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You cite Bukele, but Bukele for all practical purposes suspended the law and went full fash: the algorithm was "if you look like a criminal and smell like a criminal, you're a criminal." They were not spending months carefully dissecting each bit of evidence to make sure Fernando really is the perpetrator of the exact incidents we're charging him with. Luckily for everyone, once Bukele arrested all the duck-typed criminals, he relaxed and everyone now lives in sunshine and rainbows.
Now, granted, the US does not have a homicide rate on the scale of what El Salvador used to. But if you consider mass illegal/dubiously-legal immigration a serious problem and intend to resolve it, then yeah, it is at that scale. Even larger, actually. The idea that doing this is going to solve anything is delusional. It's pissing into a hurricane.
Similarly, for fraud of the sort in the recent video the top-level comment is discussing, I don't think carefully investigating every incident is realistic. How much human effort do you estimate it takes for a scam ring to setup a new fake daycare (or god knows what else)? If it takes them less resources to produce the scam than it does for you to fight the scam, you're losing.
Is the relaxing part happening? My read of the data (which Bukele is trying to obfuscate) is that the prison population of El Salvador is continuing to increase even after the murder rate stabilised at a low level. If you want to lock up the most criminal-looking 5% of each cohort as they enter the peak crime-committing years, you either need to start letting them out in large numbers (which Bukele has promised not to do) or you end up with 5% of the population in prison, which is probably unsustainable.
The US didn't scale back mass incarceration because of soft-on-crime Democrats, they scaled it back because Republicans stopped wanting to pay taxes to pay for prisons once crime dropped in the noughties. Despite the calls for longer sentences on the populist right, there still seems to be a consensus within the MAGA movement that the Trump tariff revenue and DOGE savings should be used for tax cuts, not prison building.
Huh, I thought he ended the state of emergency after they'd finished the gang crackdown. But apparently it's still in effect (after having been "extended" multiple times)!
I guess that's some good PR on their part.
Surely someone at the Heritage Foundation can do some clever accounting to factor in the cost of crimes committed by unincarcerated criminals. When a 20 year old is killed, that's 40 years of tax revenue you lose! It's not even dishonest math, that's actually how this should be accounted.
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In the long run, they simply have to be executed. Keeping them locked up is unsustainable (and runs the risk that some later administration will release them, like a sealed evil from a fantasy novel), exile is infeasible, and the state no longer allows private individuals to dispose of them through e.g. lynching.
Surely they can earn their keep with a bit of forced labour?
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That's a bit misleading. We are not seeing the same kind of increase as we did earlier, so we do definitely see relaxation. We are also quite definitely observing the rest of the population living under sunshine and rainbows.
The average person's views on taxation and spending are incoherent, and that's true no matter whether you're talking about the left or the right. Either way, if you want to imply that the DOGE-enjoyers want to cut spending on prison, maybe you can provide a link to an example or two.
Given that the level of imprisonment in El Salvador is not something where there is trustworthy data, I am not going to get into an argument about the second derivative.
Sure, they're about as untrustworthy as any western institution. Though in this case, since they are already yes_chadding the highest incarceration rate in the world, I don't quite see the point in lying about it.
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Not quite. If by prosecuting fraud you deter more future fraud, you can win, indeed.
if you suspend the law and instate a relatively friendly version of fascism, and then get re-elected by obscene margins, what's that tell you about people's regard for the state of the law?
I think all the judges trying to hamstring Trump with national injunctions are basically BEGGING for people to stop caring about the sanctity of the Judicial system. All the more so when the Dems keep calling the Supreme Court illegitimate.
Where else could we possibly be heading?
Fraud is only deterred if the expected consequence outweighs the expected gain. In a Western world where fines for wrongdoing often are smaller than the money gained by the wrongdoing - fraud is simply never deterred. Especially among those who have few other options!
The solution is excessive punishment, potentially including executions as so many posters have mentioned, but this of course runs counter to Western instincts and our legal tradition. We don't have a solution to this problem.
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The state of the law varies by time and place. Crime in El Salvador shortly before Bukele was elected was an order of magnitude worse than it ever got in America. At some point (which the 2020s US has not reached, except in the deluded minds of a small number of San Francisco leftists) there are more people with a friend or relative unfairly imprisoned than there are crime victims. I think the US would hit that point if you locked up an additional 1% of the population Bukele-style - i.e. without explicitly targetting proven repeat offenders.
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I think there's a lot of demand for this, especially among under-40s.
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