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Here's something annoying I found on liberal part of reddit (doesn't matter where, and I don't want to accidentally create drama by linking to it):
Here's the part I found annoying. People have basically never been more atomized in the entire human history and the above text is unironically talking about repairing relationship between a criminal and some made up community. Back when communities were actually tightly knit, criminals were hanged.
I don't even care about restorative justice all that much. I can even see myself supporting it in certain situations. For example, If I happen to be a criminal.
What I absolutely find grating is that this person takes the existence of community for granted when it's for most people no more real than bigfoot. At least conservatives recognize this lack as a problem (tho they don't have any real solutions ) while liberals kinda always assume that communities exist when they mostly don't. They don't even realize that they are talking about phantasm.
It gets even more annoying when they talk about e.g. fandoms as "communities." Are people you met on comic book convention going to build you a house? Help you find a wife? Are they going to watch over your children?
Could we have tightly knit communities without brutal punishments? Should we? I have no idea. But any analysis has to start from the fact that we mostly don't have communities right now.
I don't think people, say, in 17th century London saw themselves as part of "London community" any more than people of New York now see themselves as parts of "New York community". Hanging haven't got anything to do with it. I mean, sure, you could hang the thief in the village. Or you could expel him from the village and he'd probably die anyway (unless he's particularly talented at highway robbery and then maybe he'll stick around for a while until it becomes annoying to the local lord and he sends a squad to get rid of him). But those times are so far in the past we can't recreate them by any means short of dismantling our whole civilization infrastructure. The days of living in Dunbar-number communities are past for most of us (numerically). I mean, you still can find many real Dunbar communities, if you are either rich enough or ready to downshift enough, but vast majority of people aren't living in them and never will.
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My read of the quoted comment is different than yours.
To your point that 'community' is overused to the point of meaninglessness in liberal circles, well, I think that's what's actually going on here. My perspective is that the quoted comment isn't really arguing for any criminal justice reform because it will help mend communities in any real way. They're just pro-criminal justice reform community effects notwithstanding, with a focus on rehabilitation and reconciliation between the criminal and victim (which are goals one could have for criminal justice reform without caring about 'mending the community') and then at the very end of their comment, they merely happen to name-drop 'community' because, as you said, its become such a meaningless term in liberal discourse that they use it almost without intentional meaning.
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Back when communities were tight knit, there were informal processes to deal with crime committed by your family or neighbours. Hanging criminals is the point where people are using the power of the state to punish people (usually it starts with outsiders; you wouldn't do this with your in-group). It's a failure of community, and it usually ends up falling out of favour once enforcement comes to the point that your in-group is liable for the same treatment.
In many tight knit communities, justice was dolled out by the church. Since outsiders tended to not be a member, courts provided a great system for punishing them. Even when courts pushed out the church as the main arbitrator in a community, it still relied heavily on church officials' opinions. 30+ years ago, having a priest testify about how great you were was all but a get out of jail free card (where the judge was religious, at least).
We still have tight knit communities these days. They aren't region locked, though.
Anyways, restorative justice was more akin to what your average church would have done in the past (and many continue to do to this day).
Where and when did the local church act as a local community arbiter?
The crowns judges have been in firm control of law for at least 500 years here, with churches not having the role you describe for at minimum 2 centuries if not for longer.
Tight-knit communities are built around something, and that something is almost always the church. In tight-knit communities you do not yield the state's power against your neighbour. Even if courts exist, there's a police force, you'll almost always create bad blood by invoking the state's power in your disputes. And the police, prosecutors, judges, and juries, will all be members of the tight-knit community.
If you believe neighbour wrongs you, you'd go to your priest for help, or other neighbours. Part of being a tight-knit community is that social consequences can be enough to affect a resolution, and one that is moral/just, rather than one that is technically legal.
When you go to the police, you're basically going above the community. If the legal consequences for something are worse than what your community will tolerate, then it's likely the police will try to dissuade you, the prosecutor will decline to bring charges, the judge will give the defendant every benefit of the doubt, etc. Because they are all part of the same community.
But an outsider isn't going to be influenced much by social pressures, and so using the force of the state is seen as acceptable.
If you look at Hasidic Jewish communities, they often have their own police, 'courts', their own schools, etc. They aren't willing to use the state's violence against each other. If they were, they wouldn't be tight-knit communities. Many native reserves are also like this.
I'm sorry but in England this hasn't been the case for a very very long time, I believe for longer than America has been a country.
There is no "local community" for non elite natives.
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Kinship based judgement systems were often extremely formulaic and worked off of collective responsibility. This is not what restorative justice activists are pushing for.
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It's perfectly sensible, when you think a little and remember the politics of people known as 'community organizers'.
That there's no community doesn't mean you can't appoint yourself to be a spokesman for a community.
It's not like they're organised enough to prevent you from speaking in their name, besides, the media knows what message it wants to hear so they'll know who to ask.
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Other examples: the "African American community", the "gay community," the "trans community". These are categories, not communities. They have no unified voice, nor interests, nor (non-trivial) location. The "international community" is also a metaphor at best.
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Depends. Prison sentences in the US are longer than ever despite this atomization (rather than being hanged, you die in prison). Same for bad prison conditions. Crime thrives in countries/regions like Italy, Russia, South America, etc. which are more close knit and religious. It sorta makes sense that it's like this. Kinship offers some protection compared to the impartiality of a blind but punitive justice system.
True, however a blind but punitive justice system is not on the menu for people in Russia.
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There is another aspect to this. If you allow the victims a say in the punishment it increases the probability of victim intimidation for certain crimes, especially if the legal punishment is weak. The victim of a house invasion for example has to worry that requesting a higher sentence will result in their house being invaded again as soon as the perpetrator is out of jail. In Korea this was recently an issue as a 12 year old rape victim decided not to pursue charges against her home invading rapist, who was looking at 2 years in prison.
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Actually most clan based societies used a collective responsibility system where serious crimes were punished by reparations- often a fine- paid by your relatives. This is a poor fit for the society we live in, obviously, but if you insist on shoehorning reparation based justice into the US using race as a definition of community, well, this is not a very progressive world.
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I think there are different levels of communities. Yes, what existed a couple hundred years ago, or today still in rural villages disconnected from globalism, are much more connected and interreliant communities. Every person knows every single other person in their community like how I know my own close family. Maybe we should have a different word for that sort of thing than what we use for fandoms. But community is a sliding scale. Is a 1930s rural American town of a couple thousand where everyone goes to one of five churches a community, if it's not literally everyone knowing literally everyone personally? Was my highschool graduating year of ~400 people, where everyone knew about half the class personally and would do reasonable favours for each other but not go as far to help them build a new house a community? Where do you draw the line before getting to fandom? Especially since some portions of fandoms do get pretty close, there are lots of stories of people meeting and getting married through a fandom.
On another level, I think moving away from the death penalty may have degraded communities. You can worry less about whether strangers are trustworthy if you know untrustworthy strangers get executed and thus aren't around anymore. But also degrading communities morally necessitate the removal of the death penalty. It's one thing for a group of people who've known a criminal since they were a baby to say "yeah that person needs to be killed, it's sad but the best option here, they simply are a danger to keep in the community". It's another thing for a jury of strangers to say "yeah that person needs to be killed, even though all we know about them is what these two very biased lawyers have seen fit to show us".
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Admirable, but by you quoting it, I needed <10 seconds to find the post via Google.
There's probably a lot to unpack there, since the undergirding factor of most if not all leftists is their ideology is collectivist and considers the primacy of the group's interests over the those of the members that compose it. So in the criminal justice realm, the harm a criminal does to an individual seems strictly less important than the harm done to the 'fabric' of the community and thus repairing the relationship between the offender and the victim is a smaller step in restoring the community to health and enabling the offender to re-enter the community and continue to contribute to the group.
(Or so I interpret the lefty approach to criminal justice)
And you nail it, this falls apart entirely when there is no coherent 'society' or 'community' and long term relationships in general are nigh-impossible to maintain.
Victims suffer the harm directly, in the meantime, and this does, indeed, contribute in the aggregate to a toxic social environment which is bad for the community. But does anybody genuinely feel as though they have a stake in the community that is somehow more important than their own personal loss?
Seems unlikely. The victim wants compensation for the loss, and maybe some psychic pleasure from seeing the miscreant suffer. After that, as long as said miscreant doesn't reoffend against them, personally, I doubt they care what eventually becomes of them.
Certain exceptions would exist, in the many cases where the offender is immediate family or friend, but in that case there IS an extant community (albeit a small one) which the individual victim might feel loyalty which overrides their own immediate interests.
The collectivist is starting with the assumption that the community is the most important factor, and how the victim's interest is slotted into that framework, which in this case comes down to the 'relationship' between the victim and the perp, and the victim and perp to the society, and how it is 'good' to restore those relationships rather than simply punish the perp and move on.
But if there is no community in which the victim has a stake, what exactly is the purpose of attempting to restore relationships that never existed and indeed the victim will presumably feel affronted if you're clearly subordinating their interests to a 'social good' that is hardly real.
I make no real normative claims here, but I do observe the while it is better for society to rehabilitate criminals where possible, the basic first step towards achieving that outcome is for someone to give a shit. And under current conditions there is not likely many who are invested enough to really care.
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