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Not sure if this has been discussed elsewhere and I missed it, but Scott recently wrote an essay on prison and crime. I did not love the essay, it seemed very similar to his homelessness essay, where he presents an adversarial system where people have worked very hard to make it expensive/difficult for our society to do something, then he throws up his hands and says given the cost benefit analyses (at the current, inflated prices) it is impossible to do the solution that really sounds like it would work. So I guess we need to do something else (that I just happen to like more).
At least, that is what it felt like to me. I actually wanted to focus on something else though. In the essay he reviews three meta-analyses of the situation, and presents their biases. While it goes unstated (or I missed it), the impression I got was that he was also supposed to be a 'neutral' voice, just looking at the data. However, he got in a bit of an X spat with Cremieux over one aspect of the essay, and in the back and the forth, he said the following,
Which is interesting, because it is bringing in a component that goes totally unanalyzed in the original essay, and yet seems profoundly important to his moral and ethical understanding of the question. Am I reading this wrong, or does Scott think that putting people in prison is the moral equivalent of torturing children?
In the original essay he did drop something that sounded weird to me, but I mostly overlooked it on my first reading,
Which seems to present the modal criminal receiving a lengthy prison sentence as a married father of 2.5 children with a stable career in the tech industry who one day randomly tripped and fell into a ten year felony conviction. Not only does it seem wildly at odds with reality, it also seems at odds with the quote above, where he seems to be saying that the average prisoner is basically retarded.
Is he just saying whatever he thinks will be most convincing depending on the context to arrive at the conclusion he has already decided is morally correct?
I do not read ACX that frequently any more, but this and the homelessness essay, both feel like pieces that 2014 Scott would have torn apart, whither Tartaria indeed.
I worked in a tech hub next to a ghetto. A large number of engineers were terrorized by a small group of young men. There were more engineers who were fit gun owning veterans than there were criminals.
The criminals were generally in poor physical condition, disorganized and not an especially impressive force.
Had the cops not been there the criminals would have been dealt with swiftly. However, the police protected them. If they stole a bike, nothing happened. If an engineer with friends shut it down, they would have had their lives ruined. The criminals didn't mind getting arrested for smaller crimes. The engineers were terrified of even getting arrested. The imbalance in the risk acceptance between tech workers and criminals completely shifted the power dynamic on the street. When they mugged a developer on the way home from work it wasn't by physically overpowering them, it essentially a game of chicken in which the developer was more afraid of going to prison. It is simply cheaper to clean up graffiti on a weekly basis than to spend an night waiting in the bushes with bats and dealing with the problem.
The justice system is too harsh toward people with a life while not being effective at keeping people who can't function of the street. Ideally the dysfunctional crowd shouldn't be punished but warehoused in a place that provides them with structure, meaning and a well balanced life. Mental asylums need to be scaled up.
I find an interesting contrast between this and a European country I visited, which shall remain nameless.
Some pickpocket stole the phone of a friend of mine but didn't prevent us from geolocating it. We went to the police fully expecting the usual recording of a police report that would never amount to anything but a piece of paper for his insurance.
But no, the local policeman took the info, told us to wait in the precinct, and after an hour or so turned up with the phone and the (visibly beaten) thief, asking us what we wanted to do with him. I got the sense that we could have roughed him up ourselves without even the need for a bribe.
After that I never really doubted that the police having more respect for criminals than law abiding citizens is a choice.
I don't think there are many police anywhere that have more respect from criminals than citizens. It's just that different places have different rules/expectations for how criminals can be treated. Unless by "police" you're referring more broadly to the criminal justice system.
I'm speaking in a The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does kind of way.
I have no doubt the French policeman I talked to a few years ago cared more for me than the guy who mugged me, but in the end the guy got off with a slap on the wrist even though he was a known criminal, and I never saw my wallet again.
It didn't have to be this way. Society has chosen that my property and time is less valuable than some known criminal's freedom. And I think that's clearly dysfunctional.
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