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The Brits very conclusively disproved this concept.
Also it’s absolutely not prevailing in America. Especially in a European sense.
But even when you push to a good direction, it can be misleading. Like Portugal legalised hard drug usage, but they slashed funds of organisations helping to drug addicts. Of course, you will have a problem after a while (and they have now), even when decriminalisation is a good step. But politicians can pretend that that’s the “prevailing view”, while they just make some pretexts to point their finger to the “prevailing view”.
The poverty is not the cause, it is the symptom of the system’s rot. Especially when you compare other countries and societies that are poorer, but have far fewer of those problems and less crime. Drug addiction is not cheap.
The irony is that your very perspective is the very kind of mentality that has led to the circumstances where we can’t do anything about it even if we wanted to, while the powerful and rich simply do a cost benefit analysis of it because of that and conclude it is easier to, e.g., import replacements for the humans that have been destroyed by drugs and mental illness, which then also drives down the wages/salaries, and drives up the costs of living and drives up the profits of the rich you blame. It’s a kind of “the blind men and an elephant” problem. You keep scratching at the scabs of your self-inflicted cuts, but they don’t seem to be healing.
It really always astonished me that even here, in a community of people in a domain where logic is necessary there is still this stranglehold of irrational proto-religious, emotion based belief and dogma.
Wanting an increase in carceral solutions despite the weight of evidence against their effectiveness is exactly the "irrational proto-religious, emotion based belief and dogma" you're railing against. It doesn't feel fair to a certain worldview to allocate resources in this way. But you need to get over that, because it is what works.
That’s pretty meaningless. Distribution what matters. For example https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...
The cycle continues because we can't learn a lesson that sticks for more than a generation, and the next generation thinks it'll be better this time because they care more than their parents did.
This just doesn't work. A high-trust society cannot be built by force.
> I am fatigued of the suicidal and deleterious empathy of those in charge who refuse to take second-order effects into account.
The irony here is palpable. An increasingly desperate poverty class with no hope of social mobility has many second-order effects, and none of them can be policed out of existence.
Imo we're kinda in the worse quadrant of whats possible.
You can either have high visibility/force of prevention efforts or low. And you can have high actual rates of crime or low.
Imo we currently have low actual rates of crime (you see people saying oh its rampant in California or whatever but im not there and can't make an accurate assessment of it over the internet) and highly visible (damn near pervasive) efforts at preventing crime in almost every corner of our lives. "please don't abuse our staff" "cctv in operation", facial recognition, constant assumptions that you are a threat. If I didn't know better its almost like they "want" people to be criminals -- it seems like according to some other threads there are at least some people whose jobs it would make easier
A major part of the problem, in my estimation, is that a lot of people don't actually perceive crime as crime but instead perceive divergence from their expected social hierarchies as crime. This is how you get people saying that crime in DC is high because they saw a person that looked homeless sitting on the metro. Although sitting on the metro is legal, a poor person doesn't "belong" there so this is seen as evidence of crime.
A punitive dictatorship or police state is not a high-trust society, even though laws may be strictly enforced. Likewise, in a high-trust society, behaviour is expected to be good and moral, even where not mandated by law.
It does. Generations. We should get started.
Just to be clear, I don't think policing is futile or unethical or anything. But it is symptom control and cannot improve your society. Leaning into policing as a panacea inevitably results in worse outcomes for everybody, police included.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_G...
Once you've removed the dredges of society (by force), all of the good, law-abiding citizens have better lives.
To badly quote Mead, "It's the only thing that ever has". If the incentives are such that defecting becomes less attractive, defection will decrease.
But that isn't a high-trust society. In fact a high trust society requires minimal formal policing by definition (and a _lot_ of informal policing by parents, families, friends, and communities).
High-trust societies aren't without their problems, too, as trust is regularly abused.
Also, it’s not clear me if you really meant that enforcing property laws inevitably worsens outcomes for those who would otherwise have been victims, or if you mean that the now-much-smaller pool of victims have a worse time with effective enforcement. I’d argue that both are false, but the latter at least seems arguable.
Yes, well, I think you'll find this is how every high-trust society to date has ended up. Trust is abused, usually by the in-group rather than strangers. Abuse of power by politicians, the clergy, authorities like police, etc has largely lead to the collapse of trust across the West.
It's part of the inevitable cyclical nature of social change.
> Also, it’s not clear me if you really meant that enforcing property laws inevitably worsens outcomes for those who would otherwise have been victims, or if you mean that the now-much-smaller pool of victims have a worse time with effective enforcement.
Yes, increasing enforcement without structurally addressing the underlying issues - starting with poverty and wealth inequality - only ever leads to a criminal underclass, more poverty, more crime, and a worse society for everybody, criminals and victims alike.
It doesn't create fewer victims, it creates more (and I'm not being mealy-mouthed and counting the criminals as victims).
There is no way to police yourself into a better society.
You do understand that an overwhelming majority of crime and overall anti social behavior is done by a tiny percentage of people. Remove those people and you spare the rest of us.
For instance, the number of prisoners that have had 15 or more prior arrests is over 26%.
You can just have a 15 strikes and you're out policy and make a huge impact. Once these bad actors are out of society, high trust can be built. Stop letting a tiny percentage of people terrorize the rest of us.
It's not about poverty and ironically the biggest victims of this criminal behavior are poor people. Poor innocent people deal w theft, getting hassled and other consequences of criminal behavior at a much higher rate. It's not compassionate to let them suffer.
https://mleverything.substack.com/p/acceptance-of-crime-is-a...
Are you including all the bosses committing wage theft in this? Or are we only looking at a particular kind of crime?
What I mean is that it doesn't work. Your proposal only increases crime, only deepens poverty, only worsens society.
> You do understand that an overwhelming majority of crime and overall anti social behavior is done by a tiny percentage of people. Remove those people and you spare the rest of us.
And yet, this policy has never worked. Three-stikes laws never work. Increased policing and more comprehensive criminal legislation never works. As long as the circumstances that caused the criminality persist, the problems returns ever more entrenched.
> It's not about poverty and ironically the biggest victims of this criminal behavior are poor people. Poor innocent people deal w theft, getting hassled and other consequences of criminal behavior at a much higher rate. It's not compassionate to let them suffer.
You are correct that the poorest suffer the most. As a society, we should aim to eradicate the poverty. Anything short of that is symptom control.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
But in fact both sides want to improve their societal outcomes and the policing/criminal policies that they support are by-and-large attempts to do that - improve society.
I'm neither left- nor right-wing in the US sense, but it is clear from examples around the world that high-trust societies emerge from the ground up and require strong family units, strong local communities, and strong engagement in larger politics.
While you do need police, you can't build communities by policing them. It's never worked anywhere.
For instance, you can look at two countries and if one country has a higher prison population, that country over polices because every country and its people should have the same criminality level because all cultures and people are identical.
I remember feeling great shame that the US had such a high imprisonment rate. This led to a big decrease in state prison population and things like cashless bail and letting people go to basically like the stats. We need to get back to basics and remove people that are destructive and stop overanalyzing things
Do you know what that thing might be, and how to fix it?
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
But don't worry, I'm sure they stole that Milwaukee drill set to eat it, and only shoplift the bare necessities.
>criminals
Nice bit of dehumanizing language there.
Your word choice isn't neutral; it leaks information about you.
The fact that you’re unable to at least sympathize is pretty pathetic.