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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32405 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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By removing a small number of people from the streets we can have a drastic reduction in crime.

I think this is plausible but doesn't follow inevitably from the rest. Presumably the progressive response would be that the societal niche exists independently of the specific person who ends up filling it. Consider an analogous claim that, because 1% of people (fast food workers) do 90% of the deep frying in the US, we could improve obesity stats by removing a small number of people from the streets.

Your prediction is a useful one to distinguish between these hypotheses, but also hard to differentiate from a deterrent effect making crime less attractive (which we would also expect to see if we arrested all fast food workers).

Presumably the progressive response would be that the societal niche exists independently of the specific person who ends up filling it.

I have not ever seen a progressive claim there is a social niche of being a violent criminal. Can you explain where you got this idea?

Not with that phrasing, perhaps, but the idea that crime is caused by systemic issues and social conditions is equivalent to saying that those things create a social niche which someone will fill.

Yeah, that seems like a strawman. A progressive would more typically claim that violent criminals are mostly driven into it by their social conditions and locking people up won't fix those, so removing people from the street doesn't drive down crime rates because people still in terrible conditions will continue to commit crime. At least it seems to me.

There's lots of flaws with that idea- it fails to grapple with the fact that the severe crimes in poor communities really are the same few people- but it's not like it's inconsistent.

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