Currently the options seem to be prison or Congress.
There are a lot of naive takes in this thread. Prison is objectively and disproportionately racist and classist. It's not so much about deterring crime as about terrorising and brutalising certain demographics.
For the winners to feel better about themselves, the losers have to lose hard. It's essentially just sadism.
This has nothing at all to do with preventing criminality, as the penal systems in other countries - notably Scandinavia - have proved.
> Currently the options seem to be prison or Congress.
This made me chuckle out loud, well done!
> There are a lot of naive takes in this thread. Prison is objectively and disproportionately racist and classist. It's not so much about deterring crime as about terrorising and brutalising certain demographics.
Yes, there are biases against various races and classes, but they absolutely don't override the bias against criminals. Our system is flawed, but it's far from "about terrorizing and brutalizing certain demographics". This kind extreme hyperbolic rhetoric isn't helpful, and insofar as it motivated the de-policing and catch/release prosecution policies which led to the violent crime surge, it has done far more harm to minority communities than the criminal justice system could hope to do.
> the de-policing and catch/release prosecution policies which led to the violent crime surge
I don't actually know if this is true, intuitively. The highest-crime areas are not the areas with the least police. The lowest-crime areas are not the areas with the most police. Crime seems to respond as a phenomenon to other dysfunction of society, not because there is opportunity to commit them.
So, I don't know, can you educate me more about the relationship between police presence and its causation statistically towards crime? [To be clear, I'm not asking in bad faith or whataboutism. I'm genuinely trying to become more educated in this as a layperson who doesn't study crime to any degree.]
I don’t think it makes sense to look at number of police versus crime because cities usually hire more officers when crime goes up, and in the case of the BLM crime surge it seems like they aren’t laying off officers but rather pressuring police to avoid discretionary, preventative policing for fear of becoming the next Ferguson. There are quite a few papers that establish this connection, but this one springs to mind:
> In June 2020, Harvard economist Roland Fryer and Tanaya Devi released a paper showing evidence of the Ferguson effect. Across five cities where a deadly shooting that went viral preceded an investigation into crime and policing, they found that the violent crime rate increased, resulting in an additional 900 homicides and 34,000 excess felonies across two years. They suggest that this was caused by changes in the quantity of policing. Other theories, such as changes in community trust, were not supported by the data.
Crime is not distributed evenly across society for both victims or perpetrators, that doesn't mean that we should all become subject to crime as a result. I do believe we should make sentencing more fair and not overly police people on the basis of race or class of course. If someone is caught doing X violent/antisocial crime (including things like burglary or redicivist theft) they should not be left to continue doing it even if they are in a disadvantaged group.
A lot of crimes are not one-offs but something done over and over again until they're caught. This applies for both (sexual) assault and property theft. Laws against those need to be enforced even if the first X don't involve prison, because the people stealing hundreds of dollars of merch every week or picking fights are making their communities worse in systemic ways, and after a certain point separation from society is the only way to protect everybody else from the antisocial behavior (and serve as a deterrent).
No, I am not affected by a single instance of someone taking candy from Walgreens. But I am when so much theft occurs that everything valuable is locked up, when prices are raised to account for shrinkage, or when retail operations close down. I am when I have to tell people to leave nothing in their car and not to park in certain spots with frequent breakins, or when I can't leave my bike locked up outside even for a few minutes, or when I can't get packages delivered to my address anymore because it will be immediately stolen if I'm not there.
The victims in aggregate aren't just the people or businesses being stolen from, but all the other people in the community who subsequently have to live in a food desert, pay high prices, or can't even get deliveries any more because there is so much theft.
Scandinavian countries have generous social systems which reduce the demand for crime in the first place. We could have that too.
Lock them up with other maladjusted people for years, then let them loose on society with a hardened attitude, extensive criminal connections, and no ability to find employment?
Well, we tried pulling back policing and slap-on-the-wrist prosecution policies and violent crime is surging. How long until friendship, positive energy, and rainbows kick in and bring crime levels down? There are more constructive solutions to the prison problem--notably solving frontend problems + prison reform, but locking up violent offenders is part of "solving frontend problems" so we can't exactly stop doing that and hope to make up the difference by investing in after school programs. Any serious solution to crime has to be "lock up offenders and X" rather than "letting offenders run rampant and X".
> we tried pulling back policing and slap-on-the-wrist prosecution policies and violent crime is surging
Firstly, where is pulling back policing happening? I don't know of a single city that has actually reduced their police size to any real sense?
Additionally, how do we know this isn't just correlation and not causation? Inflation is higher, more people are addicted to things, housing insecurity is rising.
> Firstly, where is pulling back policing happening?
Most metropolitan areas. Seattle [1][2] and Minneapolis [3] have both established public policies of not responding to, citing, or arresting for a wide range of offenses.
> I don't know of a single city that has actually reduced their police size to any real sense?
Minneapolis has reduced the number of police officers, through various means, by 30%. [4]
> Additionally, how do we know this isn't just correlation and not causation?
Because we have multiple studies proving a causal relationship. [5][6]
I'm not the person you asked, but if I rephrase your question to "Then why do some places with low crime have less police?", then the answer just seems to be common sense.
"Crime is surging" seems to be the current thing in the political discourse. That's how conservatives are attacking liberals these days in the US and in other places. It's mostly not supported by numbers (at least I checked where I live).
Crime rates have multiple causes to them, many go years back.
Maybe we should try to address the root causes instead of locking up more people? We have tough times economically, many reasons for people to despair, endless incitement to violence as means of resolving disagreements or other problems.
At the very least, a harsher approach to law enforcement has to be coupled with some path forward to address the other issues.
You are mistaken. Homicides are up 60% in the US since the pre-BLM era. This is widely acknowledged among criminologists and isn’t some “conservative misinformation”. Lots of research indicates at a causal relationship between the BLM protests and crime surges, including research that compares crime rates in individual cities before and after a major BLM protest. At some point I should just compile a canned list of papers so I don’t have to dig up links every time this talking point comes up.
> That's how conservatives are attacking liberals these days in the US and in other places.
Primarily as a completely organized and funded way to attack recently elected "progressive" city officials. After the enemy prosecutor/sheriff disappears, the crime wave evaporates as fast as the complaints about kids in cages did when Biden took over.
The main issue is that we have time based sentences only for most crimes. Criminals should never be left back in society unless they prove themselves fit/worthy to come back. Of course I don't mind a minumum time based sentences as punishment on top of that requirement either.
However betrayed trust cannot be repaid in full just serving time locked-up.
>The main issue is that we have time based sentences only for most crimes. Criminals should never be left back in society unless they prove themselves fit/worthy to come back.
So if this was the strategy of the U.S until about 2010 I suppose it would have been morally justifiable as an act of self-preservation to kill anyone that saw you smoking pot - assuming of course that there is such a thing as personal rights and people had the right to smoke pot, but the government prevented them from doing so.
on edit: perhaps I'm in a bad mood but I do find it astounding how often when one of these articles comes out about how inhumane the American prison system is, whole branches of the discussion devolve into conflicting ideas on how one can make it more inhumane.
Why would you kill someone who sees you smoking pot? That may lead to a minimum life sentece as punishment regardless of your rehabilitation.
If you were certain that you can never quit smoking pot/rehabilitate in prison then perhaps your action "could be" justifiable.
You should be aware that drug use is not affecting only you. You also fund an international criminal enterprise. If you want to use drugs then take the hard, legal way(i.e political activism).
As far as I'm concerned all drugs should be legal and served in hospitals unpon request at reasonable prices or free for those who cannot afford them. But I'm not making the laws so I'm not looking providing drugs to addicts at affordable prices either regardless of how ethical would be.
>If you were certain that you can never quit smoking pot/rehabilitate in prison then perhaps your action "could be" justifiable.
If you have a right to smoke pot then you should not have to rehabilitate yourself, just as you should not have to love Big Brother or any other number of things.
>If you want to use drugs then take the hard, legal way(i.e political activism).
here I'm wondering if you are using 'you' to refer to people in general or to me? Either way it's sort of silly, hardly anybody is going to say I will do drugs after my political activism to make doing drugs legal succeeds! If it's to me I don't smoke pot, but I do believe people have the right to do it.
So if you are going to be thrown in prison on an indefinite sentence for something you have the right to do then I would advocate extreme violence for anyone that was in danger of being arrested for smoking pot.
In the end your indefinite time until rehabilitation proposal is more extreme than the current American system.
>As far as I'm concerned....
reading your last paragraph I get the feeling your view of 'drugs' is they are all somehow the same as heroin?
Well, if you have that right into law then I don't understand why you think you risk going to jail.
As far as I am concerned I believe people should be allowed to take any drug they want and even commit assisted suicide for any reason they want (as long as they are sane). After all we own our body and the gov should only protect us from abuse from others(i.e misleading advertising like they did with the tabacco).
That being said I believe in indefinite time until rehabilitation. If the law is wrong we should work to fix it instead to bend it at the expense of so many especially for crimes that lead to violent/tragic outcomes.
I also think people should own the effects of their choices. Buying from criminal or terrorist organisations does lead to tragic situations for many people regardless of the product you buy. Being ignorant shouldn't absolve you of guilt.
Mandatory minimums do work. They don't work when they're draconian measures passed in law-and-order frenzies by reactionaries, but they work for decreasing sentencing disparities between sympathetic criminals and unsympathetic ones.
The fact that the mandatory minimums for crack were so much higher than for powder cocaine was a good thing. They're an admission that the system is openly racist, and a target to aim at. Without them, we'd just have judges sentencing white snorters to probation and putting black smokers under the jail on their own discretion, and we'd need statistics that we wouldn't be given access to in order to make a case. It's better when racism is out in the open rather than buried in a judge's latitude.
Surely I must be misunderstanding everything you just said.
> The fact that the mandatory minimums for crack were so much higher than for powder cocaine was a good thing. They're an admission that the system is openly racist, and a target to aim at.
So you're saying the system is racist and we're seeing it in the value of mandatory minimums, therefore we should aim for more mandatory minimums to even out the racism? Do you believe the same thing when it comes to police shooting black men, i.e. that more white men should also get shot in order to live in a world that's more fair? Therefore making it a "good thing" that people get shot at all?
I think it's kind of interesting. The people one might concerned about are probably: "Homicide, Aggravated Assault, and Kidnapping Offenses" -> 3.2% of prisoners. "Robbery" -> 2.8% ...
I think the first question is what % of all prisoners should probably not be there in the first place and how do you deal with the root causes of them getting there. Then we can worry about when we let them out.
Some people can't function in society. What do you do with them?