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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.
Crime has a very easy and effective solution to it that is known to every civilization: ruthless and immediate enforcement of the law. Delinquents need to be beaten, murderers and rapists need to be hanged, and it all needs to happen as swiftly as possible so as to impress the right connection in the mind of the criminal between the illegal act and the punishment. Criminals need to fear the law as a basis for civilization.
Once you have this basic thing done, you then encounter the two long lasting problems: organized crime and impulsive deviants.
The former is almost impossible to squash totally but can be negotiated with and restrained to specific areas of life (and actually help make law enforcement more practical in some cases).
The latter is the more ugly side of it because if you want to have civilization, the only answer to it is ostracism or death. Some people are functionally incapable of participating in society, and they need to be taken out of it or it ceases to exist.
Now it is not nice to have to face the reality that some people cannot participate in society, that there is such a thing as savages, it's almost unfathomable to Liberal ideology that axiomatically models the individual as a rational educated bourgeois from the 1800s.
But crime as a phenomenon is real, in the sense that it's still there even if you refuse to believe in it. That one guy will reach for a cop's gun in the middle of a precinct because his mind is incapable of connecting fucking around with finding out.
Older Liberals recognized this reality and made some dispensations for it. They just failed to integrate it properly into their ideology and now the logical conclusion of their political formula (helped along by its opponents of course) ends up at absurdities like the idea that the pathological criminal is a victim of society existing, and that we should therefore dismantle society. Conveniently forgetting that in the resulting state, he visits horror upon the innocent.
They deserve to be excluded from society. Because mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.
If you are a violent creature who can't be reasoned with, you are more like a tiger than a human in moral terms, and should be treated as such. Do dangerous animals deserve to be locked behind bars? Perhaps not, but we don't let them feast on human flesh because we don't extend the same moral community to them as we do innocent human life.
OK, to be super explicit:
Yes, this would be ideal if it could be accomplished on exactly the terms that you lay out.
The obvious problem (and come on folks, you're not really this dumb not to get this) is that if you empower any actual institution composed of human beings with the ability to quickly hang criminals, then control of that institution becomes a key locus of power which ends up being used, as power always does, to take spoils and entrench itself. This is such a recurring pattern in historical record as to be a meme -- oh, look, the body for public safety turning to infighting and executing its founding members -- lol.
This is especially true when building a machinery that can then be turned around when someone decide that "hate speech" is now criminal and starts sending journalists and others to jail (happening right now over the.pond) or whatever-it-is-they-are-on-about-today.
Look, I'm not actually here to preach soft on crime bullshit or to suggest that punishment should be slow or that criminals shouldn't fear the law. But things are the way they are for a very good reason. This isn't even a plausibly-useless fence! It's a fence coated in innumerable layers of blood.
Of course. This is essentially impossible to prevent. Power cannot be destroyed. And it's always absolute, however many lies it hides itself behind.
I am simply demanding that whoever holds power act as a responsible steward and punish criminals. A sovereign that doesn't have the power or inclination to do so deserves to be deposed. Which is why many a dysfunctional democracy turn to dictatorship. Not in a tragic bout of madness, but in a quite pragmatic demand for a ruler, any ruler, that will take his basic duties seriously.
If the political system of your nation is designed so as to prevent the consolidation of power to a degree that it becomes impossible to rule, then it is ripe for a coup.
Americans should know this, since this is how their constitution was instituted, in exactly this kind of a coup against the articles of confederation.
That's not quite true. Power cannot be destroyed, but the utility of power is, at some point, super-linear and so dispersal of power functions in practice to dampen and diminish it. This was figured out (at least) as early as the Roman Republic.
Moreover, power can be bound up into systems of formal ritual and circumstance that act as a similar dampener. Again, the Romans stumbled upon this, as did many other effective ruling structures. Even in absolute rule, the emperor would exercise it from a specific place and in a specific manner.
And likewise I am demanding that whoever holds power also refrains from using it against the innocent and, in particular, against threats to their political power.
These are not incompatible goals, but you're kind of glossing over the insane difficulty of it. Creating a system that punishes the guilty and not the innocent with any kind of accuracy/speed and that is resistant to corruption remains an unsolved problem. You're posting here saying "I demand they do it" doesn't actually solve anything.
Of course, within the three goals of accuracy/speed/fidelity, there is a tradeoff margin, and it's totally fair to say "they should prioritize X over Y or Z over X". But that doesn't appear (?) to be the case.
It is better to be unruled than to fall into dictatorship (or worse). I'm reminded of the last part of this book review in terms of the tradeoffs between ungovernability and ability to slip into collective psychosis.
It was "figured out" by every republican form of government and subsequently refuted every single time by circumstance. As in the case of the Roman Republic which died precisely out of a need to split power which necessarily coalesced interest onto two rival factions with no choice but escalation, ultimately leading to a winner take all struggle and a return to monarchy that neither side wanted.
It turns out however fancy your rituals are, the incentives of consolidation are simply stronger.
Republics try to pretend that they can bound power in ritual. But a keen observer of their inner workings will notice that this is a sham. In the state of exception, they act as arbitrarily and beyond the spirit of their own rules as the most temperamental of personal tyrants.
I'd like to remind everyone we personally witnessed this a few years ago.
I'm tempted to point to the obvious that this place doesn't capture the sum total of my political action.
But if you understand how power works you know that making this demand often and publicly is the only way to get a good ruler if you are not an elite yourself.
The mistreated masses cannot solve this problem. They need a counter elite to form and their best bet is therefore to loudly advertise that they will pledge undying loyalty to their would be saviour. I believe this is called "populism".
But I understand your objection is that I'm not engaging in the liberal game of making sophisticated chains for the State.
All I can really tell you is that it is a fool's errand because the nature of power escapes all such chains, that the separation of powers is a myth that has never been instantiated, that politics revolves around group coalitions, not rituals, that every single political regime ever is a totalitarianism in waiting and that you'd understand this if you had considered politics as it is instead of how it ought to be.
Freedom is not to be found in establishing lasting rules to constrain power, it is found in the cracks that exist when it has no need to consolidate itself at one's expense.
A secure ruler can be far less tyrannical than a feckless one. Consider, for instance, how the gridlock of the US parliamentary system has reemerged as vast executive power and legislation from the bench, the total opposite of the intention. Meanwhile laissez faire is a maxim coined under absolutism.
I don't mean to imply that I hate republics. They are perfectly serviceable. But their political formula is fiction, in no less true a sense as divine right is. Acting as if setting up rules will change political reality is a kind of magical thinking. As above, so below. But that's not how it works. It's the incentives and the people that matter ultimately, not the written rules.
This is simply not true and the only way you can even have this opinion is because you have never set foot in true lawlessness.
I beg you to actually visit a country that is experiencing it, as I have, and you will see what manner of horrors humanity can produce when it is left to mob rule. I hear Libya is nice at this time of year.
Not that the desirability of government is a matter of any import, since it's restoration is inevitable. Feudal rulers start out as successful bandits after all. But chaos can last for a while, and I happen to value my life and property, so the maintenance of public order is a concern.
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