I’m not optimistic about it, but I do wonder if the experience of living through a pandemic will give folks a fresh perspective on just how rough imprisonment is, and a willingness to consider alternatives. If it’s torture to be stuck in your own home for a year—with your own bed, food, schedule, entertainment, family, and hot water—just imagine how much worse it must be for someone locked up in a cage for decades without even those basic freedoms. If you believe that long prison sentencing is a deterrent, and someone told you that breaking a law would cause you to have to live another year of pandemic life, does that not feel deterrent enough?
Unfortunately a large part of the population is conditioned to not see convicts as people, let alone citizens deserving of any kind of rights or freedoms
see: The consistent running "joke" throughout American pop culture of men getting raped on a regular basis
It's supposed to be a severe punishment, usually reserved for serious or repeat offenders.
If someone works their ass off at minimum wage for a week, just to have the fruit of their work stolen in a minute, and the thief got caught doing this for the third time (which means the thief likely also got away with it dozens of times), what then?
Most importantly, why should that person work their ass off for another week, instead of going somewhere else, stealing something, and enjoying the remaining 39 hours off?
House arrest exists, but it depends on that person not just ignoring it and running away, and is significantly milder for the reasons you listed.
> If someone works their ass off at minimum wage for a week, just to have the fruit of their work stolen in a minute
You're talking about white collar crime and financial exploitation, which generally is illegal but isn't punished, or is actually legalized. The kind of people who go to prison are lucky if they steal two or three days worth of your work.
> It's supposed to be a severe punishment, usually reserved for serious or repeat offenders.
First, prison in general, and long sentences in particular, are generally not used that way.
Second, why are you trying to punish people for what they’ve done instead of trying to help them so they can learn to do something other than crime and contribute to society?
> If someone works their ass off at minimum wage for a week, just to have the fruit of their work stolen in a minute, and the thief got caught doing this for the third time (which means the thief likely also got away with it dozens of times), what then?
Perhaps focus on why you live in a society where people feel like they need to steal low value things (necessarily, as you have said it was the fruit of a minimum-wage worker) to survive.
(A side note: as of 2017, prisoners in the United States with jobs get paid, on average, a maximum of $3.45 per day[0], if you want to compare yet another situation that is worse than working for minimum wage.)
> House arrest exists, but it depends on that person not just ignoring it and running away, and is significantly milder for the reasons you listed.
The point I was making is that house arrest is not that mild at all, and that maybe more people will realise this after being in house-arrest-lite for a year and have more reluctance to subject fellow humans to even harsher and more cruel conditions.
> Perhaps focus on why you live in a society where people feel like they need to steal low value things
There are antisocial and lazy people everywhere, even in places with a better welfare system than the US. The phone snatching and bike stealing gangs of London aren't doing it to pay for their mum's cancer treatment or to provide food for their kids, they do it because one fun night of robbery pays more than a boring week of work in a grocery or a building site.
> Perhaps focus on why you live in a society where people feel like they need to steal low value things (necessarily, as you have said it was the fruit of a minimum-wage worker) to survive.
“Need” is rarely why people steal. The calculus is, “I want this thing, I don’t have an ethical problem taking it, I think I can get away from it.”
Look, I understand the appeal of an argument that paints criminals as simply having poor morals, but it is a completely false and reductive argument that does not capture the complexity behind why people commit crimes. It’s easy to ‘be ethical’ when your needs are taken care of and you’re in an environment that supports you and guides you into being a healthy member of society.
When I say “need”, I don’t mean literally in the sense of “I need to steal that thing or I will die”. I mean it in the sense of a person being satisfied in enough aspects of their life, and having the necessary skills, to turn themselves away from committing crime.
>having the necessary skills, to turn themselves away from committing crime.
I grew up running with a sketchy crowd. I knew several people who stole things on a recurring basis. None of them did it because they were desperate or had “poor morals”.
You’re deriving this from an incorrect mental model where nobody “wants to steal” and they do it out of desperation. This leaves out people who steal for the thrill, steal because they literally have no moral problem with taking from huge corporations, etc.,
I think you’ll find nearly identical justifications between a guy that votes for someone to raise taxes on mega corporations and an anarchist who just steals from them directly.
> You’re deriving this from an incorrect mental model where nobody “wants to steal” and they do it out of desperation.
Wow, I’m not thinking that way at all. If that’s how it came across, I did a really bad job at explaining myself!
I don’t want to get into a huge thing, especially on an old thread, but what I was trying to get across is that I don’t think it’s good enough to just look at someone who commits a crime and say that it happened because they are ‘bad’, that all the blame is theirs, that society has no culpability.
When I say “need”, I don’t mean destitution. So take your example of stealing for a thrill. Why aren’t they getting enough thrill in other parts of their life? What easier or better thrill could be offered instead that doesn’t involve hurting other people? They clearly have an unfulfilled need for a thrill, and they are fulfilling it by stealing.
When I say “skills”, I don’t mean like job skills. I mean things like the skill of knowing how to talk through anger instead of physically attacking somebody. The skills of emotional regulation. Stuff that may be natural and intuitive for some, but foreign and unknown to others.
I believe that if we handled crime the same way we handle things like plane crashes—investigate without judging, look at more than just the individual, and help people instead of punishing them—there would be much less crime, it would be less serious, and suffering would be immensely reduced. But it’s way harder than just going “well, this person’s a piece of shit and they deserve be imprisoned until they’re 80 years old”.
Has pandemic lockdown really changed that many people’s views? In some countries it has become a faux pas to complain about lockdown conditions. Often that is because people don’t want to hear complaining about things we seemingly have little control over, but sometimes it is because some people honestly don’t see any problem with life in lockdown.
For example, when scientific advisors to some governments appear in national media and say there could be upsides to maintaining social distancing for potentially years into the future, and this evokes little popular outcry outside a tiny fringe of wacko “great reset”/antivaxxer conspiracy theorists on Twitter, then you start to wonder if a lot of the population has simply accepted the new normal. That might create less sympathy with prisoners, not more.
Extending COVID restrictions for years into the future would cause huge outcry, what are you talking about? I would immediately join protests and do everything in my power to get the current government out if that happened, and I'm not one for "viva la revolución!" normally.
Really? Because slowly pushing back opening dates and such leads people with no specific event to protest about.
I have supported 90% of the steps my fairly-restrictive government has taken so far, because they are backed by science. Would I be happy if they were extended indefinitely? Well, no. But, realistically, how would I know that was happening?
If schools are not fully-opened next fall I would definitely be raising a bit of a ruckus. But if Dr Fauci and all the other scientists were saying they really couldn't be re-opened because we were in the middle of another wave? Well, I'm not anti-science.
You can debate each step, but I really don't think that a continual drip-drip of extensions would raise a huge outcry at all.
This is a bit of a Ship of Theseus. When would you know they're extending lockdown indefinitely, if they keep extending it? Never, but that's besides the point.
Some are already quite annoyed with the extensions. Some keep getting more annoyed. Some are becoming accustomed. The question really is: what percentage of people will adapt, and what percentage will revolt?
Keep in mind that it does not need to a majority of people choosing (if choosing is the right word for what is more determined by innate personality traits) to revolt for it to happen. Even a relatively small percentage of sufficiently ravenous people igniting trouble is enough to aggravate the situation of the rest, causing more economic and social trouble. This would further push the society into disarray, and a surefire way to induce people to rise up is to create chaos in a system (historically, hunger was a good motivator).
My point is, I think you're watching the pot before it boils, and declaring it will never boil.
edit: actually, Zeno's paradox might be a better fit here
We're now going on year 2, with limited protests, and vaccines being promised "soon" with "soon" slowly moving further and further away.
That said, the restrictions are being released despite it being a bad idea, and I think the government realizes that they can't really tighten them without risking violent protests.
> vaccines being promised "soon" with "soon" slowly moving further and further away.
In March 2020, the US government said it would take 12–18 months to get a vaccine approved, and many people even doubted that was possible[0]. Instead, it happened just 9 months later[1].
In the United States, the current president first said it was unlikely everyone would be vaccinated before the end of summer[2], then they shifted to having enough vaccine for 300 million people by the end of July[3], and most recently an announcement that there will be supply for the entire population at the end of May[4].
I don’t know where you live, but at least in the U.S., things have been the opposite of “‘soon’ slowly moving further and further away”.
Not everyone here is American. Europeans have seen vaccination pushed back due to delays in supplies and issues with registering for the shot.
Also, some scientific advisors are saying that the present vaccines may be insufficient to fully lift restrictions, and we ought to wait for more advanced boosters to deal with variants.
We're coming up on a year of restrictions now, and many countries simply haven't seen much protest activity. Politics in some Asian and European countries is very much consensus-based, and if the main parties have converged on the idea of maintaining some level of social distancing, there isn’t much space for the populace to voice opposition to that.
Large protests in those countries tend to be unlikely because 1) protests have been banned on epidemological grounds, and the authorities have made it clear that any protest will be swiftly suppressed by the police, and 2) QAnon and antivaxxer conspiracy theorists tend to be very visible at protests, and normal people are unwilling to be associated with that. So, the bulk of the population is not going to be willing to go out and protest.
I live in the Netherlands, and there definitely has been a great deal of protesting and general mayhem. More than a dozen cities had large protests, vandalism.. we had a group chat where people told others about places where this was going to happen in my city, in our case to avoid them, but for others to coordinate.
Mind you, heavy lockdown measures have only been here for a couple of months. I have no doubt if the government makes a step towards keeping it for years, the protests will reignite.
Regarding 1), that stops absolutely nobody here. The city center is bustling with crowds, and protests for other issues still happen, there is no "police squashing".
2), that is a USA-centric view. There is little QAnon talk over here.
A lot of the news coverage of the Netherlands protests has been saying that they aren’t principled people disagreeing with COVID policy, but rather just young and marginalized people enjoying a chance to go wild and engage in vandalism. (Just like the 2005 French car-torchings were only very slightly based on minority grievances, and otherwise just young people going crazy.) Meanwhile, polls show that the Dutch population broadly supports the restrictions. As someone there in the country, do you feel this is inaccurate?
And no, not an American-centric view. QAnon has become a very visible thing in anti-lockdown social media and protests here in Eastern Europe.
The news coverage of "rowdy" protests is always the same: "not real protesters, young people going crazy". Mostly regurgitations from the police chief and the mayor, who obviously have incentive to downplay the intentions of the protesters. They are not completely wrong, of course, but you should take what they say with a grain of salt.
> As someone there in the country, do you feel this is inaccurate?
It's split. Some support the current measures. Some do not. Privately, in my own experience, most are much more unhappy with the measures than they let on publicly. The common phrasing I hear from the hopefuls is "at least it might end soon". If it does not, they might have a change of mind.
> QAnon has become a very visible thing in anti-lockdown social media and protests here in Eastern Europe.
Yes, in Eastern Europe that might be true.. over here, I would be hard pressed to find someone who has even heard of it.
My view from the Netherlands is that days getting longer will be an issue. If the 9 pm curfew is still in effect when it's still light outside at 9 pm, it will be disobeyed much more widely.
Currently it has been extended until the evening of March 30 (which is two days after the clocks go forward for spring). That evening, the sun will set at 8.11 pm in Amsterdam.
A further (hypothetical) three-week extension would AIUI take it to the point where the curfew would come into effect before the streetlights came on.
Very good point! Due to the relaxing of rules around outside crowds and sports, I have good hope they will remove or at least extend the curfew past 9PM.
Instead of looking for protests, perhaps a better (though still imperfect) signal to gauge sentiment about living under pandemic restrictions is to look at how much vaccine demand there is, and how aggressively some governments have acted to ease restrictions. After all, there aren’t constant protests in prisons, either, and I don’t think you’ll find many people saying they’re better off imprisoned than they were on the outside. (Yes, there are outliers—let’s not argue making the exception into the rule.)
If most people were truly comfortable with the status quo, it seems pretty unlikely to me that there would be such overwhelming demand for vaccines, nor does it seem like there would be a constant push to (often prematurely) end pandemic restrictions in so many areas.
I’ve been unable to find any poll asking people specifically about whether they enjoy the restrictions, so I can’t give a definitive answer, but the preponderance of evidence suggests that if people could wave a magic wand and make the pandemic go away tomorrow, they would. And that’s after only a year of relatively minor restrictions on daily life, not 5 or 10 or 50 years of being held in captivity.
> And that’s after only a year of relatively minor restrictions on daily life, not 5 or 10 or 50 years of being held in captivity.
Not to understate the restriction involved in being imprisoned, but “relatively minor restrictions on daily life” is really understating the experience of many people over the past year.
I haven’t seen my parents, sibling, 1-year-old nephew, most of my friends, and any of my co-workers in over a year. I haven’t taken any vacation time because there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do. I’m fortunate that I’m comfortably employed, but none of my regular activities are happening, so my life is essentially in a holding pattern where every day is just some variation of working from home, cooking for myself, working out by myself, and reading.
> I can't believe you would complain about living IN YOUR OWN HOME nice and comfortable while PEOPLE ARE DYING. To compare this to prison is an INSULT to OUR HEALTHCARE HEROES. We're IN A PANDEMIC
There are enough loud voices from people with high Right-Wing Authoritarian Scores (which isn't a Republican/Democrat axis, before you decide I'm being needlessly political) that will shout you down.
As a personal test, I am buying GEO and CoreCivic to see how much I believe.
