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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.
If you're making a post about a link, please actually link it.
Scott clearly still has some of the progressive aversion to harming criminals even when it's positive sum. However, he's still right (reality is complicated, you can be wrong about one thing and right about a different more important thing).
This is his final, bolded conclusion: "Prison is less cost-effective than other methods of decreasing crime at most current margins. If people weren’t attracted by the emotional punch of how “tough-on-crime” it feels, they would probably want to divert justice system resources away from prisons into other things like police and courts."
This is, IMO, just true. Consider a hypothetical: Prison sentences are capped at a week, max. But, within a minute of attempting to shoplift or steal a car, the police arrest you, take back the stuff you stole, and send you to jail. What do you think would happen to crime? Conversely, consider another hypothetical: Life sentences for stealing at all, but you'll be arrested and put to jail sometime around five years after you steal. What do you think happens to crime, given how bad at planning for the future low IQ criminals are? I think crime in the first scenario would be much lower than today, and crime in the second scenario much higher.
The biggest problem with fighting crime isn't that prison sentences are too low, it's that the police and justice system - in large part due to progressive activists, but in even larger part due to general government stasis and lack of ambition - has gotten worse at policing. They should'v gotten better at policing at a pace matching the advance of technology! Crime could be so much lower than it is today with just a bit more proactive policing, use of computers, and shaping of culture.
I think your hypothetical made sense, and I understood what trade-offs you were trying to highlight. I also appreciate that you linked the actual original article.
I'm a little less sure on this. It seems some aspects of policing have gotten easier. Cameras and evidence are more ubiquitous, but not as much in high crime areas. Other aspects remain difficult or have gotten worse. Physically restraining an uncooperative human is just as difficult. Tasers have made this somewhat easier. New drugs have have made this harder. Seems easier for people that were likely to cooperate anyways, and harder for people that were unlikely to cooperate anyways. Courts have certainly gotten worse, due to wait times and case loads. I think technology has helped courts handle some of that (remote sessions). But they are still fundamentally limited in getting people to be physically available at a given time, shortly after a crime, and provide enough time for a judge and some lawyers to talk through the case.
I mainly don't think technology is doing much to help. Culture could probably help a bit. But mainly it would be more people involved. More active policing, a much larger court infrastructure to clear out the dockets way faster, and more monitoring or jailing of known past criminals. I just don't know if myself, or voters are really willing to pay the costs necessary for crime reduction. There are diminishing returns at some point.
The biggest problem is the lack of will to impose the sentence and make it stick. Until the policing and prosecution system are doing that, the sentences don’t matter. What happens right now is that the police come by and take a report. Often, that’s the end of it, there’s a report in a desk drawer somewhere. If you’re lucky the police will do an investigation. If a short investigation leads directly to a suspect or the news media makes them look bad, they’ll arrest someone. Then you go to prosecutors who might prosecute, maybe.
With a system like that, crime, essentially, pays. The 1/25 or so chance that someone arrests you is definitely worth the risk. Especially since in larger cities you need to steal a lot of stuff to reach the felony threshold. In California, you can steal up to $1000 before it’s worth arresting you. In other areas, it’s $500. As long as the TV you’re boosting is on sale for $497, nobody is going to do anything about it. If you and 5-6 buddies go an each boost one of those TVs and sell them, it’s easy money. Drugs are basically not enforced either. People can do them pretty openly on public streets without worrying that the cops are going after them.
While funding plays a role here, the police and prosecutors seem to have lost the spine necessary to do so. I think quite often it’s about the look. You don’t want to be seen as racist for arresting and jailing too many black and Hispanics. You don’t want to look like you’re being mean to poor people. Easy answer is just let them go. Or come up with silly “reforms” that are essentially release but have a service requirement that nobody will actually enforce. If there was one thing I’d do to curb crime it’s to get arrest rates up and prosecute everyone to the full extent. Once it becomes clear that the cops are now back in the crime fighting business, crime should drop.
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