I live in Portland, and I have some friends who work in homeless services. They follow an equity model, which places those with the highest level of intersectional need first, particularly BIPOC people. White, cisgender men are thought to have the least intersectional need, and therefore they receive the least support. In practical, day-to-day terms, this means that BIPOC with marginal housing are given priority over non-BIPOC with no housing at all.
1.) Though this is becoming an increasingly popular viewpoint in many of the American cities that are experiencing these problems right now, it’s far from universally held.
2.) The U.S. is not a monolith, so looking at the prison population of the United States as a whole doesn’t tell you about what’s going on in an individual state or city.
3.) The number of people incarcerated has a long tail. In the U.S. in particular, many people received long sentences during the years following the ‘94 crime bill. Little if any effort is being made to commute these despite policies centered on new incarceration changing.
4.) In the places where reduced incarceration is being tried in the U.S. it’s important to recognize that it’s being tried effectively in a vacuum. In many other places which are able to sustain low incarceration rates, there are a lot of social programs that help make that possible, and also programs to help people rehabilitate after a conviction. The U.S. has little if any of that. Where reduced incarceration is being tried, it’s usually not replaced with something that’s more effective.
I consider myself a liberal, but while I think pretty much all drug possession charges should be dropped and decriminalized, violent crime? Robbery? Those folks should absolutely be in jail. I don't care if we have to build tent cities to incarcerate them. You hurt someone intentionally, you should not be breathing free air for a while.
The problem area seems to be property crime without direct violence.
It can ruin the victims life just as much as non-lethal violence (taking away a person's source of income, or transport required to keep a job, or wrecking a business they've spent many years building), but many take the 'it's only property, it's probably insured!' attitude.
And many at least see stealing from 'big nasty corporations' as relatively OK. But if people keep stealing from businesses until they close down or relocate and there's no easy shoplifting targets, will the thieves stop, or will they move on to stealing from homes?
Insurance increases the expected cost of loss! -- the insurer would go broke if they were charging less than that.
So yeah, sure, it can save you from the boundary effect of it instantly wreaking your life but only by putting you at a constant disadvantage to people who live in less crime prone areas or whom are wealthy enough to self insure against such loss.
People who say this don't have real jobs; not the type of jobs where they'll end up on pain killers when they retire. They have laptop jobs on the softer side of intellectual rigor.
Money is time traded from your life, health traded from your body to your employer. Stealing property is literally stealing the purpose of hours of grueling work.
I almost had to sit for a jury trial. Guy stole things worth less than $950, was likely homeless, the prosecution took 22 months to build a case and failed to leverage a plea bargain, named about 30 law enforcement officers and/or forensics specialists as potential witnesses, and jury selection started with 100 citizens and took 4+ days, then the judge claimed it would take 6 weeks to try the case.
The problem isn’t just insurance. It’s that prosecution is insanely slow and is far more harmful to society than the actual crime.
It also results in a disincentives for all parties involved to invest all the time and effort. You could either convince everyone that "don't be insensitive it's a lot of money for them", or you could try to make the process easier.
If people work for my living and see someone just steal for theirs with absolutely no consequence, what they learn is that social dysfunction is optimal, and that doing otherwise is being a chump.
Please re-read your parent. Same concept here. If you make it that comfortable, then why work? Keep in mind that there will always be people who want things the programs won't provide that they're literally willing to kill for - drugs, the newest iPhone, in-style basketball shoes, etc.
Now, I do agree in a parallel way, but with a different solution. If we fix structural problems preventing people from being, or having hope of being, productive members of society, than that can prevent some crime.
It should also be noted that locking people up puts them in contact with a bunch of convicted criminals. Making weed illegal put a bunch of otherwise harmless people in a situation where they wanted to do illegal business.
The liberal position—don’t make relatively harmless stuff illegal—is one way to reduce the amount of crime.
Sure, lock up people who do violent crimes (I mean, get them out of society while we try to figure out if we can get them psychological help), but instead of doing something dystopian like tent prison cities, just let out the people who shouldn’t be there in the first place.
(All that is to say, I agree with you, just think we should focus on the part that will benefit society).
Having spent a considerable portion of my adult life imprisoned, I don't think the contact with other criminals increases a person's penchant for criminality. I think the incarceration itself does though by essentially fucking your entire life up and resetting you to a hard zero. And while you are inside you are not making any improvement to your life, e.g. skill building, improving your emotional intelligence; and in fact you are usually letting any skills you might have had stagnate and deteriorate beyond use.
I think some of this political conflict is over what constitutes a harmless or victimless or nonviolent crime.
In the past year I've seen different people claim that hemp consumption, property crime, and even intimidation with a firearm were nonviolent and that their perpetrators were merely marginalized individuals who need social assistance rather than prosecution.
I think GP's point is that even property crime is not victimless: It hurts everyone, it makes society worse, and it likely hurts the people at the bottom of society disproportionately.
But I may add, then, that the reformers have the burden of showing evidence for their position: they need to demonstrate that it is possible to have a low-crime, low-prosecution, high social net city somewhere in the US. I'm beginning to suspect that they are missing some critical component which is required to make such a system work for everyone.
That's my point, that some people will draw the line at things that are objectively nonviolent, and others will draw it at things that are objectively very close to violent. Actually come to think of it, violence is really just a proxy for harm to others.
Well, good thing is that rehabilitation is the central goal of correctional systems; so you can send thiefs/etc to prison without feeling guilty. This is not a problem that requires a novel solution; almost every other rich country has this sorted out. The central issue US has to fix is reorient prisons around this goal, instead of trying to exploit the slave labor loophole in your constitution.
The fundamental problem is that the misguided attempt to criminalize drugs destroyed respect for the law for generations. Once you're at risk of being locked in a cage for decades for engaging in behavior that would otherwise just be called running a small business, then robbery isn't a huge leap. Especially after your industry ends up creating its own parallel justice system because the usual courts have been made unavailable.
So yes, while drugs should be deillegalized and those crimes expunged, this is only but a first step on a long road to repairing the severe damage that was done to actual law and order by the very people fallaciously rallying behind "law and order" in the 80's and 90's.
I don’t have a problem with some drugs being state regulated and I know it would reduce violence but the harder drugs should never be state sold we already have huge issues with alcohol which is a very hard drug. Acting as if lone actors serving narcotics or prostitutes are regular small business owner is an insult to legitimate entrepreneurs
There are other ways to handle abuse and addiction besides trying to prohibit a widely-desired substance. You rightfully point out that some people have huge problems with alcohol. The solution isn't just to blanket make it illegal (with the ensuing chaos that would/did cause), but rather directly address the acute harm caused by the people with the problems.
Ultimately the reason we consider some things natural rights isn't to create some prescriptive model that we imagine as the shape an enlightened society will take. Rather it's due to the inevitable ugliness when government attempts to legislate into individual autonomy, and people react en masse. And the results of the "drug war" have most certainly been quite ugly!
Aside from the legality, what’s different between a liquor store owner and a weed dealer? You may disagree with their breaking the law, but commerce is commerce, and this is victimless except with regard to the rule of law.
I thought GP was being ridiculous and hyperbolic when I first read their comment, but on second thought it's more technically correct than not. Regulating what substances people can use to affect their own bodies is totalitarian, as it presupposes a state/societal ownership interest of individuals' bodies. Mass surveillance plus parallel construction most certainly constitutes secret supervision. And any attempt to reform the system is met with a strong lobby from police and prison guards, who have long ago succumbed to Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy. It's not the stereotypical power-trickles-down-from-a-small-cabal-to-control-society, but rather an analog in the framework of inverted totalitarianism.
Of course there are different degrees, and throwing out these characterizations in a thread about even more totalitarian societies would be inappropriate whataboutism. But as domestic societal critique they do have some truth.
The thing is that some people don't have the same experience with police leading them to believe that there is no issue with our current system, that's why you see such denial of the damage caused
The police unions have a crazy amount of influence over politics where the basically just cry if they don't get their way and threaten to not go after criminals, it's happened in multiple states iirc
Basically every step of the way, whenever some sort of reform comes up they fight it tooth and nail while simultaneously grabbing every bit of extra power that they can.
These powers include things like surveillance and literal highway robbery in the form of civil forfeiture. In the way of surveillance, they can now purchase peoples data and there are companies selling services to police which analyze and track citizens movements without a warrant. Combine this with a story I saw on HN earlier today about a company purchasing live footage feeds from citizen surveillance cameras for cops to, again without a warrant, use at will.
But wait, there's more!
There are also electronic communications surveillance programs such as prism (NSA) and hemisphere (DEA) combined with the magic of parallel construction to obfuscate the fact that any surveillance was even used to spy on citizens illegally.
Cops basically get to do whatever they want without any sort of punishment when they do harm to citizens, which they do regularly including murdering innocent ones. Perhaps you've heard of the LASD gangs that terrorize the communities they're supposed to be protecting? It's well documented and has been going on for years, it still is.
Prosecutors and judges generally side with the cops because they need them to do their jobs, they have undue influence not only over prosecution but also legislation in the form of strikes and union lobbying.
Police unions are probably the only union I think should be dismantled, all other unions for workers are great but police unions are actively harmful to society.
I agree police unions are awful and cause more harm than good. Everything you say is true (to some degree) but I don't think this qualifies the country to be a police state. I'm not afraid of the police coming to my door because the police have a problem with me. I don't like them but I don't fear them and neither does anyone I know. There is still a due process and even though even one incident is too many, most times the police acts out of line they are punished even if it takes a while (again, due process). The punishment is usually far, far too lenient but at the very least, for the sake of this conversation, shows that they do not have the ultimate power.
There is a lot that can be done about the quality of policing in this country but we are really far off a police state. We are simply a state with an incompetent perpetually afraid power hungry police, likely due to the prevalence of guns. It's tragic as is.
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Maybe you aren't the target now but who's to say you won't be in the future? Consider your perspective versus those who live in predominantly Black communities
You hurt someone intentionally, you should not be breathing free air for a while.
Genuine question; is that only physically? If I like causing people pain and anguish and suffering, and my weapon of choice is words, should I also be incarcerated because I hurt people intentionally? I tend towards not giving people a free pass simply because their weapon of choice is words, but (amongst other things) the US has a reputation for being very permissive with the spoken word.
> If I like causing people pain and anguish and suffering, and my weapon of choice is words, should I also be incarcerated because I hurt people intentionally?
No, you shouldn't be incarcerated for that. You would be an asshole if you intentionally caused people anguish with your words, but being an asshole is not a crime (and shouldn't be).
Prison is where criminals go. Jail is where people not convicted of a crime go.
Drug Offenses are nearly half the prison population [1]. So the prison population can decrease by significant amounts without releasing any violent criminals.
Resistance cooktops are fine too, you just have to learn to adjust to them. I’ve had one in all but one home I’ve ever lived in, and it’s second nature at this point. Every time I try to cook on a gas stove I burn whatever I’m making until I remember how to use them.
I shuddered a little bit at the mention of on premise vs cloud. I’ve been whiplashed from one extreme to the other over the last two years. First it was all in on the cloud, now it’s a full scale retreat.
Companies who are ignorant of how to build in the cloud shouldn't build in the cloud based off of peer pressure alone. It's not just moving on-prem VMs into cloud VMs. You really need to change how you think about solving problems and leverage tools in the cloud built for solving those problems rather than just moving your on-prem knowledge to a cloud environment. The last thing you should be doing in the cloud is heavily relying on VMs.
"Let's get to Canada" will be heard as calling for launching an invasion fleet across Lake Erie. But why bother -- it's a God-forsaken wasteland inhabited by hockey pucks.
In the greater Seattle area you need to travel quite far out to cut the price by any significant amount. There are some very basic suburban houses in Bellevue, Kirkland and Issaquah selling for upwards of $2 million, and those are a good 15-20 miles away from the city itself.
If you don’t believe it, pull up Zillow or Redfin and set a price threshold under $1M and see how many listings instantly disappear. If you want a good laugh, take a look at what’s left.
Maybe it’s time to admit that more entities besides private ones need to be building and supplying housing then? Maybe some things just aren’t well suited for market driven development.
