Does that position hold if you were convinced that we could have less rape and murder by spending the millions on incarceration in some other way?
A lot of people say yes, because they believe that retribution for the conduct matters more than reducing the overall level of crime. But if your answer is no, then I think it’s really important to understand whether mass incarceration is more effective than, say, adequately funding early childhood education resources.
There is no time travel. Certainly we can engage in meaningful programs to try to prevent today’s children from becoming criminals (can but don’t since things like telling certain populations not to beat their kids is considered tantamount to cultural genocide, oh well). But when you have someone who is a violent criminal now, the most effective thing you can do is just physically separate that person from the real people.
That may be true, but it’s irrelevant to my point.
Going forward we can choose to spend our money on prisons or something else. Spending it on prisons means that over the next three decades there are X rapes. Spending it on schools (or whatever) means that over the next three decades there are Y rapes.
My question is whether IF it were true that X>Y, would you still support spending all that money on prisons.
Obviously, the “IF” part needs a lot of examination and analysis, and reasonable people might disagree. But the threshold question is whether you even care about that. I do, and I think most people should. And if you do, then it’s it not enough merely to observe that rapists deserve to be imprisoned, since what they deserve is not more important than preventing rapes.
My answer is that telling a multiple-time rapist he will not be imprisoned because we are allocating some hypothetical “money that would be used to imprison him” on schools instead is the sort of absurd thinking that led to the crime peak of the late 60s. Money can be spent on more than one thing, especially if we’re freeing up budget by not incarcerating drug addicts which everyone seems to agree shouldhappen.
I think that answer dodges the question.
We can spend money on multiple things. But money is limited, and we have to make choices about what we fund.
If it’s true that spending money in different ways leads to different crime rates, then you really are faced with the question of whether you care more about the crime or the punishment.
I am emphasizing that the best way to prevent serious crimes is to put criminals in prison so they lose access to civilian victims. Crime is committed by criminals. It’s simply a matter of making it impossible for the 1% of the 1% of the population that is responsible for nearly all violent crime to continue their criminal careers. The metaphysical dancing about whether it is “caring about punishment” or not is unimportant.
Put murders, rapists, robbers, and kidnappers in prison and you will see a huge decline in murder, rape, robbery, and kidnapping. You can also focus on preventing criminals from arising, or not, but this simple equation is what the U.S. has done to drastically reduce crime over the last 40 years of the trend.
That’s all a fine opinion to hold, but all you’re saying is that you don’t believe spending money on other things would reduce crime more. You’re not answering the question of how you would proceed if it did.
Additionally, your opinion is not supported by the evidence. The Brennan Center study posted upthread is a pretty good place to start.
This kind of defeatist attitude is the exact reason social programs look like failures. Ignorant people have been led to believe that there are simple solutions and quick fixes and when six months from now there’s no visible improvement they are quick to cry failure and cancel the program entirely.
There is no improvement except incremental improvement. There has never been a one-size-fits-all solution to any large problem, ever. But if we can provide support for addiction, keep children out of poverty, broaden access to education, and allow visible minorities equal participation in our society, we’ll see significant improvements. Just like we did with the Irish and the Italians. And we did it without “cultural genocide.”
OK, you’re just insisting that it’s impossible to spend money on both incarceration and crime prevention, despite being told that this is fairly obviously not true. I don’t see the point in participating in your hypothetical scenario where only one thing can be funded by the government at a time. I repeat for the last time that this is not the case.
It is obviously true that a government can fund both incarceration and other measures. It is equally obviously true that the amount of money a government may spend is limited. We make choices about what to fund. The reason we do not fund more early childhood education is, generally speaking, that it is opposed by people who say we cannot afford it. In the real word, the choice to spend billions on prisons presents trade-offs with other spending.
Your response may be that those silly conservative should stop objecting on the basis that we cannot afford it. So be it. But eventually spending decisions involve deciding about trade-offs, so you cannot dodge coming up with principles forever.
I just wanted to highlight this in particular.
There is no such thing as one root cause. You can’t simplify this problem to one issue, change that one thing, and expect it to magically go away.
The crime peak of the late 1960’s was a result of the blending of multiple, disparate causes. Many scientists have laid the blame in many places, and the truth is likely a combination of all of their beliefs. Some causes include:
[ul]
[li] Chemicals were used in society in staggering amounts. Leaded gas is often blamed for crime rates but we also started spraying pesticides like DDT indiscriminately and started putting artificial ingredients in our foods. [/li][li] Farm mechanization ripped apart rural communities, displacing many poor (black) labourers from their traditional rural lifestyle; these people moved to cities in record numbers. In turn, white people moved to the suburbs, and areas newly-filled with politically-disenfranchised blacks were deprived of necessary educational and infrastructure spending. Without proper education or community roots, inner cities became the ghettos we are familiar with.[/li][li] The 60’s started to see a widespread backlash against the military-industrial-scientific complex that Eisenhower warned about. There was little faith in a government that fought unjust wars while building super-weapons and many people, rightly or wrongly, felt that mainstream society wasn’t worth belonging to. [/li][li] The civil rights movement was finally able to reach a critical mass. Black people saw how the rest of the country was prospering and wanted their share. The techniques used for the previous hundred years to keep black dissent quelled were no longer working. It’s even possible that the sentencing reform you hate so much was part of the cause here.[/li][li] Drug prohibition was solidified with the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs in 1961. It’s easy to increase the crime rate if you criminalize more things.[/li]
[/ul]
There’s more, but my wife says we have to go. More to come!
If you’re trying not to look like an out-of-touch hippie when discussing the problem of crime, then blaming it on DDT and “artificial ingredients” (!!!) is not a great first step.
Great response!
What response would you like to the idea that “artificial ingredients” cause crime? Should I just upload a recording of myself laughing?
Right. You provide the laugh track, but I’ll provide some cites. Here’s two journal articles showing neuropsychological dysfunction associated with human exposure to DDT.
As for other chemicals: here’s a cite explaining the former use of boric acid as a preservative until it was finally banned in the 1950’s. At this point in history, we were adding lots of unproven chemicals to food. We’ve gotten better since, but that doesn’t mean those early experiments had no effect.
Anyway, to conclude my previous post, it’s clear that there are multiple competing economic pressures, public policies, and technological advances that all guided society towards a higher crime rate in the late 60’s. Solely blaming it on one public policy (especially one which probably does more good than harm) is simplistic and disingenuous.
It was also the peak of a social revolution, which would certainly have created ancillary criminal activity as values shifted.
I’m sorry but this comment is ridiculous.
I’m not aware of any first World countries that don’t imprison people for rape or murder.
It’s possible to chew bubble gum and talk at the same time.
It’s a hypothetical, and like all hypotheticals, contrived. It’s probably not worth continuing to debate at this point.
In the future if you see a poster suggesting we not imprison people for rape or murder, you might stop to ask yourself whether you’re interpreting the post correctly. The point of this thought experiment was as follows:
Some people approach the question of how many people we should put in prison by asking who deserves to be there. Another way to approach the problem is to ask what is the optimal imprisonment strategy to reduce crime. It is perfectly possible that those approaches yield different answers. The goal of this hypothetical is to see whether you really think we ought to ask only who deserves to be there, or whether what you really value is maximum reduction of crime.
???
I think the point would be that investing more, now, in better education and better approaches to social issues might reduce the numbers of rapes, to begin with.