From the Telegraph, on crime, incarceration, and dubious conclusions:

Readers will note the odd implication that the level of serious criminal behaviour at any given time should somehow conform to the amount of prison space you have at that time. As if the moral gravity of a criminal act, and likelihood of recidivism and danger to the public, should be determined by whether or not you can be bothered to build another dungeon.

Speaking of recidivism, it’s perhaps worth revisiting this:

Other, related statistics, linked above, may widen the eyes.

Update via the comments:

Regarding burglary and its devotees, this came to mind:

Needless to say, there’s more to chew on in the linked piece. Likewise here, where friends and relatives of the three burglars – the ones with over 200 convictions between them – claim, somewhat improbably, that the deceased were “too good for this stupid, shitty world.” As if the trio – whose other activities included assaulting and mugging elderly couples and bedridden cancer patients – were, unlike their numerous victims, somehow deserving of public sympathy.

And which, I suspect, tells us something about the quality of those friends and relatives, their moral orientation.

In the comments, Geoff quotes this from the recidivism link, above:

Then adds,

Well, indeed.

Via Tim Worstall.

Previously in the world of crime and punishment, a trilogy of sorts – parts one, two, and three.

Lifted from the comments, an illustration of progressive ethics. Or, How dare you defend your home and loved ones from sociopathic intruders with long criminal histories:

The bill’s sponsor, Rick Chavez Zbur, claims, “The bill’s goal is to prevent wannabe vigilantes… from provoking violence and then claiming self-defense after the fact.” Which suggests that finding intruders in your home, or breaking into your home, intent on thievery and God knows what else, is somehow not in itself an obvious provocation. Or a basis for vigorous self-defence.

Instead, the bill would oblige homeowners to “retreat” wherever possible, thereby reducing the risk of “force likely to cause death or great bodily injury” to the burglar or burglars, whose wellbeing is apparently a matter of great importance, if only to progressive lawmakers. This restriction is framed as a “safety” measure, albeit one that prioritises the safety of the criminal, who will presumably be enabled to continue his trajectory of repeated home invasion, but with reduced resistance and ever greater boldness.

But remember, wokeness is just about being compassionate.

Indeed, advocates of the bill claim that it “promotes racial justice.” Presumably, by giving extra chances, and extra leverage, to burglars who happen to be black. Because, well, magic blackness.

We’ve previously noted the progressive schtick of flattening values, such that predatory, habitual criminals and their victims, their numerous victims, are somehow equal in moral worth. As when “proud SJW” Zack Ford insisted that armed muggers who attack lone women at bus stops, and who do so while on probation, are every bit as valuable as their prey and should therefore not be endangered by any efforts by said women to resist them.

Likewise, when we were told – by Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender – that a dislike of having your home invaded by feral, malevolent predators, and having the lives of your family put in mortal danger, “comes from a place of privilege.” And that such violations are therefore by implication things we shouldn’t resist, and regarding which, even the thought of resisting is something we should feel bad about. On account of all that privilege.

Such are the convolutions of the progressive psyche.

Oh, and we mustn’t forget our ostentatiously agonised Guardian contributor Anna Spargo-Ryan, who wanted us to believe, all evidence to the contrary, that the gang of burglars who broke into her home in the middle of the night – the ones brandishing carving knives – are the real victims of the drama and should therefore be spared any meaningful consequence of their own chosen actions. Because, apparently, one should sympathise with the people breaking into one’s home and driving off with one’s stuff. In one’s own car.

However, it seems to me that the decision to forcibly violate someone’s home, generally at a time when the homeowner is at their most vulnerable, intent on predation and likely worse, and doing so for the umpteenth time, is precisely how you know that the intruder’s wellbeing is of very low importance. To assume that a home invader is anything less than an existential threat is, as seen in the links below, foolish in the extreme – and morally perverse.

It may be unkind – but it would not, I think, be unfair – to wish upon Mr Zbur and his fellow progressives some first-hand experience of the home-invasion scenarios that they would happily see others endure, passively and impotently, and sometimes not survive, supposedly in the name of “progress.” And fairness to burglars.

As Mr Burkett says in the X thread linked above, the level of moral wrongness is hard to overstate. It’s a mindset seemingly designed to devalue and demoralise the law-abiding, and according to which the law-abiding man must not presume to prioritise the safety of his loved ones, or himself, over the wellbeing of the sociopath violating his home. A sociopath who has almost certainly burgled others and who likely intends to burgle more, until forcibly stopped.

And contra our champions of progress, an obvious question comes to mind. If you wake to discover some conscienceless being with an extensive criminal history has broken into your home, violating an intimate and fundamental boundary, on what basis can you assume that no further, even fatal, boundary violations will occur? A lot is at stake, remember. And to make this jolly game a little more exciting, your heart is pounding, you’re still half-asleep, and you have but seconds to decide.

For readers curious as to exactly how much misery, fear, and social degradation a very small number of burglars can inflict on the world, on the better people around them, this item here may prove illuminating. In it, three prolific burglars, who between them had accumulated over 200 convictions, met their not-entirely-tragic end after colliding head-on with a lorry, while driving down the motorway at more than twice the speed limit, in the wrong direction, in a stolen BMW. Their fiery ceasing-to-be resulting in a rather significant drop in the local burglary rate.

An illustration, one of many, of how a very large fraction of crime could be prevented by dealing decisively with a surprisingly small number of persistent offenders.

Further to our lively rumblings on crime and recidivism, including recent comments, Inquisitive Bird has some relevant data:

That would be this incident here. The gentlemen in question met their maker after colliding head-on with a lorry, while driving down the N7, at more than twice the speed limit, in the wrong direction. Their car, a stolen BMW 3 series, promptly burst into flames, making the identification of their remains a time-consuming endeavour.

Happily, the driver of the lorry survived.

Readers with an interest in the subject are advised to read the whole thing, in which eye-widening statistics abound, along with some rather sensible – and therefore terribly unfashionable – policy suggestions.

Update, via the comments:

Regarding the burglars’ demise, what catches the eye are the gushing tributes from friends and relatives, claiming, rather improbably, that the gleefully malevolent creatures were “too good for this stupid shitty world.”

As if the trio – whose activities included habitual burglary on a prodigious scale, and assaulting and mugging elderly couples and bedridden cancer patients – were somehow deserving of public sympathy. Not the numerous victims of their predations, mind, but the predators themselves. It does rather tell us something about the quality of those friends and relatives, their moral orientation.

Again, I miss the concept of shame.

Oh, and consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

Time for some thoughts on crime. From the pages of the Guardian:

Being a Guardian contributor, the author, Ms Anna Spargo-Ryan, a resident of Melbourne, is of course conflicted. Her feelings, it turns out, are something of a tangle. We’re told of the uncontrollable shaking, the shattered sense of safety, the fear for a missing cat, and the experience of subsequently finding items of stolen clothing discarded in the street. “I am so frightened,” says our columnist:

All understandable, and far too commonplace. And yet, simultaneously, the experience is dismissed by the author as one of being merely “inconvenienced for a few days.” “The relative impact of this one night on the whole of my life is nothing compared to setting up a child to reoffend,” says she.

Messages, I think, that are ever so slightly mixed.

Before we go any further, I should point out that the words child and children, used throughout the piece, may be a tad misleading, as the identities of the burglars – who stole, among other items, knives, keys, jewellery, a wallet, and a car – have, at the time of writing, not been shared, or, one assumes, determined. The culprits, who presumably still roam free, are assumed to be teenagers, out for an invigorating spree of robbery and joyriding.

And the word child is so much fluffier. Ah, bless those rosy cheeks.

Theodore Dalrymple on choice, crime and the importance of punishment:  

One of the explanations of ill behaviour, if you like, is a kind of mechanical one. People have certain experiences and they react to them in a certain self-destructive way, as if their behaviour was that of a billiard ball being impacted by another billiard ball… [But] agency is extremely important. You don’t deny that things are more difficult for some people than for others, but if you deny the agency of people, then you begin to treat them as objects rather than as subjects.

There’s been a very strong current in British intellectual circles that criminality is akin to an illness, and therefore it’s wrong to treat it as something that people have any control over. And of course this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. In England, the leniency of our criminal justice system – precisely, I think, because of our tendency to sociologise everything, to say that people are not agents… this actually promotes criminality… It’s as if criminals didn’t have thought processes like us, [as if] they’re completely different from people like us. But they’re not different from people like us, on the whole…  

It’s very curious how people say that prison doesn’t work because a high proportion of prisoners when they come out commit offences again, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anywhere in a British publication that this might indicate that actually they should be in prison for longer. Another very obvious consideration, which is completely beyond the British intellectual class, is that the number of victims of crime is very much greater than the number of perpetrators. So each perpetrator actually creates large numbers of victims, and therefore it’s not kind to people who live in areas where there’s a lot of criminality not to deal properly with the criminals. We deal with criminality as if it is a benefit received by the poor, instead of what it is, one of the great hardships of being poor.

Mr Dalrymple’s views are somewhat at odds with those found in the pages of the Guardian, where readers are told with great certainty that burglary is “really quite inconsequential,” unworthy of punishment, and that anger at being burgled and the subsequent sense of violation are somehow trivial, plebeian and unsophisticated. Such that expectations of lawfulness and justice – and not being preyed upon, repeatedly, with impunity – are airily dismissed as “idiotic attitudes.”