as the "Booty Bandit."(412) The skinny Dillard was no match for Robertson, a huge, muscular man serving a life sentence for murder. Not only was Robertson nearly twice Dillard's weight, but he had earned his nickname through his habit of violently raping other prisoners.

Before the end of the day, the inevitable occurred: Robertson beat Dillard into submission and sodomized him. For the next two days, Dillard was raped repeatedly, until finally his cell door was opened and he ran out, refusing to return. A correctional officer who worked on the unit later told the Los Angeles Times: "Everyone knew about Robertson. He had raped inmates before and he's raped inmates since."(413) Indeed, according to documents submitted at a California legislative hearing on abuses at Corcoran, Robertson had committed more than a dozen rapes inside Corcoran and other prisons.(414) By placing Dillard in a cell with Robertson, the guards were setting him up for punishment.

Whether as a purposeful act or through mere negligence prisoners are all too often placed together with cellmates who rape them. A Connecticut prisoner told Human Rights Watch how he too was raped by a cellmate with a history of perpetrating rape:

It's mostly incentives. Nobody cares what happens to prisoners, especially at the hand of other prisoners, so if there are benefits to allowing it, it won't be stopped. And there are major benefits to the government for allowing it in general, in addition to all the specific benefits to parts of the system. The prospect of prison rape keeps quite a few Joe Schmos on the straight and narrow.

I find an interesting contrast between this and a European country I visited, which shall remain nameless.

Some pickpocket stole the phone of a friend of mine but didn't prevent us from geolocating it. We went to the police fully expecting the usual recording of a police report that would never amount to anything but a piece of paper for his insurance.

But no, the local policeman took the info, told us to wait in the precinct, and after an hour or so turned up with the phone and the (visibly beaten) thief, asking us what we wanted to do with him. I got the sense that we could have roughed him up ourselves without even the need for a bribe.

After that I never really doubted that the police having more respect for criminals than law abiding citizens is a choice.

which shall remain nameless

Why?

And this is a political choice made by people who are not, themselves, police officers.

I have sufficient IRL far-right street cred to have ordinary cops admit to me that they wish somebody would solve the coordination problem to bring sombra negra here, or ensure that self-help vigilantism was ignored by the legal system.

After that I never really doubted that the police having more respect for criminals than law abiding citizens is a choice.

I don't think there are many police anywhere that have more respect from criminals than citizens. It's just that different places have different rules/expectations for how criminals can be treated. Unless by "police" you're referring more broadly to the criminal justice system.

I'm speaking in a The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does kind of way.

I have no doubt the French policeman I talked to a few years ago cared more for me than the guy who mugged me, but in the end the guy got off with a slap on the wrist even though he was a known criminal, and I never saw my wallet again.

It didn't have to be this way. Society has chosen that my property and time is less valuable than some known criminal's freedom. And I think that's clearly dysfunctional.

I'm guessing this was not Northern or Western Europe.

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