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How far back turning the dial of time does returning to tradition mean? It's like a tradeoff between higher relative status for White males and lower standards of living, vs less status and the fruits of modernity. I think for the former category, there was more freedom compared to today. But also, I think people have a conception or idealization of a past that didn't really exist, when in reality things were pretty disorderly back then. If you read the biographies of artists and writers who grew up in the mid to early 20th century, when America was assumed to be more conservative and religious, a theme is how they were constantly breaking the law and given second chances. it's like these ppl were in and out of detention and skipping school and smoking and drinking in their early teens, and no one cared that much. Nowadays, things are much more strict.
I think that was viable in large part because of the lower rate of serious criminality. (Particularly in white neighborhoods before desegregation.) If crime is less of a problem, if fewer people are escalating from minor offenses to murder, then you don't need to be as harsh to keep it down. It's like a thermostat, if the furnace is running more (harsher policing and sentencing), the insulation is better (older population), and yet the temperature inside (murder rate) is the same or colder then it's probably colder outside. An alternative explanation would be that the furnace doesn't work, but based on stuff like the success of 90s tough-on-crime efforts and the surge from the Ferguson/Floyd Effect it seems like policing has the expected effect, it just has more to handle. Similarly in other countries harsher policing seems effective but the countries that need to resort to it are the ones that had crime problems to begin with. Of course none of this means that "less religiosity" or the like is one of the reasons why, I just think the tradeoffs here are underappreciated. There's a tendency for people to either believe harsh policing and sentencing is intrinsically good/free (Why should we worry about the welfare of criminal scum?), or to believe that it's evil/useless (Don't you know Sweden has 18% of the U.S. incarceration rate and yet it has only 20% of the U.S. murder rate? Why can't we just use their system?). I think the better way to think about it is that it's a necessary but serious cost and the preferable situation is to avoid paying it by having less criminality to begin with.
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"a theme is how they were constantly breaking the law and given second chances..."
Yep, all kinds of casual rule-breaking and callous behavior in the past. My dad stole cars (to this day he says "I just borrowed them (because he did in fact return them)" and went to juvenile hall but still went on to have multiple marriages, kids, long career. Dealt with alcoholism, saved by his marriage. At one point one of our cats had an unexpected litter and I shit you not he just put them in a bag and dropped them in a well. My mom was furious. (In pop culture, the first season of Mad Men depicting Draper's family littering after a picnic was also quite accurate.)
Hard to see all that happening today for a man and it still turns out ok. For one, women aren't as interested in rescuing you from yourself, as my mother did for him. You need your shit together early and on your own.
In a world where 16 year olds from time to time boost cars then leave them on the side of the road 30 feet from where they stole them, and then grow into productive citizens, this is how the criminal justice system should work.
In the world of the county I currently reside, this is instead the progression: 12-16 year olds regularly boost cars for their gangs. The gangs turn them into parts and they disappear into the black market and no owner ever sees them again. Then somewhere in the 16-21 year old age range they graduate to armed robbery and hijacking. Sometimes someone is shot, sometimes luckily not. If no one dies and they are 16 or 17, they get out in 3 years! If 18-21, 20 years. If they are the juvie, well they prolly do it again, or something else dumb like dealing drugs while armed. Then they get hit with a good 7-10. Now both sets of these juvies are lucky, they did no murders in their 20s, so they are likely about to age out of the violent crime demo. They are resigned to a life (mostly) of drug dealing, retail (or amazon delivery) thieving, and other antisocial, but usually nonviolent activities at this point. In any case the system that applied above makes no sense for the scenario here, and I gave a rosy scenario. No one has actually been shot or killed, merely placed in the extreme danger of being shot or killed.
The problem isn't that rehabilitation doesn't work as an absolute measure. Its that the places it would work are often the places where it is so rarely needed, no one even thinks about implementing it.
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Wow this is a beautiful story, in some ways at least. I do agree our culture seems far more strict and less forgiving than it used to be.
Somewhere, someone that used to post here has a lovely little blog post about the gracelessness of "computer says no" type systems. Forgiveness, grace, is the product of trust and common culture. Or divinity.
Leaving that last option aside, our culture no longer has that kind of trust and common culture, the strong ties and little platoons that made that kind of forgiveness and tolerance possible.
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I think Decarlos Brown Jr. is a pretty good example of the problem with being too forgiving.
Weirdly we seem more forgiving in a legal context and less forgiving in a social context.
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