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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.
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. 🥴
what’s the reasoning ?
Can’t commit crime if nothing is a crime. 🙂↕️
ok
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 have lived in 4 states that called out prison income and highlighted the deficit on prison labor as a problem. The sarcasm and the callout are necessary.
California especially they litterally put they’re lives on the line for your payout. And it still wasn’t a sure thing.
The state is not entitled to the labor of prisoners, especially those that are increasingly political in nature. This apply’s equally to California, Texas, Missouri, and New York.
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.
Thanks for sharing your experience
This is why we say “the cruelty is the point”. As you note, these are not serious people trying to reduce crime. They are straight up lying about their goals, possibly even to themselves. The whole mindset is against the idea that crime is something that even can be reduced; rather, “bad people” will always do “bad things”, and it’s up to “powerful men” to protect the rest of society from them. It is rooted in a deeply authoritarian mindset that puts them as one of the “powerful men”. If you were to reduce crime, how can they prove that they’re one of the “powerful men”?
well, the powerful man probably think that covering people’s basic necessities wouldn’t reduce crime. After all, they have those covered in spades, and yet steal billions of dollars each year
This is a spectacular post
To add to that, it’s the same with homelessness. Every 1-4 years, architecture students and urban planning students are asked to do projects on helping to house the homeless or something similar. Every time, they come up with innovative and unique ways to handle it. People forget about and/or realize that no one will try any of them. Repeat.
Thank you for this great insight and information.
emotional reactionaries who just want to see bad guys be treated badly to make themselves feel better about crime
I keep thinking about Dukakis. They asked if he would change his mind/support the death penalty if his wife was murdered. He said no - and folks flipped their shit.
The “left” as it exists in the US is so cowed by the idea of a Willie Horton scenario that it has to lean into that same evil vindictiveness. The 1994 Clinton crime bill which devastated Black communities was Dems trying to show off how “tough on crime” they could be.
Criminals are a safe “other” to hate.
Fantastic reply. Thanks for taking the time to write it out and thanks again for the insight into the very important work you do.
Do you have some beginner friendly references I could look at? I live in a MAGA heavy state and although logic doesn’t always work the more tools in my belt the better!
Thank you for typing that out!
What I keep getting held up on is that if the science keeps pointing toward the same conclusion, how do you actually apply those to society? How to you convince the voting masses to institute these changes? Because the average person won’t accept repealing things like three strikes and minimum sentencing, they just assume that a “tough on crime” attitude is the way to go. If a politician comes along offering justice system reform, he’d never make it into office because people would assume he’d be letting criminals run rampant unpunished.
Related, I’ve heard people argue against UBI by saying that it would just make people lazy and not want to work at all.
Related, I’ve heard people argue against UBI by saying that it would just make people lazy and not want to work at all.
I mean, it’s completely unrealistic to think that this would not be the case for some X% of the population. It’s already the case now, with the welfare programs we already have, after all. What number that X is, is what’s unclear. People saying “nobody will work” are definitely wrong, though, lol.
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.
Small point about this in particular, but isn’t the above evidence that this is effective at removing crime from an area? Why not do the same in the “other neighborhoods”, too, then?
Especially if you combine the above with what you described later to reduce recidivism:
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.
Seems like a solid plan to me, and police forces would naturally/gradually shrink over time, to suit the overall crime rate as it goes down.
I can almost picture the classroom I was sitting when I first learned about the study and having the exact same reaction you did.
Part of the study controlled for that, in the context of practical limitations. They divided the city into sectors and absolutely flooded certain sectors with cops while doing minimal patrols in the others, or in some cases none at all. The crime just moved in the opposite way. When the police presence increased in one sector, the crime rate went down there, but went up in the others. And then when they switch the sectors, the crime switched back. So practically speaking, cities and towns would have to be able to sustain that high level of policing, which hardly anyone wants. I see towns get into it over a budget allocation to hire one additional officer, let alone the number they would need to sustain to keep up the sort of levels needed to push crime out everywhere. And maybe some places would be able to do it, but the crime would just push to other areas, foisting the problem onto other communities. Further, I think there’s very little appetite in America to actually put a police officer on every corner. Nobody would like living in that world.
practically speaking, cities and towns would have to be able to sustain that high level of policing, which hardly anyone wants.
But it’d be temporary for it to be that high, no? Am I misremembering, or is this basically the way that NYC stopped being so infamously crime-ridden? I was under the impression that it’s not as aggressive now as it was then.
Hastily-googled, but this seems to confirm at least some of what I remember reading a while back: https://www.nber.org/digest/jan03/what-reduced-crime-new-york-city
I think there’s very little appetite in America to actually put a police officer on every corner. Nobody would like living in that world.
Yeah, probably. Was just wondering about it hypothetically.
After all, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, right?
Here’s some further reading in the problem I was describing.
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.
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’ve been trying it across the world, it’s called Universal Basic Income. It’s been proven mostly successful every time.
Here’s an old article about the US: https://mashable.com/article/cities-with-universal-basic-income-guaranteed-income-programs
Yeah! I wanted to specifically call out the study on UBI with formerly incarcerated people.
I know a lot of pushback on UBI is that it will make people lazy, or emboldened criminals. It has the exact opposite effect.
I believe that’s manufactured pushback tbh. People who are overworked might think it would make themselves lazy. At first, maybe? To get your thoughts in order, it might look lazy. But most people who feel safe with a steady income want to be productive.
I was talking about it with my GF over breakfast. She’s being worked to the bone, waking up in pain etc. and thought about alternatives.
She had the idea of a cat-bookstore-library-café. Imagine being able to sit down with a nice [beverage of your choice], read a good book, have a curious kitten climb onto your lap… Sure, it wouldn’t be for everyone and probably too expensive to run at a profit, but it might be possible with UBI.
And she’d still want to work her other job part-time too, just not full time anymore. She’d still be contributing, just in a different way.
It’s not “universal” unless/until it’s given to everyone. Until then, it’s just another targeted welfare program, “offered to a select portion of a city’s population instead of all residents”, as your link says.
You can’t say UBI has been “proven mostly successful” without actually doing UBI, considering its main hurdles are related directly to giving out that much money to everyone. A UBI of $12000/year ($1000/month) for just all working-age people in the US (a bit over 200 million) would cost the government $2.4 TRILLION, yearly.
Even seizing the entirety of every US billionaire’s net worth (est. $4.5 trillion), assuming you could convert it straight across into cash 1:1 (which you can’t), and cutting defense spending (~$850 billion), the two most common ways I’ve seen people claim we can pay for UBI in the US, even if defense was cut to literal zero (also absurdly unrealistic), that still wouldn’t even cover the cost of this UBI for three years.
There are alternatives that would have a similar effect, without the scary price tag. A negative income tax is an example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax
The politics are easy, except that it needs a political champion who promises and delivers the redistribution of power that is UBI.
A UBI of $12000/year ($1000/month) for just all working-age people in the US (a bit over 200 million) would cost the government $2.4 TRILLION, yearly.
Technically UBI saves government money. That $2.4T is just transfers from net tax payers to net receivers. But because programs can be cut at that UBI level, It costs somewhere around $1200B (all government levels) less to provide $2.4T. Once you look at military budget as something that could increase your own cash, even more.
A fair tax system that eliminates payroll taxes and pays for universal healthcare can be 33%. Or 25% for first $100k income, and surtaxes at higher income levels.
https://www.naturalfinance.net/2019/06/andrew-yang-and-democrat-tax-proposals.html
I’ve had this discussion before. You might want to do some more research and have sources. I would advise you to look at really good sources about the following points:
- “It’s not “universal” unless/until it’s given to everyone.”
- “…would cost the government $2.4 TRILLION, yearly.”
- “Even seizing the entirety of every US billionaire’s net worth and cutting defense spending wouldn’t even cover the cost of this UBI for three years”
Your numbers and projected income is way wonky. I’ll discuss it when you come back with sources from the studies of UBI and why most experts think they worked being referenced.
I’m not the other person but I’ve had this discussion in work before and people have hit back with the following:
This wouldn’t work because with all these people getting UBI would just mean companies would put prices up to levels making the UBI worthless. For example if the cost of living is $1000 and you give people who need it $1000 then before long the cost of living would rise to $2000.
Now I’m in support of doing more for the average person and taking from corporations but I just don’t know how to argue against their, albeit lacking in actual data, arguments.
For example if the cost of living is $1000 and you give people who need it $1000 then before long the cost of living would rise to $2000.
You may choose to have a $2000 cost of living, but you would choose that too through a pay raise. You could be empowered to keep $1000 cost of living, and there would be more apartments like “yours” if everyone else is moving up in lifestyle.
UBI gives you more choices. If you think everyone else is passive, just paying what they are told, you can use the opportunity to build more affordable life options for people, including easy access to loans from all of the extra money getting spent.
So when I said cost of living I meant in general and not on an individual basis.
For example $1000 would cover all rent and bills, but then companies or landlords get greedy and raise prices so the cost of living is now $2000 making UBI futile. Rather than an individual increasing their own cost of living. If that makes sense.
If sellers can fix prices so easily they’re a cartel. Your whole economy is way fucked in that case so you definately need radical reform of one type or another, UBI is the least of your worries. Paying monopoly prices for everything is your big problem, you do need to get on with effective anti-trust action - or other radical market reform.
Even if no prosecution due to regulatory capture and so on though, a cartel of enough oligopolists in inherently unstable and they have to work hard to keep up the cooperation, it becomes a complex situation but underying it, the first one to cut prices will sell way more units and eat the others market share . This doesn’t work all the time in all industries, but general competetive pressure does sometimes work to mediate excess profits in some circumstances.
Now, if you’d picked a broken market like rents and said landlords fix rental prices higher, yes - dysfunctional market, high barriers to entry, no real liquidity, rare transactions, powerful intermediators, weak ill informed buyers; yes such a market probably would benefit from price regulation or increasing social housing provision.
I’d love to see the evidence for the 1:1 happening in practice. I suspect it’s someone’s perverse-dream, very strong assumptions about universal sellers power and consumers total inability to substitute.
This wouldn’t work because with all these people getting UBI would just mean companies would put prices up to levels making the UBI worthless. For example if the cost of living is $1000 and you give people who need it $1000 then before long the cost of living would rise to $2000.
It’s the guaranteed part that makes a difference. If they know they can at least buy toiletries or whatever with the money.
I don’t understand the cost of living part? Are they raising the prices randomly? Is it because more people are buying stuff, so there’s more demand? Then more jobs are created. It’s a very vague question.
Apologies for being vague, it’s been a while since I’ve had this discussion.
Perhaps I am misunderstanding UBI as being linked to the cost of living, in that the UBI would provide for people’s basic needs and if they wanted more than that then they could find a job to supplement their income or maybe it’s one or the other.
I think what they were getting at ok the raising prices is that because there is more spending power then that means corps would like to get their hands on this extra money by raising prices.
I’ll try and broach this topic again and get their objections and bring it up next time I see this discussion.
No worries, I’m guessing they won’t be able to respond either. It sounds like talking points they were given by a podcast or something, and they didn’t really look into it. Whenever people start spouting those kind of things, digging deeper into their thoughts will usually tell you pretty quickly how much they believe or are repeating.
You might want to do some more research and have sources.
I brought up a handful of VERY easily-verifiable, non-controversial data points, and just did some simple math. But, I guess, for the extremely lazy:
- $1000/mo x 12 months in a year = $12000/yr
- Number of working-age (16-64) Americans = ~210 million (I rounded down to 200 and counted working-age only (i.e. no elderly/retired), two things that make my argument WEAKER)
- $12 thousand x 200 million = $2.4 trillion
- Combined net worth of US billionaires is ~4.5 trillion. But hey, I found a much higher estimate that puts it a bit above 6 trillion. That gets you almost a whole extra year!
- Latest US defense spending budget is $850 billion
Assuming stripping defense down to zero (which again, is an absolutely absurd hypothetical made for the sake of argument, and making my argument AS WEAK AS POSSIBLE) and applying the entire $850 billion to the UBI price tag, you’re left with a yearly cost of $1.55 trillion. And even using the higher estimate of $6 trillion from the billionaires, 1.55 goes into 6 less than 4 times.
The only thing ‘wonky’ is your refusal to accept mathematical reality.
P.S. Telling me to “look at really good sources” for ‘it’s not universal if it’s not given to everyone’ made me laugh pretty hard.
I’ll discuss it when you come back with sources from the studies of UBI and why most experts think they worked being referenced
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Why the hell would we give the rich $12k/year.? It makes no sense for it to be “universal,” we should change the branding. Doesn’t make it the bad idea you are so eager to paint it.
Taxes on the rich go way up, and so UBI is just a refundable tax credit, but some people pay more than they receive = taxation, where others receive more than they pay = negative taxation.
Why the hell would we give the rich $12k/year.?
Because the administrative costs associated with making sure they don’t, will cost even more. That’s one of the main upsides of UBI–no means testing makes it have practically no ‘overhead’. If means testing were added, its price tag would be even higher.
Negative income tax solves the “rich people getting 12k/yr they don’t ‘need’” issue. Beaurocracy/overhead has already been mentioned as another reason.
That’s precisely it, there’s lots of evidence which shows that welfare programs are better for creating stable societies.
They don’t want less crime they want more so they can exert force over the population
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.
I think you’re right about where the US is headed, but only idiots think having guns will save them from thugs with more guns, let alone a squad of well trained soldiers.
Plenty of resistance movements caused problems for the nazis. You can’t fight them in an open battlefield but you can assassinate leaders. They didn’t manage to kill Hitler but some others were assassinated. Heydrich for example.
Probably a bigger point is that you can’t beat fascism with an individualistic approach to resistance.
Unfortunately most modern Americans couldn’t resistance-movement their way out of a Walmart, and would report anything they thought might be putting them in personal danger.
The trick is to be rich enough that you can hire security squads with helicopters and armored vehicles. The only reason to have a gun in that situation is to take pot shots at the plutocrats.
They don’t want to lessen crime, not really anyway.
They want to increase prison labor capacity by arresting and charging more people
Americans maybe. There’s other countries that don’t have legal slavery.
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
I hit rock bottom. Was broke.
My thoughts on stealing changed entirely. I couldn’t care less. I had bigger concerns than other people’s property. Most people steal out of desperation and when you’re desperate, your moral compass disappears.
Society is perpetually 9 missed meals away from collapse.
A person can do anything when they lost everything.
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
Yeah, but by doing all that you are oppressing the oppression which the lack of those very things makes so much easier, do you ever think about that??
No, you don’t, because you only think of your face and never how the boot on it feels./s
Why would the US want to limit their pool of slave labour?
I was told automation would reduce the need for labor. Why bother getting more pops? They should be encouraging birth control so there are less dissidents and embrace the certainty of steel.
