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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30068 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 21, 2023

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The most direct way this is confused is that public schools are just not that structurally different from private schools. They both have english, math, history. Students in both write essays on To Kill A Mockingbird. Students in both do homework. Students in both play sports in some capacity. Most of the differences (e.g. misbehavior, poorer academic performance) are caused by the different student populations/genes/cultures (and the rest are caused by the different teacher populations, which have the same cause as the different student populations). Affluent/rich/elite people cluster spatially, both for other reasons and intentionally for 'good schools', and - where they differ - public high schools in rich areas are much closer to private rich high schools than public poor schools. So it just doesn't do what it'd claim to. Maybe we could do class-based busing? I don't think that'd go over well.

Having thus established that the vast majority of the society doesn't have real incentives against rehabilitative justice, we greenlight anyone who wants to test their theories about how to rehabilitate criminals--more particularly, we ask the same George Soros fund that elected progressive DAs to bankroll and vet these initiatives, to make sure that the obvious grifters are excluded.

Any form of rehabilitation that'd work would be too coercive for the DAs to endorse, though. Even something like 'actually preventing most crime' is too coercive for them. Moldbug's only-a-little-in-jest suggestion a decade ago was to give black church leaders legal control/ownership of the convicted black criminals.

The most important part is that we also pass relatively strict laws against recidivism, say, doubling the term every time.

I'm sure you've heard of 'three-strikes laws'? The anti-prison activists didn't 'try to rehabilitate their charges', they just fought three-strikes laws.

that private schools are just not that structurally different from private schools

I assume one of those was meant to be "public".

The author is comparing private schools in US to private schools (actually public?!) in England surely! /s

Any form of rehabilitation that'd work would be too coercive for the DAs to endorse, though.

I'm sure you've heard of 'three strikes laws'? The anti-prison activists didn't 'try to rehabilitate their charges', they just fought three-strikes laws.

https://www.themotte.org/post/640/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/132062?context=8#context

The actual problem we have today is that progressives think that, even though recidivism is happening, criminals (many are black, after all) still shouldn't be imprisoned for extended periods of time. That's the thing that needs to be solved. Your proposal just assumes you can pass three-strikes laws that actually work, and then leave recidivism reduction up to team Soros, but ... we currently can't, because of the efforts of team Soros. As a result, I don't see the point here.

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