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I hope this isn't too shallow for a top-level comment, but I wanted to share a personal observation about shifts in political views. Specifically, in the last couple of years, I've become a LOT more authoritarian on crime. Part of this is probably me getting older (damn kids, stop cycling on the sidewalk!), but I'd single out two main factors.
(1) A big part of it has been related to noticing shifting views on the issue among city-dwelling liberals (that's my in-group, whether I like it or not). I regularly visit a bunch of US cities for work, and I subscribe to their relevant subreddits, and there's been an incredible shift from "defund-the-police is a solid principle albeit the details need to be worked out" to "lock up the bums now". And similarly, several real life liberal friends who were traditionally pretty anti-police have become much more authoritarian of late, complaining about how e.g. the NYC subway used to be incredibly safe but has now become a creepy unpleasant space to inhabit, and something needs to be done.
(2) I've also had a lot more professional dealings with academic criminologists lately, and damn, it's been a wake-up call. It seems to be one of the most activist domains of academia I've ever encountered (and I deal with sociologists and social psychologists on a regular basis!). Over a few different conferences and dinners, I've chatted with criminologists who were pretty explicit about how they saw their role, namely speaking up for oppressed criminals; empirics or the rights of the wider populace barely came into the conversation. On top of this, there have been some spectacular scandals in academic criminology that have helped confirm my impression of the field. Suddenly, all those papers I happily cited about how prison doesn't work etc. seemed incredibly fragile.
I'm going to add two quick personal longstanding reasons why I'm inclined to be quite authoritarian on crime -
(i) Despite my fallouts with The Left, I'm still broadly a social democrat; I think that an effective state is one that provides good free services to all its citizens, including things like high quality education, healthcare, and public transit. But in order to be democratically sustainable, this requires a certain amount of imposed authority: if public schools become known as a magnet for drugs and gang violence, then middle-class parents will pull their kids out and send them to private schools, and won't give their votes or (more importantly) their organising energy to maintaining school quality. If subways become excessively creepy and weird and violent, the middle classes will get Ubers, and vote for candidates who defund public transit. In short, if the middle classes (who have options) decide not to make use of public options, then public options will die their democratic death. Speaking as someone who likes public options, I think it's essential that fairly strong state authority is exerted in public utilities to ensure that they are seen as viable by the middle class.
(ii) I have a weird sympathy towards Retributivism as a theory of justice and crime. More specifically, I have a lot of negative animus towards what I see as excessively utilitarian approaches to criminal justice, that regard criminals as just another type of citizen to be managed. As soon as we stop regarding criminals as people, but just factors of (dis)production, then I think we do them and our society a disservice; it's treating them as cattle. Instead, I'm sympathetic towards a more contractualist approach that mandates we treat all citizens as autonomous individuals who enter into an implicit social contract by virtue of enjoying the benefits of society, such that we would be doing them a disservice of sorts if we didn't punish them for their crimes. Let me try to put that in a maxim: you're an adult, you're a citizen; you fucked up, now you pay the price. If we didn't make you pay the price, we'd be treating you like a child or an animal.
Obviously lots more to be said here, but I'll save my follow-ups for the comments. Curious what others think.
Police officers I've talked to have mentioned this, and what I think is getting left out of the abovementioned trend(although probably not intentionally; it's just not mentioned) is how often it's the same adolescents getting picked up over and over again by the police for crimes and not being charged by the DA until they commit murder because they're just kids. The common thread seems to be that they're fatherless and of certain ethnic backgrounds(usually centraco, sometimes black, occasionally a venezuelan), but the police know exactly which teenagers are going to commit horrific crimes and wind up with decades long prison sentences(of which they'll serve less than ten years) long before they do so, and they're not the ones that show up to community outreach for at risk youth.
I recall a specific story told to me by an officer. He arrested one of his frequent fliers for orchestrating a kidnapping in which the victim died, and this time the DA filed charges, the charges stuck, and at 16 he got a sentence for 25 years. The officer confidently predicted he'd be out on parole by 21, would violate his parole almost immediately and disappear, and would go on to kill someone else.
What does centraco mean? Central American? I just tried googling it and couldn't find anything, was it a typo?
Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Triangle_of_Central_America
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Literally is refers to a Central American person. In practice it refers to someone from Guatemala, Honduras, or El Salvador, especially one with greater degrees of indigenous blood.
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And the frustration more than likely leads to cops being more likely to use force. If you keep seeing the same people escalating their criminal behavior, you’re not likely to want to be the person they decide to murder.
I don't know for sure whether this is true, but it seems plausible and I'm not really shedding a tear for the plight of the poor juvenile delinquents.
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I know that this sounds barbaric, but perhaps we could use something like flogging for these kids. Yes, it would have an unfortunate resemblance to slavery. Yes, it might leave marks, but figuring out how to beat someone or cause them pain without scarring them isn’t a terribly hard thing to do.
It also sounds like it might be a good idea to do this to adults for a first-time misdemeanor offense, maybe some minor felonies. Maybe expunge the whole thing from the record after a few years of good conduct.
I think farm labor would be perfect. Take the unruley city kid and have them manually transplant Vidalia onions for 3 months. If they try to start something I doubt the visa-farm laborers would take a second to beat them to the ground. could even pay them $15/hr subsidized by the government to be paid upon completion of sentence. Any tantrum or loss of crops from the individual can be taken out of their pay.
The problem is that bored young antisocial men have no outlets for constructive behavior in the ghetto. Get them working and put them in a situation where they're isolated from what allows them to misbehave.
That could work - it's basically a short term at hard labor. This being said, there are perverse incentives galore: this shit's profitable. Now you've got not only budding thugs and gangsters but also some poor sap that got busted for shoplifting caught up in this dragnet. As long as they're not working them too hard, giving them enough food and water...as long as it's not some kind of troubled-teen hellhole like Holes with less water and more beatings, it sounds like a good idea. Ideally, the government (and the farmers) would barely break even on the scheme.
I wonder what happened to the petty criminals of our grandfathers' time, who were given the choice between jail and the Army...provided they didn't see combat, were they better off?
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I mean sure, that's a thing that seems worth trying, but it'll never happen. Instead politicians will continue pretending the thirteen year old assaulter will get a stern lecture from his parents like it's 1955 until he kills someone, and cops will continue getting frustrated until sombra negra comes to the US, and that'll be significantly worse to the progressive mindset than a few floggings but it's too late to change anything.
I mean. In 1955, in a lot of cities? A White cop could basically get away with murdering that Black 13-year-old. A dropped gun, a statement that the kid had pulled it, and nobody really asks any questions. I'll grant that some of this might have been cops covering up a tragic, honest mistake, of the "I confused a wallet for a pistol" variety, but a hell of a lot was just shooting fleeing people in the back or shooting them for contempt of cop.
Nice, liberal people want their violence hidden; if it just so happens that 13-year-old juvenile delinquents are sometimes never seen or heard from again, and there is a strong suspicion that it is the local police department doing it...people can unfortunately look the other way. And that's a damn shame: frustrated cops as judge, jury, and executioner.
Like. Someone is going to want to do something about this problem. The prison-industrial complex is expensive; unlike slavery, a prisoner can't make enough off of making license plates (or whatever it is they have them doing) to pay for what it costs to keep him locked up. Bullets are unfortunately cheap.
Someone mentioned farm labor, and that seems like it wouldn't be a bad idea either. Certainly not if they're with migrant farm workers (instead of other juvenile delinquents). Three months picking strawberries because you carjacked some dude at 13 might get you to straighten up.
EDIT: To be clear, I do not think that extrajudicial killings of criminals are at all a good idea. Nice, liberal people don't like violence, but if it must happen they want it well-hidden; they'd be very much against said extrajudicial killings but could look the other way most of the time, I think. Most of us would've been good Germans. I'll stand by what I think cops could've gotten away with in 1955.
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I would have hoped I was in the timeline were we get Batman or The Shadow as our vigilantes.
If El Salvordoran death squads are all thats available it's likely another example of Central Americans taking the jobs of American vigilantes.
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