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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 the old idea of "bad company" or "going astray". There are young people who are weak-willed (and maybe weak-minded) who get into 'the wrong crowd' who happily use them as catspaws - I can think of two examples off the bat from the school where I worked.
One was a teenage guy who was the only child of elderly parents. He had 'educational problems' (meaning intellectual disabilities) but he was bigger and stronger than his parents who had no means of keeping him under control; there was no way the dad could lock him in his room or threaten him because the kid would just be violent in return. He came to notice because he had spending money without having a job. Strong suspicion that he was being used for petty crime because, to be blunt, he was big and dumb and easily influenced. If he got caught, no problem - he didn't know enough and wasn't smart enough to turn in the guys in the gang and he'd be the one ending up doing time while they found another patsy.
Second was a girl from a broken home, again easily led and not that smart (no diagnosis of learning disabilities). Again got into "bad company", ended up habitually truant, eventually dropping out of school and ending up on that early school leavers' programme I mentioned. Hard to track down because she kept moving around couch-surfing with 'friends', said friends introduced her to weed and other 'harmless' fun substances. Eventually she ends up on heroin, a single mother, and doing time in jail for stabbing another girl in the stomach at a house party. I'd followed her 'career progression' from the time she was in school with poor attendance, but basically okay, to reading the reports on her file about where she ended up (prison) due to the various jobs I'd worked in, and it was depressing.
These two weren't naturally criminal, they were weak and got led down the wrong path. If there were a robust system of intervention (i.e. if you could do anything other than 'now Johnny, that's naughty' and have to let them go under the guidance of an over-worked social worker who can't handle the workload they already have and will probably be switched out for somebody new and the whole process repeat itself) then there is a good chance of keeping them off the path of crime and jail. They maybe won't be the most productive members of society but you can divert them off the track that leads to a baby, a heroin habit, and jail.
But that requires going back to the bad old days of discipline and industrial schools and the rest of the things that nice, middle-class, university graduates protest about and work to do away with. The activists that, as they get older, move seamlessly from student socialist protests while in college to professional careers, nice middle-class well-off neighbourhoods, and the concerns of that set.
EDIT: Actually, there's a third example comes to mind. Another kid on the early school leavers' programme whose career I had followed from school onwards; he had anger management problems and suffered from being spoiled by his single-parent mother whose reaction to every disciplinary action by the school was to turn up and scream about "why are you picking on my son?" Mommy gets pregnant again, drops everything (including son) to dote on the new baby, kid is left adrift since Mommy no longer cares a damn about him and ends up on the programme, where another kid who definitely was on the path to prison (and deserved to end up there because he was one of the habitual losers who don't want to reform) used him again as a tool. Jailbait doesn't want to sit through a full class trying to teach him something he might use to get a job? He winds up Angry Kid who can reliably be set off like a hand grenade, who starts throwing chairs etc. and the rest of the morning goes on calming down Angry Kid and dealing with the aftermath of the meltdown. Jailbait sits there smirking and going "I didn't do anything, I only said X" (where X is on the surface innocent but will push Angry Kid's buttons).
Jailbait deserves to end up doing time, I don't know if he did because I moved to different job and lost track of him. Angry Kid again needs intervention (including taking him away from Mommy who did nothing to help him because she was using him as an extension of herself) but is likely to end up involved in petty crime. That's the difference.
It sounds like one very effective way to protect people like A, B, and C in your story would be to more rapidly and permanently incarcerate the genuine bad eggs around them, as well as making opiate drugs less widely available. The state can’t ensure that feckless weak-willed people are exposed to healthy friendship circles or overcome their natural deficits in decision-making. However, it can intervene to ensure that there are fewer bad actors around to exploit them.
Indeed, particularly in the case of B- has there ever been any society which has had success in keeping stupid but not actually literally mentally disabled teenaged girls from broken homes from getting taken advantage of until they wind up in a bad spot in a way that can't be fixed, like ever in the history of the world- some of these people will never have good outcomes, but you can probably make their outcomes less bad just by removing the worst aspects from society.
Did they do everything but have sex, the Mormon way, or were they actually chaste?
Oral sex was practiced by those in the know, perhaps less than 5%, but the complete lack of sex education meant that most people learned about the mechanics of sex from farmers' kids. Farmers understand a lot about breeding but are focussed almost entirely on cattle in Ireland, and the insights do not transfer quite as easily as you might think.
I would guess that most girls did not understand the basic physics of sex when they graduated high school. I have witnessed people explaining to young grooms what was expected on their wedding night. It is possible that boys were even less adroit, but they at least knew about erections.
The girls were chaste for the most part out of fear. The guys were chaste out of a complete lack of options and strangely, religious reasons. John B. Keane has a play, the Chastitute, written in 1981, that captured the zeitgeist well:
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