Do we really need to punish people with prison for non violent crimes?
We might as well call in the Criminal Punishment System, or the Government's Justice System, as it doesn't engender my views of justice, and nor should it for you.
We might as well call in the Criminal Punishment System, or the Government's Justice System, as it doesn't engender my views of justice, and nor should it for you.
No, and when it comes to white people in the suburbs we largely don't do that (except serious financial crimes).
When it comes to the inner city and gang activity, that's not so clear cut. What are you going to do, issue monetary fines?
In a suburb, probably not. In a city, I'd bet it's statistically likely that a tagger has a gang affiliation.
> Living in a city isn't a crime and shouldn't make result in you being treated differently than anywhere else.
Policing strategies must take into account the realities of living in cities versus living in suburbs. At the end of the day, nobody wants to go back to the 1970's where New York or Chicago were dangerous places (which was a major cause of the suburban exodus to begin with). Just because you live in a city doesn't mean you should live in fear of getting mugged, raped, etc.
When I lived in Chicago, there were flashmob attacks in my neighborhood: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/06/chicago-flash-mobs-.... Shit like that just doesn't happen in the suburbs, and requires commensurate police response.
There are laws on the books for tagging and laws on the books for gang affiliation. Specifically, laws indicate what can and can not be legally done by an individual or group. They specifically do not talk about the statistical likelihood that since an individual is alleged to have done X they likely also did Y and so we can prosecute for Y.
One of the neat things about the law is that we are not supposed to apply laws based on the facts and not our superstitions of the types of associations we attribute to a person who looks a certain way or who lives in a certain place.
Similarly, police don't get to do whatever they want to protect an arbitrary group of citizens from another arbitrary group of citizens.
Legislatures don't get to decide that certain citizens have more rights, or more claim on the justice system, than other citizens, for any reason at all.
One of the great things about America is that over time, we get closer to achieving a usable reference implementation of a usable system of justice.
And I'm not arguing for laissez-faire, but simply for justice, which should be the same for everyone.
Unless it's a serious serious financial crime in which case they get to remain the CEO of large financial institutions with bailouts and increased bonuses!
What are you going to do, prosecute black/brown teenagers with extreme prejudice while giving white teenagers a ride home and a stern talking to? And then wonder why the statistics wind up how they are, why so many black kids don't have a father in the house?
If more policy-makers had to deal with this situation in their neighborhoods, seeing their nephews get locked up with hardened criminals, the situation would change. They don't, so it doesn't, and young black men turn into statistics.
Especially those without guidance and mentoring. If we took a fraction of the funds used to deal with their crimes and spent it on proactive engagement we'd all be better off.
For example, programs like Midnight Basketball[1] should flourish throughout the land
Yes. The difference is that in the inner city, they're idiots without fathers, without authority figures, living in an environment where that power vacuum is replaced by gangs. Teenage idiocy amounts to a qualitatively different threat under those conditions. It's unfortunate that black or Hispanic kids are far more likely to find themselves in that situation than white kids, but does that mean we should treat gang-related graffiti intended to intimidate the same way we treat some dumb suburban kids playing a prank?
I'm not saying that our approach is the best one. I'm saying that there is more to the story than "zomg, the police are oppressing minorities!"
Look, I live in one of the most inner-city inner cities (Wilmington, DE). It's a place where the murder rate is comparable to Bogota, Colombia, and where there was a shooting this year on Main Street (rumor is more than one, and in one case the target was a public bus) just blocks from the central business district.[1] It's a really complicated situation. On one hand I feel bad for the kids without fathers, etc. I lament the de-facto segregation and oppression that continues to exist as a direct consequence of de jure segregation and oppression.
On the other hand, this shit isn't all theoretical and academic, and life isn't all about idealism. I have a wife and a kid and we live here and sometimes walk home from work late at night, and I'm not going to complain if the police crack some heads in the process of keeping the gang violence to a low simmer. I think this makes me less morally culpable than the other middle/upper class people, who have just abandoned the city altogether and live in homogenous enclaves in the suburbs, just driving in for work and quickly shuffling the distance from their office to the parking garage every day.
[1] Once, my dad and I were driving around trying to return a rental truck late at night and he suggested we try again in the morning because the place made him uncomfortable. This is a guy who was in Yemen in the 1990's when the civil war broke out, was in Afghanistan in the shadow of Tora Bora while the U.S. was fighting the Taliban, was in Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake...
1. The neighborhood is bad therefore everyone in it deserves to be treated harshly.
2. Look how many heavy sentences are handed out in the neighborhod. It's must be a bad one. (goto 1)
The other circular problem that exists is this:
1. People who have "done" bad things (as evidenced by heavy sentences on record) are probably going to do them again.
2. We don't want to give bad people any real jobs or opportunities they are bad.
3. There aren't a lot of options or opportunities left but to do bad things. (goto 1)
> 1. The neighborhood is bad therefore everyone in it deserves to be treated harshly.
How people deserve to be treated isn't the sole consideration. It's also relevant how people must be treated in order to maintain a certain level of order.
> 2. Look how many heavy sentences are handed out in the neighborhod. It's must be a bad one. (goto 1)
Did I say anything about sentences? My evidence was murders and shootings (on a per capita basis).
> 1. People who have "done" bad things (as evidenced by heavy sentences on record) are probably going to do them again.
Yes, it's called "recidivism" and is an empirically measurable phenomenon.
> 2. We don't want to give bad people any real jobs or opportunities they are bad.
I'd be happy to pay more taxes to support those things. But people like me who have the money to pay taxes aren't going to continue to live in a city if they feel like it's unsafe for their wives to walk home from work at night. It's a sad truth of life, but if you cater too much to the concerns of the poor, you'll drive out the people with the resources to implement the programs to alleviate those problems. See, e.g., Detroit or Wilmington or Camden, etc.
To put it another way, I grew up in a lily-white upper middle class suburb surrounding by morally righteous people who believed it was better to let 10,000 guilty go free than to send one innocent person to jail. That was easy to believe in a town where political assassination was more likely than gang-related crossfire.
The majority of people in Wilmington are hard-working folks who deserve to live in a safe neighborhood as much as any suburban family. They aren't involved in gangs, and steer clear of the kind of activity that might get them hassled by the police.
> But perpetuating the system through more hopelessness isn't going to work in the long term.
You know what won't help the situation? Focusing so much on the rights of the people committing crimes that you ignore the mass exodus of middle class people looking for safer surroundings. Chicago has lost 200,000 black people in the last decade, and I guarantee you they didn't leave because of police profiling. They left because the police have utterly failed to get a hold of the gang activity pervading the south side. And of course these were the kind of people you didn't want leaving: the ones that can afford to.
Just one minor detail you hear from people, young black boys/men have it drilled into them by their parents never to go walking around without ID on them, because it will make things more difficult for them if the police stop them. People's lives are full of details like that. Is that the kind of thing you're advocating other people go through so you feel safer?
One of the things that's missing in these neighborhoods is any sort of authority structure to keep a check on this sort of behavior. To a certain extent, the police have to fill that void to keep things under control.
I don't think this is even vaguely true. They left because of the property bubble raising prices, the crash shattering the black middle class, the dismantling of Chicago public schools, and having the half of the city that they occupy being utterly neglected by the administration.
Crime is bad in Chicago, but crime is down in Chicago.
>And of course these were the kind of people you didn't want leaving: the ones that can afford to.
No, it isn't. Most of the migration is people moving South, where they have family, because they can't afford to live in Chicago anymore. This city caters to upper-middle class white suburbanites and the cream of the small town Midwest to the exclusion of the rest of the population.
Moreover, the public school situation is intertwined by the security situation. There is never going to be an improvement in the quality of Chicago's schools until gang influence is removed from the school grounds. Kids can't learn in an environment where the gangs are bigger authority figures than the teachers and parents.
Other than that people started leaving the city before the latest rise in crime, and that crime is vastly
http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/Chicago-Could-See-Fewes...
down since I was growing up here?
>There is never going to be an improvement in the quality of Chicago's schools until gang influence is removed from the school grounds.
I think you're mistaking the cause for the effect. It's the horrible schools that largely create the gang problem, a gang problem that has drastically declined since the 70s and 80s, post-crack.
> It's the horrible schools that largely create the gang problem
That's utterly absurd.
I suggest your dad has some well tuned survival skills, and knew when to avoid trouble.
Same property damage, same punishment, IMO. "Justice is blind" and all that jazz...
On the other hand, this shit isn't all theoretical and academic, and life isn't all about idealism.
What is life "about" then? Do you have any principles, or is it just "let me get mine and f%#@ everybody else"?
I have a wife and a kid and we live here and sometimes walk home from work late at night, and I'm not going to complain if the police crack some heads in the process of keeping the gang violence to a low simmer.
Easy to say when it's not your head being cracked.
I think this makes me less morally culpable than the other middle/upper class people ...
I'd tell you what I think it makes you, but it would probably get me banned from HN.
Justice is a solution to a problem, not an end in itself. "Kids are marking up property as a prank" and "kids are marking up property to demarcate gang territory and intimidate people" are two different problems that are only superficially related, and warrant two different solutions.
> What is life "about" then? Do you have any principles, or is it just "let me get mine and f%#@ everybody else"?
Safer cities don't just benefit me, but the vast majority of people who live in them. I think the right of that majority to live free from insecurity and the collateral damage of gang violence is a bigger concern than the rights of individuals.
> Easy to say when it's not your head being cracked.
Sure, but that's easy to flip around too. It's easy to wax philosophical about policing methods when you're not the one getting mugged, you're not the one afraid to walk home at night, etc. It's easy to talk academically about the civil rights of flash mobbers when they beat and rob people on a different street than the one your girlfriend uses to walk home late at night.
Most people I've met who actually live in New York, Chicago, in the city proper, have a more pragmatic view of policing methods than people who would have to get in their car and drive to see a poor person.
And this is why we will probably never agree on anything. :-)
As far as I'm concerned, the rights of individuals are far more important than "the right of the majority to ..."
Well, except that is exactly what happened here. A white, presumably affluent (it sounds like he's a lawyer) guy gets arrested for a misdemeanor (graffitti), and enters the hellhole known as our legal system.
You can still issue monetary fines. Often the judge will ascertain the defendant's ability to pay, and then arrange for monthly payments to be made toward the total. Failure to pay those fines could result in a few days of jail time.
I believe this practice has been deemed unconstitutional when tested. (Since it's essentially debtor's prison.)
We probably shouldn't send people to prison for first-time trivial crimes (which this might have been) but "trivial" and "non-violent" aren't the same.
Well it does punish them. It punishes them with what many would consider torture, and again, my point is that most of these sentences are for non-violent crimes.
> it's also (theoretically) a deterrent to other potential criminals
Yes. Because people will stop smoking pot, stop being dumb drunks, and stop making non-violent mistakes, because of mandatory minimums, 3 strike laws, and horrific legal processes that threaten defendants with maximum sentences for confessions and settlements.
> a chance to rehabilitate the prisoner
Yes, sticking non-violent prisoners in with entrenched gang societies helps rehabilitate people. Also, we rehabilitate them with punishment. Great job state.
If you believe we should lock people up for non-violent crime, my statements stand.
It's a criminal punishment system that punishes not only non-violent and trivial crimes, but also meaningful dissent/experimentation that doesn't hurt anyone, with cruel and unproductive punishment. If we want to continue to "punish" people, and yet talk about "rehabilitation", then I believe there's a little bit of cognitive dissonance happening if you agree these things can coexist.