I'm sure it's a multifactorial problem, but I have a hard time seeing direct profit as being the original cause of this issue, as opposed to a parasitic growth that developed on top of it. The core issue has to be the basic voter fear and attitude that so harshly punished any politician of the 80s and 90s who was seen to be "soft on crime." Misdemeanors converted to felonies. Mandatory minimum sentences were introduced. Police got free military surplus gear and became more of a hostile occupying force than part of the community.
There's discord between the discussion in this thread and discussion any time the subject of San Francisco policing comes up. They're too soft and let crime happen. They ignore shoplifters. People are just shitting in the streets. Okay, well what do you want the police to do? It seems the options are you either kill petty shoplifters and homeless people or you send them to prison. But then the same people will complain about exploding prison populations.
Am I lacking in creativity? Because there are three options I can see:
- Create a society where even unskilled, somewhat antisocial people who went through great trauma as children do well enough that they don't turn to crime, and actually treat those who are so mentally ill that they'll be long-term homeless virtually no matter what.
- Allow some amount of non-lethal crime to happen and live with it.
- Put massive amounts of people in prison.
It seems like voters have converged on the third as their preference, not because they're being brainwashed by private prisons and corrupt corrections officer unions, but because the first option is too expensive and the second option would mean they need to see human shit and broken windows when they're walking around the city. At least prisons tend to be in the middle of the desert or swamp where it's out of sight, someone else's problem.