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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.
Surprised to see less coverage of these points from the article:
Part of me wants to take some time to dunk here on the Defund The Police movement. The really do hate the most at risk communities. But, that's probably mostly fruitless, especially on the Motte.
The fact remains that Scott's article points to the fact that one of the most cost effective ways to reduce the occurrence of all crimes (leaving aside incarceration and rehabilitation dilemmas) is to have more cops all over the play. In one of Roland Fryer's papers, I seem to remember a similar conclusion.
The culture war angle to this is that, as long as I can remember, Cops have been the victims of cultural denigration on the left. This can range from the goofy-humorous (Chief Wiggum on the Simpsons, the trope of donuts, Sooper Troopers and smiliar movies) to the naked hostile; ACAB, Fuck Tha Police, 90s gangster rap that clearly identifies street cops as the primary bad guy in the hood (not the, you know, murderous criminals that kill the friends of the protagonist). Even more nuance depictions of cops often share tropes of personal failings and issues with leadership and corruption - Harvey Keitel in Bad Lieutenant, Matthew McCanaughey and Woody Harrelson in True Detective. The biggest pop culture cop show is probably Law an Order and its many spinoffs. Most of the cops here are pretty immaculate in their personal conduct, with the primary conflict in each episode generally being the dramatic discovery of a smoking gun or other key piece of information. Still, it being a drama, many episodes feature a less than comforting ending where a bad person goes to prison, but the victim is still victim-itized and has an implied hard life after the credits role. Law and Order: SVU had a rolling subplot about the emotional toll of those cases on the lead detectives.
Suffice it to say; the Culture War isn't great for cops. So, if one of the best solutions to crime is to have lots more cops, and we assume some sort of political minor miracle wherein we all agree on this and fund it, I worry about our ability to fill the ranks. Interestingly, this kind of dovetails with the other big thread this week on fertility collapse and population issues - women don't have good incentive to be Moms and we ought to improve the status of motherhood. Id argue that the status of cops - an implicitly male and patriarchal role - is also quite low and in need of some rehabilitation.
It isn't just the Culture War; the left isn't 100% wrong. We actually don't have angels in the form of police officers, and a lot of cops get into law enforcement because they get to exercise power over others. We also have a lot of laws which would allow them to do so legitimately. Greatly increase the number of cops, and even if you avoid the anarcho-tyranny trap and do reduce crime, you also make the place more of a stifling police state for people you wouldn't normally consider 'criminals'.
I'd argue this is 100% culture war. Has there been any study that replicates that can point to a major motivating factor of police recruits being authoritarian impulses? Related, is there any data that backs up the (goofy) claim that X% of people who join the military do so in order to be able to kill people.
How would such a study even be constructed? Self-surveys? Big 5 personality traits? This is exactly the kind of data that can always been squinted-at in just the right way so as to "back-up" a latent intent kind of assertion.
What difference would it make? If there were, you would (quite possibly rightly) accuse the researchers of bias. But have you ever met any cops? Did you know people in school who grew up to become cops?
Yes, a few regular cops, a campus cop, and a couple conservation officers. (All have arrest powers with varying jurisdictions. I'm using a slightly-broad definition, but nothing too crazy.)
I'll pit my anti-authoritarian anecdotes against your vague implications any day.
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