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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   38347 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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I think that Scott's latest article on how to defeat homelessness, was an okay steelman argument for the liberal policies with regards to the issue. At least, it's completely in line with the arguments I hear regarding my city's issues. There are a couple of things missing, though.

  1. People don't become psychotic out of nowhere. Years of unrestricted drug use does that to a person. And no, I don't want the continuation of the war on drugs, but I'm convinced that without somehow removing the drugs from the equation it's infinitely harder to approach a solution.
  2. Why do other countries don't have this problem? It's multifaceted, for sure - Finland and Japan use the "housing first" system Scott suggests and achieve great results, but I'll highlight one factor that I don't see anyone talking about in the first world: shame. In some societies like China or Turkey it's shameful to have a relative who is homeless. It's largely a cultural thing, but ultimately having relatives care about the homeless is a cheaper solution than building endless fields of Soviet blocks and intentionally creating ghettos that require policing. Is it possible to change a culture? How exactly is the western culture different? This is much harder to answer, but if we are talking about an ideal world with ideal outcomes, I'd prefer the community that experiences the issue to directly handle the issue.

It's predicated on the idea that to solve the problems with the homeless, you must solve the problems the homeless have. And that is simply not true. You don't need to solve the problems the yellow smoke has, and you don't need to solve the problems the (aggressive, drug-addled, mentally ill) homeless have either.

Suppose we've built institutions for the mentally ill. And we put people in them, and they take their drugs, and they get better. Now we let them out. We don't need armies of social service workers... we just tell them that if they don't take their drugs and they start doing whatever got them locked up, we're going to treat them as criminals this time. If they can't understand that, they're not well enough to be let out. And so each time they don't take their drugs, we lock them up for some fixed and increasing term until either they're locked up forever or stop committing crimes.

That's the nice approach. The nastier approach just treats them as ordinary criminals from the get-go and ignores their mental health problems.

Long term incarceration is expensive. In California, it is about 350$ a day. And you would have to be prepared to lock up a lot of people, because the chronic homeless population is heavily slanted towards people who are unable to follow their long term incentives -- jail one to deter 100 will not work.

If we ignore the utility to the homeless themselves (as you seem to prefer), the question becomes whether the negative externalities of the median homeless person are above that sum. I don't doubt that there are some whose negative externalities can reach 1k$/day, but I don't think that is the typical case.

Long term incarceration is expensive.

Because of the same category of people who are telling us to be compassionate for the homeless! You cant cause a problem then use that problem as a reason to not solve another problem! Its disingenuous!

I agree that the minimum viable prison is just a fenced-off area with some guards watching the fence who optionally throw food in.

Unfortunately, such a prison would also be a human rights violation. If you imprison someone, you take away most of their agency which they could have used to look after their basic human interests, such as being housed, fed, adequately medicated and neither raped nor murdered. I think it is reasonable that the society who imprisoned a person should take care of these necessities.

And caring for a bunch of people who have already failed to be deterred by the grossest disincentive society has against bad behavior (prison) and preventing them from raping and murdering each other is going to be more expensive per capita than running a boarding school.

I would be surprised if the cost of imprisonment was that high because bleeding heart liberals had pushed for daily changed satin bed sheets and a wide selection of organic food for the prisoners. My money would be on general cost disease, possibly with a sprinkling of market failure (e.g. regulatory capture by the prison industrial complex).

Even in Texas, the costs per prisoner per day are 77$.

You do realize $350 and $77 are much different numbers.

We also have tech solutions today to prevent them from raping and murdering each other. Require them to wear Apple glasses or just watches. Put cheap cameras everywhere.

If you kill someone then we just need an immediate execution. If you rape someone then off to the hole for 10 years. This would negate the need for highly paid unionized gods.

Prison guards. Highly paid. These two descriptors do not belong in the same sentence.

I think labor costs are high because prisons take a lot of labor.

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