That’s the model I had in mind, yes. But actually Eugene, OR does a variant of it that could be a great model for the rest of the country.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/05/us/cahoots-replace-police-mental-health-trnd/index.html
Ok, here’s an anecdote, you tell me how this gets handled after the police are abolished:
A neighbor about 10 houses down from us was in their home one evening, mom, dad and kids, watching tv when 4 people broke into their house. Someone called 911 and the police arrived rapidly, the intruders left the house before anything happened (police caught some of them, not all).
What is the procedure for this situation when there is no police department?
Well, the Golden State Killer was caught in 2018 but turns out he was a cop so not sure where that falls in the “defund the police” narrative. Turns out cops make really effective criminals, like the 40% who commit domestic violence. Seems to me that getting rid of armed police and their stranglehold on the “justice” system might actually be very beneficial not only for their families but for the cops themselves. They obviously aren’t handling their job stresses well and the control freak mindsets that lead them to want to be cops tend to overlap heavily with a scofflaw attitude that’s incompatible with keeping the actual peace in society.
That insistence on “a long time” is part of the problem. No, we should send them away until they can learn to be better and to function in society. If that takes a long time, that’s on them. If they want to buckle down, learn, be educated, change their coping methods and mindsets quickly then that’s how long you keep them. Until they’re better–consider it the hospital method. You go to the hospital until you’re better–not for some arbitrary number of days or week that’s based on your diagnosis.
How about restorative justice? What sense does it make when someone steals your car, burns it to the ground and then gets caught–they pay fines TO THE GOVERNMENT and get sent to jail where your tax dollars pay to keep them so you get robbed TWICE. How about instead they’re made to work to repay you for what they took from you? Their property sold to make your loss whole? Wouldn’t that make more sense than this convoluted method we’ve evolved in which nobody ever gets justice?
Just restorative justice or would there be an element of punitive justice as well?
Because let’s say, for example, I’m a shoplifter. I go to stores and steal a hundred dollars worth of make-up (because that’s one of the most commonly shoplifted items). If I succeed, I sell the stolen make-up to a fence for twenty-five dollars (who resells it for fifty dollars). If I get caught, I have to return the stolen make-up back to the store. I don’t really lose anything by getting caught, other than my time.
Maybe instead, I have to pay for all of the make-up I stole. So I pay the store a hundred dollars. But if I only get caught one time out of every ten attempts, I’m still making a profit. I shoplift at ten stores and make $250. I get caught one time and pay $100. I write it off as the cost of doing business. I’m still ahead by $150.
So maybe the law enacts a punitive penalty. When I get caught shoplifting a hundred dollars worth of products, I have to pay a five hundred dollar fine on top of the one hundred dollars of restitution. Now, I’m discouraged from shoplifting because I’m not longer making a profit.
But now we face other issues. Who determines what a fair punitive punishment is? Where does the money from the punitive money go? Into a general fund? If so, we’re back to law enforcement as a revenue generator. To the store where I was caught? They just hit a jackpot; they receive six hundred dollars from a hundred dollar shoplifting attempt. That’s going to incentivize stores to encourage shoplifters. Maybe into a general fund to pay stores where there were shoplifting but nobody was caught? I think there are obvious flaws with a system that lets businesses claim they were robbed and receive money for the losses they claim. What happens when I get caught and I don’t have five hundred dollars? Do I get to go free without paying the fine?
I don’t think “pay back what you stole” is the whole, or even the main, point of “restorative justice”.
Powers &8^]
Questions of damages are up to the courts though, not the cops. And I’m not overly in favor of all damages being solely monetary and creating an incentive to find as many people guilty as possible. There’s also the factor that when a legislative body sets a specific fine for a crime it disproportionately affects the poorest who are also the most likely to commit petty crimes out of economic necessity. A speeding fine of $500 means nothing to a rich shit in a Ferrari but it is a significant blow to some poor schmuck trying to beat traffic so he doesn’t lose his job. So how about making fines a percentage of annual income and putting it all into a nice big pot from which we pay back people’s actual losses and just forgo the purely punitive aspect. Asking people to pay back the damage they’ve done to the social fabric is reasonable–but of course we need to start like a decade ago inculcating the very idea of the social fabric in the upcoming generation of citizens or it continues to go pear shaped.
Then what do you feel is the main point?
If you disagree with the Wikipedia article, then maybe you should be the one telling everyone else what you feel the main point is.
I side with Albert Eglash on this one. He saw restitution as the central component in restorative justice.
You probably know - this is how it works already many places. There’s a large monetary penalty in my state (up to $650 last time I looked) which the store charges the shoplifter, whether or not charges are even filed. It’s to help offset the cost of security (cameras, guards, extra staffing, etc). And I believe it does incentivize some stores to encourage shoplifting. Claire’s (shopping mall pre-teen jewelry store) is the one I know best (having worked in juvenile diversion for 9 years).
According to Wikipedia:
Restorative justice is an approach to justice in which one of the responses to a crime is to organize a meeting between the victim and the offender, sometimes with representatives of the wider community. The goal is for them to share their experience of what happened, to discuss who was harmed by the crime and how, and to create a consensus for what the offender can do to repair the harm from the offense. This may include a payment of money given from the offender to the victim, apologies and other amends, and other actions to compensate those affected and to prevent the offender from causing future harm.
So restitution is part of it, but it’s mostly about the perpetrator coming to an understanding of the harms done, and making amends for them, in whatever form that might take.
In the case of a shoplifter, just paying back the store is kinda the lazy way out. A true restorative justice effort might see the shoplifter working at the store, side-by-side with the people who were harmed by his or her actions, providing an up-close view of the impact of shoplifting on individuals and businesses.
Powers &8^]
Yes, provided the store wants to devote the manpower to overseeing and supervising this shoplifter, who likely wouldn’t be somebody they’d ever want working in the store in the first place.
Well, maybe we can divert some of the funds currently going to support police departments to building some sort of restorative justice program so this sort of thing wouldn’t be a financial burden to the store owner.
(I’m not necessarily advocating for this, only noting that “it’d cost money/resources that folks might not want to spend” isn’t a great argument against it, particularly since we’re talking about this in the context of reducing the cost of policing).
FWIW, educating people about cooperation, and caring, and getting along with other people isn’t the kind of education that gets you anywhere with most criminals, because they feel like they tried that, and it failed. They may have tried it back in kindergarten, and not since, but unless you are born at least into the middle class, hard work and networking don’t get you very far unless you also have some kind of extraordinary talent (it could be for playing basketball, or it could be for performing calculus, but there needs to be some special leg up).
The thing you need to educate people about is that a criminal life may be a shortcut to getting out of grinding poverty, but it really doesn’t get you very far. The mean yearly income of a criminal is only about $16,000. It’s tax free, but it still doesn’t get you far. Getting to be a drug lord, or running a network of brothels, and making hundreds of thousands of dollars is actually a longer shot that landing a middle management position, or working your way up to some other position that pays $60,000-120,000 a year if you have a high school diploma, and either a military background, and AA degree, or some kind of trade certification like being a licensed plumber or master mechanic.
And if you go to college, and finish, you can do even better.
You might have some lean years during training, and a few in your first years of working, but the payoff is big.
Then they need actual practice in delayed gratification.
People who grow up in poverty, and have no reason to think anything will ever get better, aren’t good at delayed gratification, because why save for the future when you don’t even know if you’ll be here tomorrow?
People need to be taught, though, that there’s such a thing as “observer bias,” and their odds of surviving a difficult life are better than they might think, in spite of the fact that a sibling, cousin, or friend might have died in a drive-by shooting, and they are running a better chance of living out their lives in prison than dying young.
And the thing is, you can’t just tell them this once. You have to tell them repeatedly. And you have to reward them for learning it.
Given Velocity’s original post, I think it is safe to assume that some hypothetical convicts cannot be reached through any reasoning or accomidations systems and will simply continue to steal/kill whenever given the chance. The premise is that some cannot be educated out of their crimes. I think this is mutually exclusive with an assumption underlying restorative justice that society can address the problems underlying criminal behavior.
What is a society based off mutual aid and cooperation - a society without prisons or police - supposed to do about those who cannot be educated out of their crimes? I’ve brought up the death penalty and aversion therapy as possibilities. Or perhaps do people who advocate for such a utopia dispute the premise that some people cannot be educated out of their crimes?
~Max
For the record, I was addressing only the hypothetical of how a restorative justice “sentence” would work, not the broader questions asked at the top of the thread.
Powers &8^]
I think there are a few people who are going to behave criminally no matter what, but they are a very small percentage of people who behave criminally.
But I also think there are people who cannot be taught not to behave criminally by being taught to be better people; however, they CAN be taught through knowing that in the long run, criminal behavior is not advantageous, and not because they will be punished, but because there genuinely are better ways to reach their goals.
I also think that such people can benefit from programs that employ operant conditioning.
And, I think that people who commit crimes need to be evaluated for psychiatric or emotional conditions that could be helped with medication. Also, people who commit crimes need really aggressive treatment to substance abuse.
If what is sometimes referred to as “corrections” were genuinely geared toward CORRECTION, and not punishment that is essentially revenge-propelled, everyone, the criminals, the victims, and society in general, would be better off, but advocating for correction over punishment [READ: revenge] is always attacked as at least one of the following: being “soft on crime”; forgetting about the victim, and their need for “closure”; or somehow, being in the corner of the criminal, as though everything is about taking sides, and it isn’t possible that there is a position that is good for everyone.
I’m not actually in favor of getting rid of the police, or prisons, but I think the system needs to operate under a new paradigm.
Under this paradigm, criminality is regarded as an illness that needs to be evaluated for an underlying cause, and both the cause eliminated with the most radical procedures possible, as well as residua from the illness remediated as much as is possible.
There are going to be a few people who can’t be treated, and they will need to be housed in “24-hour care facilities,” but I really think that being proactive in treating convicts’ substance abuse problems, or mental illnesses, then teaching them how to behave and be productive after treatment will eliminate an awful lot of crime. We might need “three strikes and you’re in-- for good” laws, still, but I really think we could cut back on recidivism, which the current system actually encourages.
Are you effectively saying you need a jail for those few people who can’t get with the program? Or are you saying that the only people who can’t be helped are those with severe mental illnesses, therefore all you need are mental health institutions?
Admirable as that may be, the way I see it this thread is about the tiny minority that are not educated out of their crimes. Now, you had a good point before about disincentivizing crime with jailtime and steep penalties. The way I see it, jailtime is off the table given the OP who ruled out police and jails; steep penalties come with the harsh criticism that they affect the poorest and most vulnerable. For rational people with reasonable goals, maybe all we need is to throw money at a well-administered corrections program. But for those who are less than rational, or those who have unreasonable goals (such as to murder someone out of personal hatred), what then?
If you are saying the only people who still opt for the criminal life in the utopia are mentally ill, does a certain number of criminal convictions lead to an automatic de jure diagnosis of mental illness?
~Max
mikecurtis, any response to this?
Well, first off I’m glad your neighbors are ok.
And this is not really the thread for this discussion, but I will say this. I think we can all come up with some scenario where police intervention would be welcome (even I). But, are these scenarios really justification for having a heavily armed squad with authority to kill roaming our neighborhoods?
And what many dont seem to understand is that “Disband the Police” is a goal, not the first step.
I dont know anyone who just wants to fire all the police and declare “mission accomplished.” Maybe we wont make it all the way to a society without police, but I think it’s something worth striving for. Clearly the system we have is inefficient and dangerous.
I’ve posted this website before. It’s a good place to get some answers on what that journey might look like