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We aren’t very serious about enforcing our laws, especially when kids are involved. We had police catch 12 and 13 year olds (Kia Boyz) this weekend in a car wit

We aren’t very serious about enforcing our laws, especially when kids are involved. We had police catch 12 and 13 year olds (Kia Boyz) this weekend in a car with guns, and they are out already. They will get some restorative justice, but no real correction in behavior and I’m sure they will do it again. Our real problem is just the pendulum swinging too far towards assuming people want to be good and they just need some compassion.

bryanlarsen 3y ago
I don't think there's anything more guaranteed to turn a 12 or 13 year old into a lifelong criminal than what I think you're implying by "real correction in behaviour"; aka a multi-year prison sentence.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  If someone is stealing cars at 12 or 13 years old, they're already well on their way down the path towards irredeemability. Society has to do something or they will turn into a lifelong criminal. A multi-year prison sentence is probably not going to help them, but counseling, a better home and school environment, food in the belly, and so on might. You have to do something besides "catch and release" which has been the default in the USA for some time.
  - whimsicalism 3y ago
    USA crime is still very low compared to pretty much the entire 20th century, it seems early to proclaim certain approaches as a failure. FWIW, catalytic converter theft was recently a big problem in the US and the classic approach of getting the FBI involved, identifying the high-level fencers and arresting, was incredibly effective and cat thefts have plummeted. I suspect disrupting the organized crime in Canada would work similarly well at reducing car theft.
    - rvnx 3y ago
      It's only the case if people don't deny that the crimes exist, and Canada might suffer a bit from that lack of recognition. In France as well, if you mention that there is criminality, people will frown upon you. "No it's 100% safe country, it is a feeling of being unsafe".
      - whimsicalism 3y ago
        I am someone you would label a ‘crime denier’ because I feel the problem is definitely smaller than in the past and it is generally overstated in the media. That is precisely why I think we should focus on organized crime and the driving clearing houses rather than individual street-level criminals.
        seanmcdirmid 3y ago
        I used to be like that, then I started seeing things happening myself. The first time you see Kia Boyz smashing windows and grabbing purses in a grocery store parking lot at noon on a Sunday is an eye opener (Do they want to get caught? this is pretty blatant, maybe they know we don't have many police these days). I always thought our crime problem was limited to porch piracy and street parked cars getting their windows bashed in at night (you know, typical drug addict crime), but nope, we have another problem.
        whimsicalism 3y ago
        I hear what you're saying, I live in SF. My opinions are evolving on the subject. There is a lot of not profit-driven vandalism and violence that I witness here and disrupting fencers will obviously do nothing for that. But for car theft & other profit-driven commodity thefts, I do think targeting the markets can often be very effective.
        seanmcdirmid 3y ago
        I don't know. Many of these kids...they are from war torn communities (legal immigrants, refugees). They might be working through huge trauma, and they don't seem very organized at all (steal a car to...steal another car and/or knock over a gas station...then abandon the car on the street somewhere). There really isn't a market to target, the cars are almost always found after a few days, just trashed and damaged. They are just used for other crimes mostly. The drug addicts are much more organized in comparison (steal legos at Target, fence at some place for fentanyl).
  - cyanydeez 3y ago
    if someone is 12 or 13, they're far more receptive to change than a CEO whose spent their life stealing wages. one gets constantly brought up while the other is celebrated.
    - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
      > if someone is 12 or 13, they're far more receptive to change than a CEO whose spent their life stealing wages. Yes! Which makes our lack of action even more tragic.
      - cyanydeez 3y ago
        when we consider wage theft as a significant driver of poverty, punishment for the 13 year old is more useless than anything.
        seanmcdirmid 3y ago
        So you would condemn the 13 year old to a (likely short) life of hardship because wage theft is a more important problem?
        cyanydeez 3y ago
        mmm
  - Domenic_S 3y ago
    > counseling, a better home and school environment, food in the belly, and so on might. This seems right for preventing criminals from forming out of otherwise-blank-slate children, but what do you do with these kids? There's no magic wand that turns their home & school life right. On the other hand, there are plenty of kids who had a perfectly fine and financed upbringing who turned into criminals and terrors, they just tend toward white-collar crime. This brings us full circle to the original comment that religion used to serve a useful purpose for society that's been largely lost -- a set of ethics & morals, and if those don't take real well there's always the all-seeing entity watching you at all times. In modern times the all-seeing eye of God has been replaced by surveillance cameras, but what is the base of morals replaced by?
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      >a set of ethics & morals, and if those don't take real well there's always the all-seeing entity watching you at all times. Do you think we didn't have crime when the church was in charge?
      - Domenic_S 3y ago
        Is that really what you think I said? How about making a point with less snark to it that I could respond to?
    - withinboredom 3y ago
      The first thing is that there are no universal sets of morals. Ethics is a totally different beast but it’s something I’m not sure a young kid can wrap their heads around. But following “the rules” is something you can teach a kid and works until they are old enough to know when to break the rules. One thing we stressed to our son is: if you break the rules/laws, you will eventually get caught. So make sure whatever you are doing is worth the consequences. There’s no need for some magical god to punish people, just the fact that, eventually, someone will figure out what you did (or more likely, they’ll tell on themselves). It’s worked so far…
      - 3y ago
  - MSFT_Edging 3y ago
    Do you know about the endemic of illiteracy in the US right now? More likely than not that child can't even read above a 2nd grade level. We could have real rehabilitation centers focused on educating the kids, treating them like human beings with respect, and show them how to live life well. Or we could put them in kid-jail and be put at a higher risk for all sorts of violence and abuse just to punish them. As long as people hold the opinion that a 12 year old is "well on their way down the path towards irredeemability", we won't ever move past revenge based for-profit prisons and the crime problem will continue to get worse as these illiterate and stunted children are released back out into society.
    - immibis 3y ago
      Even better, we could focus on educating them properly the first time!
      - xipho 3y ago
        What teachers are saying is that socio-economics prevent any type of education from happening in many cases, i.e. there are many, many children who are going to struggle mightily unless the totality of their life systemically improves. Could teachers improve? Probably. Are teachers the underlying problem? I used to think so, but in dealing with our own school board/system it's very clear this is not the case.
      - vkou 3y ago
        That's easy. We just need to halve class sizes, fire half of the administration, double the pay for teachers in the worst districts, and raise the floor of the child social safety net to the point that even having complete fuckups for parents won't ruin your life.
    - anticensor 3y ago
      For profit prisons are the minority of all prisons.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  > I don't think there's anything more guaranteed to turn a 12 or 13 year old into a lifelong criminal than what I think you're implying by "real correction in behaviour"; aka a multi-year prison sentence. Society had better correct that problem quickly or those two 12/13 year old kids are going to have ruined their lives by the time they turn 18. Something drastic has to be done, a slap on the wrist and sending them back to their parents isn't sufficient. Right now we fail on both sides of the pendulum, maybe its time to rethink things. I do think Europe does deal better with this. Even in France, they have a fairly aggressive/intolerant police force, but a real correction focus once arrests/convictions have occurred.
  - immibis 3y ago
    The problem cannot be corrected by locking them in a room until they're 25, then releasing them.
    - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
      The problem also cannot be corrected by letting them run wild until they are 18, and then locking them in a room until they are 50, and then releasing them.
- cltby 3y ago
  Criminality is congenital. Social interventions will not fix the kid. Neither for that matter will prison, but at least it will protect the rest of us from his increasingly violent depredations.
  - anticorporate 3y ago
    > Criminality is congenital. This is a categorically disproven view. Thankfully, it's no longer widely held, but unfortunately not before it was used to justify millions of cruel acts from eugenics to genocide.
withinboredom 3y ago
Sounds like they had some rich parents to bail them out. I highly doubt they had court in less than a week.
evilantnie 3y ago
Just to help not spread misinformation, the 12 year old was released as he was a passenger and police believe he was forced by the driver (his brother) into the car. The 13 year old driver was not released and will remain in jail until his trial.
cyanydeez 3y ago
people as organizations are a larger problem that people as cultural products.
ToucanLoucan 3y ago
> Our real problem is just the pendulum swinging too far towards assuming people want to be good and they just need some compassion. There's an entire field of study covering how ineffective punitive justice is. Unless the perpetrator at hand is literally an irredeemable monster, locking them away in a box until they're later released with even more stigmas, even further behind the curve, and without the ability to earn a living does nothing except push them right back to the anti-social behavior that put them on the radar of the justice system in the first place. All evidence on the subject points to the same thing: the best predictor of who will be a criminal and who won't is their zip code, because of things like under-served communities and generational poverty. When you give people no options to make a living in a pro-social way, they will do it in an anti-social one. Does that mean every person in the justice system just needs a firm pat on the back and to be released? Fuck no. But if you long term want to actually reduce crime, the evidence is in: you do that by improving home lives and giving communities the resources they need to grow, not by locking people up.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  To be honest, there's also entire fields of study of how God makes everything in the world happen, so I doubt I'm much convinced by how many fields of studies there are. People have been able to bullshit each other over obvious things for eons. The existence of such fields means nothing.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    God doesn't have many peer reviewed studies. This is a non-sequitur. You don't get to hand wave away reality that you don't like
    - renewiltord 3y ago
      Cellular functions of spermatogonial stem cells in relation to JAK/STAT signaling pathway was peer-reviewed so that isn't convincing either.
autoexec 3y ago
> We aren’t very serious about enforcing our laws, especially when kids are involved. In the US we lock more of our citizens behind bars than any other nation on Earth. Conviction for even a minor offense can make it extremely difficult to get employment or housing. People rarely get a clean slate after serving their time and even an arrest record without a conviction can haunt you. Nearly all other developed countries have abolished capitol punishment. We haven't gone a single year since 1981 without an execution. The pendulum has already swung too far towards punishment and law enforcement, to the point that abuses by police and our mass incarceration problem are a total embarrassment for a country that tries to call itself "the land of the free" with a straight face. There's little doubt that many of the people arrested in the US would do better with some compassion than they would with harsher punishment. This is especially true for literal children. One example where compassion is the better option would be treating addiction instead of punishing drug addicts. That would save billions in tax dollars, reduce crime, and help the addict to recover their lives and remove several barriers that could prevent them from getting work and being productive members of society. If we'd done that decades ago instead of feeding US citizens to the prison industrial complex we'd be so much better off as a nation today. There's a risk for over-correcting, but there's also a massive amount of space between "do nothing" and our usual method today which amounts to "torture then never forgive" or "torture then kill" so there's plenty of opportunity to find some improvements.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  The US isn't very uniform. Mississippi locks way more people up than Washington state. Both states are pretty ineffective in keeping crime down. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/global/2021.html?gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAiA29auBhBxEiwAnKcSqlpwRKaEdXdgqFadBu01DjlB34kb-BpRdYZFl88wZzu7PW7c6dsNmRoCAvQQAvD_BwE https://www.prisonpolicy.org/global/2021.html?gad_source=1&g... Washington is put at around Thailand, Mississippi locks more than twice as many people per capita up (and isn't very comparable to a country).
  - autoexec 3y ago
    Well that's depressing. Thailand is not a country we should strive to emulate. They have their own mass incarceration problem (they rank 8th in the world), state executions, their own "war on drugs", lots of violent killings involving guns, high levels of corruption, forced disappearances, torture, extrajudicial killings, and a horrible track record for human rights. Thailand is a mess and it's tragic that so much of the US can't do any better when it comes to locking citizens behind bars.

bryanlarsen 3y ago

I don't think there's anything more guaranteed to turn a 12 or 13 year old into a lifelong criminal than what I think you're implying by "real correction in behaviour"; aka a multi-year prison sentence.

ryandrake 3y ago
If someone is stealing cars at 12 or 13 years old, they're already well on their way down the path towards irredeemability. Society has to do something or they will turn into a lifelong criminal. A multi-year prison sentence is probably not going to help them, but counseling, a better home and school environment, food in the belly, and so on might. You have to do something besides "catch and release" which has been the default in the USA for some time.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  USA crime is still very low compared to pretty much the entire 20th century, it seems early to proclaim certain approaches as a failure. FWIW, catalytic converter theft was recently a big problem in the US and the classic approach of getting the FBI involved, identifying the high-level fencers and arresting, was incredibly effective and cat thefts have plummeted. I suspect disrupting the organized crime in Canada would work similarly well at reducing car theft.
  - rvnx 3y ago
    It's only the case if people don't deny that the crimes exist, and Canada might suffer a bit from that lack of recognition. In France as well, if you mention that there is criminality, people will frown upon you. "No it's 100% safe country, it is a feeling of being unsafe".
    - whimsicalism 3y ago
      I am someone you would label a ‘crime denier’ because I feel the problem is definitely smaller than in the past and it is generally overstated in the media. That is precisely why I think we should focus on organized crime and the driving clearing houses rather than individual street-level criminals.
      - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
        I used to be like that, then I started seeing things happening myself. The first time you see Kia Boyz smashing windows and grabbing purses in a grocery store parking lot at noon on a Sunday is an eye opener (Do they want to get caught? this is pretty blatant, maybe they know we don't have many police these days). I always thought our crime problem was limited to porch piracy and street parked cars getting their windows bashed in at night (you know, typical drug addict crime), but nope, we have another problem.
        whimsicalism 3y ago
        I hear what you're saying, I live in SF. My opinions are evolving on the subject. There is a lot of not profit-driven vandalism and violence that I witness here and disrupting fencers will obviously do nothing for that. But for car theft & other profit-driven commodity thefts, I do think targeting the markets can often be very effective.
        seanmcdirmid 3y ago
        I don't know. Many of these kids...they are from war torn communities (legal immigrants, refugees). They might be working through huge trauma, and they don't seem very organized at all (steal a car to...steal another car and/or knock over a gas station...then abandon the car on the street somewhere). There really isn't a market to target, the cars are almost always found after a few days, just trashed and damaged. They are just used for other crimes mostly. The drug addicts are much more organized in comparison (steal legos at Target, fence at some place for fentanyl).
- cyanydeez 3y ago
  if someone is 12 or 13, they're far more receptive to change than a CEO whose spent their life stealing wages. one gets constantly brought up while the other is celebrated.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    > if someone is 12 or 13, they're far more receptive to change than a CEO whose spent their life stealing wages. Yes! Which makes our lack of action even more tragic.
    - cyanydeez 3y ago
      when we consider wage theft as a significant driver of poverty, punishment for the 13 year old is more useless than anything.
      - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
        So you would condemn the 13 year old to a (likely short) life of hardship because wage theft is a more important problem?
        cyanydeez 3y ago
        mmm
- Domenic_S 3y ago
  > counseling, a better home and school environment, food in the belly, and so on might. This seems right for preventing criminals from forming out of otherwise-blank-slate children, but what do you do with these kids? There's no magic wand that turns their home & school life right. On the other hand, there are plenty of kids who had a perfectly fine and financed upbringing who turned into criminals and terrors, they just tend toward white-collar crime. This brings us full circle to the original comment that religion used to serve a useful purpose for society that's been largely lost -- a set of ethics & morals, and if those don't take real well there's always the all-seeing entity watching you at all times. In modern times the all-seeing eye of God has been replaced by surveillance cameras, but what is the base of morals replaced by?
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    >a set of ethics & morals, and if those don't take real well there's always the all-seeing entity watching you at all times. Do you think we didn't have crime when the church was in charge?
    - Domenic_S 3y ago
      Is that really what you think I said? How about making a point with less snark to it that I could respond to?
  - withinboredom 3y ago
    The first thing is that there are no universal sets of morals. Ethics is a totally different beast but it’s something I’m not sure a young kid can wrap their heads around. But following “the rules” is something you can teach a kid and works until they are old enough to know when to break the rules. One thing we stressed to our son is: if you break the rules/laws, you will eventually get caught. So make sure whatever you are doing is worth the consequences. There’s no need for some magical god to punish people, just the fact that, eventually, someone will figure out what you did (or more likely, they’ll tell on themselves). It’s worked so far…
    - 3y ago
- MSFT_Edging 3y ago
  Do you know about the endemic of illiteracy in the US right now? More likely than not that child can't even read above a 2nd grade level. We could have real rehabilitation centers focused on educating the kids, treating them like human beings with respect, and show them how to live life well. Or we could put them in kid-jail and be put at a higher risk for all sorts of violence and abuse just to punish them. As long as people hold the opinion that a 12 year old is "well on their way down the path towards irredeemability", we won't ever move past revenge based for-profit prisons and the crime problem will continue to get worse as these illiterate and stunted children are released back out into society.
  - immibis 3y ago
    Even better, we could focus on educating them properly the first time!
    - xipho 3y ago
      What teachers are saying is that socio-economics prevent any type of education from happening in many cases, i.e. there are many, many children who are going to struggle mightily unless the totality of their life systemically improves. Could teachers improve? Probably. Are teachers the underlying problem? I used to think so, but in dealing with our own school board/system it's very clear this is not the case.
    - vkou 3y ago
      That's easy. We just need to halve class sizes, fire half of the administration, double the pay for teachers in the worst districts, and raise the floor of the child social safety net to the point that even having complete fuckups for parents won't ruin your life.
  - anticensor 3y ago
    For profit prisons are the minority of all prisons.
seanmcdirmid 3y ago
> I don't think there's anything more guaranteed to turn a 12 or 13 year old into a lifelong criminal than what I think you're implying by "real correction in behaviour"; aka a multi-year prison sentence. Society had better correct that problem quickly or those two 12/13 year old kids are going to have ruined their lives by the time they turn 18. Something drastic has to be done, a slap on the wrist and sending them back to their parents isn't sufficient. Right now we fail on both sides of the pendulum, maybe its time to rethink things. I do think Europe does deal better with this. Even in France, they have a fairly aggressive/intolerant police force, but a real correction focus once arrests/convictions have occurred.
- immibis 3y ago
  The problem cannot be corrected by locking them in a room until they're 25, then releasing them.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    The problem also cannot be corrected by letting them run wild until they are 18, and then locking them in a room until they are 50, and then releasing them.
cltby 3y ago
Criminality is congenital. Social interventions will not fix the kid. Neither for that matter will prison, but at least it will protect the rest of us from his increasingly violent depredations.
- anticorporate 3y ago
  > Criminality is congenital. This is a categorically disproven view. Thankfully, it's no longer widely held, but unfortunately not before it was used to justify millions of cruel acts from eugenics to genocide.

withinboredom 3y ago

Sounds like they had some rich parents to bail them out. I highly doubt they had court in less than a week.

evilantnie 3y ago

Just to help not spread misinformation, the 12 year old was released as he was a passenger and police believe he was forced by the driver (his brother) into the car. The 13 year old driver was not released and will remain in jail until his trial.

cyanydeez 3y ago

people as organizations are a larger problem that people as cultural products.

ToucanLoucan 3y ago

> Our real problem is just the pendulum swinging too far towards assuming people want to be good and they just need some compassion. There's an entire field of study covering how ineffective punitive justice is. Unless the perpetrator at hand is literally an irredeemable monster, locking them away in a box until they're later released with even more stigmas, even further behind the curve, and without the ability to earn a living does nothing except push them right back to the anti-social behavior that put them on the radar of the justice system in the first place. All evidence on the subject points to the same thing: the best predictor of who will be a criminal and who won't is their zip code, because of things like under-served communities and generational poverty. When you give people no options to make a living in a pro-social way, they will do it in an anti-social one. Does that mean every person in the justice system just needs a firm pat on the back and to be released? Fuck no. But if you long term want to actually reduce crime, the evidence is in: you do that by improving home lives and giving communities the resources they need to grow, not by locking people up.

renewiltord 3y ago
To be honest, there's also entire fields of study of how God makes everything in the world happen, so I doubt I'm much convinced by how many fields of studies there are. People have been able to bullshit each other over obvious things for eons. The existence of such fields means nothing.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  God doesn't have many peer reviewed studies. This is a non-sequitur. You don't get to hand wave away reality that you don't like
  - renewiltord 3y ago
    Cellular functions of spermatogonial stem cells in relation to JAK/STAT signaling pathway was peer-reviewed so that isn't convincing either.

autoexec 3y ago

> We aren’t very serious about enforcing our laws, especially when kids are involved. In the US we lock more of our citizens behind bars than any other nation on Earth. Conviction for even a minor offense can make it extremely difficult to get employment or housing. People rarely get a clean slate after serving their time and even an arrest record without a conviction can haunt you. Nearly all other developed countries have abolished capitol punishment. We haven't gone a single year since 1981 without an execution. The pendulum has already swung too far towards punishment and law enforcement, to the point that abuses by police and our mass incarceration problem are a total embarrassment for a country that tries to call itself "the land of the free" with a straight face. There's little doubt that many of the people arrested in the US would do better with some compassion than they would with harsher punishment. This is especially true for literal children. One example where compassion is the better option would be treating addiction instead of punishing drug addicts. That would save billions in tax dollars, reduce crime, and help the addict to recover their lives and remove several barriers that could prevent them from getting work and being productive members of society. If we'd done that decades ago instead of feeding US citizens to the prison industrial complex we'd be so much better off as a nation today. There's a risk for over-correcting, but there's also a massive amount of space between "do nothing" and our usual method today which amounts to "torture then never forgive" or "torture then kill" so there's plenty of opportunity to find some improvements.

seanmcdirmid 3y ago
The US isn't very uniform. Mississippi locks way more people up than Washington state. Both states are pretty ineffective in keeping crime down. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/global/2021.html?gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAiA29auBhBxEiwAnKcSqlpwRKaEdXdgqFadBu01DjlB34kb-BpRdYZFl88wZzu7PW7c6dsNmRoCAvQQAvD_BwE https://www.prisonpolicy.org/global/2021.html?gad_source=1&g... Washington is put at around Thailand, Mississippi locks more than twice as many people per capita up (and isn't very comparable to a country).
- autoexec 3y ago
  Well that's depressing. Thailand is not a country we should strive to emulate. They have their own mass incarceration problem (they rank 8th in the world), state executions, their own "war on drugs", lots of violent killings involving guns, high levels of corruption, forced disappearances, torture, extrajudicial killings, and a horrible track record for human rights. Thailand is a mess and it's tragic that so much of the US can't do any better when it comes to locking citizens behind bars.