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Notes -
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.
I'm hopping in off this due to the shoplifting comment, where one of the points is to put up kiosks where the - hmm, can't call them perpetrators or criminals, I suppose "unfortunate victims of systemic racism"? - can be connected with social services.
Guy with a knife is threatening "open the till or I'll cut your throat" - send in the social workers! They (or more likely, "she" as one will be sent on their own) will talk him down! He will regret his life choices and become compliant once a sympathetic shoulder to cry on is presented!
Yeah, sure. Even the most bleeding-heart social worker is going to want police backup in the scenario of "armed criminal/crazy guy being violent". Is it any surprise that when faced with the concrete results of policies, people switch to "maybe we do need the cops after all"?
I'm not against compassionate policies and there are people who need help due to bad life circumstances or mental illness. But not when it comes to gangs of professional thieves who are career criminals doing this as a job, and not when it's down to comfortably middle-class DAs and prosecutors more interested in virtue signalling and being part of the network of the NGOs who are making careers out of this than in actually helping anyone. 'Revolving door arrests' those guys, safe in the knowledge that you will never have to encounter them face-to-face in your daily life.
And this is why I do agree that criminals should lose the right to vote: they've demonstrated that they do not want to participate in civic life or be bound by the laws on all citizens, and that they have no perception of others as fellow-citizens or respect for their rights. When you put yourself outside the common life, you lose the rights of that common life. Come back in, demonstrate genuine reform, and then ask for your rights to be restored.
Prison doesn't work if all that happens is you scoop someone up, dump them in there, do nothing about reform, then let them back out to resume their interrupted career once the sentence is served. There has to be real effort put into diverting young offenders off the path of crime and helping out guys who do want to reform but have few to no options if left on their own to go back where they came from.
But this is expensive and needs a lot of work, so it's easier to build prisons, fill them to bursting, then - when the inevitable failure occurs - turn on a dime and start releasing or not even arresting criminals in the first place. If you can't make people adhere to the terms of their bail, or their parole, or the programme for drugs they were sent on instead of serving jail time, then such things are toothless and do no good at all.
Apart from that, I have unhappily come to the conclusion that there are some people who will never change, no matter if you intervene when they're sixteen or if they're twenty or thirty. They don't care, they are only in it for themselves, they're just smart enough to be able to invoke the "pity poor little me, I had a hard life, it's not my fault" but they have no intention of changing. They want social services and the rights of unemployment assistance, social housing, etc. because they want anything and everything they can get for nothing, but they don't contribute, don't want to contribute, and think that ordinary people are suckers to be exploited. They want cheap drugs, easy sex, free money, no necessity to work or do anything, and no consequences. Knock that bitch up? Not my responsibility. Steal from my own family to get a fix? Not my responsibility. Slack off on training programme to get a job? Not my responsibility. Get fired from job after job because I show up late, don't work, and steal on the job? Not my responsibility.
Those are the hardcore who are the minority but do need to be treated differently, and yeah that is going to mean some form of "lock them up" or restrict them or harsher treatment. Because they will never change, and soft treatment just confirms their belief that "you are all suckers and sheep to be fleeced".
Either (A) we have no idea how to do that or (B) there aren't actually all that many people falling only in that category. So we should do what we can -- put more criminals in prison, building more if necessary. Perhaps if (A) is true we should work on how to do it, but not unless we're willing to reject ideas that don't work. Personally I suspect it is possible in theory, but possibly not in practice -- it would involve catching minor criminals far more often and punishing them swiftly with unpleasant but short stays in jail. But that's only a theory and even if implementable may not actually work.
There’s also option C- we have a very good idea of how to do it such that any retired cop in a diner could tell you how, but for some reason that probably has to do with civil rights or non discrimination society has decided it’s against the rules.
What, exactly, are you alluding to?
The Constitution, and hundreds of years of precedent after it (so, precedent relative to today), prevents arrest without clearing what is the highest barrier for evidence and evidence collection in the Western World.
The "retired cop in a diner" would say something like "Every Cop knows that Bad Leroy Brown is running the drug market on the South Side. But he's never actually in the room with drugs, or on phones, and no one will testify against him, so we can't indict."
This is actually a major recurring theme in The Wire. Where the kingpins generally are so far removed from the street that indicting them is a long term game of cat and mouse. Meanwhile ,the chaos that results from their empires destroys a city and then only "high visibility" solution is to "rip and run" - i.e. engage in low level arrests of minor players in an effort to clean up the streets.
The civil liberties slippery slope is real. We can't, as a society, just start making exceptions because "everybody says Leroy Brown is the big man around the way."
Interesting. Do you know how, say, an English or Australian policeman would handle Bad Leroy Brown, the local drug kingpin?
I can't say with a lot of specific certainty as I don't know those policing systems much at all.
I know that the concept of civil liberties and privacy are fundamentally weaker. For instance, I know that there has been at least an official police visit to folks who have posted offensive language on twitter. Not an arrest, per se, but an official sanctioned visit to the domicile. The threshold for what would take a warrant in the USA is much lower. I believe the language is "vital to an ongoing investigation" at the discretion of the police themselves - no judge needed.
So, assuming I'm not wildly off base with my statements above (which are, admittedly, fuzzy at best) ... A constable in the UK would hear that Leroy Brown is a bad dude from the local toughs and then, presumably, launch and official investigation. This would allow Constable Fish-N-Chips to surveil Mr. Brown and search his domicile (again, I think) with near impunity. No such thing as off-limits or 'non-pertinent' information. It's a 24/7 (or as much time as the cops feel like) surveillance and waiting game until Mr. Brown somehow commits a crime with prosecuting.
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