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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.
Subjectively, I feel like my local incarceration rate is way too low. Given the endemic property crime, illegal encampments ruining public spaces and open hard drug selling and use. Some enormous societal failure has occurred. Step one on the long road to fixing it is institutionalizing the crazy homeless people rather than letting them self medicate with hard drugs while living in filth and stealing to afford more drugs. And imprisoning the non-crazy ones.
I am not very invested in Canada's incarceration rates. If this boosts our incarceration ratio to 8x of Canada's, so be it. We have a real problem with the cost per prisoner per year. I'm open to building much cheaper prisons or paying 3rd world countries to house our prisoners.
Agree 100%
Also hard-agree (though I do think some consideration to their well being is still warranted)
I become skeptical that the problem is this simple. Maybe 8x Canada will fix it, but what if you have to go further? What if you have to get up to 10x, 15x 20x? Are you willing to pay that cost?
I bring up the comparison just because it seems like other countries do better, or at least not much worse, while having much lower incarceration rates. If you think that the nature of the US makes it impossible, what factors make it so?
We aren't other countries. Sure Japanese people live long healthy lives with lower medical spending. And if our nation was composed of Japanese people then we would too. But we aren't and won't be, so nevermind.
We are a strangely violent people. Even excluding gun crime we have very high violent crime rates compared to other developed countries. I'm not clear what factors cause this. The good news is we don't have to root cause our problems to get rid of junkie encampments in major cities.
My understanding is that a fairly small number of serial offenders commit a majority of quality of life crimes. I believe a modest increase in the prison population could fix these problems. I don't think it would take extremes like multiplying the prison population.
Doing a bit of googling I see that my state spends 2.2% of its budget on incarceration. I would gladly bear a 2.2% tax increase to fix these problems. Again, not that I think we need to go to the extreme of doubling the prison population. But if we had to it would be very affordable.
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Our sizable underclass of drug-addled, criminally-inclined, antisocial losers, many of whom come from broken homes and shitty communities. As Europe imports the third world, I expect it to struggle with many of the same issues.
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