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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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