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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.
Hence the right to a SPEEDY trial.
The reason the average trial takes so long to commence is defendant delay. If you shoot a clerk at 7/11 and get picked up that day. You'll be charged by tomorrow, in bond court the day after, indicted and arraigned within 30 days, and the prosecution will be ready for trial in 60. But your public defender (because lets be honest you dont have and cant keep a real job) wont be. And you will flirt with a private attorney half a dozen times. And they will lose the discovery the state already gave them and demand the same video surveillance 10x before trying to get you to plea, and you will flirt with said plea for 3 years before demanding a trial that you will lose. But now it will be a big pain for everyone because the murder detective retired to Florida and all the 7/11 employees who used to maintain that video system now work for wal mart on the other side of the state.
If the perp gets picked up the same day, why can't he be tried the same day? It sounds like an optimization problem. Maybe you need a drawn-out trial for something like homicide, but for shoplifting you could have a streamlined sentencing center:
It's still a lot of time wasted on the jury trial (just 4 cases per jury each day), but hopefully most crimes will be done at the first step, which takes only 2 hours per crime.
You've denied the perp the right to a lawyer, instead turning his case over to someone who gets his paychecks from the same place the prosecutor (and the judge and the jailers) get them.
Who do public defenders get their paychecks from right now?
Same place; the system is a farce.
Even a public defender trying his middle in the system described (finances aside) would not agree to the system proposed. On call PDs dont currently exist. Their job is, on average, super easy, but from time to time they can actually do good and get an innocent person acquitted, and that takes a lot of time. Maybe some woman's wife is dead and he hated her, but establishing the alibi takes months. This is uncommon, but exists.
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Still miles better than an NKVD trojka.
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