4 ms·

But we have built so many enduring systems that rely on bad apples to function the way the do. See "insurance pricing", "private prisons", and "justice enforcem

by cwmoore 2mo ago

But we have built so many enduring systems that rely on bad apples to function the way the do. See "insurance pricing", "private prisons", and "justice enforcement". In the real world, the ideal number of jails or homeless people is neither zero nor "all of them".

jMyles 2mo ago
I think the ideal number of _prisons_ (as distinct from jails / pretrial confinement) is zero. This whole charade in the USA of dressing up slavery (without even a single day of interruption on January 31, 1865) as "correction" is absurd. It's obviously a way to continue an economy that relies on a supply of involuntary labor, and has nothing whatsoever to do with public safety. There are plenty of ways to implement restorative justice which are superior to forcing convicts to make starbucks uniforms (start here if you've never delved into this, but there are great books on the topic which you can find from here: https://harvardpolitics.com/restorative-justice-abolition/ https://harvardpolitics.com/restorative-justice-abolition/).
- cwmoore 2mo ago
  That too. The check of "without due process" did not undo that rebranding or its many modern forms.
- tony69 2mo ago
  Some crimes are bad enough that the perpetrators don’t deserve second chances. I’m ok with punishment for its own sake in some cases even if it would be more “cost effective” or “productive” for society to rehabilitate.
  - cwmoore 2mo ago
    Sure, again bad apples, but one size fits sentences to the same institution? They are not all of the people ever arrested, or all of the time, or even most, and still the fundamentally medieval violence we orient by.
  - 542354234235 2mo ago
    Sure, the idea of revenge is attractive to me as well. But I really don't want the legal system to operate at the level of my base emotional desires. If a crime is bad enough that there should be no second chance, segregate them from society safely until they die. I don't see how the justice system hurting/harming/torturing people does anything other than normalize hurting others when you feel wronged, and therefore normalizing more criminal violence.
  - jMyles 2mo ago
    This seems like an orthogonal point, and one that I mostly agree with. But the question is: just because some perpetrators don't deserve second chances, why does that mean that McDonalds and Raytheon get to be the beneficiary of their free labor? And more importantly: with a huge economic incentive to enslave ("imprison"... eye roll) these people, can we ever actually have a system that properly selects people who actually need to be removed from society? If prisons are actually a viable mechanism for public safety, let's amend the 13th amendment to prohibit all slavery, instead of allowing it to exist in prisons, and then we'll get a clearer picture.
- cwmoore 2mo ago
  I’d guess the downvotes are an aberration of today’s politics, because your account of the history is factually and legally valid. (keyword “restorative”) To me, the idea that incarceration and police use of force is wrong because it is racist is backwards. It’s racist because it is wrong.
  - gadflyinyoureye 2mo ago
    Is aberration for the ground you claim? My understanding is that in the west up until recently prisons were uncommon due to cost. The courts either fined you or they killed you. You might’ve been part of a Work gang, but the goal was to kill you.
    - cwmoore 2mo ago
      I don't understand your question or your comments. I have not considered the relevance of execution to this discussion, but I do not see fines and imprisonment as the same categories of punishment/correction at all.
HWR_14 2mo ago
Obviously the ideal number of jails is not zero, but why wouldn't the ideal number of homeless people be zero?
- californical 2mo ago
  I’m guessing there’s a bit of breathing room at the lower end of the system - there will be people who become drug addicts or have major mental health breaks and lose everything. And ideally we have good safety nets that find these people and give them resources and treatment, but some people will refuse everything and end up in bad situations of homelessness due to their drug and/or mental health crises. And even in a society that forces those people into attempted treatment programs, there will still be a bit of time in between their issues manifesting and them going into treatment/therapy/confinement. To have “zero homeless” you’d need to preventatively intercept these people before they become homeless and force them into confinement in treatment facilities and mental hospitals essentially. And that’s a dangerous game because you’re essentially taking away someone’s freedom preemptively before they become homeless
  - cwmoore 2mo ago
    This is along the lines I mean. Or when shared households break up, and some stay, some leave, which one should you send to the asylum forever and why not both? Or to jail for the fights they both participated in? What of the deaths by a thousand cuts and no one at fault for the murder? But the idea that jails are an unadulterated societal good, or that they are the natural only option to police, is a crazy religion. Why on earth do we have no timely resolutions but through handcuffs and jail? There is expediency, and then there is externalizing the whole of the troubles to the smallest number of people, who could never overturn a majority, even if they had the vote. I suggest the ability to put certain people in a metal box, at least partially for losing their grasp of a better role in the world, is a big, boldface moral hazard, and self-perpetuating, but with leering cheerleaders. Some people are wild and out of control sometimes. Treating them all as permanent bad apples is just as animalistic.
    - 2mo ago
hluska 2mo ago
What is the ideal number of unhoused people? And how do you arrive at that number?
- cwmoore 2mo ago
  Probably "fewer", and probably by providing step-up housing for more people to whom it is out of reach.
jacquesm 2mo ago
In the real world the jails are for holding, the prisons are for convicted criminals and the homeless people (most of them anyway, because not everybody that is homeless is derelict, and the addicts) get whatever help they need. Because we actually can afford it.
- ai_critic 2mo ago
  > Because we actually can afford it. Can you, though? And for how long? With the current policymaking and demographic and economic trends? There is an argument to be made that the European social experiment has largely been indirectly funded by the largesse of the American hard-and-soft power strategy. As we're moving away from that (for various reasons, most idiotic), there is a question as to how it will persist. (This is not meant as trolling--there's a real existential question here. A starting point is an attack on that argument: what is the "natural" expenditure on defense versus what you can get away with America's force projection? How much social funding is derived from that delta, in the most generous sense? Maybe it's a red-herring.)
  - Muromec 2mo ago
    >There is an argument to be made If we are speaking about housing specifically, at my part of the swamp it's subsidises by more affluent people (they way our atheistic christian beliefs command) and the general idea predates the rise of America anyway. Dealing with homeless people and the like the European way is also /cheaper/ too, IRRC. Not having crack junkies shit in my front and backyard and also not worrying about it is tax money well I believe.. It's up to the village council to decide to send coppers to beat them or medics to provide some free hits on a condition of having to take a shower.
GolfPopper 2mo ago
How old are those systems in their present configuration?
cardanome 2mo ago
The ideal number of jails and homeless people is zero. Obviously you will not reach that literally. That's why it is an ideal number, not a real number. It is still a good and worthy goal. Finnland for example has nearly eradicated homelessness. It is not literally zero but 0.08% which is pretty good. You can also reduce the crime rate dramatically by better social security, education, easier access to mental health care and so many other things. And don't say we can't afford these things. These measures pay dividends in building a better society for everyone. What we can't afford is having so many billionaires not paying their fair share.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2mo ago
  >Finnland for example has nearly eradicated homelessness. It is not literally zero but 0.08% which is pretty good. If we had Finland's winters, I think we could eradicate homelessness by January.
  - cardanome 2mo ago
    If this is an attempt at humor, it is in very bad taste. And no, please educate yourself on what Finland did to eradicate homelessness. It has nothing to do climate but with the fact that Finland made it an explicit political goal to eradicate it i.e political will.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 2mo ago
      It is a success at humor, not only the attempt. Finland did something, but "eradicating homelessness" wasn't what they did. It has nothing to do with political will in the case of the United States, and everything to do with a grab-bag of leftist policies that are entirely incompatible. Even if we were to ignore those who are plainly unfit to live in a home from the score, the remainder can't be housed while you import millions of immigrants to compete with them for housing. You can have one or the other of those two things, but they are mutually incompatible. And that's before you even get to the people so broken that they complain that they want to be homeless, to be vagabonds, living out of tents in alleys and panhandling. Such people exist. Sometimes they even manage to show up online and say as much, so you can't claim perfect ignorance here. The addicts and the mentally ill that used to be institutionalized and whatever else can be said about them, they had a roof over their heads, do you want to bring back the big thorazine zombie warehouses? We could eradicate that homelessness. Is that your plan? I'm not even necessarily against it, but I do get a big kick out of the left that can't even bring themselves to say the words out loud. Finland is a dying nation with a fertility rate below 1.5. As they continue to shrink, they might manage to have so many surplus homes that homelessness is eliminated... or they might import a bunch of immigrants that put pressure on housing. They might decide that they can't forego military spending with Russia next door, in which case the social spending they're doing won't be necessarily as affordable. Especially if Trump screws NATO with finality. "Please educate yourself"... god, you people. No wonder you lose elections.

by cwmoore 2mo ago

jMyles 2mo ago

I think the ideal number of _prisons_ (as distinct from jails / pretrial confinement) is zero. This whole charade in the USA of dressing up slavery (without even a single day of interruption on January 31, 1865) as "correction" is absurd. It's obviously a way to continue an economy that relies on a supply of involuntary labor, and has nothing whatsoever to do with public safety. There are plenty of ways to implement restorative justice which are superior to forcing convicts to make starbucks uniforms (start here if you've never delved into this, but there are great books on the topic which you can find from here: https://harvardpolitics.com/restorative-justice-abolition/ https://harvardpolitics.com/restorative-justice-abolition/).

cwmoore 2mo ago
That too. The check of "without due process" did not undo that rebranding or its many modern forms.
tony69 2mo ago
Some crimes are bad enough that the perpetrators don’t deserve second chances. I’m ok with punishment for its own sake in some cases even if it would be more “cost effective” or “productive” for society to rehabilitate.
- cwmoore 2mo ago
  Sure, again bad apples, but one size fits sentences to the same institution? They are not all of the people ever arrested, or all of the time, or even most, and still the fundamentally medieval violence we orient by.
- 542354234235 2mo ago
  Sure, the idea of revenge is attractive to me as well. But I really don't want the legal system to operate at the level of my base emotional desires. If a crime is bad enough that there should be no second chance, segregate them from society safely until they die. I don't see how the justice system hurting/harming/torturing people does anything other than normalize hurting others when you feel wronged, and therefore normalizing more criminal violence.
- jMyles 2mo ago
  This seems like an orthogonal point, and one that I mostly agree with. But the question is: just because some perpetrators don't deserve second chances, why does that mean that McDonalds and Raytheon get to be the beneficiary of their free labor? And more importantly: with a huge economic incentive to enslave ("imprison"... eye roll) these people, can we ever actually have a system that properly selects people who actually need to be removed from society? If prisons are actually a viable mechanism for public safety, let's amend the 13th amendment to prohibit all slavery, instead of allowing it to exist in prisons, and then we'll get a clearer picture.
cwmoore 2mo ago
I’d guess the downvotes are an aberration of today’s politics, because your account of the history is factually and legally valid. (keyword “restorative”) To me, the idea that incarceration and police use of force is wrong because it is racist is backwards. It’s racist because it is wrong.
- gadflyinyoureye 2mo ago
  Is aberration for the ground you claim? My understanding is that in the west up until recently prisons were uncommon due to cost. The courts either fined you or they killed you. You might’ve been part of a Work gang, but the goal was to kill you.
  - cwmoore 2mo ago
    I don't understand your question or your comments. I have not considered the relevance of execution to this discussion, but I do not see fines and imprisonment as the same categories of punishment/correction at all.

HWR_14 2mo ago

Obviously the ideal number of jails is not zero, but why wouldn't the ideal number of homeless people be zero?

californical 2mo ago
I’m guessing there’s a bit of breathing room at the lower end of the system - there will be people who become drug addicts or have major mental health breaks and lose everything. And ideally we have good safety nets that find these people and give them resources and treatment, but some people will refuse everything and end up in bad situations of homelessness due to their drug and/or mental health crises. And even in a society that forces those people into attempted treatment programs, there will still be a bit of time in between their issues manifesting and them going into treatment/therapy/confinement. To have “zero homeless” you’d need to preventatively intercept these people before they become homeless and force them into confinement in treatment facilities and mental hospitals essentially. And that’s a dangerous game because you’re essentially taking away someone’s freedom preemptively before they become homeless
- cwmoore 2mo ago
  This is along the lines I mean. Or when shared households break up, and some stay, some leave, which one should you send to the asylum forever and why not both? Or to jail for the fights they both participated in? What of the deaths by a thousand cuts and no one at fault for the murder? But the idea that jails are an unadulterated societal good, or that they are the natural only option to police, is a crazy religion. Why on earth do we have no timely resolutions but through handcuffs and jail? There is expediency, and then there is externalizing the whole of the troubles to the smallest number of people, who could never overturn a majority, even if they had the vote. I suggest the ability to put certain people in a metal box, at least partially for losing their grasp of a better role in the world, is a big, boldface moral hazard, and self-perpetuating, but with leering cheerleaders. Some people are wild and out of control sometimes. Treating them all as permanent bad apples is just as animalistic.
  - 2mo ago

hluska 2mo ago

What is the ideal number of unhoused people? And how do you arrive at that number?

cwmoore 2mo ago
Probably "fewer", and probably by providing step-up housing for more people to whom it is out of reach.

jacquesm 2mo ago

In the real world the jails are for holding, the prisons are for convicted criminals and the homeless people (most of them anyway, because not everybody that is homeless is derelict, and the addicts) get whatever help they need. Because we actually can afford it.

ai_critic 2mo ago
> Because we actually can afford it. Can you, though? And for how long? With the current policymaking and demographic and economic trends? There is an argument to be made that the European social experiment has largely been indirectly funded by the largesse of the American hard-and-soft power strategy. As we're moving away from that (for various reasons, most idiotic), there is a question as to how it will persist. (This is not meant as trolling--there's a real existential question here. A starting point is an attack on that argument: what is the "natural" expenditure on defense versus what you can get away with America's force projection? How much social funding is derived from that delta, in the most generous sense? Maybe it's a red-herring.)
- Muromec 2mo ago
  >There is an argument to be made If we are speaking about housing specifically, at my part of the swamp it's subsidises by more affluent people (they way our atheistic christian beliefs command) and the general idea predates the rise of America anyway. Dealing with homeless people and the like the European way is also /cheaper/ too, IRRC. Not having crack junkies shit in my front and backyard and also not worrying about it is tax money well I believe.. It's up to the village council to decide to send coppers to beat them or medics to provide some free hits on a condition of having to take a shower.

GolfPopper 2mo ago

How old are those systems in their present configuration?

cardanome 2mo ago

The ideal number of jails and homeless people is zero. Obviously you will not reach that literally. That's why it is an ideal number, not a real number. It is still a good and worthy goal. Finnland for example has nearly eradicated homelessness. It is not literally zero but 0.08% which is pretty good. You can also reduce the crime rate dramatically by better social security, education, easier access to mental health care and so many other things. And don't say we can't afford these things. These measures pay dividends in building a better society for everyone. What we can't afford is having so many billionaires not paying their fair share.

NoMoreNicksLeft 2mo ago
>Finnland for example has nearly eradicated homelessness. It is not literally zero but 0.08% which is pretty good. If we had Finland's winters, I think we could eradicate homelessness by January.
- cardanome 2mo ago
  If this is an attempt at humor, it is in very bad taste. And no, please educate yourself on what Finland did to eradicate homelessness. It has nothing to do climate but with the fact that Finland made it an explicit political goal to eradicate it i.e political will.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 2mo ago
    It is a success at humor, not only the attempt. Finland did something, but "eradicating homelessness" wasn't what they did. It has nothing to do with political will in the case of the United States, and everything to do with a grab-bag of leftist policies that are entirely incompatible. Even if we were to ignore those who are plainly unfit to live in a home from the score, the remainder can't be housed while you import millions of immigrants to compete with them for housing. You can have one or the other of those two things, but they are mutually incompatible. And that's before you even get to the people so broken that they complain that they want to be homeless, to be vagabonds, living out of tents in alleys and panhandling. Such people exist. Sometimes they even manage to show up online and say as much, so you can't claim perfect ignorance here. The addicts and the mentally ill that used to be institutionalized and whatever else can be said about them, they had a roof over their heads, do you want to bring back the big thorazine zombie warehouses? We could eradicate that homelessness. Is that your plan? I'm not even necessarily against it, but I do get a big kick out of the left that can't even bring themselves to say the words out loud. Finland is a dying nation with a fertility rate below 1.5. As they continue to shrink, they might manage to have so many surplus homes that homelessness is eliminated... or they might import a bunch of immigrants that put pressure on housing. They might decide that they can't forego military spending with Russia next door, in which case the social spending they're doing won't be necessarily as affordable. Especially if Trump screws NATO with finality. "Please educate yourself"... god, you people. No wonder you lose elections.