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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30404 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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I think he might be guilty of going too far. I expect a hung jury because these cases haven’t been working in NYC.

I think the bigger question is what should we be doing with people like Neely? He’s obviously a net negative utilitarian value on society harassing people all day with a potential to have a bad moment and throw someone in front of a train.

Just locking him in a cell seems a little mean and drastically increases his suffering. My solution sounds a little like slavery where we put people on a farm with supervision. He gets to do a little work like taking off vegetables etc. But is removed from society.

This is kind of what asylums used to be, or were supposed to be - fairly nice open-air warehouses where people were encouraged to do a little bit of gardening or knitting to keep them minimally occupied, and otherwise drugged or sedated into docility.

with a potential to have a bad moment and throw someone in front of a train.

If memory serves, he already tried exactly that. But I can't seem to find the source and there have been a lot of rumours flying about, so take it with a grain of salt.

I've seen this claimed on twitter, but no proof. There is however a short video of a black man who pushes a woman into (not in front of) a train at a station, but I don't think it's Neely. I have a feeling that people saw this and just ran with it.

Might even be acquittal rather than a hung jury. Bernhard Goetz -- who was pretty messed up himself and did his own case a lot of harm, including fleeing the scene, destroying evidence, bragging about how he wanted to make the people he shot suffer and claiming he said "You seem to be alright, here's another" before firing his last shot -- was acquitted of all but weapons violations. And Penny didn't use a weapon and seems to at least be sensible enough to do his talking through his lawyers.

He might, but most of the damage to Penny's reputation has already been done, and a felony conviction isn't going to mean much given that. If I'm his attorney I'm taking any deal that allows him to avoid prison time. This incident is going to follow him around regardless of what happens, so an acquittal doesn't really give him that much of an advantage over a plea to a lesser charge. The DA has already charged so low that they're not particularly worried about public reaction and it's well within the ballpark of being able to avoid jail time. No need to tempt fate for the sake of principle.

He might, but most of the damage to Penny's reputation has already been done

What damage? Outside of New York most people will forget about him pretty quickly. Within New York, his reputation will likely remain decidedly mixed. A felony conviction is more than damage to reputation; it legally disqualifies you from many jobs and positions. And even those it doesn't, it's a bad thing to have and many people will not hire felons.

The DA has already charged so low

Second degree manslaughter is a class C felony carrying a up to 15 year prison term; the classes range from A down to E.

Yeah, I know a felony conviction is bad. And sure, most people will forget about this, but from here on out absent unusual circumstances this incident will come up as soon as you type his name into Google. It's enough of an issue that even people like Monica Lewinsky who technically did nothing wrong still have problems finding employment because no one wants the attention that comes with hiring them. By charging low, I meant that in most cases like these the activists are braying for blood and couldn't care less that Man 2 is technically a serious crime; they want a murder charge but would accept a plea of Man 1. Man 2 has a 15 year max but a guy like Penny is probably getting more like 1 to 3 years given his lack of a record and the sympathetic circumstances. It would be an outrage. If what they'e charging could result in his being out of jail in a year after a jury conviction, then they have no pressure not to just use the specter of jail time as a cudgel to get him to quietly take a plea of criminally negligent homicide and a few years probation. By that point no one will care.

So while he certainly may be able to get off, it's a pretty hefty gamble to take a year in The Tombs over some easy peasy probation or suspended sentence or conditional release or whatever other deal the DA throws at him. If you're not a hardened criminal, the decision is pretty easy to make unless you have an ironclad case, which he doesn't. Goetz got off, but he was in a situation where he was actually approached by a group of people carrying potentially dangerous objects. With Penny, it's not clear if he was even in the same car while Neely went on his tirade, and he held the guy in a dangerous position much longer than can reasonably be described as necessary, especially given the publicity surrounding George Floyd. So I wouldn't say it's exactly a slam-dunk acquittal, and juries are unpredictable. You're basically trying to get the jury to sympathize with the general public's sense of order and decency, which seems fine enough until you realize that there's going to be a grieving family on the stand and in the gallery, and a prosecutor who's going to ask why he went for the guy's neck when several people were holding him down and restraining his arms and legs could have been equally effective. It's a pure crapshoot, and you don't risk prison on a crapshoot.

What damage? Outside of New York most people will forget about him pretty quickly. Within New York, his reputation will likely remain decidedly mixed.

Apparently he's working his way through college as a bartender -- the incident could be a benefit for a bartender job, but probably not for whatever he's up to at college.

He could maybe reenlist, depending what he pleads to?

I think the bigger question is what should we be doing with people like Neely?

I have settled on what I think would be referred to as "nicer prison" if using honest verbiage. The important part for me is that people like him are separated from decent society. Once that decision is made, it seems obvious to me that this should be made no more unpleasant for him than absolutely necessary. If it's feasible for him to do a little work as you suggest, sure, that seems like a more meaningful life than some other options. If he wants to basically just play video games all day, that's pretty much fine by me. If he'd like to walk around the grounds, that's fine as long as he's not getting into fights with others too frequently. Ultimately, I would leave the administration of this to people with much more expertise and interest than I with the basic mission of, "don't let this guy out, but don't make his life any worse than it has to be". I'm fine with funding this at fairly high levels because I think the current policy imposes massive externalities. How much would I pay for a subway that didn't have angry vagrants, begging pests, and meth-addled lunatics? A lot.

The issue with your proposal is that you have to provide the guy with some form of due process, and you'd need to establish what is practically an entirely separate division of the court system to do this. One of the reasons institutionalization started to wane in the 1960s was that the existence of psychiatric drugs meant that a lot of the people who were previously hopeless were now capable of leading normal lives. These people obviously didn't want to continue to be committed to a nuthouse, and the state has no interest in supporting people who are capable of supporting themselves, but there was an impasse because many of these people had lifetime insanity commitments. So the laws changed to require periodic reviews to determine if there was still reason for commitment. These reviews, of course are expensive, as you need to have a judge available, a representative of the state available, get an advocate for the inmate appointed, get testimony from doctors, etc. For every inmate, like once a year. So the goal became getting people with mental health problems either on their own or into group-home type settings where they could potentially have jobs outside and lead somewhat normal lives. This is obviously only one factor in the demise of institutionalization, but it's the relevant one for my case.

By and large, the system has worked. Historically, the main institutions for the Pittsburgh area were Mayview State Hospital and Woodville State Hospital. Mayview had over 3700 patients at its peak in and Woodville had 3200. By the time Mayview closed in 2008 it had a mere 225. By contrast, the winter 2022 homeless population of Allegheny County (the most recent year for which data is available) was 880, and only about 250 of them had severe mental illness. You could house all of the county's homeless population at just one of the old hospitals, though I'd personally want to limit it to people with mental illness, drug addiction, chronic health problems, and physical disabilities. In one fell swoop you eliminate all the people who are wither causing problems or are charity cases in need of treatment (I'd try to keep domestic violence victims separate because they are neither causing problems nor in need of treatment).

I'd propose a system where if someone gets arrested for something minor and meets certain criteria, like having a history of being homeless and committing the kinds of crimes the homeless commit, the prosecutor gives them the option of living in a voluntary residential community similar to a state hospital. The person could also be referred by a social worker if they aren't causing problems but are chronically homeless and have health problems or disabilities. If they opt in they are evaluated and either put into a treatment program or labeled long-term if it's unlikely treatment is going to help. Once in, they'll be given treatment they need and plenty of recreational activities, etc., including the opportunity to work if they so desire. They're free to leave at any time. That's the carrot. The stick is that there is a crackdown on public disorder caused by homelessness. If you don't opt in you will be prosecuted, and your social worker ain't gonna save you, because she wants you in the program. If you opt-in the program but leave before your treatment program is over or before 2 years in the case of chronics, you'll forfeit your right to go back into the program and will be dealt with by the legal system. The place would be nice but just crappy enough that no one who can live independently would live there voluntarily. I'm thinking mid-level assisted living facility.

That probably takes care of about half the homeless population. With them out of the way, we can focus on housing and employment and all the other things without them getting fucked up by the problematic people. Housing a bunch of strangers in a large dormitory is a lot easier when you know that none of them have any particular inclination to use drugs or steal from other residents or harass the women. The goal here should be to make sure that they have a place to sleep and keep their stuff and take a shower and do laundry so they can stay presentable for the the job market and either keep their jobs if they have them or go back to work if they don't. These places wouldn't have all the amenities as the institutions but there would be no restrictions on coming or going and would be more like a college dorm. The only real difference is that you're still in "the system" and any arrests or violations of drug policy (I'm thinking obvious signs of use, not mandatory searches) would have you shipped of to the institution or to jail.

It would be expensive but, honestly, if the state was willing to pay for round the clock care for over 7,000 people in Allegheny County (plus a few surrounding counties) in 1967, then doing less for fewer than a thousand should be a no-brainer. Hell, with commercial real estate in the shitter you could easily take a few floors from a downtown office complex and use that to house the normal homeless. The problematic ones would have to be on an estate with grounds somewhere out in the countryside since you can't just bottle them up like it's a prison, and that could get expensive since the sites of the old ones are now all luxury homes, but hey, they shouldn't have gotten rid of them in the first place.

the push for de-institutionalization is partly to blame. In the past maybe he would have been committed. It's easy to find solutions to deal with overtly violent or mentally ill people, but those who are a nuisance and only occasionally act or threaten violence, but without breaking laws or physically harassing people, are harder to deal with.

Would he have been institutionalized in a non-prison? Based on his choices of victims: children and old ladies, he seems fairly sane. Just bog standard sociopathy and desire to harm humans explains this behavior pretty well.

Couldn’t it be that there are just far less mentally ill people in Japan, per capita? At least when it comes to the mental illnesses, like schizophrenia, which are likely to produce homelessness and street harassment? I’ve seen persuasive evidence that rates of schizophrenia differ by race/ethnicity, and it seems plausible that Japan would have significantly less homelessness than the U.S. no matter what economic/political arrangement were in place in either country.

I’ve seen persuasive evidence that rates of schizophrenia differ by race/ethnicity, and it seems plausible that Japan would have significantly less homelessness than the U.S. no matter what economic/political arrangement were in place in either country.

Do you have a link? I agree it seems plausible Japan would have less homelessness regardless.

Here’s an analysis of race differences in psychotic personality. Huadpe also linked to a similar one up above. I’ll see if I can find one about schizophrenia.

That's a study of race and psychopathic personalities. That's a pretty big mistake. But otherwise a very interesting study, cheers.

You’re right, and I should have been far more careful in my phrasing and distinguished those two things. Good call-out.

I'm under the impression that mental health is very poorly-understood in Japanese society compared to the US, so it may just be that they seem mentally-healthier simply because they're broadly more ignorant of the potential reality of things. You arguably see this reflected in the culture; besides the culture around suicide mentioned below, I have seen a fair number of "these people need therapy" takes in discussions about mecha anime (especially as many characters in these works tend to be teenagers who go through traumatic things), and ever since the explosion of VTubing, the term "menhera" (from the English term "mental health") has become a fixture of the lexicon of certain communities around it (and often used in context of talents making particularly odd or poor decisions stemming from, well, mental health issues that haven't been diagnosed or treated). Japanese culture seems to favor the grin-and-bear-it approach to emotional suffering, whereas modern Western/first-world culture favors directly interrogating emotional suffering.

"Mental illness" is, I think in most cases, something of a euphemism. At best most of these people are dual diagnosis (mental illness and drug addiction).

Right, I’m specifically talking about the mental illnesses that cause the types of symptoms we associate with homeless street harassers; I don’t doubt that Japan has high rates of depression, anxiety, etc., but those don’t make you homeless and don’t make you harass strangers.

Japan as a culture has a long, long history of valorizing and romanticizing suicide as a totally acceptable and even deeply admirable response to a variety of negative situations. If culture has any effect at all on behavior, I'd expect a lot more suicide in a country that pumps out a deluge of memes about how suicide is heckin' rad.

There are tons of people who, with a cheap studio apartment could likely get by working part time hours at a McDonald's and being at least at the margin a productive-to-neutral member of society.

I think tons overstates it. A substantial portion of the unhoused cohort have already been evicted from free housing. They were unable to follow the rules for housing and many are non-compliant with their medication. They'll need more supervision than a flop house provides.

Neely ran away from a residential care facility he was placed in as part of a plea deal and there was a warrant for his arrest at the time of his killing. He's a shining example of someone who should be institutionalized, but lowering barriers to instituionalization involves complex trade offs and reasoning about them from viral news clips seems like a bad idea.

It comes up a lot in discussions of homelessness that there are lots of low visibility functional temporarily homeless people, and then a smaller number of high visibility dysfunctional long term homeless people. I briefly worked with an otherwise functional middle aged adult who had been homeless for a couple months. Cheap flophouses would be a huge benefit to people who are temporarily in between relatives with couches to crash on, but it wouldn't do much for the guys screaming on the subway.

Forensic mental health facilities are effectively prison tier secure. They are designed with multiple layered barriers between the inmate and the outside.

I have experience with the design of these facilities. In one fun example some open air courtyards are designed without 90 degree angles (think octogon rather than square) and with rotating anti-climb barriers . The reason for this is that some mental health patients are capable of ridiculous feats of strength and will attempt things that no sane person would attempt. Things like wedging themselves into a 90 degree corner of an outdoor courtyard and shimmying up 6 metres to get onto the roof.

Yes, that I can see. The people together enough to couch surf could use a flop / boarding house. Housing the Jordan Neely's with this cohort would drive them out, or pull down the marginal ones.

The cohort in tents are often in tents because of addiction or other mental health issues. They may not be as aggressive as Neely, but they're unlikely to be suitable for flop houses either.

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