The entire discourse around this topic is so tortured and so concerned with not wanting to sound racist (in today's definition of that word) that reporters and even Matt can't come out and say what is true: The vast majority of people (including black people) want criminals (including black criminals) arrested and removed from their neighborhoods.
The disproportionate rate of crime in urban black neighborhoods has many causes, stretching back for generations. I care about those causes and their solutions. And I want criminals arrested, incarcerated and, if possible, reformed. There is no conflict between these two things.
The woke aren't living in those neighborhoods. They're in a dorm room, their parents' comfortable suburban home, or in housing at least partially furnished by said parents. And in the rare exceptions that they live in these neighborhoods, it's by choice, and they know they aren't stuck there forever.
I was a veteran of several D.C. juries during the crack epidemic. Most black jurors were ready to lock up and throw away the key, with the admonition, "If he didn't do it this time, he's done it before." I voted with my conscience, but I sure as hell didn't lecture them. I didn't go home to their neighborhoods at night.
There is somewhat of a conflict in that the arrest of a criminal has other externalities that can create a feedback loop (e.g., children with parents incarcerated, less prime working age men in the community, the violence in jails and prisons fostering hardening of criminals instead of reformation).
Also, if the attitude with which you approach this problem is “I want bad guys locked up, and reformed—if possible” you’ve already lost the plot.
I'm sympathetic to this point of view as I have some personal experience with this. In a wholistic sense the criminal’s family is also a victim of his or her misdeeds. Fault doesn’t seem very relevant to me. But still it has to start with the perpetrator being segregated from society (so they can do no further harm) and punished (so that others will be deterred from doing harm as well).
I don’t think “black people would prefer to be murdered less” is actually that controversial. It’s just that I think this can often be used to justify undesirable policy outcomes. I think that one thing that often gets overlooked too much is over and underpolicing and how the two entertained phenomena can erode community support for policing in various ways that are not helpful. This paper is a little old now, given the pace of criminology research, but has some helpful perspectives I think https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/centers/wiener/programs/pcj/files/PoliceandPublicDiscourseBlackonBlackViolence.pdf
And the sad reality is that the loudest voices in the media about this issue are conservative, the same sources which employ dog whistling and other racist techniques (as John Oliver points out just think about how often Tucker Carlson says "western civilization"). So that makes it harder for antiracist voices to also say "we need more police".
It only makes it harder if you think people are incapable of distinguishing between dog whistles and sincere compassion for suffering human beings. It only makes it harder if you think citizens are only capable of mental shortcuts like "they said 'crime' so they are Republican Racist."
In short, it only makes it harder if self-government is impossible. I think it is possible and citizens aren't morons.
I have so many frustrations with the discourse in this space. More than anything, I am frustrated with the obsession with mono-causality: that if someone is discussing how X contributes to a problem, it's a denial that Y is a factor
-It's possible that the national crime wave is the result of quarantine fatigue, distrust between citizens and police forces, police being under-resourced, and more
-It's possible that Trump's China-Covid language is a contributing factor to the anti-Asian crime wave but not the dominant one
-It's possible that Long held less respect for these women due to their ethnicity AND that it wasn't his primary motivation for killing them
On top of this, understanding the purity culture that seems to be the primary root cause of this killer's deranged mental state is actually profoundly enlightening. I encourage folks to check out David French's piece on it: https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/why-the-atlanta-massacre-triggered As a reformed wokester, the parallels between purity culture and woke culture are profuse. The obsessive focus on one sin as primary over all others, the shame that comes when obsession with avoiding one set of thoughts leads to more of those thoughts (white bear paradox), the idea that lack of purity of thoughts is a permanently dehumanizing trait, etc etc.
(This deserves a far more in-depth, sensitive discussion that I do not have the time to complete here this morning.)
My other big frustration is the idea that understanding the motive of a criminal is akin to defending them or forgiving them. It's not. If people sincerely want to promote healthy culture change to prevent crimes from occurring in the future, it helps to understand what aspects of the culture contributed to the crime. We seem unwilling to do this for white conservatives for fear of "humanizing" them, and unwilling to do this for marginalized communities for fear of "blaming" them. And we are left spinning our anti-racist wheels while people die.
Marie I think you have great insights here and your comments are certainly worth considering. But unfortunately, as cynical as this sounds, I can't escape the conclusion that the political narrative around race and poltiics is the number one driver of the discourse. I wish it was driven more by the logical and constructive reasons you're giving. Hopefully I'm at least partially wrong.
I hope you're wrong too. I never thought of myself as an optimist, but maybe I am. I really appreciate your posts and I think you've said in prior posts that you're from the midwest and that the people around you don't relate at all to the voice of the media. (Nor, I imagine to a lot of the commentators on this substack, either for that matter?) I picture an "exhausted majority" in this country that truly wants fairness, kindness and decency regardless of political persuasion. The mainstream media is failing and people are finding alternative sources. That's why I'm here. Freddie Deboer writes about this on his substack today: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/its-all-just-displacement.
Isn't it possible that some of this partisanship will calm down? Won't there be a backlash against these one-sided, simplistic conclusions? I guess I'm kind of begging you for hope here. What would your neighbors say about the Atlanta killings? How would they sum it up? It feels like we just need enough brave people to say, "enough" and maybe "the political narrative around race and politics" will shift?
The Substack drama really just feels like the good guys/bad guys illusion yet again. FDB's piece is interesting, thanks for sharing. For the "other side," I read Emily VanDerWerff's take: https://emilyvdw.substack.com/p/on-substack I totally understand where she is coming from, but the fact that for her, it boils down to "underwriting several of the internet’s worst people" is telling. More to Freddie's point, the majority of big names I've seen on Substack are ones who *signed the Harper's letter.* These are folks who tried to advocate for change within the industry, more ideological tolerance, and they were shut down. For those who weren't actively pushed out, why wouldn't they bail? As far as her assertion that these mostly straight, cis white males are engaging in intellectual parlor games over other people's identities, again, I totally get where she's coming from, and would have wholeheartedly agreed in the past. The flipside is that mainstream media also feels like intellectual parlor games, except where the game is rigged and there's only one answer and everyone is in violent agreement. It's just gotten boring, to be honest. It's why I pay $8/mo for Slow Boring--a fresh perspective and a collection of people who want to engage in frank conversation about complex topics. I wasn't getting it anywhere else. But it took a mental breakdown on my part to recognize that my cozy, self-righteous echo chamber was built on lies. So I wish I were more optimistic about the size and strength of an "exhausted majority" in this country but I do think most people see the world as a binary choice between batshit-insane Republicans and identity-obsessed liberals, and the educated ones are going with obsessed. Back to the media reaction to Substack, I believe most of these folks genuinely see themselves as actively bending the arc of the moral universe toward justice for others, they see pushback as evidence that their work is truly noble, and they see every stubborn cis straight (or occasionally gay) white male who is publicly informed that their morals are out of whack to be a win. To then see those CSWM's rewarded with a lot of money and a bigger platform is infuriating. But Freddie explains the true dynamic well. Their outrage feeds the machine.
"My other big frustration is the idea that understanding the motive of a criminal is akin to defending them or forgiving them."
That's really insightful. I feel like that is on the same spectrum as another big problem with the current ideological movement: the conflation of emotion with fact. It all seems to stem from the same place.
We as a society seem morbidly interested in parsing the motivations of these loser-murderers. In this worthless person's case, it seems far too over-determined to me, and ultimately I don't care why he popped out and got a gun (so easy to do!) and worked out his demons by driving around and blowing people away. He doesn't "represent" anything about this nation's attitudes toward Asian-Americans; he's just a loser plain and simple.
What I want to know is how we arrived at a system where so many Asian women have to work in places like this, servicing (probably mostly white) men, and no doubt suffering massive amounts of abuse from them. Forget learning more about the killer; I want to learn more about their stories.
I mean what do you mean "arrived at". The historical roots of white men taking advantage of minority women is pretty deep rooted in the country. Hell it's a global phenomenon and it's not just whites - dominant cultures do this to minorities. (Japan in WW2). The question should be, how are we currently pretending it's not the case, and how can we change it.
Well put. Still the purity instinct is, in moderate doses, a virtue. It also helps avoid disease, both venereal and mundane. It provides a real mental framework for avoiding shady shit. Purity both constrains and steers clear of danger.
Exactly. Being aware of social inequities is also a good thing. It’s when these goals become obsessions that ones moral worth is singularly attached to that things go south... moderation, as you say, is also a virtue.
I'd agree but its also worth asking how differently the arc of American moral progress would have bent in the absence of that Puritan instinct for all its faults.
I think a Haidt-ian analysis of moral psychology and its evolutionary benefits to society-building is worthwhile. The problem, in my mind, is when pockets of moral extremism pop up and butt heads with the rest of society. So maybe it depends on what we mean by "Puritan"/"Puritanical"?
Agreed murder is bad no matter the cause. The Vox writer talks about solidarity in the minority community. This seems like the part of the narrative she cares about the most. We people of color must stand against our white oppressors. Asian people should not be fooled by the great lives they live in America. Sure in most statistics they do BETTER than their white oppressors like higher education levels and income levels and less crime. But white people are against you too. We need you to stand with us (social justice left in Marxist solidarity) against white people.
Trump gets hammered for his divisive rhetoric and justifiably so. What about this divisiveness?
Matt’s right, crime is a problem for everyone and we should all be against it. We should be looking for solutions not trying to leverage criminal acts to fit social justice narratives. The public can see when someone is trying to fit a square into a round hole.
Providing universal healthcare and significantly reducing crime in the black community would do more for social justice than anything BLM has accomplished.
If you truly care about crime than you should stand with people who are advocating for solutions even if those people have different intuitions about why the crime is occurring in the first place.
Some social justice warriors seem far more concerned with advancing their narrative than fixing problems. And they’re willing to spread fear to do it...just like Trump.
I do not think the Asian American community will advance this narrative, because ultimately, they want the violence to stop. Narratives won't solve that problem.
I have extremely strong, extremely personal motivations for wanting anti-Asian hate crimes to never happen again.
And I think this progressive, BLM adjacent, SJW narrative that the NYTs and progressive left is running with is the worst way possible to try and accomplish that goal, and is in fact likely to make the matter worse, not better.
The thing about crime prevention which Matt kind of alludes to which makes me personally insane is that crime has become such a polarized issue along party lines that activists and politicians seem to think the solutions are mutually exclusive to each other. In one corner you have the punitive, city journal set who want police cracking skulls and policing with an "under siege" mentality. On the other, you have the progressive set who think that holding people in jail who have committed murder is barbaric and racist. The idea of any nuance between the two is anathema to both, with deleterious results.
The idea that seems most reasonable to me - pour resources into crime prevention like jobs programs, mental health services, violence interrupters etc, but ALSO arrest and keep incarcerated people who commit violent crimes - is championed by exactly zero people in position of power in this country. Here in DC recently we had a guy who was OUT ON PRE-TRIAL BOND FOR MURDER commit an additional murder, and it barely made a blip in the news and the city continues to look for less reasons to hold people in jail after committing serious violent crimes despite their continued rate of re-offending or ending up on the business end of gunshots themselves. The idea that we have both serious trauma and poverty problems in our poorest neighborhoods that we need to urgently address but also we should keep dangerous criminals off the streets seems like a no-brainer for a politician to win on and to help reduce crime, but so far in this country we can only seem to get one or the other, to our collective harm.
Yes, it's like we envision one big "how tough on crime?" dial that we're fighting to turn up or down, when we need at least a semi-nuanced approach. For example, crack down *hard* on violent crime - "involving community elders" is not a sufficient response to rape, murder, home invasion, and many types of assaults. But on the other hand, armed police shouldn't be our only available response to traffic violations, domestic disturbances, genuinely peaceful protests, drug use, a crazy guy yelling on the sidewalk, "suspicious" people walking alone at night, etc.
Many progressive folks really *want* to get rid of the police. And I'm sympathetic. The attitudes we see in a lot of police departments are quite reactionary and racist, and seem deeply entrenched. I can see how one would think it would be great if we could just get rid of them.
But it wont work. It will lead to an increase in crime. Which is bad. And no matter how many sophisticated arguments you try to make (and people have tried quite a few), that's still where the evidence points.
I wish people would accept that and look for solutions, like you're doing in this piece. I get that it's less emotionally satisfying then just saying "defund", but I thought as progressives we're all about figuring out ways to make actual progress.
Amongst other things, retrain the police. You can't do it in America though. Have to make them serve for 6 months alongside police officers in another country. Tons of things that American police officers consider normal just aren't. But they have to get outside of that country and see it with their own eyes.
For instance, the most common reason that officers fire their weapons in the US is to shoot potentially dangerous dogs. Occasionally, they accidentally hit a bystander. Just not a thing that really happens in other countries AFAIK, they have other ways of dealing with dogs besides shooting them.
My opinion about "defund the police" as a policy solution is that the very concept, no matter how it is interpreted, leads us toward solutions that resemble private security only for the people who can afford it. It's a libertarian wet dream.
> Sharkey expresses optimism that instead of having cops do extra patrols, you could have civilians organized by community groups do it. He argues that private security guards are very effective — poor people just can’t afford them, but they serve as proof of concept that you could fund grassroots patrols through churches or whatever else and see less crime.
Congratulations, you've privatized police and given that (dangerous) responsibility to the public who don't have the resources or training you previously allocated to the police. And since you're not actually a libertarian and have just been cornered into embracing a dash of their anti-government nonsense, we know you didn't cut taxes while reducing government services. So how exactly is the public going to afford to do it right? Helicopter money drops that can somehow only be used to buy security gear on Amazon?
"Civilians organized by community groups" is a nice euphonism. In addition to private security for the rich, let's be honest about what cities without police would look like. We'd end up with competing ethnic/tribal militas/gangs controlling territory and assuming the role as the monopoly provider of violence.
I don't know Sharkey and I'm not including him in this, but much of the radical position on this issue is based on an underlying belief that, given a choice, it would be better for 10 people to be killed by members of their own race than 1 person to be killed by a "colonial oppressor" (i.e. cop) because the former would be the price of freedom. Of course, that's easy to say if you're a college grad living in a safe neighborhood and are unlikely to have to pay that price yourself.
I am specifically not engaging in conversations like this. Others may as they see fit, but for the record, I am not talking about what you're talking about and not engaging at this level.
I am only concerned with discussing the role government plays in provisioning public services versus the role the private sector plays.
I mean that's being generous, your normal security guard did the 1 day online training and paid the state $82 to get printed and is trusted to stand near a door with a company shirt on and do nothing. While armed guards usually at least have to shoot a target before they can strap up, we are talking about people who probably average about 3 days of training who usually are explicitly prohibited from using force lest they be immediately fired, and who are generally held to the high standard of "do you usually show up to work?".
I think we have some data here that should be mentioned, and it leans more to lehman's side of the debate. The NYPD yearly reports from 2019 and 2020.
The number of hate crimes against asians went up from 3 in 2019 to 29 in 2020. That's substantial. But it is also a small minority of a hate crimes. Of felony hate crime assaults in 2020 5 were anti-lgbt, 4 were anti asian, 3 were anti-jewish, 3 were anti-black, 2 were anti-muslim and 1 was anti-white. In 2019, there actually substantially more felony hate crime assaults, including 11 anti-lgbt ones, but none were against asians.
It is also drop in the bucket compared to all assaults. In 2019 the NYPD recorded 20800 victims of felony assault in NYC, and in 2020 it recorded an almost identical 20763. In both years asians, despite making up 14% of the city's population, were just 7.7% of those who reported being assaulted to the NYPD. Black people were substantially overrepresented among assault victims (whites are just as underrepresented as asians, while hispanics resemble their population share). So you are taking about roughly 1600 asian assault victims every year in NYC, which is a much lower rate than other NYC residents, compared to hate crimes going from 3 to 29.
The massive rise was in shootings, in 2019 there were 900 people shot, and that doubled in 2020 to 1800. But the demographics didn't change, in both 19 and 20 whites and asians were massively underrepresented, hispanics underrepresented as well, but not to the same degree, and blacks overrepresented massively. Asians made up 2% of shooting victims in 2019 and 2020, so they went from 18 people shot in 2019 to 36 people shot in 2020.
In terms of demographics of assailants, shootings have almost identical demographics of shooters to victims, but for assaults asians, whites and hispanics all make up a slightly higher percentage of victims then they do for those arrested for assault, while blacks make up a higher percentage of perpetrators then they do for victims.
If you look at the numbers you see an increase in hate crimes against asians, but hate crimes are a tiny percentage of all crimes, and asians are not the majority or even substantially overrepresented among hate crimes victims. If you look at all crimes you don't see asians increasing as a share of crime victims, but you do see an overall increase in shootings and homicides, and other crimes remaining at similar rates, with the demographics of victims essentially unchanged.
> The number of hate crimes against asians went up from 3 in 2019 to 29 in 2020
For my sins, I follow the Bay Area subreddit. People there have been tracking every mugging of an Asian as a hate crime. I mean, maybe it's true that the muggers all have hate in their hearts, but I suspect two years ago none of them would be classified as hate crimes unless the mugger said something specifically.
None of that makes beating an 80 year old and taking their purse any less awful.
The problem with hate crimes statistics is that they require that an ascertainment of hate be done at the policing level. For police, an assault should be an assault and a murder a murder. Once the perpetrator is found and sufficient evidence of guilt is established, a court can decide whether there were motivations involved that require special attention. having specific hate crimes laws and statistics is about politics and nothing else.
The hot takes are going to focus on the police and racism: "blue flu!" "law enforcement handcuffed by political correctness!"
But it's worth wondering whether the police are causal at all.
The epidemic has given us a year of unemployment figures in which every week was worse than the worst week of the Great Recession. No jobs, no money. Lotta time on the hands of bored youth.
People are shut in with family and small children. Tempers fray. How many of these murders will turn out to be extensions of intimate partner abuse?
And what's the situation overseas? Murder rates flat in Europe, South America, rising, falling?
I just strongly suspect that the discourse is going to look in the wrong directions, at cop issues and race issues, when the real drivers are economic and sociological.
A great point. Public attention naturally gravitates to subjects that people are most interested in rather than objective cost/benefit analysis.
And, as you can see in this post and other recent tweets, Matt is clearly worried that raising any concerns not related to racism (thus drawing attention away from that important issue) will lead to accusations of racism and cause people to lump him in with genuine racists that he doesn’t want to be associated with.
So there’s both a carrot (talking about our favorite subjects is more enjoyable than unfavorable ones) and a stick (deviating from the current narrative risks condemnation from peers), both of which will bias our discourse.
Per this very report, “ For example, some commentators have observed that massive increases in firearm purchases at the outset of the pandemic may have contributed to an increase in homicides and gun crimes. There is some preliminary evidence to support such a conclusion, but more research is required.”
Which is something I entirely agree with, that more support would be needed to explicitly link the two, but it’s certainly not unreasonable or “bad information” to link them on the basis of the evidence we have.
To quote a relevant portion “In Chicago, as well as some other cities, the apparent increase in homicides began before the protests over the police killing of George Floyd. And in some cases, as in Chicago, the spike abruptly ended almost as quickly as it started, only to surge again weeks later, after the protests had calmed. So it’s hard to blame only the protests for a spike — especially because we know that other factors likely played a role, such as the start of summer, when crime tends to go up, and the end of stay-at-home orders.”
Now, I actually do buy that there might have been some response among the police that’s associated with the protests (points 3&4 on the list) and your sympathy to cops probably determines which one you choose.
But it’s clear that, in light of regional variations and the fact that these trends started well before the protests, any serious explanation cannot be constrained just to protest-related effects.
Not to mention that crime continued to fall during the economic collapse of 2008. So the view that economic downturns necessarily cause crime rates to spike doesn't seem to be supported. That doesn't mean THIS downturn couldn't be a causal factor in the spiking crime rates- only that we'd need to actually see evidence of that being the case before we could say that we felt like it was a reasonable explanation. It's not the sort of direct link that would allow us to infer that causal link while waiting for the evidence to come in.
At least one article I read said that the main increase in car break-ins has been due to delivery vehicles left running while someone is doing DoorDash/GrubHub/etc. I definitely haven't seen anything like complete statistics though.
Not only that, but Canada has had much more serious lockdowns across the board than the US. I think Toronto, which is the most comparable to major US cities, is the one of the longest-running "lockdowns"
This is an excellent question and would help shed some light on whether the spike is more likely Covid/lockdown related or social unrest-related. We desperately need some critical thinking and investigative journalism in this space.
Yes, but the amount of resources you dedicate to the problem would change if you expected a reversion to the mean when pandemic was over vs actual shift in cultural attitudes and behaviours.
I think it’d be extremely hard to disambiguate the effects of local conditions from the crime rates. The severity of COVID in America, our massive gun ownership rates, the policing protests, preexisting socioeconomic conditions, the strength of the welfare state, etc.
increased murders in the US are part of a global increase in crime caused by stress from the pandemic, don't you to control for the greater availability of handguns in the US?
The same angry confrontation that might lead to a fistfight in many places can more easily lead to an impulsive murder of passion here.
It's also important to understand if the different forms that "lockdown" took in different countries (and different parts of the US) led to increases in crime in some places (where businesses were closed but there were no restrictions on people being out and about) and decreases in other places (where people weren't allowed out unless they were working in an essential business).
Of course, complicating the hypothesis too much makes this look like a p-hacking expedition.
I don't think that's quite right. It would be right if there no murders in other countries, or if the few murders involved circumstances that were totally isolated from 'covid stress acts of passion'
But there are impulsive murders in other comparable counties. Perhaps many fewer, and proportionally less with guns, but they still happen. So if lockdown stress was the sole cause we'd expect Europe's continent wide rate of R to increase to 1.25 x R since lockdowns. If that hasn't happened it's evidence against that theory.
The premise is that as a background fact in the US, more violent altercations are converted to unplanned, spur-of-the moment murders because of the ubiquity of handguns.
If that's true, then to really compare apples to apples you'd need to compare fluctuation in the rates of violent altercations across countries, not just murders. Obviously not very feasible given data shortcomings but in theory...
Built into this kind of analysis is the idea that comparisons to other countries are semper paribus and that certainly isn't the case. The U.S. has always been an outlier in homicides and I don't think you can show changes in the U.S. murder rate to ever correlate well with other countries. The elements that determine the murder rate form a dynamic and even chaotic model. Trying to tie it closely to COVID or BLM is far too simplistic
To all of Matt's readership, let me heartily endorse Graham's Substack on policing (https://grahamfactor.substack.com/). I'm really enjoying it and learning a lot.
(No dollars were harmed in the posting of this endorsement.)
I should be clear that the rise in Canada is very small - "Overall Canada had 680 homicides that we have been able to find so far for 2020. That’s a slight increase over the 676 that Statscan reported for 2019. So Covid hasn’t seemed to have a big effect on the overall number of homicides in Canada in 2020. As mentioned at the start of the post, the 680 number we have currently is inevitably an under count compared to what Statscan will report much later in the year, but it shouldn’t be off by too much as we have improved over the years at collecting homicide data."
Unofficial (collated from newsreports) homicides in the Netherlands were also basically flat in 2020 (at 0.67 per 100k). There was a noticeable corona effect though - there were fewer professional hits and more domestic killings.
An old, and in my view correct, but extremely unpopular view, is that corporal punishment is a more effective deterrent, more effective at reducing recidivism, and is ultimately kinder on *the punished* than prison.
It also has the benefit, if conducted publicly, that people can "see justice be done". (Whether you like it or not, many people including victims of crime would like to see this.)
America's current prison system is in effect a kind of "corporal punishment but extremely unfair" system. Rates of violence, including sexual violence in prison, are high. But often the nastiest inmates are the ones doing it to others, so ironically have the best time in prison. Whilst the young kid sentenced for something relatively minor might be treated appallingly.
This also ties into the need for justice to be done quickly. Going quickly from Crime > Conviction > Sentencing > Punishment creates a strong psychological link in the mind of the convicted criminal between their action and the state's reaction.
Whereas the current US criminal justice system solution of letting *unconvicted* but charged suspects languish for sometimes years in jails (not prisons) before eventually taking a plea bargain that counts time already served means there is in their minds little link between their crime and their punishment.
The idea of flogging someone for stealing a car or something scares the heck out of me too, but I'm trying to get past the initial disgust and honestly consider it. Why is it better to lock someone in a modern American prison for 5 years rather than give them 10 lashes? Is it akin to arguments about the death penalty (which I oppose), along the lines of "it degrades society to have the government inflict violence on someone under its power"? If so, is prison not violence?
I think it's still a bad idea, but we should be able to describe *why* it's a bad idea and not stop at "it just isn't done in civilized society."
Yeah I don't see why it's so off limits to even discuss. We're extraordinarily far from enacting anything like that in our justice system. But we do, daily, send people to prison for years and decades where they are extremely likely to encounter violence that could be as bad or worse than Singapore-style canings. And being the victim of a serious crime (murder, rape, kidnapping, assaults) is a pretty terrible thing. As long as those crimes are committed, I'm open to any idea for how to diminish them. The point isn't "let's find new ways to hurt people". It's "let's find ways to reduce harm to everyone, but especially victims of crime, but discussing incentives"
If it's a terrible idea because it doesn't achieve those objectives, let's hear it. It very well might be, but I haven't heard the argument or seen the data. But knee-jerk "you guys are Wahabi-ist extremists for even discussing it" seems counter-productive
Well, I think the better solution is ridiculous sentencing and faster trials, but if I had to choose between 10 lashings and 5 years in prison, I'd choose the lashings every time.
Well I wasn't advocating exactly for Saudi Arabian style punishments, but yeah, I sincerely think that the idea of providing quantified amounts of pain in proportion to the crime committed is honestly better than sentencing people to spend time in a place where very often the roughest and nastiest criminals do "easier" time as they effectively rule the roost whilst meting out rough punishments to less accomplished criminals.
As I said elsewhere in thread, this can be combined with all the "nice" stuff, like drug rehab programmes, job training etc.
And I favour wiping criminal records. Well not wiping them exactly. The *police* would still have a record, but in most cases if a company ran a background check on a person who had been convicted and sentenced in this way it would come back clean, making it easier for them to get hired.
Why not *just* do the nice stuff?
A few reasons.
a) Perverse Incentives: Poor and desperate people might break the law just to get into these programmes, esp. homeless people.
b) The need to provide a link in the criminal's mind between "commit crime" and "something bad happens", rather than "I committed a crime then people were really nice to me".
c) The public wants to feel that justice has been done, and will be angry when criminals just get rehab or whatever.
If the premise is it's possible (with a heavy emphasis on possible, b/c discussing something is a lot different than "advocating' for it) that some forms of corporal punishment could be more humane than some prison sentences, and possibly be a more effective deterrent than make the case against it. But I don't think anyone here is saying "let's be Saudi Arabia, or any of the other countries that have corporal punishment, or let's cutoff hands because they f***ing deserve it"
I mean we do still have the death penalty in this country; that seems pretty corporal. If i met someone who supported the death penalty, even on a liberal-leaning forum, it wouldn't blow my mind. There are still plenty of parents that physically discipline their children. How would you make whatever your argument is to them if they told you they did't hate JFO's idea? Just say "holy fucking shit" or "you're a bad person"? Doesn't seem like a style of argument that's going to convince anyone to change their minds
the deterrent-theory I buy into has nothing to do with the specific punishments and everything to do with consistency.
Suppose every time you started your car a mouse-trap sprung and badly bruised, possibly even broke, one of your fingers. Would you drives less? Now suppose instead that every time you drove there was a tiny chance you suffered a life-changing traumatic injury that could even kill you. The latter is reality, yet we still drive. The severity doesn't matter as much as the consistency.
A real-life example was England during the period known as "the bloody code" when they cut down on policing but upped sentencing to the point where a man could be hung for stealing a loaf of bread. It's not remembered as a good time for law and order.
Megan McArdle's book "The Upside of Down" writes are length about pilot programs in which parolees are monitored much more closely, and sent back to prison for short stints (just a few days, typically) for each violation. The consistency is super effective at changing behaviour, and also at giving parolees a sense of agency. Instead of "I'm living my life and every now and then THE MAN comes in and locks me up" it becomes "my actions have consequences, and my choices - not the caprice of my parole officer or judge - determine what happens to me."
It requires a lot more investment in some ways, but given the results it produces it seems like both a more humane approach, and a win for society as a whole.
This seems like a good idea, relative to what we're doing currently.
Like you say, consistency, and a direct connection between crime and consequence is key, rather than an excessive punishment.
I still think that a literal "short sharp shock" rather than the figurative one of putting them in a prison amongst other criminals for a few days would be yet more effective though.
This is why I am so infuriated at all the limitations and restrictions on red light cameras and speed cameras, and all the people pushing the so-counterintuitive-it-must-be-true idea that speed cameras cause more deaths than they prevent.
Good point, but it's worth distinguishing between speed cameras and red light cameras. It's not hard to not speed, but red light cameras mean you *really* don't want to enter the intersection anywhere near a red light, to the point you may stop short and cause someone to rear-end you as a result, which will legally be on them and not you (or the red light camera). The incentives are all screwy with red light cameras, specifically.
I think this mechanism is quite plausible as a way for red light cameras to create more *collisions*. But my understanding is that rear-enders are much less often fatal than T-bones, so that even introducing twice as many rear-enders as the number of prevented T-bones might mean a net reduction in traffic injuries and fatalities.
Yep, consistency would be key. And shortness of time between crime and punishment. This is how people learn - accidentally touch a hot saucepan - ow. You learn not to do that again.
Yeah, so, like, not to upset the woke-skeptic vibe we generally have around here, but as inhumane as prisons are, I really don't see people signing up for public whippings of people, especially of Black people??? But I will admit I have not read the book. I suppose the argument "for" is, if you're going to treat people inhumanely, do it in public?
Not sure about the book, but I don't see a mention of the flogging being public in the article. I think the argument is more that everyone knows what a lash/extreme pain is, while six months in prison is a more nebulous concept. Beyond the idea that it's more humane to offer people the option of being harshly beaten for a brief time rather than caged for years (author's view - I'm unsure about this), this could also make it more apparent what exactly is being done "in our name", disproportionately to certain groups.
But yes, I think there's clearly a third option of humane prisons with more ability to rehabilitate.
I agree that the idea that corporal punishment is always more barbaric is a flawed one.
Leaving aside rape, inmates are violently assaulted in prison by other inmates quite commonly. And it's very hard for me, personally, to weigh the mental suffering of a lengthy prison term against the physical suffering of caning or whatever they do in Singapore and other SE Asian countries.
There are probably good constitutional and other philosophical reasons not to take opening that window too seriously, but for me, personally, I'm not particularly horrified by corporal punishment; non-corporal punishment as it's actually carried out is already horrifying on a level I can barely comprehend.
I thorougly agree about the need for speedier trials than we have - I'm not sure how we wound up with this months-long process from arrest to trial, but it seems to really go against the right to a speedy trial found in the Constitution. But... how does corporal punishment fix that? If the aim is "going quickly from Crime > Conviction > Sentencing > Punishment", how does changing the punishment to 40 lashes instead of 4 months in prison fix that?
It's connected to time preference. Criminals are often high time preference individuals, and also often young men with little life experience. Pointless to tell a young man who rarely thinks as far ahead as next week "don't do this or you'll spend 10 years in prison". He can't even envisage what that means.
Most people can understand that pain hurts though. And if they don't before the 1st time, they'll learn.
Also, since corporal punishment doesn't take very long, minor criminals wouldn't have big gaps in their education / training / employment history to explain to future employers.
I think the issue is, people do know prison is terrible. It's not that that they don't think the punishment will be bad, it's that they don't think they will get caught. That's why older cultures that hanged people for even the slightest offenses still had lots of crime.
A much bigger deterrent - and harder to create - is to make people that much more likely to get caught.
P.S I realise this won't be a very popular take as corporal punishment is widely considered barbaric.
Still I find it odd that many countries, including first world countries like the USA, Japan and Singapore, allow capital punishment, but do not consider corporal.
Surely it is worse to kill someone than to hurt them? I know that given the choice I would rather be sentenced to something painful than be literally killed, or frankly to a long prison term (depending I guess on the level of pain vs the length of the prison term and some other factors).
I find it doubly odd when many jurisdictions around the world do in fact allow corporal punishment - for children. How can it be that it is OK for a parent to hit their child if they misbehave (a process that involves no court, judge, jury etc. nor any other checks and balances) but not OK for the state to in some way "hit" a criminal convicted of a crime?
Can you elaborate further on what you’re envisioning here? At the end it sounds like you’re potentially referring to cash bail reform, which I think is a good idea but I’m not sure what you mean by more corporal punishment?? Like... bringing back out the stocks from the 18th century?
I'm not a fan of cash bail so I guess I would favour getting rid of it, but that's not at all central to what I'm saying.
I mean corporal punishment, as in, sentencing someone to a form of punishment that does not kill them, or incarcerate them, but causes them harm or pain.
What kinds of punishments, specifically? The classic one that comes to mind is some kind of beating or lashing - you're not talking about chopping off hands for shoplifting, or branding, or something, right? I ask because I think it's important to be clear about what specifically is being advocated as "corporal punishment" is pretty vague.
Do we have different punishments for people with heart conditions, etc.? Are there concerns about having people administer the process if it's not shocks, but say, flogging, instead?
Fair point. I'm sure there'd be a lot of issues to be worked out. I'm not medically knowledgeable so IDK how many different things would need to be taken into account.
But it's not like the current system is great, and lots of people *do* die in prison, sometimes in suspicious circumstances.
At the very least I think some kind of reform in this direction including the option of corporal punishment (and rehab, job training etc.) as an alternative to prison should be on the radar.
I should also add that none of this precludes the "softer" side of e.g. drug rehabilitation programmes, job training etc.
Actually it facilitates it. The typical problem is that progressives want to see a justice system based purely on rehabilitation, but conservatives, and most other people, want to see offenders punished.
Once people can see that justice has been done, they'll be more sympathetic to efforts to help turn the lives of criminals around.
It's not "a drug addict stole my bike and all he got was rehab", it's "a drug addict stole my bike, they punished him for his crime with several painful electric shocks, but now they're helping him get off drugs too."
Your idea reminds me of something that I've heard in the Army a lot (and witnessed somewhat myself over the last 12 years). There used to be a strong culture, at least in Combat Arms (i.e. Infantry, Armor, etc) of "smoking" someone with excessive/painful physical exercises and also of "wall-to-wall counseling" (usually something non-permanent like open-hand slaps or a punch to the stomach) when they (usually a private) screwed up (lost equipment, failed to report on time, etc). Now even the former technique is heavily discouraged and often considered hazing while the latter is criminal. Instead, NCOs are expected to write up every transgression on official Army forms.
Of course there is rarely the time or enthusiasm for leadership doing even MORE paperwork unless the offense is serious, and when the paperwork is done it can have a more negative effect on the soldier's career (i.e. affecting promotions and/or separation) than simply giving a short, memorable lesson that is closely and clearly linked to the offense. BLUF, the Army (like the rest of society) has gotten more legalistic, and thus worse overall.
I'm not familiar with military culture but I suspect you're right.
OTOH, I'm a bit conflicted about it though because I see a big moral difference between crimes of commission and omission.
As a civilian I would be comfortable living in a society where breaking a car window to steal something might get you a painful electric shock, because I know I'm not going to do that, or even be tempted to.
Getting hit because you forgot to bring the ammo or whatever feels different to me, and I would hate to live in that environment, but IDK, perhaps it is necessary in a military context, and so long as joining the military is voluntary and it's understood then maybe that's OK.
I think it's probably good to have a fairly bright line about not striking subordinates (down that road lies the Russian army, which is notorious for it's brutal hazing).
But making a soldier do hundreds of pushups, flutter kicks, etc doesn't seem troublesome at all. And in fact I think Americans today probably think that sort of thing is actually more common than it really is, which is a depressing commentary on both the state of the Army and people's detachment from it
If there's one thing I've noticed about the "Stop AAPI Hate" movement that is picking up steam, it's that the issue is becoming bigger than the crime wave which helped launch it. My Asian-American friends who are posting about it, sharing their experiences with racism and the alienation they have felt by being othered in their own country; they haven't been victims of any crime at all. But they are still feeling drawn to this movement because of the racism they have lived with for their whole lives. We could see assaults against Asian folks drop to zero tomorrow and the problems they are talking about would still be relevant.
So I think it's important that we take the murder surge seriously, as its own issue, and also take the issue of anti-Asian racism seriously as well. And while the two issues are currently intertwined, I have a feeling they are aren't going to remain that way for long. The movement that started at Stonewall didn't end when police stopped doing extortion raids on gay bars.
I agree with you, as usual. But why is it so controversial and even "dangerous" for you to suggest that police play a role in reducing crime, and therefore proposing to defund the police is not such a great idea? I'd say it reflects disturbing pathologies within the Progressive movement.
I think we can look no further than this weekends threads and debates on "cancel culture". Similar lines of reasoning have brought controversy and trouble for progressive pundits who were following them, so Matt exercises extreme caution when mentioning them.
Matt, your mention of CCTV also makes me think another thread to pull here is how privacy hawkery and anti-surveillance thinking make the US implementation of CCTVs and full study of the use of airborne surveillance imagery in crime investigation hard.
I'm from rural NY, work for Big Tech in NYC, cross-pressured politically six ways to Sunday.
My company is part of "surveillance capitalism" and I could immediately describe detailed implementation of surveillance techniques that would probably reduce crime numbers. We could cleanly connect cause (person was seen brandishing a weapon) with effect (police SUV arrives and hauls person away).
I think it would be fair to characterize those techniques as turning cities into open-air prisons. Even using small drones, the techniques would not scale the same way for suburban or rural areas. I would rather work for Facebook or Twitter than do this stuff.
I live in NYC where the mayor has had remarkably little influence on NYPD policy.
It terrifies me to imagine NYC having a literal machine that proactively orchestrates meting out punishments via human deputies. I think maybe you underestimate how effective dragnet surveillance could be in a wealthy country like ours. We would put China to shame if we wanted to. The biggest challenge would be bypassing bloated procurement practices
"Conversely, if you’re a 'Blame BLM' guy, then what is the solution here? Next time we see a video of an unarmed man being strangled to death, don’t mention anything?"
It seems to me there is probably some middle ground between ignoring violent cops and tolerating the like of BLM.
Presumably literally everyone who reads this advice was already following it. The question when giving advice should at least be, what can the people *receiving* this advice do differently?
I feel like the Philly DA election in May will be a good test for how much this is filtering through to Democratic voters. The police union has been going hard at him for years now, and there really has been a pretty big increase in the murder rate at least—499 murders last year was the most since 1990, and it’s on pace for a 30% increase this year. If Philadelphia voters are done with Krasner’s approach, that probably bodes pretty poorly for the reform project.
Krasner's going to need a good explanation for what he's doing about stuff like this - SEPTA closing a train station that people rely on because it's been damaged and rendered unsafe by drug users. SEPTA has it's own police force but this is ultimately a city problem.
Wow, I hadn't seen that. Before COVID I drove under that part of the MFL every day. I never felt entirely comfortable in the area, but over the last few years, it felt headed in the right direction. Reminds me of the Baltimore neighborhood I lived in about 15 years ago, which was on the edge of a dangerous area until the great recession, when the shootings started creeping closer and closer, eventually passing right over my block again.
The entire discourse around this topic is so tortured and so concerned with not wanting to sound racist (in today's definition of that word) that reporters and even Matt can't come out and say what is true: The vast majority of people (including black people) want criminals (including black criminals) arrested and removed from their neighborhoods.
The disproportionate rate of crime in urban black neighborhoods has many causes, stretching back for generations. I care about those causes and their solutions. And I want criminals arrested, incarcerated and, if possible, reformed. There is no conflict between these two things.
The woke aren't living in those neighborhoods. They're in a dorm room, their parents' comfortable suburban home, or in housing at least partially furnished by said parents. And in the rare exceptions that they live in these neighborhoods, it's by choice, and they know they aren't stuck there forever.
I was a veteran of several D.C. juries during the crack epidemic. Most black jurors were ready to lock up and throw away the key, with the admonition, "If he didn't do it this time, he's done it before." I voted with my conscience, but I sure as hell didn't lecture them. I didn't go home to their neighborhoods at night.
There is somewhat of a conflict in that the arrest of a criminal has other externalities that can create a feedback loop (e.g., children with parents incarcerated, less prime working age men in the community, the violence in jails and prisons fostering hardening of criminals instead of reformation).
Also, if the attitude with which you approach this problem is “I want bad guys locked up, and reformed—if possible” you’ve already lost the plot.
I'm sympathetic to this point of view as I have some personal experience with this. In a wholistic sense the criminal’s family is also a victim of his or her misdeeds. Fault doesn’t seem very relevant to me. But still it has to start with the perpetrator being segregated from society (so they can do no further harm) and punished (so that others will be deterred from doing harm as well).
Yes but not an irreconcilable conflict, surely?
I don’t think “black people would prefer to be murdered less” is actually that controversial. It’s just that I think this can often be used to justify undesirable policy outcomes. I think that one thing that often gets overlooked too much is over and underpolicing and how the two entertained phenomena can erode community support for policing in various ways that are not helpful. This paper is a little old now, given the pace of criminology research, but has some helpful perspectives I think https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/centers/wiener/programs/pcj/files/PoliceandPublicDiscourseBlackonBlackViolence.pdf
And the sad reality is that the loudest voices in the media about this issue are conservative, the same sources which employ dog whistling and other racist techniques (as John Oliver points out just think about how often Tucker Carlson says "western civilization"). So that makes it harder for antiracist voices to also say "we need more police".
It only makes it harder if you think people are incapable of distinguishing between dog whistles and sincere compassion for suffering human beings. It only makes it harder if you think citizens are only capable of mental shortcuts like "they said 'crime' so they are Republican Racist."
In short, it only makes it harder if self-government is impossible. I think it is possible and citizens aren't morons.
I have so many frustrations with the discourse in this space. More than anything, I am frustrated with the obsession with mono-causality: that if someone is discussing how X contributes to a problem, it's a denial that Y is a factor
-It's possible that the national crime wave is the result of quarantine fatigue, distrust between citizens and police forces, police being under-resourced, and more
-It's possible that Trump's China-Covid language is a contributing factor to the anti-Asian crime wave but not the dominant one
-It's possible that Long held less respect for these women due to their ethnicity AND that it wasn't his primary motivation for killing them
On top of this, understanding the purity culture that seems to be the primary root cause of this killer's deranged mental state is actually profoundly enlightening. I encourage folks to check out David French's piece on it: https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/why-the-atlanta-massacre-triggered As a reformed wokester, the parallels between purity culture and woke culture are profuse. The obsessive focus on one sin as primary over all others, the shame that comes when obsession with avoiding one set of thoughts leads to more of those thoughts (white bear paradox), the idea that lack of purity of thoughts is a permanently dehumanizing trait, etc etc.
(This deserves a far more in-depth, sensitive discussion that I do not have the time to complete here this morning.)
My other big frustration is the idea that understanding the motive of a criminal is akin to defending them or forgiving them. It's not. If people sincerely want to promote healthy culture change to prevent crimes from occurring in the future, it helps to understand what aspects of the culture contributed to the crime. We seem unwilling to do this for white conservatives for fear of "humanizing" them, and unwilling to do this for marginalized communities for fear of "blaming" them. And we are left spinning our anti-racist wheels while people die.
Marie I think you have great insights here and your comments are certainly worth considering. But unfortunately, as cynical as this sounds, I can't escape the conclusion that the political narrative around race and poltiics is the number one driver of the discourse. I wish it was driven more by the logical and constructive reasons you're giving. Hopefully I'm at least partially wrong.
I hope you're wrong too. I never thought of myself as an optimist, but maybe I am. I really appreciate your posts and I think you've said in prior posts that you're from the midwest and that the people around you don't relate at all to the voice of the media. (Nor, I imagine to a lot of the commentators on this substack, either for that matter?) I picture an "exhausted majority" in this country that truly wants fairness, kindness and decency regardless of political persuasion. The mainstream media is failing and people are finding alternative sources. That's why I'm here. Freddie Deboer writes about this on his substack today: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/its-all-just-displacement.
Isn't it possible that some of this partisanship will calm down? Won't there be a backlash against these one-sided, simplistic conclusions? I guess I'm kind of begging you for hope here. What would your neighbors say about the Atlanta killings? How would they sum it up? It feels like we just need enough brave people to say, "enough" and maybe "the political narrative around race and politics" will shift?
The Substack drama really just feels like the good guys/bad guys illusion yet again. FDB's piece is interesting, thanks for sharing. For the "other side," I read Emily VanDerWerff's take: https://emilyvdw.substack.com/p/on-substack I totally understand where she is coming from, but the fact that for her, it boils down to "underwriting several of the internet’s worst people" is telling. More to Freddie's point, the majority of big names I've seen on Substack are ones who *signed the Harper's letter.* These are folks who tried to advocate for change within the industry, more ideological tolerance, and they were shut down. For those who weren't actively pushed out, why wouldn't they bail? As far as her assertion that these mostly straight, cis white males are engaging in intellectual parlor games over other people's identities, again, I totally get where she's coming from, and would have wholeheartedly agreed in the past. The flipside is that mainstream media also feels like intellectual parlor games, except where the game is rigged and there's only one answer and everyone is in violent agreement. It's just gotten boring, to be honest. It's why I pay $8/mo for Slow Boring--a fresh perspective and a collection of people who want to engage in frank conversation about complex topics. I wasn't getting it anywhere else. But it took a mental breakdown on my part to recognize that my cozy, self-righteous echo chamber was built on lies. So I wish I were more optimistic about the size and strength of an "exhausted majority" in this country but I do think most people see the world as a binary choice between batshit-insane Republicans and identity-obsessed liberals, and the educated ones are going with obsessed. Back to the media reaction to Substack, I believe most of these folks genuinely see themselves as actively bending the arc of the moral universe toward justice for others, they see pushback as evidence that their work is truly noble, and they see every stubborn cis straight (or occasionally gay) white male who is publicly informed that their morals are out of whack to be a win. To then see those CSWM's rewarded with a lot of money and a bigger platform is infuriating. But Freddie explains the true dynamic well. Their outrage feeds the machine.
"My other big frustration is the idea that understanding the motive of a criminal is akin to defending them or forgiving them."
That's really insightful. I feel like that is on the same spectrum as another big problem with the current ideological movement: the conflation of emotion with fact. It all seems to stem from the same place.
" More than anything, I am frustrated with the obsession with mono-causality...."
I couldn't agree more. Mono-causal explanation is so harmful on so many fronts.
In fact, that alone is the source of everything that is wrong with the world!
You are wrong the cause of everything wrong is this other factor.
Sure, you can say "what about this other factor?" But what about whataboutism?
We as a society seem morbidly interested in parsing the motivations of these loser-murderers. In this worthless person's case, it seems far too over-determined to me, and ultimately I don't care why he popped out and got a gun (so easy to do!) and worked out his demons by driving around and blowing people away. He doesn't "represent" anything about this nation's attitudes toward Asian-Americans; he's just a loser plain and simple.
What I want to know is how we arrived at a system where so many Asian women have to work in places like this, servicing (probably mostly white) men, and no doubt suffering massive amounts of abuse from them. Forget learning more about the killer; I want to learn more about their stories.
I mean what do you mean "arrived at". The historical roots of white men taking advantage of minority women is pretty deep rooted in the country. Hell it's a global phenomenon and it's not just whites - dominant cultures do this to minorities. (Japan in WW2). The question should be, how are we currently pretending it's not the case, and how can we change it.
Maybe today really is a little different, and the historical roots don't matter as much as what is actually happening today.
Great comment. I think there needs to be more analysis of wokeism as just the latest manifestation of America's underlying puritan instincts.
Grace:Christian::Woke:Progressive
I don't get this analogy, generally grace is associated with forgiveness
Generally?
What’s about, “Grace is a participation in the life of God.”
Still not sure what you're getting at, the point of grace is that it is unearned and given to undeserving sinners
Is that “the” point?
Instant agreement with you, Ken, what is going on here! Xx
You got a good night’s sleep?
Well put. Still the purity instinct is, in moderate doses, a virtue. It also helps avoid disease, both venereal and mundane. It provides a real mental framework for avoiding shady shit. Purity both constrains and steers clear of danger.
Exactly. Being aware of social inequities is also a good thing. It’s when these goals become obsessions that ones moral worth is singularly attached to that things go south... moderation, as you say, is also a virtue.
I'd agree but its also worth asking how differently the arc of American moral progress would have bent in the absence of that Puritan instinct for all its faults.
I think a Haidt-ian analysis of moral psychology and its evolutionary benefits to society-building is worthwhile. The problem, in my mind, is when pockets of moral extremism pop up and butt heads with the rest of society. So maybe it depends on what we mean by "Puritan"/"Puritanical"?
Agreed murder is bad no matter the cause. The Vox writer talks about solidarity in the minority community. This seems like the part of the narrative she cares about the most. We people of color must stand against our white oppressors. Asian people should not be fooled by the great lives they live in America. Sure in most statistics they do BETTER than their white oppressors like higher education levels and income levels and less crime. But white people are against you too. We need you to stand with us (social justice left in Marxist solidarity) against white people.
Trump gets hammered for his divisive rhetoric and justifiably so. What about this divisiveness?
Matt’s right, crime is a problem for everyone and we should all be against it. We should be looking for solutions not trying to leverage criminal acts to fit social justice narratives. The public can see when someone is trying to fit a square into a round hole.
Providing universal healthcare and significantly reducing crime in the black community would do more for social justice than anything BLM has accomplished.
If you truly care about crime than you should stand with people who are advocating for solutions even if those people have different intuitions about why the crime is occurring in the first place.
Some social justice warriors seem far more concerned with advancing their narrative than fixing problems. And they’re willing to spread fear to do it...just like Trump.
I do not think the Asian American community will advance this narrative, because ultimately, they want the violence to stop. Narratives won't solve that problem.
I have extremely strong, extremely personal motivations for wanting anti-Asian hate crimes to never happen again.
And I think this progressive, BLM adjacent, SJW narrative that the NYTs and progressive left is running with is the worst way possible to try and accomplish that goal, and is in fact likely to make the matter worse, not better.
The thing about crime prevention which Matt kind of alludes to which makes me personally insane is that crime has become such a polarized issue along party lines that activists and politicians seem to think the solutions are mutually exclusive to each other. In one corner you have the punitive, city journal set who want police cracking skulls and policing with an "under siege" mentality. On the other, you have the progressive set who think that holding people in jail who have committed murder is barbaric and racist. The idea of any nuance between the two is anathema to both, with deleterious results.
The idea that seems most reasonable to me - pour resources into crime prevention like jobs programs, mental health services, violence interrupters etc, but ALSO arrest and keep incarcerated people who commit violent crimes - is championed by exactly zero people in position of power in this country. Here in DC recently we had a guy who was OUT ON PRE-TRIAL BOND FOR MURDER commit an additional murder, and it barely made a blip in the news and the city continues to look for less reasons to hold people in jail after committing serious violent crimes despite their continued rate of re-offending or ending up on the business end of gunshots themselves. The idea that we have both serious trauma and poverty problems in our poorest neighborhoods that we need to urgently address but also we should keep dangerous criminals off the streets seems like a no-brainer for a politician to win on and to help reduce crime, but so far in this country we can only seem to get one or the other, to our collective harm.
Yes, it's like we envision one big "how tough on crime?" dial that we're fighting to turn up or down, when we need at least a semi-nuanced approach. For example, crack down *hard* on violent crime - "involving community elders" is not a sufficient response to rape, murder, home invasion, and many types of assaults. But on the other hand, armed police shouldn't be our only available response to traffic violations, domestic disturbances, genuinely peaceful protests, drug use, a crazy guy yelling on the sidewalk, "suspicious" people walking alone at night, etc.
Many progressive folks really *want* to get rid of the police. And I'm sympathetic. The attitudes we see in a lot of police departments are quite reactionary and racist, and seem deeply entrenched. I can see how one would think it would be great if we could just get rid of them.
But it wont work. It will lead to an increase in crime. Which is bad. And no matter how many sophisticated arguments you try to make (and people have tried quite a few), that's still where the evidence points.
I wish people would accept that and look for solutions, like you're doing in this piece. I get that it's less emotionally satisfying then just saying "defund", but I thought as progressives we're all about figuring out ways to make actual progress.
Amongst other things, retrain the police. You can't do it in America though. Have to make them serve for 6 months alongside police officers in another country. Tons of things that American police officers consider normal just aren't. But they have to get outside of that country and see it with their own eyes.
For instance, the most common reason that officers fire their weapons in the US is to shoot potentially dangerous dogs. Occasionally, they accidentally hit a bystander. Just not a thing that really happens in other countries AFAIK, they have other ways of dealing with dogs besides shooting them.
My opinion about "defund the police" as a policy solution is that the very concept, no matter how it is interpreted, leads us toward solutions that resemble private security only for the people who can afford it. It's a libertarian wet dream.
> Sharkey expresses optimism that instead of having cops do extra patrols, you could have civilians organized by community groups do it. He argues that private security guards are very effective — poor people just can’t afford them, but they serve as proof of concept that you could fund grassroots patrols through churches or whatever else and see less crime.
Congratulations, you've privatized police and given that (dangerous) responsibility to the public who don't have the resources or training you previously allocated to the police. And since you're not actually a libertarian and have just been cornered into embracing a dash of their anti-government nonsense, we know you didn't cut taxes while reducing government services. So how exactly is the public going to afford to do it right? Helicopter money drops that can somehow only be used to buy security gear on Amazon?
"Civilians organized by community groups" is a nice euphonism. In addition to private security for the rich, let's be honest about what cities without police would look like. We'd end up with competing ethnic/tribal militas/gangs controlling territory and assuming the role as the monopoly provider of violence.
I don't know Sharkey and I'm not including him in this, but much of the radical position on this issue is based on an underlying belief that, given a choice, it would be better for 10 people to be killed by members of their own race than 1 person to be killed by a "colonial oppressor" (i.e. cop) because the former would be the price of freedom. Of course, that's easy to say if you're a college grad living in a safe neighborhood and are unlikely to have to pay that price yourself.
I am specifically not engaging in conversations like this. Others may as they see fit, but for the record, I am not talking about what you're talking about and not engaging at this level.
I am only concerned with discussing the role government plays in provisioning public services versus the role the private sector plays.
I mean that's being generous, your normal security guard did the 1 day online training and paid the state $82 to get printed and is trusted to stand near a door with a company shirt on and do nothing. While armed guards usually at least have to shoot a target before they can strap up, we are talking about people who probably average about 3 days of training who usually are explicitly prohibited from using force lest they be immediately fired, and who are generally held to the high standard of "do you usually show up to work?".
Has anyone seen "Observe and Report" starring Seth Rogen? Underrated dark comedy.
I think we have some data here that should be mentioned, and it leans more to lehman's side of the debate. The NYPD yearly reports from 2019 and 2020.
The number of hate crimes against asians went up from 3 in 2019 to 29 in 2020. That's substantial. But it is also a small minority of a hate crimes. Of felony hate crime assaults in 2020 5 were anti-lgbt, 4 were anti asian, 3 were anti-jewish, 3 were anti-black, 2 were anti-muslim and 1 was anti-white. In 2019, there actually substantially more felony hate crime assaults, including 11 anti-lgbt ones, but none were against asians.
It is also drop in the bucket compared to all assaults. In 2019 the NYPD recorded 20800 victims of felony assault in NYC, and in 2020 it recorded an almost identical 20763. In both years asians, despite making up 14% of the city's population, were just 7.7% of those who reported being assaulted to the NYPD. Black people were substantially overrepresented among assault victims (whites are just as underrepresented as asians, while hispanics resemble their population share). So you are taking about roughly 1600 asian assault victims every year in NYC, which is a much lower rate than other NYC residents, compared to hate crimes going from 3 to 29.
The massive rise was in shootings, in 2019 there were 900 people shot, and that doubled in 2020 to 1800. But the demographics didn't change, in both 19 and 20 whites and asians were massively underrepresented, hispanics underrepresented as well, but not to the same degree, and blacks overrepresented massively. Asians made up 2% of shooting victims in 2019 and 2020, so they went from 18 people shot in 2019 to 36 people shot in 2020.
In terms of demographics of assailants, shootings have almost identical demographics of shooters to victims, but for assaults asians, whites and hispanics all make up a slightly higher percentage of victims then they do for those arrested for assault, while blacks make up a higher percentage of perpetrators then they do for victims.
If you look at the numbers you see an increase in hate crimes against asians, but hate crimes are a tiny percentage of all crimes, and asians are not the majority or even substantially overrepresented among hate crimes victims. If you look at all crimes you don't see asians increasing as a share of crime victims, but you do see an overall increase in shootings and homicides, and other crimes remaining at similar rates, with the demographics of victims essentially unchanged.
Sources
https://app.powerbigov.us/view?r=eyJrIjoiYjg1NWI3YjgtYzkzOS00Nzc0LTkwMDAtNTgzM2I2M2JmYWE1IiwidCI6IjJiOWY1N2ViLTc4ZDEtNDZmYi1iZTgzLWEyYWZkZDdjNjA0MyJ9
https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_planning/year-end-2019-enforcement-report.pdf
https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_planning/year-end-2020-enforcement-report.pdf
> The number of hate crimes against asians went up from 3 in 2019 to 29 in 2020
For my sins, I follow the Bay Area subreddit. People there have been tracking every mugging of an Asian as a hate crime. I mean, maybe it's true that the muggers all have hate in their hearts, but I suspect two years ago none of them would be classified as hate crimes unless the mugger said something specifically.
None of that makes beating an 80 year old and taking their purse any less awful.
There is a clear Small Numbers Problem here. Small changes can seem huge when expressed as a percentage increase or decrease.
The problem with hate crimes statistics is that they require that an ascertainment of hate be done at the policing level. For police, an assault should be an assault and a murder a murder. Once the perpetrator is found and sufficient evidence of guilt is established, a court can decide whether there were motivations involved that require special attention. having specific hate crimes laws and statistics is about politics and nothing else.
The hot takes are going to focus on the police and racism: "blue flu!" "law enforcement handcuffed by political correctness!"
But it's worth wondering whether the police are causal at all.
The epidemic has given us a year of unemployment figures in which every week was worse than the worst week of the Great Recession. No jobs, no money. Lotta time on the hands of bored youth.
People are shut in with family and small children. Tempers fray. How many of these murders will turn out to be extensions of intimate partner abuse?
And what's the situation overseas? Murder rates flat in Europe, South America, rising, falling?
I just strongly suspect that the discourse is going to look in the wrong directions, at cop issues and race issues, when the real drivers are economic and sociological.
A great point. Public attention naturally gravitates to subjects that people are most interested in rather than objective cost/benefit analysis.
And, as you can see in this post and other recent tweets, Matt is clearly worried that raising any concerns not related to racism (thus drawing attention away from that important issue) will lead to accusations of racism and cause people to lump him in with genuine racists that he doesn’t want to be associated with.
So there’s both a carrot (talking about our favorite subjects is more enjoyable than unfavorable ones) and a stick (deviating from the current narrative risks condemnation from peers), both of which will bias our discourse.
I thought that The Intercept had a really good piece looking seriously at a number of different factors. https://theintercept.com/2021/02/21/2020-murder-homicide-rate-causes/
Per this very report, “ For example, some commentators have observed that massive increases in firearm purchases at the outset of the pandemic may have contributed to an increase in homicides and gun crimes. There is some preliminary evidence to support such a conclusion, but more research is required.”
Which is something I entirely agree with, that more support would be needed to explicitly link the two, but it’s certainly not unreasonable or “bad information” to link them on the basis of the evidence we have.
Except this also neglects important considerations, particularly the regional variations in homicide rates, as this Vox article explains (https://www.vox.com/2020/8/3/21334149/murders-crime-shootings-protests-riots-trump-biden).
To quote a relevant portion “In Chicago, as well as some other cities, the apparent increase in homicides began before the protests over the police killing of George Floyd. And in some cases, as in Chicago, the spike abruptly ended almost as quickly as it started, only to surge again weeks later, after the protests had calmed. So it’s hard to blame only the protests for a spike — especially because we know that other factors likely played a role, such as the start of summer, when crime tends to go up, and the end of stay-at-home orders.”
Now, I actually do buy that there might have been some response among the police that’s associated with the protests (points 3&4 on the list) and your sympathy to cops probably determines which one you choose.
But it’s clear that, in light of regional variations and the fact that these trends started well before the protests, any serious explanation cannot be constrained just to protest-related effects.
Not to mention that crime continued to fall during the economic collapse of 2008. So the view that economic downturns necessarily cause crime rates to spike doesn't seem to be supported. That doesn't mean THIS downturn couldn't be a causal factor in the spiking crime rates- only that we'd need to actually see evidence of that being the case before we could say that we felt like it was a reasonable explanation. It's not the sort of direct link that would allow us to infer that causal link while waiting for the evidence to come in.
In SF, my impression is that theft is up, people have been freaking out about car break-ins and stealing from shops.
At least one article I read said that the main increase in car break-ins has been due to delivery vehicles left running while someone is doing DoorDash/GrubHub/etc. I definitely haven't seen anything like complete statistics though.
Not only that, but Canada has had much more serious lockdowns across the board than the US. I think Toronto, which is the most comparable to major US cities, is the one of the longest-running "lockdowns"
> tinder for violence
I knew following this blog was a good way to get startup ideas
What's happening in other countries? If this rise also occurred in other rich countries then why do anything?
I'd bet that a similar rise has happened across most rich nations and is unrelated to any cultural factors.
This is an excellent question and would help shed some light on whether the spike is more likely Covid/lockdown related or social unrest-related. We desperately need some critical thinking and investigative journalism in this space.
Murder is still a problem that needs to be addressed even if people in other rich countries are also being murdered.
Yes, but the amount of resources you dedicate to the problem would change if you expected a reversion to the mean when pandemic was over vs actual shift in cultural attitudes and behaviours.
I think it’d be extremely hard to disambiguate the effects of local conditions from the crime rates. The severity of COVID in America, our massive gun ownership rates, the policing protests, preexisting socioeconomic conditions, the strength of the welfare state, etc.
But, while I haven’t had a chance to actually read it yet, after seeing your question I saw this, which has a report and an attached data set that could be of interest. https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/frontpage/2020/December/unodc-research-reveals-drop-in-reported-property-crime-and-homicide-during-covid-19-lockdown-is-only-short-lived.html
If it's the case that this is an America-only phenomenon then holy shit there's a lot of work to do.
To really evaluate the theory that
increased murders in the US are part of a global increase in crime caused by stress from the pandemic, don't you to control for the greater availability of handguns in the US?
The same angry confrontation that might lead to a fistfight in many places can more easily lead to an impulsive murder of passion here.
It's also important to understand if the different forms that "lockdown" took in different countries (and different parts of the US) led to increases in crime in some places (where businesses were closed but there were no restrictions on people being out and about) and decreases in other places (where people weren't allowed out unless they were working in an essential business).
Of course, complicating the hypothesis too much makes this look like a p-hacking expedition.
I don't think that's quite right. It would be right if there no murders in other countries, or if the few murders involved circumstances that were totally isolated from 'covid stress acts of passion'
But there are impulsive murders in other comparable counties. Perhaps many fewer, and proportionally less with guns, but they still happen. So if lockdown stress was the sole cause we'd expect Europe's continent wide rate of R to increase to 1.25 x R since lockdowns. If that hasn't happened it's evidence against that theory.
The premise is that as a background fact in the US, more violent altercations are converted to unplanned, spur-of-the moment murders because of the ubiquity of handguns.
If that's true, then to really compare apples to apples you'd need to compare fluctuation in the rates of violent altercations across countries, not just murders. Obviously not very feasible given data shortcomings but in theory...
Built into this kind of analysis is the idea that comparisons to other countries are semper paribus and that certainly isn't the case. The U.S. has always been an outlier in homicides and I don't think you can show changes in the U.S. murder rate to ever correlate well with other countries. The elements that determine the murder rate form a dynamic and even chaotic model. Trying to tie it closely to COVID or BLM is far too simplistic
To all of Matt's readership, let me heartily endorse Graham's Substack on policing (https://grahamfactor.substack.com/). I'm really enjoying it and learning a lot.
(No dollars were harmed in the posting of this endorsement.)
For Canada there is - although official numbers have not been released, so take the source with a grain of salt.
https://homicidecanada.com/preliminary-2020-canadian-provincial-homicide-stats-manitoba-retains-title-with-highest-per-capita-homicide-rate/
My 5 second search for the UK didn't manage to uncover anything.
I should be clear that the rise in Canada is very small - "Overall Canada had 680 homicides that we have been able to find so far for 2020. That’s a slight increase over the 676 that Statscan reported for 2019. So Covid hasn’t seemed to have a big effect on the overall number of homicides in Canada in 2020. As mentioned at the start of the post, the 680 number we have currently is inevitably an under count compared to what Statscan will report much later in the year, but it shouldn’t be off by too much as we have improved over the years at collecting homicide data."
Unofficial (collated from newsreports) homicides in the Netherlands were also basically flat in 2020 (at 0.67 per 100k). There was a noticeable corona effect though - there were fewer professional hits and more domestic killings.
Yup, and that's fine. Important to put it into context. As I said elsewhere - if this is an America-only phenomenon then that's very very alarming.
An old, and in my view correct, but extremely unpopular view, is that corporal punishment is a more effective deterrent, more effective at reducing recidivism, and is ultimately kinder on *the punished* than prison.
It also has the benefit, if conducted publicly, that people can "see justice be done". (Whether you like it or not, many people including victims of crime would like to see this.)
America's current prison system is in effect a kind of "corporal punishment but extremely unfair" system. Rates of violence, including sexual violence in prison, are high. But often the nastiest inmates are the ones doing it to others, so ironically have the best time in prison. Whilst the young kid sentenced for something relatively minor might be treated appallingly.
This also ties into the need for justice to be done quickly. Going quickly from Crime > Conviction > Sentencing > Punishment creates a strong psychological link in the mind of the convicted criminal between their action and the state's reaction.
Whereas the current US criminal justice system solution of letting *unconvicted* but charged suspects languish for sometimes years in jails (not prisons) before eventually taking a plea bargain that counts time already served means there is in their minds little link between their crime and their punishment.
Holy shit
Checking in on this thread 8 hours later and I would like to provide a more nuanced reaction.
Holy mother-fucking shit.
Could you elaborate?
Alright:
Holy mother-fucking shitballs.
Ah, thank you, clears it up. Thank you for your contribution.
Im frankly astonished at the amount of people advocating for a Saudi Arabian-style of "criminal justice" in this thread.
The idea of flogging someone for stealing a car or something scares the heck out of me too, but I'm trying to get past the initial disgust and honestly consider it. Why is it better to lock someone in a modern American prison for 5 years rather than give them 10 lashes? Is it akin to arguments about the death penalty (which I oppose), along the lines of "it degrades society to have the government inflict violence on someone under its power"? If so, is prison not violence?
I think it's still a bad idea, but we should be able to describe *why* it's a bad idea and not stop at "it just isn't done in civilized society."
Yeah I don't see why it's so off limits to even discuss. We're extraordinarily far from enacting anything like that in our justice system. But we do, daily, send people to prison for years and decades where they are extremely likely to encounter violence that could be as bad or worse than Singapore-style canings. And being the victim of a serious crime (murder, rape, kidnapping, assaults) is a pretty terrible thing. As long as those crimes are committed, I'm open to any idea for how to diminish them. The point isn't "let's find new ways to hurt people". It's "let's find ways to reduce harm to everyone, but especially victims of crime, but discussing incentives"
If it's a terrible idea because it doesn't achieve those objectives, let's hear it. It very well might be, but I haven't heard the argument or seen the data. But knee-jerk "you guys are Wahabi-ist extremists for even discussing it" seems counter-productive
Well, I think the better solution is ridiculous sentencing and faster trials, but if I had to choose between 10 lashings and 5 years in prison, I'd choose the lashings every time.
Well I wasn't advocating exactly for Saudi Arabian style punishments, but yeah, I sincerely think that the idea of providing quantified amounts of pain in proportion to the crime committed is honestly better than sentencing people to spend time in a place where very often the roughest and nastiest criminals do "easier" time as they effectively rule the roost whilst meting out rough punishments to less accomplished criminals.
As I said elsewhere in thread, this can be combined with all the "nice" stuff, like drug rehab programmes, job training etc.
And I favour wiping criminal records. Well not wiping them exactly. The *police* would still have a record, but in most cases if a company ran a background check on a person who had been convicted and sentenced in this way it would come back clean, making it easier for them to get hired.
Why not *just* do the nice stuff?
A few reasons.
a) Perverse Incentives: Poor and desperate people might break the law just to get into these programmes, esp. homeless people.
b) The need to provide a link in the criminal's mind between "commit crime" and "something bad happens", rather than "I committed a crime then people were really nice to me".
c) The public wants to feel that justice has been done, and will be angry when criminals just get rehab or whatever.
If the premise is it's possible (with a heavy emphasis on possible, b/c discussing something is a lot different than "advocating' for it) that some forms of corporal punishment could be more humane than some prison sentences, and possibly be a more effective deterrent than make the case against it. But I don't think anyone here is saying "let's be Saudi Arabia, or any of the other countries that have corporal punishment, or let's cutoff hands because they f***ing deserve it"
I mean we do still have the death penalty in this country; that seems pretty corporal. If i met someone who supported the death penalty, even on a liberal-leaning forum, it wouldn't blow my mind. There are still plenty of parents that physically discipline their children. How would you make whatever your argument is to them if they told you they did't hate JFO's idea? Just say "holy fucking shit" or "you're a bad person"? Doesn't seem like a style of argument that's going to convince anyone to change their minds
the deterrent-theory I buy into has nothing to do with the specific punishments and everything to do with consistency.
Suppose every time you started your car a mouse-trap sprung and badly bruised, possibly even broke, one of your fingers. Would you drives less? Now suppose instead that every time you drove there was a tiny chance you suffered a life-changing traumatic injury that could even kill you. The latter is reality, yet we still drive. The severity doesn't matter as much as the consistency.
A real-life example was England during the period known as "the bloody code" when they cut down on policing but upped sentencing to the point where a man could be hung for stealing a loaf of bread. It's not remembered as a good time for law and order.
Megan McArdle's book "The Upside of Down" writes are length about pilot programs in which parolees are monitored much more closely, and sent back to prison for short stints (just a few days, typically) for each violation. The consistency is super effective at changing behaviour, and also at giving parolees a sense of agency. Instead of "I'm living my life and every now and then THE MAN comes in and locks me up" it becomes "my actions have consequences, and my choices - not the caprice of my parole officer or judge - determine what happens to me."
It requires a lot more investment in some ways, but given the results it produces it seems like both a more humane approach, and a win for society as a whole.
This seems like a good idea, relative to what we're doing currently.
Like you say, consistency, and a direct connection between crime and consequence is key, rather than an excessive punishment.
I still think that a literal "short sharp shock" rather than the figurative one of putting them in a prison amongst other criminals for a few days would be yet more effective though.
This is why I am so infuriated at all the limitations and restrictions on red light cameras and speed cameras, and all the people pushing the so-counterintuitive-it-must-be-true idea that speed cameras cause more deaths than they prevent.
Good point, but it's worth distinguishing between speed cameras and red light cameras. It's not hard to not speed, but red light cameras mean you *really* don't want to enter the intersection anywhere near a red light, to the point you may stop short and cause someone to rear-end you as a result, which will legally be on them and not you (or the red light camera). The incentives are all screwy with red light cameras, specifically.
I think this mechanism is quite plausible as a way for red light cameras to create more *collisions*. But my understanding is that rear-enders are much less often fatal than T-bones, so that even introducing twice as many rear-enders as the number of prevented T-bones might mean a net reduction in traffic injuries and fatalities.
Good point - I believe last time I looked the understanding was that this was not the case, but that knowledge is rusty...
Yep, consistency would be key. And shortness of time between crime and punishment. This is how people learn - accidentally touch a hot saucepan - ow. You learn not to do that again.
Peter Moskos (a former cop and now criminal justice professor) wrote a whole book about this. Here's a preview: https://petermoskos.com/files/moskos/moskos_2014_APJ_flogging.pdf and here's the book https://www.amazon.com/Defense-Flogging-Peter-Moskos/dp/0465032419
Yeah, so, like, not to upset the woke-skeptic vibe we generally have around here, but as inhumane as prisons are, I really don't see people signing up for public whippings of people, especially of Black people??? But I will admit I have not read the book. I suppose the argument "for" is, if you're going to treat people inhumanely, do it in public?
(Just to be super clear, I am opposed to both flogging and inhumane prisons.)
Not sure about the book, but I don't see a mention of the flogging being public in the article. I think the argument is more that everyone knows what a lash/extreme pain is, while six months in prison is a more nebulous concept. Beyond the idea that it's more humane to offer people the option of being harshly beaten for a brief time rather than caged for years (author's view - I'm unsure about this), this could also make it more apparent what exactly is being done "in our name", disproportionately to certain groups.
But yes, I think there's clearly a third option of humane prisons with more ability to rehabilitate.
Huh I didn't know that - I'll check it out.
I agree that the idea that corporal punishment is always more barbaric is a flawed one.
Leaving aside rape, inmates are violently assaulted in prison by other inmates quite commonly. And it's very hard for me, personally, to weigh the mental suffering of a lengthy prison term against the physical suffering of caning or whatever they do in Singapore and other SE Asian countries.
There are probably good constitutional and other philosophical reasons not to take opening that window too seriously, but for me, personally, I'm not particularly horrified by corporal punishment; non-corporal punishment as it's actually carried out is already horrifying on a level I can barely comprehend.
I thorougly agree about the need for speedier trials than we have - I'm not sure how we wound up with this months-long process from arrest to trial, but it seems to really go against the right to a speedy trial found in the Constitution. But... how does corporal punishment fix that? If the aim is "going quickly from Crime > Conviction > Sentencing > Punishment", how does changing the punishment to 40 lashes instead of 4 months in prison fix that?
It's connected to time preference. Criminals are often high time preference individuals, and also often young men with little life experience. Pointless to tell a young man who rarely thinks as far ahead as next week "don't do this or you'll spend 10 years in prison". He can't even envisage what that means.
Most people can understand that pain hurts though. And if they don't before the 1st time, they'll learn.
Also, since corporal punishment doesn't take very long, minor criminals wouldn't have big gaps in their education / training / employment history to explain to future employers.
I think the issue is, people do know prison is terrible. It's not that that they don't think the punishment will be bad, it's that they don't think they will get caught. That's why older cultures that hanged people for even the slightest offenses still had lots of crime.
A much bigger deterrent - and harder to create - is to make people that much more likely to get caught.
P.S I realise this won't be a very popular take as corporal punishment is widely considered barbaric.
Still I find it odd that many countries, including first world countries like the USA, Japan and Singapore, allow capital punishment, but do not consider corporal.
Surely it is worse to kill someone than to hurt them? I know that given the choice I would rather be sentenced to something painful than be literally killed, or frankly to a long prison term (depending I guess on the level of pain vs the length of the prison term and some other factors).
I find it doubly odd when many jurisdictions around the world do in fact allow corporal punishment - for children. How can it be that it is OK for a parent to hit their child if they misbehave (a process that involves no court, judge, jury etc. nor any other checks and balances) but not OK for the state to in some way "hit" a criminal convicted of a crime?
Can you elaborate further on what you’re envisioning here? At the end it sounds like you’re potentially referring to cash bail reform, which I think is a good idea but I’m not sure what you mean by more corporal punishment?? Like... bringing back out the stocks from the 18th century?
I'm not a fan of cash bail so I guess I would favour getting rid of it, but that's not at all central to what I'm saying.
I mean corporal punishment, as in, sentencing someone to a form of punishment that does not kill them, or incarcerate them, but causes them harm or pain.
What kinds of punishments, specifically? The classic one that comes to mind is some kind of beating or lashing - you're not talking about chopping off hands for shoplifting, or branding, or something, right? I ask because I think it's important to be clear about what specifically is being advocated as "corporal punishment" is pretty vague.
IDK depends on the crime. Could start with something as low as a mildly unpleasant electric shock for a first offence I guess.
Do we have different punishments for people with heart conditions, etc.? Are there concerns about having people administer the process if it's not shocks, but say, flogging, instead?
Fair point. I'm sure there'd be a lot of issues to be worked out. I'm not medically knowledgeable so IDK how many different things would need to be taken into account.
But it's not like the current system is great, and lots of people *do* die in prison, sometimes in suspicious circumstances.
At the very least I think some kind of reform in this direction including the option of corporal punishment (and rehab, job training etc.) as an alternative to prison should be on the radar.
I should also add that none of this precludes the "softer" side of e.g. drug rehabilitation programmes, job training etc.
Actually it facilitates it. The typical problem is that progressives want to see a justice system based purely on rehabilitation, but conservatives, and most other people, want to see offenders punished.
Once people can see that justice has been done, they'll be more sympathetic to efforts to help turn the lives of criminals around.
It's not "a drug addict stole my bike and all he got was rehab", it's "a drug addict stole my bike, they punished him for his crime with several painful electric shocks, but now they're helping him get off drugs too."
Your idea reminds me of something that I've heard in the Army a lot (and witnessed somewhat myself over the last 12 years). There used to be a strong culture, at least in Combat Arms (i.e. Infantry, Armor, etc) of "smoking" someone with excessive/painful physical exercises and also of "wall-to-wall counseling" (usually something non-permanent like open-hand slaps or a punch to the stomach) when they (usually a private) screwed up (lost equipment, failed to report on time, etc). Now even the former technique is heavily discouraged and often considered hazing while the latter is criminal. Instead, NCOs are expected to write up every transgression on official Army forms.
Of course there is rarely the time or enthusiasm for leadership doing even MORE paperwork unless the offense is serious, and when the paperwork is done it can have a more negative effect on the soldier's career (i.e. affecting promotions and/or separation) than simply giving a short, memorable lesson that is closely and clearly linked to the offense. BLUF, the Army (like the rest of society) has gotten more legalistic, and thus worse overall.
I'm not familiar with military culture but I suspect you're right.
OTOH, I'm a bit conflicted about it though because I see a big moral difference between crimes of commission and omission.
As a civilian I would be comfortable living in a society where breaking a car window to steal something might get you a painful electric shock, because I know I'm not going to do that, or even be tempted to.
Getting hit because you forgot to bring the ammo or whatever feels different to me, and I would hate to live in that environment, but IDK, perhaps it is necessary in a military context, and so long as joining the military is voluntary and it's understood then maybe that's OK.
I think it's probably good to have a fairly bright line about not striking subordinates (down that road lies the Russian army, which is notorious for it's brutal hazing).
But making a soldier do hundreds of pushups, flutter kicks, etc doesn't seem troublesome at all. And in fact I think Americans today probably think that sort of thing is actually more common than it really is, which is a depressing commentary on both the state of the Army and people's detachment from it
If there's one thing I've noticed about the "Stop AAPI Hate" movement that is picking up steam, it's that the issue is becoming bigger than the crime wave which helped launch it. My Asian-American friends who are posting about it, sharing their experiences with racism and the alienation they have felt by being othered in their own country; they haven't been victims of any crime at all. But they are still feeling drawn to this movement because of the racism they have lived with for their whole lives. We could see assaults against Asian folks drop to zero tomorrow and the problems they are talking about would still be relevant.
So I think it's important that we take the murder surge seriously, as its own issue, and also take the issue of anti-Asian racism seriously as well. And while the two issues are currently intertwined, I have a feeling they are aren't going to remain that way for long. The movement that started at Stonewall didn't end when police stopped doing extortion raids on gay bars.
Also, if you haven't read R.O. Kwan's piece in Vanity Fair, I highly recommend it: https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2021/03/ro-kwon-letter-to-asian-women
"No one is more intimidating to me than ferocious Korean women..."
I can relate.
Damnit, autocorrect, it's R.O. Kwon...
I agree with you, as usual. But why is it so controversial and even "dangerous" for you to suggest that police play a role in reducing crime, and therefore proposing to defund the police is not such a great idea? I'd say it reflects disturbing pathologies within the Progressive movement.
I think we can look no further than this weekends threads and debates on "cancel culture". Similar lines of reasoning have brought controversy and trouble for progressive pundits who were following them, so Matt exercises extreme caution when mentioning them.
Matt, your mention of CCTV also makes me think another thread to pull here is how privacy hawkery and anti-surveillance thinking make the US implementation of CCTVs and full study of the use of airborne surveillance imagery in crime investigation hard.
I'm from rural NY, work for Big Tech in NYC, cross-pressured politically six ways to Sunday.
My company is part of "surveillance capitalism" and I could immediately describe detailed implementation of surveillance techniques that would probably reduce crime numbers. We could cleanly connect cause (person was seen brandishing a weapon) with effect (police SUV arrives and hauls person away).
I think it would be fair to characterize those techniques as turning cities into open-air prisons. Even using small drones, the techniques would not scale the same way for suburban or rural areas. I would rather work for Facebook or Twitter than do this stuff.
I live in NYC where the mayor has had remarkably little influence on NYPD policy.
It terrifies me to imagine NYC having a literal machine that proactively orchestrates meting out punishments via human deputies. I think maybe you underestimate how effective dragnet surveillance could be in a wealthy country like ours. We would put China to shame if we wanted to. The biggest challenge would be bypassing bloated procurement practices
"Conversely, if you’re a 'Blame BLM' guy, then what is the solution here? Next time we see a video of an unarmed man being strangled to death, don’t mention anything?"
It seems to me there is probably some middle ground between ignoring violent cops and tolerating the like of BLM.
Yes, the middle ground there is a miles and miles wide.
You can certainly "mention something" without taking over and burning down the police stations in major US cities, for example.
Presumably literally everyone who reads this advice was already following it. The question when giving advice should at least be, what can the people *receiving* this advice do differently?
I feel like the Philly DA election in May will be a good test for how much this is filtering through to Democratic voters. The police union has been going hard at him for years now, and there really has been a pretty big increase in the murder rate at least—499 murders last year was the most since 1990, and it’s on pace for a 30% increase this year. If Philadelphia voters are done with Krasner’s approach, that probably bodes pretty poorly for the reform project.
Krasner's going to need a good explanation for what he's doing about stuff like this - SEPTA closing a train station that people rely on because it's been damaged and rendered unsafe by drug users. SEPTA has it's own police force but this is ultimately a city problem.
https://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2021/03/15/septa-to-close-somerset-station-in-kensington-to-develop-safety-security-strategy-repairs/
Wow, I hadn't seen that. Before COVID I drove under that part of the MFL every day. I never felt entirely comfortable in the area, but over the last few years, it felt headed in the right direction. Reminds me of the Baltimore neighborhood I lived in about 15 years ago, which was on the edge of a dangerous area until the great recession, when the shootings started creeping closer and closer, eventually passing right over my block again.