7 ms·

UBI + health (and other calamity) insurance for all. A strong public mental health system. Prescription drugs of every kind, heroin, meth, whatever. With the

UBI + health (and other calamity) insurance for all. A strong public mental health system. Prescription drugs of every kind, heroin, meth, whatever. With the right counselling and support attached. I might be an idiot but pretty sure most crime will just go away, then we can spend proper resources to help and support (and punish when needed) the few offenders who really struggle to stay within the rules of society. There are a few genuinely 'bad people' out there. But it's vanishingly small. Most people do bad things because of their circumstances. Lets fix the root cause then we can get rid of most of the cops (i.e. the shit ones), & most of the jails. I don't particularly want to start a debate here. I know it's not all so simple. Just dreaming.

transitory_pce 5y ago
> There are a few genuinely 'bad people' out there Do you want to count the number of violent rapes by year? Violent premeditated murders? Lets add violent robbery and assault by people have food and a place to stay, but are looking to level up and buy shiny things? This is not a circumstance, and there are many 'bad people' out there.
- throwawaygimp 5y ago
  How about a legal and regulated sex industry. I live in a country with next to no violent premeditated murders, next to no violent robbery. And a LOT of very poor people. But there is a public social safety net which you can't fall below. So no one is ever really desperate. I understand if you're based in the US why you think this way, but it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- anovikov 5y ago
  Most of these are mental health issues. ESPECIALLY violent rape. Really every cop will tell you that vast majority of crime is not committed by some cold-blooded, well-planning, career criminals - but by mentally unstable or sick people and/or people suffering from addictions, that do ridiculous things being clearly out of sane mind. Sadly, psychiatry is really in its infancy and its success record at both diagnosis and treatment plain out sucks.
  - transitory_pce 5y ago
    What about cold blooded well planning rapists who work as cops?
    - zepto 5y ago
      Most of these are mental health issues.
      - anovikov 5y ago
        Basically, is there any "rational" reason to be a rapist AT ALL? Especially in today's world which is full of easy to get sex. I think every rapist is mentally not OK.
        zepto 5y ago
        > Basically, is there any "rational" reason to be a rapist AT ALL? Are you equating taking irrational actions with being mentally ill? By that logic, everyone is mentally ill. > Especially in today's world which is full of easy to get sex. What makes you think sex is easy to get in today’s world? The evidence would contradict that. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/all-about-sex/202106/why-so-many-people-are-having-less-sex-they-used https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/all-about-sex/202106... > I think every rapist is mentally not OK. Sure, but is it an illness which can be alleviated?
        anovikov 5y ago
        >Sure, but is it an illness which can be alleviated? That's exactly my point. There isn't. So we criminalise it instead. It's inhumane and will be most certainly seen by our grandchildren in a way similar as we see chattel slavery today, but it's just simply that we have no other way today.
        zepto 5y ago
        How do you imagine our grandchildren will solve it?
- benrbray 5y ago
  My own feeling is that many of these people were not born evil, but their life circumstances as children (e.g. extreme poverty or abuse by family members) set them on a bad trajectory that's quite hard to correct for in adulthood. I think giving every child a stable home life will go a long way in reducing crime. Of course some people will slip through the cracks. But I'm in agreement with OP that the number is quite small compared to the number of people currently incarcerated.
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  >Do you want to count the number of violent rapes by year? Violent premeditated murders? People do keep count of this, and the (per-capita) rate of violent crime has been falling fairly monotonically since at least the end of WW2. Our genetics haven't changed in that time, but circumstances have.
  - transitory_pce 5y ago
    So what do you do with the violently inclined people? Put them in therapy and hope they get better?
    - AussieWog93 5y ago
      I mean, it depends on what you mean by "violently inclined". I'm not a sociologist, so I don't know specifically what works and what doesn't, but clearly whatever we've been doing for the last 50 years has led to a smaller percentage of children born with inherently aggressive/antisocial personalities going on to commit violent crimes as an adult. If you're talking about adults with violent inclinations that have acted on them and committed horrific crimes, then the obvious answer is to segregate them from the rest of society as they're clearly dangerous. It looks like we're speaking across purposes. I'm not trying to absolve rapists and murderers of blame, nor am I trying to downplay the danger they pose to the rest of us. At the same time, though we should acknowledge that violent crime seems to be a mostly-solvable problem on a population level and simply throwing up your arms and saying "bad people are bad" isn't going to push the stats down.
    - skinkestek 5y ago
      Some get better, some are disasters waiting to happen. Source: Norwegians do this. It is not every day it seems but there absolutely are multiple cases each years of people with violent pasts who become violent again given the opportunity. There are two types of prison sentences here: ordinary and "forvaring" (best translation I could come up with is "detainment") which practically means they get to serve a minimum sentence anyway but won't be released until the specialists consider them reasonably safe. Kind of close to life but with a chance of parole, only the parole is meant to be the rule, not the exception. For now it seems to work well enough, but if the rate climbs I think they will have to make adjustments.
- anemoiac 5y ago
  The comment you’re responding to suggests that implementing certain societal changes would dramatically reduce crime. Your reply completely ignores their considerations and offers the status quo, I.e. a world completely lacking the changes they mention, as a supposed counter-argument.
bserge 5y ago
If only.
jpxw 5y ago
Health insurance for all? Agree. I’m not sold on the economics of UBI. IMO something that I think would make a huge difference while also being realistically achievable is criminal justice reform. We cannot let prisons continue being factories for drug addicts and career criminals. There must surely be a better way than this.
- throwawaygimp 5y ago
  UBI no one knows. Being sold or otherwise doesn't matter. Small trials here and there aren't much use. We need a country with balls to try it like Portugal did with drug policy. So yea, I'm not sold either. No one really is until we get the hard truth. Nothing more complex (and chaotic) than society and it's economy. Good luck modelling and predicting that reliably ha!
  - jimnotgym 5y ago
    Whilst the detractors of UBI like to paint it as automatically impossible, like breaking some fundamental law of nature, I bet the same people would have said the same things about the Covid benefit schemes. In my country people could be furloughed by their employer on 80% of their salary... and somehow we paid for it ok.
    - everyone 5y ago
      Most people's jobs are utterly pointless. Yet still, by doing these jobs the workers get money with which they can buy their portion of resources. Let's just do the same thing without the pointless and wasteful busy work. Maybe the only thing stopping us is our cultural values dating back to the industrial revolution when workers were indoctrinated with the idea of work as virtuous.
      - hunter-gatherer 5y ago
        I mostly agree with this. When I worked in the federal government, a bunch of colleagues there used to jest that it was "middle class welfare". The point being, that a huge portion of the white collar federal employees just exist to fill a billet. The number of free loaders was insane. In my experience, most operations were done by a few, and much of the extra work that was done really didn't need to happen (example: making useless one time spreadsheets with 10 rows and 4 columns filled with data that expires in the short term, embed into powerpoint, make powerpoint look pretty, email it to someone)
adam-a 5y ago
Your comment ignores the most obvious problems in the system. First this guy had his conviction overturned, he was innocent, and he claims his sentence was politically motivated. Second, this type of solitary confinement is inhumane and unecessary. Yes, it would be great to improve the quality of life for prospective criminals, but we don't need to set the bar as high as UBI, we could start by having a fair and sympathetic penal system.
kilroy123 5y ago
It's been my experience around the world that about 99% of people are honest for the most part and won't rob or harm you. But... that means there's that 1% who _will_. I think no matter what, that 1% will exist (this is just a gut feeling). That means in the US alone, there are ~3.3 million people roaming around that will rob, steal, murder, rape, and do other horrible things. At a peak, 2.3 million were in prison so I don't think that number is too far off. Yes, I understand the complexities of this. Yes, I know many of those people are in prison for drug related offenses. I'm not here to debate any of that, it's a complex issue and I'm generalizing big time. It's just to point out that, the 1% thing probably has some truth to it based on real data.
- SirHound 5y ago
  That’d be “data” if the American prison system was just. But it isn’t.
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  >It's just to point out that, the 1% thing probably has some truth to it based on real data. Quite the opposite. Rates of violent crime vary by orders of magnitude from one society to the next, and have reduced dramatically over time within most societies in the developed world with no indication that we've reached the bottom.
- account42 5y ago
  > It's been my experience around the world that about 99% of people are honest for the most part and won't rob or harm you. But... that means there's that 1% who _will_. I think no matter what, that 1% will exist (this is just a gut feeling). Yes, those tend to be referred to as the 1%.
  - kilroy123 5y ago
    Exactly, biker gangs even wear a 1% patch. Which means, they're part of that 1%.
rkangel 5y ago
I think we should absolutely do all of that, for more reasons than just reducing crime. Specifically talking about crime though, I think it becomes diminishing returns. Some countries in Western Europe are not a million miles from that ideal and still have a non-negligible crime rate and homelessness rate. Mental health support is probably the biggest thing missing, at least in part because we (as a planet) are quite bad at treating it. I expect (and hope) that that's the area that will have the biggest advances in medical treatment over the next couple of decades.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  Plus there's organized crime, white-collar crime, etc; you could get just about enough to keep your head above water, yes, but what if you could become rich instead?
goodpoint 5y ago
I think people understimate the impact on mental health caused by the absence of social safety nets. Provide UBI and health services and a lot of anxiety might go away. Remove the need to toil in a bad workplace and a lot of depression might go away.
- chrisshroba 5y ago
  I think you might mean “underestimate”?
  - goodpoint 5y ago
    Thank you. Fixed.
- throwawaygimp 5y ago
  Bingo
downWidOutaFite 5y ago
The man in the article was a political prisoner punished for joining the Black Panthers. It doesnt really have to do with crime unoess you count the crime of abusing the justice system for political purposes.
balb0a 5y ago
Thomas Sowell would disagree on some points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERj3QeGw9Ok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERj3QeGw9Ok But I don't live in America:).
Gunax 5y ago
I don't think there's anything wrong with starting a debate. Rehabilitation is one of those code words that polls well, but I am skeptical it exists. In reality it usually just means 'addiction treatment' (which seldom works) and there isnt really a good analogy for crimes that are not drug related. Just for my own clarity, what exactly constitues rehabilitation for eg. someone who embezzles? The second issue is that it seems to focus on preventing additional crime, but punishment is about preventing crime before it happens. Just proving 'I would never do it again' isn't really the point, we want to prevent crimes from ever happening. Your theory seems to be that most people are inherently good and wouldn't do crime just because if their nature. I think that is fundamentally wrong, and I can prove it. All you need to do is examine situations in which people were suddenly put in situations where they knew they were unlikely to receive punishment: and crime explodes. There were millions of rapes commited by soldiers against German women during the occupation following world war 2. My guess is most of the perpetrators never raped again--they went home and were otherwise normal citizens. Had they not been given the opportunity to get away with it, they would not have done it. I sort if see this akin to the Milgram experiment. You probably think you wouldn't shock the man--and maybe you wouldn't--but our studies suggest most people would.
- BayAreaEscapee 5y ago
  I don't disagree with our premise against people being inherently good. I personally don't think that a universal basic income will solve all the problems that its proponents think it will solve. But I don't think your example about rape in occupied Germany is a great example. The citizens of the Soviet Union suffered greatly, and it is estimated that about 26 million of them died during WW2. I have no doubt that the minds of those soldiers were filled with thoughts of rage and revenge, and probably felt that the perpetrators of the war somehow deserved it.
TomSwirly 5y ago
> There are a few genuinely 'bad people' out there. But it's vanishingly small. 70 million people voted for Donald Trump.
- IiydAbITMvJkqKf 5y ago
  If you think half of the USA are genuinely bad people you desperately need to go outside.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    If you think that 70 million people is half of the USA, you desperately need some contact with facts.
tomjen3 5y ago
I certainly appreciate dreaming, but you are missing domestic violence[0], the I want shiny thing effect, rape[1], jalousy murder and all traffic violations, which are probably going to be worse when drugs are more freely available. Some of that may be solvable by only making UBI availabel to nonfellons, or keep people in prison until we are pretty sure they won't commit any crimes[3] [0]: alcohol makes this a worse problem, but it is not the only thing that causes it. [1]: it is almost always easier to hire a prostitute, if this was about sex. [3]: you will have ended nearly all non serious crimes, meaning that those who do commit crimes will be really bad people.
- likeclockwork 5y ago
  > A strong public mental health system. I think you missed this point maybe.

transitory_pce 5y ago

> There are a few genuinely 'bad people' out there Do you want to count the number of violent rapes by year? Violent premeditated murders? Lets add violent robbery and assault by people have food and a place to stay, but are looking to level up and buy shiny things? This is not a circumstance, and there are many 'bad people' out there.

throwawaygimp 5y ago
How about a legal and regulated sex industry. I live in a country with next to no violent premeditated murders, next to no violent robbery. And a LOT of very poor people. But there is a public social safety net which you can't fall below. So no one is ever really desperate. I understand if you're based in the US why you think this way, but it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
anovikov 5y ago
Most of these are mental health issues. ESPECIALLY violent rape. Really every cop will tell you that vast majority of crime is not committed by some cold-blooded, well-planning, career criminals - but by mentally unstable or sick people and/or people suffering from addictions, that do ridiculous things being clearly out of sane mind. Sadly, psychiatry is really in its infancy and its success record at both diagnosis and treatment plain out sucks.
- transitory_pce 5y ago
  What about cold blooded well planning rapists who work as cops?
  - zepto 5y ago
    Most of these are mental health issues.
    - anovikov 5y ago
      Basically, is there any "rational" reason to be a rapist AT ALL? Especially in today's world which is full of easy to get sex. I think every rapist is mentally not OK.
      - zepto 5y ago
        > Basically, is there any "rational" reason to be a rapist AT ALL? Are you equating taking irrational actions with being mentally ill? By that logic, everyone is mentally ill. > Especially in today's world which is full of easy to get sex. What makes you think sex is easy to get in today’s world? The evidence would contradict that. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/all-about-sex/202106/why-so-many-people-are-having-less-sex-they-used https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/all-about-sex/202106... > I think every rapist is mentally not OK. Sure, but is it an illness which can be alleviated?
        anovikov 5y ago
        >Sure, but is it an illness which can be alleviated? That's exactly my point. There isn't. So we criminalise it instead. It's inhumane and will be most certainly seen by our grandchildren in a way similar as we see chattel slavery today, but it's just simply that we have no other way today.
        zepto 5y ago
        How do you imagine our grandchildren will solve it?
benrbray 5y ago
My own feeling is that many of these people were not born evil, but their life circumstances as children (e.g. extreme poverty or abuse by family members) set them on a bad trajectory that's quite hard to correct for in adulthood. I think giving every child a stable home life will go a long way in reducing crime. Of course some people will slip through the cracks. But I'm in agreement with OP that the number is quite small compared to the number of people currently incarcerated.
AussieWog93 5y ago
>Do you want to count the number of violent rapes by year? Violent premeditated murders? People do keep count of this, and the (per-capita) rate of violent crime has been falling fairly monotonically since at least the end of WW2. Our genetics haven't changed in that time, but circumstances have.
- transitory_pce 5y ago
  So what do you do with the violently inclined people? Put them in therapy and hope they get better?
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    I mean, it depends on what you mean by "violently inclined". I'm not a sociologist, so I don't know specifically what works and what doesn't, but clearly whatever we've been doing for the last 50 years has led to a smaller percentage of children born with inherently aggressive/antisocial personalities going on to commit violent crimes as an adult. If you're talking about adults with violent inclinations that have acted on them and committed horrific crimes, then the obvious answer is to segregate them from the rest of society as they're clearly dangerous. It looks like we're speaking across purposes. I'm not trying to absolve rapists and murderers of blame, nor am I trying to downplay the danger they pose to the rest of us. At the same time, though we should acknowledge that violent crime seems to be a mostly-solvable problem on a population level and simply throwing up your arms and saying "bad people are bad" isn't going to push the stats down.
  - skinkestek 5y ago
    Some get better, some are disasters waiting to happen. Source: Norwegians do this. It is not every day it seems but there absolutely are multiple cases each years of people with violent pasts who become violent again given the opportunity. There are two types of prison sentences here: ordinary and "forvaring" (best translation I could come up with is "detainment") which practically means they get to serve a minimum sentence anyway but won't be released until the specialists consider them reasonably safe. Kind of close to life but with a chance of parole, only the parole is meant to be the rule, not the exception. For now it seems to work well enough, but if the rate climbs I think they will have to make adjustments.
anemoiac 5y ago
The comment you’re responding to suggests that implementing certain societal changes would dramatically reduce crime. Your reply completely ignores their considerations and offers the status quo, I.e. a world completely lacking the changes they mention, as a supposed counter-argument.

bserge 5y ago

If only.

jpxw 5y ago

Health insurance for all? Agree. I’m not sold on the economics of UBI. IMO something that I think would make a huge difference while also being realistically achievable is criminal justice reform. We cannot let prisons continue being factories for drug addicts and career criminals. There must surely be a better way than this.

throwawaygimp 5y ago
UBI no one knows. Being sold or otherwise doesn't matter. Small trials here and there aren't much use. We need a country with balls to try it like Portugal did with drug policy. So yea, I'm not sold either. No one really is until we get the hard truth. Nothing more complex (and chaotic) than society and it's economy. Good luck modelling and predicting that reliably ha!
- jimnotgym 5y ago
  Whilst the detractors of UBI like to paint it as automatically impossible, like breaking some fundamental law of nature, I bet the same people would have said the same things about the Covid benefit schemes. In my country people could be furloughed by their employer on 80% of their salary... and somehow we paid for it ok.
  - everyone 5y ago
    Most people's jobs are utterly pointless. Yet still, by doing these jobs the workers get money with which they can buy their portion of resources. Let's just do the same thing without the pointless and wasteful busy work. Maybe the only thing stopping us is our cultural values dating back to the industrial revolution when workers were indoctrinated with the idea of work as virtuous.
    - hunter-gatherer 5y ago
      I mostly agree with this. When I worked in the federal government, a bunch of colleagues there used to jest that it was "middle class welfare". The point being, that a huge portion of the white collar federal employees just exist to fill a billet. The number of free loaders was insane. In my experience, most operations were done by a few, and much of the extra work that was done really didn't need to happen (example: making useless one time spreadsheets with 10 rows and 4 columns filled with data that expires in the short term, embed into powerpoint, make powerpoint look pretty, email it to someone)

adam-a 5y ago

Your comment ignores the most obvious problems in the system. First this guy had his conviction overturned, he was innocent, and he claims his sentence was politically motivated. Second, this type of solitary confinement is inhumane and unecessary. Yes, it would be great to improve the quality of life for prospective criminals, but we don't need to set the bar as high as UBI, we could start by having a fair and sympathetic penal system.

kilroy123 5y ago

It's been my experience around the world that about 99% of people are honest for the most part and won't rob or harm you. But... that means there's that 1% who _will_. I think no matter what, that 1% will exist (this is just a gut feeling). That means in the US alone, there are ~3.3 million people roaming around that will rob, steal, murder, rape, and do other horrible things. At a peak, 2.3 million were in prison so I don't think that number is too far off. Yes, I understand the complexities of this. Yes, I know many of those people are in prison for drug related offenses. I'm not here to debate any of that, it's a complex issue and I'm generalizing big time. It's just to point out that, the 1% thing probably has some truth to it based on real data.

SirHound 5y ago
That’d be “data” if the American prison system was just. But it isn’t.
AussieWog93 5y ago
>It's just to point out that, the 1% thing probably has some truth to it based on real data. Quite the opposite. Rates of violent crime vary by orders of magnitude from one society to the next, and have reduced dramatically over time within most societies in the developed world with no indication that we've reached the bottom.
account42 5y ago
> It's been my experience around the world that about 99% of people are honest for the most part and won't rob or harm you. But... that means there's that 1% who _will_. I think no matter what, that 1% will exist (this is just a gut feeling). Yes, those tend to be referred to as the 1%.
- kilroy123 5y ago
  Exactly, biker gangs even wear a 1% patch. Which means, they're part of that 1%.

rkangel 5y ago

I think we should absolutely do all of that, for more reasons than just reducing crime. Specifically talking about crime though, I think it becomes diminishing returns. Some countries in Western Europe are not a million miles from that ideal and still have a non-negligible crime rate and homelessness rate. Mental health support is probably the biggest thing missing, at least in part because we (as a planet) are quite bad at treating it. I expect (and hope) that that's the area that will have the biggest advances in medical treatment over the next couple of decades.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago
Plus there's organized crime, white-collar crime, etc; you could get just about enough to keep your head above water, yes, but what if you could become rich instead?

goodpoint 5y ago

I think people understimate the impact on mental health caused by the absence of social safety nets. Provide UBI and health services and a lot of anxiety might go away. Remove the need to toil in a bad workplace and a lot of depression might go away.

chrisshroba 5y ago
I think you might mean “underestimate”?
- goodpoint 5y ago
  Thank you. Fixed.
throwawaygimp 5y ago
Bingo

downWidOutaFite 5y ago

The man in the article was a political prisoner punished for joining the Black Panthers. It doesnt really have to do with crime unoess you count the crime of abusing the justice system for political purposes.

balb0a 5y ago

Thomas Sowell would disagree on some points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERj3QeGw9Ok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERj3QeGw9Ok But I don't live in America:).

Gunax 5y ago

I don't think there's anything wrong with starting a debate. Rehabilitation is one of those code words that polls well, but I am skeptical it exists. In reality it usually just means 'addiction treatment' (which seldom works) and there isnt really a good analogy for crimes that are not drug related. Just for my own clarity, what exactly constitues rehabilitation for eg. someone who embezzles? The second issue is that it seems to focus on preventing additional crime, but punishment is about preventing crime before it happens. Just proving 'I would never do it again' isn't really the point, we want to prevent crimes from ever happening. Your theory seems to be that most people are inherently good and wouldn't do crime just because if their nature. I think that is fundamentally wrong, and I can prove it. All you need to do is examine situations in which people were suddenly put in situations where they knew they were unlikely to receive punishment: and crime explodes. There were millions of rapes commited by soldiers against German women during the occupation following world war 2. My guess is most of the perpetrators never raped again--they went home and were otherwise normal citizens. Had they not been given the opportunity to get away with it, they would not have done it. I sort if see this akin to the Milgram experiment. You probably think you wouldn't shock the man--and maybe you wouldn't--but our studies suggest most people would.

BayAreaEscapee 5y ago
I don't disagree with our premise against people being inherently good. I personally don't think that a universal basic income will solve all the problems that its proponents think it will solve. But I don't think your example about rape in occupied Germany is a great example. The citizens of the Soviet Union suffered greatly, and it is estimated that about 26 million of them died during WW2. I have no doubt that the minds of those soldiers were filled with thoughts of rage and revenge, and probably felt that the perpetrators of the war somehow deserved it.

TomSwirly 5y ago

> There are a few genuinely 'bad people' out there. But it's vanishingly small. 70 million people voted for Donald Trump.

IiydAbITMvJkqKf 5y ago
If you think half of the USA are genuinely bad people you desperately need to go outside.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  If you think that 70 million people is half of the USA, you desperately need some contact with facts.

tomjen3 5y ago

I certainly appreciate dreaming, but you are missing domestic violence[0], the I want shiny thing effect, rape[1], jalousy murder and all traffic violations, which are probably going to be worse when drugs are more freely available. Some of that may be solvable by only making UBI availabel to nonfellons, or keep people in prison until we are pretty sure they won't commit any crimes[3] [0]: alcohol makes this a worse problem, but it is not the only thing that causes it. [1]: it is almost always easier to hire a prostitute, if this was about sex. [3]: you will have ended nearly all non serious crimes, meaning that those who do commit crimes will be really bad people.

likeclockwork 5y ago
> A strong public mental health system. I think you missed this point maybe.