Im in favor of more incarceration on the condition that we invest in prisons and criminal justice generally. No more tacit acceptance of rape/violence/drugs and, ideally, provide fast enough trials that we can eliminate or reduce the use of bail without holding people in jail for years before trial. I also don’t like the labor idea b/c it seems like it would encourage corruption without making a big dent in overall costs; labor is fine but there is plenty to do in the prison or in public works especially in rural areas where most prisons are located.
I know this trope as the "Fox Butterfield Effect", which I think James Taranto coined, after several notorious 1990s NYT pieces of Butterfield's lambasting the "paradox" of decreasing crime and increasing prison populations.
A large percentage of doctrinaire leftists seem to have a mental defect whereby they are almost suicidally drawn towards sympathizing with criminals and pursuing pro-criminal policy, almost akin to the way that certain fungi will colonize the nervous systems of spiders and cause them to engage in pro-fungi behaviors.
I'm convinced that it is mostly because of this mental defect, which seems to appear and reappear among leftists across time and space, that the left can't simply maintain a lock on electoral politics forever. Crime and disorder are things that eventually get apolitical normies animated, unlike e.g. regulation vs. deregulation, and the left proves to each generation, time and again, that it doesn't really care about stopping criminals if doing so requires actually punishing them.
Speaking of normies, I do want to quibble with the point you made here:
>To their credit, the same voters soon realized that the nice-sounding rhetoric led to disastrous outcomes,
This isn't really what happened. Boudin won with 35% of the vote under an RCV system under which the left-of-center vote was split and the hard-left vote was consolidated. Kind of like what's going on in the NYC Mayoral race at this very moment.
Also, it was in a low-turnout off-year election (2019), which tends to favor turnout of white leftist activists over comparative normies (many of them working-class and nonwhite). In some cities where Soros DAs have thrived, the Mayor and the DA are elected in different years, with much higher turnout for the Mayor. E.g. Philly. Though this wasn't the specific case for SF, but there was still a lot more energy around this race for leftist activists than for normies.
The SF recall was held at the same time as the statewide primary, and around 15% more ballots were cast. So more normies showed up.
Hence this is mostly another case of crime animating the normies, who managed to display a supermajority even in San Francisco city limits when the left made its desires regarding crime fully manifest.
Stalin ultimately tolerated about 3 people, but in this regard they weren't so different.
There's a lot of who/whom in both the Bolshevik and the contemporary leftist approach to crime. Non-political criminals aren't class enemies and often cause more problems for the kulaks than the government. It's hard to get too worked up about a murderer-rapist who came from a bad home in a bad neighborhood and was probably a victim of *racism*. But January 6 grandmas: they need to burn.
Of course we do. Works every time it’s tried. Giuliani turned NYC around in a matter of months through strict enforcement of the most trivial offenses—especially the most trivial offenses. This simple process broke the increasing cycle of “learned/increasing” criminal behavior, by interrupting such at levels when there was still time to direct such (youthful) individuals into more productive behavior. Lived there during such time.
I think you’re missing a big part of the argument that sold normie voters on reducing incarceration pre-Floyd - locking people up is expensive! My sources tell me that it cost California $133k* to lock someone up for all of 2024. Even if you believe that repeat felony shoplifters are irredeemable and should be three striked as quickly as possible, is it worth the taxpayer’s ($133k/year * 50 years) $6.5 million dollars to keep them sequestered from society for the rest of their life? Certainly it’s worthwhile to look at alternatives, from a good government / balanced budget perspective if nothing else.
*Note that this amount will likely only go up due to aging population and Baumol effects (incarceration is a labor-intensive industry with heavy union presence).
First, the US is a wealthy country that can afford to reduce crime through incarceration, just like we can afford to spend the most of any country on healthcare. And for the same reason: it makes our lives better.
Second, the state can sell the uncompensated labor of prisoners to American companies to dramatically reduce the overall cost of imprisonment. Prisons should be factories.
Selling uncompensated labor to American companies seems dangerous to average workers, as they would likely (and already do, often) choose such cheap labor from prisons over hiring law-abiding citizens for more reasonable wages, similar to complaints about mass immigration. I don't think prisoners shouldn't work, though. Perhaps keeping it to work directly related to prisons, like cooking, laundry, etc.
Really, all of these things already exist in the system, but I'm not sure to what degree, or if it differs between private/government-run prisons.
Honestly I wonder how much better it might be if prison were less of a labor camp and more of a place to try to prepare the non-lost causes to re-enter society as productive citizens when their sentence is over. Some will never be able to be rehabilitated, but I'm sure there are plenty who would benefit from more programs within the prison system that could make their chances of recidivism lower.
Combine prison labor with mass deportations and you have a positive impact on American labor, as well as a compounded reduction in crime. An added bonus is the positive effect of productive labor on the character of the incarcerated. Win, win, win.
Because the US is a rich country, turning US prisons into garment factories will generate a very small amount of income realtive to the marginal cost of incarnation.
I thought prisons did still use labor in the laundry and jobs like that, offsetting some of the labor costs of running the prison. That's probably the right way to do it. Eliminating a single salaried prison employee saves as much as replacing a LOT of Guatemalan sweatshop workers. And the logistics are also much easier.
If I wanted to reduce prison costs this way, I would start by analyzing how else prisoner labor could be employed WITHIN the prison.
The prison industry isn't going to love that though. There are local politics involved.
We certainly could afford it, the spike in incarceration in the 90s was essentially taxpayers saying that they’d be willing to pay to improve QoL through incarceration. Maybe that’s the case again today. State budgets are fungible though, and I think it’s a worthwhile question to ask if that money could be better spent elsewhere ($133k would probably get you a full-time cop anywhere except SF once you count pension and benefits, would that reduce shoplifting more than removing one recidivist criminal from the streets? Could we hire two repeat offenders to cushy state jobs as long as they keep their noses clean?).
As someone with a libertarian bent I personally have issues with compelled labor in prison. Setting morality aside though no way are you getting close to making that $133k back. Foxconn workers in China are making $3 an hour, which is probably close to what their labor is worth. Maybe a US company would be willing to invest more in automation to improve productivity and value of labor, but there are obvious downsides in making capital investments in prisons for your fancy machines to be used by criminals.
I went through a process of trying to imagine a purely privately run prison system, where "prison" includes such non-incarceration methods as ankle monitors, random telephone calls, etc. The main point was to make it entirely funded by donations, to get the politicians, the prison guard unions, and the other parasites out of the picture.
I have no doubt people would donate enough to pay for prisons. The average cost I saw was $40K/year, with that $133K California cost an outlier whose source seemed a bit dubious. You need 5 guards for every guard position for 40 hours/week, vacations, etc. 5 guards at $100K/year means $40K/prisoner is 12.5 guards per prisoner, which is 2.5 guard positions per prisoner, massive overkill. That leaves plenty for infrastructure, so I think the $40K/year is much more realistic than the bloated California figure.
A million prisoners is $40 billion a year. With 250 million adults, that comes to $160/year donations. Of course there'd be free riders, but costs would also be considerably lower without all the parasites.
If more people donate, more low-level offenders get locked up. If donations drop off, the low-level offenders get released. But "locked up" and "released" is relative. Ankle monitors are cheap and at least make it easier to track down repeat offenders, then shift them to a week in jail. If the re-offend, make it a month, then a year. Or keep the time short, and vary the accommodations from dinky but tolerable single-occupancy rooms to bunk beds and no privacy to concrete hellholes.
The point is to let the donors choose where their money goes, and make it clear to the inmates that their level of incarceration (including ankle monitors) is directly under their control. Pick fights, you go directly to a worse place. Behave for a month, you go to a nicer place. Behave long enough, you get a job, some training, some remedial education.
What I was trying to do was get prison out of the hands of vote-grubbing politicians and power-grubbing prison guard unions, and put control in the hands of the public who are their victims, with the prisoners having some real incentive to improve their behavior.
I don't claim it would be the magic beans that bring peace and civility to society. I do claim it's plausible enough for fiction, and it would be better than what we have now.
Private funding is the only way to get it out of the hands of politicians and guard unions, and the only way to give the public a say in where the funds go. I know that makes it a political fairy tale, but I can’t think of any other way to get corruption out of incarceration.
The other aspects of indeterminate sentences and variable accommodation are the only way I can think of to make prisoners aware that they have ultimate responsibility for themselves, that getting education, training, and released is entirely up to them and not sadistic guards or politicians in black robes.
I don’t think it matters much one way or the other whether we force convicts to work. It probably helps the higher-functioning ones get rehabilitated. But the important thing is they are confined to a place where they can’t victimize anyone else.
The problem most people ignore is that unless all prisoners are sentenced to life, they are going to be released at some point, and if all they have learned is how to fight and be better criminals, society hasn't gained much.
I'd much rather have indeterminate sentences, where the type of incarceration depends entirely on the prisoner's behavior. Misbehave and your accommodations get worse, immediately. Behave for a month, get better accommodations. Good enough behavior earns remedial education, job training, and other rehab efforts. Do well enough at that, get released with an ankle monitor.
Work is fine to keep prisoners occupied, but to believe they can earn enough to compensate for their confinement…not even close.
Prisoners are basically dumb, uneducated and lazy. They’ll never earn enough to justify confinement—much less compensation for the crime they were convicted of.
Your first graph suggests that it was incarceration in mental hospitals that really made the difference in the past. The prison rate remained consistent into the mid-1970s even as the murder rate spiked.
Is the problem possibly then a question of how we deal with mentally ill people than how we handle persistent but sane criminals?
Certainly a lot of public disorder issues come down to leaving severely mentally ill people on the streets to survive as best they can, or in the care of families who can’t cope.
Keep in mind the prison numbers are absolute. The fact that numbers were flat in the face of population growth meant we were incarcerating many fewer people during those years.
Prisons now double as de facto asylums for anybody crazy enough to be dysfunctional but not crazy enough to be declared incompetent at trial. The progressive movement to severely curtail involuntary commitment put a lot of very vulnerable people out on the street, some small portion of whom are dangerous.
The Left closed mental health institutions and pushed those populations onto the streets. The Left pushed defunding and neutering police and brought crime back into our cities. The Left has resisted every effort to reverse the destruction. The Left had funnelled $Billions into dealing with root causes that has solved nothing, made the problem exponentially worse and themselves rich. I'm not much interested in repeating the cycle.
I lived through enforcement working in NYC. We had the same situation in NYC and we were told for decades that we couldn't solve crime by enforcement. But then Giuliani came in, enforced the law - and voila, crime collapsed. I felt and saw the change every day. It was like the inmates ran the asylum before and then once the changes were made law abiding citizens and law enforcement were in charge.
I stupidly thought this would bring on a sea change in Democrat/Left idiotic crime policies, cuz of the the whole reality thing, ya know? But nope. They still peddle the same debunked nonsense and rarely get pushback.
Bukele recently made a speech about how pissing in the street would not be allowed anymore and preemptively addressed the claim that the government must first build enough public bathrooms by saying that it was an impossible and ridiculous demand, and that if women can refrain from public urination, so can men. This is a microcosm of the "root causes of crime" discourse.
There were periods of history where people got hanged for stealing a lamb, and that period was a period where real serious hunger, starvation was real. Sure it is clear and obvious that one could create a crime-free utopia by - in extremis - hanging 5% of the population or something like that. It is doable. That is not the question.
The question is how much cruelty and state-power are people willing to put up with.
To me, one of the main bottlenecks in the American criminal justice system is judges. They are way too lenient. We need a new generation of hanging judges, and everything else will fix itself. Trying to patch it will legislation will not fix the problem because personnel is policy. The problem is the judges. Not the role of a judge, but this specific generation of liberal judges who can't stomach punishing clearly evil people. Passing laws for minimum sentencing or whatever will have minimal effect, because the judges will either ignore it or just acquit criminals altogether. If you have bad employees who are awful at their jobs, they should be fired and replaced with good employees. The liberal judges are bad employees who are awful and being judges, defaming the very role of a judge, they are unworthy of it. They aren't real judges, and they should be fired and replaced with actual judges. Find cops who are smart enough to become lawyers, give them good education, and then give them black robes.
For the worst criminals, we can beat the crap out of them, or just put them in a large prison and force them to get along. Deport the immigrants. Cut taxes and welfare for all people convicted of major felonies.
"Putting people in jail doesn't stop crime," is obviously dumb when you're talking about impulsive/opportunistic criminal behavior. Some people have very low self control and will keep doing antisocial shit until they're stopped.
I do think there's something to it when you're talking about criminal businesses like drug dealing or gambling rings or sex trafficking. If you arrest the local dealer, someone else is in touch with his supplier before the trial date is set.
That's not to say enforcement is pointless. But to actually change things you need operations big enough to actually disrupt the market, either on the supply side, the demand side, or ideally both.
Democrats need to admit that crime in big cities continues to be a major problem and to quit allowing Trump to take control of this issue. Why not make fighting criminals a major priority of the Democratic Party and especially of Democratic mayors? Why are they always on their back foot on this issue? There is no political logic to being seen as soft on crime when most of the victims of crime are the very minorities that Democrats are supposed to champion. The single most important thing Democrats could do to save the lives of young black men would be to reinstitute the policing policy of “stop and frisk” in black neighborhoods to stop the blight of illegal guns. This would help stem the tide of murders of blacks that fill the nightly news in every major city in America. These kids would quickly get the message and quit carrying illegal guns. Young black men (15-34) are just 2% of the population and yet commit about half of the nation’s homicides. A rate an astounding 50 times higher than the average American. They are also the primary victims of these murders. We need to save their lives in spite of all the ACLU bullshit niceties.
Democrats are like moths attracted to light. They are biologically incapable of avoiding taking the 20% position in any issue when Trump takes the opposite position.
The US has a more violent, criminally inclined population than most European countries, so we need to incarcerate more people to control crime to the same extent.
Unless you believe there are a vast number of people locked up for crimes they did not commit, you already acknowledge this is true.
But isn’t that fact strong potential evidence for the “root causes” theory?
If the US has a more violent, criminally inclined population than other Western nations, we should be diligently trying to figure out why and trying to change it.
As you say, we can still lock up more persistent criminals while searching for solutions to the larger problem. But it’s not just a leftist delusion.
Sure but people who insist this is possible should be compelled to explain why the last 60 years of attempts didn't work. What new ideas are there, and why should we believe they'll be effective when they weren't in the past? At the same time, it's certainly the case that the past was both much more violent and much more harsh in its punishments, so there's obviously some truth to the idea that criminality is socially determined.
"Root causes" becomes a delusion when someone insists that they excuse the criminal for his acts (even in part), which is the next logical step in this ideology and has a long history of being implemented.
Sure. I’m all for demanding good evidence and solid proposals. I wholly agree that just offering it as an excuse for going easy on persistent criminals is no good and hasn’t worked.
On the other hand I think most “root cause” people would point out that US policy since at least 1980 has not focused at all on reducing factors like poverty. In that sense there haven’t been 60 years of attempts to solve the problem, just 60 years of leaving the root causes untouched or even making them worse—while also incarcerating fewer people.
The concept of “poverty causes/induces crime” is easily refuted when one breaks down race and poverty statistics. Likewise, one accounts for much of the difference in European countries crime rates with this statistic as well.
Additionally, how does one reduce “poverty”? Not a rhetorical question either. Poverty is a relative thing. Our poorest poor live like kings to much of the third world—especially our Black community compared to their brethren in Africa. So what do we do when people are not of sufficient intellect to prosper in a first world, technological society? Simply give them a house? Buy them a new car every period of years. Employ them in “make work” jobs and pretend they earn their keep?
We’ve been there and done that. At best a stop gap measure which we now find no longer effective, nor can continue.
Examining income and race statistics can be misleading. Poor people tend to commit more crimes when they live in high-density, impoverished areas. Low-income Black individuals and low-income White individuals are not distributed equally across different geographical locations.
Many low-income White individuals reside in neighborhoods with higher median incomes and greater opportunities compared to where low-income Black individuals live, who often reside in high-density, higher-poverty neighborhoods. Research shows that about 50 percent of the variance in crime rates between poor Black and poor White individuals can be attributed to geography. I verified this with ChatGPT which quoted Raj Chetty's work on this issue
One idea I'm very sympathetic to from John McWhorter is that something broke in our society in the 1960s, and a bunch of invisible social controls that kept things going disappeared and it's going to be really hard to get them back (he points out the levels of social disorder, especially in the African-American community currently, simply did not exist prior to that era).
Before the Merkel era opened the borders, the EU was VASTLY less "diverse" than the United States. By an order of magnitude.
And while Leftists bury the problem of culture and crime by screaming "RACIST!", the simple fact remains that some cultures commit violent crimes at far higher rates than others.
Corresponding members of groups in the US and Europe offend at similar rates.
"we should be diligently trying to figure out why and trying to change it."
Well, uh, part of the "why" includes things like "centuries of genetic pacification", and "a conservative estimate of ~200 years of ethnic cleansing", both of which don't seem to be on the Overton Buffet of potential policy options
Don’t mean to be obtuse but not sure what these two things mean.
Is it that other Western nations have undergone “centuries of genetic pacification” while the US has not?
Does the “~200 years of ethic cleansing” refer to the US extermination of the native population? If so, how does that connect to current disparities in crime rates between the US and other Western nations?
"Does the “~200 years of ethic cleansing” refer to the US extermination of the native population?"
No, it refers to the process by which Europe goes from a collection super- (kingdoms of multiple ethnicities) or sub-national (large number of states of the same ethnicities, eg the pre-confederation Germany or Italy) polities into cohesive polities largely built around a single ethnic group (which is to say, "nation-states" in the Westphalian system). Dating is from 1790s (start of the French Revolutionary Wars) to the 1990s (breakup of Yugoslavia), although there's an argument you can drag it out further to say "after 1648 (Hundred Years War) to uh ongoing" (not Europe but ironically probably European: remember way way back to all of two years when the 99% of the population of Nagorno-Karabakh got exiled in the space of a month? Pepperidge Farm remembers) .
"If so, how does that connect to current disparities in crime rates between the US and other Western nations?"
Other Western Nations are very ethnically homogenous and either a) killed all their criminally inclined individuals below an acceptable threshold (genetic pacification) or forced them other places where they could manage themselves within their own cultures (in extreme cases, places like "West Virginia" for the Borderers*).
Officially, the largest ethnic group in America is German at ~14% (although it's almost certainly actually English in the mid 20s; the 7% of "American-Americans" are almost certainly English, specifically Borderers for example). Compare with the the lowest ethnically homogenous country in Europe is last I checked Macedonia, with a paltry 44% of the country being Macedo-ers. The point here is that ethnicity (which implies with it shared common culture) covers a lot of things that, in lieu of a shared culture, has to be dealt with by [extreme Judge Dredd voice] The Law.
*as an aside, I have often thought of the fact that the ethnicities consistently performing at the bottom in the US-Blacks, Borderers and Injuns-notably got to their current state because they lost wars. Cf with the Vietnamese, who also are here because of a lost war but are performing pretty well.
One needs only to look at genetic differences among races as they pertain to IQ and inherent behavioral proclivities to explain the current criminal stat’s. Of course, such can not be spoken of in today’s “woke” society.
Ethnicity matters. Likes do better living in community with likes. (It may be possible to substitute shared values for ethnicity and get the same results) Just back from two weeks in Europe. Walked city streets at night without fear. Cities cleaner than US, though less clean than once. Generally more homogeneous.
If you only look at whites, we do have lower rates of violent crime committed using firearms. Crime is functionally a demographic question. Just as it in in modern EU with MENA being the primary source of all violent crime - just committed with knives, machetes and vehicles more often.
Your conclusion does not follow from your premise. The US locks up people for things that they would not be locked up for in Europe. As people get older they generaly become less criminal, but, if they have been locked up they (1) mix with and learn from more hardened criminals (2) find it harder to make a life for themselves that isn't based on crime when the are eventually released (the longer the sentence, the harder it is). Thus where, hypothetically, in Europe a young man might commit a minor crime and be fined and put on probabtion, learn their lesson and never commit a crime again, if that same person were to be locked up, lose their friends and family and job then eventually be let out and find it impossible to find well paying employment because of that encarceration, they might then go on to commit many more crimes (The conviction rate is very low, even in the US) thus producing the figures that you are so concerned about.
"I think prisons should be emptier."
"Oh, you're in favor of giving the underprivileged another chance"
"..."
"You're talking about second chances, right?"
I'm in favor of corporal punishment as an alternative to incarceration. Ten lashes would do more deterrence then being around other criminals.
I also think about half of all crime is because we closed the mental institutions and we just need to shove the schitzos back into them.
Im in favor of more incarceration on the condition that we invest in prisons and criminal justice generally. No more tacit acceptance of rape/violence/drugs and, ideally, provide fast enough trials that we can eliminate or reduce the use of bail without holding people in jail for years before trial. I also don’t like the labor idea b/c it seems like it would encourage corruption without making a big dent in overall costs; labor is fine but there is plenty to do in the prison or in public works especially in rural areas where most prisons are located.
I know this trope as the "Fox Butterfield Effect", which I think James Taranto coined, after several notorious 1990s NYT pieces of Butterfield's lambasting the "paradox" of decreasing crime and increasing prison populations.
A large percentage of doctrinaire leftists seem to have a mental defect whereby they are almost suicidally drawn towards sympathizing with criminals and pursuing pro-criminal policy, almost akin to the way that certain fungi will colonize the nervous systems of spiders and cause them to engage in pro-fungi behaviors.
I'm convinced that it is mostly because of this mental defect, which seems to appear and reappear among leftists across time and space, that the left can't simply maintain a lock on electoral politics forever. Crime and disorder are things that eventually get apolitical normies animated, unlike e.g. regulation vs. deregulation, and the left proves to each generation, time and again, that it doesn't really care about stopping criminals if doing so requires actually punishing them.
Speaking of normies, I do want to quibble with the point you made here:
>To their credit, the same voters soon realized that the nice-sounding rhetoric led to disastrous outcomes,
This isn't really what happened. Boudin won with 35% of the vote under an RCV system under which the left-of-center vote was split and the hard-left vote was consolidated. Kind of like what's going on in the NYC Mayoral race at this very moment.
Also, it was in a low-turnout off-year election (2019), which tends to favor turnout of white leftist activists over comparative normies (many of them working-class and nonwhite). In some cities where Soros DAs have thrived, the Mayor and the DA are elected in different years, with much higher turnout for the Mayor. E.g. Philly. Though this wasn't the specific case for SF, but there was still a lot more energy around this race for leftist activists than for normies.
The SF recall was held at the same time as the statewide primary, and around 15% more ballots were cast. So more normies showed up.
Hence this is mostly another case of crime animating the normies, who managed to display a supermajority even in San Francisco city limits when the left made its desires regarding crime fully manifest.
Do you think Stalin would have tolerated the modern American leftists?
Stalin ultimately tolerated about 3 people, but in this regard they weren't so different.
There's a lot of who/whom in both the Bolshevik and the contemporary leftist approach to crime. Non-political criminals aren't class enemies and often cause more problems for the kulaks than the government. It's hard to get too worked up about a murderer-rapist who came from a bad home in a bad neighborhood and was probably a victim of *racism*. But January 6 grandmas: they need to burn.
Right up until they stopped being useful.
Regardless of what you believe about the root causes of crime, we serve the common good by taking repeat offenders off the streets.
Of course we do. Works every time it’s tried. Giuliani turned NYC around in a matter of months through strict enforcement of the most trivial offenses—especially the most trivial offenses. This simple process broke the increasing cycle of “learned/increasing” criminal behavior, by interrupting such at levels when there was still time to direct such (youthful) individuals into more productive behavior. Lived there during such time.
I think you’re missing a big part of the argument that sold normie voters on reducing incarceration pre-Floyd - locking people up is expensive! My sources tell me that it cost California $133k* to lock someone up for all of 2024. Even if you believe that repeat felony shoplifters are irredeemable and should be three striked as quickly as possible, is it worth the taxpayer’s ($133k/year * 50 years) $6.5 million dollars to keep them sequestered from society for the rest of their life? Certainly it’s worthwhile to look at alternatives, from a good government / balanced budget perspective if nothing else.
*Note that this amount will likely only go up due to aging population and Baumol effects (incarceration is a labor-intensive industry with heavy union presence).
There are two easy rejoinders to this objection.
First, the US is a wealthy country that can afford to reduce crime through incarceration, just like we can afford to spend the most of any country on healthcare. And for the same reason: it makes our lives better.
Second, the state can sell the uncompensated labor of prisoners to American companies to dramatically reduce the overall cost of imprisonment. Prisons should be factories.
Selling uncompensated labor to American companies seems dangerous to average workers, as they would likely (and already do, often) choose such cheap labor from prisons over hiring law-abiding citizens for more reasonable wages, similar to complaints about mass immigration. I don't think prisoners shouldn't work, though. Perhaps keeping it to work directly related to prisons, like cooking, laundry, etc.
Really, all of these things already exist in the system, but I'm not sure to what degree, or if it differs between private/government-run prisons.
Honestly I wonder how much better it might be if prison were less of a labor camp and more of a place to try to prepare the non-lost causes to re-enter society as productive citizens when their sentence is over. Some will never be able to be rehabilitated, but I'm sure there are plenty who would benefit from more programs within the prison system that could make their chances of recidivism lower.
Combine prison labor with mass deportations and you have a positive impact on American labor, as well as a compounded reduction in crime. An added bonus is the positive effect of productive labor on the character of the incarcerated. Win, win, win.
Because the US is a rich country, turning US prisons into garment factories will generate a very small amount of income realtive to the marginal cost of incarnation.
Yeah, this is the real problem.
I thought prisons did still use labor in the laundry and jobs like that, offsetting some of the labor costs of running the prison. That's probably the right way to do it. Eliminating a single salaried prison employee saves as much as replacing a LOT of Guatemalan sweatshop workers. And the logistics are also much easier.
If I wanted to reduce prison costs this way, I would start by analyzing how else prisoner labor could be employed WITHIN the prison.
The prison industry isn't going to love that though. There are local politics involved.
We certainly could afford it, the spike in incarceration in the 90s was essentially taxpayers saying that they’d be willing to pay to improve QoL through incarceration. Maybe that’s the case again today. State budgets are fungible though, and I think it’s a worthwhile question to ask if that money could be better spent elsewhere ($133k would probably get you a full-time cop anywhere except SF once you count pension and benefits, would that reduce shoplifting more than removing one recidivist criminal from the streets? Could we hire two repeat offenders to cushy state jobs as long as they keep their noses clean?).
As someone with a libertarian bent I personally have issues with compelled labor in prison. Setting morality aside though no way are you getting close to making that $133k back. Foxconn workers in China are making $3 an hour, which is probably close to what their labor is worth. Maybe a US company would be willing to invest more in automation to improve productivity and value of labor, but there are obvious downsides in making capital investments in prisons for your fancy machines to be used by criminals.
I went through a process of trying to imagine a purely privately run prison system, where "prison" includes such non-incarceration methods as ankle monitors, random telephone calls, etc. The main point was to make it entirely funded by donations, to get the politicians, the prison guard unions, and the other parasites out of the picture.
I have no doubt people would donate enough to pay for prisons. The average cost I saw was $40K/year, with that $133K California cost an outlier whose source seemed a bit dubious. You need 5 guards for every guard position for 40 hours/week, vacations, etc. 5 guards at $100K/year means $40K/prisoner is 12.5 guards per prisoner, which is 2.5 guard positions per prisoner, massive overkill. That leaves plenty for infrastructure, so I think the $40K/year is much more realistic than the bloated California figure.
A million prisoners is $40 billion a year. With 250 million adults, that comes to $160/year donations. Of course there'd be free riders, but costs would also be considerably lower without all the parasites.
If more people donate, more low-level offenders get locked up. If donations drop off, the low-level offenders get released. But "locked up" and "released" is relative. Ankle monitors are cheap and at least make it easier to track down repeat offenders, then shift them to a week in jail. If the re-offend, make it a month, then a year. Or keep the time short, and vary the accommodations from dinky but tolerable single-occupancy rooms to bunk beds and no privacy to concrete hellholes.
The point is to let the donors choose where their money goes, and make it clear to the inmates that their level of incarceration (including ankle monitors) is directly under their control. Pick fights, you go directly to a worse place. Behave for a month, you go to a nicer place. Behave long enough, you get a job, some training, some remedial education.
What I was trying to do was get prison out of the hands of vote-grubbing politicians and power-grubbing prison guard unions, and put control in the hands of the public who are their victims, with the prisoners having some real incentive to improve their behavior.
I don't claim it would be the magic beans that bring peace and civility to society. I do claim it's plausible enough for fiction, and it would be better than what we have now.
I don’t know if we need it privately funded, but we could certainly be making much greater use of technology to save money, yes.
Private funding is the only way to get it out of the hands of politicians and guard unions, and the only way to give the public a say in where the funds go. I know that makes it a political fairy tale, but I can’t think of any other way to get corruption out of incarceration.
The other aspects of indeterminate sentences and variable accommodation are the only way I can think of to make prisoners aware that they have ultimate responsibility for themselves, that getting education, training, and released is entirely up to them and not sadistic guards or politicians in black robes.
So, you want convict leasing? I suggest you type those words into Google. That wasn’t the law-and-order triumph you think it is.
I don’t think it matters much one way or the other whether we force convicts to work. It probably helps the higher-functioning ones get rehabilitated. But the important thing is they are confined to a place where they can’t victimize anyone else.
The problem most people ignore is that unless all prisoners are sentenced to life, they are going to be released at some point, and if all they have learned is how to fight and be better criminals, society hasn't gained much.
I'd much rather have indeterminate sentences, where the type of incarceration depends entirely on the prisoner's behavior. Misbehave and your accommodations get worse, immediately. Behave for a month, get better accommodations. Good enough behavior earns remedial education, job training, and other rehab efforts. Do well enough at that, get released with an ankle monitor.
“ Prisons should be factories.”
Work is fine to keep prisoners occupied, but to believe they can earn enough to compensate for their confinement…not even close.
Prisoners are basically dumb, uneducated and lazy. They’ll never earn enough to justify confinement—much less compensation for the crime they were convicted of.
User was banned for this comment. Criticism is welcome, unproductive insults from strangers are not.
Your first graph suggests that it was incarceration in mental hospitals that really made the difference in the past. The prison rate remained consistent into the mid-1970s even as the murder rate spiked.
Is the problem possibly then a question of how we deal with mentally ill people than how we handle persistent but sane criminals?
Certainly a lot of public disorder issues come down to leaving severely mentally ill people on the streets to survive as best they can, or in the care of families who can’t cope.
Keep in mind the prison numbers are absolute. The fact that numbers were flat in the face of population growth meant we were incarcerating many fewer people during those years.
Prisons now double as de facto asylums for anybody crazy enough to be dysfunctional but not crazy enough to be declared incompetent at trial. The progressive movement to severely curtail involuntary commitment put a lot of very vulnerable people out on the street, some small portion of whom are dangerous.
Exactly. Maybe we should be talking more about how to handle mentally ill people specifically, not just putting more people in prison.
Seems to me swapping asylums for prisons isn’t a great move.
So, getting crime off the streets and saving lives is a bad idea?
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Please keep arguments respectful and productive.
The Left closed mental health institutions and pushed those populations onto the streets. The Left pushed defunding and neutering police and brought crime back into our cities. The Left has resisted every effort to reverse the destruction. The Left had funnelled $Billions into dealing with root causes that has solved nothing, made the problem exponentially worse and themselves rich. I'm not much interested in repeating the cycle.
I lived through enforcement working in NYC. We had the same situation in NYC and we were told for decades that we couldn't solve crime by enforcement. But then Giuliani came in, enforced the law - and voila, crime collapsed. I felt and saw the change every day. It was like the inmates ran the asylum before and then once the changes were made law abiding citizens and law enforcement were in charge.
I stupidly thought this would bring on a sea change in Democrat/Left idiotic crime policies, cuz of the the whole reality thing, ya know? But nope. They still peddle the same debunked nonsense and rarely get pushback.
Bukele recently made a speech about how pissing in the street would not be allowed anymore and preemptively addressed the claim that the government must first build enough public bathrooms by saying that it was an impossible and ridiculous demand, and that if women can refrain from public urination, so can men. This is a microcosm of the "root causes of crime" discourse.
There were periods of history where people got hanged for stealing a lamb, and that period was a period where real serious hunger, starvation was real. Sure it is clear and obvious that one could create a crime-free utopia by - in extremis - hanging 5% of the population or something like that. It is doable. That is not the question.
The question is how much cruelty and state-power are people willing to put up with.
To me, one of the main bottlenecks in the American criminal justice system is judges. They are way too lenient. We need a new generation of hanging judges, and everything else will fix itself. Trying to patch it will legislation will not fix the problem because personnel is policy. The problem is the judges. Not the role of a judge, but this specific generation of liberal judges who can't stomach punishing clearly evil people. Passing laws for minimum sentencing or whatever will have minimal effect, because the judges will either ignore it or just acquit criminals altogether. If you have bad employees who are awful at their jobs, they should be fired and replaced with good employees. The liberal judges are bad employees who are awful and being judges, defaming the very role of a judge, they are unworthy of it. They aren't real judges, and they should be fired and replaced with actual judges. Find cops who are smart enough to become lawyers, give them good education, and then give them black robes.
For the worst criminals, we can beat the crap out of them, or just put them in a large prison and force them to get along. Deport the immigrants. Cut taxes and welfare for all people convicted of major felonies.
"Putting people in jail doesn't stop crime," is obviously dumb when you're talking about impulsive/opportunistic criminal behavior. Some people have very low self control and will keep doing antisocial shit until they're stopped.
I do think there's something to it when you're talking about criminal businesses like drug dealing or gambling rings or sex trafficking. If you arrest the local dealer, someone else is in touch with his supplier before the trial date is set.
That's not to say enforcement is pointless. But to actually change things you need operations big enough to actually disrupt the market, either on the supply side, the demand side, or ideally both.
Democrats need to admit that crime in big cities continues to be a major problem and to quit allowing Trump to take control of this issue. Why not make fighting criminals a major priority of the Democratic Party and especially of Democratic mayors? Why are they always on their back foot on this issue? There is no political logic to being seen as soft on crime when most of the victims of crime are the very minorities that Democrats are supposed to champion. The single most important thing Democrats could do to save the lives of young black men would be to reinstitute the policing policy of “stop and frisk” in black neighborhoods to stop the blight of illegal guns. This would help stem the tide of murders of blacks that fill the nightly news in every major city in America. These kids would quickly get the message and quit carrying illegal guns. Young black men (15-34) are just 2% of the population and yet commit about half of the nation’s homicides. A rate an astounding 50 times higher than the average American. They are also the primary victims of these murders. We need to save their lives in spite of all the ACLU bullshit niceties.
Democrats are like moths attracted to light. They are biologically incapable of avoiding taking the 20% position in any issue when Trump takes the opposite position.
So how do you square the crime versus encarceration rates in the US versus any EU country you care to pick?
The US has a more violent, criminally inclined population than most European countries, so we need to incarcerate more people to control crime to the same extent.
Unless you believe there are a vast number of people locked up for crimes they did not commit, you already acknowledge this is true.
But isn’t that fact strong potential evidence for the “root causes” theory?
If the US has a more violent, criminally inclined population than other Western nations, we should be diligently trying to figure out why and trying to change it.
As you say, we can still lock up more persistent criminals while searching for solutions to the larger problem. But it’s not just a leftist delusion.
Sure but people who insist this is possible should be compelled to explain why the last 60 years of attempts didn't work. What new ideas are there, and why should we believe they'll be effective when they weren't in the past? At the same time, it's certainly the case that the past was both much more violent and much more harsh in its punishments, so there's obviously some truth to the idea that criminality is socially determined.
"Root causes" becomes a delusion when someone insists that they excuse the criminal for his acts (even in part), which is the next logical step in this ideology and has a long history of being implemented.
Sure. I’m all for demanding good evidence and solid proposals. I wholly agree that just offering it as an excuse for going easy on persistent criminals is no good and hasn’t worked.
On the other hand I think most “root cause” people would point out that US policy since at least 1980 has not focused at all on reducing factors like poverty. In that sense there haven’t been 60 years of attempts to solve the problem, just 60 years of leaving the root causes untouched or even making them worse—while also incarcerating fewer people.
The concept of “poverty causes/induces crime” is easily refuted when one breaks down race and poverty statistics. Likewise, one accounts for much of the difference in European countries crime rates with this statistic as well.
Additionally, how does one reduce “poverty”? Not a rhetorical question either. Poverty is a relative thing. Our poorest poor live like kings to much of the third world—especially our Black community compared to their brethren in Africa. So what do we do when people are not of sufficient intellect to prosper in a first world, technological society? Simply give them a house? Buy them a new car every period of years. Employ them in “make work” jobs and pretend they earn their keep?
We’ve been there and done that. At best a stop gap measure which we now find no longer effective, nor can continue.
Examining income and race statistics can be misleading. Poor people tend to commit more crimes when they live in high-density, impoverished areas. Low-income Black individuals and low-income White individuals are not distributed equally across different geographical locations.
Many low-income White individuals reside in neighborhoods with higher median incomes and greater opportunities compared to where low-income Black individuals live, who often reside in high-density, higher-poverty neighborhoods. Research shows that about 50 percent of the variance in crime rates between poor Black and poor White individuals can be attributed to geography. I verified this with ChatGPT which quoted Raj Chetty's work on this issue
One idea I'm very sympathetic to from John McWhorter is that something broke in our society in the 1960s, and a bunch of invisible social controls that kept things going disappeared and it's going to be really hard to get them back (he points out the levels of social disorder, especially in the African-American community currently, simply did not exist prior to that era).
He's right; policy changes destroyed the black family and community structure.
Most of the violent crime in the US is committed by blacks. That's the elephant in the room nobody wants to acknowledge.
Before the Merkel era opened the borders, the EU was VASTLY less "diverse" than the United States. By an order of magnitude.
And while Leftists bury the problem of culture and crime by screaming "RACIST!", the simple fact remains that some cultures commit violent crimes at far higher rates than others.
Corresponding members of groups in the US and Europe offend at similar rates.
"we should be diligently trying to figure out why and trying to change it."
Well, uh, part of the "why" includes things like "centuries of genetic pacification", and "a conservative estimate of ~200 years of ethnic cleansing", both of which don't seem to be on the Overton Buffet of potential policy options
Don’t mean to be obtuse but not sure what these two things mean.
Is it that other Western nations have undergone “centuries of genetic pacification” while the US has not?
Does the “~200 years of ethic cleansing” refer to the US extermination of the native population? If so, how does that connect to current disparities in crime rates between the US and other Western nations?
"Is it that other Western nations have undergone “centuries of genetic pacification” while the US has not?"
Correct
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/147470491501300114
"Does the “~200 years of ethic cleansing” refer to the US extermination of the native population?"
No, it refers to the process by which Europe goes from a collection super- (kingdoms of multiple ethnicities) or sub-national (large number of states of the same ethnicities, eg the pre-confederation Germany or Italy) polities into cohesive polities largely built around a single ethnic group (which is to say, "nation-states" in the Westphalian system). Dating is from 1790s (start of the French Revolutionary Wars) to the 1990s (breakup of Yugoslavia), although there's an argument you can drag it out further to say "after 1648 (Hundred Years War) to uh ongoing" (not Europe but ironically probably European: remember way way back to all of two years when the 99% of the population of Nagorno-Karabakh got exiled in the space of a month? Pepperidge Farm remembers) .
"If so, how does that connect to current disparities in crime rates between the US and other Western nations?"
Other Western Nations are very ethnically homogenous and either a) killed all their criminally inclined individuals below an acceptable threshold (genetic pacification) or forced them other places where they could manage themselves within their own cultures (in extreme cases, places like "West Virginia" for the Borderers*).
Officially, the largest ethnic group in America is German at ~14% (although it's almost certainly actually English in the mid 20s; the 7% of "American-Americans" are almost certainly English, specifically Borderers for example). Compare with the the lowest ethnically homogenous country in Europe is last I checked Macedonia, with a paltry 44% of the country being Macedo-ers. The point here is that ethnicity (which implies with it shared common culture) covers a lot of things that, in lieu of a shared culture, has to be dealt with by [extreme Judge Dredd voice] The Law.
*as an aside, I have often thought of the fact that the ethnicities consistently performing at the bottom in the US-Blacks, Borderers and Injuns-notably got to their current state because they lost wars. Cf with the Vietnamese, who also are here because of a lost war but are performing pretty well.
One needs only to look at genetic differences among races as they pertain to IQ and inherent behavioral proclivities to explain the current criminal stat’s. Of course, such can not be spoken of in today’s “woke” society.
Ethnicity matters. Likes do better living in community with likes. (It may be possible to substitute shared values for ethnicity and get the same results) Just back from two weeks in Europe. Walked city streets at night without fear. Cities cleaner than US, though less clean than once. Generally more homogeneous.
Is this really true. I would think if we had European gun laws, we would have lower homicide rates than Europe.
If you only look at whites, we do have lower rates of violent crime committed using firearms. Crime is functionally a demographic question. Just as it in in modern EU with MENA being the primary source of all violent crime - just committed with knives, machetes and vehicles more often.
Your conclusion does not follow from your premise. The US locks up people for things that they would not be locked up for in Europe. As people get older they generaly become less criminal, but, if they have been locked up they (1) mix with and learn from more hardened criminals (2) find it harder to make a life for themselves that isn't based on crime when the are eventually released (the longer the sentence, the harder it is). Thus where, hypothetically, in Europe a young man might commit a minor crime and be fined and put on probabtion, learn their lesson and never commit a crime again, if that same person were to be locked up, lose their friends and family and job then eventually be let out and find it impossible to find well paying employment because of that encarceration, they might then go on to commit many more crimes (The conviction rate is very low, even in the US) thus producing the figures that you are so concerned about.
I freakin love you Kitten, this article kicked major ass
🙏
Obviously. Every criminal in prison or dead is not out in society doing harm.