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I'm hopping in off this due to the shoplifting comment, where one of the points is to put up kiosks where the - hmm, can't call them perpetrators or criminals, I suppose "unfortunate victims of systemic racism"? - can be connected with social services.
Guy with a knife is threatening "open the till or I'll cut your throat" - send in the social workers! They (or more likely, "she" as one will be sent on their own) will talk him down! He will regret his life choices and become compliant once a sympathetic shoulder to cry on is presented!
Yeah, sure. Even the most bleeding-heart social worker is going to want police backup in the scenario of "armed criminal/crazy guy being violent". Is it any surprise that when faced with the concrete results of policies, people switch to "maybe we do need the cops after all"?
I'm not against compassionate policies and there are people who need help due to bad life circumstances or mental illness. But not when it comes to gangs of professional thieves who are career criminals doing this as a job, and not when it's down to comfortably middle-class DAs and prosecutors more interested in virtue signalling and being part of the network of the NGOs who are making careers out of this than in actually helping anyone. 'Revolving door arrests' those guys, safe in the knowledge that you will never have to encounter them face-to-face in your daily life.
And this is why I do agree that criminals should lose the right to vote: they've demonstrated that they do not want to participate in civic life or be bound by the laws on all citizens, and that they have no perception of others as fellow-citizens or respect for their rights. When you put yourself outside the common life, you lose the rights of that common life. Come back in, demonstrate genuine reform, and then ask for your rights to be restored.
Prison doesn't work if all that happens is you scoop someone up, dump them in there, do nothing about reform, then let them back out to resume their interrupted career once the sentence is served. There has to be real effort put into diverting young offenders off the path of crime and helping out guys who do want to reform but have few to no options if left on their own to go back where they came from.
But this is expensive and needs a lot of work, so it's easier to build prisons, fill them to bursting, then - when the inevitable failure occurs - turn on a dime and start releasing or not even arresting criminals in the first place. If you can't make people adhere to the terms of their bail, or their parole, or the programme for drugs they were sent on instead of serving jail time, then such things are toothless and do no good at all.
Apart from that, I have unhappily come to the conclusion that there are some people who will never change, no matter if you intervene when they're sixteen or if they're twenty or thirty. They don't care, they are only in it for themselves, they're just smart enough to be able to invoke the "pity poor little me, I had a hard life, it's not my fault" but they have no intention of changing. They want social services and the rights of unemployment assistance, social housing, etc. because they want anything and everything they can get for nothing, but they don't contribute, don't want to contribute, and think that ordinary people are suckers to be exploited. They want cheap drugs, easy sex, free money, no necessity to work or do anything, and no consequences. Knock that bitch up? Not my responsibility. Steal from my own family to get a fix? Not my responsibility. Slack off on training programme to get a job? Not my responsibility. Get fired from job after job because I show up late, don't work, and steal on the job? Not my responsibility.
Those are the hardcore who are the minority but do need to be treated differently, and yeah that is going to mean some form of "lock them up" or restrict them or harsher treatment. Because they will never change, and soft treatment just confirms their belief that "you are all suckers and sheep to be fleeced".
This is not so. Men achieve peak of their criminal career between 16 and 30, after that they naturally become more placid. If you keep the worst offenders in prison during that time, you physically prevent majority of the crime they’d ever commit, even if you do absolutely nothing to rehabilitate them. In short, they do not exactly resume their career.
Not exactly the same career, but -- won't someone who spent most of their youth learning no skills that are not crime-related, socializing with nobody except other criminals, and is actively discouraged from finding non-criminal jobs and forming non-criminal social connections even after leaving prison, be rather unlikely to become a highly productive member of society, even if they strongly wish to?
I do not, in fact, care about them being highly productive members of society. I am not going for some sort of grand society improvement project. I just want them to stop committing crime.
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Highly productive might be a stretch, but "noncriminal and employed" is probably doable.
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I’m willing to try other ideas. For example, I’d be interested in adopting public beatings a la Singapore for first time non deadly (or non child related) felony crime.
But after that, I think jail serves the purpose of incapacitating the criminal. If you still commit crime after a public flogging, then you deserve to be removed from society.
Agree with the public beatings. Have medical professionals see if the individual in question is able to endure it: it would suck to have a criminal with brittle bones or something.
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Either (A) we have no idea how to do that or (B) there aren't actually all that many people falling only in that category. So we should do what we can -- put more criminals in prison, building more if necessary. Perhaps if (A) is true we should work on how to do it, but not unless we're willing to reject ideas that don't work. Personally I suspect it is possible in theory, but possibly not in practice -- it would involve catching minor criminals far more often and punishing them swiftly with unpleasant but short stays in jail. But that's only a theory and even if implementable may not actually work.
There's the old idea of "bad company" or "going astray". There are young people who are weak-willed (and maybe weak-minded) who get into 'the wrong crowd' who happily use them as catspaws - I can think of two examples off the bat from the school where I worked.
One was a teenage guy who was the only child of elderly parents. He had 'educational problems' (meaning intellectual disabilities) but he was bigger and stronger than his parents who had no means of keeping him under control; there was no way the dad could lock him in his room or threaten him because the kid would just be violent in return. He came to notice because he had spending money without having a job. Strong suspicion that he was being used for petty crime because, to be blunt, he was big and dumb and easily influenced. If he got caught, no problem - he didn't know enough and wasn't smart enough to turn in the guys in the gang and he'd be the one ending up doing time while they found another patsy.
Second was a girl from a broken home, again easily led and not that smart (no diagnosis of learning disabilities). Again got into "bad company", ended up habitually truant, eventually dropping out of school and ending up on that early school leavers' programme I mentioned. Hard to track down because she kept moving around couch-surfing with 'friends', said friends introduced her to weed and other 'harmless' fun substances. Eventually she ends up on heroin, a single mother, and doing time in jail for stabbing another girl in the stomach at a house party. I'd followed her 'career progression' from the time she was in school with poor attendance, but basically okay, to reading the reports on her file about where she ended up (prison) due to the various jobs I'd worked in, and it was depressing.
These two weren't naturally criminal, they were weak and got led down the wrong path. If there were a robust system of intervention (i.e. if you could do anything other than 'now Johnny, that's naughty' and have to let them go under the guidance of an over-worked social worker who can't handle the workload they already have and will probably be switched out for somebody new and the whole process repeat itself) then there is a good chance of keeping them off the path of crime and jail. They maybe won't be the most productive members of society but you can divert them off the track that leads to a baby, a heroin habit, and jail.
But that requires going back to the bad old days of discipline and industrial schools and the rest of the things that nice, middle-class, university graduates protest about and work to do away with. The activists that, as they get older, move seamlessly from student socialist protests while in college to professional careers, nice middle-class well-off neighbourhoods, and the concerns of that set.
EDIT: Actually, there's a third example comes to mind. Another kid on the early school leavers' programme whose career I had followed from school onwards; he had anger management problems and suffered from being spoiled by his single-parent mother whose reaction to every disciplinary action by the school was to turn up and scream about "why are you picking on my son?" Mommy gets pregnant again, drops everything (including son) to dote on the new baby, kid is left adrift since Mommy no longer cares a damn about him and ends up on the programme, where another kid who definitely was on the path to prison (and deserved to end up there because he was one of the habitual losers who don't want to reform) used him again as a tool. Jailbait doesn't want to sit through a full class trying to teach him something he might use to get a job? He winds up Angry Kid who can reliably be set off like a hand grenade, who starts throwing chairs etc. and the rest of the morning goes on calming down Angry Kid and dealing with the aftermath of the meltdown. Jailbait sits there smirking and going "I didn't do anything, I only said X" (where X is on the surface innocent but will push Angry Kid's buttons).
Jailbait deserves to end up doing time, I don't know if he did because I moved to different job and lost track of him. Angry Kid again needs intervention (including taking him away from Mommy who did nothing to help him because she was using him as an extension of herself) but is likely to end up involved in petty crime. That's the difference.
I really like the additional block about Angry Kid and his interaction with jailbait because it illustrates a pernicious part of the problem that is both underappreciated and extremely hard to remedy...
A very small percentage of true sociopaths / anti-social personalities can destroy entire communities, especially if those communities are already fragile, and this can be done without the sociopath's overt attempt (i.e. "all I said was x").
Raphael Mangual talks about this in his book Criminal Injustice and, if memory serves, Roland Fryer had a paper that analyzed the disastrous effects of even a single murder on a neighborhood in (again, going off memory here) St. Louis.
I think the short, mid, and long term solution is more cops. A HELL of a lot more cops. First, this would be to simply dissuade crime. Yes, the sociopaths don't care, but the young "hoppers" who are just getting acquainted with crime will still avoid a purse snatch, or a hand-to-hand deal, etc. if there's a police cruiser within line of sight. Second, more seasoned cops can be freed up to perform Community Policing (don't worry, TollBooth hasn't go Prog on y'all) .... what I mean is acting as intelligence agents ... without calling it that ... because something something constitution.
You want the veteran cops creating detailed reports of the network of crime in a given area, with special attention paid to those sociopaths. That attention could be quite obvious - meaning that the "target" ought to know the Cops are watching him or her closely. Optimistically, this would hopefully have the same impact as incarceration. That is, creating a "dead zone" for the sociopath's criminal capabilities. At the very least, the second the target commits a violent crime, the arrest could be swift.
I sort of think that America has an over-incarceration problem, but not because we're just chucking all the kids with joints into prison. Again, reading Criminal Injustice, your average prison (not jail) inmate has over a dozen arrests and more than a handful of felony charges. We give our Junior Varsity criminals a lot of time to practice and then get serious with them after they do some Big League crime. The solution, IMHO, is to over-emphasize the front of the funnel; more arrests more frequently, more visible police presence always.
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It sounds like one very effective way to protect people like A, B, and C in your story would be to more rapidly and permanently incarcerate the genuine bad eggs around them, as well as making opiate drugs less widely available. The state can’t ensure that feckless weak-willed people are exposed to healthy friendship circles or overcome their natural deficits in decision-making. However, it can intervene to ensure that there are fewer bad actors around to exploit them.
Indeed, particularly in the case of B- has there ever been any society which has had success in keeping stupid but not actually literally mentally disabled teenaged girls from broken homes from getting taken advantage of until they wind up in a bad spot in a way that can't be fixed, like ever in the history of the world- some of these people will never have good outcomes, but you can probably make their outcomes less bad just by removing the worst aspects from society.
Did they do everything but have sex, the Mormon way, or were they actually chaste?
Oral sex was practiced by those in the know, perhaps less than 5%, but the complete lack of sex education meant that most people learned about the mechanics of sex from farmers' kids. Farmers understand a lot about breeding but are focussed almost entirely on cattle in Ireland, and the insights do not transfer quite as easily as you might think.
I would guess that most girls did not understand the basic physics of sex when they graduated high school. I have witnessed people explaining to young grooms what was expected on their wedding night. It is possible that boys were even less adroit, but they at least knew about erections.
The girls were chaste for the most part out of fear. The guys were chaste out of a complete lack of options and strangely, religious reasons. John B. Keane has a play, the Chastitute, written in 1981, that captured the zeitgeist well:
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There’s also option C- we have a very good idea of how to do it such that any retired cop in a diner could tell you how, but for some reason that probably has to do with civil rights or non discrimination society has decided it’s against the rules.
What, exactly, are you alluding to?
The Constitution, and hundreds of years of precedent after it (so, precedent relative to today), prevents arrest without clearing what is the highest barrier for evidence and evidence collection in the Western World.
The "retired cop in a diner" would say something like "Every Cop knows that Bad Leroy Brown is running the drug market on the South Side. But he's never actually in the room with drugs, or on phones, and no one will testify against him, so we can't indict."
This is actually a major recurring theme in The Wire. Where the kingpins generally are so far removed from the street that indicting them is a long term game of cat and mouse. Meanwhile ,the chaos that results from their empires destroys a city and then only "high visibility" solution is to "rip and run" - i.e. engage in low level arrests of minor players in an effort to clean up the streets.
The civil liberties slippery slope is real. We can't, as a society, just start making exceptions because "everybody says Leroy Brown is the big man around the way."
Interesting. Do you know how, say, an English or Australian policeman would handle Bad Leroy Brown, the local drug kingpin?
I can't say with a lot of specific certainty as I don't know those policing systems much at all.
I know that the concept of civil liberties and privacy are fundamentally weaker. For instance, I know that there has been at least an official police visit to folks who have posted offensive language on twitter. Not an arrest, per se, but an official sanctioned visit to the domicile. The threshold for what would take a warrant in the USA is much lower. I believe the language is "vital to an ongoing investigation" at the discretion of the police themselves - no judge needed.
So, assuming I'm not wildly off base with my statements above (which are, admittedly, fuzzy at best) ... A constable in the UK would hear that Leroy Brown is a bad dude from the local toughs and then, presumably, launch and official investigation. This would allow Constable Fish-N-Chips to surveil Mr. Brown and search his domicile (again, I think) with near impunity. No such thing as off-limits or 'non-pertinent' information. It's a 24/7 (or as much time as the cops feel like) surveillance and waiting game until Mr. Brown somehow commits a crime with prosecuting.
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I'm not alluding to anything in particular, just pointing out that it's entirely possible in the society we have that the solution is both known and politically impossible because it has bad optics or a disproportionate impact or something.
Yeah. I would suspect that "catch and flog/beat petty criminals" might be it, or at least part of it.
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