Anybody reading down from here, note that you are entering the zone of mostly evidence free ideological-team-signaling posting. Let’s all get out our jerseys and tell everybody how society actually works.
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.
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”.
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.
People from every socioeconomic level steal, and the motivations vary far more widely than simple need. It has much more to do with personal ethics than the amount of money you can afford to spend.
It's not mutually exclusive. Just because poverty exists you shouldn't legalize theft, as that hurts both business and the community as a whole, since nobody wants to run a business and create jobs where there's a lot of crime so then the entire community spirals down into a shithole.
Yep. Eventually the businesses shut down the stores that have too much theft to be profitable; then people complain about problems like food deserts and accuse the businesses of isms; then well-meaning people elect politicians who promise to make it all better; then the politicians use tax breaks, sweetheart deals, and social pressure to get the businesses to open stores in those areas again.
The cycle continues because we can't learn a lesson that sticks for more than a generation, and the next generation thinks it'll be better this time because they care more than their parents did.
So your solution is to put people who are desperate enough to steal say $500 of goods from a pharmacy into jail at a cost of $50K+? As others have said, that money is better spend helping these people out of poverty or helping them with their addictions rather than trying to "teach them a lesson".
> Put the criminals in prison. Do it often enough, and shoplifting ceases to be a problem of plague-like proportions. Big fan of accountability and immediate personal consequences and enforcing the law.
This just doesn't work. A high-trust society cannot be built by force.
> I am fatigued of the suicidal and deleterious empathy of those in charge who refuse to take second-order effects into account.
The irony here is palpable. An increasingly desperate poverty class with no hope of social mobility has many second-order effects, and none of them can be policed out of existence.
Imo we're kinda in the worse quadrant of whats possible.
You can either have high visibility/force of prevention efforts or low. And you can have high actual rates of crime or low.
Imo we currently have low actual rates of crime (you see people saying oh its rampant in California or whatever but im not there and can't make an accurate assessment of it over the internet) and highly visible (damn near pervasive) efforts at preventing crime in almost every corner of our lives. "please don't abuse our staff" "cctv in operation", facial recognition, constant assumptions that you are a threat. If I didn't know better its almost like they "want" people to be criminals -- it seems like according to some other threads there are at least some people whose jobs it would make easier
It is amazing to me that we have have failed so completely to report on the miraculous drop in crime rates over the past 30 years. People consistently report that crime is up, even when presented with contradictory evidence.
A major part of the problem, in my estimation, is that a lot of people don't actually perceive crime as crime but instead perceive divergence from their expected social hierarchies as crime. This is how you get people saying that crime in DC is high because they saw a person that looked homeless sitting on the metro. Although sitting on the metro is legal, a poor person doesn't "belong" there so this is seen as evidence of crime.
All examples of high trust societies show that those consequences must be social, because _by definition_, in a high-trust society, you must trust other people to do the right thing.
A punitive dictatorship or police state is not a high-trust society, even though laws may be strictly enforced. Likewise, in a high-trust society, behaviour is expected to be good and moral, even where not mandated by law.
I don’t think that’s what a high trust society is. In fact, I’m pretty sure the whole point of the thing is that people in a high trust society don’t defect even when they don’t think they’ll get caught, because they understand that not-defecting is part of the bargain everybody is engaging in to keep the good thing going.
You're just plain wrong. You can enforce compliance - a police state - but it inevitably worsens outcomes for both people who commit crimes and their victims.
But that isn't a high-trust society. In fact a high trust society requires minimal formal policing by definition (and a _lot_ of informal policing by parents, families, friends, and communities).
High-trust societies aren't without their problems, too, as trust is regularly abused.
You do understand that an overwhelming majority of crime and overall anti social behavior is done by a tiny percentage of people. Remove those people and you spare the rest of us.
For instance, the number of prisoners that have had 15 or more prior arrests is over 26%.
You can just have a 15 strikes and you're out policy and make a huge impact. Once these bad actors are out of society, high trust can be built. Stop letting a tiny percentage of people terrorize the rest of us.
It's not about poverty and ironically the biggest victims of this criminal behavior are poor people. Poor innocent people deal w theft, getting hassled and other consequences of criminal behavior at a much higher rate. It's not compassionate to let them suffer.
What I mean is that it doesn't work. Your proposal only increases crime, only deepens poverty, only worsens society.
> You do understand that an overwhelming majority of crime and overall anti social behavior is done by a tiny percentage of people. Remove those people and you spare the rest of us.
And yet, this policy has never worked. Three-stikes laws never work. Increased policing and more comprehensive criminal legislation never works. As long as the circumstances that caused the criminality persist, the problems returns ever more entrenched.
> It's not about poverty and ironically the biggest victims of this criminal behavior are poor people. Poor innocent people deal w theft, getting hassled and other consequences of criminal behavior at a much higher rate. It's not compassionate to let them suffer.
You are correct that the poorest suffer the most. As a society, we should aim to eradicate the poverty. Anything short of that is symptom control.
Yes. I presume you’re not capable of empathy, given your comment. Punishments don’t stop people being hungry, and they sure don’t stop people from stealing when they are hungry.
The fact that you’re unable to at least sympathize is pretty pathetic.
> Put the criminals in prison. Do it often enough, and shoplifting ceases to be a problem of plague-like proportions.
The Brits very conclusively disproved this concept.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Code
Anybody reading down from here, note that you are entering the zone of mostly evidence free ideological-team-signaling posting. Let’s all get out our jerseys and tell everybody how society actually works.
Glad to hear you love laws, you can start with wage theft: comparable in scale, basically unenforced
AFAIK improving on poverty is a more effective approach.
Not only poor people shoplift. Guessing the majority of shoplifting is done by people not living in proverty.
Guessing is a great method of directing criminal justice policy.
6 replies →
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.
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”.
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.
1 reply →
Is it rich people in the homeless camps?
6 replies →
People from every socioeconomic level steal, and the motivations vary far more widely than simple need. It has much more to do with personal ethics than the amount of money you can afford to spend.
> People from every socioeconomic level steal
That’s pretty meaningless. Distribution what matters. For example https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...
It's not mutually exclusive. Just because poverty exists you shouldn't legalize theft, as that hurts both business and the community as a whole, since nobody wants to run a business and create jobs where there's a lot of crime so then the entire community spirals down into a shithole.
Yep. Eventually the businesses shut down the stores that have too much theft to be profitable; then people complain about problems like food deserts and accuse the businesses of isms; then well-meaning people elect politicians who promise to make it all better; then the politicians use tax breaks, sweetheart deals, and social pressure to get the businesses to open stores in those areas again.
The cycle continues because we can't learn a lesson that sticks for more than a generation, and the next generation thinks it'll be better this time because they care more than their parents did.
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So your solution is to put people who are desperate enough to steal say $500 of goods from a pharmacy into jail at a cost of $50K+? As others have said, that money is better spend helping these people out of poverty or helping them with their addictions rather than trying to "teach them a lesson".
Organized crime or a disorganized black market supply chain aren't desperate.
That would require spending more tax dollars on law enforcement and courts, and almost nobody wants to do that.
> Put the criminals in prison. Do it often enough, and shoplifting ceases to be a problem of plague-like proportions. Big fan of accountability and immediate personal consequences and enforcing the law.
This just doesn't work. A high-trust society cannot be built by force.
> I am fatigued of the suicidal and deleterious empathy of those in charge who refuse to take second-order effects into account.
The irony here is palpable. An increasingly desperate poverty class with no hope of social mobility has many second-order effects, and none of them can be policed out of existence.
> A high-trust society cannot be built by force.
Imo we're kinda in the worse quadrant of whats possible.
You can either have high visibility/force of prevention efforts or low. And you can have high actual rates of crime or low.
Imo we currently have low actual rates of crime (you see people saying oh its rampant in California or whatever but im not there and can't make an accurate assessment of it over the internet) and highly visible (damn near pervasive) efforts at preventing crime in almost every corner of our lives. "please don't abuse our staff" "cctv in operation", facial recognition, constant assumptions that you are a threat. If I didn't know better its almost like they "want" people to be criminals -- it seems like according to some other threads there are at least some people whose jobs it would make easier
It is amazing to me that we have have failed so completely to report on the miraculous drop in crime rates over the past 30 years. People consistently report that crime is up, even when presented with contradictory evidence.
A major part of the problem, in my estimation, is that a lot of people don't actually perceive crime as crime but instead perceive divergence from their expected social hierarchies as crime. This is how you get people saying that crime in DC is high because they saw a person that looked homeless sitting on the metro. Although sitting on the metro is legal, a poor person doesn't "belong" there so this is seen as evidence of crime.
2 replies →
High trust societies can only exist when there are consequences for things like theft.
All examples of high trust societies show that those consequences must be social, because _by definition_, in a high-trust society, you must trust other people to do the right thing.
A punitive dictatorship or police state is not a high-trust society, even though laws may be strictly enforced. Likewise, in a high-trust society, behaviour is expected to be good and moral, even where not mandated by law.
7 replies →
A high-trust society cannot be built any way other than force!
Once you've removed the dredges of society (by force), all of the good, law-abiding citizens have better lives.
What you're describing is a police state and has never resulted in a high-trust society.
^ found the fascist.
> This just doesn't work. A high-trust society cannot be built by force.
To badly quote Mead, "It's the only thing that ever has". If the incentives are such that defecting becomes less attractive, defection will decrease.
I don’t think that’s what a high trust society is. In fact, I’m pretty sure the whole point of the thing is that people in a high trust society don’t defect even when they don’t think they’ll get caught, because they understand that not-defecting is part of the bargain everybody is engaging in to keep the good thing going.
You're just plain wrong. You can enforce compliance - a police state - but it inevitably worsens outcomes for both people who commit crimes and their victims.
But that isn't a high-trust society. In fact a high trust society requires minimal formal policing by definition (and a _lot_ of informal policing by parents, families, friends, and communities).
High-trust societies aren't without their problems, too, as trust is regularly abused.
2 replies →
What do you mean "this just doesn't work"?
You do understand that an overwhelming majority of crime and overall anti social behavior is done by a tiny percentage of people. Remove those people and you spare the rest of us.
For instance, the number of prisoners that have had 15 or more prior arrests is over 26%.
You can just have a 15 strikes and you're out policy and make a huge impact. Once these bad actors are out of society, high trust can be built. Stop letting a tiny percentage of people terrorize the rest of us.
It's not about poverty and ironically the biggest victims of this criminal behavior are poor people. Poor innocent people deal w theft, getting hassled and other consequences of criminal behavior at a much higher rate. It's not compassionate to let them suffer.
https://mleverything.substack.com/p/acceptance-of-crime-is-a...
> You do understand that an overwhelming majority of crime and overall anti social behavior is done by a tiny percentage of people.
Are you including all the bosses committing wage theft in this? Or are we only looking at a particular kind of crime?
1 reply →
> What do you mean "this just doesn't work"?
What I mean is that it doesn't work. Your proposal only increases crime, only deepens poverty, only worsens society.
> You do understand that an overwhelming majority of crime and overall anti social behavior is done by a tiny percentage of people. Remove those people and you spare the rest of us.
And yet, this policy has never worked. Three-stikes laws never work. Increased policing and more comprehensive criminal legislation never works. As long as the circumstances that caused the criminality persist, the problems returns ever more entrenched.
> It's not about poverty and ironically the biggest victims of this criminal behavior are poor people. Poor innocent people deal w theft, getting hassled and other consequences of criminal behavior at a much higher rate. It's not compassionate to let them suffer.
You are correct that the poorest suffer the most. As a society, we should aim to eradicate the poverty. Anything short of that is symptom control.
A policeman's job is only easy in a police state.
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7 replies →
Where is your empathy for your fellow man?
Empathy for the criminals making the rest of us deal with these increasingly patronizing technologies?
But don't worry, I'm sure they stole that Milwaukee drill set to eat it, and only shoplift the bare necessities.
>>fellow man
>criminals
Nice bit of dehumanizing language there.
5 replies →
Yes. I presume you’re not capable of empathy, given your comment. Punishments don’t stop people being hungry, and they sure don’t stop people from stealing when they are hungry.
The fact that you’re unable to at least sympathize is pretty pathetic.
1 reply →