Lunch Money Surrendered
The Council of the District of Columbia approved legislation Tuesday that would pay residents in the nation’s capital for not committing crimes.
First reported by the Associated Press, the bill penned by Democratic Council-member Kenyan McDuffie gained unanimous approval from the D.C. Council. The legislation, called the “Neighbourhood Engagement Achieves Results Amendment Act of 2016 (NEAR Act),” would establish an office to identify as many as 200 residents annually who are at risk of committing violent crimes or becoming a victim of such crimes. The individuals would be instructed to participate in life planning, trauma informed therapy, and other programmes; if they comply and do not commit crimes, the individuals would receive a stipend. The legislation was based on a Richmond, California, programme that pays individuals who participate as much as $9,000 annually.
Mr McDuffie describes his bill as “bold and innovative,” “a step in the right direction,” and “working to prevent crime by treating its root causes.”
Update, via the comments:
The experiment in Richmond, on which the above is based, involved “sifting through police records to determine the 50 [or so] residents most likely to shoot someone.” And then “approaching them and [offering] a stipend [of up to $1000 a month] to turn their lives around, and a mentor to help.” After four years of being subsidised for not being caught committing any further violent crimes, 65 of the 68 “fellows” enrolled in the programme were “still alive,” although “one had survived a shooting and three had died.” This was deemed “promising.”
The city’s murder rate did in fact fall while the programme was running, though other, more obvious factors – from a new police chief’s dramatic overhaul of policing methods to the local housing crisis and the consequent relocation of many known criminals – may have been more relevant. Comparable experiments in other cities haven’t exactly been conclusive either, with many supporters losing their initial interest and withdrawing funding, both private and public. A scheme in Pittsburgh initially coincided with an increase in the murder rate; one in Chicago has been “overshadowed by escalating homicide numbers,” and a similar project in Boston is described as “ending disastrously.”
I have not committed a crime today. Where is my money?
C’mon! If I don’t get it soon I may revert to my former lifestyle…
Apparently, the “root cause of violent crime” and underclass dysfunction is those violent and dysfunctional individuals not being handed a $9,000 stipend extracted from the law-abiding.
Crime doesn’t pay, allegedly, but the prospect of crime does.
Me, after reading this:
Bounty hunters would be cheaper.
I don’t know why you people are pissed. According to the Ten Commandments, those “Thou shalt not”s ended with “provided there’s a cash payment at the end of the month.” I know this. Charlton Heston told me.
I have been saying it for many years now the terminally stupid are in control. I wonder what restrictions are on receiving the 9,000 dollars. if no crimes are committed does every citizen in the area, at least a couple of million, will get 9,000 dollars each. idiots.
Bounty hunters would be cheaper.
The experiment in Richmond, on which the above is based, involved “sifting through police records to determine the 50 [or so] residents most likely to shoot someone.” And then “approaching them and [offering] a stipend [of up to $1000 a month] to turn their lives around, and a mentor to help.” After four years of being subsidised for not committing any further violent crimes, 65 of the 68 “fellows” enrolled in the programme were “still alive.” Although “one had survived a shooting and three had died.” This was deemed “promising.”
The city’s murder rate did in fact fall while the programme was running, though other, more obvious factors – from parallel crime-prevention programmes and a new police chief’s dramatic overhaul of policing methods to the local housing crisis and the consequent relocation of many known criminals – may have been more relevant.
Comparable experiments in other cities haven’t exactly been conclusive, with many supporters losing their initial interest and withdrawing funding, both private and public. A scheme in Pittsburgh initially coincided with an increase in the murder rate; one in Chicago has been “overshadowed by escalating homicide numbers,” and a similar project in Boston is described as “ending disastrously.”
Of course even if bribing the violent and dysfunctional were shown to work, and to work enough to justify the cost and expanding bureaucracy, there’s still the moral aspect. I.e., whether incentives of this kind are how one should deal with violent and predatory individuals, presumably on an ever-larger scale. Is it a policy that would be acceptable as commonplace, perhaps even the norm?
Who said “Kids Company”.
Now own up in the back. You haters
others who visit the charity are given cash allowances to supplement their Jobseekers’ Allowances and to prevent them from stealing or dealing drugs
would establish an office to identify as many as 200 residents annually who are at risk of committing violent crimes or becoming a victim of such crimes.
It’s a scheme to create jobs, see? As for who gets to “identify” which “residents”, that’s another one of those things that make me go hmmmm…
What would be…uh…awesome…is if this program was open to everyone. Sure, it would simply be robbing Peter to pay Paul, and the “office” established would suck up much more (though I’m sure that in DC such is just pissing in the sea), but can you imagine the howling when certain kinds of people who have no criminal record are getting a stipend of $12K a year and those kinds who do have a record don’t get squat? Of course such an expansion is in no danger of happening, but oh what fun it would be. And what if people on the margins of DC with no criminal records were to start moving in and forcing out the criminal element?
Again, of course I understand that this is absurd BS, but if it was just contained to DC, possibly funded by sales taxes, it would be funded by the sort of idiots who are running this country. And it could very well be entertaining watching them twitch. I’m slowly coming around to the idea of enjoying the decline.
I demand to paid well for every crime I have not committed, and I confess to not having committed hundreds of crimes this day. Tomorrow I will again not commit hundreds more crimes, and expect payment for each of them too.
Send me cheques, excluding a tithe allocated to David Thompson, for all the crimes he has also not committed today, and to allow him to run this crime-free web site.
We already have such a payment scheme in place: it’s called Welfare. People are being paid so that they are not out robbing houses, businesses and people to get enough money to buy food, housing, clothing, smokes, booze, prostitutes, recreational drugs and other such necessities of life for the unemployed and the unemployable.
I don’t get nearly enough credit for not being a homicidal maniac. That pisses me off!
Incidentally, when tried in Boston, the taxpayer-funded outreach staff – called “street workers” – were asked to work in the evenings in order to mingle with the known thugs and sociopaths they were expected to bribe. At which point their union protested, citing fears for workers’ safety. According to the report linked above, “workers now spend many hours in [staff] meetings,” i.e., among more civilised people.
I live in the DC area. The array of free stuff that indigents get in the District of Columbia is staggering. The parasite class in DC live better than average earners do in my home town in Pennsylvania.
I have one thing to add:
de facto, this is a benefit given for ones’ natal identity, and as to how that expresses itself in DC, to one’s politics.
if they comply and do not commit crimes, the individuals would receive a stipend.
So they only lose the stipend if they get caught. Small odds. And these known criminals are bound to be honest about it, aren’t they?
Rudyard Kipling, in an extract from a poem tweeted by Richard Dawkins recently in a different context:
How is this not a “bold and innovative” protection racket?
Yeah, I saw this earlier. I am empty of outrage at this point, but get back to me later. I may have refueled.
Prison works: it prevents crime. The longer the sentence, the better it works. Recidivism is best prevented by longer sentences. Most crime in the UK is committed by some 100, 000 – 200,000 repeat offenders: lock ’em up for as long as possible.
Prison works: it prevents crime. The longer the sentence, the better it works. Recidivism is best prevented by longer sentences. Most crime in the UK is committed by some 100, 000 – 200,000 repeat offenders: lock ’em up for as long as possible.
Highly questionable at best; completely out of phase with the purpose of justice at worst, together with being its own unique and deeply onerous injustice. To wit: how can we possibly reconcile this rightist myth with the rampant prison state, the bane of liberty?
We cannot. Rather:
Bloody noble savages, am I right?
Persons and their families and immediate communities are far more adverse to shunning and inescapable fines than a stay at the graybar. On the other hand, when, because there are practically no ethics, everybody’s an outlaw, we have our present system where might makes right and the law is a nearly complete ass.
Highly questionable at best; completely out of phase with the purpose of justice at worst
Uh…it works. It obviously works at preventing violence and theft. Such people who demonstrate an inability to behave themselves at the most primitive requirement level for social interaction should and must be removed from the general population. If you can’t do the time, don’t commit the crime. Now in regard to non-violent, non-property offenses and such, prison is probably one of the worst places to put someone. But keeping the violent criminal out of the poorest neighborhoods at least gives the younger ones a chance to grow up and be respectable, productive citizens. These innocents deserve the fruits of the justice dealt out to the violent ones more than anyone. Agree that the idea of reforming people in prison is of dubious value or probability, but secondary to the problem.
There is no such thing as justice as far as most of society is concerned. If you put people in jail for committing crime they may — note may — not return to crime once free (and perhaps even, having dabbled in crime inside prison, see no reason to give it up ever). Now it may well be that once disadvantaged people find it hard not to return to crime; I can see how that happens. But as the old adage “let the punishment fit the crime” has long since been phased out then a short sentence where a longer sentence might once have been expected gives society little protection at all.
Criminals tend to commit crime because they think they can get away with it, and the people who suffer most from this crime are the ones who can least afford to lose what little they have. In this respect society is not given ‘justice’ as such. Putting ne’er-do-wells back on the streets a matter of weeks after a crime does not reassure anyone, especially in poorer areas. I know there is the idea of the ‘gentleman thief’ who like a modern day Robin Hood merely relieves the wealthy of some of their baubles, but most crime happens in places where there is no such romantic tradition. Criminals will steal from and hurt those who are already trapped in the poorer spectrum of life.
The ‘rampant prison state’ is a cosy illusion for the hard-of-thinking, but it is an illusion because reality will always defeat the whimsical. There are people in prisons dedicated to reform, just as there are recidivists who see all reform efforts as laughable. But for the person who has been robbed or assaulted by someone who has done it again and again, then the question mark has to be on how do you deal with the ones who make life hell from those who are most vulnerable. Jail is the only answer, if only to give the more vulnerable population some relief.
It obviously works at preventing violence and theft.
A notion from which many like yourself dangle equally opaque reasoning – for the last few decades it’s been impossible to miss that rhetoric. Obviously a lot of things prevent violence and theft. Chaining people to trees prevents violence and theft.
Those assertions from the throw-away-the-key brigade of the lower-level right are nothing new. The question within the great cycle of social ebbs and flows is not if they exist – you haven’t missed them, obviously – but whether they stand to reason.
To rise above rhetoric a thing has to stand philosophical tests. Frankly, yours doesn’t, generally because that splinter of rightism hasn’t applied any such tests beyond assumption. The presuming anger is always there, but a careful analysis of the issues always goes wanting (not that the let-em-all-go-free left is any more complete; it isn’t.)
Yet somehow, legal reform is a timely topic on both sides of the political divide. Somebody’s thinking about pendulums, and that’s a good thing. Evidently it just hasn’t percolated all the way down.
Classic liberals and constitutionalists and anti-authoritarians do tend to think about things a little more philosophically, however. As did, apparently, not insignificant hunks of the Anglo past, whether in intellect, clarity, or longevity.
We’re all advised to reconsider before simply reacting.
They should pay the legislators not to commit crime.
Prison works: it prevents crime. The longer the sentence, the better it works. Recidivism is best prevented by longer sentences. Most crime in the UK is committed by some 100, 000 – 200,000 repeat offenders: lock ’em up for as long as possible.
As Theodore Dalrymple points out most criminals stop being criminals around 40, so that’s about the time to let them out. Crime is a young man’s game.
Highly questionable at best; completely out of phase with the purpose of justice at worst, together with being its own unique and deeply onerous injustice. To wit: how can we possibly reconcile this rightist myth with the rampant prison state, the bane of liberty?
Fox Butterfield, call your office.
The ‘rampant prison state’ is a cosy illusion for the hard-of-thinking, but it is an illusion because reality will always defeat the whimsical. There are people in prisons dedicated to reform, just as there are recidivists who see all reform efforts as laughable. But for the person who has been robbed or assaulted by someone who has done it again and again, then the question mark has to be on how do you deal with the ones who make life hell from those who are most vulnerable. Jail is the only answer, if only to give the more vulnerable population some relief.
Addressing the last half of that before disassembling the former, life just isn’t fair, friend. You want protection?
(And “jail is the only answer”? I’m chucking at the absurdity. You’ve just been confronted with a concrete, historical, proven, effective refutation of that ongoing myth involving an entire people. Then there’s your local traffic court. Your county sanitation department. The public library.
Please, stop making this so easy – I keep pleading for philosophical standpoints and I get back all this protectionist fear gussied up in hoorah. You wear camo with all that mental fatigue?)
Which means that the problem is really this: All such notions of this “relief” you refer to eventually show they’re not justice-centric, but a weakness demanding to not feel a certain way anymore. Yes, you want protection.
It doesn’t much work that way; at least justice doesn’t. Would you like my anecdote? I’m not going to give it to you because it’s not relevant, the monumental criminal damages against me notwithstanding. It could all happen again tomorrow. Because life just isn’t fair.
Notions about safety are a running fallacy. They’re progressive.
As for the former bit, it’s a transparent assertion – a badly worded fallacy, really – trying to paint something what it’s not: Of course the reform effort is real and of course it’s built, in no small part, on the facts and figures on incarceration. On incarceration as a industry, as a policy, as a conflict of interest, as a populist fancy turned institution; and by its damage to what it touches and to the tenets of classic liberalism, they being the apparently entirely now-incidental threads of the social and cultural heritages that form(ed) western enlightenment and civilization.
But the ostensible right is wrong on a solid dozen very major issues. This one isn’t surprising.
All this is “reality”. It’s hardly an illusion, although it is victim to all sorts of those familiar assertions and presumptions from our many latter-day Utopianists begging for safety at any cost.
I would like to say a brief elegy for the old meaning of “justice”, which was speedy and faithful execution of the law. If the law specified that thieves should spend thirty days in jail, then justice consisted in jailing thieves for thirty days – not 29, not 31, nor five strokes of the whip. Now I find myself short a word for this.
Today, “justice” has seemingly come to mean something more like doing to thieves what one feels is good to do to thieves, regardless of the law, a concept for which we already had a brace of terms such as due, desert, fairness, warranted, comeuppance, you’ll get yours.
This I find to be disastrous when combined with the idea I see growing increasingly prevalent that the law should be oriented towards justice – which is to say, under the new meaning of justice, that the law ought at all times to reflect the present mood towards thieves. Taken to its logical conclusion, this would imply that every criminal should receive a personalized sentence determined by public vote, this expression of the public will being the prime material of which the written law is only a crude shadow, necessitated by the tyranny of logistics. Perhaps someday in the digital future, following improvements in public accessibility and the like, “justice” will evolve to merge the courthouse with the reality TV show.
Ten: What are you on about? It would seem to me that absent any notions of rehabilitation, punishment and deterrence (which can be argued about until the cows come home), the chief virtue of imprisoning criminals is prophylactic. You see, if thieves and ruffians are in prison, they are not out nicking things or hitting people. What most people want out of a justice system is to not have their things nicked or to be hit by ruffians. Yes, there’s a certain atavistic yen among some for seeing the toerags suffer, but personally I couldn’t care less whether prisons are run like CenterParcs or the Chateau d’If. I would favour a relatively benign sentencing regime for first-time offences but a rapidly escalating ladder for subsequent. It should be literally impossible to see things like “X has 47 precious convictions for burglary”, unless X was first convicted some time in the Carboniferous Era.
If justice – as a semantic device and not the philosophy thereof – is a blind execution of the law, then naturally we’d hope law was just. If, however, it’s the deployment of leftist tropes to exercise statist force per some meandering, emotional, contemporary “need” – like safety, for example – we should reject it.
But we have a predicament, Microbillionare.
If the execution of law commonly turns it into the proverbial ass – the terribly precise 30 day rule for its own sake, the redistribution of resources, the incarceration nation, racialist preferentialism, the safety myth, reparations nonsense, gay wedding cake penalties, et al – obviously we’d have to define the justness aside from justice, and not mix together the dictionary definition with reactionary, rhetorical, and loosely defined arbitrary pragmatism.
Arbitrary pragmatism of any kind. We can’t have it both ways.
Just justice is just, so to put it, and the rest is shite: Either justice is valid as a philosophy, an ideal, a sound theory; or it’s a warped travesty. Naturally we define the former to prevent the latter. How we define it and by why standard counts.
Keelhauling people to get ’em off the boat – the safety myth – isn’t that thing. For example, the law isn’t to create safety anymore than social justice is to create safe zones. Both are recent phenomenon, two sides of the same coin, and neither are just per se.
Rightist absolutists who refuse to examine the philosophy of justice have no right to claim it. They’re another statist form of what they reject on the left. Adopting a pragmatic statism the rightist thinks he controls for its effects while ignoring its philosophical basis – an established standard deeply valued by the progressive right of our times – puts him on the wrong side of a good ten very major issues. Crime is one.
The classical liberal knows this. The rightist misses it while it’s being pointed out, and that’s a barometer of how far “conservatives” have gone off the beam…
…the chief virtue of imprisoning criminals is prophylactic.
So is the chief virtue of hanging them.
What most people want out of a justice system is to not have their things nicked or to be hit by ruffians…there’s a certain atavistic yen among some for seeing the toerags suffer, but personally I couldn’t care less whether prisons are run like CenterParcs or the Chateau d’If.
Clockwork orange.
I would favour a relatively benign sentencing regime for first-time offences but a rapidly escalating ladder for subsequent. It should be literally impossible to see things like “X has 47 precious convictions for burglary”, unless X was first convicted some time in the Carboniferous Era.
Justice as a tool of populist revenge enacted democratically. Where have we heard that before.
So basically, defeat is conceded. But you feel better about yourself, right?
Justice as a tool of populist revenge enacted democratically.
‘Justice’ is always about populist revenge; since it’s a subjective ideal, speaking of justice is sidetracking the issue. The first principle of government must be protection of it’s citizens of deprival of rights (including those of property) by theft or fraud; if it can’t do that, it has no legitimacy as a government.
If people have no fear of fines (viewed either as ‘because they have nothing to take from them’ or ‘because the state will provide them with enough that they won’t starve no matter what’) and can’t be exiled and insists on returning to crime over and over again, government can’t throw up its hands and say ‘I can’t do anything’, it’s obligated by the social contract to do something to protect those that support the social contract from those that violate it. Right now, imprisonment is the viable means of doing so.
Short form: I can fine someone, and they can go back to committing crimes right away. I can sentence people to rehabilitation, and they can go back to committing crimes right away. Prison is the most humane option I have where they can’t victimize the law-abiding, unless somehow you consider executing them a better option.
“Either justice is valid as a philosophy, an ideal, a sound theory; or it’s a warped travesty.”
What is this philosophically based justice?
‘Justice’ is always about populist revenge; since it’s a subjective ideal, speaking of justice is sidetracking the issue.
It is? Folks upthread don’t seem to think so, although like you, they believe in not saying if they could be brought to question the criminal justice status quo, a thoroughly subjective – subjected – point of view they, at least, presumably find to be just anyway.
And this hammer-of-justice subjectivity comes from the same line of reasoning most known for claiming rights are from God; that is, are inherent to absolute principle…
The first principle of government must be protection of it’s citizens of deprival of rights (including those of property) by theft or fraud; if it can’t do that, it has no legitimacy as a government.
The Safety Progressives speak, and of said principle! But it’s a rather severe corruption of the principle of liberty we’ve taken to get to all this preemptive safety, and that is a well-worn and accepted tenet of any valid conservative ideal on law and justice. Hardly a surprise and certainly not a mystery.
Rather, the first principle of government must be protecting it’s citizens from its depriving them of their rights. If it could magically prevent others doing that – which neither it or they can do, literally by design – we wouldn’t have a remedial system of justice, would we, with due process, presumptions and protections, jury trials, and especially Blackstone’s Formulation, a cornerstone of the west’s common law roots and its constitutional trajectory.
Which brings us back to…the past. Nobody has yet addressed the Celts and penalties and compensation, for one example, and the effective, stable, reasoned, and quite different system that, in all evidence, worked well on top of being arguably wiser to boot. That we mustn’t talk about, there being no noble savages or something, which is a heck of an exclusionary fallacy. And for what are increasingly obvious reasons.
If people have no fear of fines (viewed either as ‘because they have nothing to take from them’ or ‘because the state will provide them with enough that they won’t starve no matter what’) and can’t be exiled and insists on returning to crime over and over again…
If? Now we’re interjecting corruptions of reason and practice, and conflating them with inevitability. That’s not an argument; it’s a conditional preference.
…government can’t throw up its hands and say ‘I can’t do anything’…
It can’t? Only government creates order? Only official force counters anarchy and defends these victims so entitled to their safety? Tort and recovery just disappeared forever?
That’s an excluded middle, and we’ve touched on that. Well, I have. Of course it can throw its hands up, and sometimes you and I both hope it does.
…it’s obligated by the social contract
It has an obligation to principle, not this arbitrary “democratic” populism we’ve been failing to wrangle inside some useful parameters. And what “social contract” is this; the one we refuse to even consider the foundations or the workings of? If justice is the effective mob we started out with above, how did we eventually get to a unitary principle of order?
There’s a social contract of throwing bricks through shop windows from time to time too and all it takes is “populist revenge, a subjective ideal”.
…to do something to protect those that support the social contract from those that violate it.
Because…safety. And at some point we haul off to jail the guys perched on top of those shops with shotguns, protecting the family business. They just violated the prevailing social contract, the one made from populist revenge, a subjective ideal. We’ll advise them that justice talk is sidetracking their issues.
Right now, imprisonment is the viable means of doing so.
Because we say so, having first narrowly defined terms, then options, then outcomes, and now presumed benefits? But so does hanging them. Chaining them to trees. Keelhauling them for the social contract.
Which leads us to the fourth iteration today of the same authoritarian pragmatism, with no reason and certainly no further investigation required:
Short form: I can fine someone, and they can go back to committing crimes right away. I can sentence people to rehabilitation, and they can go back to committing crimes right away. Prison is the most humane option I have where they can’t victimize the law-abiding, unless somehow you consider executing them a better option.
No, to be literal it’s just the most expedient rhetoric the unreasoned habitual view cares to consider. It’s an assertion.
Not so incidentally, I didn’t get into this to argue for a fines-based justice system. I got into it to see if the right – this is a somewhat rightist place, no? – could remember its intellectual roots and, per the above, prevent its popular view falling back into sloth, but calling it everything from justice to the only tool in the shed.
I worked with children in a clinical psychology practice. We were forever getting referrals for children who were poorly behaved. One behaviour management technique we always advised was to catch the child being good and provide positive reinforcement – e.g., praise, affection, or in some cases may be even a treat. The idea is that positive reinforcement increases the likelihood of behaviour so you use it when kids are doing something you want to encourage them to do more of. Hopefully, you will then need less negative reinforcement, or punishment as kids have less time to do bad things if they are busy doing good things.
This is a tactic that parents, families, friends and maybe even communities to a certain degree, can use to encourage the development of compassionate, kind and well adjusted adults and keep antisocial behaviour to a minimum (i.e. a guy becomes popular and mates want to hang out with him when he is not acting like a dick and breaking into houses). Unfortunately, it rarely seems to happen that way, especially in certain areas (my suburb).
Nevertheless, it is not the government’s role to try to shape the moral compass of individuals – it just doesn’t work. It requires a very intimate and close connection with that person, which is not a relationship we want with government in a free society. If we consider governments that do try to take on that role of moral teacher (e.g. Nth korea, soviet russia) people always seem to end up as wan, crunchy husks.
Also, if this program were widespread, whats to stop people purposefully upping the amount of crime they commit until are suffiently ‘at risk’ and qualify for payment?
Hmmm…much here but if I may just reply to Ten’s reply to my comment..
A notion from which many like yourself dangle equally opaque reasoning – for the last few decades it’s been impossible to miss that rhetoric.
Funny you mention rhetoric. Funny ironic. I stated something definitive and substantive, a solid, obvious fact that if you lock people up they will not rape, kill, or steal from you. You disagree? Did you grasp orthodoc’s comment? Then you retort “Chaining people to trees prevents violence and theft.” What? So does cutting off their hands (or their heads). What sort of argument is that? Hell, it’s not even a decent straw man. What follows is mostly of the TL;DR variety with much sound and fury to no end. A Clockwork Orange is not the sum total of justice nor injustice. Nor much of an argument.
I smell a philosophy student. Collections of words arranged in such a manner that allow for an out at every turn. It is a simple fact, as Civilis states, “The first principle of government must be protection of it’s citizens of deprival of rights (including those of property) by theft or fraud; if it can’t do that, it has no legitimacy as a government.” And as David Gillies states, “You see, if thieves and ruffians are in prison, they are not out nicking things or hitting people. What most people want out of a justice system is to not have their things nicked or to be hit by ruffians.”
And in regard to To rise above rhetoric a thing has to stand philosophical tests. Frankly, yours doesn’t, generally because that splinter of rightism hasn’t applied any such tests beyond assumption. The presuming anger is always there, but a careful analysis of the issues always goes wanting (not that the let-em-all-go-free left is any more complete; it isn’t.)…Do you not see the arrogance in this statement?
Like most philosophers, you seem to have already made up your mind about the world outside your head and thus those who express a different view of the world, especially those that base their views on real-world experience, must be explained away as “rhetoric” that doesn’t stand “philosophical tests”. Let me clue you in on a little thing the real world knows that philosopher fail time and time again to understand, THERE ARE NO PHILOSOPHICAL TESTS. There are facts, there are experiences, there are experiments, and then there are wild ass guesses. And way behind all those WAGs are philosophers arguing how many angels fit on the head of a pin. Your mind cannot determine how the world is or will be. Only actions matter. And the action of locking up thugs, thieves, and such prevents such creatures from hurting anyone around them.
And if there is one salient point you allude to, I think…perhaps I’m wrong…it is that the law can be an ass when it grows so big and broad that it cannot be administered (or even understood) in a way a reasonably educated man can follow in his spare time. That is when he isn’t slaving away to support the behemoth state, legal system, his community, and every other leech of his time and still be able to care for his children, his parents, his wife, and his friends. We cannot allow the lawyers to legislate us into anarchy.
And this hammer-of-justice subjectivity comes from the same line of reasoning most known for claiming rights are from God; that is, are inherent to absolute principle…
Religion postulates the existence of an entity uniquely powerful, all knowing, unbiased, and objective enough to provide justice in the form of God. If God exists (as I believe), he’s able to be uniquely just; the same does not apply to states as creations of man.
The Safety Progressives speak, and of said principle! But it’s a rather severe corruption of the principle of liberty we’ve taken to get to all this preemptive safety, and that is a well-worn and accepted tenet of any valid conservative ideal on law and justice. Hardly a surprise and certainly not a mystery.
Conservatives also agree on the role of government in protecting people from threats to rights, and I generally see even Minarchists agree that this is a legitimate role of government. And my phrasing was deliberate: if there is to be a government, it’s first goal must be the safety of the rights of its citizens from itself, other citizens, and outsiders; a government that doesn’t do that can’t claim legitimacy. I said nothing about government being required.
Which brings us back to…the past. Nobody has yet addressed the Celts and penalties and compensation, for one example, and the effective, stable, reasoned, and quite different system that, in all evidence, worked well on top of being arguably wiser to boot. That we mustn’t talk about, there being no noble savages or something, which is a heck of an exclusionary fallacy. And for what are increasingly obvious reasons.
Of course I answered that. We can’t exile (shun) people (if you’re willing to kick people that break the law out of the country (by force) entirely in lieu of prison, I apologize for wasting your time, but most people aren’t). Fines don’t work if they have nothing to take away and you’re promising to feed and house them no matter what they do. Fines also don’t work if the people are free to say ‘no’ when told to surrender their fine, you need something to collect that fine by force; how do you assess and collect fines without something approximating a government with the power to force people to comply?
It can’t? Only government creates order? Only official force counters anarchy and defends these victims so entitled to their safety? Tort and recovery just disappeared forever?
Anything that creates order will necessarily have many of the features currently associated with governments, such as the ability to define the law in its boundaries, determine appropriate punishments for transgressions of the law, and the ability to carry those judgments and punishments out. Tort and recovery don’t exist without a body willing to back up judgements with force.
Some people are going to insist on depriving others of life and liberty (including property). If you’re not willing to stop them, you’ve generated a society where the strong and willing to break the rules rule at the expense of the weak and law-abiding.
Let’s narrow this down to basic principles. We have someone with the desire and ability to violate someone else’s rights (rob them, rape them, murder them, doesn’t matter) and willing to place that desire over all other considerations. How do we prevent that violation of rights without using force on the person with that desire?
{Reads Ten’s comments}
{Takes long drag on joint}
….
Far out, maaaannnn.
Ten, I can’t tell whether you;re playing devil’s advocate or being deliberately obtuse. In my conception of a justice system, people are given increasingly longer periods of incarceration not to punish them but to increase the period when they are not inflicting themselves on the rest of us. You probably could reduce the crime rate for a bit by hanging the fifty most prolific thieves in every town. If instead they got a year for the second offence (we’ll let them have the first one suspended) then 18 months for the second, 27 for the third, 41 for the fourth, 61 for the fifth and so on then by the time they’d racked up offence number seven they’d have accumulated fifty years in prison. Fifty years of the rest of us not having to suffer the depredations of someone so degenerate that 32 years of gaol was insufficient to stop them thieving again. It isn’t three strikes and you’re out. It’s just segregating the incorrigible from everyone else. There is absolutely nothing in the libertarian tradition that says violation of rights cannot be condignly countered, and much that says not only can it be, but that it must be. If we assume that criminals have agency then we must assume that they respond to rational risk/reward calculations. Right now, for many, the calculation is that a life of habitual crime is a good bet. But, to repeat, I don’t care about that. I just want scumbags cordoned off. If that means they die in prison of old age, then too bad. I suspect you would find few multiple offenders under my system; you’d really have to work at it. But even those that did exist wouldn’t indicate a failure. They would be a demonstration it was working exactly as intended.
Prison is the most humane option I have where they can’t victimize the law-abiding, unless somehow you consider executing them a better option.
I’ve always been rather fond of John Carpenter’s well known documentary on this subject.
If prison worked prophylactively, the US would have low crime.
Instead they have enormous prison populations and high crime.
They are “harder” on crime yet have to spend more on police.
As a solution — just jail them for longer — clearly doesn’t work.
Morning, all.
[ Scans thread. ]
I’m going to need a bigger cup of coffee.
If prison worked prophylactively, the US would have low crime.
Instead they have enormous prison populations and high crime.
They are “harder” on crime yet have to spend more on police.
As a solution — just jail them for longer — clearly doesn’t work.
Well, Chester, you started out with the wrong assumptions, therefore reached and invalid conclusion.
In general, crime rates in the US have gone down significantly over the last 25 years, pretty much in line with programs such as California’s 3-strikes law (enacted 1994) and many major cities and states basing their policing on the Broken Windows theory (also early 90s).
Now, over the past year, California has seen a rise of 20-21% in crime – both property and violent crime. How ever can this be? Because Gov. Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown decided that letting 10,000 state prisoners out under his prison realignment program was just peachy-keen AND last year’s Proposition 47, which moved a lot of felonies into misdemeanor land plus, in essence, incentivized commercial burglary*
*e.g. grab your boosterbag & go to your local mall .. steal all day long, just make sure you hit different stores & take no more than $949 dollars worth at each store. Result? If caught, you’ll get a citation. And no matter how many times you do it, you’ll never have it advanced to felony status.
Please spare me the poor-criminals-as-victims schtick.
at risk of committing violent crimes
Because they have *already* committed violent crimes more than once.
Still trying to make my way through this thread.
Americans do believe in the MONEY. This is crazy and funny and idiotic and dangerous and absurd, …but it fits.
wtp’s high points:
Funny you mention rhetoric. Funny ironic. I stated something definitive and substantive, a solid, obvious fact that if you lock people up they will not rape, kill, or steal from you. You disagree?
Given that we defend this consistent but deeply pragmatic, ends-justified lack of context – that locking people up is the primary goal of a government charged with Keeping the Public Safety, apparently at any cost that being the missing context in probably ten comments – with incredulity at any tacit demand we add that context – because we can’t assess and rank “chaining people to trees prevents violence and theft [too]” in some concrete matrix of thought and function that apparently may involve instead only wholesale incarceration for safety’s sake – yeah, I find the point rhetorical and ironic.
It’s not a point, as I keep recording. It’s a preference. It’s a point when it has relevant context and stands to broad reason. It doesn’t do that either.
What? So does cutting off their hands (or their heads).
What seems obvious: We don’t do capital punishment and there has to be a reason for that.
Because we reason it’s not acceptable, and because we, apparently, reason instead that industrialized incarceration is our utopian panacea – a panacea none of us can justify beyond an appeal to safety, it being govt’s highest ideal – followed by an appeal to the humanity thereof coupled to a happy stated apathy for the consequences.
I’m really tempted to ask:
What sort of argument is that? Hell, it’s not even a decent straw man.
Actually, it’s one of the foundational assumptions of a civilization: That a people be able to reason its justice formulation among itself without resorting to a sort of offended, dazed bewilderment, looking at the guy asking the question like a leper, and going back to eating itself alive behind its securely locked doors.
What follows is mostly of the TL;DR variety with much sound and fury to no end. A Clockwork Orange is not the sum total of justice nor injustice. Nor much of an argument.
He said, in the ringing vacuum of any argument beyond a presuming pragmatism. But I’m obtuse.
I smell a philosophy student.
No, you hear a constitutionalist. Rather stunning that we all need a trigger warning instead.
Collections of words arranged in such a manner that allow for an out at every turn..
At every turn. And I’m an arrogant SOB too, it’s said.
It is a simple fact, as Civilis states, “The first principle of government must be protection of it’s citizens of deprival of rights (including those of property) by theft or fraud; if it can’t do that, it has no legitimacy as a government.”
That again? Find me that in the American founding documents, among others.
Govt’s role is a system of remedial justice, not a foregone conclusion presumed only by safety nannies unable and unwilling to construct its justification. Of course, we won’t answer the more literal questions regarding safety and justice, but my asking them and for a conscious formulation about them is strawmanish. Obtuse. Diversionary. Hardly an argument.
And then we go right back to that contextless nonsense, as if, somehow, your Phil 101 target can’t possibly have heard of – and challenged four times to empty vacuum – the preposterously open-ended notion that:
as David Gillies states, “You see, if thieves and ruffians are in prison, they are not out nicking things or hitting people. What most people want out of a justice system is to not have their things nicked or to be hit by ruffians.”
The brisk, foundational novelty of that original thought has me speechless.
And in regard to [“]to rise above rhetoric a thing has to stand philosophical tests. Frankly, yours doesn’t, generally because that splinter of rightism hasn’t applied any such tests beyond assumption. The presuming anger is always there, but a careful analysis of the issues always goes wanting (not that the let-em-all-go-free left is any more complete; it isn’t.)[“]…Do you not see the arrogance in this statement?
Yes, I see the arrogance in my presuming liberty types on the right haven’t the means to define that liberty philosophically. Safety they get, however. Being progressives instead.
Like most philosophers, you seem to have already made up your mind about the world outside your head and thus those who express a different view of the world, especially those that base their views on real-world experience, must be explained away as “rhetoric” that doesn’t stand “philosophical tests”.
My goodness, but that is ironic.
Let me clue you in…
With bated breath.
…on a little thing the real world knows that philosopher fail time and time again to understand, THERE ARE NO PHILOSOPHICAL TESTS. There are facts, there are experiences, there are experiments, and then there are wild ass guesses.
Yeah. I get that. There are wild ass guesses. And safety.
Please spare me the poor-criminals-as-victims schtick.
Nobody raised a schtick. What’s raised is ham sandwich nation. And this issue, summed up well in this analysis.
“How Wall Street Turned America Into Incarceration Nation”
Ahahahahahahahahahahahaha
[takes deep breath]
Ahahahahahahahahahahahaha