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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   25740 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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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.

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