Police and firefighters do come from the general population, but my sense is their views about many issues aren’t representative of the general population, in the sense of polling the way the country does. May be my own bias. Would be interested to see some polling.
One of my first jobs out of college I was an analyst and junior product manager. As analysts, one of my tasks was predicting our revenue. As product manager, my job was to figure out problems and fix them.
The first problem I found was that our users accounts were getting hacked. As a solution, I implemented a bunch of authentication measures (some early two factor authentication, etc). Problem solved - the measures worked well enough that would be hackers went off to some other soft target. Hacked accounts went to 0.
Unfortunately, in my other job I realized that at the same time we started missing revenue projections. The new authentication measures materially reduced signups, etc so the net effect of the changes I made as product manager was negative.
The conclusion to me was that when something seems to you like a maximization or minimization problem, you're probably just missing a dimension of the problem. The optimum number of hacked accounts isn't in fact 0. Pissing off people with security measures does in fact have a cost. With a given level of technology, there's an optimum security level.
It seems really hard for people to see both sides of the problem. You increase policing, without improving the technology, you piss innocent people off. The police seem to have really no idea that this is a thing. There just isn't a "revenue" function there at all. Police defunders would like to stop policing entirely, which would reduce the insult rate... but at the cost of increased crime, a cost function they mostly ignore.
For the most part, to be honest we need to acknowledge both sides of this. Either say - there's too much crime now, so I think we need more policing, and I'm ok with a bit more bullshit harassment of "suspicious looking" people. Or - there's too much bullshit harassment, and I'm ok with more crime. If you're going so say you need to improve both - there needs to be a technological improvement. I think we need to give up some privacy/use facial recognition/dna databases/surveillance so that there can be both improved policing and less harassment.
I agree with all of this till we touched on facial recognition technology.
I oppose pretty much all use of facial recognition technology by governments. (and really for businesses as well) It allows, and I would argue encourages the surveillance state.
I refuse to trade liberty for safety. We don't need the government monitoring us all the time. If they want to monitor us they should require probable cause and a warrant. All other broad based tracking schemes (including license plate readers ) are IMHO unconstitutional. And at the very least unethical.
The basic take here - that milder penalties and more thorough policing are an effective way to reduce crime, and that excessive penalties result in people (witnesses, police, prosecutors) letting petty criminals get away with crimes, which drives up crime - is one that I was taught in history class in high school in the 1980s.
The introduction of Peelian policing and the gradual removal of the "bloody code" in the Victorian era saw a dramatic drop in crime rates. Until 1823, there were something like 200 crimes that could be punished with death (often reduced to transportation to the colonies in practice); by 1861, there were only five civilian offences, of which only murder was prosecuted in any significant numbers (there were a handful of executions for treason and espionage relating to the two world wars, the last piracy execution was in 1830, the only execution for arson in a royal dockyard was in 1777). "Something like" is there because there isn't a formal list; Parliament had to pass a law saying "all crimes except these five can no longer be penalised with death" because there was no complete list available.
Not only was the death penalty abolished, many crimes saw the punishment reduced to a fine or short sentence, not long terms in prison.
At the same time, professional policing - first the Metropolitan Police in London (1829) and the copycat police in, eventually, every county in the country - was introduced, which meant a huge increase in the fraction of crimes being caught and prosecuted, and a big fall in crime rates.
The other part of the story is that prisons became professionalised and much less savage; Elizabeth Fry was the person credited with this in my high school; how true that really is, I don't know.
Now, that's the "high school history" version of this bit of criminology, how true it actually is compared to reality, I don't know. But it does show that this dates back well over a century.
I, for one, welcome Matty's slow migration towards normie old-school conservative ideas (with a technocratic neoliberal twist). Perhaps, as in days of old with the original neocons (Irvin Kristol and crew), the saviors of the right will be liberals.
The problem is Matt is still a big fan of fighting white collar crime like most American progressives but yet all these other countries with higher homicide clearance rates are very soft on white collar crime. So while in theory it should be able to fight blue collar homicide and white collar financial offenses at the same time in practice countries have to choose one or the other. Most of the rest of the world opts for fighting homicide above white collar financial crime.
This doesn't add up to me. Resources and funding are not so scarce that we can't fund the IRS and the FBI. It's in no way one or the other. Where are most of these other countries? Europe and Asia? They seem to have lower levels of violent crime for all kinds of reasons and the way they police violence is only part of it.
Likewise - Latin America has very high levels of violence, but I'd say they also have high levels of corruption and white collar crime. What countries are hard on white collar crime but easy on violence?
The US is hard on white collar crime and easy on violence. Most of Europe like Switzerland, Germany, etc along with Canada are hard on violence and easy on white collar crime;
Lots of evidence others are much softer on white collar. Switzerland and Marc Rich, Germany and Dieselgate, multiple European countries vis a vis sanctions busting and money laundering, Britain and the Saudi Al-yamana bribery scandal, Alstom in France paying bribes all over the place, Canada and Conrad Black. Not quite white collar but a symbol of being soft on crime too is France and Roman Polanski.
CSI notwithstanding, police mostly solve crimes by talking to people. That requires the police and the criminal justice system generally to have credibility as a legitimate source of justice, in the community that knows about the murder. Non fatal shooting victims know exactly who shot them. They’re just not about to tell the fucking pigs about it.
Not relevant at all. Pure cost/benefit analysis, which Matt likes to flaunt. If we want to expand life expectancy, I’d suggest vaccine mandates, but a large segment of the population, maybe a majority, wants to do what it wants to do, including OD’ing on heroin, even if it makes us look really bad on rich country life expectancy tables. Read Columbia professor Carl Hart on how heroin has helped him achieve his ‘work-life’ balance. I’m sure yours involves yoga, and I’d be the last to suggest we lock you up for pursuing your bliss.
Your contrarian view isn't that murder is wrong and murders should be caught. Your contrarian view is that it is possible to both increase funding for police and make our criminal justice system more humane. Most people think there is just a tradeoff between lower crime vs being less harsh to criminals.
It feels like Dems have decided to not give anyone a rate increase while taking away a credit for parents between$200k-$400k breaking a campaign promise. I think their strategy is to pretend that the crowd is actually chanting ‘Let’s go!’
I'm puzzled that you think that "murder is wrong" is a contrarian take. I know that you place high value on being contrarian, but I believe you will find common ground with most of humanity on that position. You had some very sensible things to say from a contrarian position about the Defund the Police movement. Police funding and training regimes are in need of a major overhaul. For instance, the practice of civil forfeiture creates some truly malignant incentives for police agencies. The heavy dependence on traffic and parking enforcement for municipal revenues also creates perverted incentives. Police training needs to emphasize de-escalation skills not use of force. It would also be helpful to have a different mix of professions involved resolving some situations which today almost exclusively feature the police, e.g. mental health crises. Finally, screening out racists from police training intakes is imperative.
"The people who murder should be caught and punished" is, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, what's intended to be the "contrarian take" there. Contrarian, in the sense that if you followed a somewhat popular Internet policy and completely abolished policing, there would be no mechanism to apprehend and imprison murderers.
"the old paradigm where you forget about crime and just focus on reform is dead."
That's good. No such paradigm should ever have existed if it did
Capturing more criminals IS policing reform. [It's not ALL of policing reform, of course: we also want to reduce shooting and other abuse of authority.] My guess s that police already put a reasonable maybe even unreasonable amount of resources in investigating and clearing (and thereby deter) crimes against high-income people. [My part of Washington DC probably IS a lot safer that were some of my cowering, gun toting FB friends who worry about home invasions live.] Where the MPD fails is in protecting life and property in low income neighborhood where more racial and ethnic minorities live. Where is the justice in that?
My assumption is that police in DC are just responding to incentives like any other group of people. If they're clearing less crime in low income neighborhoods, how would you restructure incentives to reverse that?
At the end of the day the police chief is appointed by the mayor of DC and the police are enforcing local laws passed by the representatives who were elected by the voters (although I'm pretty unclear of what the equivalent of state laws are in DC). So there's not really any Republicans to blame in that situation. And the police are hired from the local area, probably as often from the low income neighborhoods as from the high income ones.
It may be more difficult to clear such crimes and also involve more risk for the department
I'm not blaming Republicans or anyone else. I do not know HOW to restructure the incentives. That's the chief of Police's job. And the Mayor and Council to provide the resources.
Fwiw I didn't mean to imply you were personally blaming Republicans. It's just a common complaint in the national conversation so it felt worthwhile to reference. Sorry if it seemed that's what I meant. I don't know how to restructure the incentives either. But what I seem to read most of the time (again, not from you in your comment) is that the people to blame are simply "whoever it is the person writing the comment doesn't like, which is usually the police". It's a sad state of affairs and I wish I was more optimistic.
I think the reason Demings isn't really a "rising star" - and why she's putting it on the line in a tough-to-win race next year - is that she'll be turning 65 in March. Its now or never for her.
She's got a great bio and hopefully she's a strong campaigner as well. The obvious countertactic from the Republicans is to find some Orlando police officers who were disgruntled with her (there will inevitably be some) and create a Swift Boat-style montage ad where they all say, one after another, that she "betrayed law enforcement" for this or that reason. (If I recall correctly, in the Swift Boat ad half the guys didn't even serve under Kerry! They were just right-wingers who happened to have served somewhere in Vietnam.) So she'll have to be ready for that: her bio alone won't be enough, and she'll have to lean *hard* into pro-police messaging.
It seems like the obvious countertactic from the Republicans will be that Florida is R+5, 2022 will already skew GOP and Rubio is a (relatively) popular incumbent.
Demmings will have to hit a home run to win that race.
That is not a countertactic. Republicans are not just going to sit around and do nothing on campaign messaging just because they have a baseline partisan edge.
Sorry you're right that was glib. I just meant I'm not sure that they will bother Demmings' message that directly when they can just run a standard Republican campaign and probably win easily.
Two points on the shoplifting. The researchers you quote don’t say don’t use FR technology, they say there’s a non-crime values trade-off involved, so legislators should make that call. If the value weren’t privacy (which you personally aren’t very interested in), you’d normally agree with that. Second, as various people have pointed out over on Twitter, as things stand in our criminal justice system, mere contact (much less a conviction) has significant repercussions regardless of the notional penalty; it’s not clear that we can “make the punishment [adequately] lighter.”
And point one exactly. I was surprised MY seems to have misread their point. The point is that the severity of the crime needs to be balanced with the the intrusiveness of the surveillance. Not that FR technology shouldn't be used for fear of punishing minor offenses.
Point two exactly. And the fragmentation of criminal justice institutions means that “just make the consequences lighter” is not a lever anyone has available to them; Matt’s policy preference here might make sense in the UK but from a purely harms reduction standpoint almost certainly doesn’t make sense in the US.
I do think it’s possible with traffic laws - I think in that case, the same body can both institute traffic cameras and reduce the fines charged for violations. They haven’t tended to, but they could. It’s harder with criminal offenses.
“getting better at solving crimes is also the key to ultimately reducing some of the cruelty of the American criminal justice system.”
Disagree. There simply isn’t the appetite for shortening sentences for serious crimes. In Georgia, only 12% of the prison population are serving sentences for drug crimes. Most of these people were either trafficking significant quantities or got caught dealing multiple times. Even in a high incarceration state like Georgia, significantly reducing the prison population means freeing either sex or violent offenders. No one wants to do this.
I think there is a very strong case for reducing the penalty for a rape conviction. Rape is not uncommon— about half of the women I know well claim to have been raped. Almost all of us have a rapist on our block. If you live in a mid-rise apartment, there is probably a rapist in your building. Yet only 1 to 2% of rapists go to prison, mainly because prosecutors are very reluctant to prosecute rape when the woman voluntarily entered a man’s residence.
On the other hand, men are reasonably afraid of false accusations. Most sexual relationships end acrimoniously and plenty of women want to get money from or tarnish their reputations of their ex’s. I think that most rape allegations are truthful but a significant minority are not. Accordingly, as a juror, I would be very reluctant to convict a man in a “he said/she said” case without strong corroborating evidence.
On the other hand, if I knew a man had been accused by three different, unacquainted women, I would convict. Georgia, like many states, allows the state to prove “similar transactions” in criminal trials and juries are far likelier to convict in such cases. However, similar transactions can’t be proven unless the prosecution knows about them. A booking record would be really helpful. Making a first rape conviction lower stakes would make prosecutors less embarrassed to lose such cases. It would make jurors more likely to convict when guilt less than certain. Critically, it would create booking records to identify serial rapists. And yet, no politician will touch this idea because voters don’t want to be “soft on rape” even when the median penalty for rape is currently zero days in jail.
I think the hope is that, just as criminal justice reform got more popular as crime dropped, it will also get more popular as people are catching criminals more.
If we cleared 2x as many murders, and the murder rate therefore dropped(since punishment got more certain), people might be more willing to lower the sentences(hopefully).
The tenuous consensus for criminal justice reform has never extended far beyond “victimless crimes.”. People hear about the (rare) cases where someone gets rung up for a couple grams of cocaine and want that to stop. It rarely extends to cases with a victim crying for blood.
Life in prison with the possibility of parole after 30 years seems about right for murder.
It’s second tier crimes— rape, armed robbery, aggravated child molestation, where there might be room for shorter sentences. Only 10% of Georgia prisoners are murderers, you could put a big dent in the prison population by parolling sex offenders when they hit late middle age, at which point recidivism risk is much smaller
All degrees of murder? What about extenuating circumstances? How likely is the person to do it again? If the victim was constantly stalking/harassing/verbally abusing the killer?
On the other extreme, "cold-blooded killer" situation, that sentence seems more reasonable.
Hmm, the U.K seems to give parole after... 15/30 years for murder - depending on the severity (double murders suggest 30 years, some other heinous single murders - but typical 15 years), but a "life sentence" beyond that (so that crimes after release can send you right back to prison). If people are generally happy with the U.K.'s prison terms (with their lower murder rates) then perhaps those are good targets?
Lot of mixed feelings about this topic. I just hate the idea that we would lock someone up at age 18 so that they got out of prison in 30+ years. They would miss out on the majority their productive adult life. I understand if there is no other option, but still hate needing to do it.
why not structure the prison system so that people can be productive within prison? I would have no objection to a murder getting work release after 15 years of good behavior. But they shouldn’t get to have a wife or drink or do normal fun stuff
Police and firefighters do come from the general population, but my sense is their views about many issues aren’t representative of the general population, in the sense of polling the way the country does. May be my own bias. Would be interested to see some polling.
One of my first jobs out of college I was an analyst and junior product manager. As analysts, one of my tasks was predicting our revenue. As product manager, my job was to figure out problems and fix them.
The first problem I found was that our users accounts were getting hacked. As a solution, I implemented a bunch of authentication measures (some early two factor authentication, etc). Problem solved - the measures worked well enough that would be hackers went off to some other soft target. Hacked accounts went to 0.
Unfortunately, in my other job I realized that at the same time we started missing revenue projections. The new authentication measures materially reduced signups, etc so the net effect of the changes I made as product manager was negative.
The conclusion to me was that when something seems to you like a maximization or minimization problem, you're probably just missing a dimension of the problem. The optimum number of hacked accounts isn't in fact 0. Pissing off people with security measures does in fact have a cost. With a given level of technology, there's an optimum security level.
It seems really hard for people to see both sides of the problem. You increase policing, without improving the technology, you piss innocent people off. The police seem to have really no idea that this is a thing. There just isn't a "revenue" function there at all. Police defunders would like to stop policing entirely, which would reduce the insult rate... but at the cost of increased crime, a cost function they mostly ignore.
For the most part, to be honest we need to acknowledge both sides of this. Either say - there's too much crime now, so I think we need more policing, and I'm ok with a bit more bullshit harassment of "suspicious looking" people. Or - there's too much bullshit harassment, and I'm ok with more crime. If you're going so say you need to improve both - there needs to be a technological improvement. I think we need to give up some privacy/use facial recognition/dna databases/surveillance so that there can be both improved policing and less harassment.
I agree with all of this till we touched on facial recognition technology.
I oppose pretty much all use of facial recognition technology by governments. (and really for businesses as well) It allows, and I would argue encourages the surveillance state.
I refuse to trade liberty for safety. We don't need the government monitoring us all the time. If they want to monitor us they should require probable cause and a warrant. All other broad based tracking schemes (including license plate readers ) are IMHO unconstitutional. And at the very least unethical.
The basic take here - that milder penalties and more thorough policing are an effective way to reduce crime, and that excessive penalties result in people (witnesses, police, prosecutors) letting petty criminals get away with crimes, which drives up crime - is one that I was taught in history class in high school in the 1980s.
The introduction of Peelian policing and the gradual removal of the "bloody code" in the Victorian era saw a dramatic drop in crime rates. Until 1823, there were something like 200 crimes that could be punished with death (often reduced to transportation to the colonies in practice); by 1861, there were only five civilian offences, of which only murder was prosecuted in any significant numbers (there were a handful of executions for treason and espionage relating to the two world wars, the last piracy execution was in 1830, the only execution for arson in a royal dockyard was in 1777). "Something like" is there because there isn't a formal list; Parliament had to pass a law saying "all crimes except these five can no longer be penalised with death" because there was no complete list available.
Not only was the death penalty abolished, many crimes saw the punishment reduced to a fine or short sentence, not long terms in prison.
At the same time, professional policing - first the Metropolitan Police in London (1829) and the copycat police in, eventually, every county in the country - was introduced, which meant a huge increase in the fraction of crimes being caught and prosecuted, and a big fall in crime rates.
The other part of the story is that prisons became professionalised and much less savage; Elizabeth Fry was the person credited with this in my high school; how true that really is, I don't know.
Now, that's the "high school history" version of this bit of criminology, how true it actually is compared to reality, I don't know. But it does show that this dates back well over a century.
I, for one, welcome Matty's slow migration towards normie old-school conservative ideas (with a technocratic neoliberal twist). Perhaps, as in days of old with the original neocons (Irvin Kristol and crew), the saviors of the right will be liberals.
Matt writes: “Biden vetted her for the Vice Presidential nomination but decided to go in a different, safer direction.”
Maybe it felt that way at the time, but I would much rather have Val Demings as my next Democratic presidential candidate than Kamala Harris.
The problem is Matt is still a big fan of fighting white collar crime like most American progressives but yet all these other countries with higher homicide clearance rates are very soft on white collar crime. So while in theory it should be able to fight blue collar homicide and white collar financial offenses at the same time in practice countries have to choose one or the other. Most of the rest of the world opts for fighting homicide above white collar financial crime.
This doesn't add up to me. Resources and funding are not so scarce that we can't fund the IRS and the FBI. It's in no way one or the other. Where are most of these other countries? Europe and Asia? They seem to have lower levels of violent crime for all kinds of reasons and the way they police violence is only part of it.
Likewise - Latin America has very high levels of violence, but I'd say they also have high levels of corruption and white collar crime. What countries are hard on white collar crime but easy on violence?
The US is hard on white collar crime and easy on violence. Most of Europe like Switzerland, Germany, etc along with Canada are hard on violence and easy on white collar crime;
BTW, in my personal opinion Jesse Eisinger knows very little about the criminal justice system outside of the US.
Lots of evidence others are much softer on white collar. Switzerland and Marc Rich, Germany and Dieselgate, multiple European countries vis a vis sanctions busting and money laundering, Britain and the Saudi Al-yamana bribery scandal, Alstom in France paying bribes all over the place, Canada and Conrad Black. Not quite white collar but a symbol of being soft on crime too is France and Roman Polanski.
CSI notwithstanding, police mostly solve crimes by talking to people. That requires the police and the criminal justice system generally to have credibility as a legitimate source of justice, in the community that knows about the murder. Non fatal shooting victims know exactly who shot them. They’re just not about to tell the fucking pigs about it.
Not relevant at all. Pure cost/benefit analysis, which Matt likes to flaunt. If we want to expand life expectancy, I’d suggest vaccine mandates, but a large segment of the population, maybe a majority, wants to do what it wants to do, including OD’ing on heroin, even if it makes us look really bad on rich country life expectancy tables. Read Columbia professor Carl Hart on how heroin has helped him achieve his ‘work-life’ balance. I’m sure yours involves yoga, and I’d be the last to suggest we lock you up for pursuing your bliss.
Wow. I had not heard of Columbia prof Carl Hart but apparently he really does use heroin to relax. Probably worth a look for the curious:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Hart
Your contrarian view isn't that murder is wrong and murders should be caught. Your contrarian view is that it is possible to both increase funding for police and make our criminal justice system more humane. Most people think there is just a tradeoff between lower crime vs being less harsh to criminals.
Baffles me why anyone would argue with this.
It feels like Dems have decided to not give anyone a rate increase while taking away a credit for parents between$200k-$400k breaking a campaign promise. I think their strategy is to pretend that the crowd is actually chanting ‘Let’s go!’
I'm puzzled that you think that "murder is wrong" is a contrarian take. I know that you place high value on being contrarian, but I believe you will find common ground with most of humanity on that position. You had some very sensible things to say from a contrarian position about the Defund the Police movement. Police funding and training regimes are in need of a major overhaul. For instance, the practice of civil forfeiture creates some truly malignant incentives for police agencies. The heavy dependence on traffic and parking enforcement for municipal revenues also creates perverted incentives. Police training needs to emphasize de-escalation skills not use of force. It would also be helpful to have a different mix of professions involved resolving some situations which today almost exclusively feature the police, e.g. mental health crises. Finally, screening out racists from police training intakes is imperative.
"The people who murder should be caught and punished" is, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, what's intended to be the "contrarian take" there. Contrarian, in the sense that if you followed a somewhat popular Internet policy and completely abolished policing, there would be no mechanism to apprehend and imprison murderers.
"the old paradigm where you forget about crime and just focus on reform is dead."
That's good. No such paradigm should ever have existed if it did
Capturing more criminals IS policing reform. [It's not ALL of policing reform, of course: we also want to reduce shooting and other abuse of authority.] My guess s that police already put a reasonable maybe even unreasonable amount of resources in investigating and clearing (and thereby deter) crimes against high-income people. [My part of Washington DC probably IS a lot safer that were some of my cowering, gun toting FB friends who worry about home invasions live.] Where the MPD fails is in protecting life and property in low income neighborhood where more racial and ethnic minorities live. Where is the justice in that?
My assumption is that police in DC are just responding to incentives like any other group of people. If they're clearing less crime in low income neighborhoods, how would you restructure incentives to reverse that?
At the end of the day the police chief is appointed by the mayor of DC and the police are enforcing local laws passed by the representatives who were elected by the voters (although I'm pretty unclear of what the equivalent of state laws are in DC). So there's not really any Republicans to blame in that situation. And the police are hired from the local area, probably as often from the low income neighborhoods as from the high income ones.
It may be more difficult to clear such crimes and also involve more risk for the department
I'm not blaming Republicans or anyone else. I do not know HOW to restructure the incentives. That's the chief of Police's job. And the Mayor and Council to provide the resources.
Fwiw I didn't mean to imply you were personally blaming Republicans. It's just a common complaint in the national conversation so it felt worthwhile to reference. Sorry if it seemed that's what I meant. I don't know how to restructure the incentives either. But what I seem to read most of the time (again, not from you in your comment) is that the people to blame are simply "whoever it is the person writing the comment doesn't like, which is usually the police". It's a sad state of affairs and I wish I was more optimistic.
I think the reason Demings isn't really a "rising star" - and why she's putting it on the line in a tough-to-win race next year - is that she'll be turning 65 in March. Its now or never for her.
She's got a great bio and hopefully she's a strong campaigner as well. The obvious countertactic from the Republicans is to find some Orlando police officers who were disgruntled with her (there will inevitably be some) and create a Swift Boat-style montage ad where they all say, one after another, that she "betrayed law enforcement" for this or that reason. (If I recall correctly, in the Swift Boat ad half the guys didn't even serve under Kerry! They were just right-wingers who happened to have served somewhere in Vietnam.) So she'll have to be ready for that: her bio alone won't be enough, and she'll have to lean *hard* into pro-police messaging.
It seems like the obvious countertactic from the Republicans will be that Florida is R+5, 2022 will already skew GOP and Rubio is a (relatively) popular incumbent.
Demmings will have to hit a home run to win that race.
That is not a countertactic. Republicans are not just going to sit around and do nothing on campaign messaging just because they have a baseline partisan edge.
Sorry you're right that was glib. I just meant I'm not sure that they will bother Demmings' message that directly when they can just run a standard Republican campaign and probably win easily.
Two points on the shoplifting. The researchers you quote don’t say don’t use FR technology, they say there’s a non-crime values trade-off involved, so legislators should make that call. If the value weren’t privacy (which you personally aren’t very interested in), you’d normally agree with that. Second, as various people have pointed out over on Twitter, as things stand in our criminal justice system, mere contact (much less a conviction) has significant repercussions regardless of the notional penalty; it’s not clear that we can “make the punishment [adequately] lighter.”
And point one exactly. I was surprised MY seems to have misread their point. The point is that the severity of the crime needs to be balanced with the the intrusiveness of the surveillance. Not that FR technology shouldn't be used for fear of punishing minor offenses.
I don't think FR should be used even murder. FR is too intrusive. I'll take traditional detective work over the surveillance state.
Point two exactly. And the fragmentation of criminal justice institutions means that “just make the consequences lighter” is not a lever anyone has available to them; Matt’s policy preference here might make sense in the UK but from a purely harms reduction standpoint almost certainly doesn’t make sense in the US.
I do think it’s possible with traffic laws - I think in that case, the same body can both institute traffic cameras and reduce the fines charged for violations. They haven’t tended to, but they could. It’s harder with criminal offenses.
Completely unrelated. This book you recommended is awesome. All Systems Red
“getting better at solving crimes is also the key to ultimately reducing some of the cruelty of the American criminal justice system.”
Disagree. There simply isn’t the appetite for shortening sentences for serious crimes. In Georgia, only 12% of the prison population are serving sentences for drug crimes. Most of these people were either trafficking significant quantities or got caught dealing multiple times. Even in a high incarceration state like Georgia, significantly reducing the prison population means freeing either sex or violent offenders. No one wants to do this.
I think there is a very strong case for reducing the penalty for a rape conviction. Rape is not uncommon— about half of the women I know well claim to have been raped. Almost all of us have a rapist on our block. If you live in a mid-rise apartment, there is probably a rapist in your building. Yet only 1 to 2% of rapists go to prison, mainly because prosecutors are very reluctant to prosecute rape when the woman voluntarily entered a man’s residence.
On the other hand, men are reasonably afraid of false accusations. Most sexual relationships end acrimoniously and plenty of women want to get money from or tarnish their reputations of their ex’s. I think that most rape allegations are truthful but a significant minority are not. Accordingly, as a juror, I would be very reluctant to convict a man in a “he said/she said” case without strong corroborating evidence.
On the other hand, if I knew a man had been accused by three different, unacquainted women, I would convict. Georgia, like many states, allows the state to prove “similar transactions” in criminal trials and juries are far likelier to convict in such cases. However, similar transactions can’t be proven unless the prosecution knows about them. A booking record would be really helpful. Making a first rape conviction lower stakes would make prosecutors less embarrassed to lose such cases. It would make jurors more likely to convict when guilt less than certain. Critically, it would create booking records to identify serial rapists. And yet, no politician will touch this idea because voters don’t want to be “soft on rape” even when the median penalty for rape is currently zero days in jail.
I think the hope is that, just as criminal justice reform got more popular as crime dropped, it will also get more popular as people are catching criminals more.
If we cleared 2x as many murders, and the murder rate therefore dropped(since punishment got more certain), people might be more willing to lower the sentences(hopefully).
The tenuous consensus for criminal justice reform has never extended far beyond “victimless crimes.”. People hear about the (rare) cases where someone gets rung up for a couple grams of cocaine and want that to stop. It rarely extends to cases with a victim crying for blood.
Life in prison with the possibility of parole after 30 years seems about right for murder.
It’s second tier crimes— rape, armed robbery, aggravated child molestation, where there might be room for shorter sentences. Only 10% of Georgia prisoners are murderers, you could put a big dent in the prison population by parolling sex offenders when they hit late middle age, at which point recidivism risk is much smaller
All degrees of murder? What about extenuating circumstances? How likely is the person to do it again? If the victim was constantly stalking/harassing/verbally abusing the killer?
On the other extreme, "cold-blooded killer" situation, that sentence seems more reasonable.
Hmm, the U.K seems to give parole after... 15/30 years for murder - depending on the severity (double murders suggest 30 years, some other heinous single murders - but typical 15 years), but a "life sentence" beyond that (so that crimes after release can send you right back to prison). If people are generally happy with the U.K.'s prison terms (with their lower murder rates) then perhaps those are good targets?
otoh, if someone goes down for 15 years at 18, yet get out at 33 and still have a lot of testosterone left
Lot of mixed feelings about this topic. I just hate the idea that we would lock someone up at age 18 so that they got out of prison in 30+ years. They would miss out on the majority their productive adult life. I understand if there is no other option, but still hate needing to do it.
That is sad but if they murdered someone they've taken away quite a bit more than 30 years from the victim.
why not structure the prison system so that people can be productive within prison? I would have no objection to a murder getting work release after 15 years of good behavior. But they shouldn’t get to have a wife or drink or do normal fun stuff