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On July 31 2023 18:03 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2023 14:34 ChristianS wrote:
…most people agree the operant conditioning exists, but that a lot of implementations of it are cruel and inhumane. Sure, you *can* beat your dog/kid/wife when they do something you don’t like, and narrowly speaking it probably will reduce occurrence of the behavior in question. But, uh, there’s some side effects, probably worse ones than whatever they’re doing to annoy you.
You spend so much time complaining about head-empty “woke” liberals, yet your whole theory of criminal justice boils down to “just punish them until they stop, it’s called operant conditioning”? How does that make you any better than some college Tumblr girl to whining about the world based on some half-baked theories about how things should be that would have been dismissed as childish in high school?
Of course it’s not a conspiracy theory that progressives want to reduce sentencing guidelines. Criminal sentences for most crimes are way too punitive. We lock people up way more often and for way longer than most countries, and all we have to show for it is massive prison populations without any clear reduction in crime. Maybe human cognition is more complicated than trying to get a dog to salivate or a rat to push a button? Actually you're the first person in 4 pages of back and forth to acknowledge that punishing people for bad behavior will reduce the behavior in question. So alas we can move on. Do I think we can have a crime-free utopia if we just keep increasing the penalties for all crimes until nobody commits crime and we hang people for jaywalking? No, obviously not. I think any punishment has diminishing returns that will get to a point it is counter-productive if too severe. My contention is that when you have 327 people in NYC getting arrested 6,000 times in one year then you're obviously being too lenient. Only in woke circles is this even a controversial opinion.
If your community is having a problem with certain crimes you should consider it the time to crackdown to prevent those crimes instead of allowing it to fester and worsen like an infected wound.
Or, as many people here have pointed out, it could also mean that learning the situations of these 327 people and having a system in place to rehabilitate them could potentially address the problem in a more productive and humane way. The discussion isn't between *having consequences* vs. *doing nothing*; it's between *our current system of endless jail punishments* vs. *trying to integrate better ways of helping these criminals so that they can become functional members of society*. Our country does a great job of imprisoning, but not a great job of reforming; proposing steps towards the latter might help us move away from needing the former, which a lot of people think is a good trade-off.
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On July 31 2023 18:25 Magic Powers wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2023 18:19 BlackJack wrote:On July 31 2023 16:32 Salazarz wrote:On July 31 2023 16:10 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I don't understand why there's a conflict between 'prosecute people for committing crimes' and 'address the structural, underlying reasons for why people commit crimes'? You can do both. Because putting more people into prison has the unfortunate effect of having more people commit crimes further down the line so you end up in a vicious cycle of putting more and more people into prison and never really changing anything. Figure out how to make sure people have other options than joining a gang after having done time, then you can maybe start considering handing out more jail sentences for minor offenses if you haven't solved that issue by then; otherwise your yesterday's tide pod thieves are simply going to come back as gang bangers and drug dealers few years later. Here's another vicious cycle: Rampant shoplifting causes businesses to close down and people to lose their jobs. Meanwhile rampant car break-ins and open-air drug markets cause tourists and other locals to not want to travel into the city to spend their money. The closed down businesses and fewer tourists causes less foot traffic for the remaining businesses and they find it difficult to stay profitable. Ultimately they have to close down as well, again laying off more people and again making the situation more dire for the remaining businesses. Now fewer people are employed which means more poverty and more idle hands which leads to more crime. Around and around we go. The only difference between our two "vicious cycles" is mine is not hypothetical. That's what's happening right now. + Show Spoiler +
“It’s time that the reign of criminals who are destroying our city…come to an end. It comes to an end when we take the steps to be more aggressive w/ law enforcement…and less tolerant of all the bullshit."
-Mayor of San Francisco, London Breed (Shit, she's MAGA too?!)
Ok so lets incarcerate the worst criminals and ideally not ask at all where they came from to begin with and why they decided to commit these crimes. Next wave of these sorts of criminals we do the same thing again and ideally not ask any questions again. We do this for eternity, never asking for the true cause, just put a band-aid on everything. Lets keep kicking the can down the road. Who cares if this means people are suffering needlessly.
What are you talking about? Ask them any questions you want. Why would I care?
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On July 31 2023 18:30 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2023 18:25 Magic Powers wrote:On July 31 2023 18:19 BlackJack wrote:On July 31 2023 16:32 Salazarz wrote:On July 31 2023 16:10 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I don't understand why there's a conflict between 'prosecute people for committing crimes' and 'address the structural, underlying reasons for why people commit crimes'? You can do both. Because putting more people into prison has the unfortunate effect of having more people commit crimes further down the line so you end up in a vicious cycle of putting more and more people into prison and never really changing anything. Figure out how to make sure people have other options than joining a gang after having done time, then you can maybe start considering handing out more jail sentences for minor offenses if you haven't solved that issue by then; otherwise your yesterday's tide pod thieves are simply going to come back as gang bangers and drug dealers few years later. Here's another vicious cycle: Rampant shoplifting causes businesses to close down and people to lose their jobs. Meanwhile rampant car break-ins and open-air drug markets cause tourists and other locals to not want to travel into the city to spend their money. The closed down businesses and fewer tourists causes less foot traffic for the remaining businesses and they find it difficult to stay profitable. Ultimately they have to close down as well, again laying off more people and again making the situation more dire for the remaining businesses. Now fewer people are employed which means more poverty and more idle hands which leads to more crime. Around and around we go. The only difference between our two "vicious cycles" is mine is not hypothetical. That's what's happening right now. + Show Spoiler +
“It’s time that the reign of criminals who are destroying our city…come to an end. It comes to an end when we take the steps to be more aggressive w/ law enforcement…and less tolerant of all the bullshit."
-Mayor of San Francisco, London Breed (Shit, she's MAGA too?!)
Ok so lets incarcerate the worst criminals and ideally not ask at all where they came from to begin with and why they decided to commit these crimes. Next wave of these sorts of criminals we do the same thing again and ideally not ask any questions again. We do this for eternity, never asking for the true cause, just put a band-aid on everything. Lets keep kicking the can down the road. Who cares if this means people are suffering needlessly. What are you talking about? Ask them any questions you want. Why would I care?
Because you could be one of those criminals if you had been born under different circumstances. You didn't decide as a baby that you're going to be an honest, upstanding citizen. You were made to be this way. Under different circumstances you'd have a high chance of being a criminal.
Edit: I myself have committed crimes, some more serious and some less serious than others. But because I live in a country where juvenile crime isn't persecuted as harshly as it is in the US, and also because I share the "correct" skin color, I was never prosecuted.
In the US my odds of being incarcerated would be around 5-10 times greater compared to my home country.
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On July 31 2023 18:30 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2023 18:03 BlackJack wrote:On July 31 2023 14:34 ChristianS wrote:
…most people agree the operant conditioning exists, but that a lot of implementations of it are cruel and inhumane. Sure, you *can* beat your dog/kid/wife when they do something you don’t like, and narrowly speaking it probably will reduce occurrence of the behavior in question. But, uh, there’s some side effects, probably worse ones than whatever they’re doing to annoy you.
You spend so much time complaining about head-empty “woke” liberals, yet your whole theory of criminal justice boils down to “just punish them until they stop, it’s called operant conditioning”? How does that make you any better than some college Tumblr girl to whining about the world based on some half-baked theories about how things should be that would have been dismissed as childish in high school?
Of course it’s not a conspiracy theory that progressives want to reduce sentencing guidelines. Criminal sentences for most crimes are way too punitive. We lock people up way more often and for way longer than most countries, and all we have to show for it is massive prison populations without any clear reduction in crime. Maybe human cognition is more complicated than trying to get a dog to salivate or a rat to push a button? Actually you're the first person in 4 pages of back and forth to acknowledge that punishing people for bad behavior will reduce the behavior in question. So alas we can move on. Do I think we can have a crime-free utopia if we just keep increasing the penalties for all crimes until nobody commits crime and we hang people for jaywalking? No, obviously not. I think any punishment has diminishing returns that will get to a point it is counter-productive if too severe. My contention is that when you have 327 people in NYC getting arrested 6,000 times in one year then you're obviously being too lenient. Only in woke circles is this even a controversial opinion.
If your community is having a problem with certain crimes you should consider it the time to crackdown to prevent those crimes instead of allowing it to fester and worsen like an infected wound. Or, as many people here have pointed out, it could also mean that learning the situations of these 327 people and having a system in place to rehabilitate them could potentially address the problem in a more productive and humane way. The discussion isn't between *having consequences* vs. *doing nothing*; it's between *our current system of endless jail punishments* vs. *trying to integrate better ways of helping these criminals so that they can become functional members of society*. Our country does a great job of imprisoning, but not a great job of reforming; proposing steps towards the latter might help us move away from needing the former, which a lot of people think is a good trade-off.
Great. Do it. I'd much rather have a rehabilitated criminal than an imprisoned one. If 327 people have been arrested an average of 18~ times each then it's safe to say you've done neither.
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On July 31 2023 18:36 Magic Powers wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2023 18:30 BlackJack wrote:On July 31 2023 18:25 Magic Powers wrote:On July 31 2023 18:19 BlackJack wrote:On July 31 2023 16:32 Salazarz wrote:On July 31 2023 16:10 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I don't understand why there's a conflict between 'prosecute people for committing crimes' and 'address the structural, underlying reasons for why people commit crimes'? You can do both. Because putting more people into prison has the unfortunate effect of having more people commit crimes further down the line so you end up in a vicious cycle of putting more and more people into prison and never really changing anything. Figure out how to make sure people have other options than joining a gang after having done time, then you can maybe start considering handing out more jail sentences for minor offenses if you haven't solved that issue by then; otherwise your yesterday's tide pod thieves are simply going to come back as gang bangers and drug dealers few years later. Here's another vicious cycle: Rampant shoplifting causes businesses to close down and people to lose their jobs. Meanwhile rampant car break-ins and open-air drug markets cause tourists and other locals to not want to travel into the city to spend their money. The closed down businesses and fewer tourists causes less foot traffic for the remaining businesses and they find it difficult to stay profitable. Ultimately they have to close down as well, again laying off more people and again making the situation more dire for the remaining businesses. Now fewer people are employed which means more poverty and more idle hands which leads to more crime. Around and around we go. The only difference between our two "vicious cycles" is mine is not hypothetical. That's what's happening right now. + Show Spoiler +
“It’s time that the reign of criminals who are destroying our city…come to an end. It comes to an end when we take the steps to be more aggressive w/ law enforcement…and less tolerant of all the bullshit."
-Mayor of San Francisco, London Breed (Shit, she's MAGA too?!)
Ok so lets incarcerate the worst criminals and ideally not ask at all where they came from to begin with and why they decided to commit these crimes. Next wave of these sorts of criminals we do the same thing again and ideally not ask any questions again. We do this for eternity, never asking for the true cause, just put a band-aid on everything. Lets keep kicking the can down the road. Who cares if this means people are suffering needlessly. What are you talking about? Ask them any questions you want. Why would I care? Because you could be one of those criminals if you had been born under different circumstances. You didn't decide as a baby that you're going to be an honest, upstanding citizen. You were made to be this way. Under different circumstances you'd have a high chance of being a criminal.
Very true. I'd still be okay with you asking me questions if I was one.
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On July 31 2023 18:38 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2023 18:30 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 31 2023 18:03 BlackJack wrote:On July 31 2023 14:34 ChristianS wrote:
…most people agree the operant conditioning exists, but that a lot of implementations of it are cruel and inhumane. Sure, you *can* beat your dog/kid/wife when they do something you don’t like, and narrowly speaking it probably will reduce occurrence of the behavior in question. But, uh, there’s some side effects, probably worse ones than whatever they’re doing to annoy you.
You spend so much time complaining about head-empty “woke” liberals, yet your whole theory of criminal justice boils down to “just punish them until they stop, it’s called operant conditioning”? How does that make you any better than some college Tumblr girl to whining about the world based on some half-baked theories about how things should be that would have been dismissed as childish in high school?
Of course it’s not a conspiracy theory that progressives want to reduce sentencing guidelines. Criminal sentences for most crimes are way too punitive. We lock people up way more often and for way longer than most countries, and all we have to show for it is massive prison populations without any clear reduction in crime. Maybe human cognition is more complicated than trying to get a dog to salivate or a rat to push a button? Actually you're the first person in 4 pages of back and forth to acknowledge that punishing people for bad behavior will reduce the behavior in question. So alas we can move on. Do I think we can have a crime-free utopia if we just keep increasing the penalties for all crimes until nobody commits crime and we hang people for jaywalking? No, obviously not. I think any punishment has diminishing returns that will get to a point it is counter-productive if too severe. My contention is that when you have 327 people in NYC getting arrested 6,000 times in one year then you're obviously being too lenient. Only in woke circles is this even a controversial opinion.
If your community is having a problem with certain crimes you should consider it the time to crackdown to prevent those crimes instead of allowing it to fester and worsen like an infected wound. Or, as many people here have pointed out, it could also mean that learning the situations of these 327 people and having a system in place to rehabilitate them could potentially address the problem in a more productive and humane way. The discussion isn't between *having consequences* vs. *doing nothing*; it's between *our current system of endless jail punishments* vs. *trying to integrate better ways of helping these criminals so that they can become functional members of society*. Our country does a great job of imprisoning, but not a great job of reforming; proposing steps towards the latter might help us move away from needing the former, which a lot of people think is a good trade-off. Great. Do it. I'd much rather have a rehabilitated criminal than an imprisoned one. If 327 people have been arrested an average of 18~ times each then it's safe to say you've done neither.
Or it could instead mean that the conditions for crime in the US are much more present, leading to people to resorting to crime more frequently to begin with. It's not all about rehabilitation. You have to find ways to reduce SENDING people to prison in the first place. And that has nothing to do with the criminals, that's on the voters. They need to stop voting for "tough on crime" approaches and instead vote for "tough on discrimination".
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On July 31 2023 18:43 Magic Powers wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2023 18:38 BlackJack wrote:On July 31 2023 18:30 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 31 2023 18:03 BlackJack wrote:On July 31 2023 14:34 ChristianS wrote:
…most people agree the operant conditioning exists, but that a lot of implementations of it are cruel and inhumane. Sure, you *can* beat your dog/kid/wife when they do something you don’t like, and narrowly speaking it probably will reduce occurrence of the behavior in question. But, uh, there’s some side effects, probably worse ones than whatever they’re doing to annoy you.
You spend so much time complaining about head-empty “woke” liberals, yet your whole theory of criminal justice boils down to “just punish them until they stop, it’s called operant conditioning”? How does that make you any better than some college Tumblr girl to whining about the world based on some half-baked theories about how things should be that would have been dismissed as childish in high school?
Of course it’s not a conspiracy theory that progressives want to reduce sentencing guidelines. Criminal sentences for most crimes are way too punitive. We lock people up way more often and for way longer than most countries, and all we have to show for it is massive prison populations without any clear reduction in crime. Maybe human cognition is more complicated than trying to get a dog to salivate or a rat to push a button? Actually you're the first person in 4 pages of back and forth to acknowledge that punishing people for bad behavior will reduce the behavior in question. So alas we can move on. Do I think we can have a crime-free utopia if we just keep increasing the penalties for all crimes until nobody commits crime and we hang people for jaywalking? No, obviously not. I think any punishment has diminishing returns that will get to a point it is counter-productive if too severe. My contention is that when you have 327 people in NYC getting arrested 6,000 times in one year then you're obviously being too lenient. Only in woke circles is this even a controversial opinion.
If your community is having a problem with certain crimes you should consider it the time to crackdown to prevent those crimes instead of allowing it to fester and worsen like an infected wound. Or, as many people here have pointed out, it could also mean that learning the situations of these 327 people and having a system in place to rehabilitate them could potentially address the problem in a more productive and humane way. The discussion isn't between *having consequences* vs. *doing nothing*; it's between *our current system of endless jail punishments* vs. *trying to integrate better ways of helping these criminals so that they can become functional members of society*. Our country does a great job of imprisoning, but not a great job of reforming; proposing steps towards the latter might help us move away from needing the former, which a lot of people think is a good trade-off. Great. Do it. I'd much rather have a rehabilitated criminal than an imprisoned one. If 327 people have been arrested an average of 18~ times each then it's safe to say you've done neither. Or it could instead mean that the conditions for crime in the US are much more present, leading to people to resorting to crime more frequently to begin with. It's not all about rehabilitation. You have to find ways to reduce SENDING people to prison in the first place. And that has nothing to do with the criminals, that's on the voters. They need to stop voting for "tough on crime" approaches and instead vote for "tough on discrimination".
6,000 arrests and 0 prison, I don't know if you can reduce it any more than that
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On July 31 2023 18:50 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2023 18:43 Magic Powers wrote:On July 31 2023 18:38 BlackJack wrote:On July 31 2023 18:30 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 31 2023 18:03 BlackJack wrote:On July 31 2023 14:34 ChristianS wrote:
…most people agree the operant conditioning exists, but that a lot of implementations of it are cruel and inhumane. Sure, you *can* beat your dog/kid/wife when they do something you don’t like, and narrowly speaking it probably will reduce occurrence of the behavior in question. But, uh, there’s some side effects, probably worse ones than whatever they’re doing to annoy you.
You spend so much time complaining about head-empty “woke” liberals, yet your whole theory of criminal justice boils down to “just punish them until they stop, it’s called operant conditioning”? How does that make you any better than some college Tumblr girl to whining about the world based on some half-baked theories about how things should be that would have been dismissed as childish in high school?
Of course it’s not a conspiracy theory that progressives want to reduce sentencing guidelines. Criminal sentences for most crimes are way too punitive. We lock people up way more often and for way longer than most countries, and all we have to show for it is massive prison populations without any clear reduction in crime. Maybe human cognition is more complicated than trying to get a dog to salivate or a rat to push a button? Actually you're the first person in 4 pages of back and forth to acknowledge that punishing people for bad behavior will reduce the behavior in question. So alas we can move on. Do I think we can have a crime-free utopia if we just keep increasing the penalties for all crimes until nobody commits crime and we hang people for jaywalking? No, obviously not. I think any punishment has diminishing returns that will get to a point it is counter-productive if too severe. My contention is that when you have 327 people in NYC getting arrested 6,000 times in one year then you're obviously being too lenient. Only in woke circles is this even a controversial opinion.
If your community is having a problem with certain crimes you should consider it the time to crackdown to prevent those crimes instead of allowing it to fester and worsen like an infected wound. Or, as many people here have pointed out, it could also mean that learning the situations of these 327 people and having a system in place to rehabilitate them could potentially address the problem in a more productive and humane way. The discussion isn't between *having consequences* vs. *doing nothing*; it's between *our current system of endless jail punishments* vs. *trying to integrate better ways of helping these criminals so that they can become functional members of society*. Our country does a great job of imprisoning, but not a great job of reforming; proposing steps towards the latter might help us move away from needing the former, which a lot of people think is a good trade-off. Great. Do it. I'd much rather have a rehabilitated criminal than an imprisoned one. If 327 people have been arrested an average of 18~ times each then it's safe to say you've done neither. Or it could instead mean that the conditions for crime in the US are much more present, leading to people to resorting to crime more frequently to begin with. It's not all about rehabilitation. You have to find ways to reduce SENDING people to prison in the first place. And that has nothing to do with the criminals, that's on the voters. They need to stop voting for "tough on crime" approaches and instead vote for "tough on discrimination". 6,000 arrests and 0 prison, I don't know if you can reduce it any more than that
The one example you posted of someone who allegedly hadn't faced imprisonment, that claim was immediately refuted.
Why are you holding on to this claim regardless if there are apparently no concrete examples proving that your claim is true?
Furthermore how about this idea: the prisons are already filled to the brim.
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Northern Ireland23754 Posts
Right but isn’t this as clear an instance of the pitfalls of only tackling only one part of a multifaceted problem as exists?
We keep zoning back to San Francisco despite to my knowledge most people advocating a less draconian approach to crime while simultaneously overhauling associated services and institutions to tackle various root causes.
In terms of my kid becoming an outstanding citizen, I may have more success in beating him for various transgressions than I would not disciplining him at all. It doesn’t mean beating him is a remotely optimal or ethical approach to the problem.
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Norway28553 Posts
On July 31 2023 16:54 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2023 16:10 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I don't understand why there's a conflict between 'prosecute people for committing crimes' and 'address the structural, underlying reasons for why people commit crimes'? You can do both. Frequently the "crime" is "addressing the structural underlying reasons" as seen in the Nixon example: + Show Spoiler +“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.
“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” It goes all the way back to the origins of police as slave catchers where the crime was not being a slave.
I mean yeah drug laws are one area where police enforcement makes the problem worse not better, and that Erlichman quote is atrocious. But you can fix drug laws, regulate and legalize possession and use (and even sale) of the most common/all drugs, free all the people who are imprisoned for use or possession, and still punish people who commit theft. I think the former is more important than the latter, but I mean, I don't want people to just repeatedly go to stores and steal stuff.
Obviously I want cost of living in the most expensive cities to decrease, and I want more equitable pay so the lowest paid wage earners can afford to make a living, and I want a penal system to focus on rehabilitation not punishment, and I want society as a whole to combat poverty and provide decent education and real opportunities in life for everybody and I want the people who fall through the cracks to be picked up early on etc etc etc. I still want theft to be punished. I'm not saying that it's particularly sensible to have a long stay in jail for someone stealing tide pods, but at the very least do something about those fencing operations that are obviously full of stolen goods. (Here, you'd definitely require a permit to set up shop like that..)
Like, we have repeat offending thieves in Norway too, without really going away for long even if they are caught in the act. I have a friend who works as a store clerk who shares some stories. But those are exclusively alcoholics who steal beer/food. I've heard of breakins where people steal pallets of cigarettes because those you can also move pretty easily, but medical supplies and razor blades and hygiene products and clothes? Really shouldn't be hard to kill off those markets.
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On July 31 2023 18:22 Uldridge wrote:Your suggestion is the beating your dog/kid analogy ChristianS used. It does correct behavior, but for all the wrong reasons. Crackdowns don't address the root problems. War on drugs and alcohol prohibition doesn't really ring any bells? Show nested quote +On July 31 2023 18:19 BlackJack wrote:Here's another vicious cycle: + Show Spoiler +Rampant shoplifting causes businesses to close down and people to lose their jobs. Meanwhile rampant car break-ins and open-air drug markets cause tourists and other locals to not want to travel into the city to spend their money. The closed down businesses and fewer tourists causes less foot traffic for the remaining businesses and they find it difficult to stay profitable. Ultimately they have to close down as well, again laying off more people and again making the situation more dire for the remaining businesses. Now fewer people are employed which means more poverty and more idle hands which leads to more crime. Around and around we go. The only difference between our two "vicious cycles" is mine is not hypothetical. That's what's happening right now. + Show Spoiler +
“It’s time that the reign of criminals who are destroying our city…come to an end. It comes to an end when we take the steps to be more aggressive w/ law enforcement…and less tolerant of all the bullshit."
-Mayor of San Francisco, London Breed (Shit, she's MAGA too?!)
This is a quote about the most notorious neighborhood, 2 years ago. Kind of a cherry pick, no? SF is a large city...
I don't attribute her comments to be solely about the Tenderloin there. She also mentions about how in an average room 90-95% of people can raise their hand and say their car has been broken into. Car Break-ins aren't unique to the Tenderloin either.
Her interview with Jon Stewart on his podcast is pretty good.
Mayor Breed is the one that announced a crackdown on shoplifting
"We are better than this," Breed said during a press conference Wednesday. "There has to be consequences because we can't continue to allow what we see as lawlessness continue to dominate our city."
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On July 31 2023 12:13 cLutZ wrote:
Sure. Jokes. I guess people having to got to shady craigslist baby formula dealers instead of Walgreens is good I guess.
You mean to say stealing 10 or 12 packs of tide pods and reselling them to the store you stole them from, for a living, isn't a joke?
A scathing indictment of how insufficient our current minimum wage is, maybe.
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On July 31 2023 19:15 Liquid`Drone wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2023 16:54 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 31 2023 16:10 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I don't understand why there's a conflict between 'prosecute people for committing crimes' and 'address the structural, underlying reasons for why people commit crimes'? You can do both. Frequently the "crime" is "addressing the structural underlying reasons" as seen in the Nixon example: + Show Spoiler +“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.
“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” It goes all the way back to the origins of police as slave catchers where the crime was not being a slave. I mean yeah drug laws are one area where police enforcement makes the problem worse not better, and that Erlichman quote is atrocious. But you can fix drug laws, regulate and legalize possession and use (and even sale) of the most common/all drugs, free all the people who are imprisoned for use or possession, and still punish people who commit theft. I think the former is more important than the latter, but I mean, I don't want people to just repeatedly go to stores and steal stuff. Obviously I want cost of living in the most expensive cities to decrease, and I want more equitable pay so the lowest paid wage earners can afford to make a living, and I want a penal system to focus on rehabilitation not punishment, and I want society as a whole to combat poverty and provide decent education and real opportunities in life for everybody and I want the people who fall through the cracks to be picked up early on etc etc etc. I still want theft to be punished. I'm not saying that it's particularly sensible to have a long stay in jail for someone stealing tide pods, but at the very least do something about those fencing operations that are obviously full of stolen goods. (Here, you'd definitely require a permit to set up shop like that..) Like, we have repeat offending thieves in Norway too, without really going away for long even if they are caught in the act. I have a friend who works as a store clerk who shares some stories. But those are exclusively alcoholics who steal beer/food. I've heard of breakins where people steal pallets of cigarettes because those you can also move pretty easily, but medical supplies and razor blades and hygiene products and clothes? Really shouldn't be hard to kill off those markets.
I meant to explain why they are in conflict under the status quo, not suggest that addressing aberrant behaviors and their social causes are mutually exclusive intrinsically.
I think you missed a bit of my point though. If slavers build a justice system that makes the person escaping slavery the criminal and the person enslaving them the functional member of society (they did in the US), then prosecuting the crime and addressing the underlying the structural reasons the crime was committed are opposing goals. It also makes trying to turn "criminals" into "functioning members of society" a pretty foolish and problematic goal.
The specific conditions have changed significantly (less so for the slaves the US keeps in cages and forces to work for $0.00/hr) but the basic premise remains.
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On July 31 2023 09:44 BlackJack wrote:
When all else fails, rant about Trump or capitalism. Because you know, Trump and capitalism are most popular in San Francisco and Portland which has this problem the worst.
To be fair, out-of-control speculation on the housing market is fairly obviously a large contributor to many of the problems San Francisco is facing right now. Severe pricing controls, public housing and other "communist" solutions to housing in the city center might be a good solution to some aspects of the situation that gave rise to black market tide pod gangs!
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On July 31 2023 13:22 Salazarz wrote:
Median rent in SF is $3000 per month. A $15/hour job nets you $2400 per month working 40 hours per week, before taxes are paid. But sure, hopelessness and lack of opportunity aren't real. Just gotta put more people behind bars to make the rest of the troublemakers fall in line and start pursuing The American Dream in earnest.
At first I thought this was a fair point, but then I realized the median rent price doesn't tell us much when we are trying specifically to focus on the "underbelly" of society. If the spread is huge, and the 10th percentile is $500, then a $15/hour job allows you to pay your rent just fine. You don't compare the median rent with the minimum wage, because the median rent should correspond approximately with the median wage. Of course, in the case of SF specifically I am pretty confident that the p10 is also far too high, and then you have the problem that minimum earners cannot live in the city they are expected to work in... and that would be a fair point to make. Furthermore, regarding homelessness, it's quite a vicious circle, because I don't doubt you can join a gang that knocks over supermarkets to steal pallets of tide pods while homeless, but it's probably hard to hold down any kind of job without a permanent address. So if rent is too expensive, people on minimum wage are forced out of their homes, which in turn causes them to lose the job they had, and are now homeless and forced to turn to crime to subsist.
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A quick search reveals to me that low cost housing in San Francisco averages at around $1500. If a $15/h job provides $2400, then that's $900 after rent. If rent is an indicator of the general cost of living, then $900 doesn't sound like very much to me.
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Norway28553 Posts
On July 31 2023 20:14 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2023 19:15 Liquid`Drone wrote:On July 31 2023 16:54 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 31 2023 16:10 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I don't understand why there's a conflict between 'prosecute people for committing crimes' and 'address the structural, underlying reasons for why people commit crimes'? You can do both. Frequently the "crime" is "addressing the structural underlying reasons" as seen in the Nixon example: + Show Spoiler +“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.
“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” It goes all the way back to the origins of police as slave catchers where the crime was not being a slave. I mean yeah drug laws are one area where police enforcement makes the problem worse not better, and that Erlichman quote is atrocious. But you can fix drug laws, regulate and legalize possession and use (and even sale) of the most common/all drugs, free all the people who are imprisoned for use or possession, and still punish people who commit theft. I think the former is more important than the latter, but I mean, I don't want people to just repeatedly go to stores and steal stuff. Obviously I want cost of living in the most expensive cities to decrease, and I want more equitable pay so the lowest paid wage earners can afford to make a living, and I want a penal system to focus on rehabilitation not punishment, and I want society as a whole to combat poverty and provide decent education and real opportunities in life for everybody and I want the people who fall through the cracks to be picked up early on etc etc etc. I still want theft to be punished. I'm not saying that it's particularly sensible to have a long stay in jail for someone stealing tide pods, but at the very least do something about those fencing operations that are obviously full of stolen goods. (Here, you'd definitely require a permit to set up shop like that..) Like, we have repeat offending thieves in Norway too, without really going away for long even if they are caught in the act. I have a friend who works as a store clerk who shares some stories. But those are exclusively alcoholics who steal beer/food. I've heard of breakins where people steal pallets of cigarettes because those you can also move pretty easily, but medical supplies and razor blades and hygiene products and clothes? Really shouldn't be hard to kill off those markets. I meant to explain why they are in conflict under the status quo, not suggest that addressing aberrant behaviors and their social causes are mutually exclusive intrinsically. I think you missed a bit of my point though. If slavers build a justice system that makes the person escaping slavery the criminal and the person enslaving them the functional member of society (they did in the US), then prosecuting the crime and addressing the underlying the structural reasons the crime was committed are opposing goals. It also makes trying to turn "criminals" into "functioning members of society" a pretty foolish and problematic goal. The specific conditions have changed significantly (less so for the slaves the US keeps in cages and forces to work for $0.00/hr) but the basic premise remains.
I am entirely on board with the US system being an aberration in many ways and tbh my argument is more principled in nature, in the sense that I believe theft is one thing the police should police. The way I understand it you guys have several actors that in various ways benefit from having an incarcerated population and that these actors have successfully lobbied to ensure just that. Not qualified to opine on the racial component (as in I cant state with confidence one way or the other that this is part of the motivation rather than just economic concerns) but I'm also not arguing it isn't a factor and obviously I think that part is massively fucked up.
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On July 31 2023 18:03 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2023 14:34 ChristianS wrote:
…most people agree the operant conditioning exists, but that a lot of implementations of it are cruel and inhumane. Sure, you *can* beat your dog/kid/wife when they do something you don’t like, and narrowly speaking it probably will reduce occurrence of the behavior in question. But, uh, there’s some side effects, probably worse ones than whatever they’re doing to annoy you.
You spend so much time complaining about head-empty “woke” liberals, yet your whole theory of criminal justice boils down to “just punish them until they stop, it’s called operant conditioning”? How does that make you any better than some college Tumblr girl to whining about the world based on some half-baked theories about how things should be that would have been dismissed as childish in high school?
Of course it’s not a conspiracy theory that progressives want to reduce sentencing guidelines. Criminal sentences for most crimes are way too punitive. We lock people up way more often and for way longer than most countries, and all we have to show for it is massive prison populations without any clear reduction in crime. Maybe human cognition is more complicated than trying to get a dog to salivate or a rat to push a button? Actually you're the first person in 4 pages of back and forth to acknowledge that punishing people for bad behavior will reduce the behavior in question. So alas we can move on. Do I think we can have a crime-free utopia if we just keep increasing the penalties for all crimes until nobody commits crime and we hang people for jaywalking? No, obviously not. I think any punishment has diminishing returns that will get to a point it is counter-productive if too severe. My contention is that when you have 327 people in NYC getting arrested 6,000 times in one year then you're obviously being too lenient. Only in woke circles is this even a controversial opinion. If your community is having a problem with certain crimes you should consider it the time to crackdown to prevent those crimes instead of allowing it to fester and worsen like an infected wound.
Yeah, “diminishing returns” is one way to think of it. Another is to actually look at causes and consequences of the crime you’re worried about, as well as the punishment you’re proposing, and try to figure out what’s actually happening, rather than treating the whole system as a black box for which you only have one input (raising/lowering sentences). More work than “hurt them til they stop,” I know, but if crime is as serious a problem as you seem to think, maybe we have an obligation to get off our asses and actually study something instead of assuming “more punishment -> less crime” is all we need to know.
No clue where this 327 people stat is coming from but if the same people are getting arrested ~20 times a year, it sounds like the cops didn’t have anything on them but had a grudge against them for some reason. Otherwise why would they keep arresting them but never charge them? Maybe they wanted to get their “# of arrests” stat up? Or didn’t charge because they wanted to keep the crime stat down? In any case longer sentences isn’t going to help anything if the cops aren’t charging people in the first place.
Your general prescription for “as a crime becomes more of a problem you increase punishment” – basically, treat the criminal justice system as a feedback controller, with crime rates as your sensor and sentencing guidelines as your input – is basically what was done for the crack epidemic, and I don’t think it’s generally regarded as very successful (in addition to probably being racist, in that particular case). There’s a lot of problems, one of which is that if you take “more punishment -> less crime” as self-evidently true, rather than something to be shown empirically, there’s never really a moment in time where anybody *lowers* punishment. The crime rate is never too low, people never think “oh that crime isn’t really a problem right now so let’s pull back the sentencing.” So we wind up with the same insane sentencing rules for crack that were established in the 80s because they were set crazy high in a moment of panic and never lowered.
Another is that the theoretical prediction “bigger punishments will dissuade people from committing crimes” is relying on a lot of assumptions about people acting as rational agents. A lot of crimes might already be considered “throwing your life away” even *before* criminal justice gets involved, and people do them anyway, so those assumptions might not be on very firm footing. Alternatively, if people are desperate enough to think “My life is fucked anyway, but getting away with this crime might be an escape” no amount of jail time can rationally dissuade them – as far as they’re concerned they have nothing to lose!
+ Show Spoiler [mostly irrelevant aside] +Of course, it also doesn’t help when at the same time you’re trying to crack down on the drug trade with increased enforcement, the government is also surreptitiously aiding and funding the same drug trade abroad. But that’s hopefully not a factor in modern crime patterns (although how could I know for sure?).
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On July 31 2023 22:34 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2023 18:03 BlackJack wrote:On July 31 2023 14:34 ChristianS wrote:
…most people agree the operant conditioning exists, but that a lot of implementations of it are cruel and inhumane. Sure, you *can* beat your dog/kid/wife when they do something you don’t like, and narrowly speaking it probably will reduce occurrence of the behavior in question. But, uh, there’s some side effects, probably worse ones than whatever they’re doing to annoy you.
You spend so much time complaining about head-empty “woke” liberals, yet your whole theory of criminal justice boils down to “just punish them until they stop, it’s called operant conditioning”? How does that make you any better than some college Tumblr girl to whining about the world based on some half-baked theories about how things should be that would have been dismissed as childish in high school?
Of course it’s not a conspiracy theory that progressives want to reduce sentencing guidelines. Criminal sentences for most crimes are way too punitive. We lock people up way more often and for way longer than most countries, and all we have to show for it is massive prison populations without any clear reduction in crime. Maybe human cognition is more complicated than trying to get a dog to salivate or a rat to push a button? Actually you're the first person in 4 pages of back and forth to acknowledge that punishing people for bad behavior will reduce the behavior in question. So alas we can move on. Do I think we can have a crime-free utopia if we just keep increasing the penalties for all crimes until nobody commits crime and we hang people for jaywalking? No, obviously not. I think any punishment has diminishing returns that will get to a point it is counter-productive if too severe. My contention is that when you have 327 people in NYC getting arrested 6,000 times in one year then you're obviously being too lenient. Only in woke circles is this even a controversial opinion. If your community is having a problem with certain crimes you should consider it the time to crackdown to prevent those crimes instead of allowing it to fester and worsen like an infected wound. Yeah, “diminishing returns” is one way to think of it. Another is to actually look at causes and consequences of the crime you’re worried about, as well as the punishment you’re proposing, and try to figure out what’s actually happening, rather than treating the whole system as a black box for which you only have one input (raising/lowering sentences). More work than “hurt them til they stop,” I know, but if crime is as serious a problem as you seem to think, maybe we have an obligation to get off our asses and actually study something instead of assuming “more punishment -> less crime” is all we need to know. No clue where this 327 people stat is coming from but if the same people are getting arrested ~20 times a year, it sounds like the cops didn’t have anything on them but had a grudge against them for some reason. Otherwise why would they keep arresting them but never charge them? Maybe they wanted to get their “# of arrests” stat up? Or didn’t charge because they wanted to keep the crime stat down? In any case longer sentences isn’t going to help anything if the cops aren’t charging people in the first place. Your general prescription for “as a crime becomes more of a problem you increase punishment” – basically, treat the criminal justice system as a feedback controller, with crime rates as your sensor and sentencing guidelines as your input – is basically what was done for the crack epidemic, and I don’t think it’s generally regarded as very successful (in addition to probably being racist, in that particular case). There’s a lot of problems, one of which is that if you take “more punishment -> less crime” as self-evidently true, rather than something to be shown empirically, there’s never really a moment in time where anybody *lowers* punishment. The crime rate is never too low, people never think “oh that crime isn’t really a problem right now so let’s pull back the sentencing.” So we wind up with the same insane sentencing rules for crack that were established in the 80s because they were set crazy high in a moment of panic and never lowered. Another is that the theoretical prediction “bigger punishments will dissuade people from committing crimes” is relying on a lot of assumptions about people acting as rational agents. A lot of crimes might already be considered “throwing your life away” even *before* criminal justice gets involved, and people do them anyway, so those assumptions might not be on very firm footing. Alternatively, if people are desperate enough to think “My life is fucked anyway, but getting away with this crime might be an escape” no amount of jail time can rationally dissuade them – as far as they’re concerned they have nothing to lose! + Show Spoiler [mostly irrelevant aside] +Of course, it also doesn’t help when at the same time you’re trying to crack down on the drug trade with increased enforcement, the government is also surreptitiously aiding and funding the same drug trade abroad. But that’s hopefully not a factor in modern crime patterns (although how could I know for sure?).
Since people are talking about operant conditioning and behavioral principles, I wanted to weigh in as a professional behavior analyst.
To start, here is the flowchart that is used to ethically reduce problem behaviors (this applies to any creature that is capable of behavior)...
1) Identify the function(s) of the problem behavior. The complexity of these can vary based on the individual, but they all generally boil down to four categories: attention, escape, access (to tangibles typically), and sensory (the act of engaging in the behavior itself). Functional analyses typically need to be conducted to ensure the highest degree of accuracy when hypothesizing the function(s), but for this conversation we'll say it's to get money (with secondary functions of attention via prestige among peers, and sensory via the "high" one gets from being exerting power over their environment).
2) Identify alternative replacement behaviors. These are behaviors that fulfill the same function as the problem behavior, in a way that is deemed appropriate/acceptable by the ones implementing the change while ensuring the individual's quality of life improves as a result of continued occurrences of the behavior. These can be also be varied and complex depending on the individual, but my understanding of societal values and expectations lead me to think the alternative replacement behaviors are paid jobs (ideally ones that involve prestige/socializing among peers and control over their environment; state-sponsored construction/FDR's New Deal kinda' stuff comes to mind as an example).
3) Ensure the problem behaviors no longer fulfill their function by putting them on extinction (basically, ensure the behaviors do not result in (or create a net loss of) money, prestige, or control over environment, e.g. punishment), WHILE AT THE SAME TIME make it as easy and rewarding as possible to engage in the alternative replacement behavior (shorter shifts, higher pay, easy to find the work, social initiatives such as state-sponsored events/dinners celebrating those engaging in the work, etc.).
4) When consistently applied and done correctly, the alternative replacement behavior will occur more frequently than the problem behavior. Once the individual has reached fluency in the behavior (basically muscle memory, it's so easy/routine for them that they don't need to think about it), increase the intensity/severity of the behavior needed to fulfill the function of the behavior (this might look like saying after a year of successfully keeping the program, transition to a similar job in the private sector).
To further add to this, using punishment techniques by themselves has been a strategy used forever, however it is not only unethical, but ineffective. If you want someone to engage in a behavior that they've never done before, it's much easier to simply teach and encourage them to engage in the behavior instead of punishing them over and over and hoping that they'll somehow start doing it on their own. Many societies in the past have tried the whole "death penalty for stealing" thing, which is the logical conclusion of the "more punishment = less crime" idea, and it just flat out doesn't work. People get understandably frustrated and start to resent the system, and the problem behaviors continue.
However, going without punishment at all is not going to work either. Creatures like habits and routines, and even if the alternative replacement behavior is easier/more effective at fulfilling the function, the old routines are very likely to continue just because it's what has worked for them in the past. They need to be made ineffective by controlling their environment and removing rewarding consequences and/or introducing aversive ones. That being said, punishment both should not and doesn't need to be punitive; the goal should be to change behavior, not impart justice (although I guess this can be up for debate?). Two to four weeks in jail is plenty disruptive for most people.
The other thing though is that for implementation of the flowchart above, it requires a level of control over the individual's environment that is likely way too intense for most people to allow. Those engaging in problem behaviors would need to be stopped immediately; if they are successful even 5-10% of the times they try, and the alternative replacement behavior is too difficult, they'll keep engaging in the problem behavior and be even less likely to stop (for the same reason slot machine gamblers are less likely to stop after hitting a nice payout every so often).
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Thanks for that. I was thinking somebody with professional experience in behavior and operating conditioning would be able to illuminate a little more why the current system doesn’t work. I didn’t get into it since it’s not my area, but my suspicion is that if operant conditioning is your goal, incarceration is a pretty poor choice of stimulus. It’s too abstract, and too removed from the actual behavior to actually be effective training. If you locked your dog up in Rikers every time they shit on the floor it would probably not be a very effective way to discourage the behavior.
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EPT
