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Comment by earthscienceman | Hacker News Reader

Yeah. Makes total sense. That's why the wild west was crime free, because everyone feared the retributive punishments...

People don't pull out a knife then think "wait, but I'll be punished" and put the knife away. What you are proposing feels good but in no way lines up with the reality of society in a contemporary city. If you want there to be less crime you have to treat it as the social class problem it is and find ways to get people access to other ways of living, or if they're ill (mentally or otherwise) get them care and shelter.

That, or we can continue to price people out of being healthy members of our social strata. It's clearly going great in SF

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>> We need to be way tougher on crime. Immediate life sentences without parole for murder, ending catch+release for property theft.

> If you want there to be less crime you have to treat it as the social class problem it is and find ways to get people access to other ways of living, or if they're ill (mentally or otherwise) get them care and shelter.

IMHO, you probably have to do both. There do exist people who are just antisocial, who don't have the self-control to stop themselves from committing crimes or who lack the moral framework to avoid crime if it would otherwise satisfy a goal. And even with crime was driven by "social class problems," even if you solve all those there's still the problem of transitioning from one regime to the other, and dealing with people who's habits and mindset from the old regime keep them committing crimes in the new one.

People who want to crime do tend to avoid places where the police are more aggressive with enforcement. E.g. you don't really want to do petty property crime in Bellevue Washington when more tolerant Seattle is right across the lake.

The same problem exists for "getting care and shelter" in that the problems themselves are hardly immobile, while the solutions are expected to be provided locally.

This is a very valid and important point. It also causes knock-on effects that are aggravating factors. The important subtlety in what you are stating is: People don't consider punishment when they're committing crimes but they do absolutely seem to consider the likelihood that they will be caught (hooray for the complexities of being human!).

So we end up with densely concentrated areas of crime in places that are "soft on crime". But it's very clear that the solution isn't increasing police presence in these areas, if it were that simple NYC the 80s would have been crime free. The solution is to fix the problem at its core but to do that we need to agree to cooperate on a broader scale... with something like a federal government that can enact wide policies to create incentives for these things to end. This is how it works in "crime free" japan. But we seem to have given up on federal solutions to these things ages ago.

You can definitely push the problem somewhere else with more aggressive policing, but that relies on a soft on crime area nearby or rather popular as a place to push it to.

China is "crime free" also, but the hammer hits really hard so really it is either just very well hidden, or accepted by the police informally (e.g. tea scams, red light massage parlors).

Just curious. Where are you getting your data that the wild west was crime free? (or... is this satire / sarcasm? it's hard to recognize sometimes.)

It's very clearly sarcasm. Retributive justice is not just.

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