Microblog Memes

Americans: look north you twits.

Gun violence goes hand to hand with poverty.

poverty goes up, gun violence goes up

Abolish laws. Then crime will instantly disappear. 🥴

But if crime declined, the poor private prison corporations would lose money, and that's not a good thing. They wouldn't be able to give judges kickbacks to sentence lesser crimes! Please, think of the poor private prison corporations!

/s in case the sarcasm isn't abundantly clear.

I got a degree in criminology about 25 years ago and can confirm that there was no dispute in the science at that time that this was the way to reduce crime.

Everything else had been tried and tried again and proven not to work. It was around that time that my (then) field realized that the DARE program increased drug use.

It was almost 25 years after the St. Louis (maybe wrong city, it's been a while) Crime and Control study proved that flooding the streets with more police officers only pushed crime into other neighborhoods.

When I studied, it was almost a joke to read new research coming out, because every serious study was just confirming what everyone knew. Guest lecturers would come in to talk about their latest theories in criminology. and, it was basically everyone just sitting around saying oh yeah that's obvious. The field has peaked, and it was up to society then to catch up.

We looked at three strike's laws, truth and sentencing laws, asset forfeiture laws, mandatory minimums, and every time we found that these policies increase violent crime. They further fracture communities and destroy families at the generational level.

It may not be intuitive to think that, but would a little thought, a little reflection, it is hard to say that this would not be the obvious result.

The methods to reducing and ending recidivism have been well known to science. People who talk about harsh law enforcement and punitive corrections are either ignorant, emotional blowhards, or not serious about reducing crime.

We have in America a well-established cat and mouse model of policing. And indeed it does Trace its history to slave patrols, a reactionary force of violence, dispatched into the community to capture offenders. The entire model does absolutely nothing to prevent future crimes from occurring.

Maybe they catch some guy who's a serial offender, and get him off the streets. And they call that a win. But until the root causes of crime are addressed, all they're doing is playing serial offender whack-a-mole; the next one is just going to pop right up. And maybe they'll say, oh sure, that's because we have a "catch and release" system.

Well, if we literally did nothing at all to stop crime, and totally abolished the concept of a police force, the science is absolutely clear that most people are going to age out of crime by the time they turn 25, and the rest, save for a few people who are likely mentally disabled, will age out by the time they hit 35. But instead, we're kicking down doors and locking people out in cage for decades on end, making sure that their families are broken and locked in a cycle of poverty and trauma, and we end up sometimes with three generations of men sharing a prison together.

And while we're on the subject of prison, the science is also absolutely clear that the way to reduce recidivism to almost nothing is to provide good health care, good mental health care, and to teach people marketable skills, all in a safe environment. When I got my degree, the field was shifting to a program evaluation approach, because we had figured out what programs we needed to have, and the only thing left to do was to fine-tune those programs to get the most out of them.

But then 4 years would go by, or 8 years would go by, and some new tough-on-crime politician would come and wonder why we're spending so much money to hold people in a cage, and they'd start cutting the programs.

And despite that, and despite the emotional reactionaries who just want to see bad guys be treated badly to make themselves feel better about crime, virtually every type of crime is the lowest it's ever been in my lifetime.

They don't want less crime they want more so they can exert force over the population

I can’t find the podcast. Maybe someone else can post an article about this:

Several years ago, I listened to a podcast that interviewed a man in Chicago who was conducting a study. His team found people with a criminal history(I think maybe drug dealers?) and tell them they’ll get $1000 a month. No strings attached.

There were a few who didn’t use the money well, but most quit crime/dealing drugs entirely. They found steady work and some went back to school.

All they needed was an opportunity to feel financially safe, feed their kids, and pay rent.

Edit: I think I found it? Here’s an article on it. Some of my facts were wrong, but the idea was right overall.

Chicago Future Fund

The article also mentions another called the Stock Economic Empowerment Demonstration.

I’m not sure which I heard about but I suspect the interview was with Richard Wallace who is mentioned in the article. Some of his talking points sounded familiar.

Won't happen in the United States. We're headed hard in the opposite direction. And the changes taking place right now will effectively make it impossible going forward.

Buy a gun. Protect yourself. Things are about to get real dark. There are about to be a lot more desperate people in this society.

People who do try that get demonized as Enemies of Freedom. But it's funny how much more free it feels when you don't worry about medical bills making you homeless etc.

They don't want to lessen crime, not really anyway.

They want to increase prison labor capacity by arresting and charging more people

Oh man, most of those were in place during the so called "golden age" of America. Maybe this is what the red hats have been fighting for all this time! /s

If people have nothing to lose, they're gonna act like they have nothing to lose...

Like, it's basic psychology. Resource scarcity changes how our brains work, it's literally Maslow's hierarchy of needs

Yeah, but by doing all that you are oppressing the oppression which the lack of those very things makes so much easier, do you ever think about that??
No, you don't, because you only think of your face and never how the boot on it feels.

/s

Why would the US want to limit their pool of slave labour?

UBI on top of universal healthcare is far better happiness promotion, violence elimination, than all of the non-health proposals.

public housing is always rationed, and usually ghetoization. It is rarely implemented as government funded abundance of housing that is small to be affordable, and in competition to private scarce supply that maximizes profits and lobbying power to keep housing scarce. Promoting housing abundance along with UBI is path for zero cost government programs where market prices of homes sold cover costs.

strong unions is concerned with high paying jobs for union members, at higher priority than expanding union membership. Less employment. UBI provides universal labour bargaining power including strike pay for organized labour. The freedom to say no and survive is a freedom that is far more important than coercion of companies to support labour unions? or just cheering on labour organization movements.

universal childcare is usually proposed as an institutional/licensed program designed to provide full time employment at living wage levels. UBI empowers people to both pay for childcare, but also be happy to look after fellow parents kids on a rotating basis for people empowered to choose 4 day workweeks, or lets a granny be happy to supplement UBI with a few hours of babysitting without needing to create a giant empire to achieve full time job creation scheme. Motivation for universal childcare is that "bureaucratic tax funded worker empire" with incidental benefits to parents.

free college is necessarily a rationed service. Affordable college with UBI is a pathway for people qualified for college, and who appreciate value over alternative opportunies they could choose instead of college if value is not there, is still a choice most qualified young people would make. Importantly for UBI, young teens can have hope that affording college gives them a future... a reason to study and be engaged in school.

There's truth in that to a degree. But so long as mass media can stir the pot and create public anxiety where none existed before, even a strong egalitarian economic model is insufficient to deter interpersonal violence.

Americans bombarded by "Shoplifter Alert!" and "Murder Spree!" and "Rape Gangs Terrorizing Your Neighborhood!" news coverage are going to be deeply suspicious of anyone they don't recognize (and more than a few they do recognize). People will lash out in fits of paranoia and induced terror, then claim self-defense against their victims. And if we've instilled a legitimacy to this fear in the general public, they'll get away with it.

Basically, wealth inequality.

It should be very difficult to be very poor or very wealthy.

The Nordic countries.