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Notes -
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 read that as "if we could retcon reality so that someone who has received a decade of prison sentences had never been born, that would be the moral thing to do".
While we do not have the power of retroactive birth control, we likely prevent the births of some children who are most at risk of becoming criminals themselves. A violent criminal who is locked up for a decade during his 20s or 30s will likely cause fewer accidental pregnancies, which are likely (through either genetics or environment) to later end up in the criminal justice system. I have discussed that here.
That doesn't sound like the sort of position Scott would hold or endorse. I could be wrong though. I'm reading it more along the lines of his UBI post where he argues that because modern society has created all of these artificial restrictions in exchange for massive productivity increases, we owe a share of that to the people modern society has disadvantaged via this bargain. Just in this case its forgiveness/charity/social-services rather than cash.
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