I agree with another commenter here, the overlap of this mindset with tweakers is large.
Crime goes down when the gap between the rich and the poor goes down.
The idea that humans only commit crime out of necessity and wouldn't do it if they could just get a 9-5 job is extremely naive.
I believe that most people are good, but others do not have good character. They are the ones who ruin things for everyone else. They even ruin things for the people who are "good but victims of bad luck." By refusing to deal harshly with the bad actors (e.g. by locking them up), we create a world where you can't really trust anyone, including those who are just down on their luck but have integrity.
The idea that you've been "force of willing" it through your whole life since infancy and are therefore solely accountable for your outcome is absurd. We know that at some level and yet still can't help taking credit for our nice things and passing judgment on others for their failings.
Is that blameworthy?
A lot of people on this site have no concept of what it is like to grow up unprivileged (they think they do, but to them that means growing up merely upper middle class as opposed to ridiculously wealthy) but as bad as it can be sometimes it has actually gotten a bit better in recent years.
There used to be an even higher concentration of ultra-libertarian "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" posters who clearly never had to do that themselves to anywhere near the extent they believed they had.
Some people here interact frequently with youth who are completely unmotivated to pull themselves up because they aren't really down. They have food, shelter, a $1200 cell phone with a $75/month data plan, an XBox, a $3k wardrobe, and free taxi service. And nobody is teaching them that all of this luxury comes at a cost.
So sometimes it is hard to see the kid in real difficulty. The kid with the $80 discarded phone on the $25/month plan. The kid with the difficulty processing math that isn't just the lazy excuse of all the other students. The kid with no internet at home. The kid trying to look after a younger sibling--not raise them, just helping them survive. The child in desperate isolation. These folks get lost in the sea of people pretending to have a hard life. And the pretenders can slip down into the reality without people noticing.
Yes. It's hard to see the bottom clearly after you've climbed some distance. And sometimes you can never see the steeper mountain face that is not the one you climbed. And its easy to get sick of listening to the belly aching. But try volunteering for an after-school club and recognize that the youth in that program are often already in a home life that gives them a life advantage. Not necessarily because of wealth (but maybe), but mostly because of culture. They have caregivers that provide a culture beyond living off of handouts. They might receive a handout, but they are going to use it as an investment to build a better future.
Some of the people on this site recognize the difference between engorging and investing. Sometimes they mistake people who don't invest as people who engorge. It's an understandable mistake.
The disconnect I see a lot between where I stand, and your average 2026 "proud Democrat" is this: They believe humans are perfectible, and therefore that the plan should be to keep transferring resources, from those who work to those who don't, until such time as we achieve full "equity" of outcomes. So if any people are poor or committing crime, it must mean we just aren't giving them enough.
I question both the wisdom of increasing the tax burden on the workers past a certain point, and whether the goal of getting every disadvantaged person to a successful life is even remotely achievable anyway.
The above is admittedly probably (?) a strawman in that I guess (?) most Democrats today would not be foolish enough to believe 100.00% equity is possible, that every last person in the country can be gotten to "great" quality of life - even with ruinous amounts of welfare expenditure. If that is a strawman, then the only actual debate here is what percentage of people is an acceptable amount to be given up on, to be left where they are, with society telling them "You'll have to do some of the work yourself before you'll get further help."
Also, importantly, it would be nice to make sure we are working with the same set of data. If one side says fine, 2% of people being quite poor is fine, then let's be honest about what the line is, how many are below it, and very importantly how numerous is the actual cohort who is staying there -- it's fine with me if we have 4% in poverty at any given time if half of them are only temporarily poor, and are using the existing resources to get their lives back on track. Even if you believe humans are perfectible, it's unreasonable to expect that no one will ever even temporarily get into a jam.
wanna bet that in a few days there will be a follow up with mugshots and short bios of the perpetrators, and each one will turn out to be a worthless fuck with a long rap sheet?
The concept of a "luxury belief" makes a lot more sense of it. Believing that thieves aren't just scumbags is like driving a Porsche, it's a way to signal to other people who've never had to struggle in their life that you're one of them.
As a gross generalization, they don't. But not because they don't understand being poor, but because there are various powerful groups that benefit from pitting the lower class against themselves.
But "poor people" aren't a monolithic group with an absolutist view on the issue. There's a nuanced understanding of low level crimes in impoverished communities. People are much more likely to be pissed at a crackhead that stole their neighbors stuff, than a mother stealing food from a chain store.
oh come on now, how can that Dickensian scenario happen in a country where even a McJob pays, per hour, more than enough to feed for a week?
"mother stealing food from a chain store" is what people far removed from poverty think poor people do.
People who resort to theft don't allocate the theft proportionally to each of their expense categories. They do it based on opportunity. If you're $50 short at the end of the month, you can't retroactively take it out of the rent check you sent at the beginning of the month.
> "mother stealing food from a chain store" is what people far removed from poverty think poor people do.
Rich neighborhoods don't lock up the baby formula.
The Internet commenters who cheer "Yeah, mama, you stick it to Grocery Chain! Feed them babies!" really want this narrative to be true, but it just isn't.
Actual poor moms with hungry babies and kids have entire government programs dedicated to help them that are easy to get, called WIC and SNAP.
SNAP and WIC are great but there are gaps (and they are getting bigger as congress has further restricted them and this administration have started dismantling them administratively)
Do you think it's more Fundamental Attribution Error [0] (not exercising empathy or an incomplete view of others' problems) or more Just World Fallacy [1] (believing the universe works a certain way)?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
If it isn't, your solution is interesting because it's already been tried. The United States has one of (maybe actually?) the highest incarceration rates on Earth. We've spent decades locking up enormous numbers of people, often for nonviolent offenses, tearing parents away from their kids, destroying employment prospects, and creating exactly the kind of instability that feeds more crime. There's people in prison serving decades for fuckin weed. Yet somehow your conclusion is that we haven't imprisoned enough people for long enough.
What jumps out is how quickly you write people off. You look at poverty, addiction, untreated mental illness, failing schools, broken communities, and a criminal justice system with a well-documented history of racial disparities, and your answer is basically: "Sounds expensive. Put them in a cage."
The really wild part is calling that the practical option. Education costs money, healthcare costs money, treatment costs money, rehabilitation costs money. But decades of policing, courts, prisons, lost productivity, broken families, and repeat incarceration are apparently the cheap, sensible alternative.
If this isn't sarcasm, you are a disgusting ghoul. There's a name for people like this that we hung in the 40s. Sorry HN, but I just can't with this shit anymore.
And the more people you incarcerate the more you normalize incarceration and it loses its power of dissuasion.
Surely it is worthwhile to encourage other ideas. We might have to experiment with a lot of ideas to find some game changers.
The people you mention are failing society, not the other way around.
Someone who’s never seen it before, who has no exposure to the cultures that produced it or the discourse around it, can be impressed by the size, but otherwise not care.
Worse, if such a person is actively hostile to the cultures that produce it, then learning that it is valuable to that culture will lead them to assign negative value to it.
Though I don't know if there are enough prisons for all those stealing catalytic converters.
Am I making an excuse for _this_ individual? No. Am I making a broader point about the sources of "crime" overall? Yes.
The lack of caution in creating the current status quo has some obvious negative outcomes that could easily be legislated around. The impetus to do this is strangely missing.
There should be something in the middle, I hope we can agree on that. We're talking about addiction and property damage here, not a homicidal psychopath.
Even murderers also get the same assumption, from the same liberal voices, that it's really due to their lack of opportunity.
> but that doesn't mean every thief...
Sure maybe, but I think a lot of the blowback that people who advocate for this more compassionate view of criminals are starting to see, is because it seems that they won't admit that any thief is an irredeemable POS, which reads as gaslighting to everyone (poor or not, even including other criminals) who has spent time around actual criminals.
By doing things like California's Prop 47, which had the very real result of making it virtually impossible for most thieves to ever go to prison (at least the ones who can do math), we've codified into law that all thieves are just nice people who apparently had some kind of "misunderstanding" about property.
So when someone has their work truck burgled or their business robbed for the 6th time, and the police won't even come because it was an "under $950" misdemeanor, they would rather see all theft dealt with harshly than keep the status quo.