The typical American believes in human sacrifice. We don't think of it that way, but that's what it is. A heinous crime, especially one that violates an individual, is a shock to the social fabric, and the prescription is that somebody must be harmed to purge society of the bad juju. Ideally, it's the perpetrator, but historically, it isn't that important. We're more than happy to let innocent people rot in prison and to let corrupt police and prosecutors off the hook for misconduct, as long as they continue to produce the human sacrifices we demand. It's not even necessary to solve crime as long as the state is able to inflict damage to the right sorts of people in response. It doesn't particularly matter that our criminal criminal justice system is woefully inefficient at solving or preventing crime. The cruelty of the criminal justice system and everything that follows is the point.
It's not a human sacrifice, it's putting the criminal somewhere will they won't be able to hurt anyone ever again, therefore reducing the expected level of killing.
I'm 100% for keeping people safe, including physically separating dangerous people from the rest of the population, but
1) Way too often, we don't catch the killer or put people away on flimsy evidence.
2) We have murderers in prison way beyond the circumstances that led to them to commit murder. In other words, ones that likely pose no particular elevated risk.
3) The inhumane conditions of the prison system do nothing to enhance public safety. In fact, they make it worse by doing immense trauma to incarcerated people, leading to high recidivism and high violence and poor health within the prisons.
Has nothing to do with bad ju ju, and everything to do with finding a fitting punishment of sufficient unpleasantness as to deter even people with short time preferences from harming others.
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
Remember the author, as cool as he sounds, murdered somebody.
And how is that working? For all of the cruelty of our justice and carceral system, we still have high crime and high recidivism. It's catastrophically bad policy from a public safety standpoint, costing an immense amount of money for the outcomes we get. And yet, there's not much public motivation to demand better.
I have concluded that the system largely does what the public wants. It inflicts tremendous harm and collateral damage with a veneer of plausible deniability that lets us tell ourselves that it's about crime reduction, justice, and/or rehabilitation.
To add to the previous, where is our commitment to misconduct and abuse of power that causes widespread damage? If we actually cared about deterring crime, we'd take the same punitive approach to white collar criminals as street crime.
I argue that white collar crime doesn't have the same psychological effect on society. It doesn't create the same demand for human sacrifice. Consequently, you've got no interest in taking a pound of flesh, combined with the same lack of actual care for safeguarding the public interest.
