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Yesterday, I was out for a late morning run, coming up my city's main commercial and restaurant street towards the capitol square. As I approached a stoplight and took a little break in the sweltering heat, a man across the street was blaring music on Bluetooth speakers; mildly annoying, but common enough in the public square. What startled me was another man on the other side of the road who began rapping (for lack of a better description, since it was basically just yelling with a slight match to the cadence) a stream of invective - he was going to kick people's asses, motherfucker this, n-bomb that, people better not fuck with him, and so on.
Reflecting a bit, this made me think of the recent discourse on asylums and what to do, and it occurs to me that I think many people are still missing the actual point. The man I described above didn't show outward signs of any particular mental illness, I have no idea if he uses drugs, and while he did look like a vagrant, I don't know whether he sleeps rough or not. Do any of those things actually matter to me? In some sense, it would matter if there was a serious and treatable mental illness (e.g. schizophrenia), but I don't actually care whether he has diagnosable narcissistic personality disorder or is merely what we would colloquially describe as an asshole. What's to be done if there is no such diagnosis and no drug-induced psychosis, but merely an asshole yelling at people about how he's going to kick their ass? My answer is basically that I want police officers to exercise their discretion to inform him that his options are that he can knock it off, do it elsewhere, or they'll arrest him for disorderly conduct. We don't need to escalate to immediate criminalization, starting with "move along sir" is fine, but no, you don't get to keep yelling at people all day.
So much of the discourse about
bumspersons experiencing houselessness seems like we're just talking past each other. At the end of the day, I genuinely don't care what the state does with these people, I just want them removed from my neighborhood. This attitude is derided as not solving the problem, but that claim merely highlights that we don't agree on what the problem is. For the people that insist on handling root causes, that part will be up to them, I'm perfectly satisfied with literally any solution that removes the people that throw chicken bones and vodka bottles on the ground in the park. I'm not actually very interested in whether they're addicts, mentally ill, or simply terrible people. The answer from the BeKind crowd seems to be that everyone has the right to behave the way they want to and that I'm a very bad person for wanting these guys removed; this seems like an unsolvable impasse in preferences for how to live.I wouldn't be surprised if the person you're describing has been arrested in the past for disorderly conduct or maybe a low-level assault.
Anybody here watch police bodycam videos on YouTube? Post-BLM, there have been dozens of new channels (Midwest Safety is one of the largest) that upload bodycam footage daily. In almost every video, the person they stop and arrest is inevitably a repeat offender. Sometimes they're being arrested for the same offense – like domestic violence – but often times it's an entirely new thing.
The point is, a high percentage of these people have been convicted of multiple crimes but are always let out after a short jail or prison term. That's the issue as I see it.
I don't think the issue can be boiled down to "just keep more people in jail longer".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_United_States_incarceration_rate_with_other_countries
I mean sure it would probably work eventually, at great financial and moral cost, but the US is already topping the charts here. Presumably there are other solutions that would get you more bang for your buck.
Does it really matter that the US is topping the charts? Similarly rich countries are probably going to be less violent and criminal (certainly with the cases listed like Canada and Australia) and poorer and more criminal societies probably have less state capacity.
It's a huge huge difference though. Canada to the US is almost a 6x difference. Do the inherent population and cultural differences between Canada and the US really justify that? And even if they did, is more prison the best way to close the gap?
I think the more likely truth is that the US is well past the point of diminishing returns when it comes to prison capacity, and should instead spend in other areas, like trying to bring down housing cost and funding proper asylums (rather than prisons).
Population has some effect. Cultural though I think does much of the lift here. America has an ambitious culture, which I believe pushes people to more extreme behaviors. Canada, as far as it has a national identity, is defined by not rocking the boat and getting along. This dates back to the foundations of both countries as independant entities, the US being created in a bold armed revolution, Canada by convincing daddy Great Britain that its peoples are getting along now.
It's not just Canada, much of Europe is the same in this, ambition is looked at with suspicion. This leads to calm, sedate peoples. Americans are more ambitious, which leads to a more aggressive people; more Americans resent and resist the idea that they have to be content with their lot in life, which leads many to act erratically.
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