Comment by andy99 3 days ago
Is there evidence of that? That seems to have been the prevailing view over the last many years, and it's not clear to me that it's improved anything. There seems to be more homeless camps, more petty crime, more drugs.
The drive for increased penalties is very deeply rooted in the human psyche because it works extremely well in smaller societies on the order of 100 people, so we’re tempted to believe that it works in modern cities with hundreds of thousands to millions of people. In real life the evidence seems to be pretty mixed. As far as I can tell, shoplifting today breaks down into two categories: (1) dumb kids, who don’t much care about your example, and (2) professionals who are monetizing shoplifting by reselling stolen goods on platforms like Amazon. If you want to deal with the large-scale problem, you’d probably focus on (2).
Where do you live where that's the prevailing view? Where I am police funding has increased year after year for decades, and people are routinely prosecuted and jailed for petty offenses. For the most part bmn's position is the prevailing view, they have already gotten what they're asking for and it has failed to achieve those goals. At what point are we going to acknowledge the evidence and try something else.
In places that have more crime, they typically don't prosecute effectively. A significant chunk of NYC's shoplifting was just ~350 people, if I remember the NY Times article correctly from a few years back, but they just keep getting released back to do more of it, while more and more steps are taken by private businesses in response, like locked cases and limited hours, the burden for which is more keenly felt by the poor.
Then you are looking at it from a totally wrong perspective anyways, just like most people do. The homeless encampments are full of people with mental illness challenges and/or in one or another way related to drugs. It is why I cannot stand drug use apologists and drug dealer/traffickers defenders that at the same time lament poverty and homelessness.
The poverty is not the cause, it is the symptom of the system’s rot. Especially when you compare other countries and societies that are poorer, but have far fewer of those problems and less crime. Drug addiction is not cheap.
The irony is that your very perspective is the very kind of mentality that has led to the circumstances where we can’t do anything about it even if we wanted to, while the powerful and rich simply do a cost benefit analysis of it because of that and conclude it is easier to, e.g., import replacements for the humans that have been destroyed by drugs and mental illness, which then also drives down the wages/salaries, and drives up the costs of living and drives up the profits of the rich you blame. It’s a kind of “the blind men and an elephant” problem. You keep scratching at the scabs of your self-inflicted cuts, but they don’t seem to be healing.
It really always astonished me that even here, in a community of people in a domain where logic is necessary there is still this stranglehold of irrational proto-religious, emotion based belief and dogma.
The ones I know personally ruined their lives with drugs, and ended up on the street. It's an intertwined issue, but the direction of causality is pretty clear when, eg, one brother is poor, but employed and in a shitty apartment, and the other is a human pit of misery and the primary fork was a proclivity for illicit drugs in his teens.
The weight of evidence is abundantly clear that the most effective way to reduce interpersonal crime is by reducing poverty, and providing housing & healthcare to everyone. Relatively modest sincere funding of these programs can have a huge impact, and if you had mentioned some of these "other countries and societies that are poorer, but have far fewer of those problems" I might even be able to point to some for you.
Wanting an increase in carceral solutions despite the weight of evidence against their effectiveness is exactly the "irrational proto-religious, emotion based belief and dogma" you're railing against. It doesn't feel fair to a certain worldview to allocate resources in this way. But you need to get over that, because it is what works.
According to this for example, the correlation is significant: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...
Also it’s absolutely not prevailing in America. Especially in a European sense.
But even when you push to a good direction, it can be misleading. Like Portugal legalised hard drug usage, but they slashed funds of organisations helping to drug addicts. Of course, you will have a problem after a while (and they have now), even when decriminalisation is a good step. But politicians can pretend that that’s the “prevailing view”, while they just make some pretexts to point their finger to the “prevailing view”.