I got a degree in criminology about 25 years ago and can confirm that there was no dispute in the science at that time that this was the way to reduce crime.
Everything else had been tried and tried again and proven not to work. It was around that time that my (then) field realized that the DARE program increased drug use.
It was almost 25 years after the St. Louis (maybe wrong city, it's been a while) Crime and Control study proved that flooding the streets with more police officers only pushed crime into other neighborhoods.
When I studied, it was almost a joke to read new research coming out, because every serious study was just confirming what everyone knew. Guest lecturers would come in to talk about their latest theories in criminology. and, it was basically everyone just sitting around saying oh yeah that's obvious. The field has peaked, and it was up to society then to catch up.
We looked at three strike's laws, truth and sentencing laws, asset forfeiture laws, mandatory minimums, and every time we found that these policies increase violent crime. They further fracture communities and destroy families at the generational level.
It may not be intuitive to think that, but would a little thought, a little reflection, it is hard to say that this would not be the obvious result.
The methods to reducing and ending recidivism have been well known to science. People who talk about harsh law enforcement and punitive corrections are either ignorant, emotional blowhards, or not serious about reducing crime.
We have in America a well-established cat and mouse model of policing. And indeed it does Trace its history to slave patrols, a reactionary force of violence, dispatched into the community to capture offenders. The entire model does absolutely nothing to prevent future crimes from occurring.
Maybe they catch some guy who's a serial offender, and get him off the streets. And they call that a win. But until the root causes of crime are addressed, all they're doing is playing serial offender whack-a-mole; the next one is just going to pop right up. And maybe they'll say, oh sure, that's because we have a "catch and release" system.
Well, if we literally did nothing at all to stop crime, and totally abolished the concept of a police force, the science is absolutely clear that most people are going to age out of crime by the time they turn 25, and the rest, save for a few people who are likely mentally disabled, will age out by the time they hit 35. But instead, we're kicking down doors and locking people out in cage for decades on end, making sure that their families are broken and locked in a cycle of poverty and trauma, and we end up sometimes with three generations of men sharing a prison together.
And while we're on the subject of prison, the science is also absolutely clear that the way to reduce recidivism to almost nothing is to provide good health care, good mental health care, and to teach people marketable skills, all in a safe environment. When I got my degree, the field was shifting to a program evaluation approach, because we had figured out what programs we needed to have, and the only thing left to do was to fine-tune those programs to get the most out of them.
But then 4 years would go by, or 8 years would go by, and some new tough-on-crime politician would come and wonder why we're spending so much money to hold people in a cage, and they'd start cutting the programs.
And despite that, and despite the emotional reactionaries who just want to see bad guys be treated badly to make themselves feel better about crime, virtually every type of crime is the lowest it's ever been in my lifetime.
This is why we say "the cruelty is the point". As you note, these are not serious people trying to reduce crime. They are straight up lying about their goals, possibly even to themselves. The whole mindset is against the idea that crime is something that even can be reduced; rather, "bad people" will always do "bad things", and it's up to "powerful men" to protect the rest of society from them. It is rooted in a deeply authoritarian mindset that puts them as one of the "powerful men". If you were to reduce crime, how can they prove that they're one of the "powerful men"?
well, the powerful man probably think that covering people's basic necessities wouldn't reduce crime. After all, they have those covered in spades, and yet steal billions of dollars each year
This is a spectacular post
First, thanks for taking the time to do that writeup!
Second - do you happen to have links to any likely sources that would present that info in a digestible manner? I'm not asking this to challenge you, I'm asking so I have linkable references in future discussion.
Thanks!
Trump mandated that lead piping won't be replaced. That stuff correlates with crime rates, far as location goes. Brilliant. 🤦♂️
To add to that, it's the same with homelessness. Every 1-4 years, architecture students and urban planning students are asked to do projects on helping to house the homeless or something similar. Every time, they come up with innovative and unique ways to handle it. People forget about and/or realize that no one will try any of them. Repeat.
I remember reading that a study showed that giving homeless people (without drug problems) a steady source of money, and not even that much money, helped almost all of them get back on their feet.
Thank you for this great insight and information.
emotional reactionaries who just want to see bad guys be treated badly to make themselves feel better about crime
I keep thinking about Dukakis. They asked if he would change his mind/support the death penalty if his wife was murdered. He said no - and folks flipped their shit.
The “left” as it exists in the US is so cowed by the idea of a Willie Horton scenario that it has to lean into that same evil vindictiveness. The 1994 Clinton crime bill which devastated Black communities was Dems trying to show off how “tough on crime” they could be.
Criminals are a safe “other” to hate.
yeah. i thought this was common knowledge myself (as a layman) but then i realized i lived in an intellectual bubble, and that most conservatives would reject the idea even when presented with evidence because cruelty is the point.
that's when i realized that the only solution was to get rid of conservatives.
seriously. none of this will ever change until the vast majority of abrahamic religious minded, protestant work ethic devoted people are gone.
and for those that say, "if you just educate them", well... they stand in the way of education reforms, so...
the answer remains: [redacted]
Yeah. There was a time that I wanted to believe conservatives were merely misguided. Now I know: they are straight up evil. As dehumanizing and unkind as it is, I have started to mentally replacing them with orcs, goblins, and dragons.
A small part of me is sad about the death of my naivety. Then my brain reminds me what price society has paid for hosting these malicious turds. If there is a Reconstruction 2.0, these words must be followed: "Rip and tear, until it is done."
Do you have some beginner friendly references I could look at? I live in a MAGA heavy state and although logic doesn't always work the more tools in my belt the better!
What I keep getting held up on is that if the science keeps pointing toward the same conclusion, how do you actually apply those to society? How to you convince the voting masses to institute these changes? Because the average person won’t accept repealing things like three strikes and minimum sentencing, they just assume that a “tough on crime” attitude is the way to go. If a politician comes along offering justice system reform, he’d never make it into office because people would assume he’d be letting criminals run rampant unpunished.
Related, I’ve heard people argue against UBI by saying that it would just make people lazy and not want to work at all.
Honestly, I think it would require being raised in a society where social welfare is the norm before it can be considered ordinary.
It would take a revolution with people of vision in order to create a social welfare society. Similar to the Founding Fathers of America, where people of intelligence, character, and spine agreed that a change must be made. We will need people who can fight like hell to lead us into battle, and coolheaded types who will spend a great deal of midnight oil on drafting and workshopping a new way of living.
It won't be easy nor intuitive, but the crisis caused by Yarvin's Cabal might be the kindling we need for people to give up on the way we have lived. After all, the old ways are dying with the Constitution. When cowardice offers no shelter, all that is left is to fight.
Related, I’ve heard people argue against UBI by saying that it would just make people lazy and not want to work at all.
I mean, it's completely unrealistic to think that this would not be the case for some X% of the population. It's already the case now, with the welfare programs we already have, after all. What number that X is, is what's unclear. People saying "nobody will work" are definitely wrong, though, lol.
Thank you for typing that out!
Thanks for sharing your experience
Fantastic reply. Thanks for taking the time to write it out and thanks again for the insight into the very important work you do.
Wow, all very insightful, thanks for taking the time write this!
Do you have any recommended sources to read more about this topic / research? I'd love to learn more!
It was almost 25 years after the St. Louis (maybe wrong city, it’s been a while) Crime and Control study proved that flooding the streets with more police officers only pushed crime into other neighborhoods.
Small point about this in particular, but isn't the above evidence that this is effective at removing crime from an area? Why not do the same in the "other neighborhoods", too, then?
Especially if you combine the above with what you described later to reduce recidivism:
the way to reduce recidivism to almost nothing is to provide good health care, good mental health care, and to teach people marketable skills, all in a safe environment.
Seems like a solid plan to me, and police forces would naturally/gradually shrink over time, to suit the overall crime rate as it goes down.
I can almost picture the classroom I was sitting when I first learned about the study and having the exact same reaction you did.
Part of the study controlled for that, in the context of practical limitations. They divided the city into sectors and absolutely flooded certain sectors with cops while doing minimal patrols in the others, or in some cases none at all. The crime just moved in the opposite way. When the police presence increased in one sector, the crime rate went down there, but went up in the others. And then when they switch the sectors, the crime switched back. So practically speaking, cities and towns would have to be able to sustain that high level of policing, which hardly anyone wants. I see towns get into it over a budget allocation to hire one additional officer, let alone the number they would need to sustain to keep up the sort of levels needed to push crime out everywhere. And maybe some places would be able to do it, but the crime would just push to other areas, foisting the problem onto other communities. Further, I think there's very little appetite in America to actually put a police officer on every corner. Nobody would like living in that world.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment
I can’t find the podcast. Maybe someone else can post an article about this:
Several years ago, I listened to a podcast that interviewed a man in Chicago who was conducting a study. His team found people with a criminal history(I think maybe drug dealers?) and tell them they’ll get $1000 a month. No strings attached.
There were a few who didn’t use the money well, but most quit crime/dealing drugs entirely. They found steady work and some went back to school.
All they needed was an opportunity to feel financially safe, feed their kids, and pay rent.
Edit: I think I found it? Here’s an article on it. Some of my facts were wrong, but the idea was right overall.
The article also mentions another called the Stock Economic Empowerment Demonstration.
I’m not sure which I heard about but I suspect the interview was with Richard Wallace who is mentioned in the article. Some of his talking points sounded familiar.
They've been trying it across the world, it's called Universal Basic Income. It's been proven mostly successful every time.
Here's an old article about the US: https://mashable.com/article/cities-with-universal-basic-income-guaranteed-income-programs
It's not "universal" unless/until it's given to everyone. Until then, it's just another targeted welfare program, "offered to a select portion of a city's population instead of all residents", as your link says.
You can't say UBI has been "proven mostly successful" without actually doing UBI, considering its main hurdles are related directly to giving out that much money to everyone. A UBI of $12000/year ($1000/month) for just all working-age people in the US (a bit over 200 million) would cost the government $2.4 TRILLION, yearly.
Even seizing the entirety of every US billionaire's net worth (est. $4.5 trillion), assuming you could convert it straight across into cash 1:1 (which you can't), and cutting defense spending (~$850 billion), the two most common ways I've seen people claim we can pay for UBI in the US, even if defense was cut to literal zero (also absurdly unrealistic), that still wouldn't even cover the cost of this UBI for three years.
That’s precisely it, there’s lots of evidence which shows that welfare programs are better for creating stable societies.
They don't want to lessen crime, not really anyway.
They want to increase prison labor capacity by arresting and charging more people
Americans maybe. There's other countries that don't have legal slavery.
"Arrgh that would be communism, so we can't allow that" - 🤡
I mean the first thing the federated mastadon did was ban the socialists to their own little corner. So even "on the left" what you said isn't a joke, it's deeply ingrained dogma.
Yes, we did (The Netherlands). It really works! But sadly policies are changing, heading more towards the American system with privatization, where the gap between the rich 1% and the rest is increasing rapidly. But at least we're still far away from the current American collapse.
They don't want less crime they want more so they can exert force over the population
If people have nothing to lose, they're gonna act like they have nothing to lose...
Like, it's basic psychology. Resource scarcity changes how our brains work, it's literally Maslow's hierarchy of needs
I hit rock bottom. Was broke.
My thoughts on stealing changed entirely. I couldn't care less. I had bigger concerns than other people's property. Most people steal out of desperation and when you're desperate, your moral compass disappears.
Society is perpetually 9 missed meals away from collapse.
A person can do anything when they lost everything.
SHOULD be obvious
Won't happen in the United States. We're headed hard in the opposite direction. And the changes taking place right now will effectively make it impossible going forward.
Buy a gun. Protect yourself. Things are about to get real dark. There are about to be a lot more desperate people in this society.
I think you're right about where the US is headed, but only idiots think having guns will save them from thugs with more guns, let alone a squad of well trained soldiers.
The trick is to be rich enough that you can hire security squads with helicopters and armored vehicles. The only reason to have a gun in that situation is to take pot shots at the plutocrats.
The Nordic countries.
we're going through a massive organised crime wave at the moment.
coincidentally we've also been dismantling our social systems since the 90s and put a shitload of immigrants in the same poor neighbourhoods away from everyone else.
i'm sure it's unrelated.
In Australia we created ghettos in the 80s and 90s. It wasn't great.
I'm sure someone will be along in a moment to remind us that these ghettos were just one link in the chain of shit things Europeans did to first Australians.
There's a reason that Toronto is labelled one of the top safest cities in the world as well.
Toronto is becoming unaffordable for the working class. High cost of living is what is breaking the US too. I don't really know why people want to seek asylum in the west. I guess if you're okay sharing the floor of a room with a few other people on sleeping pads then the rest of the world must be an event worse shithole. You have to work two hours just to afford lunch.
My daughter has a boyfriend who lives on the outskirts of London. He was shocked at the cost of things in fucking Cincinnati. Ohio is in the cheaper half of US states.
Iceland be much like this...
The only reason some people don’t like the Nordic model is because it has the word Nordic in it. If instead it was the Marxist model, I am sure they’d say it sprung forth from gods own asshole
Edit again, downvote brigade of Marxists butthurt on being called out, lol
Lessening crime was never thier objective, it's just a double speak in support of the prison system.
Create conditions for "have nots" to be drawn to crime
Arrest them
Have a penal system that utilizes their labor
????
MAGA Paradise
What you people don't understand is that this is the right wing plan to introduce neoslavery with extra steps. As they continue to gut the government and safeguards, they're going to lean HARD into prison labor and detainment camp labor to replace migrant labor and working poor labor.
It's based on their percept that they're superior and the people that end up here are subhuman, so they deserve to be slaves to enhance their supremacy.
If they get the public to associate LGBT with Sexual Deviancy and Sexual Deviancy with Crimes against children, they can arrest anyone they want for being "Light in the Loafers"
I'm not saying that lizard people control the world and that they actively feed upon our misery and create the conditions that make us the least happy, without breaking us so much that we destroy the system imprisoning us in retribution....
But if there were what would they be doing differently?
The reason why punishment does not deter crime is because people who commit crimes usually do so because they are out of options, or were not given other options to begin with. So if you increase the severity of the punishment, you are merely making it more stressful for the people to commit the crimes, rather than deterring them.
That's my take. And I don't have a damn criminology degree to come up with that. (Not to say it's necessarily true, but it rings true to me.)
That's my take. And I don't have a damn criminology degree to come up with that. (Not to say it's necessarily true, but it rings true to me.)
It's good that you say that. There are occasions where what seems reasonable, really isn't after investigating the issue.
Regarding crime and punishment: First, I also don't specialize in criminology, but I have read a bunch of scientific papers regarding the effect of severity of punishment on crime rates. From what I've gathered, more severe punishments usually do not reduce crime rates. A prominent example are death sentences, which virtually do nothing to reduce crime rates. Instead, the danger of being caught seems to be more effective.
However, this does of course not encompass the causes of crime, which can be manifold. It's not always stuff like the satifaction of basic needs. Take a look at big companies or rich individuals, who commit tax fraud for example. Or people who murder or harm others out of unstable emotions. Would you say they are out of options?
But I don't know about numbers and associated causes for crime in an average populace. It could be enlightening to take a look at that.
Take a look at big companies or rich individuals, who commit tax fraud for example. Or people who murder or harm others out of unstable emotions. Would you say they are out of options?
Definitely not, that's why I made sure to say "usually", because the number of crimes that require a lot of resources to begin with, and murders who occur due to mental illness are surely outnumbered by crimes that happen out of necessity, I imagine. I'd also like to see statistics on this. (And have the energy to study it, of course.)
Basically, wealth inequality.
It should be very difficult to be very poor or very wealthy.
There is absolutely a direct correlation between crime and poverty.
It's just here in America we don't care about that because crime is business.
Why would the US want to limit their pool of slave labour?
I was told automation would reduce the need for labor. Why bother getting more pops? They should be encouraging birth control so there are less dissidents and embrace the certainty of steel.
UBI on top of universal healthcare is far better happiness promotion, violence elimination, than all of the non-health proposals.
public housing is always rationed, and usually ghetoization. It is rarely implemented as government funded abundance of housing that is small to be affordable, and in competition to private scarce supply that maximizes profits and lobbying power to keep housing scarce. Promoting housing abundance along with UBI is path for zero cost government programs where market prices of homes sold cover costs.
strong unions is concerned with high paying jobs for union members, at higher priority than expanding union membership. Less employment. UBI provides universal labour bargaining power including strike pay for organized labour. The freedom to say no and survive is a freedom that is far more important than coercion of companies to support labour unions? or just cheering on labour organization movements.
universal childcare is usually proposed as an institutional/licensed program designed to provide full time employment at living wage levels. UBI empowers people to both pay for childcare, but also be happy to look after fellow parents kids on a rotating basis for people empowered to choose 4 day workweeks, or lets a granny be happy to supplement UBI with a few hours of babysitting without needing to create a giant empire to achieve full time job creation scheme. Motivation for universal childcare is that "bureaucratic tax funded worker empire" with incidental benefits to parents.
free college is necessarily a rationed service. Affordable college with UBI is a pathway for people qualified for college, and who appreciate value over alternative opportunies they could choose instead of college if value is not there, is still a choice most qualified young people would make. Importantly for UBI, young teens can have hope that affording college gives them a future... a reason to study and be engaged in school.
Americans: look north you twits.
Exactly. Most people get into crime because their backs are to the wall. They're stuck in debt due to medical treatments they had to get, they're struggling to pay obscene rent prices and risk being kicked out their home - there's plenty of reasons, and much of it is down to poverty.
If you give people legitimate, easily accessible support nets that are enough to actually survive on, then you'll get less crime. It's rather simple.
I know that one guy that sold drugs to feed is fur baby Tigers. He 100% would have done anything else but love them cats and needed money.
Gun violence goes hand to hand with poverty.
poverty goes up, gun violence goes up
Oh man, most of those were in place during the so called "golden age" of America. Maybe this is what the red hats have been fighting for all this time! /s
"Those who make peaceful reform impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
People who do try that get demonized as Enemies of Freedom. But it's funny how much more free it feels when you don't worry about medical bills making you homeless etc.
Brought a tear to my eye, yo.
Big if true
If true?
...but think of the billionaires, then they couldn't buy politicians, control the media, and buy bigger yachts.
No thanks, they should pay more taxes for all the good they get out of society and it’s structure
You wanna know what else makes billionaires billions of dollars? A strong middle class...the one with a lot of disposable income to, you guessed it, spend on goods and services!
Make enough affordable reliable cars then people with the disposable income will buy a new one every 5ish years and then the secondary used car market has good reliable cars to sell
Every dollar the "middle class" has in disposable income is a dollar the billionaires didn't hold onto.
But I don't want money in 5 years, I want it now!
— A 300 lbs toddler with an inherited hedge fund.
Man can be free only when and if he’s able to rise above his insecurities
My two thoughts on this:
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If I ask people for a million dollars to higher cops they'll give it to me easy, if I ask for 100k to reduce crime through community outreach - it's a huge fight
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That experiment where a class needs to unanimously agree to all recieve 98% final grade but 30% of them absolutely refuse to give themselves a leg up if that also means someone else gets it and they didn't work as hard.
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Yes, but no one can get fabulously rich off this.
There's truth in that to a degree. But so long as mass media can stir the pot and create public anxiety where none existed before, even a strong egalitarian economic model is insufficient to deter interpersonal violence.
Americans bombarded by "Shoplifter Alert!" and "Murder Spree!" and "Rape Gangs Terrorizing Your Neighborhood!" news coverage are going to be deeply suspicious of anyone they don't recognize (and more than a few they do recognize). People will lash out in fits of paranoia and induced terror, then claim self-defense against their victims. And if we've instilled a legitimacy to this fear in the general public, they'll get away with it.
It's the symptoms tbf
You lessen crime by eliminating poverty. That part is correct. The other parts of this meme are more like incidental details what could happen when a society is richer, not the cause.
This is stupid, there will always be crime. These things should be happening simply because that's actually TAKING CARE OF YOU'RE CITIZENS.
Lot of people who turn to crime do so because they don't have any other chance.
On the flipside, the harder you squeeze the underclass the harder they work. (And they are kept in a state of safe distraction too)
So there's a balance.
Yeah, but by doing all that you are oppressing the oppression which the lack of those very things makes so much easier, do you ever think about that??
No, you don't, because you only think of your face and never how the boot on it feels./s
Basically what the Venus Project wants to do, except no artificial currency
No one in the UK started a drug empire to pay for chemo.
Yes. I don't remember the name of the civilization, but there was an entirely "peaceful" society that existed for several hundred years, until Christopher Columbus showed up, and raped and murdered them all.
No group of people has ever been peaceful with each other, let’s stop this anti-west fantasy and start talking about real problems, like how to fix democracies and capitalism
https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/north-american-indigenous-warfare-and-ritual-violence
https://newsofstjohn.com/the-taino-legacy-of-a-peaceful-joyous-and-ingenious-people/
Try again, and stop erasing history. They were unique because they lived on an isolated island, so they didn't have neighbors to make war with.
Oh, and I was misinformed, Columbus didn't wipe them all out, just most of them. Some still exist and have resumed their ancestral ways, apparently.
the public housing part is like one bad decision from a workhouse, but otherwise yeah
