This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
(1) Another Scott Watch. Note: I am not a California resident.
How's about this essay and comments on ACX?
The Case Against California Proposition 36
Scott publishes a guest essay by Clara Collier who argues against California's Proposition 36. Prop 36 modifies California's Prop 47 which increased the value required in crimes such as shoplifting and theft ($950) before qualifying as a felony charge. Readers of this forum should be familiar with the basic story arc here. Prop 47 passed, 2018-2022 came, more compassionate district attorneys were elected, less thieves kept in prison, and policing was softened. Now it is common in the big CA metropolises for stores lock up items like toothpaste to deal with an increase in opportunistic and organized retail theft.
Offenders repeatedly arrested with hard drugs (now including fentanyl) will face felony charges if Prop 36 passes. It allows judges to send presumed dealers or suspects with large quantities of drugs to prison instead of county jail. It carves out some exceptions for mandated or opt-in treatment-- which Clara Collier thinks is useless, because CA doesn't have enough in-patient beds anyway. Collier also shares there's not enough room in prison and identifies Prop 47 as a response to an overcrowded prison population. The money saved from not putting people in jail is spent on various treatment and rehabilitation programs.
No real comment on the efficacy of treatment programs that California mandates through Prop 47. It sounds like they're probably not very effective.
The comment section on this article is lively for ACX. Lots of finger pointing and blame to go around.
As Collier says, California can lock people up for longer, but there's a hard limit for how many prisoners can be housed. I would think this answer would be obvious: build more prisons. Personally, I still think there's a place for work camps and chain gangs for offenders less likely to run off. Probably more personnel heavy, but less structural overhead to build a camp out and dig a well out in the wilderness. Maybe this is an impractical romanticized idea, or it is considered cruel and unusual these days.
There's an additional argument between people pointing out that an increase in prison time doesn't matter if prosecutors don't prosecute. Which became more common since 2018 in liberal cities and was supercharged in 2020. The other side, including Clara, points fingers at police for being lazy good-for-nothings (my words, not hers) that don't do their job right. For me, it is obvious that police who don't expect the criminals they arrest to be punished are less inclined to arrest people. I would expect this to be the conclusion of rationalists who are interested in incentive structures, but I guess there's enough compounding problems, and policing unpopular enough, it can be quietly asserted that cops are bad, or swept under the carpet.
I do agree that following through with prosecution and "clearing" cases matters more than whether something is a felony or misdemeanor. The value in making it a felony is that it should encourage prosecutors and police to go after cases. It is a signal from the people saying, lock these people up actually and felony convictions hold more weight in law enforcement and DA offices. "I have X felony arrests or X felony convictions" is a metric most police and prosecutors will point at as a record, unless your police and prosecutors consider more arrests/convictions as a bad thing. It can be a bad metric for performance that leads to unnecessary prosecutions and pleas, but maybe it's still better than this alternative.
If I were a California resident, and my city left me dissatisfied, I would probably vote for Prop 36 just to send a signal to officials. Deal with this problem. That's pretty much it. I wouldn't care about how ineffective prison is, or impossible it is to jail more people. I'd start with this, then ask for more. The alternative, which Collier advocates, is more of the same. Which, as a dissatisfied resident, would not appeal to me. Then, I'd probably vote for DA's that do stuff like convict criminals and a state leadership that builds more prisons when they're full instead of releasing criminals.
(2) Among the comments was posted this piece by City Journal earlier this year. I had missed this whole story, it is more interesting than the ACX post, and it probably deserves its own post. Maybe you guys already did that.
The The California Racial Justice Act of 2020 is starting to bear fruit for convicts in the California penal system.
The RJA allows convicts that can show racial disparities in sentencing and various other flavors of racial bias. Including one example in the article of a policeman who, claiming that he did not see the race of an individual driver in a car before he pulled it over, where it was argued this could be true-- but still racially biased because of "unconscious" implicit bias.
I'm open to the idea City Journal is being uncharitable and misrepresentative here, but it seems like California's legal system faces a number of crises. Which, given the statistics of crime and prosecution, is what I would call this trend. Ok, I'm out of steam.
Clara's core argument is that longer sentences do not decrease crime, so vote no on 36.
The paper she links says the opposite, Clara just chooses to ignore the sections that don't agree with her:
Clara is not an honest person. She does not seriously engage with the question "do longer sentences decrease crime." She selectively engages in the question in such a way that points to her favored outcome. She openly lies about the content of papers she uses to argue her favored outcome.
An honest reckoning of this question needs to consider incapacitation - when someone is locked in prison they cannot engage in crimes outside of prison. I have yet to see an explanation for the below two facts.
criminality is extremely concentrated, it is the same people being arrested over and over again. https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1647031826202935300
people who are released from prison will the majority of time go on to commit more crimes.
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/research/recidivism_and_reentry/
It is extremely clear that criminality is very concentrated. It is the same people being arrested over and over again, of course keeping them locked up longer will decrease crime. When they're let out they usually reoffend. They reoffend at such rates that it is impossible to believe that letting them out will not increase crime.
I do wish we could figure out real rehabilitation methods for those that could be receptive. We can program people to think and believe lots of things. Norway, Denmark, and Japan all have seemingly more successful release programs. Although, I have read on Wordcel Substacker #300 differences in recidivism may not be as stark as they are made out to be as commonly understood.
Norway still releases more young people in their 20's that reoffend less than the US. So, something over there works better. Whether that's ethnic, cultural, procedural, or a combination. Intaking people young and releasing them old will decrease crime, yes. Clara would probably say it isn't fair to keep someone in jail for 20 years after stealing $500 of shampoo (for the 5th or 25th time).
Bleeding heart advocacy might be better aimed at separating the extreme serial offenders (who should remain in jail) at the tails from the less dedicated (but regular) criminal. Instead it appears to all be wrapped together in the general Prison Bad memeplex and abolitionist impulse. Effective parole programs should keep former criminals busy and out of trouble, but they don't do this very well. The profit incentive for a private probation contractor is another, if often overstated, complicating factor in my eyes.
I don't trust the state to throw up its hands and say, sorry the best we can do is hand out X year sentences to everyone until they're 40. Thankfully this isn't proposed. For the person on their 12th conviction? I don't know what else can be done. Either accept the trade off (more criminals more crime), ship them to Australia, or some Prospera-style project where Progressive Abolitionist, Inc. can run their own rehabilitation experiments.
I think to a large extent we already have figured this out, and there really was not much to figure out to begin with. Being receptive to rehabilitation is the battle, that is all it takes, that is rehabilitation. Someone is rehabilitated when they don't want to do crime anymore, and then they go out and don't do crime anymore. Maybe we can program people to think and believe things, but we cannot program people who do not want to be programed. They will just do what they want. But really there is nothing much to program - just don't do crimes.
It is largely forgotten in these conversations that we are asking for the bare minimum. Do not steal, do not be violent, pay your taxes. People refuse to cooperate, they make active and conscious choices to break the law in ways we (almost) all agree are unacceptable, and it suddenly turns into this vexing social problem of "why?" or "how do we fix this". As if something is wrong with us, society, and not them, the criminal. I think that we as a society need to get over asking "why" here, we should realize that it is the simple answer: they want to. They are the problem, they need to fix it. And if they don't want to fix it then they can stay in the cage for the agreed upon time.
To speak to the larger conversation, which I don't necessarily think you are arguing: When we have a conversation about rehabilitation, who is this conversation centered on? It is the criminal. Whose interests should the criminal justice system serve? Is it the criminal's? Or is it society's? I do think that rehabilitation needs to be a large part of the conversation, but the frame always needs to be on society and what is best for us. The conversation cannot just center on rehabilitation, it needs to include incapacitation. The conversation needs to be centered on what is best for society. Clara, and most progressives, ignore this.
This gets to a key point in my "disparate impact" effortpost, as well as the Emile DeWeaver "Crime, the Myth" piece I linked and quoted here, particularly the bit:
(Emphasis added).
The criminal laws we have did not descend from the heavens. They are a social construct, a societal choice, and we can always choose differently; laws have varied quite a lot across human history.
It's a matter of where we place the problem. I remember an anti-HBD piece from @ymeskhout, giving the example of a game law limiting shellfish harvesting from a beach, and how everyone caught breaking it was a Cambodian immigrant. One can frame this as a problem with the Cambodians, and ask how we get them to stop over-harvesting shellfish… or we can frame it as a problem with a law that disproportionately punishes Cambodians by labeling behaviors more common among them as "criminal." One could easily eliminate said disparate impact by repealing the limit on shellfish gathering, after all.
If, instead of picking our leaders by elections, we did so by a test of sprinting ability ("There's only one Big Giant Office, and whoever outruns the fireball wins!"), the racial makeup of our government would be rather different, wouldn't it? (A lot more
Kenyans, Afro-Caribbeans no?) Similarly with all the "13/50" memes; if you replaced the current US criminal code with that of, say, the Kingdom of Dahomey, would the racial disparities stay nearly as stark?The position in the Kendi, DeWeaver, etc. space is that to frame the problem as being with people is inherently bigotry, and incompatible with values of tolerance and equity. The problem must be seen as with the system, and to address any problems, we must change who and what our society chooses to label as "criminal," and how we treat those so labeled.
I'm reminded of all the "Positive Action" self-esteem building crap we got in grade school back in the late 80s and early 90s (I thought it was stupid and nonsense back then, and my opinion has only gotten lower). It was full of "you're perfect just the way you are" assertions. Take this idea — the flower of liberal tolerance and the individualist view that "[a]t the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life" — and combine the value of "equity," and this seems to follow rather straightforwardly.
There's a core liberal impulse here — a "the laws were made for Man" view, a "that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men… it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it" view — that we must adapt "the system" to fit, and bring equity and fairness to, the people in all their diversity and freedom, rather than force people to adapt to a particular "system" created by one specific culture, reflecting a specific set of values, out of all the many possibilities.
Kenyans are the distance runners. It's west africans, the dominant genetic heritage of Caribbean blacks, that are the sprinters.
Thanks, fixed. (Like Hakan Rotmwrt said, "High-quality racism is extraordinarily hard work.")
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link