Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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I'm interested in seeing the for and against for the argument that "crime is a result of social deprivation and social workers are a better use of money than police for solving it". The only arguments I can muster up in favour of policing are common sense ones which don't (though they should) pass muster in online debates.
Caveat: I want to either use this information to win internet arguments or concede the point in my own head and stop starting that argument altogether.
If we look at a wide cohort of “the socially deprived”, ie those who live in poverty and from single-parent homes, we see enormous differences in criminality according to ethnicity and subculture. If you compare two groups, both socially deprived, the Chinese immigrant or Indian immigrant is going to something like 1/50th as likely to be criminal than a Black American. They may be both socially deprived, they may live in the same neighborhood, but one group is going to be much more likely to be criminal, which means that “extent socially deprived” does not predict criminality. You can do this same analysis across nations. There are socially deprived teens in Japan and China; when you look at their criminality rate, it is nothing like Black American teens.
Next, we have to consider whether at-risk teens actually use the services offered to them such that we would expect if they desired improvement of character. This is surely not the case. The teens shooting each other in gangs do not take out books from the library or use any of the hundreds of thousands of resources they could access on a public library computer or device.
Finally, we can examine the actual soul of the criminal teens and young adults. Who are their idols and what do they value? Criminal rappers, and crime. No amount of “services offered” can change a culture that loves being criminals. Or rather, no one is willing to launch a real propaganda effort to manipulate the teens into hating crime / criminals and competing prosocially. I bet a Batman movie is going to be a better risk mitigation strategy than tens of millions of dollars in services the academics can cook up.
Cool rhetorical trick, calling poor Black boys raised by single mothers “socially deprived.” I’d argue these kids are the most socialized by their peers, who pass down toxic masculinity through their culture of guns, gangs, grifting, and seeing the police as just a gang keeping the wypeepo’s stuff safe.
Bill Cosby tried to change the culture, but the people who overlook the sex crimes of Roman Polanski, Kevin Spacey, Woody Allen, and Bill Clinton decided that this comedian would be the one they’d ruin.
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