VICE's "Raised in the System" feature on juvenile prisioners shows how detrimental sending kids away to juvenile detention centers is. They are 30 times more likely to be sent to prisons as adults, completely unequipped to integrate back into society when they return from detention and the crimes they're sent away for can mostly be explained by adolescent tendencies that most people grow out of.
Putting a kid in there almost feels like a purposeful reinforcement of the same behavior. It feels like society is saying, "Oh, you're looking for a career in crime? Let's put you in crime college for a few years so that you'll be better prepared for your new life of crime when you get out."
Also, our society is set up so that once you are labeled a criminal, that label sticks with you for the rest of your life. Many aspects of legitimate law-abiding life, particularly employment and housing, get harder once you’ve been convicted of something, even after you’ve served your time. Every application that asks for your criminal history or “have you ever been convicted” cements this class distinction.
If we want fewer repeat offenders, maybe we should stop punishing them after they fulfill their punishment.
A new restaurant just opened in my neighborhood called "All Square". They are staffed entirely by ex-cons, as a way to get them decent jobs. Cool idea, I'd love to see it become more widespread.
On the flip-side, however, many average people don't want former criminals in their society, near their kids, etc.
How do you separate the ones who actually want to get back on track and live a normal life, and the ones that plan on committing more crimes as soon as they get out? If you were to offer your home as a halfway house or something similar, would you feel safe without any sort of guarantee for your safety?
I would start by drawing a distinction between misdemeanors and felonies, since that could be done immediately. Make it so everything less than a felony conviction is not part of a background check. Including arrests, etc. So as long as you've not been convicted of a felony, then you get to say no to all those filter questions on job & housing applications.
Then I would make it a requirement that every state offer a realistic way to have felonies expunged by petition after a certain length of time. Prove you're not a problem, get back to a clean record.
Honestly, there are a lot of people I don't want around me or my kids who haven't been convicted of a crime. It's hardly a perfect filter as it is.
Set a criminal record expiration date depending on crime? Small crimes would expire quickly (but get refreshed/increased if you commit another small crime), more serious crimes would take longer to expire. Some study would be necessary on crime rate vs. time since last detention leave -- the principle being employers shouldn't need to unknowingly bear above a threshold of risk on their property/life (you need to balance doing good to ex-cons and protecting society).
Even better might be spending directly on ex-cons to better integrate them back into society (education, training, etc), instead of spending copious amounts on detention, security, punishment. The resulting decrease in recidivism probability is likely well worth it in most cases.
Also programs for locating at-risk for crime individuals and making sure they have better alternatives, to lower crime rate in first place.
The main problem is I'm quite skeptical that you could consider most criminals as "rational"/well informed of their possibilities and consequences of choices. Therefore increasing punishment probably doesn't change significantly their behavior, only might worsen the outcome once they leave detention in a negatively-reinforcing environment, not to mention consume public resources that could be better employed -- like targeted education clearing the minds of at risk individuals on what are the likely outcomes of criminal life compared to alternatives.
>former criminals in their society, near their kids, etc.
This is mostly a result of words. If someone who committed a crime 2 years ago and someone who committed a crime 42 years ago are both "former criminals", people will avoid both of them.
>How do you separate the ones who actually want to get back on track and live a normal life, and the ones that plan on committing more crimes as soon as they get out?
Time is not perfect, but it is simple, effective and hard to cheat.
Make sure everyone has the skills and means to survive in the world. Don't expect the public to provide halfway houses, but instead provide that as part of your criminal justice system. If someone commits more crimes, punish them for the crimes and perhaps, take a different approach with the rehabilitation portion of their sentence the second time around.
I would also add that the means bit is rather important. If I was getting out and realized how slim my chances of actually getting a job and supporting myself were, I might plan on doing more crimes. There isn't much incentive not to. On the other hand, if I knew I'd be OK just by going through the program, I'm more likely to do that.
Evidently there are many people who agree with you. One of them founded, and now many support an awesome foundation called the Delancey Street Foundation. It is in San Francisco (and now other places). They provide housing and employment, via their own internal businesses, which employ those they are helping to reintegrate into society. Their cafe and restaurant are really great if you're in the neighborhood in San Francisco! Their story of starting with a small house and growing into a block-sized complex is really inspiring!
I used to live 2 blocks from Delancey. I had them move me into my apartment, move me out, hired them for two office moves, and they were the labor for the SF-end of a significant datacenter move. Great guys, hard workers. The professionalism at the cafe is almost military, I had breakfast there almost every morning for 2 years. It's part of the reason I'm so fat.
And it is also hard to miss that the racial distribution of the prisoners is very skewed. HN likes customer acquisition probability funnels, you can apply a similar technique looking at how poorer and more minority schools have more police presence on campus, causing those juvenile populations to experience harsher consequences for the same crimes as more wealthy schools, leading to more detention sentences for a subgroup, leading to "crime college" and onward until we arrive at one input to the wealth gap between minority families and others.
A lot of these sort of features engage in bad science for the sake of shocking numbers and headlines. For instance is that 30x more likely compared to juveniles who were tried and convicted of the same offense, but avoided detention, or is it compared to the general population? I expect we're almost certainly looking at the latter, but then suddenly it's a completely meaningless statistic meant to mislead rather than inform.
What bothers me about the discussion about this in Europe is that it keeps focusing on how sorrowful and tough this system is ...
... on the people who work in it. Not on the kids. They hardly get mentioned at all.
The kids barely get mentioned at all. And of course, when the system abuses kids (including literally), the employees/bureaucrats are protected/shielded from consequences and the kids ?
Sometimes it seems like half of them commit suicide. This is distressingly common thread in the stories about these people. Now I get it, stories only make it out if they're dramatic enough, but still.
In the name of being "nice" to the kids they are locked up, excluded from schooling, imprisoned (including in solitary confinement for weeks), beaten ("pain impulses" is the psychological term), constantly moved around (so they don't have safety and predictability), and so on.
Everything is done to prevent these kids from, even if they want to, get a normal life going. But you know who this is hard on ? The employees of youth services. That's who it's hard on.
This has been going on for decades like this. The result is that most of the employees never even sees the kids. Everyone's working on figuring out what to do (without seeing the kids, of course), on dividing up the kids, on "influencing" the laws and advising government/parliament, on administrativa like processing request forms, on ... and the kids systematically aren't happy with their performance.
And the saddest part is. These people are being judged against the lowest standards you can possibly imagine. These kids, most of them have been in youth services since 10 years old or less. They have never known differently, and so they accept the abuses of the system. Getting thrown out of their residence into the street every friday evening, because they can't pay for a weekend presence, then incarcerated by the police because they weren't back on monday morning ... Kids comment "that's inconvenient, I cried a bit", and move on in the conversation as if that's the most normal thing to have happen to you. Like this is hitting your head on a door. "Oh well".
But even these kids judging these people by those sorts of extreme low standards ... aren't happy with the system, mostly because of the psychological safety issue: the kids can't predict what the youth services system will do to them in 2 months, and it's just 100% forced on them. So they can't plan, they can't compensate, they can't achieve anything, because it's just ripped away from them by someone they've never seen before 2 months down the line.
Needless to say, the standards youth services uses to judge parents are getting ever stricter, and what they themselves do is ... remniscent of the stories we used to hear from Eastern Germans when I was young.
Reality is that it's pretty damn clear that leaving a kid with alcohol addicted parents is a far superior option to putting the kid, even part time, into youth services.
"Tough on crime" was always a dog whistle to signal to (most) voters that politicians were willing to lock up minorities for comparably minor crimes. It's good to see that the winds have shifted towards a more just system although there is a long way to go.
I think there are many factors that contribute to this trend and would love to see a paper which goes into the details. I would bet that prosecutors have a lot to do with this. Prosecutors have so much power in our criminal justice system due to what charges they choose to bring forward.
This seems like revisionist history. From the seventies thru the beginning of the nineties, the national homicide rate was double to triple what it is today. We had real crime problems in the "Tough On Crime" era, and we were hitting record crime rates.
A lazy Wiki snip:
Violent crime nearly quadrupled between 1960 and its peak in 1991. Property crime more than doubled over the same period. Since the 1990s, however, crime in the United States has declined steeply.
I'm sure there was probably always some racial influences, e.g. perhaps people were more willing to hand out harsh sentences because the defendants were mostly black. But to say that "Tough On Crime" was really just a cover to marginalize african americans & nothing more... it just seems like a stretch when you suggest everyone was in on it.
I really encourage you to read The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
Hand waving away racial influences is convenient to some, but definitely not to those affected by it. If you look into the statistics, you'll see that primarily minority communities were targeted by the "tough on crime" era. And these touted "tough on crime" policies only had the effect of enslaving and crippling generations of minority communities.
The crime rates are nearly similar among all races, and it's actually been shown that whites use more drugs than minorities. The thing is though, police don't patrol white communities. They also let white people off the hook. If you're not white though, the tradition is "one strike" (see Bill Clinton's damning policy). Hence, you get in trouble for something any kid might do at 16, and you get locked into a system of control and degradation for the rest of your life.
Please, please, please, do not defend the dark parts of American history. Especially when they're still going on.
> The crime rates are nearly similar among all races
This is patently false and not all crimes are the same. The murder and assault rate, for example, is tragically - and dangerously - high for blacks.
> The thing is though, police don't patrol white communities.
The thing is though, police patrol crime-ridden communities, which sadly are often black communities. Or do you think there's a massive unknown murder wave in New Hampshire that would be uncovered if only the police presence there was increased?
I'm sorry to be blunt but this kind of obfuscation of facts is extremely unhelpful and we'll never resolve societies problems by shifting the blame to 'the man' all the time.
Actual crimes committed is what you need to look at, not who gets caught and charged. That's the part that's broken, and that's what you're using to justify the brokenness. I see this time and time again from people.
The more you patrol an area, the more crime you'll find.
All you need to do is look at the statistics. The crime rates (I don't mean arrests or charges here!) are the same or higher among whites. They simply aren't charged or harassed like minority communities are.
You misunderstand. I'm simply objecting to the claim that "tough on crime" was a political dog whistle, aka a code word all the voters understood to actually mean "oppress minorities".
"Law and order", "tough on crime", they're all code words. Maybe not everyone realizes, but they're simply a method to enforce racist policies and hierarchies without getting in trouble.
As long as you don't explicitly say it's about race, the Supreme Court has ruled time and again that it's okay for police to target minority communities.
This is all detailed with plenty of sources in the book I mentioned. It's truly sickening.
"The crime rates are nearly similar among all races"
Do you have any stats to back that up? Everything I find says the opposite.
A Channel 4 News fact check says:
https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-black-amer...
"Blacks were disproportionately likely to commit homicide and to be the victims. In 2008 the offending rate for blacks was seven times higher than for whites and the victimisation rate was six times higher."
You can look at the stats yourself:
https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/rhovo1215.pdf
See Page 3 Table 2. This is the "Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey" where they ask victims of violent crime demographic information about the offenders. This avoids any question of bias from the arrest rates. Doing the math, black people offend at a rate 2.4x higher than whites.
I tried to find data about offender rate for property crime, but every discussion said that since the victims don't encounter the offenders, there is no good way to estimate offender race.
I'm not defending anything in American history. I just want to set the facts straight.
When you just look at race numbers it doesn't correct for things like economic or educational standing.
Besides, isn't this begging the question? You can't really use statistics from the same institution you're trying to evaluate. The wikipedia link you posted gives a good summary of whats misleading about the snippet you chose immediately after that snippet.
> I disagreed with two false statements of fact: "The crime rates are nearly similar among all races"
Believe it or not there is a great deal of research about just these questions. You might want to actually review such research before you confidently declare these facts as false. As it is, you've been presented with several highly acclaimed books and responded with cherry picked statistics and banal pedantry. It is reminiscent of climate change deniers who love to link to the Koch-funded study of AFP data while also carefully ignoring the last 50 years of other research. If you or anybody really want to actually understand the dark years of "Tough on Crime" that define America from 1960 to now there's a lot of serious texts out there that presents mountains of data on everything from targeting to minorities to redlining.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Even if you believe someone is arguing in bad faith, the exercise of responding to their best possible interpretation forces us to sharpen our own arguments and makes us stronger. It's a worthwhile constraint.
I hope you'll find a way to accommodate yourself to the guidelines and stick around; if not, I hope you'll find a venue that suits you. Regardless: keep on keepin' on, amigo.
Its a very interesting subject, and depends how far down you want to go before you are satisfied with an answer.
Both victimization and offending rates for murder were 3-4x the rate for blacks than whites in 1980 for example. Why was that? Could it be factors like systematic racism, redlining, bundling a lot of poor people into housing projects, brain drain in cities (due to redlining post-integration)?
The result of "tough on crime" has been incarceration rates exploding. They just throw anyone in jail. 5% of black adults are in jail.
You would think that since the crime rates are down, the incarceration rate would be going down - how can incarceration rates go up as crime goes down? Technology and standard of living increases for the poorest has probably helped crime. The mass incarcerations just help for-profit prisons.
Yes, the results are a mess. But did the voting public elect "tough on crime" politicians as a covert way to oppress minorities? Or did they elect those politicians because they were concerned about crime?
I think you have to look at the effect at the end of the day. Did redlining happen to specifically punish and oppress minorities, or to let white homeowners feel "safe from criminals"?
"Lock all the criminals up" when the subtext/unspoken relation for "criminals" is "black people/minorities" is a way to oppress minorities. Its also a failure to think of or implement a different path to work against poverty or criminality - something politicians love to do as a crackdown is easier for them to implement than actually improving people's lives.
Option 3: Did they elect those politicians because they were concerned about the idea of crime? Fear is a powerful motivator; I'd be interested to see how areas that elected "tough on crime" politicians correlate to actual crime rates.
Yes, there was a crime spike around the early '90s. Here's the fascinating thing: it went away, everywhere. It didn't just go away in some cities that were "tough on crime" and stick around elsewhere. It went away in every city across the nation, regardless of their local policing. It was a transient phenomenon that probably would have gone away even if no changes happened to the criminal justice system.
Also, one thing that's worth understanding here is that a group of individuals all working under the same values system responding to the same stimuli will typically exhibit the same responses, which can often have the appearance of collusion or organization. And in a way it is, through the shared values system, but not in the overt way many think. That doesn't make the results any more palatable.
There are a lot of things to consider, including what you consider a crime.
I read one article that described how because of the increase in police presence in schools students were more often being handled by the criminal justice system like the common school fight, that would’ve otherwise not been included in assault statistics in the past.
During the crack epidemic many small offenses, such as petty theft were being punished harshly and used as an excuse to put more resources towards the war on drugs rather than diversion and treatment.
Tough on crime has gone out of style. We had our primaries recently and only a few conservative dinosaurs even mentioned ToC in their voter biography. Most of the candidates running for AD, circuit judge, and other legal offices were drumming up their crime intervention bonafides.
Certain states are likely to remain relatively worse places for minorities, particularly blacks, to live. But the system is bent in this manner everywhere, including California. The diffference, of course, is that in Florida the voting populace has collectively decided that they like the way things currently work. Whereas in places like California, the voting populace is deciding for a lot of reasons that they don't like the current situation.
I never understood the mindset of "oh, this person committed a crime, let's disallow them from voting in the future".
My opinion is, if society has decided that an individual does not get to exercise their right to vote, then they also should have no tax liability. No taxation without representation, and all that jazz. I guarantee you if they were forced to make the choice between the two, they'd immediately reinstate every felon's voting rights.
For sure, we are also starting to see more minority district attorneys and attorney generals. I don't have stats to back this up to sense a trend but America recently had their first black AG (Holder, Lynch) and California and New York have had minority AGs recently (Kamala Harris & Becerra for CA, NY recently elected Letitia James for the democratic nomination and she is likely to win the general)
> "Tough on crime" was always a dog whistle to signal to (most) voters that politicians were willing to lock up minorities for comparably minor crimes.
I think race in these discussions is a poor stand-in for the reality of the situation. It's convenient, because it's much more easily quantifiable than culture, and we in the US had laws calling out race until ~55 years ago. But, looking at today, cultural mores and attitudes are the more dominant factor.
Even liberal Minnesota has the highest (or one of) achievement gaps in education. Part is the high influx of immigrants, which introduces a lot of second-language barriers, but not all. See https://www.twincities.com/2017/08/18/15-years-later-mn-scho...
Looking at very rural, very white areas, you see very similar bad outcomes WRT education and crime. Some companies are willing to pay very good wages for workers, and are very short on staff, but cannot hire because so many of the candidates fail a drug test or won't take one. A teacher I know in rural Iowa has white children in kindergarten who know (and use) more swear words than most adults, and their parents (if they know more than one of them) have little interest in encouraging achievement in school. They'd rather blame the teacher for the child's bad behavior and grades.
Tough on crime was a misguided attempt to change the culture of drugs and violence. That culture is still glorified in popular music, and fueled by poverty. It destroys the potential for hope, and so leads to more hopelessness, which fuels the culture.
Yes, race plays a factor in all of this, but it's not the only factor, and I suspect (though know not where or even if it is possible to gather) that culture plays a far more significant role. I know several people who believe (or believed) in "Tough on Crime" and not one of them did so because of race, or to lock up minorities for minor crimes. They see families in their community torn apart by drugs and violence, drunk driving, and so on, and want it to stop.
Edit: I read / skimmed the article, and realized it mentioned growing segregation, but failed to mention an experiment run by Eden Prairie and Minneapolis, where students could voluntarily switch schools in an effort to de-segregate. The results were that those who took advantage of the switch were black students moving from suburban to urban schools, and minority white students in urban schools going out to the suburbs.
> Tough on crime was a misguided attempt to change the culture of drugs and violence.
- Why is violence a sibling of drugs?
- Why do people feel the need to take drugs?
I think you're right that poverty is the problem, and its not only the "culture" of poverty to blame for it. The criminal justice system upholds poverty as a way of life by mass incarcerations of working-age people rather than treatment and rehabilitation. The lack of any social real safety net also upholds poverty - an entire town can be devastated by an arbitrary boardroom decision.
Anyone have any evidence that suggests this is because there are fewer juveniles that should be in prison, or if we're imprisoning more accurately, or there are more juvneiles that aren't in prison but should be?
There's a lot of nuance here and I haven't found any good data on what caused the change -- just political bloviation
If you look at the data, in general America's youth has been "doing better" compared to the 80s and 90s. High school graduation rates are up [0], juvenile crime is down [1], teenage pregnancy is down [2], tobacco use was down for a long time but is seeing an uptick due to e-cigs [3]. Generally the youth population is doing better and I think that all reflects in the detention rate.
This is also what I was wondering. The first thing I was looked for was raw numbers. I found those here [1]. Nationwide youth confinement dropped 41% from 1995 to 2010. So the next question is how does this compare to the general change in crime rates. A convenient graph with those data is available here. [2] And we see there has been an overall 36% drop in crime rates.
And so, lacking any confounding data, it would seem to be almost fully explained by the general drop in crime. Of course now that begs the question of what's causing that drop, but that's a more actively researched question and it appears that the answer to that could likely also explain this.
Another reference showed "peak juvenile incarceration" at ~100k kids, and 2000 cases were identified in this scandal alone, so 2% of the peak population were touched directly - and this was the most publicized incidence.
its interesting that most other comments in here are debating sociological issues rather than the medical one here, as the paper you linked pointed out. Thanks for sharing.
Steven Pinker talks about the root causes for this in Better Angels of Our Nature. He argues that crime has been trending steadily downward for centuries. There was a blip of increasing crime, at odds with the trends, that lasted from about the early 1960s to the late 1980s, and he offers some explanations for that blip. But in general, crime should continue to fall.
The US homocide rate has been dropping steadily since 1991, from 9.8 to about 4.5 today. (The post-WWII peak was 10.2 in 1980.) It stands to reason that a drop in juvenile crime would track the drop in adult violent crime.
I really liked Pinker's book, but that was imho one of the weaker sections. For one thing, it more or less says that violence dropped because of "cultural shifts", which is more or less a description of what happened, not an explanation.
Interesting read.
In Enlightenment Now, Pinker attributes the spike in opioid overdoses and suicides to "the druggy Baby Boomer cohort reaching middle age".
(Similarly, the same cohort reached prime crime-committing age during the 1960s-80s spike in violence.)
Lead and Roe v Wade are often discussed, but it's one of those issues that's really hard to gain confidence about any particular explanation. It appears likely that both played a role, but to what extent is more difficult to say.
Roe v Wade is pretty far out there, but lead exposure has a lot of decent correlational data from different regions, since it was phased out around the country and around the world at different times.
Roe v Wade is not _that_ far out there. It explains state-level differences for when the decline began, for example. I'm not saying it's a slam dunk, but it's got some reasonable supporting evidence, enough to at least not be considered "out there".
You may be right; I recall, though, hearing some fairly convincing counter-arguments at the time the first Roe v Wade hypothesis was floated. But maybe there's been more research since.
The biggest argument I've heard since then was that, while the abortion rate has gradually declined again since then, the crime rate has not gone back up.
Peter Turchin points to a blip in violence in the 1970's, and the 1920's (think Prohibition), and maybe also the 1870's. These are on top of a long-term downward trend, though.
Wait, so California made if very hard to put a youngster in juvenile detention, and the number of youngsters juvenile detention plummeted. Is there some deep meaning behind this that I am missing? It's like saying "we reclassified most crimes from felony to misdemeanor and the number of felonies decreased dramatically!" Well, duh!
The thing to check would be what happened to crime/reoffense rates. And then making conclusions. But that didn't happen in the article.
I see no such comparison in the article. It may be so, or not - I have no idea. I know general crime rates are mostly declining (though it depends on place and crime - it's not universal) but I have no idea whether the drop in juvenile detention is the same as in crime, more or less. If it's the same, does it mean the reform described in the article had absolutely no effect and the reduction in detention is caused by other trend that was outside of reformer's control? Or does it mean absence of detention actually reduced the crime, causing virtuous cycle? If it's falling faster, how much this actually reduces the crime? None of these questions - which are vital for understanding the matter - were even mentioned, let alone answered.
In SF I've seen first-hand groups of youths filling up their backpacks with store items and running off laughing. They don't even run more than a block before slowing down to walk because they know nothing will happen. Thousands of dollars of items are taken but because of the new law where theft under $1000 per person is considered a misdemeanor, nothing happens. I talked with the merchant and she said that the police in SF don't even respond. It's shocking to me, maybe I'm naive, how quickly the changes in law get exploited to the maximum.
Property crime is rampant in a lot of the Bay Area. Violent crime has hit historic lows. I've learned to never keep valuables in your car and always lock your doors, but I also feel safe walking around in a number of places that historically have had really bad reputations, like even the Tenderloin.
I wouldn't be so quick to blame changes in laws, though. In my experience, property crime is up because the police don't do anything when they get a report of a theft or burglary. If there's a fight, drug deal, or even just a drunk person stumbling around, the police will be out in force. If somebody got robbed, well, good luck, they'll take your statement and then you're on your own.
Now, perhaps that has to do with incentives and the police knowing that the offender isn't going to jail even if they pick him up for burglary. But it seems like there could still be a healthy middle ground where property crime offenses still result in fines, restitution, community service, and probation without needing to lock kids up in prison.
The city refuses to enforce property crimes. Even if the police make an arrest, nothing comes out of it. Many residents consider it to be "criminalizing poverty", thus it is socially unacceptable to enforce property crimes. Sure, there are specific roles (e.g. the District Attorney) that have control over this, but they answer to city hall, and they respond to voters' desires. Ultimately it's on us residents for how property crime became de-facto legal.
I think it starts with the fact that being penniless is illegal. You can’t poop, you can’t build shelter. You can’t vend small items like snacks or clothing. All of that is illegal. So poverty truly is illegal in SF.
So, the poor will be criminalized regardless of whether they steal, what’s their incentive not to steal? From their perspective, they’re already criminals for not being rich, why not act like it?
Add to that the fact that most plots of land were illegally seized and resold. So from a moral perspective the landowners in SF are criminals too.
The city needs to take those issues seriously before they can reasonably expect the poor to cease their mischief. Without a navigable legal framework for the poor to subsist, and without a property court committed to restitution of stolen land, I don’t see how we can in good faith demand people refrain from stealing iPhones.
As far as I can tell California is right in the middle of 50 states in terms of property crime (a little below actually at 26th-27th) [1] so I’m not sure where this doom and gloom is coming from. Well, I did find a few laughable articles from mass media claiming that prop 47 had some impact, it itmdoesnt hold up when looking at demographics across the country and over a long time.
So if I get mugged and want the police involved I'm incentivized to actually act with reasonable force (like, for example, trying to force my stuff back from the assailant) in order for the police to get involved and me get my stuff back?
Just because something is a misdemeanor doesn't mean nothing happens. If you are convicted with a misdemeanor you still cam get a fine, community service, probation (and violating parole IS a felony), and even a jail sentence of up to 12 months. For theft of less than $1000 that sounds like a perfectly reasonable punishment.
I don't know why police aren't responding to these calls, but it's not because those committing these crimes aren't going to face a (reasonable) punishment.
That's the root of the problem. The police and prosecutors simply aren't interested in misdemeanors, despite the fact that the penalties can be quite severe.
I think because for decades so many crimes were potential felonies that police and prosecutors used the misdemeanor/felony dividing line to systemize the allocation of resources--prosecute felonies, ignore misdemeanors. Most of these felonies were ultimately prosecuted as misdemeanors through plea arrangements, which shows another aspect of the system: heavy potential penalties made it easier to secure pleas, which reinforced reliance on felonies to filter prosecutions.
Now that penalties are actually fair, police and prosecutors need to change their habits. But they haven't, despite the fact that they'll openly admit they won't prosecute the exact same crimes they once did.
It's perverse and there's no excuse for it. Felonies may have made it easier to secure plea deals, but misdemeanors are easier to prosecute from a technical perspective[1] and because of the lower penalty easier to secure plea deals closer to the maximum sentence. It's an open question whether they're cheap enough, but nobody has yet even bothered to suggest it's not practical, let alone prove it or show that there aren't measures we could take to streamline enforcement.
[1] More safeguards in place to ensure fair trial when felonies are involved. Compare traffic court, where indigent aren't even guaranteed counsel. Indeed, counsel for indigent defendants is only required by the Federal constitution for potential sentences of 6 months or longer. First offense shoplifting kids could theoretically be swiftly prosecuted in the blink of an eye (especially given camera evidence), though in some states that may require changes in the law as defendant protections were often fashioned in the context of insane penalties for common offenses.
In San Francisco at least, it really does mean nothing happens. There have been instances of stabbings (non-lethal) and the perpetrator was spotted in public days later.
The vast majority of those incidents involve the homeless, though, even though they're not all reported that way. There's a ton of issues to unpack there so I won't even bother trying, but nonetheless it's a distinction that matters at least in terms of understanding what's happening and why.
The hand of one is the hand of all. If they come as a group and together steal $500 x 5 it isn't merely 5 misdemeanors its 5 participants in one felony.
Presumably retail stores have insurance to cover this. I wonder if we can get data on the cost of insurance or general actuarial data that might be better than what the crime statistics would show.
Although the police should have these statistics as well, since it is probably impossible to file a claim without a police report in hand.
Prop 47 happened at the end of 2014, while the trend on those charts started at least 10 years ago. If anything, it looks like 2015 was a notably bad year with little decrease over the previous year.
There doesn't seem to be anything to support that idea.
>It's shocking to me, maybe I'm naive, how quickly the changes in law get exploited to the maximum.
It shouldn’t be shocking. The people who push this sort of feel-good legislation always, always, always fail to think about how these policies can be exploited or handwave away such concerns by assuming that the number of people who would do so is vanishingly small.
I've witnessed a teenage girl just grabbed a store item on the shelf in Starbucks and ran away. On another instance I've seen the video of a night break-in with a girl just used a hammer to break the glass on the door to open it, came in, and cleaned out the cash register. Yeah, they are very brazen.
Ok this still seems like a problem with enforcement and not with the law. We should not need increased sentences simply to get police protection from nuisance behavior. Undue inflation of consequences for smaller crimes has many negative side effects for our society - including increased cost of incarceration and long-term negative productivity of citizens. This is why these crimes were reduced in their sentencing - it seems like enforcement needs to catch up on a new balance.
On paper, I would agree with you that up to 12 months of jail time for a relatively minor crime like shoplifting is reasonable. In practice, it appears the result of the new law is that the police don't bother showing up and property crime essentially isn't enforced.
I'm all for rapid unpleasant but not cruel consequences.
The biggest thing seems to be preventing those administering the consequences from indulging in sadism, or exploiting those who they administer.
If the consequence for minor property damage(think public defecation, minor vandalism etc) a 2-4 hour shift cleaning the streets, potentially connects people with the consequences of their actions without becoming cruel
Maybe spend a small fraction of that million on a child much earlier?
Making jail "cheaper for taxpayers" tends to mean things like more mandatory labour, more phone calls that cost $5 / min, etc. Trying to squeeze money out of inmates will only make them resent the system even more.
We could bring back large-scale public executions.
Make the punishment for shoplifting being tortured to death in a public square, and the cost of prison will go down. Sounds shocking to you? It used to be the standard in the Western world, until just a couple of centuries ago.
I live in a community with a massive number of Somali refugees. Amputated hands for crime/whatever are a common sight among the older men. Somalia is one of the most dangerous places in the world.
Over time, Europe has abolished the death penalty. They have the lowest murder rates in the history of civilization. In the US, there are wide variations between states for violent crime. Unsurprisingly, the states with the most draconian laws have the highest rates of crime.
I've concluded that violent punishment does not reduce violent crime.
I don't think that comparison is fair. Europe is an advanced, civilised and homogeneous place; Somalia and the US are nothing like that (for different reasons)
It's an absolutely fair comparison. Remember, it wasn't that long ago that all of Europe was unimaginably barbaric by modern standards. Literally millions of people were put to death in gruesome ways for crimes we'd consider trivial (or not even crimes) today. And yet, the murder rate dropped right along with the end of absurdly draconian punishment.
Moreover, the violent crime rates for many parts of the US are no higher than in Europe. Coincidentally, those places tend to be the same states that have ended capital punishment.
Now, I'm not drawing a causal relationship between draconian punishment and an increase in crime. I'm just saying there's demonstrably no relationship between "tough on crime" harsh sentencing and a decrease in crime. Fear of violent retribution by the State is not what stops people from committing crimes. We have to look at other reasons.
Property crimes are not punished in California and the problem is acute when Gun ownership is also discouraged. While techies in bay area might only see an occasional car break-ins or theft the problem in Central and northern California is of theft of copper wires, fence wires, illegal dumping etc.
I worked with lot of self help groups in California and learned that the cops and prosecutors would rather go after soft targets than real criminals. For example catching those kids stealing $1000 worth of stuff from store requires a cop to run after them fight with those kids (which sometimes might turn fatal). The cop would rather catch a normal kid in wrong place at wrong time because that kid will not fight back.
While compassionate criminal justice reform is needed I think we should also pay attention to the fact that law obedience does not wither away.
> The cop would rather catch a normal kid in wrong place at wrong time because that kid will not fight back.
That sounds like a real problem to fix - incentivizing our law enforcement to go after "easy" targets does not create the sort of society I want to be in. I don't see how increasing sentences helps change this (if the sentences are being selectively applied anyway), and gun ownership is likewise orthogonal (shooting "easy" targets doesn't sound better, nor does encouraging vigilantism, which you did NOT suggest, but is a logical conclusion if law enforcement isn't doing their job).
Any ideas on how to improve the equal application of law enforcement?
Do we really need to throw shoplifting kids into prison, which will only serve as a training school for worse crime? Stores have insurance for this kind of loss.
Return or replace the stolen items as restitution. Pay the value of the stolen items as punishment. And since we want poor kids to get the same lesson as rich kids, make them work the value of their punishment off with a real job, like graffiti removal or trash pickup or municipal grounds-keeping or something.
Sliding down the slope means replacing insurance with government, and turning this into a type of basic income. Let people take what they want from the store, and pay the store back with taxes.
>groups of youths filling up their backpacks with store items and running off laughing. They don't even run more than a block before slowing down to walk because they know nothing will happen.
i'm completely against locking them up and ruining their lives for what in most cases is just a [stupid] fun for them. We do know that the brain of teenager is biologically flawed to correctly estimate risks/consequences of things like that. Yet it is the duty of society to help correct the flaw and teach them a lesson. I think something like allowing store owners to shoot using salt charges (an old USSR method for situations like this, no serious injury, yet supposed to be very painful for a few days) will make these youngsters running much faster and laughing less :)
In more general - while corporal punishment is an unquestionably bad thing on its own, when it comes to the choice of corporal punishment vs. situation of 2nd graders already having a rap sheet, i'm not sure what is better for society long-term.
Except now that maximum penalties are reduced, there's less risk of life-destroying consequences unfairly meted out. Teenagers especially may be less responsive to consequentialist preventive measures (i.e. punishment), but they are responsive to some degree. It's not tenable to argue that an environment of zero punitive consequences won't increase the incidence of crime, especially property crime.
if you notice, i'm not arguing against punishment. The punishment is a must. The best punishment would teach the violator instead of just punishing per.se.
>Teenagers especially may be less responsive to consequentialist preventive measures (i.e. punishment), but they are responsive to some degree.
Exactly. The issue is that the more immediate/instant punishment works better for teenager mind than the chance of delayed/procedural/etc punishment. The immediate punishment is what helps the forming brain to develop cause/consequences machinery of behavior.
I'm willing to bet decriminalization of weed is a huge factor of keeping kids out of prison.
Just hope we continue to learn how to build a system that restores dignity, treats the causes of criminal activity and focuses on keeping people out of the system. Hard to do when many prisons are moving to for-profit private facilities.
Marijuana and Tobacco are not cool anymore for kids. Part of the reason why Vaping became a fad is because the youngsters did not bother with all kinds of smoking.
The numbers show that teenage drinking and smoking has been going down year on year since the 90s. Vaping changed at but I think that trend is a short lived too.
It's not just or even mostly the direct "kid smoked weed went to jail". It's growing up in a culture of drug war were the police are the enemy cause they round up, hassle, and jail your older brothers, parents, everyone you know for doing things you know are not criminal. The pushers, gangs, lookouts, mules, etc. Surround kids with crimes and criminals, they will pick up the lifestyle.
Pot is not a gateway drug. But pot illegalization was a gateway into crime.
This is where Singapore style caning can be much more humane than incarceration without throwing the whole city to the dogs. A few minutes of searing agony, a few days of recovery, a lifelong lesson to never do that shit again, without putting you in crime college or preventing you from ever getting a job again.
The one thing I didn't see mentioned in any of this is, are we certain that we're not just sending underaged kids to regular prison? I would like to think not, but if we're charging them as adults...
Could it be that the "greatest generation" were just really bad parents? The men came back from WW2, and then again Korea, completely broken with PTSD"?
The boomers didn't deal with nearly as much war as their parents. Violent crime peaked exactly 18 years after Roe vs Wade. An entire generation was allowed to wait until they were ready to be intentional parents rather than accidental.
>No one painted this portrait so well as John Dilulio, the criminologist who popularized the term. A self-styled tough researcher, he surveyed juvenile prisons, where he saw “vacant stares and smiles” and “remorseless eyes” staring back at him. These kids “pack guns instead of lunches,” he wrote. They roam the streets in “‘wolf packs,’” and “‘maim and kill on impulse.’”
Sure sounds like sound science /s. I wish more politicians/the general public weren't so vulnerable to Appeal to Emotion fallacy. A guy wandering through a juvenile prison and being spooked shouldn't count for jack shit in policymaking.
