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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   34939 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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(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 Act, in part, allows a person to challenge their criminal case if there are statistical disparities in how people of different races are either charged, convicted or sentenced of crimes. The Act counters the effect of the widely criticized 1987 Supreme Court decision in McClesky v. Kemp, which rejected the use of statistical disparities in the application of the death penalty to prove the kind of intentional discrimination required for a constitutional violation."

The Act, however, goes beyond countering McClesky to also allow a defendant to challenge their charge, conviction or sentence if a judge, attorney, law enforcement officer, expert witness, or juror exhibited bias or animus towards the defendant because of their race, ethnicity, or national origin or if one of those same actors used racially discriminatory language during the trial.

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.

Judge Cheri Pham wrote, a person could reasonably conclude that Shore “believes certain racial or ethnic groups commit more crimes than others.” (They do.) Just as bad, Shore may not “give weight to statistical evidence that indicates there is an implicit bias against certain racial or ethnic groups.” (Fittingly, Pham earned her J.D. from the Berkeley law school.)

The San Diego Public Defenders Office had sought to prevent a San Diego Superior Court judge from hearing an RJA motion in a homicide case. The judge’s sin? In a previous prosecution, he had questioned the defense claim that blacks and Hispanics are disproportionately incarcerated—a claim based on population ratios, rather than crime commission. “There is absolutely no evidence that . . . the proportion of persons in an ethnicity committing a crime must be the same as the proportion of the population,” Judge Howard Shore had said in court. In another case, Shore had questioned whether the criminal-justice system is infected by racism.

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.

Californians - at least, those of us in big cities - shouldn’t have to tolerate the current rate of retail theft. But the decreased sentences of Prop 47 didn’t cause this crime, and there’s substantial evidence that harsher criminal penalties won’t decrease it. So what should we do?

The paper she links says the opposite, Clara just chooses to ignore the sections that don't agree with her:

8.6. Summary: Incapacitation versus standard release Surveying these studies of incapacitation relative to standard release reveals a few patterns:

• All find incapacitation.

• Incapacitation emerges more clearly for property crime than violent crime. Possibly this is merely because some of the policies studied (in the Netherlands and California) focused on people convicted of property crimes. But it may also be that the propensity for violence is more evenly distributed in the population, so that incarcerating some people does less to contain it.

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.

  1. criminality is extremely concentrated, it is the same people being arrested over and over again. https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1647031826202935300

  2. 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.

You definitely need to post this call-out in the thread. Lying about what's in cited papers knowing nobody will read them should be disqualifying, or the spirit of SSC is just another hollowed-out skin-suit for leftist propaganda.

I did go back and reread the paper. "Openly lies" was not very charitable of me, and there is an interpretation of it that supports what she says. I just think its a very bad interpretation, to the point still makes me question her and the authors integrity.

The claim is this, from the top line summary. Basically that while incarceration does reduce crime via incapacitation (Section 8), it also causes more crime inherently (Section 9). And that these effectively cancel each other out:

The crux of the matter is that tougher sentences hardly deter crime, and that while imprisoning people temporarily stops them from committing crime outside prison walls, it also tends to increase their criminality after release. As a result, “tough-on-crime” initiatives can reduce crime in the short run but cause offsetting harm in the long run.

So the question becomes: does a reasonable reading of Section 9 say this? I do not think it does, and I think its very weak to the point of dishonesty to claim it does. There are 13 studies examined, here is the summary.

9.14. Summary: Aftereffects The preponderance of the evidence says that incarceration in the US increases crime post-release, and enough over the long run to offset incapacitation. A quartet of judge randomization studies (Green and Winik in Washington, DC; Loeffler in Chicago; Nagin and Snodgrass in Pennsylvania; Dobbie, Goldin, and Yang in Philadelphia and Miami) put the net of incapacitation and incarceration aftereffects at about zero. In parallel, Chen and Shapiro find that harsher prison conditions—making for incarceration that is harsher in quality rather than quantity—also increases recidivism. Gaes and Camp concur, though less convincingly because in their study harsher incarceration quality went hand in hand with lower incarceration quantity. Mueller-Smith sides with all these studies and goes farther, finding modest incapacitation and powerful, harmful aftereffects in Houston; but modest hints of randomization failure accompany those results.

Some studies dissent from the majority view that incarceration is criminogenic. Roach and Schanzenbach find beneficial aftereffects in Seattle—a result that is also subject to some doubt about the quality of randomization. Bhuller et al. make a more compelling case that incarceration reduces crime after—in Norway. Berecochea and Jaman, one of the few truly randomized studies in this literature, also looks more likely right than wrong, and is also somewhat distant in its setting, early-1970s California. And there are the two Georgia studies (Kuziemko and Ganong), which upon reanalysis no longer point to beneficial aftereffects, but still do not demonstrate harmful ones either.

Aftereffects must vary by place, time, and person. But the first-order generalization that best fits the credible evidence is that at the margin in the US today, aftereffects offset in the long run what incapacitation does in the short run.

Ok so of the 13 studies they looked at, some say more prison makes people commit more crimes when they are released. Some say that more prison makes people commit less crimes when they are released. Some say that more prison doesn't have any effect people committing crime when released.

Positive aftereffects, count of more crime studies: 9.3!, 9.4!!, 9.9

Negative aftereffects, count of less crime studies: 9.1, 9.7, 9.8, 9.11, 9.12!!!!

Zero aftereffects, count of same crime studies: 9.5!!!, 9.6, 9.10, 9.13

Not clear aftereffects, count of little predictive value: 9.2

I did really only skim these, so possible I misassigned some. But I think it is very clear that from the studies reviewed they have no idea the impact of incarceration on recidivism. Very curious how aftereffects can vary by place, time and person so much and still offset the results of incapacitation. Looks very unclear to me, and given the highly concentrated nature of criminality this is not sufficient evidence to conclude that being incarceration is criminogenic such that it cancels out the effects of incapacitation. No idea how the author comes to the top line conclusion they do. Wonder if it has anything to do with this:

The Open Philanthropy Project has joined a latter-day criminal justice reform movement. It too is motivated by the belief that something is wrong with the state’s use of punishment to combat crime. Something is wrong, in other words, with those pictures. Higher incarceration rates and longer sentences, along with the “war on drugs,” have imposed great costs on taxpayers, as well as on inmates, their families, and their communities (Alexander 2012).

! 9.3 does not actually look at how long prisoners are in prison, it only looks at security levels. Why is it in here?

!! 9.4. Similar to 9.3, this only looks security levels, and only among those that return to prison. Nothing about if they commit more crimes, or even if those in higher security commit more or less crimes. It just asks "if they were in a higher security level prison, does someone who is reoffend do so faster or slower than in lower security." Say only 1 of high security prisoner reoffends, but he does it in a day after release. If 100% of lower security releasees reoffend, but they all do it longer than 1 day after release, then this study says its more assignment to a higher security prison causes releasees to go back to prison faster.

!!! 9.5 - this one was actually very weakly more crime, but author says it is so weak he is counting it as 0

!!!! 9.12 - original study said strong negative aftereffects, author reanalyzed and says ambiguous. Maybe this goes in zero.

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