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Didn't expect that last line ("BTW") but to be honest, I think something like that is the only solution. If you look at society 400-500 years ago, brutal punis

by 77777 6y ago

Didn't expect that last line ("BTW") but to be honest, I think something like that is the only solution. If you look at society 400-500 years ago, brutal punishment of this variety was the norm: theft in Restoration England was often enough met with hanging. Since then, the penalties for theft and other "petty" crimes have been reduced, to the point that now theft has been completely normalized. People complained, for example, when charges against Amy Cooper were dropped in New York, but the fact is that you can get arrested hundreds of times in New York, and your charges will always be dropped, for basically any charge, theft, assault, domestic violence, you name it, they drop it. There is a total unwillingness by people in power to inflict punishment on people who punish ordinary citizens by committing crimes against them, sending the signal committing crime is not at all, in fact, criminal, but normal, expected and acceptable behavior. Non-criminal people will flee such environments en masse or become criminals themselves. The result will be lawless cities that blowhards like Trump talk about but do nothing to fix, and only make worse. I am not saying we should go back to hanging people for theft. But we do need to figure out how to punish people without maintaining the Prison Industrial Complex. We need to figure out what is a crime (theft) and not a crime (drug use), we need to provide social services, food, shelter to poor people. We MUST provide education and opportunities to people. But if crime goes unpunished, perhaps in an asymmetric manner like caning, the lawlessness we're seeing today will grow much, much worse and make basic life unlivable in places that were once and still maybe are the pinnacles of civilization, like New York. It will destroy us.

capnrefsmmat 6y ago
It's hard to square this comment with the simple fact that property crime is, in the United States, currently much less common than it has been in decades. For example, household burglary dropped 56% from 1994 to 2011. https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=4657 https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=4657 Theft and motor vehicle theft have had similar major drops (figures 10 and 11): https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/mpcncvs.pdf https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/mpcncvs.pdf This data is from the National Crime Victimization Survey, which directly asks respondents if they have been the victim of a crime, and is not based on police reports or prosecutions. The same decline has also been seen in violent crime, and is actually one of the major unanswered questions in modern criminology: why has crime declined by about half since 1990? There are many theories (you've probably seen the theories involving lead or pollution exposure) but no definitive answers. But whatever the explanation may be, it does not justify brutal punishment, since (a) crime is declining, not increasing, and (b) I'm not aware of any substantial evidence showing a major deterrent effect of severe prison sentences or even capital punishment.
- 77777 6y ago
  You may very well have statistics, but these statistics may very well be false, especially when it comes to including figures that represent quality of life (i.e. how anxious you are on a constant basis with respect to your property or being assaulted). Yes, home burglaries are usually reported and tracked in data. But, as it says in this very New York Times article, package theft goes completely unreported and is therefore not part of your statistics. Likewise, sexual assaults in subways are only very recently being tracked in New York. Why did you choose, by the way, to assume I was only talking about property crime? The types of crimes not tracked by NYPD is vast, and such crime I have seen escalating year over year. Stats are stats, but if you live in New York, you notice how 10 years ago people didn't rob Walgreens, and now they rob it all the time practically on an on-going basis. You just take what you need and walk past "security." See some boxes inside a vestibule? They're yours. But it's not just property crime, it's all crime.
  - capnrefsmmat 6y ago
    As I said, "This data is from the National Crime Victimization Survey, which directly asks respondents if they have been the victim of a crime, and is not based on police reports or prosecutions." The NCVS results, as far as I am aware, match every other attempt to estimate the prevalence of crime over time. They are also consistent across property crime, violent crime, and other types. You may be noticing these issues more, but that's because you're older and have seen more examples over the years, and perhaps have gotten more invested in your community -- not because they are universally more common across the country.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - 77777 6y ago
      I didn't say they were universally more common across the country. I am talking about my experience with living in New York. I am talking about seeing people constantly masturbating in the subway, having not seen that 10 years ago when I moved to New York. I am sure I would have noticed that. If you take the stats you cite as truth, I don't know how you square these stats with the contents of the original post itself. As you know, stats represent a sample. Beyond the sample, there is reality.
pjc50 6y ago
.. has everybody forgotten the massive protests over the police killing peope last year? Or that the US already imprisons more people per capita than any other country, including failed states like El Salvador and dictatorships like Turkmenistan? The solution is not more violence. I suspect the problem is that the police have failed at the basic business of connecting crime to punishment, so they roam neighbourhoods looking for people they deem suspicious and dishing out punishment. So you get injustice and crime. It's a basic competence issue.
- war1025 6y ago
  > has everybody forgotten the massive protests over the police killing peope last year? Just because that was the most vocal faction doesn't mean they are the only faction, or even the majority.
- 77777 6y ago
  Did you read my comment wherein I specifically reject the notion that we need to perpetuate in Prison Industrial Complex? It's an incredible burden on our civilization and must be dismantled. I think the problem is you have people who grow up in violence and only know violence. If we have a society that successfully educated people, kept people from falling through the cracks and provided them with opportunities, violence wouldn't be necessary. But for how many generations has our society failed people? How many generations have the failed, neglected people in our society grown up only knowing violence as something to be respected? Two? Three? Four generations? The question in my mind is whether even violence will deter people, which I am not certain of. But certainly prison doesn't deter anybody. The only real answer, obviously, is education. But education is almost beyond repair at this time.
  - pjc50 6y ago
    Well, American society was not merely failing people but formally excluding them until the moon landings. You talk about education; some of the Southern states shut down their education system entirely for a year rather than accept integration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_resistance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_resistance If you want a solution to the spiral of violence, http://www.svru.co.uk/ http://www.svru.co.uk/ were hugely effective as an intervention carrot-and-stick approach.

by 77777 6y ago

capnrefsmmat 6y ago

It's hard to square this comment with the simple fact that property crime is, in the United States, currently much less common than it has been in decades. For example, household burglary dropped 56% from 1994 to 2011. https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=4657 https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=4657 Theft and motor vehicle theft have had similar major drops (figures 10 and 11): https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/mpcncvs.pdf https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/mpcncvs.pdf This data is from the National Crime Victimization Survey, which directly asks respondents if they have been the victim of a crime, and is not based on police reports or prosecutions. The same decline has also been seen in violent crime, and is actually one of the major unanswered questions in modern criminology: why has crime declined by about half since 1990? There are many theories (you've probably seen the theories involving lead or pollution exposure) but no definitive answers. But whatever the explanation may be, it does not justify brutal punishment, since (a) crime is declining, not increasing, and (b) I'm not aware of any substantial evidence showing a major deterrent effect of severe prison sentences or even capital punishment.

77777 6y ago
You may very well have statistics, but these statistics may very well be false, especially when it comes to including figures that represent quality of life (i.e. how anxious you are on a constant basis with respect to your property or being assaulted). Yes, home burglaries are usually reported and tracked in data. But, as it says in this very New York Times article, package theft goes completely unreported and is therefore not part of your statistics. Likewise, sexual assaults in subways are only very recently being tracked in New York. Why did you choose, by the way, to assume I was only talking about property crime? The types of crimes not tracked by NYPD is vast, and such crime I have seen escalating year over year. Stats are stats, but if you live in New York, you notice how 10 years ago people didn't rob Walgreens, and now they rob it all the time practically on an on-going basis. You just take what you need and walk past "security." See some boxes inside a vestibule? They're yours. But it's not just property crime, it's all crime.
- capnrefsmmat 6y ago
  As I said, "This data is from the National Crime Victimization Survey, which directly asks respondents if they have been the victim of a crime, and is not based on police reports or prosecutions." The NCVS results, as far as I am aware, match every other attempt to estimate the prevalence of crime over time. They are also consistent across property crime, violent crime, and other types. You may be noticing these issues more, but that's because you're older and have seen more examples over the years, and perhaps have gotten more invested in your community -- not because they are universally more common across the country.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - 77777 6y ago
    I didn't say they were universally more common across the country. I am talking about my experience with living in New York. I am talking about seeing people constantly masturbating in the subway, having not seen that 10 years ago when I moved to New York. I am sure I would have noticed that. If you take the stats you cite as truth, I don't know how you square these stats with the contents of the original post itself. As you know, stats represent a sample. Beyond the sample, there is reality.

pjc50 6y ago

.. has everybody forgotten the massive protests over the police killing peope last year? Or that the US already imprisons more people per capita than any other country, including failed states like El Salvador and dictatorships like Turkmenistan? The solution is not more violence. I suspect the problem is that the police have failed at the basic business of connecting crime to punishment, so they roam neighbourhoods looking for people they deem suspicious and dishing out punishment. So you get injustice and crime. It's a basic competence issue.

war1025 6y ago
> has everybody forgotten the massive protests over the police killing peope last year? Just because that was the most vocal faction doesn't mean they are the only faction, or even the majority.
77777 6y ago
Did you read my comment wherein I specifically reject the notion that we need to perpetuate in Prison Industrial Complex? It's an incredible burden on our civilization and must be dismantled. I think the problem is you have people who grow up in violence and only know violence. If we have a society that successfully educated people, kept people from falling through the cracks and provided them with opportunities, violence wouldn't be necessary. But for how many generations has our society failed people? How many generations have the failed, neglected people in our society grown up only knowing violence as something to be respected? Two? Three? Four generations? The question in my mind is whether even violence will deter people, which I am not certain of. But certainly prison doesn't deter anybody. The only real answer, obviously, is education. But education is almost beyond repair at this time.
- pjc50 6y ago
  Well, American society was not merely failing people but formally excluding them until the moon landings. You talk about education; some of the Southern states shut down their education system entirely for a year rather than accept integration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_resistance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_resistance If you want a solution to the spiral of violence, http://www.svru.co.uk/ http://www.svru.co.uk/ were hugely effective as an intervention carrot-and-stick approach.