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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   2220 thread views

Transnational Thursday for January 11, 2024

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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The cartels have responded in kind with major prison uprisings and ghastly footage of them breaking into a news broadcasting station and holding the staff hostage on live TV. It's been a really crazy few days.

I wouldn't mind them hanging around as debate moderators, especially if they're strict about time keeping. Shooting an Uzi next to someone's ear works better than muting mics!

I am curious to see how a genuine "tough on crime" policy plays out, now that we have multiple ongoing experiments. Some people might still like to believe that violence and repression can never work when it comes to reducing crime, whereas it's obvious to me that if it doesn't, you're not using enough, or at least employing it on the wrong targets. Bukele somehow didn't manage to shut up all the doubters, but at least other people in power have noticed and that seems to have overruled a lot of institutional inertia and learned helpless handwringing.

It'll be interesting to see what Noboa does next. He ran on and for now seems to be pursuing a genuine tough on crime policy, but there are a fair amount of people who suspect his family of having cartel ties as well. His family is a banana shipping magnate and banana shipments are the primary way (that we/Europe have caught at least) that the Ecuadorian cartels have been moving drugs. The cartels are more recent in Ecuador but at least in more established countries like Colombia (1, 2) and Mexico it's normal for them to spend significant sums backing friendly candidates to the Presidency.

Bukele somehow didn't manage to shut up all the doubters,

In fairness it's a lot easier to lock up all the criminals when they've tattooed "bad guy" on their face. The real trick is just to have such a permissive approach to crime that gang members feel comfortable labeling themselves, then you can swoop em up all at once. Fwiw though, Bukele does have a string of copycat candidates running/or who ran in elections across Central and South America, though not all of them successful.

There are very few important political actors in Central America who doesn’t have some sort of ties to some drug crime. It’s typically more useful to think of the “cartels” (what a weird name when you think about it) as public-private partnerships between the drug entrepreneurs and different levels of the government. The real difficulty these states have fighting against cartels doesn’t have anything to do with regular policing problems. It’s the challenge of organising the state apparatus to fight parts of itself. Army against police departments, judiciary against army, central government against provincial governors etc is how it usually goes. There is a reason why these states get a new “totally not corrupt this time” police department every 5 years to investigate the other police departments. “Cartel”s are often just a part of the state organism

I think the meaning of a genuine tough on crime policy is very different in Ecuador or El Salvador where the crime problem is organised crime where sane people have chosen to persue criminal careers because they are more attractive than legal careers, versus a place like the US where most of the crime we are worried about is committed by drunks, druggies and mentally ill people.

If the gangs are credibly threatening the State's monopoly on violence (and busting a gang leader out of jail counts), then fighting them is more like war than policing.

I agree that long jail sentences don't act as a great deterrent for U.S. criminals, but they are still extremely valuable. Why? Because there is immense value to keeping the worst of society isolated during their most violent years.

Most criminals do not commit only one crime. They tend to commit dozens. The typical murderer will be a career criminal with several serious crimes. If we arrest and jail people for armed robbery or assault, we reduce the pool of potential murderers. Three strikes laws worked great in this regard.

As the prison population increased from 1980–2010, the crime rate fell.

As the prison population decreased since 2010, the crime rate rose.

Could you provide some citations on "typical murderer will be a career criminal"? Are you saying that murderers are generally violent people who tend to commit other crimes like assault (which I can believe), or specifically that they pursue crime as a career (i.e. serial robbers, shoplifters, etc.)?

Are you saying that murderers are generally violent people who tend to commit other crimes like assault

Yes.

or specifically that they pursue crime as a career (i.e. serial robbers, shoplifters, etc.)?

No, I don't believe they are primarily motivated by money. I think they are just violent people.

Could you provide some citations on "typical murderer will be a career criminal"?

You're going to be hard pressed to find an academic study on this matter for the usual obvious reasons. But the newspaper is full of anecdotes of killers being arrested who already have dozens of convictions which in a city like Seattle means hundreds of crimes.

Here's a stat from an earlier time (2002) https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/ascii/vfluc.txt

"Sixty-seven percent of murderers had an arrest record."

This does seem unbelievably low to me. I remember an earlier study out of Wisconsin that said the average murderer had already been arrested SIX times before committing the murder. Unfortunately, this seems to have been memory holed.

Are you saying that murderers are generally violent people who tend to commit other crimes like assault

Yes.

or specifically that they pursue crime as a career (i.e. serial robbers, shoplifters, etc.)?

No, I don't believe they are primarily motivated by money. I think they are just violent people.

Makes more sense. Because yeah, there are places where most murder is by actual career criminals - organised crime, in particular - but I was strongly under the impression that the West wasn't in that category.

"Sixty-seven percent of murderers had an arrest record."

This does seem unbelievably low to me. I remember an earlier study out of Wisconsin that said the average murderer had already been arrested SIX times before committing the murder.

Both can be simultaneously true, because there are some murderers who have been arrested literally hundreds of times and that drives up the mean. In particular, psychopaths. Quoting from Without Conscience:

Many of the antisocial acts of psychopaths lead to criminal convictions. Even within prison populations psychopaths stand out, largely because their antisocial and illegal activities are more varied and frequent than are those of other criminals. Psychopaths tend to have no particular affinity, or “specialty,” for any one type of crime but tend to try everything. This criminal versatility is well illustrated in the television program, described earlier in this chapter, in which Robert Ressler interviewed G. Daniel Walker. Following is a brief exchange from that interview:

“How long is your rap sheet?”

“I would think the current one would probably be about twenty-nine or thirty pages.”

“Twenty-nine or thirty pages! Charles Manson’s is only five.”

“But he was only a killer.”

What Walker meant was that he himself was not only a killer but a criminal of enormous versatility, a fact of which he seemed very proud. He openly boasted of having committed more than three hundred crimes in which he had not been caught.

I think he means that it's the other way around.

A career criminal is much more likely to commit all sorts of crime. Locking them up for their other crimes won't reform them or deter like-minded people outside but while locked up it will prevent them from continuing to do crime, including possibly murder.

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