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PaperclipPerfector  23d ago (text post)   26094 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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If you're making a post about a link, please actually link it.

Scott clearly still has some of the progressive aversion to harming criminals even when it's positive sum. However, he's still right (reality is complicated, you can be wrong about one thing and right about a different more important thing).

This is his final, bolded conclusion: "Prison is less cost-effective than other methods of decreasing crime at most current margins. If people weren’t attracted by the emotional punch of how “tough-on-crime” it feels, they would probably want to divert justice system resources away from prisons into other things like police and courts."

This is, IMO, just true. Consider a hypothetical: Prison sentences are capped at a week, max. But, within a minute of attempting to shoplift or steal a car, the police arrest you, take back the stuff you stole, and send you to jail. What do you think would happen to crime? Conversely, consider another hypothetical: Life sentences for stealing at all, but you'll be arrested and put to jail sometime around five years after you steal. What do you think happens to crime, given how bad at planning for the future low IQ criminals are? I think crime in the first scenario would be much lower than today, and crime in the second scenario much higher.

The biggest problem with fighting crime isn't that prison sentences are too low, it's that the police and justice system - in large part due to progressive activists, but in even larger part due to general government stasis and lack of ambition - has gotten worse at policing. They should'v gotten better at policing at a pace matching the advance of technology! Crime could be so much lower than it is today with just a bit more proactive policing, use of computers, and shaping of culture.

I thought it was well known that certain American states which will remain unnamed are addicted to prison labor. They want a large populace of manual labor they can pay nothing and can put to work.

If crime went down, they'd actually have less free labor.

It's "well known", certainly, but is it true?

I mean, it's kind of trivial to look it up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_States

AP I consider a bit more reliable than other mainstream news sources. https://apnews.com/article/prison-to-plate-inmate-labor-investigation-c6f0eb4747963283316e494eadf08c4e

Fine, news is news, what bleeds leads. So here's an investor report from Northstar Asset Management... written to clarify that they themselves don't invest in that kind of thing: https://missioninvestors.org/sites/default/files/resources/Prison%20Labor%20in%20the%20United%20States%20-%20An%20Investor%20Perspective.pdf

The list of prisoner-made goods that we have uncovered is both staggering and very likely incomplete. Inmates in the U.S. are involved in sectors ranging from agriculture to defense contracting, from simple electrical wiring to solar panels.

And then there's, you know, the whole kerfluffle over this. It's actually been on the ballot several times and failed each time. https://capitolweekly.net/private-prison-firms-make-big-money-in-california/

Okay, so let's not look at the private sector. Firefighting, asbestos removal, making COVID hand sanitizer. https://www.vera.org/news/from-fighting-wildfires-to-digging-graves-incarcerated-workers-face-danger-on-the-job

A study that examined the disaster plans of the 47 states that make them publicly available found that 30 of them have explicit instructions to use incarcerated people for disaster relief. The jobs for incarcerated people detailed in these plans ranged from making sandbags or clearing debris to specialized or especially dangerous tasks like cleaning up hazardous materials.

I don't have the link to it, but I did once read an article detailing just how extensively prison labor is used. I think ConAgra Foods was one of the users of prison labor mentioned in the article.

I think your hypothetical made sense, and I understood what trade-offs you were trying to highlight. I also appreciate that you linked the actual original article.

The biggest problem with fighting crime isn't that prison sentences are too low, it's that the police and justice system - in large part due to progressive activists, but in even larger part due to general government stasis and lack of ambition - has gotten worse at policing. They should'v gotten better at policing at a pace matching the advance of technology! Crime could be so much lower than it is today with just a bit more proactive policing, use of computers, and shaping of culture.

I'm a little less sure on this. It seems some aspects of policing have gotten easier. Cameras and evidence are more ubiquitous, but not as much in high crime areas. Other aspects remain difficult or have gotten worse. Physically restraining an uncooperative human is just as difficult. Tasers have made this somewhat easier. New drugs have have made this harder. Seems easier for people that were likely to cooperate anyways, and harder for people that were unlikely to cooperate anyways. Courts have certainly gotten worse, due to wait times and case loads. I think technology has helped courts handle some of that (remote sessions). But they are still fundamentally limited in getting people to be physically available at a given time, shortly after a crime, and provide enough time for a judge and some lawyers to talk through the case.

I mainly don't think technology is doing much to help. Culture could probably help a bit. But mainly it would be more people involved. More active policing, a much larger court infrastructure to clear out the dockets way faster, and more monitoring or jailing of known past criminals. I just don't know if myself, or voters are really willing to pay the costs necessary for crime reduction. There are diminishing returns at some point.

Courts have certainly gotten worse, due to wait times and case loads. I think technology has helped courts handle some of that (remote sessions). But they are still fundamentally limited in getting people to be physically available at a given time, shortly after a crime, and provide enough time for a judge and some lawyers to talk through the case.

I actually think reforming prosecution and courts to simply take advantage of technology is going to be a huge part of this. Our court system was designed for a century ago. Just adding zoom to the old mountains of process doesn't hurt, but there's a lot of room for efficiency gains without compromising on accuracy or anything else. And just hiring more prosecutors and judges and staff is exactly the kind of thing Scott's suggesting doing in his post instead of spending money on police. (Although I think political energy/will, more than money, is the main constraint)

Technology is a force multiplier for IQ, and criminals are not, actually, that smart. So if you can have some very smart people figure out how to use drones with cameras, or warrants to track phones, or etc etc, in a more systematic way than they currently are (not that that isn't being done, it just isn't being done efficiently because government is slow), that's just good.

The biggest problem is the lack of will to impose the sentence and make it stick. Until the policing and prosecution system are doing that, the sentences don’t matter. What happens right now is that the police come by and take a report. Often, that’s the end of it, there’s a report in a desk drawer somewhere. If you’re lucky the police will do an investigation. If a short investigation leads directly to a suspect or the news media makes them look bad, they’ll arrest someone. Then you go to prosecutors who might prosecute, maybe.

With a system like that, crime, essentially, pays. The 1/25 or so chance that someone arrests you is definitely worth the risk. Especially since in larger cities you need to steal a lot of stuff to reach the felony threshold. In California, you can steal up to $1000 before it’s worth arresting you. In other areas, it’s $500. As long as the TV you’re boosting is on sale for $497, nobody is going to do anything about it. If you and 5-6 buddies go an each boost one of those TVs and sell them, it’s easy money. Drugs are basically not enforced either. People can do them pretty openly on public streets without worrying that the cops are going after them.

While funding plays a role here, the police and prosecutors seem to have lost the spine necessary to do so. I think quite often it’s about the look. You don’t want to be seen as racist for arresting and jailing too many black and Hispanics. You don’t want to look like you’re being mean to poor people. Easy answer is just let them go. Or come up with silly “reforms” that are essentially release but have a service requirement that nobody will actually enforce. If there was one thing I’d do to curb crime it’s to get arrest rates up and prosecute everyone to the full extent. Once it becomes clear that the cops are now back in the crime fighting business, crime should drop.

I mainly don't think technology is doing much to help.

Tech papers over the cracks. The US might have Brazil tier crime rates without it. European countries that have seen big demographic upheaval have only preserved low crime rates through it. London has an almost 100% homicide solve rate, and ubiquitous CCTV is a big part of that, both at the police level and when it comes to convincing a jury.

Prison sentences are capped at a week, max. But, within a minute of attempting to shoplift or steal a car, the police arrest you, take back the stuff you stole, and send you to jail. What do you think would happen to crime?

A huge explosion. It's basically a slap on the wrist, and only when you're caught. It generalizes very poorly to other crime as well. Want to murder somebody? If you're caught, you're looking at one week. Rape? One week. Million-dollar fraud? One week. I don't think a solution exist which doesn't contain punishment which is highly unpleasant for the punished.

I think bringing back violence might actually be an improvement here. I personally dislike it, but if it works on animals, it probably works wonders on really stupid people as well (unlike more abstract punishments). It seems to work for Singapore (Singapore doesn't have a lot of stupid people, though).

And most of what's wrong with society now is not handled effectively by the government or the police as its social issues. Minor crime and inappropriate behaviour is handled through social norms, social pressure, culture, etc. The government should go after corruption and bigger issues plaguing society rather than wasting time harassing individuals for minor things (inappropirate jokes, building shreds in their gardens, not reporting birthday money to taxes, and things of this nature)

It's basically a slap on the wrist, and only when you're caught

The assumption for the hypothetical is that you're caught every time. It's a slap on the wrist, but you can't actually benefit! So organized small groups stealing over and over wouldn't pop up, because they wouldn't benefit from it. That example was specifically for shoplifting and stealing cars. My argument is they would go down, because you wouldn't actually be able to benefit from doing them anymore. It wasn't intended to apply to rape or fraud. I don't really think there's much you can do about rape on current margins, absent everyone having a camera and audio recorder on them at all times, and fraud's a whole different thing anyway.

I think the implicit assumption that most harm society suffers from criminal action is likely untrue.

Cutting the profit incentive through magic will certainly remove some crime (and likely most of the organized crime), but plenty of crime would remain.

Tax fraud would be eliminated, but murder would likely not drop much. Clearly, we will disincentivize killing your grand-mother for the inheritance or murder-for-hire, and indirectly eliminate some murders conducted in organized crime and other for-profit crimes (such as robberies), but plenty of murders would be wholly unaffected.

The thought experiment was intended to be scoped to things like shoplifting and car theft, should've been more specific about that. But I actually think it'd have a moderate effect on murder for a subtle reason - it'd break up cultures of crime by making the moderately profitable activities they sustain themselves not profitable anymore. Like if you couldn't sell drugs, and couldn't steal stuff, and couldn't do welfare fraud, and so on, that culture becomes less attractive

So it's basically the idea that, if your criminal actions are effectively undone with zero benefits, then you learn not to engage in them. In a mathematical sense, I suppose you're right, but people need to get caught in like 99% of cases, and all the benefits will need to be fully reversible in order for it to work. If I steal a cake and eat it, you cannot make me uneat it, for instance. I think it's difficult to get real-life benefits from this thought experiment. A best case scenarios requires surveillance worse than what China has, so I regard it as an expensive solution for that alone

Absent everyone having a camera and audio recorder on them at all times

I think one of the dangers of low punishments is that, even with the punishment, the actions may still worth worth it. Even if you punish rape and murder, the crime is not undone and the victim still suffers. Two wrongs balance out in a sense, but not in a way which cancels the wrong. I think large companies break a lot of laws because the fines they get are smaller than what they gain doing it. Large companies generally do whatever is the most profitable, so it's quite important that we make crime not worth it financially (companies are amoral after all)

The point is that criminals are not deterred by the length and severeness of the punishment but by the likelihood and immediacy of the punishment.

But that's just not true. If we imagine that there's only a 50% chance of getting caught, there'd be a vast different in attempts with a 1 week cap on sentences vs. a 1 year cap on sentences, I'd think?

It depends what kind of criminals you're thinking about, but most of them don't do any kind of reasonned risk/reward analysis. They simply believe punishment doesn't matter because they won't get caught. It's like reckless driving; a likely result is death, the harshest punishment, but it's infrequent enough that the people doing it discount its possibility to zero. Or teens and unwanted pregnancies, even when there wasn't an easy way out, it still happened all the time because the punishment was infrequent enough as to seem unlikely to happen.

Are you really suggesting that, in the example I suggested, you'd have equal crime rates?

You'd get close to equal crime rates from irrational actors. Rational actors you just need to be sure to not let the benefit of crime outweigh the penalty, but that's a relatively low bar to clear. I think there's likely very few criminals in prison who believe whatever benefit they got from their crime is worth the time spent in prison (and the criminal record). Piling on more punishment after that has very little if any effect. Increasing the catch and conviction rate, however... It would hit the behavioral conditioning that irrational actors need to get.

As an interesting anecdote, I grew up firmly believing the mantra that "crime doesn't pay" and "criminals always get caught". I mean that I believed them literally, that the police had an almost 100% rate of solving crimes. Of course as I grew up I realized it's not really the case. But it still shaped me to be a person who is almost obsessively rule-abiding. Like I have a hard time jaywalking at night when there's absolutely no one watching, I feel dumb not doing it, but when I force myself to do it, it feels like I'm going against a deeply programmed instinct. I wonder what kind of person I would have grown up to be if I had the current perception that criminals almost always get away with crime, and get caught when they're unlucky or sloppy. There's a lot of kids who probably believe that nowadays, from seeing friends and family get away with crime.

Is that true if the cost is very small?

I mean, the thought experiment is comparing two extremes' effect on irrational actors, but any sane policy would adjust punishments so that it doesn't at the same time create unfortunate incentives for rational actors.

But that’s the problem. There can be a bunch of assumptions but do they describe the real world?

In a mathematical sense, I suppose you're right, but people need to get caught in like 99% of cases, and all the benefits will need to be fully reversible in order for it to work

Yes, this was the point of the extreme hypothetical, which I which I should've been more clear about.

I suppose you're right, but people need to get caught in like 99% of cases, and all the benefits will need to be fully reversible in order for it to work

It works for repeated or organized theft, where the criminal's doing it because they're going to resell the goods for money - you can almost entirely stop that by just making costs > benefits.

I think one of the dangers of low punishments is that, even with the punishment, the actions may still worth worth it

Yeah, I'm not proposing low punishments for rape, because the benefit is intrinsic to the act itself and also a very primitive one that's hard to punish, rather than an economic one you can take away.

This is, IMO, just true. Consider a hypothetical: Prison sentences are capped at a week, max. But, within a minute of attempting to shoplift or steal a car, the police arrest you, take back the stuff you stole, and send you to jail. What do you think would happen to crime? Conversely, consider another hypothetical: Life sentences for stealing at all, but you'll be arrested and put to jail sometime around five years after you steal. What do you think happens to crime, given how bad at planning for the future low IQ criminals are? I think crime in the first scenario would be much lower than today, and crime in the second scenario much higher.

First hypothetical: Many, many police officer hours will be needed to achieve it. Perhaps, within a generation, people will learn not to steal.

Let me present a small variation to your first hypothetical. The police will appear within a minute of attempted theft in 90% of all attempts, and everything happens as you write, the thief gets a week in jail. In 10% of cases, nothing happens to the thief. It is still super unrealistic clearance rate in any country not governed by totalitarian surveillance dystopia of magical fairies, but more realistic, as there will no be human society where the police are 100% effective.

In this altered hypothetical, I expect that thievery will be extremely common. What is one week in prison for almost unlimited amount of free stuff, and you get to network with other prisoners? I expect the police would be so demoralized that they soon stop enforcing the rules. They may join the thieves, even, and the whole 90% rate will collapse.

In your converse hypothetical, assuming it happens as stated, with 100% effective police but 5 year lag period for enforcing a life sentence to thieves -- my conclusion is totally opposite. I presume that stealing will dramatically drop in after the 5 years lag, and possibly wither to nothingness in following decades. If you read statistics in the ACX post, it is quite clear that most crime is done by repeat offenders, who are incapacitated in prison. Some or many first-time offenders become repeat offenders as they enter the criminal way of life in prison, but in your hypothetical they have life sentences without parole and that is not a problem.

Again, realistically, it would be terribly expensive and assumes magically competent cops. Thieves would also become more violent if there is only a little difference between the punishment for a theft and murdering witnesses to the theft.

Yeah. All the prison reform projects I even fisk run into the issue that the primary purpose of prison is incapacitation.

The other issue with prison reform is that all these problems are correlated. If your prisons are expensive, it is because progressive activists have won a lot of victories, why do you think policing and the courts aren't similarly being tied up by progressive activists?

why do you think policing and the courts aren't similarly being tied up by progressive activists?

Well, they are; progressive prosecutors and judges use paper bags to determine whether they should prosecute or not (or how they should sentence), and they absolutely will prosecute police who fail to use them.

The Summer of Love 4 years ago is conclusive evidence that a significant minority of Americans believe this is just and correct.

The hypothetical was an extreme to illustrate the point. Yes, in practice, enforcement isn't perfect, so a week is too short and you want escalating sentences. The point that effective policing is higher leverage than increasing sentences remains.

Again, realistically, it would be terribly expensive and assumes magically competent cops

... no? Like stores do, currently, have security guards. We could just empower them to arrest shoplifters. That would be fine. (edit: this includes fixing the laws that create extreme liability for doing that)

I presume that stealing will dramatically drop in after the 5 years lag, and possibly wither to nothingness in following decades

Isn't most crime committed by young people? There's a steady supply of fresh young people, and arresting them 5 years after they're young isn't even going to stop them from having kids to form the next (on average) generation of criminals. Like the US, today, does up arresting most violent criminals for long periods of time eventually, and it hasn't fixed the crime problem.

The hypothetical was an extreme to illustrate the point. Yes, in practice, enforcement isn't perfect, so a week is too short and you want escalating sentences. The point that effective policing is higher leverage than increasing sentences remains.

I am not convinced it is relevant to the point or real life. The police that appears within a minute to 100% of crime scenes is practically impossible yet causes major consequences of the stated hypothetical. You can make many points with similarly strong but unrealistic assumptions.

If I assume an existence of a 100% effective at 1-month drug and crime rehabilitation program (criminal turned into citizen who will never commit a crime and is no longer drug addict), it is obvious that we should use such program to rehabilitate all criminals. I believe lot of progressive politics are result of median democrat who believes in such program, that with "enough" social services, one could disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline, problem solved. To some extent modern prisons are outgrowth of similar Victorian era ideas. The problem is that such programs don't exist.

Coincidentally, I agree that the legal processing time from arrest to punishment should be reduced. It is more effective to discuss it more realistic assumptions .

Isn't most crime committed by young people? There's a steady supply of fresh young people, and arresting them 5 years after they're young isn't even going to stop them from having kids to form the next (on average) generation of criminals. Like the US, today, does up arresting most violent criminals for long periods of time eventually, and it hasn't fixed the crime problem.

Your hypothetical did not stipulate age limits, by the way. Most criminals start young, too, as teenagers, so a shoplifting 14-year old would be in prison before they turn 20. And even in the US, most prisoners go free eventually. Most crime can't committed by re-offenders unless they have an opportunity to re-offend. If you get to "tag" every criminal today and put them all permanently away with 5 year lag, all habitual criminals are gone after the first wait period, and there will be left only those criminals who started committing crime during those 5 years. Further 5 years down, they are also permanently removed from society. Within the rules of thought experiment, I think this should work to reliably but slowly reduce the number of criminals around.

I agree that realistically it wouldn't be like this, but again, the experiment as specified is not realistic.

We could just empower them to arrest shoplifters. That would be fine.

They're already empowered to arrest shoplifters. It's just so much of a liability concern that it's cheaper to tell them not to in almost all cases.

Yeah, what I mean by empower them to is remove all of the obstacles like that that prevent them from doing so. The liability concerns are a consequence of specific laws and precedents, and laws can be changed.

Consider a hypothetical: Prison sentences are capped at a week, max. But, within a minute of attempting to shoplift or steal a car, the police arrest you, take back the stuff you stole, and send you to jail. What do you think would happen to crime? Conversely, consider another hypothetical: Life sentences for stealing at all, but you'll be arrested and put to jail sometime around five years after you steal. What do you think happens to crime, given how bad at planning for the future low IQ criminals are? I think crime in the first scenario would be much lower than today, and crime in the second scenario much higher.

You're treating the situation as if there exist a pair of control sliders marked "prison time" and "policing power" and that if you slide the former down to 0/10, then you're automatically able to slide the latter up to 10/10 and create godlike supercops. In reality the sliders are demarcated in dollars or man-hours rather than in simple outcome generation, and there isn't enough money in the world (much less in the prison budget) to create a police force of infinite capability that solves every crime in sixty seconds.

It was an unrealistically simple and extreme hypothetical to illustrate the point. Grocery stores have security guards.

It's a hypothetical that boils down to a scenario where the resources for law enforcement are near-infinite versus one where they aren't. Grocery stores having security guards doesn't mean we can reduce all prison terms to a week-long timeout and expect to be fine.

It’s a valid point that long sentences mean little if people aren’t getting caught. Also, I think people here find it hard to model high-time-preference, low IQ criminals. We can likely imagine the abject horror of a 10 or 20 year sentence in a way they can’t.

"Within a minute of attempting to shoplift [...] the police arrest you" is quite possible at reasonable (if significant) cost. Put policemen at all store exits so that the RFID tags going off (or using an emergency exit in a non-emergency, or triggering the metal detectors with a Faraday cage) gets you immediately arrested.

Car theft is harder, though. You could do okay with mandatory biometrics and self-driving and having cars drive thieves to the police station, but it'd be very expensive in money and false positives and still wouldn't get to 100%.

The 'minute' part was hyperbole, but I think a day or two should be trivial? If we can modify the design of the car, just have it disable itself in a way that can't be undone without the owner's consent (have many different components do the verification on their chips so the thief can't just swap out one), and broadcast its location. Just location broadcasting (only with the owner's consent once it's stolen) would be trivial to retrofit existing cars with very cheaply. And then you just, like, have the cops go pick up the car whenever it's stolen.

Wouldn't get 100% (most obvious and effective bypass is to turn the theft into a robbery - "turn over control of the car or I shoot you" - and there's also "EMP the car, pick it up with a truck and repair it later"), and would still be expensive in false-positives (i.e. when the car doesn't recognise the owner).

Also, with most forms of "disablement" that can't be worked around, you'd need to clean up auto manufacturers' cybersecurity to avoid megadeaths the next time somebody goes to war with you and mounts a cyberattack, although frankly some of the "safety features" of modern cars (as well as ~all self-driving cars) are already reaching that threshold (TTBOMK without the necessary cybersecurity in nearly all cases) because safetyists are apparently Mr. Topaz and assume blithely that software will do what they want and not what they don't want (and also don't think probabilistically and thus dismiss the tail risk of the Long Peace failing to hold).

I think those are reasonable points, I'm not expecting that a few minutes of my thinking about this will solve it, just that a few years of smart tech people will. But I think just the location sharing part would be enough - you'd have to make it hard for the thieves to disable without totaling the car, but I think that's doable (just put it on the car's main board? put it in a random location? idk), and then if the cops just reliably physically repossess the car a few days after it's stolen that should make car theft a lot less attractive. A lot of new cars already have GPS and data.

  1. The adversary knows the location of X if X is transmitting EM.
  2. I think it might be hard to render it impossible for thieves to disable without totalling the car without catastrophic issues. After all, the chip's no good without the antenna, and it might be a bit tricky to enforce "the antenna is capable of transmitting to something" (not broken, and also not shielded) without enforcing "the antenna is in communication with a specific system" (the latter of which means any failure in that system or in connectivity bricks All Of The Cars).

The adversary knows the location of X if X is transmitting EM.

At an extreme, make it only transmit for a few seconds every 24h?

For 2 I don't mean enforce it at a software level, just make it physically difficult to disable

This sounds like it would require a lot of cops.

I don't think so? Grocery stores have security guards, you can just let them arrest people.

You'd have to beef them up significantly and/or alter the design of stores (emergency exits unusable unless triggered by central authority (and even then, I suppose there's the "set a fire so that you can shoplift" option), main entrance with lockable gates after the RFID scanners) to avoid the "shoplifter outruns security guard" problem; lots of security guards are would-be police that are too fat to pass the physical.

I mean fixing the laws would allow stores to do the cost/benefit analysis on that themselves, and if they think it isn't then they're probably right.

Robot cops!

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