Microblog Memes

"Arrgh that would be communism, so we can't allow that" - 🤡

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.)

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.

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.

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.

Americans: look north you twits.

Gun violence goes hand to hand with poverty.

poverty goes up, gun violence goes up

Abolish laws. Then crime will instantly disappear. 🥴

But if crime declined, the poor private prison corporations would lose money, and that's not a good thing. They wouldn't be able to give judges kickbacks to sentence lesser crimes! Please, think of the poor private prison corporations!

/s in case the sarcasm isn't abundantly clear.

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.

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.

Chicago Future Fund

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 don't want less crime they want more so they can exert force over the population

They don't want to lessen crime, not really anyway.

They want to increase prison labor capacity by arresting and charging more people

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.

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.

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

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

Why would the US want to limit their pool of slave labour?