Chicago gave hundreds of high-risk kids a job; violent crime arrests plummeted | Hacker News Reader

Chicago gave hundreds of high-risk kids a job; violent crime arrests plummeted

washingtonpost.com

53 pointstheoutlander10 comments

Poverty = recruiting base for violent organizations

Poor state = lack of security (under-funded police or over-burdened courts for example)

Prohibition = creates market incentives for violence and coercion

These reasons are 100% why economic intervention should always be answer #1 to violence and crime. Not more warfare or tough justice.

I'd even take this position beyond the war on drugs and apply it to the war on terrorism as well. As we saw in Afghanistan, what good was spending trillions on war when we leave them with a non-existent economy or infrastructure? The only massive industry there is now opium and funds are going straight to the adversary.

Same with the American drug war. Thousands of impoverished kids with their fathers dead or in jail on drug charges, no long-term career possibilities except an extremely accessible job market built on violence.

I'm not promoting pacifism, security is essential. But social/market liberalism, combined with creating economic support infrastructure, and investing in a strong legal systems against corruption (so it doesnt end up like Africa).

The only way practical justification for more war/justice is via some emotional gratification of getting 'revenge' on some unsavory class of people in society by the controlling class. Because how could the goal really be to minimize or stop the problem when the failures of that strategy are so obvious to anyone who spends a moment critically analyzing the history of it?

Everything, with the exception of pacifisim, you say is logical and rational, however failure of the revenge/"justice" strategy is either by design or emergent from stakeholder conflicts of interests.

Why not promote pacifism? Existential security of the US is guaranteed by military supremacy, average daily life security of the US citizen in comparison with other western countries is quite low.[0]

I think that the main problem of the US society's approach to punishment/justice/war is rooted in deontological ethics, which stems from high religiosity and "american values" propaganda.

Adopting a more consequentialist ethics approach would help to switch social consensus from punishment to rehabilitation, from doing what is "right"(definition that is coopted by politicians and media) to doing what is useful.

One can only dream. I believe that AI originated societal change is more probable than massive perception shift, though.

[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics

We don't need social perception shift, they just need to do it. We have seen they do many things that the public disagrees with (eg. NSA Spying, Iraq war, etc) they might as well do something good.

Yep, pretty much all of this is well known c100 years. Part of what made social welfare popular across europe. Whenever the UK forgets that, crime and riots go back up. Crime is caused by poverity and inequality. Countries that push back against inequality and poverity have crime reductions.

As if people that do have something to lose, try to not break the laws too much or too obvious.

As long as you have poor, horny and young male population you will always have high crime and organized crime (and some terrorists lately) will have no lack of recruits.

If high risk, high reward life of crime is the only shot at social status - the kids will take it.

Very much agree - especially on prohibition.

Somewhat related to this idea that improved economy is a solution to violence - the trade economy is what has stopped most wars as well.

I really wish people would look at jobs programs, education programs, mental health care and similar public welfare efforts as an investment in making society better. We are all better off in the long term with less crime and unemployment.

Every person committing crimes and going to prison, or unemployed or employed in criminal activity is a person who could be not only doing less harm through crime to their community, but also, with proper support, meaningfully contributing to GDP.

The real important thing here is the ease at which a significant impact can be made to change people's behavior towards the better with a minimal (literally minimum wage) investment. Criminality is not an inherent trait, at least not for the majority of individuals. It's a product of environmental factors. And the effect increased after the work was over.

The potential increase in property values from reduced crime alone are interesting.

The Red Hook Initiative has a few interesting projects in their neighborhood in Brooklyn. I have casually followed them since Sandy and am very impressed.

One project was to setup a mesh wifi network and they made a 'digital stewards' program so the kids and young adults in the neighborhood could learn how to maintain and troubleshoot the hardware and software.

The program seems to have legs

http://rhidigitalstewards.wordpress.com/who-we-are/

So maybe preserving jobs, along the lines advocated by US populists for the last 200 years, isn't quite as idiotic a social policy it has been made out to be by the mainstream left, neo-conservative right and libertarians?

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