The US over-reliance on incarceration is lazy and cruel
obviatethestate.substack.com
obviatethestate.substack.com
The poorer we are, the more likely we have to resort to more barbaric methods of order maintenance, like execution.
Therefore, if you have a desire for a society that doesn't imprison people (or effectively psyops them into believing they're free when they're not), your primary obligation should be towards growing civilizational real wealth.
edit; wealth is not just resource wealth as the US has in abundance, but also cultural wealth, like raising children that know how to solve their problems with words instead of violence and put their shopping cart back despite any reward or punishment.
If managed counter productive individuals remain a perpetual parasitic cost on society, then it's not obvious that just executing them and being done with it isn't the greatest wealth generative action.
First off, there is no single "US prison system." There are 50+ distinct prison systems in the US (one for each state/territory, plus a federal prison system) as well as hundreds of "jail" systems which are distinct from (and run by different folks) the prison systems. And that doesn't take into account the private prisons or the immigration detention facilities.
Secondly, there's wide variety in how these disparate systems are run, funded and used. As such, it's not really useful to talk about the "US prison system" as a monolithic institution.
However, one current runs through most prison systems in the US -- cruelty and a lack of interest in rehabilitation.
What's more, those who have been incarcerated are generally discriminated against (lack of access to jobs, housing and reintegration back into their communities) by society once they've served their time.
And that's the biggest cruelty of US society against those who have been imprisoned. And it negatively affects the economic potential of those folks, as well as the economic well-being of their communities. Which may lead to recidivism.
By focusing on rehabilitation and not continuing to punish those who have been incarcerated after their release by discriminating against them in a whole host of ways.
That's not to say there aren't folks who are too dangerous to be allowed to live in society. There certainly are. But those are a tiny fraction of those who pass through the various carceral systems in the US.
We're doing it wrong and have been for a long time. We can, and should, do better.
Edit: Fixed prose.
Also, wealth isn't just in the form of money.
A culture that produces few criminals is a form of wealth that can't be captured by taxes.
Clearly there are more differences between Denmark and the US. But I don't think that only countries wealthier than the US (the likes of Quatar, the UAE or Luxembourg) can afford to handle crime in a more humane way.
The reason that it's important to point this out, is that prison labor is an element of growing civilizational real wealth and this nuance is important.
I suspect on a societal level the US justice system costs more than a system without prison labor and a focus on rehabilitation (Sweden gets mentioned frequently, but most of Western Europe qualifies). The US system self-perpetuates because of the profit it brings individuals, not because it's beneficial to society.
Just because richer societies can devote more resources doesn't mean they want to, or will.
The US GDP Per Capita for 2022 was $76,399. For Norway, $106,149. That's a significant difference, but we'd need to compare a far larger set of nations to determine correlation.
I suspect that there are thresholds of wealth where restorative justice becomes more or less viable. In an isolated and preindustrial village of 100 people, confining or killing a problematic citizen may prove more costly if they provide an essential service. For post-industrial societies, there's likely a cliff after which restorative justice is consistently less costly. IIRC, Norway spends far less per capita on criminal justice than the US.
Actually, should that be my next article? Analyzing the trends of wealth, criminality, and incarceration?
> Like all high morality
Is wrong. Being poor might make it harder to avoid certain moral failings (e.g. if you're literally starving you might be forced to beak all sorts of moral principles to avoid death), but certainly not all. Not cheating on your spouse isn't a "privilege of wealth", nor is not abusing your children, and a huge number of other morals. And even in those moral situations where wealth is a factor (at least in that its correlated with "high morals") its certainly not the only one, and I think reducing things to an income level is likely to be detrimental to your desired outcomes. (Not saying you were doing that, this is just a word of caution.)
Unfortunately, any deterrent has to by its nature be unpleasant, so if prison terms are off the table, you end up with instinctively gross and backwards-seeming things like inflicting physical violence on prisoners. That, uh, doesn't seem good either.
For the sake of brevity, at the risk of glibness: it seems like a system created with little consideration for its users, who are very different people from its designers.
As a dramatic overgeneralization of the principle, you'll have fewer thefts if every thief is forced to pay for their stolen goods than if 1% of thieves are tortured to death on live television.
It suggests that lowering expenditures on prisons, by reducing sentences, and retargeting that money toward enforcement would yield positive effects.
https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/five-things-about-deterr...
1. At a bare minimum, you have to scale the penalty with the probability of getting caught. If you can do $1500 worth of damage with only a 10% chance of being caught, the criminal has the advantage, because they can expect to do $15,000 worth of damage before being forced to pay the $1500 penalty.
2. On top of that, you need to scale up your punishment to allow for a safety margin, to avoid actively incentivizing your criminal act as long as the criminal believes they have a slight edge over your expected efficacy at enforcement.
3. On top of that, the direct damages to a victim from a crime are not the only damages that are created by criminality. Criminality undermines trust, social cohesion, and general societal good will, carrying both hard to quantify, soft costs, (how do you put a price value on the marginal effect of people feeling less secure in their protected speech) and hard costs (if we didn't have criminals, we wouldn't need a justice system, or large parts of the legal system. Those costs can be amortized over every criminal convicted).
4. Worst of all, with ideologically motivated crimes (like the one the blogger brought up), the act is propaganda in of itself, promoting not only the ideology in question, but also the concept of committing criminal acts in the name of the ideology. The shameful excuse for a man who vandalized this religious display effectively told everyone receptive to it that "This activity is okay, there are others out there that support you". There is a cost to civilization writ large, that scales based on the publicity of the crime.
Personally, I think we underestimate the damaging effect of incarceration. There are far more humane, less damaging approaches to justice that still maintain good social order. But trying to justify a hate crime as "only doing a couple thousand dollars worth of damage, thus demands only a couple thousand dollars in punishment" is over correction.
Give the guy a couple lashes and send him on his way.
The "do X damage pay X penalty" framework is a simplification for the purpose of convenience. To try calculating all the ephemerals would be tedious, provide little additional illumination, and lose the thread. It's meant to illustrate, NOT be writ into law.
The propaganda element is particularly interesting in light of the effect on mass shooters. It's been established that sensationalizing mass shooters encourages new ones, hence why some media outlets have stopped. I'd question the reach and efficacy of the propaganda, in this case.
You could surely find another person who would spend the proposed 11 days in prison to make the statement, "I also hate satanists enough to break their stuff." Hence, and as you said, we would need to fine tune the punishment to maximize deterrence while minimizing cruelty.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on the responsibility of media and society as a whole. If you can punish an offender for propagandizing criminality, as you propose, could we not also punish a news organization for broadcasting their act nationally? Purely hypothetical and ignores all the obvious reasons you can't (e.g. freedom of speech). I'd really like to understand your mental model for the "cost to civilization writ large" and how you determine responsibility.
Alternatively, a market opportunity. I ensure that $45k/y of damage is done to my friend’s property. The state, eschewing incarceration, merely makes my friend whole. A new Tesla every year for him at no cost to either of us locally. He could then likewise do the $45k to me, or if that’s too close, we could form a large enough ring of people, each of which does the $45k of damage onwards so that we get a free amount of money at no personal risk.
And, just because the religious altar cost $X to physically replace doesn't mean desecration only caused $X of damage. The reduction of the act of desecration of a symbol people care deeply about to just the replacement cost is absurd.
To state that the reason the maximum is 5 years is because the item was religious in nature, then ignore that fact when calculating the cost of the offense tells me this person is starting from a conclusion and working backwards. By this methodology, conspiracy to commit murder should get no jail time since the "cost" is $0.
I'm not saying 5 years would be fair in this instance, just that obviously this is about more than the raw monetary cost...
For the inconvenience, missed opportunity, and emotional damage, I'd look to tort law. The entire matter could be resolved through civil suit without incarceration, and I'd rather see the victim whole than the criminal suffer.
How would that work in this case? The Catholic church should sue the guy on behalf of their members?
That said, yes. Assuming the Church of Satan retains ownership, or at least responsibility for restoration, they are the injured party and owed restitution.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/12/06/u-s-publi...
just look at Oakland and see if lax on crime policies work.
The solution is obviously to allow the for-profit prisons to branch out into for-profict policing, too. /s
1. The certainty of being caught is a vastly more powerful deterrent than the punishment.
2. Sending an individual convicted of a crime to prison isn’t a very effective way to deter crime.
3. Police deter crime by increasing the perception that criminals will be caught and punished.
4. Increasing the severity of punishment does little to deter crime.
1. "Likelihood" ≠ "Certainty" - I might think there's a high chance of getting caught, but unless I'm overwhelmingly certain that I'll get busted, I'll still take a risk. This is an important distinction, because it's not as though there's a linear correlation between likelihood of getting caught and crime rate.
2. This perception can be increased in ways other than just investing in police. A city could invest in cameras and signs that say "you're on camera." They could take out advertisements showing the conviction rate for particular crimes. They could hire rehabilitated offenders to share their stories with kids. The list goes on, there are plenty of ways to spend that money that might be more effective than giving it to police departments.
> thousands have been unjustly detained without due process and dozens have died in prisons.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/el-salvador-prison-gangs-bukele-4...
Not saying El Salvador went the wrong path. Sometimes you need extreme measures to get out of extreme problems, and at least in the near-term it obviously created great results. But I would withhold judgements on the applicability to healthier states until we had a chance to observe any long-term effects.
I don't think that generalising from one example is a good basis for public policy.
> cruel treatment of murderers and violent criminals
The whole point of Bukele’s approach is that it does away with due process to lock up actual criminals faster; but it is hard to see how that wouldn’t also involve locking up more innocent people than would be locked up otherwise. It’s very easy to make any policy look good by focusing on its least sympathetic victims, but that doesn’t really address the tradeoffs in question.