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Notes -
Hold on.
Didn’t we try “tough on crime” over and over again? Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr, Clinton, all spearheading different approaches to shooting the dealers and locking up the addicts. Okay, Nixon had a really confusing stance on remediation, but his admin popularized the “war on drugs!” So what were these guys doing wrong?
@JarJarJedi and @FarNearEverywhere posit that progressive idpol is holding us back from implementing harsh solutions. This train wreck of a wiki article suggests the same…but most of its examples are post 2010. There were massive race riots before Clinton was elected, yet the 1994 crime bill saw huge bipartisan support. Reagan wasn’t deferring to victim narratives. It’s plausible that today, progressives are unwilling to accept the trade off, but that doesn’t explain what happened in the 80s and 90s.
I’m sympathetic to the argument below: America is so damn rich that our drug-addled homeless don’t mind it too much. That demand curve makes it hard to suppress the supply of drugs. Maybe reinstitutionalizing would help make up the difference. I just have little confidence that it would succeed where two generations have failed.
That's not what I'm saying. Harshness of the solution is not the issue. We don't need public executions of weed smokers. At least it won't fix public space decay problems. What is likely to fix it is consistent enforcement of quality-of-life crimes. It won't fix the drug abuse - but it would prevent it from messing up the lives of ordinary citizens not participating in it. However, the society took the conscious decision that the welfare of drug addicts is more important than the quality of life of the rest of the society.
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state vs. federal. War on drugs was in response to trafficking of cocaine and large scale stuff. Dealers who avoid federal laws can get much more lenient sentences, same for users . It does not cover local, smaller scale dealing of homegrown weed, homemade drugs, resale and abuse of prescribed opioids, etc .
If the sentiment was strong enough to get wild bipartisan support, I’d expect some of the same policies to show up. California was red until ‘92, the same year of the LA riots. It can’t have always matched up with today’s politics.
Did states generally break from the feds on this one issue? That seems really odd.
No, it wasn't. From 1960-1992, it had two Republican Senators for about 4 years. Governors largely alternated party. The State Assembly was majority Democratic from 1971 to 1995 [Note that the sift to R happened after your 1992 cutoff] and the State Senate has not been majority Republican since 1970. Republican candidates have gotten a lower pct of the vote in CA than in the country as a whole in every election since 1984. The Briggs Initiative lost overwhelmingly in 1978.
Moreover, re crime, the Three Strikes initiative was adopted after 1992, as were other initiatives to increase penalties for certain crimes. See here and here
Everything else is fine if arguable, but as far as the Briggs Initiative goes, it was opposed by...Ronald Reagan, as he was about to become the standard bearer of conservatism only two years later.
Nevertheless, a red state would not have such a lopsided vote. Compare that with the 69-31 vote in 1979 to repeal Miami-Dade County's ordinance oulawing anti-gay discrimination.
And, was Ronald Reagan the standard -bearer, or the Moral Majority?
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Huh. That's what I get for just looking at the presidential vote.
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And, perhaps relevantly, local prosecutors have no incentive to seek long sentences but every incentive to get convictions, so they offer really good plea bargains which result in dangerous criminals getting short sentences. The rest of local court systems usually don’t have the resources to actually process all of these cases, either. The plea bargain system makes ‘just throw the book at ‘‘em’ difficult to implement as a solution even when large parts of the system aren’t actively conspiring against punishing criminals because reasons.
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In his Reactionary Philosophy in a Nutshell post Scott posited an "uncanny valley of half measures" and I kind of feel like that's the situation a lot of cities are in now regarding a lot of issues surrounding mental health and substance abuse. A completely laissez faire approach would mean tolerating misbehavior but also tolerating the train driver telling the masturbator to get off their train if they don't want to have their skull stove in by a tanker's bar or coupling tool. A tough-on-crime approach would mean removing the masturbator from the train by having the police lock him/her up. Either of these options is arguably preferable in terms of transit ride quality to the current status quo where individuals are allowed to misbehave but are not allowed to be punished for that misbehavior.
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Honestly, the Reactionary Philosophy in a Nutshell post is one of my favorite ones that Scott has ever written, possibly my very favorite. He convinced me that reactionary philosophy is correct far more than his followup convinced me that it's incorrect. Which is damn impressive considering he doesn't even agree with it. I think at one point it kinda went off the rails because I don't really agree that the solution to our problems is to install a king back on the throne. But the entire analysis of society's issues where he goes "if you're in a hole, stop digging" over and over was dead on.
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More commonly called anarcho-tyranny. I also sometimes call it the government as dog-in-the-manger with respect to such problems; they won't solve the problems but they won't let anyone else do it either.
There's that classic Simpsons quote:
Marge: "I thought you said the law was powerless?"
Wiggum: "Powerless to help you, not to punish you."
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Yes, we did try "tough on crime" and it worked. The U.S. murder rate fell by large amounts and reached a minimum in the 2010s a few years after the peak in the prison population. The fall in murder rates was perhaps most visible in New York where it fell from about a peak of 30.7 in 1990 to just 3.4 in 2018.
Unfortunately, we've done a complete 180 and now are extremely permissive. In today's news in my hometown of Seattle, a person was arrested after committing a violent assault against a tourist while spewing racial slurs. (The story was mysteriously short on other details). The particular offender had been arrested 47 previous times.
https://old.reddit.com/r/SeattleWA/comments/11tqdik/man_arrested_for_committing_racial_hate_crime/
The "War on Drugs" was also largely successful. Drug overdoses per capita during the 1980s were less than 1/10th current rates. Yes, that's correct. Drug overdose rates have increased by more than 1000% since the 1980s.
As is typical, in an effort to reign in rare abuses, we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater and now tolerate exceptional rates of drug use and violent crime.
Homicide rates and other forms of crime rates dropped in more places than the US during that timeframe. Surely not all of them concurrently decided to go hard on crime at that same exact time, there's probably something else at play here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_drop
Not saying the US's approach to reducing crime was strategically the wrong thing to do, but there is a confounder here.
The US has a steep drop in the 90s while Europe actually ends the decade higher than it started. South America is mostly flat during that time. I'm not seeing a global trend matching the US one during the 90s when we adopted tough on crime policies like 3 strikes laws.
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What is the confounder specifically? Are criminals some form of a global hivemind, and if they decide to do less crime in one place that somehow affects every other place?
It's more we stopped poisoning people with lead, everybody could track crime better due to computers, and frankly, entertainment like video games and the Internet became more prominent. I'm not going to say tough-on-crime proposals did nothing, but most crime is not some rational choice made.
So howcome there's a rise in crime since BLM, and the implementation of "easy on crime" policies?
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I don't have any explanation better than what the Wikipedia article says.
I phrased it wrong, there might or might not be a confounder, but the base rate of crime was reduced globally, and that fact itself raises the question of "did the US's tough-on-crime policy actually work?". Also worth noting is that crime went up in almost all countries that in any way shape or form facilitated the illicit drug trade, so the effect is starker than averages would imply.
Extremely wild ass uninformed guess, but what if crime was offshored via globalization and its resulting specialization? Instead of producing and distributing some drugs everywhere, why not let Colombia and Mexico do all of it?
The question is much bigger than that. You can ask it about literally anything in social sciences, and you'll never know the answer because you can't rerun an experiment under controlled conditions.
If education counts as "social science", yes you can run trials and experiments according to most rigorous scientific standards, and you can also completely disregard the results and drop the whole thing into memory hole.
Official line for introduction
Twitter thread following the crumbs into rabbit hole, with links to further resources
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Yes, we are in agreement. I even conceded that to reduce crime.. you must attempt to reduce crime.
But I am from the school of unintended consequences and not wanting to fall for base rate fallacies. So from my vantage point, its not too unfathomable that a confounder probably does exist, it seems to be the Occams Razor explanation for the Crime Drop.
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