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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)
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.
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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