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Notes -
Turning to some good news:
Article link
This is a WSJ article about the rise in justified homicides in the US in recent years. Much of it is about "Stand Your Ground Laws." I'd be interested to hear the thoughts of the more lawyer-brained Mottizens on those kind of laws and their proliferation over the past decade or so.
On the culture war angle, this article is maybe the starkest example of "erosion of trust in society" that I've come across. A few of the anecdotes are pretty hair raising. They're cherry picked, I know, but the idea that a kid loses his father over an argument about a a fence and a property line made me sad. The "road range" incident they cover in detail seems like it was unfortunate but when one guy levels a gun at another, there's only one reasonable reaction.
Violence must be tightly controlled for a society to function. This is something that's bone deep in humans. We've developed methods of conflict resolution that fall short of violence for our entire existence as a species. Even within the context of violence, there are various ways of controlling it. Duels and so forth. Even informal ones; basic Bro code dictates that when one guy falls down in a fight, the other one backs off.
But this article hints at the idea that people are zooming past any of that to full lethality. It's impossible to compile the stats to determine if that's actually the case or not, but the larger point remains; in a society with plunging basic trust, you're going to see levels of interpersonal violence spike. How should state laws governing violence respond to this? Stand Your Ground is something I generally still support, but my mind could be changed if simple Bad Neigbor fights end up with more orphans.
Either:
or
Personally, I would prefer (1), but the neutered police forces of the modern west, constantly monitored, unable to dispense even basic local low-level enforcement (which for reasons of criminal high time preference and the time the evidence gathering, prosecution and court process usually takes can never be replaced by another aspect of the justice system), also known as “police brutality”, are for now incapable of it.
It's more like you go to jail and then the beatings happen there. the police don't need to do it and have it go viral online
There is violence in prisons, but almost none of it is at the hands of the guards.
And there's a pretty strong difference between jail(which most petty criminals have some stints in) and prison(which petty criminals generally don't go to and are as scared of as a regular person would be).
I wonder whether jails in densely-populated places like Chicago (total inmates 5900, largest single facility designed to hold 1500) are worse than prisons in sparsely-populated places like Wyoming (total inmates 2500, largest single facility holding 700).
As I noted below, it varies wildly by jurisdiction. 100% of clients I've dealt with have found state prison far easier to handle than local jails. One reason is that the inmate population of the local jail changes more frequently, so the rules for behavior (think Eternal September, but with high-impulse, violent, low-IQ, and/or very mentally unstable people) are harder for inmates to enforce among themselves.
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