Your including a tweet from John Pfaff reminded me that I had suggested once when Ezra asked for ideas that Vox should have him on one or other podcast. It never did, but it made me consider just googling, and it seems there are a bunch out there he's been on, so hopefully they're as informative as his twitter feed.
Make traffic violence into something that gives you swift and certain, but relatively mild, punishment, and that's how you make cities safer for everyone.
Can someone make the case for why this isn't done in every urban area? It seems obviously better, and likely cheaper, than having cops occasionally set speed traps. Am I missing something?
I think there have been court cases claiming that you can't be convicted of something if you can't face your accuser, and if your "accuser" is a camera then you can't be charged. At least, I think that's been the constitutional pretext for banning them, along with some vague worries about privacy concerns, and concern trolling about municipalities using them to increase revenue, and that red light cameras increase collisions because people stop short more often.
The privacy concern is the only one I am at all moved by (rear-end collisions just aren't anywhere near as dangerous as t-bones, and low speed collisions aren't as dangerous as high speed collisions, so increasing collisions seems like a minor price to pay if you greatly decrease injuries). But I think the big thing is just that people don't like their driving behavior being watched, just like they don't like having to search for parking, or being stuck in traffic.
At least sometimes, it's probably also related to the fact that roadway design encourages a different sort of behavior than the legal regulations, but those could be fixed.
Also less glibly.. in many (most?) cases it requires state legislative approval. In NY, for example, the program was originally authorized only in school zones and only when the school was in session. To expand the program requires state legislators to come out in favor of more speeding tickets, which is just really not very popular with anyone outside of Vision Zero advocates and professionals. Most people don't see speeding as a big deal and have personal experience getting a ticket.
We all think we are smart enough to know when it's safe to speed and when we need to slow down. How many people admit they were being unsafe when they got a ticket after all? And most of the time we're probably right! (or so I like to believe :).
We probably need a society-wide re-calibration of traffic rules - streets are often designed to encourage speeds higher than the posted ones, because traffic engineers note that these encouraging streets are safer for drivers than streets that get people to drive at the posted speed; four-way stops almost never really need people to stop, as long as everyone respects right-of-way; red lights could be a lot smarter in when they change; etc.
I can see why it would be unbearable to pay current hugely inflated fines all the time for going a few mph over the speed limit. But why would it be unbearable to pay the sort of small fines that would be reasonable to charge if they were assessed every time? I don't see how this makes anything "unbearable", to just ask people to follow the speed limit and stop at red lights, especially since most of the time that most people are driving, traffic makes it impossible to violate these rules.
Now you know more about how police behave than I do, so maybe it's impossible to think that police would ever care about criminal behavior with an automobile. But I would think that taking all police off of traffic law duties would mean that at least a few of them could occasionally try to impound cars without plates.
Great article, but it fundamentally misunderstands the point of the long sentences. The goal is not to deter crime, but to bully defendents into talking and taking plea deals. Take these tools away and I'd be surprised if the police clear any cases at all.
There's so much I could say here, but on this day after reading about the U.S. Army officer who was terrorized by cops and about the 20 year-old in the Minneapolis area who was shot--accidentally--by a cop who thought he was shooting a taser, I will say only this: the criminal justice system needs a Flexner Report that will lead to washing out all the people who are attracted to police work because of their psychological problems and their racism, leaving only cops like my friend Howard Wynn, who retired from the Police Department of Philadelphia without ever having shot his gun.
Holy crap, why did the clearance rate drop so much over the last 50 years? The rest of the article and discussion is great and all, but that's what jumped out to me.
I think the standard explanation is that there's now more 'random' crime, more violence between strangers who didn't previously know each other well. So this cancels out the increase in cameras, the surveillance device we all carry around in our pockets, etc. Supposedly in the past more violence was either a neighborhood or domestic dispute, where it's not tough to track down the perpetrator
Well why is Bernie Madoff still in jail? At his age he’s not a physical threat, and who in his right mind would hire him as a mini-mart cashier let alone a financial advisor?
Besides all he really did was copy the Social Security business model.
Isn't another byproduct of lengthening prison terms the inflation of what behavior is considered a felony? IIRC there is a big difference between crimes punishable by more than a year in prison and those punishable by less...
In practice this would mean a lot more cops and a lot more cop interactions in low income neighborhoods. To get there would require flipping the entire media perspective on black lives matter.
I have to disagree with Matt and some of the others here on white-collar policing. In fact, the US already prosecutes white-collar crime far more harshly than any country on earth. Yet all of these other countries like Canada, the UK, Germany, etc that all have high clearance rates also have far lower white-collar prosecution rates. The need for white-collar prosecution in the US is more a reflection of the religiosity and quasi-religiosity of many Americans including Matt and Elizabeth Warren. In a truly secular country like Canada, the left-wing has very little interest in white-collar crime.
A one size fits all for crime doesn’t work. Rapists, pedophiles, serial killers and terrorists shouldn’t be put in the same categories as drug dealers or gang members. Certain crimes are so vile that death or life in prison isn’t enough. “Violent Crime” encompasses far too many acts to have one specific way in dealing with. Should an 18 year old drug dealer that murdered a rival have a chance at rehabilitation and freedom? I think so. Should someone who raped and murdered a toddler? No. Both are murders, but very different.
Maybe the best way to start the conversation is to be more specific about which crimes are worthy of rehabilitation.
A significant chuck of those unsolved murders happens in places like Chicago’s south & west sides - places where residents refuse to cooperate with police and rely on street justice instead. There aren’t easy answers to this. Long-term policies to shift the culture are one thing. In the near-term, would a surge of police on the streets reduce murders in the first place? Is that sustainable? Would an increase in surveillance tech in the worst areas be worth the trade offs?
It’s just an incredibly difficult situation when residents refuse to cooperate with investigations in the first place.
But what the bulk of law abiding citizens worry about is not gang murder but things like robbery, assault, sexual assault, menacing, down to burglary, car theft, and just general disorder. The violent crimes seem to get nominal attention but I gather the rate of clearance even for these is very poor. The other stuff the police don't even pretend to enforce, it might as well not be illegal. So what are the effective strategies to protect the wider citizenry from this kind of stuff? What is the model for how these things happen?
Here’s a simple idea: if there’s a shooting and residents are uncooperative with police, blanket the area with surveillance technology. When things improve, rollback the tech.
"If you want to solve more crimes, you need to make a point of investing in and rewarding that activity."
If police are rewarded for "solving" cases, it seems like an incentive to make sure someone goes to jail for each crime, but not necessarily the person who committed the crime.
I wonder what the psychology of capping all sentences at twenty years would be for judges and prosecutors? Since you couldn’t give an offender more time, would “tough-on-crime” prosecutors and judges look to up-charge defendants to get as many as possible into the twenty-year category? I suppose they already do that a lot of the time anyway. Seems like you’d also need to mandate that all sentences for multi-crime convictions be concurrent rather than consecutive, to forestall stringing together multiple twenty-year sentences.
It blows my mind that there are people in this country that would release criminals, after 20 years, that have raped and murdered children or committed acts of terrorism resulting in mass death. I am a moderate democrat and would switch votes if any democrat advocated for this kind of thing. It’s a losing issue.
Go read the Lopez article. Such a system would have provision for ongoing detention in cases where the statement can make a compelling argument that theres an ongoing risk to the public, but it's a decision made at the time of putative release rather than based on a sentence imposed decades before.
An old aging child rapist isn’t a danger to society. Doesn’t mean society should have to reintegrate him. I read it and it’s flawed to those of us that support law and order.
Nonviolent crime I’m not even agreement on either. Bernie Madoff should die in prison even though he isn’t a physical danger to people.
I guess my question is do you think there are a significant number of people who would do these things knowing that it's a 20 year sentence if caught, but would not knowing that it is a longer sentence?
If yes, I think Matt covered the argument against that pretty well, if no, what's your goal here if not to prevent crime?
That's an act, not a goal. I'm guessing what you're trying to say is the goal is retribution, i.e. there's a moral imperative to make certain people suffer for the sake of making them suffer.
The problem with building a justice system around that is it's purely a values question - who gets to decide how much suffering is enough? We're all going to have a different view on that, how do we mediate that conflict? Democratically seems like the obvious answer, but the most motivated are almost inevitably going to be the most retributive - you get a spiral of harsher punishment.
It's not worth the trouble, JFO. You're responding to someone whose outlook has been shaped by growing up in Singapore, and then moving to San Francisco. The violent swing from one tiny enclave of extreme social conformity to another tiny enclave of extreme non-conformity has acted on his brain like taking a glass baking dish out of the oven and plunging it into ice-water -- his sense of moral perspective has been shattered. He has no experience of any part of America outside of the Bay Area, and he claims that the rest of us are living in a fantasy land.
Then we should have a substantial increase in funding of the justice system to reduce the pressure on defendants to agree to plea bargains or prosecutors to offer them.
If large numbers of defendants are being pressured into plea deals and sent to prison, who would be acquitted if they went to trial before a jury of peers, that is quite a damning indictment of our current system.
It is, but maybe not in the way that you think. There is so little trust in the system in poor neighborhoods that a high number of acquittals of actual criminals is not only possible but quite likely. I speak as a person who has served on Bronx juries: the prosecutors empanel juries to put the pressure on for a settlement, then they knock down the charges and plead them out.
You can argue those juries are doing exactly what juries are there for - to ensure criminal punishment is not meted out by authorities who lack democratic legitimacy with the community in which the accused lives.
For all it's faults, the right to a jury is the most direct form of democracy we have in this country. Your neighbors and community members literally get to vote on whether you should be punished for something you did.
Oh, for God’s sake. This is not medieval England. Judges are very careful to instruct jurors in their absolute responsibility to render a verdict in the light of the evidence. Anybody who doesn’t think they can do that is excused. Doing otherwise is perjury.
Jury service is not a form of democracy, or a vote on the legitimacy of The Man. Jurors are not there to “send a message.” Jury nullification has been used mostly for evil ends and is not something to be celebrated or honored.
God help me if I my life is left in the hands of my neighbors. It sounds like the assembly of Athens. Who thinks Alcibiades should be executed! Raise your hands!
There's strong evidence that juries are not actually very nice--John Rappaport's recent paper on this is exceptional--but jury nullification is impossible to eliminate and it would be normatively bad if it was. In legal theory, this is called "acoustic separation"--it's probably good that jurors are told told they're not allowed to nullify, because doing so would lead to too much nullification, but it's good that nullification happens nevertheless to provide some sort of a community check.
If the role of juries isn't to provide a last line of defense against unjust or illegitimate criminal prosecutions, then what are they for?
Juries sure as heck aren't good at fact finding, especially in any case involving expert evidence. One side can have the world's foremost expert in a field, and the other a total quack, but if the quack looks good and speaks with confidence, more often than not the jury will believe the quack over the bona fide expert.
All juries are good for is keeping the law real. And that's important.
The argument you're making is that we need to hold wildly disproportionate punishment over the heads of the accused so that we can continue to underfund the justice system and avoid paying to assess the evidence against them.
I guess my contention is that the costs of an inadequate justice system should be borne by society writ large rather than those unfortunate enough to be wrongly accused.
I don't think this holds on the west coast anymore, where major city prosecutors have essentially legalized misdemeanors. I was caught in the middle of a mass shooting a couple of years back, which turned it to be three drug dealers having a shootout in the middle of downtown. They were all in their early to mid twenties and between them had been arrested literally over 100 times. These guys were getting caught constantly, but nothing ever happened to them so eight innocent bystanders got shot.
The ceiling on punishments is probably too high but we've also got to bring the floor back above zero.
Absolutely: this is an intolerable situation. When three dealers with 100 arrests between them still cannot shoot straight enough to avoid hitting bystanders, then something must be done. I think mandatory target practice for all three of them is the least that society demands.
It will take a better mind than I currently possess to make rational counter-arguments to this analysis. I don't think there are any. But I would note that in the aftermath of the Wall St meltdown the endless cries for the incarceration of just about everyone on Wall st managed to ignore the fact that not that many committed actual crimes. Torts are not crimes and a complete lack of regulation of whole classes of investment instruments like derivatives made a lot of prosecutions of any sort impossible. Nor did I think much of the idea of imposing crippling fines on financial institutions that the government via TARP had to rescue just to to avert a massive liquidity crisis. That would have been very stupid. As would have been the idea that a saved Wall St should be compelled to lend money to people to save Main st when the problem was they lent money where they should never have done so.
There's a similar problem with prosecuting insider trading. Our insider trading laws go back to the 1930's and quite a few of the insider trading convictions were reversed because courts found that the defendants simply hadn't violated the law as written.
The many cops and assistant DA's in my acquaintance all agree that society survives because of the impulsivity and shortsightedness of the criminal class. Only in the movies do you find crooks who case the joint or even plan a good way of getting away from the scene. In many ways, this comes down to the fact that robbery, mugging, and burglary are pretty much a high-risk waste of time.
I think a very large percentage of the front-line crimes like this are driven by addiction, which is itself something that produces short-term thinking and poor risk-reward assessment. I’m sympathetic in some ways, I just wish instead of breaking a $200 car window to steal something worth $10 to get high for the next 4 hours, we could, like, get them to ride an exercise bike for a couple of hours for $10 (or just give them the drugs directly). The lack of universal, time-investment-based ways to make relatively petty amounts of money comes at a large cost for everyone else. This is also (less strictly tied to addiction of course) why I think the gig economy has more value than is ascribed to it. Having low-barrier-to-entry ways to do a few hours of work and make a few bucks is useful for a lot of people whose lives are somewhat disordered.
I remember some years ago a House debate on some crime prevention bill being defended by Barney Frank, with someone saying that "smart criminals" could easily evade the measures being proposed, and Frank responding "so we'll catch the dumb criminals."
Your including a tweet from John Pfaff reminded me that I had suggested once when Ezra asked for ideas that Vox should have him on one or other podcast. It never did, but it made me consider just googling, and it seems there are a bunch out there he's been on, so hopefully they're as informative as his twitter feed.
Red light cameras. Speeding cameras.
Make traffic violence into something that gives you swift and certain, but relatively mild, punishment, and that's how you make cities safer for everyone.
Can someone make the case for why this isn't done in every urban area? It seems obviously better, and likely cheaper, than having cops occasionally set speed traps. Am I missing something?
I think there have been court cases claiming that you can't be convicted of something if you can't face your accuser, and if your "accuser" is a camera then you can't be charged. At least, I think that's been the constitutional pretext for banning them, along with some vague worries about privacy concerns, and concern trolling about municipalities using them to increase revenue, and that red light cameras increase collisions because people stop short more often.
The privacy concern is the only one I am at all moved by (rear-end collisions just aren't anywhere near as dangerous as t-bones, and low speed collisions aren't as dangerous as high speed collisions, so increasing collisions seems like a minor price to pay if you greatly decrease injuries). But I think the big thing is just that people don't like their driving behavior being watched, just like they don't like having to search for parking, or being stuck in traffic.
At least sometimes, it's probably also related to the fact that roadway design encourages a different sort of behavior than the legal regulations, but those could be fixed.
See above.
Also less glibly.. in many (most?) cases it requires state legislative approval. In NY, for example, the program was originally authorized only in school zones and only when the school was in session. To expand the program requires state legislators to come out in favor of more speeding tickets, which is just really not very popular with anyone outside of Vision Zero advocates and professionals. Most people don't see speeding as a big deal and have personal experience getting a ticket.
We all think we are smart enough to know when it's safe to speed and when we need to slow down. How many people admit they were being unsafe when they got a ticket after all? And most of the time we're probably right! (or so I like to believe :).
We probably need a society-wide re-calibration of traffic rules - streets are often designed to encourage speeds higher than the posted ones, because traffic engineers note that these encouraging streets are safer for drivers than streets that get people to drive at the posted speed; four-way stops almost never really need people to stop, as long as everyone respects right-of-way; red lights could be a lot smarter in when they change; etc.
At least speeding cameras only issue fines and don't try to tase anyone. I think society just needs to get over this unpopularity.
I can see why it would be unbearable to pay current hugely inflated fines all the time for going a few mph over the speed limit. But why would it be unbearable to pay the sort of small fines that would be reasonable to charge if they were assessed every time? I don't see how this makes anything "unbearable", to just ask people to follow the speed limit and stop at red lights, especially since most of the time that most people are driving, traffic makes it impossible to violate these rules.
Now you know more about how police behave than I do, so maybe it's impossible to think that police would ever care about criminal behavior with an automobile. But I would think that taking all police off of traffic law duties would mean that at least a few of them could occasionally try to impound cars without plates.
Great article, but it fundamentally misunderstands the point of the long sentences. The goal is not to deter crime, but to bully defendents into talking and taking plea deals. Take these tools away and I'd be surprised if the police clear any cases at all.
There's so much I could say here, but on this day after reading about the U.S. Army officer who was terrorized by cops and about the 20 year-old in the Minneapolis area who was shot--accidentally--by a cop who thought he was shooting a taser, I will say only this: the criminal justice system needs a Flexner Report that will lead to washing out all the people who are attracted to police work because of their psychological problems and their racism, leaving only cops like my friend Howard Wynn, who retired from the Police Department of Philadelphia without ever having shot his gun.
Holy crap, why did the clearance rate drop so much over the last 50 years? The rest of the article and discussion is great and all, but that's what jumped out to me.
I think the standard explanation is that there's now more 'random' crime, more violence between strangers who didn't previously know each other well. So this cancels out the increase in cameras, the surveillance device we all carry around in our pockets, etc. Supposedly in the past more violence was either a neighborhood or domestic dispute, where it's not tough to track down the perpetrator
Well why is Bernie Madoff still in jail? At his age he’s not a physical threat, and who in his right mind would hire him as a mini-mart cashier let alone a financial advisor?
Besides all he really did was copy the Social Security business model.
I mean, two days later it's no longer a problem
Isn't another byproduct of lengthening prison terms the inflation of what behavior is considered a felony? IIRC there is a big difference between crimes punishable by more than a year in prison and those punishable by less...
In practice this would mean a lot more cops and a lot more cop interactions in low income neighborhoods. To get there would require flipping the entire media perspective on black lives matter.
I have to disagree with Matt and some of the others here on white-collar policing. In fact, the US already prosecutes white-collar crime far more harshly than any country on earth. Yet all of these other countries like Canada, the UK, Germany, etc that all have high clearance rates also have far lower white-collar prosecution rates. The need for white-collar prosecution in the US is more a reflection of the religiosity and quasi-religiosity of many Americans including Matt and Elizabeth Warren. In a truly secular country like Canada, the left-wing has very little interest in white-collar crime.
A one size fits all for crime doesn’t work. Rapists, pedophiles, serial killers and terrorists shouldn’t be put in the same categories as drug dealers or gang members. Certain crimes are so vile that death or life in prison isn’t enough. “Violent Crime” encompasses far too many acts to have one specific way in dealing with. Should an 18 year old drug dealer that murdered a rival have a chance at rehabilitation and freedom? I think so. Should someone who raped and murdered a toddler? No. Both are murders, but very different.
Maybe the best way to start the conversation is to be more specific about which crimes are worthy of rehabilitation.
A significant chuck of those unsolved murders happens in places like Chicago’s south & west sides - places where residents refuse to cooperate with police and rely on street justice instead. There aren’t easy answers to this. Long-term policies to shift the culture are one thing. In the near-term, would a surge of police on the streets reduce murders in the first place? Is that sustainable? Would an increase in surveillance tech in the worst areas be worth the trade offs?
It’s just an incredibly difficult situation when residents refuse to cooperate with investigations in the first place.
But what the bulk of law abiding citizens worry about is not gang murder but things like robbery, assault, sexual assault, menacing, down to burglary, car theft, and just general disorder. The violent crimes seem to get nominal attention but I gather the rate of clearance even for these is very poor. The other stuff the police don't even pretend to enforce, it might as well not be illegal. So what are the effective strategies to protect the wider citizenry from this kind of stuff? What is the model for how these things happen?
Here’s a simple idea: if there’s a shooting and residents are uncooperative with police, blanket the area with surveillance technology. When things improve, rollback the tech.
"If you want to solve more crimes, you need to make a point of investing in and rewarding that activity."
If police are rewarded for "solving" cases, it seems like an incentive to make sure someone goes to jail for each crime, but not necessarily the person who committed the crime.
Yeah, incentive structures are like the hardest things to design.
I wonder what the psychology of capping all sentences at twenty years would be for judges and prosecutors? Since you couldn’t give an offender more time, would “tough-on-crime” prosecutors and judges look to up-charge defendants to get as many as possible into the twenty-year category? I suppose they already do that a lot of the time anyway. Seems like you’d also need to mandate that all sentences for multi-crime convictions be concurrent rather than consecutive, to forestall stringing together multiple twenty-year sentences.
It blows my mind that there are people in this country that would release criminals, after 20 years, that have raped and murdered children or committed acts of terrorism resulting in mass death. I am a moderate democrat and would switch votes if any democrat advocated for this kind of thing. It’s a losing issue.
Go read the Lopez article. Such a system would have provision for ongoing detention in cases where the statement can make a compelling argument that theres an ongoing risk to the public, but it's a decision made at the time of putative release rather than based on a sentence imposed decades before.
An old aging child rapist isn’t a danger to society. Doesn’t mean society should have to reintegrate him. I read it and it’s flawed to those of us that support law and order.
Nonviolent crime I’m not even agreement on either. Bernie Madoff should die in prison even though he isn’t a physical danger to people.
I guess my question is do you think there are a significant number of people who would do these things knowing that it's a 20 year sentence if caught, but would not knowing that it is a longer sentence?
If yes, I think Matt covered the argument against that pretty well, if no, what's your goal here if not to prevent crime?
Punishment for crimes committed.
That's an act, not a goal. I'm guessing what you're trying to say is the goal is retribution, i.e. there's a moral imperative to make certain people suffer for the sake of making them suffer.
The problem with building a justice system around that is it's purely a values question - who gets to decide how much suffering is enough? We're all going to have a different view on that, how do we mediate that conflict? Democratically seems like the obvious answer, but the most motivated are almost inevitably going to be the most retributive - you get a spiral of harsher punishment.
I feel like there might be an analogy that can be drawn to the max contract in the NBA.
Lol what
Literally none? How long has this been going on?
It's not worth the trouble, JFO. You're responding to someone whose outlook has been shaped by growing up in Singapore, and then moving to San Francisco. The violent swing from one tiny enclave of extreme social conformity to another tiny enclave of extreme non-conformity has acted on his brain like taking a glass baking dish out of the oven and plunging it into ice-water -- his sense of moral perspective has been shattered. He has no experience of any part of America outside of the Bay Area, and he claims that the rest of us are living in a fantasy land.
Then we should have a substantial increase in funding of the justice system to reduce the pressure on defendants to agree to plea bargains or prosecutors to offer them.
If large numbers of defendants are being pressured into plea deals and sent to prison, who would be acquitted if they went to trial before a jury of peers, that is quite a damning indictment of our current system.
It is, but maybe not in the way that you think. There is so little trust in the system in poor neighborhoods that a high number of acquittals of actual criminals is not only possible but quite likely. I speak as a person who has served on Bronx juries: the prosecutors empanel juries to put the pressure on for a settlement, then they knock down the charges and plead them out.
You can argue those juries are doing exactly what juries are there for - to ensure criminal punishment is not meted out by authorities who lack democratic legitimacy with the community in which the accused lives.
For all it's faults, the right to a jury is the most direct form of democracy we have in this country. Your neighbors and community members literally get to vote on whether you should be punished for something you did.
Oh, for God’s sake. This is not medieval England. Judges are very careful to instruct jurors in their absolute responsibility to render a verdict in the light of the evidence. Anybody who doesn’t think they can do that is excused. Doing otherwise is perjury.
Jury service is not a form of democracy, or a vote on the legitimacy of The Man. Jurors are not there to “send a message.” Jury nullification has been used mostly for evil ends and is not something to be celebrated or honored.
God help me if I my life is left in the hands of my neighbors. It sounds like the assembly of Athens. Who thinks Alcibiades should be executed! Raise your hands!
There's strong evidence that juries are not actually very nice--John Rappaport's recent paper on this is exceptional--but jury nullification is impossible to eliminate and it would be normatively bad if it was. In legal theory, this is called "acoustic separation"--it's probably good that jurors are told told they're not allowed to nullify, because doing so would lead to too much nullification, but it's good that nullification happens nevertheless to provide some sort of a community check.
If the role of juries isn't to provide a last line of defense against unjust or illegitimate criminal prosecutions, then what are they for?
Juries sure as heck aren't good at fact finding, especially in any case involving expert evidence. One side can have the world's foremost expert in a field, and the other a total quack, but if the quack looks good and speaks with confidence, more often than not the jury will believe the quack over the bona fide expert.
All juries are good for is keeping the law real. And that's important.
The argument you're making is that we need to hold wildly disproportionate punishment over the heads of the accused so that we can continue to underfund the justice system and avoid paying to assess the evidence against them.
I guess my contention is that the costs of an inadequate justice system should be borne by society writ large rather than those unfortunate enough to be wrongly accused.
I don't think this holds on the west coast anymore, where major city prosecutors have essentially legalized misdemeanors. I was caught in the middle of a mass shooting a couple of years back, which turned it to be three drug dealers having a shootout in the middle of downtown. They were all in their early to mid twenties and between them had been arrested literally over 100 times. These guys were getting caught constantly, but nothing ever happened to them so eight innocent bystanders got shot.
The ceiling on punishments is probably too high but we've also got to bring the floor back above zero.
Absolutely: this is an intolerable situation. When three dealers with 100 arrests between them still cannot shoot straight enough to avoid hitting bystanders, then something must be done. I think mandatory target practice for all three of them is the least that society demands.
And NRA memberships
It will take a better mind than I currently possess to make rational counter-arguments to this analysis. I don't think there are any. But I would note that in the aftermath of the Wall St meltdown the endless cries for the incarceration of just about everyone on Wall st managed to ignore the fact that not that many committed actual crimes. Torts are not crimes and a complete lack of regulation of whole classes of investment instruments like derivatives made a lot of prosecutions of any sort impossible. Nor did I think much of the idea of imposing crippling fines on financial institutions that the government via TARP had to rescue just to to avert a massive liquidity crisis. That would have been very stupid. As would have been the idea that a saved Wall St should be compelled to lend money to people to save Main st when the problem was they lent money where they should never have done so.
There's a similar problem with prosecuting insider trading. Our insider trading laws go back to the 1930's and quite a few of the insider trading convictions were reversed because courts found that the defendants simply hadn't violated the law as written.
Great nym. Truly excellent nym.
The many cops and assistant DA's in my acquaintance all agree that society survives because of the impulsivity and shortsightedness of the criminal class. Only in the movies do you find crooks who case the joint or even plan a good way of getting away from the scene. In many ways, this comes down to the fact that robbery, mugging, and burglary are pretty much a high-risk waste of time.
I think a very large percentage of the front-line crimes like this are driven by addiction, which is itself something that produces short-term thinking and poor risk-reward assessment. I’m sympathetic in some ways, I just wish instead of breaking a $200 car window to steal something worth $10 to get high for the next 4 hours, we could, like, get them to ride an exercise bike for a couple of hours for $10 (or just give them the drugs directly). The lack of universal, time-investment-based ways to make relatively petty amounts of money comes at a large cost for everyone else. This is also (less strictly tied to addiction of course) why I think the gig economy has more value than is ascribed to it. Having low-barrier-to-entry ways to do a few hours of work and make a few bucks is useful for a lot of people whose lives are somewhat disordered.
I remember some years ago a House debate on some crime prevention bill being defended by Barney Frank, with someone saying that "smart criminals" could easily evade the measures being proposed, and Frank responding "so we'll catch the dumb criminals."
I miss Barney.