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[reposting from last week, now with the permanent URL]
For anyone interested, I did my first livestream where I show my face and everything with Counterpoints, a conservative/centrist in Florida who used to be a cop and is now an internet pundit (and WH40k enthusiast). We talk for about an hour and discussed our contrasting experience within the criminal justice system, domestic violence prosecution, drug policing, and very briefly get into race identitarianism.
Relatedly, Counterpoints made a video about the [history of political YouTube] (HE TOOK IT DOWN FOR SOME REASON) which I thought was very interesting look into a phenomenon I hadn't been exposed to much. It's curious to me why this ever became a thing, and why so many online pundits got their start in video game streaming. When Jesse Singal was interviewed by Destiny, they talked for an hour and a half through these tiny viewports, while unrelated Elden Ring gameplay footage played on center stage throughout.
Anyway, it was a fun experience with a format I had never tried before.
One specific criticism:
"I walked down a street with 20 cars, each one with windows smashed - there's no amount of law enforcement funding that could prevent this". The standard hard-right, or moldbug, response is just "that's not true, just put all the people doing that in jail for a long time, that'd stop it" - which is true! It might not be feasible under the constraint of 'we want to be kind to the poor battered homeless addicts', but that's the thing preventing it, not funding.
Also was interesting he explicitly noted an influence of "fascist philsophy" and the "dissident right" - not that I mind, but it's interesting if that's becoming more common among "conservative / centrist" internet people. (obviously, he follows with a "and I don't want either the far-left or far-right to be in power", and means it)
note that many places across world manage to avoid this
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In economics, the formula for how to punish crime has to take into account the chance of getting caught. The idea is that to the extent crime will remain unsolved, you can compensate for that differential by just punishing extra hard the people that do get caught. It makes sense, assuming perfect information and rational actors and blah blah blah.
The problem is that the system will be run by mortals. I had a class with Alex Tabarrok and he tried to argue for the dissuasion effect of the death penalty by saying "How many people would speed if the penalty was death? Zero of course." Well, no. If the penalty for speeding was death, cops will pretend to be blind, prosecutors will pretend they don't know the definition of 'speeding', and judges will curiously start finding all sorts of violations to dismiss these cases. This is sort of what happened in Victorian England where the penalty for sodomy on paper was death, but judges got around that by just writing 'death recorded' — poetically relegating the penalty to also only exist on paper.
So to go back to car prowling, this is a highly opportunistic crime. Any car left parked on the street will forever be vulnerable to have its window smashed, and there is no realistically feasible amount of surveillance that you can implement to sufficiently tamp down on this. Yes, maybe you can install cameras everywhere, hire a cop on every corner, and RFID tag every potential suspect, etc. but obviously the costs mount up. Safeguarding the nation's car windows is not going to be worth that. So if the solution is to compensate for the low risk of getting caught by going HAM on the bozos that do get snared up, you're necessarily going to have to advocate for prison sentences that span several decades and maybe centuries. Then you're just back to the 'death recorded' scenario, because people within the system are just not going to have the appetite to implement this policy.
My alternative of just giving free heroin already exists in the world and would be more effective than trying to scare drug addicts chasing a high with hypothetical eons in prison.
Right now, legalizing slavery would do nothing, nobody would enforce it. Yet slavery was widely practiced and legal many hundreds of years ago - and people did enforce it. So, right now, in a "different culture", or with an occupying army or sufficient power, there could certainly be slavery.
Similarly, much harsher penalties for smashing windows is plausible, certainly within the wide space between Rome and today. Homosexuality was punished in many places, before 'death recorded'
Cameras are incredibly cheap, drones are somewhat cheap, we could just have cameras everywhere and track everyone's movements with those. I don't think that's necessary at all but this statement isn't really true. Expensive? Sure, but still much lower than the welfare or military budget.
Not that any of that is necessary to prevent smashing windows.
That's a bold claim. Isn't human trafficking widespread (though condemned) globally? Aren't income-sharing agreements and non-dischargeable debts (arguably on the slippery slope of slavery) commonly accepted financial tools?
I'm referring to full on chattel slavery with whippings and whatever, specifically in the US, to say that enforceability of nonprogressive ideas is contingent on will to do so
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The penalty for speeding is already death, when people who can't drive as well as they think they can try to speed, overtake, drive in bad conditions, etc. But still there are fuckwits who do this, and even if there was an official "break the posted speed limits, death" penalty, you would still get fuckwits doing it because "Hey, maybe the cops aren't out on this stretch of road/I can slow down in time to fool the cameras/I'm good enough to get away with it" and so forth.
We have had the death penalty for as long as we've had any kind of legal system or laws, and that didn't discourage anyone. There may be an argument that without the death penalty, we would have had even more killings and murders, but having the death penalty did and does not mean "zero murders".
And what about the criminals who break into cars or even steal cars, but are not drug addicts? By the same logic, there is no way to prevent this despite any level of policing and surveillance, so do we throw up our hands and give them free stuff too? "Joe only steals and lies and cheats and defrauds because he's a poor heroin addict, if he got free heroin he'd never do that stuff". Yes, he would. Give Joe enough free heroin to maintain himself, where 'if I take more, I'll overdose' and Joe will look for other drugs to get that high that he can't get anymore from heroin. So unless we commit to giving Joe a range of free, pure drugs, then he'll go right back to robbing and stealing to feed his habit. There is a risk of methadone addiction and overdose, because junkies chase that high and will try anything, even if they're on something specifically prescribed to treat opioid addiction.
"Jim isn't an addict but he breaks into cars, robs, steals, cheats, and defrauds because he's a career criminal. If we only gave him free shit then he wouldn't do that any more". Would you recommend this policy, also?
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I don't think the argument is from dissuasion, but rather from incapacitation. The theory is that only a small percentage of the population commit crimes, and that most crimes are committed by chronic recidivists. Even if you can't catch every crime, prosecute the ones you do catch hard enough, and put the perpetrators away for long enough, and you'll eventually wind up with most of the truly-disastrous people behind bars, which will have a disproportionate affect on crime levels.
I'm inclined to agree that the proclivity towards violent crimes is relegated to a small and fairly stable minority of the population. It seems at least plausible that you could reduce violent crime significantly through incapacitation solely by focusing on the chronic recidivists. But petty property crime is almost entirely motivated by drug addiction, and that has the potential to affect a large and constantly shifting segment of the population, depending on trends and circumstances. So for incapacitation to work in this case you'd need a dragnet big enough to encompass every drug addict who turns to theft to feed their habit, which most eventually do. Given the experience with the drug war so far, I don't see this as a viable solution.
This is a contingent fact. In the 1980's in the UK, there were career professional burglars who saw a short jail sentence each time you got caught as a cost of doing business. (My MIL was a legal secretary who typed up a lot of the rap sheets). After sentences for repeat burglars were increased, there stopped being career professional burglars.
Longer sentences deter crime if criminals expect to get caught eventually and choosing to crime anyway because the sentence is short. They don't deter crime if criminals think they will never get caught (like most rioters), or if criminals don't think at all (like car-prowling junkies).
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Well, not all "petty property crimes" are the same. And I think it's a fairly solid conjecture that someone who is committing violent crimes probably also has some form of intersection with illegal drugs, so the populations at issue are likely broadly overlapping. Moreover, the thefts and vandalism cases are often bad enough on their own that I'm comfortable deploying incapacitative justice, particularly in the case of repeat offenders. Whatever the reason, that type of conduct is extremely prejudicial to the preservation of functional society. By all means, attack the problem through multiple vectors - though I'm skeptical that drug legalization would necessarily have the effect you hope it would, and I am unwilling to countenance actively supplying drugs to junkies...that just gets you junkie-coming-down-off-a-high nuisance activity rather than theft - but I don't think that any "root causes" analysis can actually resolve criminal activity without some sort of incarcerative or otherwise penal "stick" meaningfully backing it up. Of course, it's a debate at least as old as the Chinese response to the British opium trade, and not one which we'll resolve here.
Additionally, a major facilitator of the "use theft to feed drug habit" racket is the existence of significant retail-goods-resale criminal enterprises; it allegedly got to the point that people picked up in SF after looting the neighborhood CVS/Rite Aid were found with actual value charts of the items and brands to look for in the store and target for grabbing. If the stolen goods cannot be converted to cash except at a significant loss, property crime becomes much less able to support expensive drug habits.
I'm trying to identify where we disagree. Yes, there's intersection between property crimes and violent crimes and illegal drugs. Yes, property crimes are not conducive to a functional society. Yes, an efficient fencing market will encourage more property crime. I don't deny that carceral incapacitation can prevent crime, I'm just skeptical about the relative elasticity so to speak. I used car prowling as an example to showcase the wide gap between the supply and demand. Most people know not to leave anything valuable in their car, but enough people forget to make it worthwhile for junkies. And that's true even with the horribly inefficient methods junkies rely on to convert stolen property to cash. You can sentence thousands of drug addicts to decades in prison, but all you need to end up with dozens of car windows smashed up is just one junkie experiencing opioid withdrawal desperate enough to do whatever to scrounge up $10 for a pop. A car prowling rampage plus the hours of work it takes to convert the loot (my clients definitely are not lazy when it comes to scoring drugs) does not make sense in a world where clean heroin is handed out for free.
I think this is where we disagree:
I think that where test policies on the road to hand-out-heroin-to-junkies-ville have been tried, such as SF's open injection sites, or open-access methadone clinics, local incidences of "junkie smashing windows"-type-public nuisances have not significantly fallen or otherwise responded in a way which leads me to believe that broader adoption would be beneficial.
I think that the intersection between crime and drugs is a lot more complicated than (law-abiding person) + (drugs) = (junkie who has to steal to keep up a habit). Moreover, I think that this complexity is deep and broad enough that liberalizing drug policy would not put a significant dent in property crime and public nuisance activity (in particular, and in the spirit of falsifiability, I would expect that verbal harassment and minor assaults would make up any decrease which materialized in property crime, which might not decrease at all).
Personal story time - I don't do criminal law, but I do a lot of permitting and small-fry land use. My firm has a lot of retailers as clients, from mom-and-pop corner stores to national chains, who come to us for help dealing with things like nuisance abatement, or administrative discipline against a license. So I've seen the call-for-service logs, and I can say for sure that for every case that makes its way to your brethren's desks in LA Superior Court, there's literally hundreds of calls for police service that go something like "group disturbance, caller states participants likely vagrant; caller states participants appear intoxicated; all suspects gone upon arrival" or "clerk reported theft of food items" or "susp. smashed shelving when asked to leave 7-Eleven." You're right that we can't put a cop on every corner or incarcerate our way out of that (though that doesn't stop cities from occasionally trying to make private businesses do it for them), but nor does handing out heroin help. Maybe I'm too pessimistic, but at the end of the day I don't see any alternative to helping the ones that are willing to be helped, and then just removing the remainder who can't or won't try to rebuild their lives and re-enter society as something vaguely approaching sociable. It doesn't bring me joy, but the alternative is letting them ruin civilization for everyone else, which just isn't reasonable.
His argument goes like - yeah, but those only were "injection sites" or "giving small amounts of heroin", not "as much heroin as you want for free" - if you really could go down to the local hospital and ask for 100 grams of heroin and they'd just give it to you, because heroin is just a chemical compound and we're good at mass producing them, so almost all of the current cost of heroin is because it's illegal - then there'd be no need to smash stuff anymore.
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